Tunnels 03, Freefall

Will's family, revealed that all the time she'd had an identical twin. He remembered these twins mocking Will so mercilessly, and taking such cruel pleasure in disclosing their plans to wipe out swathes of Topsoilers using the deadly virus, Dominion. The twins telling Will to give himself up, and then Will's brother, Cal, stepping out in the open, wailing that he wanted to go home.
    Then he remembered the hail of bullets that had cut the boy down.
    Cal was dead.
    Chester shuddered, but forced himself to recall what had happened next. The image of his friend, Will, came back to him -- he and Chester were reaching out their hands to each other, and Elliott was shouting, and they were all linked together by a rope. Chester knew at that instant that there was still hope... but why? Why was there hope? ... he couldn't remember . They had been caught in a desperate situation, with no way out. Chester's mind was so muddled it took him several seconds to order his thoughts.
    Yes! That was it! Elliott was going to try to take them down the inside of the Pore... there was still time... they were going to escape.
    But it had all gone so very wrong. He screwed up his eyes as if his retinas still burnt with the fiery flashes and the searing whiteness of the explosions as they'd been bombarded by the Styx Division's mighty guns. He re-lived the feeling of the ground quaking beneath him, and then another memory resurfaced -- the hazy image of Will being flung into the air right over his head, and over the edge of the Pore.
    Chester recalled his blind panic as he and Elliott had tried to prevent themselves from being dragged over by the combined weight of Will and Cal's bodies. But it had been in vain because they were all bound together, and the next thing he knew they were hurtling, all four of them, into the dark vacuum of the Pore.
    He recalled now the sensation of the rushing, unceasing wind, which snatched away his breath... and flashes of red light and incredibly intense heat... but now...
    ... but now ...
    ...now he was supposed to be dead .
    So what was this? Where the hell was he?
    Bartleby meowed again, and Chester felt the cat's warm breath in his face.
    "Bartleby, that is you, isn't it?" Chester asked falteringly.
    The animal's huge domed head was inches away from him. Of course, it had to be Bartleby. Chester was forgetting that the cat had also gone over the side at the same time as the rest of them... and he was here now.
    Then Chester felt a damp tongue rasp against his cheek.
    "Geddoff!" he bawled. "Stop it!"
    Bartleby licked him even more vigorously, clearly delighted to be getting a reaction from Chester. "Get away from me, you stupid cat!" Chester shouted in growing alarm. It wasn't just that he was powerless to stop the animal, but Bartleby's tongue was as abrasive as a sheet of sandpaper, and being licked by him was actually quite painful. Renewing his efforts to free himself, Chester struggled furiously, all the time hollering at the top of his lungs.
    The shouting appeared not to deter the animal in the slightest, and Chester was left with no recourse but to hiss and spit as savagely as he could. It eventually worked, and Bartleby backed off.
    Then there was just silence and darkness again.
    He tried to call out to Elliott and then to Will, although he didn't know if either of them had survived the fall. He had the most horrible feeling in the pit of his stomach that he might be the only one left alive, other than the cat, of course. That almost made it worse for him -- the idea that it was just him alone with the giant slobbering animal.
    A suggestion struck him like a cricket ball to the head... by some miracle had he landed in the very bottom of the Pore? He remembered what Elliott had told them -- that not only was the opening more than a kilometer across, it was so deep that only one man had, so the story went, managed to climb back out of it. As much as the invisible substance he was stuck in would allow him, he trembled uncontrollably. He was in his worst nightmare.
    He was buried alive!
    He was jammed in some kind of body-form shallow grave, stranded in the guts of the Earth. How was he ever going to get out of the Pore again and back out onto the surface? He was further down even than the Deeps -- and he'd thought that had been bad enough. The prospect of returning home to his parents and to his nice predictable life was growing ever more distant.
    "Please, I just want to go home," he gabbled to