“Mon dragon.”
“Mondragon, yeah. One where that—I mean—”
“Where the hot girl’s gonna live and take long naked showers,” Jade says for him.
The dimple in his cheek gives away how right she is.
“You can pour the concrete so the top’s level,” Shooting Glasses continues, doing his hand left to right in case “flat” is a new concept to her. “The base, not so much. It doesn’t have to be so flat, I mean. But you do want to dig down to pour.
Bedrock works best, and like you were saying, it’s shallow as shit over there.”
“The bedrock you mean,” Jade says.
“Yeah, what—？”
“The lake is deepest over there, because that side of the valley’s steeper than over here. Forget about it, sorry.”
She Theo Mondragons her hand for him to go on, and he does: “I wasn’t running the backhoe, Telly was. Just scraping back and forth with the boom. He’d loosen a big rock then push it out of the way. One or two of them caught the slope, went all the way down to the lake. It was like a game.
Anyway, we had this leaf blower, I guess. It was so one of us could blast it around after Telly’d scraped an area pretty clean.
So we could know what there was still left to do.”
“Where’d you plug it in, this leaf blower?”
“It was gas.”
Jade nods, chides herself for stopping him again.
“Anyway,” he says, “Greyson had his safety glasses on, would step in right after Telly lifted out, and he’d—” In the confines of the cab, Shooting Glasses mimes sweeping a great windy nozzle back and forth at foot-level, like herding mice with air. Jade almost has to grin, the picture’s so clear. “I was standing right beside his dumb ass, right? But I had my eyes closed, because Grey was spraying my legs. It was hilarious to him, I guess. He was always screwing around, was an accident waiting to happen. But I had to like close my eyes from it, all that little shit blasting up. Then my pants legs just went still.
That was the first way I knew something had happened. At first I thought he’d maybe run out of gas.”
“And this is in the day time?” Jade asks, hardly believing any slasher could be so brazen as to take someone with the sun shining down on them, people all around.
Shooting Glasses nods like that’s not the interesting part.
“He’d fallen through,” he says. “I guess—I guess we were on top of a cave? I don’t know how Telly’s backhoe hadn’t crumbled it all in already. But Greyson, man, the leaf blower was still there, wedged across the crack like he’d tried to hold on to it. It was still running. But he was gone, man. Fucking fell his ass all the way in, whatever.”
“One of you go down there for him?”
Shooting Glasses winces, having to be there again.
“We dropped a flashlight down to him,” he says. “Fifteen feet? Probably not even that. It wasn’t a big-ass cavern or anything. Just a little hollowed-out place, maybe fifteen by fifteen. Your history teacher’s right about it being all caves over there. Like fucking Swiss cheese.”
The reason there’s pockets of air in Swiss cheese, Jade knows but doesn’t say, is that there’s corruption in there, eating all around itself.
“But you got him out,” Jade prompts.
Shooting Glasses nods.
“How?”
Shooting Glasses huffs air through his nose in a sick laugh.
“We had to loop him like a goddamn pig,” he says, wiping his lips with the back of his sleeve. “He kept—he kept running away from the light we’d shine down. Like, running on all fours, like he’d forgot he was even a person.”
“Head injury?”
“Finally we shined all our lights into this one kind of corner he kept running to. So he had to cross under the hole to get out of the light, right? We dropped a cargo net on him, and when he tried to fight out of it, it tangled him up. He fought it the whole way, was making these… these like noises, I don’t know.”
“Had he been bitten?”
“What? No. I don’t know, shit. By what? He couldn’t breathe, though. Like, hypo—no. What do they call it?”
“Hyperventilating.”
“Yeah, that. Rabbit-breathing, the kind where your heart’s about to explode. And he was all curled up, kind of spasmy, his fingers crooked but not really broken. I don’t think they were broken. You don’t remember the day the ambulance came?”