The Stirlings and the Missing Statue

Chapter Twenty-One: Where We're Going, We Won't *Have* Roads

A mile into the tunnel, the lamp ran out of fuel. Mr. Steach was always an excellent judge of distance while he knew the pace he would have normally used was quick, the girl's was even faster even though she looked near death. She'd had no water or food in the vault and the last time he'd had anything, it had come from a couple of apples and a mason jar. Steach wondered how he would go much further on an empty stomach and how the girl could go anywhere at all.
But when the light went out, neither of them seemed to truly care. They both welcomed the darkness and, at least in Mr. Steach's case, drew comfort in it. As a thief skilled in many acts of subterfuge and discretion, he was at home in any kind of darkness which only served to amplify his talents. He'd already learned just how low to duck his head to avoid the occasional support beam under a building's floor or when to lift his feet when the dirt floor seemed to rise where floodwaters had pulled in mud and debris. As they trekked and especially after the lamp died, he could see tiny cracks of light that streamed into the tunnel.
"It's too dark outside for that," he'd said to the girl who was always at least ten steps ahead of him with the knife. The first few cracks of light he'd seen were allowing a soft yellow light through an opening that was already behind them with how fast the girl was going.
"Restaurante," she said dismissively.
When they passed under another opening further on, the smell of beans—salty and enriched with pork fat—drifted down through the floorboards that covered the tunnel under another restaurant.
They continued on in silence, the girl allowing Mr. Steach to shorten the distance between them so she could more easily warn him of a lower ceiling or particularly gooey collection of refuse. When they passed what Mr. Steach could measure as being their second mile, he was out of breath and his survival instincts were becoming more dominant in his mind.
"Water," he said to the girl and placed a hand on her shoulder after he'd closed the distance between them with three long strides.
She whipped away from him, cursing in Spanish, and Steach felt the tip of the knife blade scratch against his forearm as the girl spun around.
"¡No me toques!"
Steach opened his mouth to tell the girl to calm down, but he decided against it at the last second. He could feel a hot streak on his skin and felt a trickle of blood cool instantly after oozing from his new wound. The second injury he could remember, and the second the girl had caused him. There would not be a third.
"Water," he repeated. He couldn't tell if the girl had nodded, but it seemed like she understood.
She clicked her tongue against her cheek and beckoned her to follow with a terse command in Spanish.
They marched along the tunnel as it curved right and narrowed into a space only large enough for one person at a time. The ceiling and the floor seemed closer together as well and Mr. Steach soon found that he had to crouch and squat at the same time in order to walk—which was more like rocking back and forth on his feet. After some distance at a new tortoise-like pace, the girl, who was having no difficulty at all making her way through, stopped abruptly. Mr. Steach nearly bowled her over in his concentration to eke out a way through the cramped place.
"Food," she said, pointing upward.
Indeed, the smell of spiced meat and lard emanated down from an opening in the tunnel ceiling. It was covered with thick boards that were at least six-inches wide and only a tiny amount of yellow glowed from above.
"Water," Mr. Steach corrected. He was, contrary to what his aching stomach was trying to tell him, more concerned with finding clean water than he was interested in a plateful of salted beans or chilaquiles.
The girl persisted, her annoyed grunts as she lifted the furthest edge of one of the planks telling him that he was close to feeling her blade again. When the small cracks of light became a flood of yellow, he could see said blade clenched, dull side against her cheeks, between her teeth.
"I'm not interested in stealing food. Or water, girl. I pay...for things..." Mr. Steach felt for his wallet in which he'd kept a few hundred pesos and nothing else. It was gone and probably lining the floor of the tunnel a mile or two behind him. "Carry on," he said to the girl needlessly.
She pulled up a second plank and flipped both onto the adjacent pieces of the floor above them, then wriggled through the foot-wide opening by clamping her dirty hands on either side. Mr. Steach would never fit through but he needn't try. Once through and squatting next to the hole, the girl glared at Mr. Steach and pulled the knife from her teeth. She pointed the blade at him, telling him to stay put. Before he could protest, she'd slipped the planks back into place and sealed him into the comfortable darkness again.
His hearing was heightened with the temporary loss of sight and he could hear the creaking floorboards as the girl walked above and near the tunnel. He moved a little further down the tunnel and felt a temperature change as the chill in the darkness was replaced with an intensifying heat. By feeling along the ceiling since there was a complete absence of light, he could feel where there would have been another opening near the hottest section of the tunnel. But instead of giving way to timber floorboards, the ceiling was covered in concrete. His fingertips caught on corded metal rods—rebar, he guessed—and the rough underside of what he believed to be the flooring underneath a barbecue or smoker. Behind him, the girl was already slipping back into the tunnel.
"Tómalo," she told him, pushing a loaf of bread into his hands.
"Ovens," he corrected himself.
She hadn't replaced the boards yet and he could see that she'd pitched a few plastic bottles of water into the tunnel before she'd dropped herself after them. She carried the knife in one hand and had another round loaf of crusty bread under one arm. She tore into her loaf immediately and motioned to the planks. It was his turn to replace them.
They both wolfed down their stolen bread and, without stopping to ask, Mr. Steach picked up one of the bottles and drained it. He reached for a second but the girl stomped a disgusting foot on his hand—not quite hard enough to cause an injury, but Mr. Steach made a mental note that put her on notice: those would have to stop.
"Do you—"
She held up a hand to his mouth and nearly punched him. She extended a finger across his lips to silence him.
Mr. Steach steeled his eyes at her. He continued, but in a whisper, "Do you mean to tell me that this tunnel stretches all the way to San Luis? Like this?"
The girl squeaked at the name but nodded.
"That's ten miles!" Mr. Steach complained. He didn't mind a little cardio now and then, but it was just dawning on him how arduous this little trek down the tunnel would be.
"Catorce," the girl corrected through a mouthful of crackling bread.
The journey from San Luis Amatlán to the larger city he'd chosen to stay for the night (to put a little distance between himself and his grave robbing crime, just in case the old man chose to report what he saw) had been a long drive—mostly due to the rental car. The drive from there to the little town where Aurelio's cheating wife had chosen a lover all those years ago had been a good distance, but had put him slightly north of Aurelio's hometown, but off any major roadway system, so it too had taken a significant amount of his time. But the idea of walking even the ten—fourteen, as the girl had said—miles back to San Luis Amatlán was outrageous. After all, Mr. Steach had been hoping that by now, at the very least, he would be reclining in an Equipale and smoking a cigar while admiring his newest gilded and bejeweled and formerly lost acquisition. Instead, he was traipsing around in the dark eating stolen bread that still had the greasy and stained fingerprints of the violent girl who'd taken it on its crust.
He had plenty of time to lose and wanted more than anything to get this part of his scheme over with—even though he couldn't quite call it a scheme, given that he wouldn't and couldn't have planned for this in a million years. "Faster. Más rápido," he told her, finding himself growing more comfortable with the Mexican dialect. He reflected for a moment on his youth spent traveling in summer between Barcelona and Madrid and teaching himself how to order sangria properly.
"Sí, gringo," the girl said. She pocketed one of the bottles of water into her worn cargo pants and tucked the knife into her dominant hand again before she started to push past him toward the part of the tunnel under the ovens.
Strange, Mr. Steach thought. The girl calls me a gringo?
Not allowing him another moment of thought, the girl started walking at a finer clip down and past the ovens and, confidently, through a passage that forked left and ignoring a second section that continued straight. It was the first time they'd come to a junction and the girl gave no indication that it was even a choice. He followed, blindly (literally) as the tunnel departed from what might have been a market or restaurant district and occasionally branched left or right as the miles began to fall under their footsteps. At least twice in the next five miles as they branched away from the heavily populated areas, the tunnel was collapsed and required some clever (and painful) movements over rank piles of what Steach believed to be night soil, based solely on the smell of it. By the time they'd reached the small chamber into which the tunnel fed before branching harshly to the right, he'd drank all of his water and forced the girl to hand over the rest of hers. Even with the cooling air of the tunnel, he was sweating and only making the stench he'd carried with him since the day before all the worse.
"We can't be there yet," he announced when he saw the girl's accomplished expression by way of an unknown light source from above them.
"Home," the girl said sternly.
"Yes, yes. I'll take you home," Steach assured her as he moved past her and into the chamber. He spun around to her. "Not home first! Statue first! San Luis first!"
His fervor startled her and she winced again at the name of Aurelio's hometown, but she shook her head decidedly. "Dejamos los...túneles ahora."
"Perdón?"
The girl huffed through her nose and walked forward to the farthest edge of the chamber. There against the wall was another rope ladder, like the one in the vault. She pulled herself onto it after sticking the knife back in her teeth and started to climb. Mr. Steach could see—by moonlight, he supposed—that the ceiling of the chamber had a wooden platform of similar design to the vault's as well. At the top of the ladder, the girl pushed up and slid the platform aside, exposing the chamber to a generous supply of, indeed, moonlight. She was up and standing at the opening's edge before Mr. Steach could put another thought together. He rushed forward and latched onto the ladder and scrambled up, his weak and overworked legs struggling with the additional exercise.
"¿Y ahora?" he asked when he was at last standing beside the girl in the open air.
Except the air wasn't quite open. Above them, a corrugated tin roof covered the opening and the side that faced south was open and exposed to an open field filled with over-grazed grasses. A dozen or more sheep slept together in a heap at the west wall of the half-barn and a dozen or more were tucked into a ball in the east corner. A few sheep heads popped up above the mound of white wool and stared, on watch, waiting for Mr. Steach or the girl to move.
"San Luis," the girl said with a grimace.
"We...walk there? Just out in the open? I could...get..."
There was no chance of a car anywhere that Mr. Steach could see. Even with the moonlight guiding them, they were in the middle of ranch lands that were only intended for sheep or the occasional ATV or even horseback rider. No roads. No cars.
In the middle of the field and some forty-feet away, a hulking animal stood on four hooves, watching over its flock and assessing if the two strangers in the barn were a danger. It let out a bray that split the night's serenity in two.