Bone Rattle

by Marc Cameron

  Urgency drew Teariki and Van Dyke up the mountain. The tracks became more difficult to find as soon as they passed into the woods. Lola slowed, doubting herself, using the willow stick the way Cutter had taught her, willing the tip to point to a track. Her eyes settled on something she thought might be the print of an Xtratuf in the dirt. Crouching, she took a shuffling half step and then held the stick over that spot, twisting her wrist so the point of the stick arced back and forth.

  She gave an audible gasp when it crossed a divot she absolutely knew belonged to Cutter’s heel.

  She reached in her pocket and took out a roll of bright orange flagging tape, ripping off a foot of it and dropping it on the ground beside the good track.

  “This is going to take all day,” Van Dyke said. “Going from track to track.”

  “Agreed,” Lola said. “That’s why we’re not going to do that.”

  “What then?” Van Dyke asked, brow raised.

  “We’re going to bound,” Lola said.

  “Okay…” Van Dyke said.

  Lola moved forward as she explained. “Cutter knows heaps about tracking,” she said. “And he’s a terrific teacher. I’m learning, but it helps if I hang what I learn on things I’m already familiar with.” She studied the hillside ahead, looked down at her feet, then the area ahead again. “My dad’s a sailor, a voyager. Loves the ancient ways of navigation our forefathers used to cross the Pacific in double-hull canoes.”

  She stopped to study a devil’s club leaf that had been torn off the plant and now lay on the ground, bruised and darker green from being crushed under a boot. She marked it with tape as well and moved on.

  “Anyway,” she continued. “When I was a little girl, my dad used to sail with this friend from the island of Mongaia who taught him something called Kaveinga… and he taught it to me. In a nutshell, it’s the same sort of thing I’m learning from Cutter.”

  Ten yards up Lola spotted a divot where someone, likely Cutter, had dug a heel into the mossy ground. She marked it with another piece of flagging tape and stood.

  “Where was I?”

  “Your dad and his friend from Mongaia.”

  “Right,” Lola said. “Kaveinga. You locate a star on the horizon in the direction you want to sail, then steer toward that star. When it rises too high and out of line, you pick the next star that comes over the horizon at that same spot and steer to that one, until it’s too high and out of line… and so on and so on. A path of stars. We’re just following the azimuth between two known tracks as fast as possible until the next one presents itself, then adjusting course as needed. Kaveinga, but with tracks instead of stars.”

  “Sounds cool enough,” Van Dyke said. “But you have to know which stars to look for. And what if there are clouds and you don’t even have stars?”

  “Yeah,” Lola said. “Those would be problems. But I prefer to focus on what we do have, and right now, we have stars – tracks.”

  Lola moved as quickly as she dared, going from heel divot in the soft loam here, a toe scuff in the moss there. She paused to study a stalk of cow parsnip. Waist high, it was the diameter of a large piece of celery. The leaves were green and healthy, not yet beginning to wilt. Fresh sap pooled around the broken stem. She’d learned the hard way that she was allergic to the stuff, using the stalks to swordfight with another deputy at a party. Her skin had become hypersensitive to the sun wherever the sap had touched her, causing her to burn and scar.

  Less than an hour into Lola’s gut-wrenching first solo tracking effort, the woods began to clear. Dirt gave way to bedrock, making it difficult to find any clear sign at all. Lola kept moving in the general direction of what she’d already found, losing faith in her own abilities with each passing step. She brightened when the roar of a waterfall carried through on the wind. A crossing would give her a funnel, a track trap where she was sure to find some sign of Cutter. She broke out of the trees with Van Dyke in tow and realized immediately that she had something even better. The hand trolley waited on the far side of the ravine, meaning someone had used it to get across.

  She was on the right track.

  Chapter 46

  Rock and gravel slid off Arliss Cutter’s back as he pushed himself up on all fours. A high-pitched squeal assaulted his ears. His head felt as though he’d been hit between the eyes with a sledgehammer. The darkness was thick enough to cut.

  Stunned, he coughed, trying to catch a breath that wasn’t full of grit. He felt movement beneath him in the darkness, heard a muffled cry.

  “Lori?”

  She flailed blindly in the blackness, brushing his face with her outstretched fingers. “Cutter? Are you all right?” His ears rang so badly that her words sounded like they were coming from the bottom of a well.

  He took her hand, held it tight to his chest. She’d admitted to being scared of tight spaces and this had to be terrifying for her. Cutter, who’d never been claustrophobic, found himself suddenly reeling and disoriented. He tried to speak, but coughed again, sputtering this time. “Light,” he finally managed to say. The Streamlight he’d been holding was hopelessly gone, buried after it had been knocked or blown out of his hand.

  Maycomb found her light first and flicked it on, pointing toward the ground. Cutter squinted anyway, blinded by the relative brightness until his eyes adjusted. The timber supports were gone, buried under a mound of rocks that completely blocked the exit and sloped into the tunnel. Gauging from the location of their safety cutout, the first ten feet of the mine had collapsed from the explosion.

  A rock the size of an axe head and just as sharp fell from the ceiling and clattered at Cutter’s feet, narrowly missing Maycomb’s head.

  Cutter snatched up his pack. “Let’s put our helmets on before we both get brained.”

  “They buried us alive,” Maycomb said, breathing heavily. She pressed tightly against Cutter as she fastened her helmet under her chin and switched on the headlamp.

  “Do you bend anywhere you shouldn’t?” Cutter asked.

  “I… No,” Maycomb said. “Can… we dig our way out?”

  “Eventually,” Cutter said. “I need to know if you’re hurt.”

  “I’m fine,” Maycomb snapped. “We should start digging now so we—”

  “We could,” Cutter said. “You’ve been in tougher jams than this. Don’t you think it’s better if we take a breath, look at the situation from all sides.”

  Maycomb looked up at him, her chin quivering under the helmet strap. “O… okay…” she stammered.

  “Good deal,” Cutter said, trying to convince himself there was a way to get out of this and still reach Donita Willets in time. “You’ve got the CO and O2 meters in your pack. Go ahead and check our levels while I take stock of ammo and other gear.”

  Cutter knew exactly what they had, but he wanted Maycomb to know, to understand that they were fine for the near term. That there was no need to panic.

  They knelt facing each other, their packs between them, and he ticked through the gear – ropes, ascenders, foil blankets, candles, water bottles, thin gloves, jackets, extra headlamps and batteries, along with his regular everyday carry of a small knife, a small flashlight, and Zippo lighter. He had another six rounds for the Python. The Glock magazine had six rounds left, plus the one in the pipe.

  Maycomb followed each item he pulled from the pack, but none of it seemed to register with her.

  He reached inside like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat. “And toilet paper. My buds always bring a bunch of weapons and then forget to bring TP.”

  “I need a cigarette.”

  Cutter ignored her, pulling a gallon-size ziplock bag from the main portion of his pack. “And I saved the best for last. My nephews stashed some biscuits in here.”

  Maycomb looked up, blinking, a defeated look on her face. “That’s the best thing in your pack? Biscuits?”

  “I don’t know,” Cutter chuckled. “They’re good biscuits.”

  “I’m going to sta
rt digging,” Maycomb said.

  “Okay,” Cutter said. “Mind if I borrow your phone?”

  She was on the verge of hyperventilating. “There’s no way we get a signal in here.”

  Cutter kept his voice low and even. Calling her Captain Obvious wouldn’t help matters at all. “I want to look at the maps you got from Horning.”

  “Whatever.” She dug in her pocket. “It probably doesn’t even work.” She passed it to Cutter, who gave it back.

  “I’m going to smoke.”

  “Nope,” Cutter said. “Not in here, you’re not. Password?”

  She used her thumbprint and passed it back, then began to cast around the tunnel floor, presumably looking for something to dig with.

  Cutter scrolled through several pages of map thumbnails until he found one that read CC#2. “Here’s something.”

  “What?” Maycomb asked, her back to him. She’d found a rusted shovel, but it looked about to crumble in her hands. “Photos of biscuits?”

  “That’s cute,” Cutter said. “No, come look at this.” He lowered the phone so Maycomb could see. “CC#2 means it’s the second entry Horning discovered into a mine named the Cross Cut.” He used his thumb to swipe to the next page. This one displayed a sectional map of a large bubble-like stope complete with support columns. The entry was located at the top and necessitated a rappel to get inside. It was labeled CC#1. Opposite this areal entry was a shaft – a winze in mining terminology – dropping down to a secondary tunnel with the notation “to CC#2.”

  Maycomb read it three times, swiping back and forth between the two maps. “So,” she said, still unconvinced. “We just go to the end of this tunnel, rappel down, and then end up in this big room with another way out?”

  “According to Horning’s map,” Cutter said, tapping the screen.

  “What about these marks?” she asked, pointing to a series of blue hash marks beside the down shaft.

  “No idea,” Cutter said. “But we need to go look.”

  A single tear rolled down Maycomb’s cheek, creasing a line in the thin layer of dirt there. “Remember when I told you I don’t scare?”

  “Matter of fact, I do remember that,” Cutter said.

  Maycomb’s jaw clenched, moving her helmet straps. “Well, this scares the shit out of me and I don’t mind telling you. It makes my groin ache and my head spin and I feel like I’m going to keel over dead.”

  “Hey,” Cutter said, completely serious. “I’m no paragon of bravery. I want out of here as badly as you do. The map says it’s about three hundred yards to the down shaft. We’ll be able to decipher Horning’s code when we get there.” A sudden thought hit him. “Everything happened so fast, I never got to ask you. Did you recognize any of the men who were shooting at us?”

  “The one with the black beard is Harold Grimsson,” Maycomb said, as if it meant the end of the world. “He’s the owner of the Valkyrie Mine Holdings.”

  “The other two?”

  “I didn’t get a good look.”

  “Grimsson,” Cutter said. The name tasted bitter. “We need to get to Donita Willets before he does.”

  Thinking about the missing woman seemed to take Maycomb’s mind off her own troubles and she followed dutifully, head down, behind Cutter.

  Deeper in, the tunnel looked much the same as it had near the entrance. Here and there, a half-burned candle slumped in small alcoves along the wall, drips of snow-white paraffin running down the rock, frozen in time. Miners had written their names in soot from carbide lamps with dates going back as far as 1908. The remnants of an old dynamite crate made Cutter want to stop and look, but he kept going, methodically, checking every step for rotting boards and hidden down shafts – and all the other dangers Horning had warned them about.

  Two hundred feet in, Maycomb’s steps grew heavier, trudging along, kicking the water as she walked. The beam of her lamp pointed straight down.

  “We’re going to die in here,” she said, blurting it out like she was trying to rid herself of a heavy load. “These walls… They don’t seem to be getting closer to you?”

  “The walls are fine,” Cutter said. “Let’s just keep moving forward. We’re not going to die.”

  “You can’t know that.” Maycomb grabbed his sleeve, sloshing to a stop in her tracks. He turned and faced her. Logical arguments made little difference when someone was panicked. If anything worked, it was a calm, understanding voice.

  “Let’s keep going,” he said. “Tom Horning’s map says this is a way out.”

  She stomped her feet, splashing the ankle-deep water.

  “Look,” she said. “I’m not a stupid person. I’m not trying to be dramatic, but let’s be honest. We could die right here in this mountain.”

  “We certainly will if we give up,” Cutter said. “But it’s much more likely that my partner will check in with Horning when they can’t find us. They’ll see that one of the mines on his maps has caved in, and somebody will come dig us out.”

  “You’re forgetting the guys with guns up there,” Maycomb said.

  “That’s true,” Cutter said. He thought of Lola, coming to help him, and prayed she wasn’t walking into an ambush. “So let’s get moving and be our own rescue. We’ll find a way out of the tunnels ahead. We have food and water to last a couple of days if we had to.”

  Maycomb sniffed, rubbed her nose with the back of her sleeve. “I’m just so scared.”

  “Me too,” Cutter said. “But moving helps me keep that fear in check.”

  She sniffed again. “As long as you have biscuits…”

  “There you go,” Cutter said.

  They began to walk again, side by side instead of single file.

  Maycomb’s chest shuddered with a single sob, but she shook it off. She glanced up at him, facing slightly away to keep from blinding him with her headlamp. “If there’s a chance I’m going to die, there are some things I need to get off my chest.”

  Cutter gave a somber chuckle. “As sin eaters go, I’m not much—”

  “I can never make amends,” she said. “Not really. Not after all the things I’ve done to the people I love. But I’ve got to tell somebody, just in case… you know…”

  “All right,” Cutter said, steeling himself. If there was one thing he understood, it was trying to make amends.

  Chapter 47

  Lola Teariki wasn’t exactly scared of heights, but she wasn’t keen on smashing into the toothy rocks below either. She gave the rope attached to the hand trolley a series of sharp hand-over-hand yanks, pulling it toward her.

  The open cage – what there was of it – swung violently back and forth, but stayed on the cable as it rattled and squeaked across the ravine.

  “Careful!” Rockie Van Dyke said.

  “This is what careful looks like, sister,” Lola said. “If it’s going to fall, I want it to fall before I get on it.”

  Other than the white marking on the pipe frame from an expended flashbang, the car looked in decent enough shape considering its age.

  In the end, it held, and Teariki and Van Dyke pulled themselves across without incident.

  Marks in the rocky ground that looked like several sets of tracks moved across the clearing and into the mossy undergrowth and chaotic deadfall. Scuffed moss and freshly broken ferns said at least one set of tracks, and probably two, headed straight up the mountain.

  “High ground,” Lola said, half to herself.

  Van Dyke was focused on the shadows ahead on the sidehill as she took a drink from a water bottle in her pack.

  “What?”

  Lola pointed uphill with an open hand. “I’m thinking Dollarhyde, or whoever it is in that other skiff, set off the flashbang to let them know if they’re being followed. Cutter would have expected them to come back, so he’d have looked for a high vantage point.”

  “Did they?” Van Dyke asked. “Come back?”

  “I can’t tell,” Lola said. “But I’m staying on what I think is Cutter’s track.
”

  “You seem to know what he’s thinking,” Van Dyke said, following, pushing aside brush. She kept her eyes up and scanning while Lola tracked.

  “Cutter’s not particularly mysterious when it comes to tactics,” Lola said.

  “I don’t know,” Van Dyke said. “The big guy seems like a mystery to me. I mean, have you ever even seen him smile?”

  “Not often,” she said. “But when he does, you know you’ve earned it.”

  “He married?”

  Lola gave a soft belly laugh. “When it comes to his personal life, that dude is Fort Knox and the NSA all rolled into an enigmatic ball. But tactically, you can always count on him to do the right thing, right now. He does have kind of a resting-killer face, but you have to work pretty hard to offend him personally. I’ll tell you what, though, he will flat pull the head right off of anybody who mistreats someone he thinks is the underdog.” Lola glanced up to make sure she had Van Dyke’s attention. “An underdog like, say, your sister-in-law.”

  “That again?” Van Dyke waved her away. “I’m gonna have to call bullshit. In this scenario, my brother was the underdog. His son is the underdog. If anybody needs their head pulled off, it’s little Lori Lush.”

  “You say so.” Lola shrugged. “But it seems to me she’s trying. How many people do you know who don’t even do—”

  Lola held up a fist, signaling Van Dyke to freeze. A glint of metal caught her eye – and it could only be one thing.

  Scuffs in the duff and moss had led her through the twilight forest to a large hemlock. The space on the uphill side of the tree looked different. Needles, twigs, and other debris had been moved around a great deal, piled up here and there to reveal fresh dirt underneath.