Alex Bell - Fighting with fire

Unfortunately, so much track meant that certain routes had to bend and dip rather horribly in order to fit in with the rest of it, and the track Lex and Jesse were on went, almost instantly, into a two-hundred-foot drop. Jesse barely had time to right himself in the cart behind Lex before it was plummeting downwards.

The two of them screamed their heads off. The rickety little wheels of the cart blazed along, leaving a trail of sparks and making a horrible, tearing, rusty, screeching sound, as if they were about to come right off the track altogether.

But then, suddenly, it levelled out. Despite the initial drop, they were still astonishingly high. Then they found themselves shooting upwards, carried along by the force of their own momentum. They came to a brief slow at the top of the curve? just long enough for Lex to glance back and see that the rabbits had reached the entrance and, unable to stop themselves, a whole load of them were toppling through the arch like lemmings, freefalling the two-hundred-foot drop to the tracks below. That seemed to kill them, which was reassuring. Finally, they managed to stop themselves and, instead, piled up in the archway, blowing fire out into the cavern. They were far too far away to be able to reach Lex and Jesse, for that brief, frenetic wagon ride had carried them right out to the middle of the cavern.

‘Perhaps we oughta try and get out-’ Jesse began, but it was already too late.

The cart tipped over the top of the curve and then they were speeding off again. This time the drop was not so steep, but the track was long and straight instead, heading directly towards a tunnel on the opposite side of the cavern. Jesse was relieved at first, for this would surely get them off this helter-skelter of death. But then Lex said, ‘Uh oh.’

When you’re speeding along on an ancient, unfinished mining track, the very last thing you want to hear coming out of anyone’s mouth is, Uh oh.

‘What?’ Jesse asked.

‘The track runs out up ahead.’

Jesse looked over Lex’s shoulder and saw that he was right. The track ran out abruptly. Where it should have continued, there was just empty space stretching out ahead? and they were speeding right towards it. Perhaps it had collapsed due to age and damp, or perhaps that part of the track had never been built to begin with. However it had happened, the track disappeared out from under the cart a bare second later and Lex and Jesse found themselves hurtling through the air with a great cavernous drop stretching out beneath them.

‘Jump!’ Lex shouted.

But jumping from a falling cart is actually harder than you might think. They therefore didn’t so much jump, as throw themselves over the edge towards a stretch of nearby track about ten feet below them. They smashed into it, causing it to move beneath their weight in a worrying sort of way, before it, thankfully, steadied. The cart, meanwhile, fell three hundred feet before it hit another piece of track and was smashed to bits.

Jesse, who was clinging to the track beside Lex, reached over and smacked the back of the thief’s head.

‘Ouch! What was that for?’ Lex demanded.

‘Dragging me into that cart!’ Jesse growled.

‘Oh, shut up. If I hadn’t, you’d have been eaten by the bunnies by now.’

‘Yeah, ’cos my position is so much better now, ain’t it?’

‘Well, I won’t save you again if you’re going to be that ungrateful,’ Lex replied. ‘Stop whining; it’s not that bad.’

He slowly got to his feet. His glow-canary had fallen a little further along the track, so he crept forwards and picked it up. The bird appeared to be unharmed and was still shining brightly, as were the other ones hanging from the ceiling.

‘Come on,’ Lex said. ‘We can walk to the other side.’

This was easier said than done, for they were at an incredible height and the track was narrow and had a tendency to shift beneath them. Lex forced himself to keep his eyes on the archway ahead and not to look down. Inch by slow inch, they finally made it to the other side. It didn’t do anything for their nerves that a large part of the track groaned, creaked and then collapsed almost as soon as they did so.

‘It’s probably rotten to the core, after all these years,’ Jesse said. ‘It’s a miracle we survived at all.’

‘But we did,’ Lex said briskly. He turned away from the cavern as he spoke, though, for it was quite horrible seeing nothing but air where the track you’d just been standing upon seconds ago had once stood. ‘Let’s finish looking for this dragon.’

‘What dragon?’ Jesse said. ‘I’d bet anything that you were right and there never was one. It was most likely them bunnies all along. A hundred years ago, there’d probably have only been ten or twenty of ’em but that’s more than enough to roast a man and pick the meat off his bones.’

‘You may be right,’ Lex replied. ‘I think you probably are. But I’m not taking any chances. I’m going to explore every square inch of this mine before I’m satisfied there’s no dragon.’

‘We’ll probably end up getting killed when a ceiling collapses on top of us,’ Jesse grumbled. ‘This place is gonna come caving in before too long.’

‘Let’s make sure we get in and out before that happens, then.’

They pressed on. Everywhere they went, they woke up more glow-canaries that lit their way. Fortunately, they had all been left behind when the workers decided to flee and so the way was illuminated for Lex and Jesse better than they had expected.

Lex had nurtured a faint hope that perhaps the fire-bunnies were all on the other side of the mine? that they were unable to cross the cavern with its great wooden roller coaster. This hope, however, turned out to be sadly, ridiculously, optimistic. The rabbits were everywhere. They could tell by the warrens and rabbit holes. Lex and Jesse fled past every rabbit hole, dreading that a rabbit head might suddenly pop up and roast their feet. In fact, this very nearly happened on one occasion. They missed the rabbit hole and didn’t even realise a rabbit was there until a blast of fire suddenly scorched the back of Lex’s legs. He yelled and jumped up in the air. When he looked back, sure enough there was a vicious fire-bunny glaring at him with a surprisingly angry expression on its face, considering the fact that it was the one that had almost barbecued Lex. The rabbit had burnt the back of his trousers but, thankfully, his legs were unharmed. Jesse threw a rock at it and it disappeared back into the tunnel.

‘What the heck is their problem?’ Lex said in exasperation.

‘Fire-bunnies hate everyone and everything,’ Jesse replied with a shrug. ‘Little monsters. Say, I sure as heck hope that there’s more than one way outta this place, ’cos I don’t fancy having to go back the way we came.’

Neither did Lex. Hordes of fire-bunnies aside, there was no guarantee that they could get back across that network of wooden railways without the whole damned thing collapsing beneath them. Besides which, without getting in a speeding, runaway cart again? an experience that even Lex was keen to avoid repeating? the whole journey would take much longer.

‘We oughta start lookin’ for a way outta here,’ Jesse said after about half an hour. ‘There’s been no sign of the others. Chances are they turned back long ago. We’ll end up getting ourselves killed and Jeremiah will win by default. You don’t want that, do you?’

‘Not particularly, no,’ Lex replied, aware of the fact that Jesse was attempting to manipulate him. ‘But I don’t want to be the twit who cut the third round short because he didn’t think the dragon existed when, in fact, it did the whole time. Jeremiah could be slaying it as we speak. We keep going.’