Orwell's Revenge by Peter Huber

Author:Peter Huber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press

CHAPTER 18

Blair smelled the rats long before he saw them. It was a foul, musty smell of fetid droppings and wet fur. He heard them scuffling evilly behind the bricks. The small flashlight cast only a tiny pool of light on the floor of the tunnel at his feet; everything else was darkness. Occasionally he raised the beam to check on the rubbery orange cables. They were to his right, about shoulder high, just under the curved roof of the tunnel.

“Follow the cables,” the phreak had said.

For a moment Blair wished he had not listened to him. He would have forgotten Kate in time, consigned her to the memory holes of his mind. He had gone about a mile in the tunnel now, and it had taken the best part of an hour. It had been bad going underfoot—thick dust and jagged chunks of rock, and here and there the mud as deep as in a farmyard, and viciously slippery At the start the stooping had not been too difficult, but now it was almost unbearable. At some points in the tunnel he had to bend double, but all the while he also had to keep his head up to watch for the tunnel arches and dodge them when they came. He had a constant crick in his neck, but that was nothing to the pain in his knees and thighs. After half a mile it had become unbearable agony.

At first, as he crept into the dark, stinking tunnel, a terror had risen in his throat, an unreasoning fear that he could not understand. He knew that in the darkness was something unendurable, something too dreadful to be faced. And then he had known. Rats. Somewhere, near him, they were rustling, scurrying, gnawing. He felt blind and terrified. Of all the horrors in the world, he despised rats the most.

He shone his flashlight up onto the cables. Every third or fourth hanger was dislodged, and the cables dangled limply downward like decaying vines in a dying forest. The rats had been at the orange insulation, and in many places it was entirely stripped away. Every few feet the pale beam of the flashlight picked up a glint of glass threaded through the tattered rubber shielding.

The tunnel was curving to the right now, and seemed to be sloping slightly upward. He had just passed through a low stretch of about a hundred yards and a succession of arches which had forced him to a crawl. Getting down on all fours had been a relief after the stooping, but when he came to the end of the arches and tried to get up again, he found that his knees refused to lift him. He rested for a minute or two, before painfully rising again to his feet. A large patch of muddy water appeared in the pale light of his flashlight. He reached up with his left hand to steady himself against the wall.

For a moment he felt the dank hairiness under his hand, and then a piercing pain shot through the tip of his index finger.

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