Don't Look Down

He wades past a drowned ventilation box and heaves himself onto the raised bank on the other side. The others follow him over the bridge and through the water. Soon, they're all on the other side of the lake, wet to their thighs and shivering.

"You motherfuckers. I'm shorter than you," shouts Gothstone, who has a water mark up to the crotch of his jumpsuit. "When I leaned left, it got wet," he says. He pulls out his leather wallet and notices that water has stained part of it green. No telling what it's done to his anatomy. He shudders.

This is their first stop of the day. On a recent Saturday, the crew will spend more than 12 hours scouring long-forgotten structures. They'll trespass through the cave, an abandoned theater, a grain silo and a sewer.

In recent years, urban exploring clubs have taken root in the bowels of major cities — New York, Toronto, even London. There are guidebooks. The Discovery Channel produced a miniseries on the movement, and MTV's Fear ran a segment on the sport. Most of these clubs were formed online by bored nine-to-fivers. Kansas City, with abandoned buildings to spare, has become an urban explorer's playground.

KCUrbex.org has more than 200 members, including about 50 locals who are actively plotting how to develop new, secret clubhouses.

On Monday, this crew will return to the monotony of day jobs. Right now, they're here to answer one question: What are you willing to risk for a bit of adventure?

The doorway across the lake is another rabbit hole. It leads to an auditorium-sized room lined with more doorways that connect to a standard commercial complex of windowless offices. The men fan out through the labyrinth. Sprayed-on script covers the limestone-and-brick compound's walls, repping the Crips and white power. In the rooms, the team finds reminders of the cave's former occupants: an old Folgers can, a flattened paper Christmas tree with lights strung around it, an upturned stove. The cave looks like it was evacuated in a heartbeat.

Still dripping wet from his crotch down, Gothstone gazes at the rectangular panels of lights dangling from the ceiling above him. He approaches a breaker box on a wall. Sonic steps back. Gothstone starts flipping switches. Each clicks like a dry-firing pistol.

"One of these days, you are going to shock yourself," Sonic says.

"One of these days, the lights are going to come on, and it's going to be cool," Gothstone counters.

Sonic is a 26-year-old software engineer and IT consultant with a wife and 2-year-old son. As a kid, he explored the sewers in his hometown of Los Angeles. He skipped college and bootstrapped his way into the computer world. He was recruited in 2000 to work for a Kansas City firm. He spent the next three years scouting abandoned areas around the city but was too wary to enter alone. Finally, he stumbled across a generic Web-site meet-up group. Inspired, he started his own user-friendly site, KCUrbex.org. In the field, he often dictates orders, but the others joined this crew so that someone will watch their back, not control them.

Gothstone, 26, runs a computer store. Wolf, only recently old enough to drink, works for Gothstone. Billionaire, a project manager for a construction company, refuses to divulge his age, but he seems far more mature than his compatriots. He dates his interest in abandoned buildings to the mid-'80s, when he lived in New York. Explorer, 21, restores old cars.

Staying within earshot of one another, they continue to move through the compound. In an adjoining room, Wolf finds the missing aluminum boat bobbing in another deep pool of water. He forgets the need for stealth and loudly shouts, "We found the boat!"

"Should we launch it?" Sonic asks. He wants to see if the waterway leads back to the start of the maze.

"Let's keep going," Explorer says.

"There's more stuff back here," Wolf agrees. He finds a bathroom and pees in a toilet.

The crew enters a large dirt cavern with numbers marked on the columns; they figure it was once a parking garage. The ground is muddy, marked with animal footprints and hardened tire tracks. Dust fogs their flashlights in the stale air. Nobody is sure what kicked up the cloud, but it's common for potentially harmful carbon dioxide to gather in limestone caves. Or perhaps poisonous carbon monoxide, leaking from old machinery, has fouled the air.

Gothstone lights a smoke.

"You probably shouldn't smoke in here," Sonic says, nodding at the dust clouds.

"I don't know what that dust is, and I don't want to find out," Gothstone says, retreating to an unventilated room to keep puffing.

"We don't know how extensive this place is. Stick together," Sonic says. But Billionaire follows a wall away from the group and into the darkness.

"What do you see?" Sonic calls after him.

"I can't see the end of it," Billionaire calls back.

Billionaire and Wolf step over a huge shelf of rock. Above them, there's a hole in the ceiling with the same shape as the rock below them.