Hugh Howey - Half Way Home

“Looks like we’re not the only ones getting thirsty,” Tarsi said.

Leila pulled her tarp out of her pack. “Let’s set up to collect some water.”

“Are they coming out of any one hole more than another?” I asked.

“Karl and I saw a whole train coming out of one back there,” Mindy said, pointing back the direction we’d come.

“What are you thinking?” Kelvin asked.

“Just trying to find something that separates them. I feel like we’re sitting on top of a maze, and I don’t want to just start at random.”

“And I don’t want to get trampled,” Jorge said.

“I’ll go explore it,” said Samson. Vincent agreed, and the two of them set off, but not before dropping their scraps of tarp and water containers.

“I say we set up close to their hole,” Tarsi said. “We can take shelter in it while the water puddles.”

We thought that was the best plan and followed the two boys back toward the hole. Meanwhile, hundreds of vinnies could be seen writhing across the landscape all the way into the distance. Tarsi stood beside me, watching them. “Almost feels like a party up here,” she said.

“Yeah,” Kelvin said, handing us one side of a tarp. “I just hope the grown-ups aren’t invited.”

Yet another sleepless night ensued as the rain thundered down on the leaves above us. Our entire group had retired into the large tunnel Karl and Mindy had found, but it was impossible to sleep with the sporadic vinnie traffic and the rough tangle of woven limbs beneath us.

Kelvin and Samson went up onto the canopy once to cut some leaves away and bring them down for bedding, but the waxy surface was too slick to sleep on thanks to the slope. And just like the major tunnel we had come up, the only flat dip in the upper section was soggy with collected water.

I rarely used the flashlight in order to conserve our only battery, which meant a night of damp and uncomfortable darkness. Whenever a vinnie would creep up from below, one of us would shriek in terror, causing the rest of the group to shift out of the way as it pushed itself up to the canopy. Nobody wanted to be the lowest person, the one the vinnies reached first, which resulted in a tight clump up where the slope was steepest. We clung to the brambles and each other, shivering and miserable.

We waited all night for the precious sun to come up. Minutes ticked by like hours. We took turns asking our neighbors what time they thought it was, but the answers were nothing more than guesses. I could feel the group growing restless, the reaction to a passing vinnie turning into anger rather than annoyance. Several times, Jorge crawled up and lifted the flap of leaves above us, poking his head out to look for the sun. After the fourth or fifth time, someone told him to give it up as each peek just brought down a small shower of cold rain.

“I don’t think it’s coming,” he said. “I think it’s morning already, but the clouds are so thick the sun can’t get through.”

Looking up, I could see the faintest of silhouettes around me.

There did seem to be light filtering in from somewhere.

“I can’t stand this,” someone said.

“We need to just take our chances and go down. I’d rather be walking or riding a vinnie than sitting here like this.”

“Agreed. My ass is cramping.”

We all laughed at that, and the shared levity seemed to wake us up and signal the start of a new day—or at least the continuation of a very long one. As a group, I think we were still wary of the tunnels. Maybe that’s why we were huddled up near the miserable rain, and why we shrieked whenever one of the smaller, harmless vinnies passed.

“Screw it,” I heard one of the girls say. “I’m gonna go check on the water in the tarps.”

“And I’m gonna head down,” Karl said from directly below me. “Might as well explore this tunnel some.” He said it like a question, with some lilt of doubt at the end like he needed to buttress himself. We were all silent for a moment, waiting to see if he would really do it.

Kelvin reached over and patted my arm. “Let’s go with him.”

I nodded, even though it was too dark for Kelvin to see me. Maybe I was just steeling myself, or perhaps I felt too anxious to fake the decision verbally. We followed Karl down to the soaked dip below us, all three of us likely feigning a confidence we didn’t truly feel. One of the vinnies made its way past us, keeping high up the curved wall of the tunnel to stay out of the water.

“Vinnie coming,” Karl shouted back to the rest.

I fumbled in my pack for the flashlight, even as each minute seemed to bring a tad more filtered light down through the canopy above. I flicked it on and its bright cone revealed a tunnel similar to the hole we’d ascended through two nights ago. The steep slant worked its way down through a dip before rising back up and falling down again.

I cursed myself for not using the flashlight the previous night when others wanted to explore further. We wouldn’t have gotten any sleep with the vinnies passing through, but it might’ve been more comfortable on flat ground. If we could’ve gotten over our fears of what had happened the last time.

“It’s like a plumber’s trap,” Kelvin said. He splashed forward into the puddle of water at the bottom, the level coming up past his ankles.

“A what?”

“The curved pipe below a sink,” he explained.

“Like I know what those are for.” I splashed past him, twisting up my nose at the smell of rot and mildew. Karl had already picked his way up the rise to where the tunnel leveled out again.

“It’s to keep the rain out of the tunnels in the tree,” Kelvin explained. “Whatever drips down from above collects in this low spot and leaks through the tangled limbs. The vinnies must’ve evolved the habit of chewing their tunnels this way.”

“Or they’re just smarter than they look,” I said. A short train of vinnies crested the rise by Karl. I moved to get out of their way, but they swung to the side, up the slope of the tube and away from the water.

“They don’t like to get their feet wet,” Karl pointed out.

Kelvin and I followed as he continued forward, and I kept his way lit from behind with the flashlight. Several dozen paces further and the tunnel began a gradual descent. We stumbled down until we came to one of the familiar openings in the gear-like side of the tree’s trunk.

“Hell, yeah,” Karl said. He smiled back at us, his teeth flashing in my cone of light.

“Good call on picking this tunnel,” Kelvin said, slapping my back.

I could feel myself beaming, even as I again lamented the less miserable night we could’ve had in the lower portion of the tunnel if only I’d agreed to go look. Then I thought about something bad happening, something like Britny, and realized it would’ve been my choice that made it happen. I had a sudden desire to hand the flashlight to Kelvin and run back, up to the treetop. I wanted to leave my decision-making behind, along with my responsibility for all future ones.

Kelvin and Karl knelt by the hole and looked out, oblivious to my fears. I crowded in behind them, resting my hand lightly on their shoulders so they wouldn’t turn and bump into me, or get startled and fall.

Above us, the heavy patter of rain could be heard against the leaves, the thwaps of each impact ringing out like pops on a tight drum. Below, we could see the ground with far better clarity than we could each other, as if the light of the world were rising instead of falling.

“We must be facing the mountains,” I said. “The canopy’s not blocking out the light in that direction.”

Kelvin and I craned our necks to see more of the landscape, but a large limb rising up from below cut most of it off. I trained my light up the limb and toward the canopy, the falling rain sparkling as it streaked past. We could see dozens of bombfruit hanging from above, and it dawned on me that the rain we had felt back at base was nothing more than the delayed drippings from the real storms as the canopy leaked its puddles through its tight brambles.