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Gutsy had no response to that. She offered a meaningless smile and rose, waving for Captain Ledger and Sam Imura to come over to the barn so she could show them the tunnel.
“Someone get me a lantern,” said Ledger. Gutsy took one from the wall and handed it to him. Sam covered Ledger with the rifle as he leaned down into t
he tunnel mouth. Everyone crowded around to see.
“Look,” said Spider, pointing, “they got it all shored up with boards.”
“No way they dug that since the attack on the wall,” said Gutsy.
“Nope,” agreed Ledger. “Makes me wonder if this is the only tunnel, too.” He glanced at Benny. “Go tell Karen about this, okay? Have her start a search.”
“On it,” said Benny, and he ran outside.
“What if there are, like, fifty of these things?” asked Spider. “What if they’re all over town?”
Ledger shook his head. “If there were a lot of them, we’d all be dead right now. No, I think this might be another of the Raggedy Man’s experiments. First he hits the wall with a big force, then he tries this ninja stealth stuff.”
“Yes,” said Sam. “He’s learning a lot about the town, too.”
Ledger nodded. “We’re going to have get the walls repaired. Right now a couple of nearsighted gophers could invade this place. In the meantime, I want to see where this goes.”
“You’re too big,” said Lilah. “I’ll go.” She handed her spear to Nix, drew her automatic, checked the magazine, then dropped into the hole.
Ledger handed his lantern to her. “No heroics, kid. You look and you come right back. If you run into anything nasty down there, give a yell.”
Lilah’s reply was a sour little laugh, and then she was gone.
There was a scuffling sound, and then Lilah came scrambling out of the hole. Ledger helped her out and she sat, panting, on the edge of the opening, brushing dirt out of her hair.
“It’s about sixty yards long,” she said in her ghostly whisper of a voice, “but it connects with a bigger tunnel that I think was some kind of old drainage system. The bigger part is brick-lined. Old. And there were some places where it looked like the drainage tunnel is caved in. Seems like they had to clear it out to finish this one.”
“If I had to guess,” said Benny, “they were digging this out so they could invade the town from inside at the same time they hit the walls. The cave-ins must have slowed them down.”
Nix nodded. “Lucky break for us.”
“Doesn’t feel that lucky,” said Spider. “They killed a bunch of people today.”
“If these tunnels had been finished in time,” said Sam, “they would have killed everyone.”
Alethea gave a loud, derisive snort. “So… this is us being lucky?”
“This is us still being alive, kid. Take the wins where you can.” Ledger turned to Gutsy. “You know anything about the old sewer system? How big it is? Where it goes? Anything?”
“No. But Karen would.”
“I’ll go ask her,” said Spider, and hurried out.
“In the meantime,” said Gutsy, “I think we should go back and ask Captain Collins a whole lot more questions.”
“Yes,” said Sam, his dark eyes glittering.
Lilah retrieved her spear and ran her thumb along the wicked edge of the blade. “I volunteer to ask.”
5
KAREN PEAK AND SPIDER ARRIVED before they could leave the stable. Gutsy brought her up to date.
“There’s only a couple of drainage tunnels big enough to crawl through,” said Karen after thinking about it. “One is definitely collapsed. That happened when Billy Cantu and his crew were digging up the streets to lay down new sewer pipes. They didn’t even know about the other tunnel and smashed through it. Since it was old and not in very good shape, they filled that section in after they laid their pipes. The other one that Lilah found goes way, way back to when there was an old Catholic church here in the late 1800s. Runs about four hundred feet, but it’s not tied into any of the modern plumbing. I can check the maps to see if there’s more, but I don’t think so.”
