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Story 05

7,600 words

Published by Plotter

Nautilus
Geoff Manaugh

PART ONE

Other students said the boys had been acting strange for weeks. Different. Not like themselves. In Luke’s case, that meant happy, the first time he had been sociable since his parents’ divorce more than two years earlier. Several classmates even said they saw him laughing.

For Billy, the older of the two, athletic, widely admired, hurtling forward through his first year at the town’s technical school, that meant showing up at local autobody shops, farm equipment dealers, estate sales, and junkyards, sometimes milling about for hours, crawling under vehicles, inspecting combines, diggers, and plows with a flashlight in one hand, buying all manner of things in cash, on three separate occasions hauling whole truck engines home. He bought axles. Skid plates. Rotary tilling blades. Sometimes he brought along his girlfriend, Reese. They would check lists together and whisper, holding hands.

For two brothers who were more likely to fight than spend time with one another, their lives had become noticeably intertwined. Some nights, Luke even hung out at the technical college till late in the evening, waiting with Reese while Billy fabricated frame parts or assembled who knew what inside. Other days, Billy would pick up his younger brother after school with a visible sense of excitement, speeding back home like the whole town was on their tail.

Then, one day, neither boy showed up for school at all.

+ + +

Miller Park, Illinois, was a small place, but two brothers absent without explanation didn’t, at first, seem startling. At least not the Nieman boys. Everybody knew Jodie and Mark, whose parental dysfunction had been legendary; most people still followed gossip of Mark’s escapades since the couple’s tornadic divorce. That neither parent would call to say their boys weren’t coming to school surprised no one, and the fact that both parents would be hard to reach for routine attendance questions even less so. A couple of voicemails were left on Jodie’s phone and Mark? Mark was who knows where—and, besides, he was no longer even noted as an official family contact.

When Jodie got home from work, saw that her boys weren’t around, and checked her voicemail, she had a feeling. She stepped out onto the porch, into the insectile roar of an Illinois spring evening, and looked across her driveway at the barn. The door was shut. There was no light inside, no music or noise from the boys’ cluttered workshop.

Jodie still lived on the old family farm, a spread her father—and his father before him—had brought to profit, but that she had neglected, letting it fill with weeds as tall as her teenagers. She knew one day she would have to give up at least part of it, maybe slice it up and sell five acres here, ten acres there, to neighboring farms. Or maybe to developers, she thought, if the economy recovered and more people moved to town.

She walked over toward the barn and stopped for a breath beneath its moth-circled light. Then she slid the door open to see what she knew she would see, something she had expected for months.

The barn was empty. The boys were gone.

+ + +

She called Mark, who picked up without saying a word.

She sighed. “Your boys did something real stupid today.”

“My boys?”

Now Jodie was the one who went silent.

“I thought you’d be more concerned about the stupid part,” she said.

+ + +

Mark was at the farm an hour later—Jodie’s farm, the house where Mark used to live, a place where he had celebrated Super Bowls, birthdays, and Christmas—but, for him, it was like trespassing on enemy terrain. He hadn’t been back in more than a year and there was a reason for that, he thought, maybe not a good one, but it felt like the past was being rubbed in his face out here. Like he had played a game there and lost. That he had once lived like a king on this very land, lording over—

“What’re you drinking these days?” Jodie said, interrupting his reverie. She could smell beer on his breath.

Mark hated these sorts of questions. He hated any question from Jodie. “Skim milk,” he said.

Jodie took him through one side of the barn and out the other, facing west, away from town. She directed his attention toward something that, for Mark, was not worth looking at. He could see the tracks of large wheels pressed deep into dirt, leading off toward an unkempt cornfield. The tracks stopped midway through a vortex of churned mud and plant roots. It meant absolutely nothing to him.

“I told you it was dumb,” Jodie said. “I told them it was dumb. It was the dumbest thing those boys could do.”

Mark still didn’t understand. “What am I seeing here, Jodie? They try to build a pool or something? Billy digging a duck pond?”

Jodie turned to face him. She glanced down at the goatee Mark had grown apparently thinking it would make his sunken chin seem masculine, and she caught the familiar impatient expression he wore when he didn’t like a situation he’d been placed in. She thought, Did this man really not know? Had Luke and Billy not told their father anything?

The right response here would be caution, she knew, taking things slow, going back to the beginning of the story and easing Mark into it, but Jodie wasn’t sure she cared.

“No, Mark,” she said, as if speaking to a child. “Your boys are digging a tunnel.”

+ + +

Officer Betz arrived, prepared to take notes—this could be a serious issue, he knew, two boys missing in a town as quiet as Miller Park—but Jodie’s whole story rubbed him wrong. He must be mishearing her, he thought, because it made no sense.

“You’re saying…” Officer Betz started, not knowing how to finish his own question. He was standing next to Jodie, police notebook in one hand, tactical flashlight in the other, directing its over-powered beam at the remains of a hole in the ground ten feet away. “Jodie, you’re saying your sons are in there?”

“They’re underground somewhere.”

He panned his flashlight side to side across the weed-filled field, looking for any evidence that Jodie planned on planting something this year. The season was already underway. Other farmers were hard at work. For Officer Betz, this did not reflect well on Jodie’s sense of responsibility.

He put his notebook back in his pocket. He said, “You got pictures of this… this thing you described?” She had said Billy was a star student at Miller Tech, but the rest of her explanation—some sort of project in the barn—had sounded like a fever dream.

Then Officer Betz saw something. “Hang on,” he muttered.

It might be nothing, he knew, but he had driven all this way. He walked forward into the field. Jodie followed.

About a hundred feet away, the ground was partially caved in. Beyond that, a small ridge of shadow appeared in the authoritarian blaze of his flashlight. It looked like a giant animal had burrowed beneath. In places, the disturbance was easily ten feet wide. And beyond that—damn, he thought.

“You see that?” he asked.

Officer Betz increased the power of his flashlight. Its beam narrowed, illuminating a nearly straight line of turmoiled earth extending deep into the field. It went and it went, until even police-grade illumination couldn’t track it.

“I told you,” Jodie answered. She was shaking her head, not at Officer Betz but at her boys. What had gotten into them? She opened up her phone’s photo app and scrolled around for a few seconds. “Here,” she said. “Look.”

But, as Jodie held out her device, Officer Betz exclaimed. The dirt beneath his feet had begun to slip. The ground was shifting.

He lurched forward and grabbed Jodie’s wrist, gently, a touch she hadn’t experienced in years, and placed his other hand on the small of her back, turning her to safety. It was a life-saving waltz and, as she found her footing, Jodie looked directly for his eyes.

He didn’t return the gaze. Officer Betz pointed his light at where they’d been standing. Streams of dirt were sliding down into some sort of gully underground. Some sort of opening. It looked, he had to admit, like a collapsed tunnel.

Jodie finally handed Officer Betz her phone. He looked down at the screen and whistled.

+ + +

Mark got the call, not Jodie, which thrilled him. Answering the phone, Mark felt like a father again. Trusted. A man in charge of his boys.

It was Tamara, the mother of Billy’s girlfriend, Reese. In a flash, Mark thought he understood the whole thing. Jodie’s nonsense had been exactly that—nonsense—because the boys had been hanging out at Reese’s house this whole time and Tamara was calling to explain. That was it.

Jodie always got so caught up in her stories, he thought, her worst-case scenarios and imaginary plots. It drove Mark crazy. He thought maybe Billy’s truck had broken down and Mark would have to go pick his boys up, rescue them like a father would. The return of the king! He would drive them both out to Jodie’s farm, look proudly back at her slack-jawed stare, and that would be that.

But Tamara wasn’t calling for automotive assistance. She was calling because Reese hadn’t come home from school that day.

+ + +

The boys had told themselves it would be a thrill ride and nothing more, but both of them knew that was not the whole truth. If they had really believed this was just a test-run, they would have gone out for the weekend, not on a school morning and certainly not a week before classes were through.

It was Billy’s doing, Luke believed, and Luke’s vision, Billy knew, this unusual engineering project that had consumed all their free time and spending money. All of Billy’s know-how from technical school and all of his self-taught expertise, with Luke’s genius guiding them. They would be the Wright Brothers of the underground, Luke proclaimed.

It had never really been a secret. Their mom knew; Jodie had seen it, heard them building it, even sat inside it, taking pictures. Billy had brought Travis, his partner from shop class, out a few months after construction began and actually showed it to him, this metallic tangle of bits and bobs he and his brother had been assembling in the barn. At that point, the whole thing was about the size of three refrigerators, nowhere near the behemoth it would soon become. Travis couldn’t figure it out, couldn’t tell which side was front and which was back, couldn’t imagine what on Earth it would ever be used for.

“What the hell is it?” he finally asked.

“Man,” Billy said, proud. “It’s, like, lawnmower blades. Old car engines. A bunch of stuff. Truck parts. Abandoned farm equipment. Those,” he pointed at some heavy welded pieces, “are excavators.”

“No—I mean, what is it?”

“Oh,” Billy said, as if that should have been obvious. “It’s a tunneling machine.”

PART TWO

Luke was the first one awake. He could see the hazy outline of his older brother across the hull in another bunk, Billy’s girlfriend, Reese, asleep beside him. Beyond the faint sound of breathing, it was silent.

No, Luke realized, that wasn’t true. He could hear birdsong.

He slowly rose and pulled himself through the top hatch, closing it behind him to make sure it didn’t clang. The sun was perched low over the horizon, its pink morning light skimming fields already planted for the season. Spiderwebs wet with dew shimmered in a small ravine of nearby trees.

They lived in a part of Illinois known for its peat farms and bottomless soil, its flood-nourished fields not far from the Mississippi, which had been flooding and spilling, breaking its banks and shifting, depositing fertile silt by the square-mile for millions of years. You could plow the ground here like butter, sell its worm-rich dirt halfway across the continent.

As Luke and Billy knew, that made it ideal tunneling country.

Their machine was the size of a school bus. It rested half-in, half-out of the ground like a whale’s back, a riotous beast of the deep now warming in the Illinois sun. They had surfaced just after midnight with no real idea of where they’d be. It could have been some family’s basement, the side of a busy road, or the center of town somewhere. The boys knew they’d have to work on that—navigation remained an unsolved challenge—but, for now, they’d gotten away with it. They had ridden their machine all day, belching and scrabbling through mud, peat, and soil, finally erupting on the outer edge of a stranger’s farm, disturbing nothing but empty earth.

Luke was still amazed any of this had worked. He opened his phone again, looked at the map, and couldn’t believe it. They were nearly twenty miles from home. They had done this in one day, he reminded himself. How much further could they go? Imagine a week, he thought. Imagine a month.

The machine wasn’t fast, but it was powerful. Sturdy. It performed as planned, and that was what mattered. It could drive through the ground at five miles an hour, maybe six, a light jog, hitting its stride here and there at seven or eight if the soil was right. In Luke’s eyes, it was a gigantic underground plow, a Frankenstein’s monster of reused and salvaged farm parts. Billy had built it, testing drill heads, blades, and excavators outside, producing dozens of craters that their mom didn’t seem too curious about, if she had noticed them at all. But Luke was the one who suggested it, who believed such a thing could be possible, that moving through the Earth like a slow-motion bullet was within reach if someone could figure out how to put it all together. Which was exactly what Billy then did. Luke made sketches; Billy made machines. Inspired by his favorite childhood book, Luke insisted they call it the Nautilus.

The vehicle’s interior was halfway between a delivery van and a submarine. It was all exposed controls and metal surfaces, with some rough bunks for sleeping and a few incidental places to sit. There were levers for turning on different digging bits and gearwheels salvaged from sportscars that could crank the engine up or down in power, with labels made from masking tape to remind the boys which thing did what. A wireless speaker Billy had snuck out of his dad’s office during the divorce hung from a ceiling beam. Random band stickers dotted the walls.

The first night, Billy drove. Inspired by electric motors, he had designed a regenerative braking system that responded to the tunneling itself: the resistance of the soil they cut through helped recharge the machine. He understood how the nested mechanisms worked, how to get more juice from the battery packs, and which specific digging system to turn on and when. Besides, he loved it. A man with a vehicle, Billy thought, was a man with a destiny.

Operating it was nowhere near as difficult as the boys had expected. Sure, clouds of dirt had showered down from the ceiling, coating every surface in fine dust, getting under their nails and on their clothes, the steering room rich with the smell of midwestern earth. But Reese and Luke had swept up the worst of it, leaving Billy to bump and shudder the machine forward, all three of them laughing, flinching, shouting as they hit tangles of roots and stray rocks.

Then, past midnight, roaring up into the silence of an Illinois spring field, ears ringing, the sky a dashboard of stars and passing satellites, they had somehow slept.

So here they were, wherever that was, far from any road, nestled up near a gully overgrown with trees. Birds were singing. Maybe they should call their mom, Luke thought. Maybe they shouldn’t. Maybe they should just see how far they could go and worry about telling the world once they got there. A proof-of-concept journey where the concept was themselves.

Luke heard sounds beneath him. Footsteps. Voices in the machine.

The hatch opened. Reese popped her head out, smiling.

+ + +

Reese had known Billy’s intentions for months, but that didn’t mean she believed him. She didn’t think he and Luke would actually do it, that what Billy had been saying was a plan, not a daydream. She knew he was over-enthusiastic. Excitable. Manic, even. Billy and his brother were going to drive underground in something that, to her, looked more like a metal-clad mole. She had already gone along with Billy once, on an early trial, lurching maybe forty feet through the soil in a field hidden from view of Jodie’s house. It was absurd. It was dangerous. Reese loved it.

What she had always liked about Billy, besides his touch and his smell, his smile and the gentle attention he paid to her, was that he acted like life beyond Miller Park was real. Billy, all of nineteen but a grown man in her eyes, an adult, took it for granted that possibilities existed in the world outside town and that people like Reese deserved them. She didn’t want to let that go. If Billy took off in a tunneling machine, she thought, he might never come back.

The original idea had been that Billy would text after he and Luke hit their or the machine’s limit. Distance and destination to be determined. Billy told Reese not to worry. She knew he could handle it. She loved watching him steer something so violent and unruly.

Reese wrote him a note that she hid in his jeans pocket, wondering when he might find it. Maybe right away. Maybe never. Then they both had second thoughts.

The morning of the boys’ departure, Reese texted. Billy texted back. They had been thinking the same thing. He raced over in his truck, waiting a few blocks away so Tamara wouldn’t see. Reese climbed inside next to him. Her backpack was full of food she had taken from the kitchen. She had her toothbrush with her and an extra change of clothes.

No one did anything with their lives anymore, Reese thought. Maybe they posted on social media, ganging up on people they had been friends with hours earlier. But why? No one wanted to explore. People acted like what the world gave them was all they were allowed to have.

Reese rolled her window down and watched as houses became trees, and trees became open fields, then they were pulling up the driveway to Jodie’s farm. An old barn with a machine inside it loomed ahead. Luke was there, sliding the door open, shaking his head at her arrival but grinning.

+ + +

Billy came up out of the hatch a few minutes later. He always slept well, even in the belly of this half-buried beast, and he carried his alertness like a taunt. He put his arm around Reese.

“I checked the map,” Billy said, continuing a conversation the two of them had been having in their bunk below. “It’s not far from here. We can make a quick stop.”

Billy saw confusion on his little brother’s face. He said, “You remember Travis, right?”

+ + +

Travis had worked with Billy on some projects at Miller Tech, where he had become known as a mechanical whiz, good with heavy tools and strong enough to use them. Along with Reese and Jodie, Travis knew about—and had seen—the tunneling machine. Once he got his head around what the brothers wanted to do, he even offered ideas on how to improve it.

Travis didn’t speak at first when he responded to a knock on the side door of his rural house and saw Reese and Billy standing there. Billy’s clothes were filthy with dirt, as if he had crawled across the yard, and even Reese was dusted with plant matter.

A second or two passed. “Wait,” Travis finally said. He smiled. “No, no, no.” The realization made him laugh. “Come on, dude. You really did it?”

+ + +

They had left the machine parked out of the ground a mile or so away behind a wall of trees in a farmer’s field. Luke was there, waiting. He and Travis nodded hello.

Travis laughed again as he looked at this half-entombed mass of metal plates and excavating wheels, as if an armored plow had fallen from the sky. He was already running his hand along its side, dislodging dirt from rough-welded seams, admiring the effort.

“You want to see it work?” Billy asked.

Of course he did.

+ + +

The four of them spent the rest of the day underground before surfacing for the night twenty miles west, in a landscape of secluded hills that sloped down toward the Mississippi. They ate slices of bread and peanut butter, and, thanks to Reese, some fruit, outside beneath a dome of clouds that had moved in and hid the stars.

The idea had been to drop Travis off somewhere in a town with bus service the next morning and send him home with a story to tell, but, as they sat there together surrounded by the smell of Illinois soil, it was Travis who couldn’t take his eyes off the western horizon. When they climbed back inside and found what passed for comfort in the machine’s uncushioned bunks, he became insistent that they should try to tunnel under the river. At that moment, Iowa sounded as exotic and otherworldly as Hawaii.

Luke admitted it was theoretically possible. Billy agreed, saying the hull could handle the weight and pressure of saturated clay.

Even better, Travis added, he had cousins over there, less than two hours away. “We should tunnel up beside their house. Jump out. Pretend it’s, like, an Illinois thing.”

Reese laughed. Billy realized to his dismay that she seemed enthralled by Travis’s casual air of self-assurance and began questioning the logic of bringing this particular friend along for the ride.

But that also meant Reese covertly held the deciding vote. They went for it just before lunch the next day, north of an old river port on the Illinois side, where the Mississippi’s banks were close enough that two towns facing each other across the waters held an annual tug of rope competition every summer. From one state to the other, the distance was half a mile. It took them more than four hours.

Midway under the river, the machine rammed headlong into glacial rocks that had been locked in mud for thousands of years. Stuck there, plow blades stalling, the relentless flow of the river above became audible, its guttural roar like every airplane in the world passing slowly overhead. The sediment around them rumbled. Debris ground and tapped against the hull. The water itself was harmless—insulated by dozens of feet of ancient clay—but small rivulets ran down the walls inside, causing momentary panic.

Then Luke came up with a plan. Billy implemented it. The machine shuddered like a submarine and they broke through.

When they emerged into open air again, the clouds had cleared. Late afternoon Iowa sun burned down on them from the west. They ascended on the fenceline of two newly planted cornfields, dragging a barbed-wire knot of wooden posts along with them a few hundred feet, but they were teenagers and the only damage they cared about was what they could see on their own machine. There were several large dents, a loose panel or two, and jagged scrapes that looked like a monstrous animal had attacked them in the deep.

They now had all of Iowa ahead of them, twenty-thousand leagues of well-plowed earth deposited over millennia by forests and streams. The land here was oceanic, endless waves of hills defining the horizon. In the late-spring humidity, Travis took off his shirt; Billy, cognizant now of more than just mechanical issues, quickly followed.

On a whim, Luke took a picture of himself standing in the dirt next to the machine, the mud-spattered legs of his companions visible in the frame above. He put his fingers in a peace sign. He texted it to his mom. “Made it under the river.” He would let her figure out which one.

+ + +

What later reports would never get right was what it felt like inside the machine. The exhilaration and thrill every time they plunged underground. The constant fear that something might fail, the soil above them slumping or the machine’s ribs caving in, crushed like a can in a compactor. The screech of metal teeth across sandstone; the sodden chopping of blades through soil.

Wherever they stopped became their next destination. Billy would park the machine behind some trees. Luke and Travis would throw dead branches against its hull to hide it from passing view. Then they’d walk into town as a group to get groceries, their clothes covered in grease, their body odor growing, at one point hiking more than three miles to use a pay-as-you-go truck-stop shower along I-80 to get clean, then carrying cheap food back to a machine that increasingly felt like home.

The first few nights, Luke couldn’t sleep. To his frustration, Travis kept referring to the machine as Billy’s and Billy’s alone. Luke had yet to hear his brother correct him. Luke had also come to resent the fact that he, too, had wanted to bring a friend along, but Billy had said it would be too crowded—only to show up with Reese. Now Travis was aboard, suggesting different destinations. Luke felt like he had been sidelined from his own experience.

As the others stayed up late, the hatch above them open, quiet music playing on the speaker, Luke climbed outside to wander the fields. The world seemed huge and inexhaustible, Miller Park a million miles away. He saw constellations and the occasional shooting star. Barns and farmhouses formed silhouettes in the distance. At one point, he heard an owl.

The next morning, latent tensions boiled over. Luke made a reasonable point, that the landscape ahead was filled with river cliffs and underground rock formations, which would make it almost impossible to tunnel through. They’d go ten feet, not ten miles. We should head southwest, Luke said. We should follow the soil.

Travis wasn’t really paying attention. He mistook the comment as a personal challenge, as if Luke was implying he was unreliable.

“And what exactly is your role here on Billy’s machine?” Travis said.

Billy’s machine.

“Chill out, man,” Travis said through an unconvincing grin. “Let the grown-ups drive.”

To Luke’s horror, his older brother laughed.

+ + +

Luke didn’t think of himself as an introvert, despite spending so much time alone. He also never thought of himself as shy, despite preferring the company of books and movies. But Luke had never minded being cast out of groups. Rejection, he felt, took the pressure off; you could relax and do things better on your own.

So here he was, walking the streets of a town called West Liberty, a place that had taken him nearly two hours to reach on foot, thinking back to a very successful first tunneling expedition. Billy and the machine were still grinding west, Luke knew, directly into a landscape of hard rock where they would inevitably run aground, like a ship striking a reef. Luke could have helped them avoid that fate, but so be it.

There was a bus stop a few blocks ahead with at least two connections that could return him to a new version of his old life back home. Luke was already picturing other, better machines and longer, future journeys. Maybe north, he thought, into Canada, or straight to Chicago, pop up in a park downtown and make the evening news. He would send Billy a postcard just to piss him off.

Then Luke’s phone vibrated. Then it vibrated again.

+ + +

Luke felt the machine before he saw it. It was Reese who had told him where to go, a wild meadow south of town. Luke was right, she texted. Billy had scraped against a heavy shale ridge for more than a mile underground and nearly lost two plow blades. He couldn’t get through. Billy had to admit what he didn’t want Travis or even Reese to hear. That they needed Luke.

A tremble in the dirt fifty feet away became a rumble. Then the shaking turned sonic, an audible thump of rhythmic engines underground. Wakes of soil burped up and slumped.

Luke stepped aside as the deformed hull of the machine finally breached.

+ + +

“You threw me out of my own machine, man.”

The brothers had wandered off to settle things. Reese and Travis pretended not to watch, trying not to eavesdrop. They all knew they were within view of a nearby golf course. They had to get going soon.

“Dude, you left. Literally. You walked away.”

“You told me to leave. You laughed.”

“This is exactly what you always do. You go off on your own like this. It’s annoying.”

“Annoying is you taking credit for everything. I said, someone should build a tunneling machine, and started drawing this. You’d be repairing pick-up trucks if it wasn’t for me.”

“I never said it was my idea. Ever. But I built this.”

“It’s basically Travis’s trip now.”

“Oh my God. Look, Travis—” Billy started. “This is our trip. You and me. I came back for you. We should have listened. I rammed straight into bedrock. I nearly tore half the machine off.” Billy smiled. “I mean, this is crazy. All of this is crazy. But I can’t do it without you.”

+ + +

Travis’s aunt, Merritt, had spent fifteen years working as a maritime shipping lawyer in Norfolk, Virginia, before moving back to Iowa in her mid-40s. She had begun running a boutique apple farm with her now-late husband; since his passing, it had become less a viable business than a labor of love.

She stood outside in the shifting midwestern weather, looking at a still-active machine that had come grinding up from the mud, directly into the pillars of her old garage. She was reaching for her phone to call the police when Travis, her nephew from Illinois, leaped out.

An intimidating whorl of plow blades and welded steel loomed over them both.

“Oh my God, Travis—that doesn’t look safe!”

Before Travis could reply, the full roof of the garage collapsed backward away from them, its weather-ravaged planks splintering across the hull of the machine.

In the ensuing silence, Billy emerged, followed by Reese. Luke popped out seconds later.

“Where on earth did you find this thing?” Merritt said.

“We built it,” Billy replied. He took Reese’s hand, as much for Merritt to see as for Travis. “My brother and I did. We’ve been tunneling for nearly a week.”

+ + +

When Merritt’s three teenage daughters came home from final exams that afternoon, they saw the ruins of their old garage at the top of the driveway. Then they saw the machine. All three of them made short, baffled videos and posted them to social media.

As they filed inside to ask what was going on, they saw a young man sitting next to a girl roughly their age talking to their mother, and a cute, younger-looking boy sitting alone by the living room window. In the background, the clothes washer started beeping.

Their shirtless cousin, Travis, walked in from the kitchen holding a plate of food.

“Laundry’s done!” he shouted.

Then he noticed his cousins. They one-arm hugged with the reluctance of teenage relatives.

“You see that thing outside?” he asked.

“Uh, duh,” the oldest cousin, Cybill, said. “It’s the size of a house.”

+ + +

Merritt believed in hospitality. She and her husband had bought this old Victorian for many reasons, from its sun-drenched breakfast room with a built-in table to its line of sturdy oaks shading the back porch. But its two extra guest rooms had sealed the deal.

She insisted Travis sleep on a couch downstairs but wouldn’t let him go to bed before he called his mom—Merritt’s sister—and explained where he was and, she demanded, specifically how they got there. She gave Reese the largest guest room and put Billy and Luke down the hall, in twin beds, near windows overlooking the machine.

As they were going to bed their second and final night, Travis told Billy that he wouldn’t be continuing. Unlike Billy, he said, he actually wanted to get back to finish the school year. His aunt would drive him home. Also unlike Billy, he added, he didn’t think either of the brothers were doomed.

“There’s no way Miller Tech will kick you out,” Travis said. “You’re missing finals—so what? This thing makes you their number one best student, ever. When people hear about this thing, they’ll name whole colleges after you.”

Merritt’s middle daughter, Sophie, was Luke’s age. They were both avid readers. After Merritt went to bed, she and Luke stayed up facing each other on the living room floor in a quiet part of the house, talking about their favorite books. At one point, Sophie uncrossed her legs and gently bumped her foot against Luke’s knee. Later, they snuck out through the side door to see the machine. Luke wasn’t sure it made sense to say it out loud, but he told her that this ugly hunk of gears and excavating blades wouldn’t last forever, but he needed to see how far it could go. Sophie nodded, like she got it. Their hands briefly touched.

When they left the next morning, Merritt gave them bags of fresh groceries and a pile of clean clothes. Luke promised Sophie he would text, planning instead to surprise her with a letter sent somewhere down the road, maybe even from across the Nebraska line. As they closed the hatch and began whirring back underground, he felt a crush so strong he was sick to his stomach.

+ + +

Sightings, meanwhile, were on the rise. A family driving back from a Chinese restaurant saw some sort of armored vehicle roar out of the ground like a creature at SeaWorld before their view was cut off by trees. A boy home sick from school told his parents he had seen a geyser of dirt explode in a field behind the house and a machine briefly surface, his unlikely claim later backed up by the discovery of a half-collapsed tunnel.

An elderly farmer living alone swore up and down he had seen “a robot” parked at sunrise, “just sitting there,” he said, “not doing much,” beyond the back hills of his property, but it was gone by the time he found his camera. Then, from one backyard to the next, across an entire town, at least a dozen pet dogs began barking, furiously scratching the ground, until whatever they were bothered by had passed beneath.

Taken alone, the reports made no sense; taken together, something underground was clearly heading west.

+ + +

On the ninth day of their odyssey, Billy surfaced the machine in the middle of the night under the glow of a full moon. Luke climbed out and saw they were next to an unlit baseball diamond, the streets of a small town visible half a mile away.

Then he saw headlights approaching. Two cars parked and a group of teenagers jumped out.

They were holding cameras and waving.

+ + +

A teenage science club in central Iowa had figured out what no one else apparently could, which was that whatever was making the ground in their state rumble could be easily tracked with seismometers—homemade ones, in this group’s case. Its members had been sending texts back and forth all day as it became obvious that the tremors were headed directly toward them.

As Luke and Billy climbed down to the ground, they were greeted like rock stars. They posed for photographs. They gave tours of the machine’s interior. Reese told everyone stories of where the three of them had been—their impossible river passage, the small towns and endless fields, the sunrises and stars.

What became obvious as they showed everyone around, however, was that the machine was looking worse for the wear. It had held up under river and field, through gravel and soil, but its condition was clearly deteriorating. The hull had become clumped with grass and plant roots. Snagged earth hung from metal dents and broken panels. Making it all the way to the Rockies had never been realistic—the machine was designed for soil, not mountain rock—but even the Iowa/Nebraska line now seemed unlikely.

At the end of the night, everyone stood aside to watch the machine roar to life. Steel-drum vibrations passed through its hull with a shivering whine and bits of gravel shook loose, plinking down the outer walls like rain.

With a jolt, they were moving again. Downward into the ground, the teens rumbled.

+ + +

For two more nights, they headed west. They snuck into one town to stretch their legs and found themselves in the midst of a tulip fest, the village an old Dutch settlement, Reese and Billy walking through rows of flowers, hand in hand. Another day, they ascended just before sunset near a quarry, only to see a worksite supervisor staring in disbelief at this mechanical Leviathan of mud and soil emerging from the deep. Somehow, they convinced him to help reattach a dangling panel.

It was a Saturday morning when they decided to change course, hoping to avoid a reservoir southeast of Des Moines. They weren’t far beneath the surface when something in the earth next to them gave way in a slobbery rush. They felt themselves pushed hard sideways, mud sluicing into the steering room through every crack. The metal hull screeched under pressure. Then the engines shut off, and the lights went out.

PART THREE

Officer Betz was at the door. Jodie had soured on him since their night together, next to each other in her fields. What now? she was about to say. She had grown tired of men who claimed expertise when the right moment to display that competence never came.

But Officer Betz had a strange expression on his face.

+ + +

They just got a call, he said. Down at the station. It was some sort of science club over in Iowa, a bunch of kids. Based on something or other about earthquakes and seismometers—Officer Betz admitted he didn’t understand—they were afraid the boys’ machine might be in trouble.

Hobbyists and high school students had been monitoring the ground for days now, like listening for whales in the Pacific. They thought they had picked up signs of a cave-in that morning, some kind of ground collapse. They said the machine had gone silent. They hadn’t heard it moving for several hours.

They said the boys might be trapped.

+ + +

Juan Guerrero had lived in central Iowa all his life. He owned car dealerships, a restaurant with his wife, and half a dozen off-road racing tracks, one of which was so high-end it hosted state championships every summer. Those events were televised, often nationally, featuring prominent signage with the Guerrero family name visible in every shot. He had five kids—four sons—two of whom had earned back-to-back state racing trophies around that very track. The family garage, as large as an autobody shop, held whole fleets of recreational vehicles, from dirt bikes to ATVs.

The call that morning was a fantasy Juan didn’t even know he had. The governor of Iowa was on the line. She and Juan were friends going back more than twenty years, even if their friendship was purely transactional, sustained less by camaraderie than by Juan’s generous campaign donations.

“Have I got something for you,” the governor said.

+ + +

Juan knew his kids could get there in half an hour. If the boys’ machine was stuck where the governor said it was, it meant they were somewhere smack in the middle of a state-owned nature reserve, a boggy waste too muddy for emergency vehicles.

But the Guerreros were a family of landcraft. They staked their name on all-terrain power, with branded crash helmets and off-road tires to match. Juan’s daughter and three of his sons were home that weekend. He ran in, bellowing, and chased them off their PlayStation. They were ready to go in instants.

They took two racing trucks, an ATV, and a dirt bike for maneuverability, along with several hundred feet of towing rope. They had permission from the governor herself to trespass on state lands. Local police were expecting them. The half-hour journey down Iowa 5, turning north into the old river marshes near the state’s largest reservoir, took them less than twenty-three minutes at full speed.

+ + +

Navigation was still the boys’ Achilles heel and here it nearly killed them. Saturated soils had liquified as the machine’s drills spun closer to the reservoir than he thought, and a wave of aqueous earth rushed into the tunnel behind them. It filled every gap like caulk, pushing their vehicle to the side and leaving it pinned at an odd angle in the muck. It lay jammed into the ground like a slowly-flooding shipwreck.

As the Guerreros ran towing straps from the back of their vehicles, the obvious fear was that more of the reservoir’s shoreline might slump. That would flood the machine, a catastrophe for Luke, Billy, and Reese, and likely as disastrous for those attempting to rescue them.

The youngest of the brothers, Alonso, roared up to the edge of the marsh on his dirt bike. He couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. The machine was more than double the size he’d expected, not a van but a small building. Al could sense its power and, of course, its possibility; he could easily imagine driving something like that with his siblings, and he instantly knew that he and his dad could redesign the engines, triple the horsepower, ramp it up to racing speeds, add some aftermarket flair.

But he also noticed the silence. No mechanical sounds. No voices.

They had arrived too late.

+ + +

Then there was a loud bang, then another, then more, then a panel broke free from the hull with a clatter and splashed into the rising waters below.

A being so covered in earth it was unrecognizable as human stuck its head through the hole and looked around. The two boys saw each other.

Luke waved, his arm flinging mud in all directions.

+ + +

Up to his thighs in reservoir water, Al roped down into the sludge. He joined Luke on the hull; together, they knotted towing straps onto exposed ribs in the machine’s broken frame. The two of them bumped fists and Luke disappeared inside.

Engines ready to go, the Guerreros sparked their vehicles back to life. Sliding back and forth in torrents of mud, unable to find traction, it took several minutes for them even to begin inching forward.

Billy got the battery packs to fire, just enough to start chopping sodden soil, helping wiggle the machine free. With an explosion of earth, the machine burped backward out of the ground like a bewildered baby.

+ + +

Both Luke and Billy knew right away the sound wasn’t good. Half the steering system was gone and an entire group of cutting wheels had folded backward, nearly in two, when the machine lurched in reverse against the grain. A quick inspection confirmed the worst. They could still tunnel, Billy reckoned, but slower now, and turning the machine left or right would be impossible. Luke, though, said that would probably be enough.

The oldest Guerrero brother laughed. “You can’t be serious. You’re going underground again?” But everyone could hear the tone in his voice. It was not shock but admiration. They knew their family would do exactly the same thing.

+ + +

The machine made it less than two miles. Billy and Reese steered it, flapping forward through mud, dirt, and soil, asthmatic and wheezing, but could no longer get it to tunneling depth. It lurched and gasped like a broken submarine drifting into port.

Then, with a sigh, the machine gave out. Its engines were silent, its gears and wheels locked in place, a final puff of dust blowing away on the breeze.

+ + +

The three of them sat down atop the vehicle, eyes squinting in the overcast light. Billy put his arm around Reese. Luke picked up a piece of gravel he had found lodged in the hull and tossed it as far as he could, aiming for nothing in particular, just distance.

Luke’s forehead marked with mud, he mumbled, “You know, this thing wouldn’t be hard to fix.”

“I was just thinking that,” Billy replied.

They had tunneled more than two hundred miles. A couple days with the right tools and the brothers could tunnel four hundred more.

“You think they’ll let us?” Reese asked. She knew everything in their lives had changed, but not exactly how. She knew, if she could, she would do it all over again. She would jump right back in with Billy and go anywhere, if the world wasn’t in the way. Why not?

Luke, now, was on his feet. An Iowa state trooper had pulled up on the side of the highway. The officer stepped outside and was standing there, dumbstruck, unsure of what he was seeing.

“I think we’re about to find out,” Luke said.

The three of them stayed there, Billy and Reese holding hands, Luke throwing rocks. The revolving lights of more police cars approached in the distance.

All images U.S. Library of Congress or Google Street View.

GEOFF MANAUGH is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer, author of the New York Times-bestselling book A Burglar’s Guide to the City (2016) and co-author, with Nicola Twilley, of Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine (2021). He has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Financial Times Magazine, Wired, and many other publications. His short story “Ernest” (2017) was adapted into a feature film by Netflix under the title We Have a Ghost (2023). GEOFFMANAUGH.COM

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©2026 Geoff Manaugh

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