Tunnels 05 - Spiral

bedroom. The vile little snakes slept there, under the same roof as me,” he said, then swiveled around and slumped down against the door. “This place was all I knew for so long . . . and now I can hardly remember it.”
    Elliott hummed but didn’t say anything.
    “I’m not going to ask what you lot are up to.” The bald man behind the steering wheel suddenly spoke up. It was Drake’s mechanic from the under-the-arches garage in West London, who had been brought in to supply them with the mock British Gas van, the overalls Drake and Mrs. Burrows were wearing, and also their identity cards. It was apparently one of the many services his “clientele” expected from him, in addition to unregistered vehicles.
    The mechanic had met them in a motorway services parking lot, where Will, Elliott, Mrs. Burrows, and Drake had transferred from the Bedford to the van for the final leg of the journey to Highfield. “But whatever your caper is, it’s not strictly legit, is it?” the bald mechanic now added.
    “Do you really want to know?” Will challenged him.
    The mechanic rubbed his chin but didn’t reply.
    “If I said that we’re trying to save the human race, would you believe me? And if we don’t succeed, every single person on the surface will die,” Will said, completely straight-faced.
    Elliott drew in a breath in surprise.
    The mechanic grinned, showing his golden tooth. “You’re right, mate, I shouldn’t go sticking my nose in your beeswax. The less I know, the better.” He patted his breast pocket, then chuckled. “Anyway, the sparklies your Mr. Jones gave me are all the answer I need.”
    “Mr. Smith,” Will corrected him, grinning. “Mr.
Smith
gave you the diamonds.”
    At that moment, Mr. Smith, who was actually Drake, rapped on the back of the van and then opened the door a few inches. “The owner’s out of the way. I called Sparks and the others — they’ll be along when we’ve prepped the place. But in the meantime, we should” — noticing the mechanic was listening, he checked himself — “get the Christmas decorations inside.”
    The Christmas decorations were in fact enough explosive to blast through many yards of rock. As Will entered the house, carrying two heavy bags laden with them, he stopped dead. He looked at Mrs. Burrows. “It’s all different, Mum,” he gasped. “The wallpaper’s new.” He scuffed his boot on the floor — it was no longer covered with the stained carpet he’d known all his life. “And this, too. They’ve completely redone the place.”
    Drake came up behind him. “We need the gear downstairs, Will. OK?”
    “Sure,” Will replied, ambling toward the cellar door. “This is where my dad disappeared every night,” he told Elliott, who was following behind him with a kit bag full of tools. “Until he disappeared altogether, down to the Colony.”
    The cellar was also very different now — very tidy and organized — with peg boards on the walls, holding carefully arranged power tools. And a partially disassembled vintage Triumph motorcycle sat on an oily sheet in the center of the room.
    “Sweet,” Drake said, running a finger over the gleaming chrome of the handlebars. “But we need to shift all this out of the way so we can get at those.” He looked at the shelves, on which there were pots of paint and decorating equipment.
    Will and Drake worked quickly while Mrs. Burrows and Elliott dragged between them a mattress down from one of the upstairs bedrooms. This was secured against the back door of the cellar leading to the garden, to help deaden any noise they might make while working.
    Taking a pickax from one of the bags, Drake used the tip to lever the shelves from the wall. As he heaved the unit aside, the others gathered around to see. Behind it, there was what appeared to be a stretch of perfectly ordinary wall painted white.
    “Right here,” Will said, going over and tapping the spot where he remembered the tunnel mouth had been. “It was right here.”
    Drake nodded. “We’ll do it the hard way to begin with, using good old elbow grease to knock a hole through. It’ll make less noise,” he said. “Everyone back,” he warned, then swung the pickax. Within a matter of minutes, he’d loosened enough bricks that a chunk of the wall dropped onto the cellar floor. A raft of hardcore and gravel slid from the small opening.
    “Very clever,” Drake said. “Precisely what you might expect to find.” He continued until