The Underground by K.A. Applegate

Author:K.A. Applegate
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Published: 2017-11-23T05:00:00+00:00

Down and down I dug.

Till my entire body was in the dirt. And now I was no longer hiding beneath the mole’s mind. I was a human being, digging blindly into the dirt.

Why should it have been terrifying? Why?

Was it the way the dirt pressed in all around me? The fact that I could not possibly turn around? I couldn’t breathe! Only I could breathe. Yes, I was breathing. But that panic, that terror of suffocating in a dark place, kept rearing up. I could push it down, I could reason with myself, but that fear of suffocation was too strong.

I was buried alive.

Correction: I was burying myself alive.

Down I went, down and down. I knew I should be digging a vertical hole, but it was impossible. The mole couldn’t dig that way. The best it could do was slope downward.

I dug. How long, I don’t know. It seemed like a very long time.

And then, quite suddenly, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I needed air! I tried to back up, but no! I couldn’t move that way.

<Come on, Rachel. Get a grip, kid. Get a grip!> I said to myself. <Just dig a turnaround. That’s it. A little more off the sides. Yeah. Hang in there.>

No air! Oh, lord, I’m buried alive!

<No! No! Hold on. Keep digging out a turnaround.>

I scraped madly with my “hands,” shoving the dirt back beneath my body to be shoved back by my hind legs.

And slowly a chamber began to appear. A hole a few inches wide on either side of me. I tried turning. Not yet. Dig some more. Dig in blind darkness.

Finally … yes! I could turn around. My sensitive nose felt the empty, open tunnel ahead of me. It was crumbly and far from perfect, but it was a tunnel.

I raced down it, squeezing through the tight spaces, desperate, desperate for air!

My nose emerged into light. It seemed blinding now.

“She’s back,” Cassie said. “Rachel, are you okay?”

<Yeah. Yeah. Fine,> I lied.

“How far did you get? You were down there for twenty minutes.”

Twenty minutes? No. It had been an hour at least.

<I … um, I don’t know.> I tried to visualize the tunnel I’d never actually seen but only felt. How long was it? <I guess it was, I don’t know, probably only three feet.>

“Three feet straight down?” Jake said with a whistle. “That’s pretty good. The top of the Yeerk pool dome is probably what, fifty feet down maybe?”

<Not straight down,> I said. <The mole can’t dig straight down. It’s just barely downhill. Maybe a foot deep.>

<Oh, man,> Tobias groaned. <This is going to take us forever.>

We took one-hour shifts. Between shifts those of us who weren’t digging or standing guard walked down to the Mickey D’s and bought fries and Cokes.

Six hours of digging till we had each done our shift. The day was over. We couldn’t stay any longer. We had to head home.

“Someone should carry a string down in to see how far we got,” Marco suggested.

No one volunteered. No one even moved.

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