A H.E.R.O.S PROJECT 12

20. Hunt

The hole that leads to the cellar appears untouched. It looks how I found it on Friday night.

A flawlessly dug rectangle pit in the ground. Far too precise corners, smooth sidewalls plagued with curvy bony tree roots projecting outward like needy limbs. And not a single trace of shoveled dirt anywhere.

I carefully walk around the hole, scanning for dug earth, footprints, or any signs of human tampering.

"There," Richie points at the giant black door. The door is one of the shorter four walls that create the hole.

"What the hell is wrong with you, Richie!" Tristian is in Richie's face and punches his noodle arm hard. Richie will have a bruise there tomorrow morning. "Why are you always meddling in stuff?! Who in their right mind goes into a freak'n hole at night and thinks something good will happen!"

"An inventor would." Richie steps around Tristian and jumps into the rectangular hole like a rabbit. He doesn't land the fall and yelps when his ass hits the ground with a thud. Mud splatters all over his clean clothes.

Uhhh—

"Get your brother Yaya. I'm one second away from beating him." Tris ties her hair into a messy ponytail and maneuvers into the hole as girly as possible. She swears at Richie when mud ruins her vintage Queen t-shirt.

"Why did you go into the cellar, Richie? Now that I think about it, this is all your fault," I clarify, remembering how these unfortunate events occurred. I have a good life. I had a boyfriend and friends, and I was human. Damn, at least I was human.

Richie cleans his glasses, "I don't know. Why did John F. Kennedy want to go to the moon? Why did Christopher Columbus go to the Caribbean islands and enslave the indigenous people? Why did Martin Luther King have a dream? Why?..."

"Why are you so stupid?" Tris finishes for him. She turns on her phone flashlight and storms inside the dark cellar first. Tris loudly stomps her feet, clearly irritated. "Are you going to stand there while I find your cure, or are you coming inside!" she shouts from within the dark dwelling.

Richie flaps his arms, and Lou barks at him. Lou stays above ground this time, lying beside the door's entrance. She yawns, closing her eyes.

Not bothered by Tris's attitude, I slide into the hole, and so does Lee. Without snapping it, Lee graces a tree root, slyly maneuvering down, gracefully landing on his feet. Lee is still clean, and not a single drop of mud stains his clothes.

Lee gravitates to the black slab door and inspects it with his fingers, talking to himself in Chinese. "What have we here?" Lee smiles, cleaning patches on the door with his shirt. He scrubs a circular silver H.E.R.O.S. abbreviation and the Number Two in metallic blue metal below the emblem. The H.E.R.O.S emblem is a valuable clue I missed the first time I was here.

Questions, questions, questions.

Richie's Number Two made the black slab door?

Questions, questions, questions.

"You follow Richie. I'll stay here and conduct my research," Lee kindly informs me, flicking his wrist and steering me away from him because I'm distracting his genius. Lee politely bows when I don't move fast enough, my cue to leave him alone.

Lee sits in the mud, tinkering with a magnifying glass he takes out of his shirt pocket. Setting his phone on the ground, Lee records himself deciphering the door's secrets. He talks in Chinese, smiling the higher his exploration takes him.

"Whatever." I go inside the cellar.

Richie and Tris are rummaging through a clean stack of binders and moth-eaten papers on rickety wooden tables. They dump papers on computer desks with funny-looking machinery, black wires, and old boxy computers. They're ruthless in their search, briefly scanning documents, abandoning one paper for another.