Descent
Hostage Tunnels. 950 words, 3 minute read. With Claude Opus 4.
The playground's elephant slide had lost an ear to shrapnel. Sarah's knees buckled as rough hands steered her past the twisted swings, her vision still swimming from the rifle strike. She'd been haggling over oranges—three shekels, not five—when the market erupted. Now copper filled her mouth, and her left eye wouldn't stop watering.
Two men in mismatched fatigues kicked aside empty Pepsi bottles and yanked up a metal grate where children once played hide-and-seek. The hole beneath exhaled cool, damp air that smelled of wet concrete and something else—machine oil, maybe.
"Yalla," the younger one muttered, scratching at acne scars on his jaw. When Sarah hesitated, he switched to English. "You go down now, miss. Is okay. We have..." he paused, searching for the word, "...protocol. You understand? Rules."
The ladder's rungs had been worn smooth. Sarah counted them in her head—her grandmother had taught her that trick during thunderstorms. Count something, anything, to keep the fear from spreading. Thirty-seven, thirty-eight. Her forearms burned. Fifty-two, fifty-three. The circle of sky above contracted until it resembled the period at the end of a sentence.
At the bottom, her legs shook like a newborn colt's. LED strips ran along the ceiling in plastic housing meant for Christmas lights. Their glare made everyone look corpse-pale. The tunnel ahead curved gently, its walls showing chisel marks and the occasional print of a work glove pressed into concrete patches.
"Move, please." The older guard had a Beirut accent and a wedding ring that caught the light. "Long walk. You need steady pace, like marathon. You know marathon?"
She knew marathon. She'd run a half-marathon in Tel Aviv two years ago, back when crossing borders meant showing a passport, not being dragged through holes in the earth. Her body found a rhythm: inhale for four steps, exhale for four. The tunnel branched and merged with others like veins in a vast circulatory system. Her guards navigated without hesitation, occasionally exchanging jokes in Arabic about someone's mother-in-law.
The first explosion hit when they'd been walking for maybe an hour. The ground shivered. Dust sifted down like flour through a sieve. Sarah's whole body clenched, waiting for the ceiling to collapse.
"Is nothing," the younger guard said, brushing dirt from his shoulders. "Like—how you say—when neighbor upstairs drops furniture. We are..." He held his hand low, then raised it high above his head. "Very far down. The generals, they drop their big bombs, think they're so clever. But we're drinking tea down here."
More impacts followed, irregular drumbeats from another world. The older guard passed Sarah a water bottle. The label had been peeled off, leaving ghostly adhesive patterns. The water tasted of limestone and rubber gaskets, but she drank deeply.
"My daughter," the guard said quietly, "she has your color eyes. Green like olives. She lives with her mother now, in Jordan." He took the bottle back. "Come. Not much further."
The tunnel widened gradually, like a throat opening to swallow. New sounds drifted toward them—metal clanging against metal, the hiss of walkie-talkies, someone singing off-key to a pop song. The air grew warmer, thick with the smell of unwashed bodies and instant coffee.
When they emerged into the main cavern, Sarah's mind struggled to process the scale. The space defied logic—a hollowed-out cathedral where prayers had been replaced by preparation for war. Men cleaned rifles with the patience of monks illuminating manuscripts. Forklifts hummed between towers of supplies. Along the far wall, missiles lay cradled in racks, their fins jutting out like shark teeth.
"Ahmad!" A woman in a hijab and tactical vest waved from behind a folding table covered in spreadsheets. "Is this the one from the market? Bring her here. I need to log—" She rattled off numbers and codes that meant nothing to Sarah.
They wove through the organized chaos. A group of fighters sat cross-legged, sharing a pot of rice and what looked like canned tuna. One offered Sarah a piece of flatbread as she passed. She almost took it before remembering her bound wrists.
"This way." The older guard guided her to a section of smaller chambers carved into the rock. He produced a key from his vest. "Inside, please."
The room barely qualified as a closet. A cot with a mattress that showed the ghost-imprints of previous occupants. A blue bucket with a lid. Three bottles of water and a LED lantern with Arabic writing on the battery compartment. On the wall, someone had scratched a calendar, though Sarah couldn't tell if it was recent or years old.
"The bathroom," the guard gestured down the corridor, "is three doors left. Knock first. Someone brings food at eight and eight. Morning and night, you understand?"
Sarah nodded. Her throat felt full of sand.
The younger guard lingered in the doorway. "Is not forever," he said, as if trying to convince himself as much as her. "Everything here, is just...waiting. All of us, waiting for something."
The lock turned with a sound like knuckles cracking. Sarah sat on the cot and listened to their footsteps fade into the general rumble of activity. Somewhere above, another missile found earth instead of flesh. The lantern cast her shadow large against the wall—a giant in a cave within a cave within the earth. She pressed her palm against the cool stone and felt the mountain's pulse, slow and patient, keeping time to a war that had moved underground.
Outside her door, the resistance prepared for battles that would never make the evening news. Inside, Sarah began her own excavation—digging through the fear to find whatever came after.