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"We have to find them first," I reminded him. |
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"They're here, all right. I can smell the stinkin' bastards." |
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Jake lowered his backpack down through the hole, then shimmied gingerly down, lowering himself to the floor below. The drop was less than ten feet. He had no more than landed when he started signaling for me to follow. |
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I turned around to signal to Kelto. |
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A shudder ran down my spine, and I found myself scurrying frantically to get through the hole. |
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The news stunned Madden. "Where the hell could he have gone?" the big man blistered. |
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I stood there in the chilled dampness of the subterranean universe, wondering, like Jake Madden, what kind of terrifying world I had entered. |
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The world that surrounded me was right out of Jules Verne. The walls virtually shimmered with a palette of muted colors. We had entered an underground domain created by literally thousands of years of undisturbed, unhurried eroding waters. From some long-buried convolution in the back of my mind I recalled a seemingly unimportant (at the time) lab experimentwater absorbing tiny amounts of carbon dioxide and the ultimate formation of |
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