By Joshua Vise – July 21, 2025

Published in the anthology Dead Man’s Land: Shell Shock by Wicked Shadow Press. Lulu: Paperback or EPUB

Pfc. Henry Hughes hit the ground, his combat boots squishing in the soft mud. He pulled the rappelling rope through the belay mechanism on his harness and held the line taut as he attempted to survey his surroundings. The blackness that engulfed him at the bottom of the pit was thick and impenetrable, and until he engaged his night vision monocular, he would never know just how far the tunnel in front of him extended. For all he knew, it ended just beyond the reach of his fingertips.

“Clear down?”

The voice hissed from above, but Hughes didn’t bother to look up.

“Wait one,” he half-whispered.

Hughes reached for the scope attached to his helmet and flicked it down. The reticle glowed green as soon as it locked into place, and a series of range estimator markings lined the edges of his field of view. Still, a burrow like this one isn’t a low-light situation, but a no-light one, and it was only after he turned on the infrared flashlight on his shoulder that his surroundings exploded into view. Roots snaked through the loosely packed dirt walls on either side of him, occasionally jutting out like spindly fingers reaching their way out of the soil. Just ahead, the tunnel extended into a darkness that even his optical gear couldn’t penetrate. 

“Clear down,” Hughes stated flatly, “and no booby traps.”

Pvt. Sonny Wright’s belay mechanism zipped as he descended into the hole along the same rope, hitting the ground just behind Hughes. The large cylinder of detonation cord on his back wobbled as he struggled to keep his balance on the uneven ground. Wright had fastened the end of the cord to a stump outside of the entrance, and the explosive cabling unspooled with each step he took. Hughes could see a hint of green trickle out from around Wright’s eyepiece as Wright engaged his helmet scope. 

“Looks promising,” said Wright softly. In these circumstances, speaking in a low tone was second nature. It had become such a habit for Wright and Hughes that they sometimes had difficulty making themselves heard when back on the surface.

“Yeah,” replied Hughes, “Let’s string it out for as long as we can. We’re bound to find something.” He drew a deep breath of cool, musty air into his lungs, the dampness always tinged with a hint of something reminiscent of mildew or fungus.

During the Vietnam War, the military couldn’t force you to be a tunnel rat. You had to volunteer. You’d descend headfirst through passages barely wider than your shoulders, carrying only a pistol, a knife, and a flashlight. Waiting for you in this subterranean world were bats, snakes, spiders, booby traps, and, assuming you made it past all of these obstacles, your enemy. 

Hughes often thought about that conflict, and though the last soldier had died decades ago, the similarities he imagined between his experiences and theirs always roused strange feelings of kinship. He would have liked to have talked to any of those original tunnel rats, despite the fact that they would probably have resented the comparison given the realities of this current conflict. He imagined their resentment, and had rehearsed his reply to such a rebuke over and over. While the Viet Cong had carved out hundreds of miles of tunnels, these modern insurgents had taken over and repurposed literally thousands of miles of underground spaces, linking together abandoned subway lines, old sewer systems, and natural caverns into networks that stretched from the Mississippi River to the Rockies. The most recent estimates put the underground population at just over thirty million, all driven below by the army’s relentless use of tiny, explosive-tipped drones on the surface. But drone signals couldn’t penetrate the ground, and other remote vehicles were too prone to becoming stuck in traps. As such, the role of tunnel rat had long since ceased to be a volunteer-only position. In fact, the subterranean world had become the army’s primary theater of combat.

Hughes took the lead, his pistol at the ready. Wright followed behind, unwinding his spool of Primacord carefully as he progressed. The modern stuff was much more stable, unlikely to ignite from friction, heat, or electronic interference. Even so, stories of unlucky grunts had circulated among the explosives teams, and the most conscientious among them treated their pack gingerly, as much out of respect for their teammates as from their own sense of self-preservation. Wright was one of the more diligent and meticulous ‘spoolies’ in Hughes’s outfit, a fact that Hughes had been thankful for ever since they were first paired up after basic training. Together, they made their way forward slowly, always mindful of their surroundings.

“Side passage on the left,” whispered Hughes.

Wright peered over Hughes’s shoulder, and saw the tunnel leading to a step off. After two stairs, the passage forked, one continuing roughly in the same direction that they had been heading, the other turning sharply to the left.

“Which one do we take?” Wright asked.

Hughes wrinkled his nose.

“Hold one,” he said as he proceeded alone down the stairwell. He aimed his gun steadily down each passage, his eyes scanning for signs of recent human activity or evidence of booby traps. Satisfied that no immediate danger existed, he leaned into the side entrance, sniffing deeply.

“Shit pit,” he confirmed, “Maintain course, and brace for contact.”

The shit pits were designated areas of tunnel systems where underground inhabitants could throw their refuse. Leaving anything above ground would instantly alert the drones to their presence in the area. 

“Switching to thermal,” said Wright.

Hughes reached for his scope, and twisted a knob on its side. Instantly, the green hue in his viewfinder disappeared, replaced with a smear of black and blue as the thermal imager began to pick up heat signals in the tunnel. Soon, brighter colors materialized in the eyepiece.

“Je-sus,” Wright drawled out each syllable, a mannerism he always slipped into when taken aback. “Look at that.”

The source of Wright’s surprise was as obvious as it was unsettling. Amid the darker blues and purples, a distinct band of yellow streaked along the floor. The impact of recent footprints warmed the ground slightly relative to the surroundings, something that all tunnel rats had been trained to notice when using their thermal imagers. Hughes had run tracking drills in basic, using his scope to locate footprints in the dark. Each crescent-shaped boot print glowed slightly against the cooler ground, almost as if someone had stepped in phosphorescent paint.

But nothing in his training had prepared him for the image in his viewfinder. Rather than a series of prints, the entirety of the floor was streaked with color. In a world where ignorance could be fatal, this unfamiliar sign raised grim questions that neither man was prepared to answer.

“Ever seen this before?” whispered Wright.

“No,” answered Hughes softly, “nothing like this.”

“Maybe they just dragged something hot through here.”

“Yeah, or a thousand people just walked through.”
               Rumors of camps the size of cities had spread through the army’s ranks, though nothing had been confirmed. 

“So what do we do?” asked Wright, a hint of hissing anxiety evident in his voice.

“How much cable do we have left?”

Wright cupped his hand over a small digital readout on his left wrist before pressing a button, revealing the number ‘131’ in faint, red text similar to an old alarm clock.

“Three hundred sixty-nine meters to go.”

Hughes thought for a moment.

“Move ahead.”

Hughes and Wright moved deeper into the tunnel. It seemed that every few meters, the streak across the floor became perceptively brighter, warmer, and wider, with no indication as to the source of the temperature change.

Hughes felt a tap on his shoulder, and turned to see the heat-silhouette of Wright gesturing ahead. Peering through his unobstructed eye, Hughes could make out a faint beam of light trickling from some source just beyond, something that didn’t show up on thermal. In many cases, guerillas were able to tap into power lines running through their vast network of tunnels, and had repurposed these areas to fit their needs. Such had been the case on their last mission, when Wright had stepped through a concealed door in the floor of a passage, revealing a cache of communications equipment and weaponry. They confiscated as much intel as they could carry, and blew the Primacord after they left, collapsing the tunnel and burying the remaining stash under tons of earth.

Hughes switched his scope back to infrared, and saw an entranceway, much like the passage leading to the shit pit. A thick tarp hung from the ceiling and concealed anything beyond, though its corners had been left slightly ajar, allowing tiny slivers of light through near its edges. He approached the entrance and took a knee. Reaching for a pack on his hip, Hughes removed a meter of flexible cable with a small camera on its end. He plugged one end into his viewfinder, and slowly snaked the camera through the tarp.

The image slowly came into focus, and Hughes found himself looking not from the perspective of the floor, but much nearer to the ceiling. On the other side of the tarp, a ladder dropped down into a rectangular room. Massive, gray concrete walls suggested that this had once been part of a large structure, possibly a sewer outflow from a nearby town on the surface, though enough debris had piled up at the far end to form an impenetrable wall of rock. Along the ceiling, simple lighting had been hung over the dozens of bunk beds that took up the majority of the floor space. 

The lights were dim and the room quiet, but even so, Hughes could see that every bunk was occupied. In some, young children slept, their small limbs draped over the sleeping mother lying beside them. In others, several boys crouched, as if playing a board game or reading from the same book, their motions subdued to keep from disturbing the people sharing the bunk. In the corner, a few stacks of papers rested neatly on the surface of a lone desk. A row of cribs and bassinets along the far wall…

Hughes jerked the cable from his eyepiece. He didn’t need to see anymore. Nothing he saw would change the inevitable outcome that he knew had to occur. 

Wright tapped Hughes on the shoulder and raised his hands questioningly, knowing not to speak when close to enemy positions. Hughes mimed scissors with his hand, and Wright nodded in acknowledgement, turning to give Hughes access to the spindle. Hughes unsheathed his knife and cut the Primacord cleanly. He handed the end to Wright, who threaded the tip into the blasting cap of a seismic charge before placing it gently near the tarp. After covering it with a few handfuls of dirt, Wright gave the thumbs up signal to Hughes, who again took the lead.

As they turned to retrace their steps, Hughes peered through his thermal imager. What he saw immediately stopped him in his tracks. A single, red speck had appeared, emerging slowly from the cool darkness of the surroundings. The hot speck in his eyepiece slowly became a streak, before finally materializing into a discernable shape.

Even at a distance, there were many telltale signs that this was a child. He stood upright in the tunnel, his arms out to either side in the shape of the letter T. He dragged his fingers lazily against the loose dirt, as much out of childish habit as for the purpose of navigation, and made his way alone through the darkness, alternately plodding and skipping along the rough path, with seemingly no concern for anything.

Probably heading back from the shit pit, thought Hughes. He gripped the hilt of his knife tightly, never taking his eyes off of the boy. Military training had taught him how to scan a person’s thermal image for information: how weapons stand out against a person’s body, how reflective clothing could be used for concealment, and the various shades that different types of body armor produce. As he waited for the target to get closer, he couldn’t help but do the same. He noticed how much cooler the boy’s hair was as his bangs drooped over his face. There were holes in his clothes through which the warmth of his body radiated. His lips moved, and though the tunnel was silent, Hughes couldn’t help but imagine the song he must be mouthing to himself. The boy never changed his posture, never slowed his pace, and never showed any awareness of the two men he was approaching.

All at once, Hughes was upon him, his hand cupping the boy’s mouth as he thrust the knife into his neck. A cascade of intense whiteness spilled onto his shirt as the boy collapsed to the ground, the glowing puddle of blood seeping into the nooks and crannies of the earth, giving a texture to the soil that would otherwise not have been seen. In Hughes’s hand, the deadly blade’s sharp edges and serrations were defined by the heat all the way to the hilt.

Both Hughes and Wright stepped over the body and continued through the tunnel. It was dangerous to linger after a kill, both physically and psychologically. The tunnels were considered ‘free fire zones’, meaning that anyone found inside them was to be treated as hostile. “No innocents in a civil war,”their commanding officer would remind them. Still, Hughes rubbed his arms against the sides of the passage as they walked, covering the glowing splotches on his sleeves with cool earth. They could have thermal cameras, too, he thought to himself, trying to justify his need to scrub himself of the boy’s blood.

The men clambered up the same rope that they had entered with, emerging from the tunnel into the moonlight. Wright silently unpacked the detonator mechanism while Hughes unwound the end of the explosive cord from the stump they had used to anchor it. He handed Wright the line.

“What did you see down there?” Wright asked as he threaded the cord through the electronic igniter control, a small box that could easily pass for a handheld calculator.

“Barracks.”

“Any weapons? Any equipment?”

“Just a barracks.”

“How many men?” Wright continued to probe, not looking up from the device in his hand.

Men, thought Hughes, no men.

“About two dozen.”

Wright stood, holding the control tightly in his hand. A red warning light glowed on the front of the panel, signaling that the line was live.

“And the boy?” he asked. 

“Maybe just a messenger,” answered Hughes, “running messages between outfits or something…”

Hughes trailed off. Wright had never questioned him during a mission before. Hughes studied his face in the moonlight, and the same discernment that allowed him to read a thermal image also allowed him to recognize the germ of an unspoken doubt lingering in Wright’s mind. Amid a civil war, when no place was safe, doubt could get a team killed. Hughes knew he had to do something.

“Give it to me,” he said coolly, gesturing to the detonator.

“But I’m supposed to…” Wright began.

“Give it to me,” Hughes repeated, maintaining his flat tone.

After a moment’s hesitation, Wright handed the box to Hughes. His control relinquished, he took cover behind the stump, lying prone to the ground. Hughes followed, took a knee, faced away from the entrance, and pressed each of the two triggers.
               A bright flash of lightning jumped from the box, darting through the entrance and into the cave system at seven thousand meters a second. The space in front of them erupted into a dense wall of soil, pebbles, and upturned foliage as the Primacord exploded, and the line of destruction it cut across the open field revealed the exact route that the underground tunnel had followed. Three hundred meters distant, a much more violent explosion seemed to lift an entire layer of topsoil into the air. For an instant, the ground held its convex shape against the shockwave before shattering in the air and raining back down. Nearby soil tumbled into the crater the explosion had produced, and Hughes knew that the underground structure had collapsed.

When the chaos had subsided, both men turned and disappeared into the treeline, without so much as a glance in the direction of the scar they had cut into the earth. Behind them, in the center of the crater, the dark soil churned slowly as the bodies of those not yet dead struggled against their entombment. They had not been the enemy, at least not yet, but they would have grown to be the enemy. 

As they made their way back to their forward post, Hughes vowed never to tell Wright about what he had seen. After all, their superiors cared about body count, and they had delivered. What did he need to know beyond that?

Why put that on him? thought Hughes, In a civil war, nobody is innocent. And if we can’t be innocent, we can at least be victorious.