The light from five candles let us see, but imperfectly. Jar candles were better for carrying than many types - at least the rim of the glass kept the wind of our motion from blowing out the flames - but the wax inside sloshed as we walked, causing the flames to flicker and the shadows to jump disquietingly.

I had half-expected it to be silent down here, a lack of sound as absolute as the lack of light. It was anything but. Though we couldn’t see anyone, we could hear voices shouting and crying. Almost immediately after we’d passed through the door a panicked voice called out to us.

“Wait! Stop! I don’t care if you’re angels or devils or aliens or the glorious hereafter, just don’t take those lights away from me!”

The shouter turned out to be a woman named Marina. In spite of the panic in her voice, she calmed down quickly after she’d reached us. She told us she’d been driving a baggage train back to the terminal when the aliens stole our lights and power, and she’d been here in the darkness since then.

“Where’s the baggage train you were driving?” I asked her.

She glanced around uncertainly. “I don’t know. I was trying to get out of these tunnels and I tripped. I’m not sure if I got turned around getting back up or not. There’ll be more, though, no matter which way we head. Bags don’t move themselves.”

“Did you run into any monsters down here?” Kurtis asked.

She drew back from him. “Monsters? Look, honey, I don’t know what conspiracy theories you’ve been reading, but these are just tunnels. Nothing in here any weirder than the souvenirs in people’s suitcases.”

John cut in. “Right, right, in these tunnels, but what about the other ones?”

“Oh lawdy, you’re some of those,” Marina muttered.

“Some of which, now?” I asked, trying to keep my voice friendly and light. “And what other tunnels are you talking about, John? The ones for the passenger trains?”

“No, no! The ones to the nearby military bases.”

“There’s nothing like that,” Marina said. She sounded tired, like this was something she'd had to say before.

“That’s what they pay her to say,” John said.

“They barely pay me enough for rent and weed. Not nearly enough to lie to your asses.”

“Weed?” John interjected incredulously. He sounded like the nineties parent of a delinquent teen. Marijuana had been legal in Colorado for years and Marina was an adult and a stranger. John was a really nice guy. Generous as heck. But sometimes he could be pretty, uh, preachy.

I stepped in before this could get further out of hand. “John. None of us but Marina know what you’re talking about - about these ‘other tunnels,’ not about weed. Mind filling us in?”

John turned to us, face serious. “Did you know when this airport was built, it ran about three billion dollars over budget?”

Kurtis laughed. “You’re kidding? That’s pretty impressive for a civilian overrun. Gotta be one of the big primes to outdo that.”

“Big primes?” Davi asked.

“The top few defense contractors,” I explained. “If they have a project that only goes over budget by 200 million, that’s considered pretty good.”

“200 million! That’s more than the annual revenue for our whole division.” Davi sounded horrified, but… she was pretty fresh out of college.

“Right! Right!" John said. "That’s my point exactly: 3 billion overrun is unthinkable for most folks. And the people doing the tunnels were from a bunch of different companies and things took longer than planned. All that was done to hide the fact that a lot of the tunnels they dug aren’t under the airport at all! There’s secret bunkers to keep the President safe under here, and a tunnel that goes all the way to the Colorado Springs Air Force Base!”

“No way, man!” Byron laughed. “We just drove from there this morning. That took us more than an hour by car. No way the tunnel goes that far.”

“That’s what they want you to think,” said John.

“Look, buddy,” Marina’s voice was tired. “If there’s any alien base, secret state-spanning tunnels, or underground bunkers, I’ve never found out about them. If it’s all the same to you, can we get moving?”

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

John nodded stiffly. “I guess it would make more sense for the average worker not to be in on the secrets.”

Marina rolled her eyes. It was pretty hilarious uncovering John’s secret penchant for conspiracy theories, but as much as I wanted to keep watching this play out, the situation was too serious.

“Uh, secret tunnels and stuff aside, there were actually monsters up top. Did you hear the announcement down here? About the abilities and stuff?”

Marina stared at me. “Wait. You heard that too? I thought I hit my head when I tripped or something.”

“Nope. It’s real. There’s monsters outside and we can take some magical-ass abilities.” Byron shot a Fire Bolt against the far wall, succinctly backing up his words.

Even with the demonstration, it was difficult to convince Marina that there really were monsters outside. I found that heartening, though; she’d been down here for a while. They’d seemed pretty common outside, but I hadn’t seen any in the terminal. Maybe this counted as “inside” and was a safe zone.

I said as much, and the way it made everyone in our group relax seemed to convince Marina more than anything else that we were telling the truth.

She was able to show us the way to the terminal and we headed off. We found a baggage truck almost immediately. Marina said it wasn't the one she had been driving, although there was no one inside. That made me a bit uneasy, but Marina had left her vehicle; there was no reason to assume other drivers hadn’t done the same. Kurtis unlocked the truck and I moved inside to search it for possible weapons.

Most of the bags were too small. I supposed they could contain knives and stuff, but I didn’t feel like sitting and sorting through dozens of strangers’ dirty laundry. There was a pair of water skis, so I picked one up and swung it experimentally. The result made me grimace. The length wasn’t too different from the jo staff I practiced aikido with, but the edges of the ski cut into my hands unpleasantly. Not only that, it was also poorly balanced for swinging and wobbled unpredictably. This would never work.

“What on earth are you doing?” John asked. “That stuff’s not ours!”

I looked around. Nothing else in here seemed terribly promising. “John, the only things that are ours for several thousand miles are in the bags on my shoulders. I can’t fight a monster with a toothbrush.”

“That doesn’t mean you can just take from people,” John said, but he sounded less certain.

I didn’t see anything here I wanted, but I didn’t want to have this argument again and again. I hopped down from the back of the truck and looked him in the eyes. “John. I’m going back home. My kids and wife are waiting for me. I’m going to do whatever I need to do to get there.”

He frowned, but didn’t argue. John hadn’t lived a life with a lot of unclear moral decisions. I knew a little bit about his history, and while things hadn’t always been easy for him, they hadn’t been muddy. I could almost see the ideals “Family is important!” and “Stealing is wrong!” going to war across his face.

I continued to scan the baggage trucks and trains as we went, but didn’t find anything too good. A clang from one bag made me unzip it and I found a small collection of kitchenware. The cast-iron frying pan wouldn’t make a great weapon, but I took it for now. Davi found a metal-cornered clarinet case. Both were better than hitting something with our bare hands, but that was about all that could be said.

Where were the baseball bats and hockey sticks? Maybe if we’d dug through every corner of every bag we could have found more and better things, but our paltry finds seemed really… unfair.

Voices in the distance let us know we were approaching others before we saw them. They saw us first, and hailed us with excited shouts from the shadow of an out-of-service baggage train.

Marina ran forward. “Gary! What’s going on?”

A man waved at her. “Steve took one of those alien abilities to make light, and we were following him back to the terminal. But he got more and more tired and then he just…” He shrugged, stepping aside to show a man collapsed on the ground, head propped up on a purloined suitcase. “I don’t know if it was his diabetes or what. He’s usually pretty good about managing it. We were debating what to do. If someone else should take the same ability… We’re almost to Concourse A.”

“Oh! The medic station there?” Marina said.

“Yeah, that’s what we were thinking. Some smelling salts might be enough to wake him up, and it’s a long way back to the urgent care on C Concourse… but we weren’t sure we could make it anywhere in pitch darkness.”

When we shared our intention to head toward the terminal, the group decided that the medical station in Concourse A was a good first step. They quickly detached the final car from the baggage train, a simple flat-bed affair with foot-high metal railings. Emptied of the luggage it had started with, it was fairly light. Even the addition of our own bags and the slumbering form of Steve didn’t weigh it down too heavily. We set most of our candles down in the cart, and took turns pushing and pulling it along. It was easy work, shared among so many shoulders, and I was grateful to have my bags off my back.

I noticed that Kurtis, while talking loudly about helping and working together, had managed to avoid doing more than a token amount of actual work.

Management, I thought with irritation. Well, he won’t be able to keep that up for long.

We made a turn as we approached Concourse A, following the confident lead of men and women who’d driven these roads for years.

“Shouldn’t be much further,” Marina said. “The medic station’s not on the road itself, but it’s close. I think-”

A shrill noise, almost like a birdcall, interrupted her.

“That came from nearby,” I said, turning.

I saw nothing in the darkness, but I could hear the sound of claws skittering against the road.

Then a man on the other side of the cart screamed.