SEVENTEEN
Robert leapt out of the garbage, shrieking and shouting and swatting the larvae from his clothes, neck, and hair. They were everywhere—inside his sneakers, behind his ears, under his collar. They clung to his skin like tiny leeches.
“I’m sorry,” Karina told him. “I figured it was better if you didn’t know.”
Glenn dropped into the garbage a moment later—and unfortunately he ignored Karina’s warning to keep his mouth closed. Worse, he screamed “Yahoooo!” all the way down and ended up swallowing some larvae. He spent the next few minutes spitting on the basement floor, trying to rid his mouth of their awful bitter taste. “This is the most disgusting thing that’s ever happened to us,” he said, groaning.
“Stick around,” Robert told him. “We’re not finished yet.”
“Look on the bright side,” Karina said. “At least we’re out of the ducts.”
They looked around. The mechanical room was a labyrinth of giant steel pipelines, plastic tubes, and metal ducts that appeared to deliver heat, cold air, and water all throughout the building. The room was alive with the buzzing of boilers, handlers, pumps, and generators.
“So, this is it?” Glenn asked. “This is the giant underground burrow?”
“It’s too bright,” Karina said.
“What do you mean?”
“Have you ever walked into the woods and flipped over a rock? You know all the weird slithery bugs that cling to the bottom? The bugs that like cool, dark places? That’s the kind of space we’re looking for. They’re going to be hiding.”
“Howard said the entrance was well-concealed,” Robert remembered. “He said not even the janitors would be able to find it.”
They spread out across the mechanical room, checking every corner. Robert crawled under boilers; Glenn squeezed behind air compressors; Karina searched in supply closets. Everything was neat and clean and orderly. Apart from the swarms of flies, there were no signs of anything amiss.
At the far end of the basement was a window overlooking a much smaller adjacent room; a sign on the door read POOL UTILITY. Robert glanced through the window but saw nothing unusual, only several fifty-five-gallon barrels of liquid chlorine, stockpiled in the corner. He was turning away when he stepped on something small and brittle.
He leapt back, thinking he had crushed some kind of hard-shelled beetle. But no—it was the frayed end of a yellow USB cable.
“That’s the wire!” Karina exclaimed. “Remember the cameras Pip and Squeak were wearing?”
Robert lifted the cable. Karina was right—it was the same yellow wire that Ms. Lavinia had affixed to the camera helmet, the same yellow wire that had disappeared through the ventilation ducts. “It was a hundred feet long,” Robert said. “If Pip and Squeak are still attached to the other end, they must be close.”
All three followed the cable out of the mechanical room and into the pool utility room, where it disappeared among the jumble of barrels. It took ten minutes of shoving and grunting before the boys moved the containers aside and discovered a small hole in the wall. It wasn’t like the ventilation duct; this opening definitely wasn’t man-made. It looked like it had been gnawed on by a variety of creatures, and the yellow wire disappeared through its center.
Glenn aimed his flashlight inside. The passage descended into the earth, as if it had been dug by a mole or a groundhog. “Another tunnel?”
“This is more like it,” Karina said. “This is where we’ll find some bugs.”
Robert knew she was right. “Howard said the burrow was underneath the soccer field. We have to crawl out of the school to get there.”
He wriggled into the opening headfirst. On a class trip back in third grade, Robert had toured an underground cavern; he found the insect burrow had the same cool temperature, the same dank smell, the same overwhelming sense of blackness. The passage was hollowed out of dirt and clay, and roots and stones jutted in from the sides.
“Come on,” he called back. “We’re getting close.”
The tunnel began as a tight squeeze but quickly expanded to a height that allowed them to stand. Glenn’s flashlight did little to illuminate the darkness, but they saw a faint orange glow in the distance.
“How much farther?” Karina asked.
Robert was coiling the wire around his wrist, and he estimated he had collected most of it. “Maybe another thirty feet,” he said. “We’re almost there.”
The ground sloped upward, and they arrived in a large circular chamber. The walls were ringed with torches providing heat so the insects could thrive. And they certainly were thriving. Termites and butterflies coated the ceiling. Grasshoppers and millipedes clung to the walls. The floor was teeming with bugs upon bugs—locusts on top of caterpillars on top of katydids. Robert avoided looking down and ignored the disgusting crunch of his footsteps.
As he pulled the last few inches of wire through his hands, he found it stretching up to the ceiling—to a silky white cocoon tethered to the earthen wall.
Karina gasped. “Oh, no.”
Robert knew what she was thinking. Some spiders cocooned their prey before eating them. It was a way of storing their meals for a later time—the spider equivalent of stashing leftovers in the fridge. Robert yanked on the wire, hoping to pull down the entire cocoon.
Instead, the opposite end of the wire simply popped out. Attached were the helmets and leather glove that Ms. Lavinia had stitched together in the library. The materials looked corroded, as if they had been partially digested.
“That doesn’t mean anything,” Glenn insisted. “We need to get them down. There’s a chance they’re still OK.”
Inside the burrow was one of the fifty-five-gallon drums, lying on its side. It was full of crickets and moths and other bugs that liked to nest in dark, shadowy places. Glenn rolled it across the floor, slapping away the insects that scrambled across its surface. He stopped underneath the cocoon, then flipped the drum upright and hammered the lid on top. “This ought to hold me, don’t you think?”
“I’ll do it,” Robert said.
“I’m taller,” Glenn reminded him. “It’ll be easier for me to reach them.”
“But they’re my pets. I got them into this mess.”
“At least let me give you a boost.” Glenn knelt down and formed his hands into a step. “Come on.”
Robert climbed up to the top of the barrel. It wobbled from side to side on the uneven dirt floor, and he paused to steady his balance. He still wasn’t tall enough to reach the cocoon, but if he used the handle of the flashlight, he could manage to tap it.
“Guys?” he whispered. “Can you hear me?”
No answer.
He tapped it again, harder this time.
The cocoon broke away from the wall and fell to the ground.
It was perfectly still.
“Oh, Robert,” Karina said. “I am so sorry.”