Gold Promise

by Ninie Hammon

  He was all the way down now, not moving anymore. Still, she kept hitting him and hitting him — they all did. Finally, her arm was too tired to lift the rock and she fell over on her side, panting, gasping for air. She heard whimpers, groans, cries all around her, finally found the air to call out.

  "Jeni!"

  There was a groan on the other side of the form of the man.

  "Is that you — Jeni?"

  I'm here.

  It was Jeni, but she didn't say the words out loud.

  Then she did speak, called out, "Lora!"

  No response.

  "Lora!"

  Still nothing.

  "Ana!"

  "I am …" Ana didn't finish, just groaned and whimpered, "Where's Christina?"

  "Christina is here," Jeni gasped. "He knocked her into the water but she grabbed my leg, held on."

  Bailey could hear the moaning near Jeni. Christina was injured. The groan ended in a word … "Lora?" Christina's voice was pain-thin. "Lora, where are you? Where's Lora?"

  There was still no response.

  "Is he dead?" Jeni gasped.

  Bailey didn't know if he was dead, but he was obviously unconscious.

  "We need to make sure."

  She felt around in the darkness, felt his head, his face where the nose was crushed, his mouth was open, teeth were shattered.

  And Bailey felt something like animal triumph, then. He had done that to Poli. Had punched her and kicked her, knocked out her teeth and then strangled her.

  Bailey felt around for a rock, picked it up, and began to pound his head with it. Hammered it into his face until she was slick with blood and had no more strength.

  "Is he dead?" Jeni pleaded again.

  "I think so."

  A hand came out of the darkness — Jeni's hand, feeling for Bailey, for the man.

  "Move!" she told Bailey and Bailey rolled away. She heard Jeni hitting the man as she had done. Again and again.

  When Bailey caught her breath, she told Jeni, "We have to push him into the water. Over here, from this side."

  Feeling for each other in the darkness, Bailey knelt beside Jeni.

  "Push!" The two girls shoved with all their might, but were only able to move the massive body a few inches, and Jeni cried out in pain from the effort.

  "Maybe ribs broken," she said.

  Bailey was sure the little finger and ring finger on her right hand were either broken or dislocated. Her left wrist had been twisted so badly that surely it was broken, too. She felt the pain of it now, the agony no longer masked by the adrenaline of the fight. And there were cuts and bruises on her upper arm, her legs, her back — all over — where she'd been pummeled by the other girls' rocks.

  "Not all of him," Bailey gasped. "Just his head. I want his head in the water!"

  For Poli. When he'd strangled Poli, he'd strangled Bailey, too.

  Until his head was in the water, under the water, for a long time … only then would Bailey believe he was dead, that he would not suddenly regain consciousness and kill them all.

  "Use your feet."

  They scooted backward on the rocks on their butts and used their feet and legs to shove the body down toward the water. It wasn't far and he was already lying with his head downward. But Bailey was almost utterly spent, knew she did not have the strength for more than one more shove. The two of them heaved with all their might. The body scooted downward a few more inches.

  Bailey got to her knees, felt around, felt down his back, his neck … and felt water. His face was in the water, she felt around to make sure. His whole head wasn't under, but his face was. All of it.

  He wasn't going to come back to life. He was dead.

  She collapsed backward, on her side, suddenly loath to touch the body, didn't want to feel him anywhere near her.

  Who was left?

  A voice out of the darkness gasped, "I found … Lora is here." The voice was Ana's. "She's breathing but she's not moving."

  Bailey, Jeni and Ana appeared to be the least injured. Christina was hurt bad. Lora was unconscious.

  Sophia. Where was Sophia?

  Bailey and the others felt around, called her name.

  She was gone.

  Sometime during the battle, her limp body had been shoved off the rocks into the water and washed away.

  No one actually said it, but it was an unspoken agreement that they all wanted to get as far as possible from the body of the Beast, which had ended up — if Bailey's mental picture of the rockfall was accurate — on the far end of the island very near the spot where the monster had been crouching in the dark.

  Together, Bailey, Jeni and Ana helped Christina move to the end of the island where they'd washed up on shore. Though she was awake and aware, Christina was in great pain. Her left arm — Bailey could feel the jagged bone! Compound fracture.

  Then the three of them dragged Lora, who was now semi-conscious, to the same spot.

  "We need to huddle together close," Bailey said. And they all squirmed and wiggled, crying out when someone bumped an injury in the dark. "Don't lie down, sit up. The rocks are colder than the air."

  They pulled the unconscious Lora into the pile of bodies and all shivered together. Finally, silence returned to the shaft, broken only by the sound of running water and the whimpers and groans of the injured.

  "What is to happen to us?" Jeni asked.

  Bailey was too tired and in too much pain to sugar-coat the truth.

  "The water is still rising. I don't think it's all the way up to the roof of the shaft yet, but if it's not, it soon will be."

  "Will it cover us, will we drown—?" Ana's voice sounded so small and frightened.

  "It can only rise up to the top of the shaft — we're higher than fifty-two inches. But if it fills the shaft, it will cut off the air supply. Then the air in this hollow space — that's all the air we'll have to breathe. I don't know how far up it goes. Higher than I can reach my hand."

  "Will someone look for us, try to find us, to help us?" Christina asked. Her teeth were chattering so hard she could barely form words. She would go into shock soon unless … "The man who shouted out of the darkness? And the other one?"

  Bailey didn't say, "if they didn't drown" because she couldn't think a thought that scary and painful.

  "Yes."

  "So we just … wait for help?" Jeni asked.

  Bailey felt around for Jeni's hand and squeezed it. "They'll come for us."

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Brice sank to his knees beside the body of the dead girl, in part because they seemed suddenly unstable. He reached out his own hand to feel for the carotid artery in her neck. There was no pulse, and her body was cold, lifeless. She was a pretty girl, with long brown hair stretching in a wet braid down her back. Her clothing was torn, but the dress was some kind of filmy fabric that clung to all the right places, expensive, the kind of garment you'd expect on someone who was out for a night on the town at the casino. Brice got slowly to his feet and turned his back and the men loaded the body onto a stretcher, covered it with a sheet and moved it toward the waiting ambulance.

  How many girls were there? He didn't even know.

  "Sheriff!"

  Brice turned to see another body float out of the mine; this one came from the shaft that ran along the east wall of the mine, where the current was the strongest.

  This body was alive.

  T.J. Hamilton shot out of the shaft and down into the mini-lake in front of the mine like a kid on a waterslide into a swimming pool. He was struggling to his feet with the help of two deputies, coughing out water, choking, gasping for breath when Brice slogged out into the water to him.

  "T.J." It was all he could say.

  T.J. was looking around frantically and spotted the body of the girl lying on the stretcher by the ambulance.

  His look of fear and pain matched Brice's.

  "Is she …?”

  He couldn't finish the sentence.

  "One
of the teenagers. How many girls were there? What happened?" Then, because he couldn't help himself, Brice added, "Where's Bailey?"

  He could hear the anguish in the question but he couldn't mask it.

  T.J. turned back toward the mine, coughing.

  "In there."

  EMTs approached and he waved them away, while he explained to Brice in clipped sentences what had happened.

  Brice didn't look at him. Partly because he couldn't take his eyes off the water flowing out of the mine shafts and partly because he couldn't look at anybody right now, didn't dare make eye contact, not until he got better control of himself.

  "… were four kidnappers," T.J. said. "I shot one before he could shoot Dobbs …" T.J.'s voice trailed off. He wasn't looking at Brice, either, his eyes devouring the water spewing out of the shafts. "And I killed another one. In the dark, broke his neck."

  Brice noticed then that T.J. was bleeding. The water had washed the blood away, but it was appearing again now, from multiple small wounds all over him, his face and arms, his back, and from a larger wound, a deep gouge across his upper arm.

  "You need to sit down, let the EMTs—"

  "I'm fine." The point was non-negotiable. "So only that one body. The two men …?"

  Brice shook his head. Anything that was in that mine could have gotten hung up on any number of things and not washed out. Water pressure could hold … whatever … against a coal pillar in a cross shaft.

  "They're not full yet," T.J.'s eyes swung back and forth across the streams of water pouring from the shafts. "There's still air left in them."

  Brice could hear the hope, the desperate hope in his voice.

  "I went looking for the girls, for Dobbs, got my headlamp knocked out. Took the flashlight from the man I killed, but it went out soon's it got wet. Then I couldn't see any better than they could. By then the water was so high, you couldn't cross the current. There was nothing to do but float out. But I thought … hoped … when I got out here, they'd be …"

  They both saw the body shoot out of the shaft at the same time. Both hoped. Both instantly realized it was one of the kidnappers. The two of them slogged over to the body as the rescue squad members dragged it out of the pond.

  The body had a flathead screwdriver buried up to the hilt in its back.

  "Dobbs?" T.J. gasped in wonder. He looked at Brice, his face the definition of astonishment. "Had to be. Who else …?"

  The deputies dragged the body up onto the high ground and as Brice was turning around, T.J. shouted, "Dobbs!" and took off running toward Main Street, where the conveyor belt had been torn by the current but still dangled out the hole.

  Through that hole, the water had just spit out a man. T.J. reached him two steps ahead of Brice and was already calling over his shoulder for the EMTs. Dobbs was limp, blood poured from a gunshot wound in his right shoulder.

  "He has a pulse," T.J. cried and began to pull him out of the water. The rescue squad swarmed over him, carried him quickly to the shore, where the paramedic examined him.

  Brice could see that he wasn't breathing. T.J. must have imagined the pulse.

  While others rushed to the ambulance for the gurney, the paramedic and one EMT began CPR and mouth-to-mouth, working quickly and efficiently. T.J. and Brice backed away to let them do their jobs. It took four men to lift Dobbs's limp body onto the gurney, and they continued to work on him as they shoved the stretcher across the bumpy ground to the open back door of the ambulance.

  "Charge the paddles," the senior paramedic called out before they'd even reached the vehicle. One of the EMTs not working on Dobbs spotted T.J.'s wounds and started to treat them but T.J. shoved him roughly away, all his attention focused on his friend, on the big chest that only moved up and down when air was forced into it.

  T.J. started to step up into the ambulance after they loaded the gurney but the paramedic stopped him.

  "We got this," he said. "You'll just get in the way."

  Brice watched T.J. bristle, knew he could chew the man up and spit out pieces no bigger than raisins.

  T.J. said nothing, stepped back, watched the medics slam the ambulance doors shut behind Dobbs and roar up the hillside, bouncing over rocks and chunks of dislodged asphalt to the piece of highway above the mine that was still intact, lights flashing, siren wailing. Brice watched the lights until they disappeared around the first bend, listened to the shrieking siren until it, too, fell silent in the distance.

  "I got no idea what that miner hit." The two men had returned to the vantage point of Brice's cruiser and stood scanning the water flowing from the mine.

  "Something big. More than a mine shaft full of seepage water. I'm thinking an underground aquifer. And if it is, then—"

  "There could be …" T.J. stopped, then continued, his voice firmed up. "… millions of gallons of water in it. And through that one hole, it could take—"

  "Days for the mine to empty."

  Both of them were watching the water levels in the shafts. Brice had noticed, was sure T.J. had, too, that the shafts were filled completely to the top. Neither said a word, just stood there, helpless.

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  "Who are you?" The words came from only a few feet away in the darkness. It was a whisper, the way you whisper when you're scared even if there's nobody to hear you. "Why you help, not want … our bodies like the others?"

  It was Jeni, and at first Bailey thought she was talking about the johns who had … had raped these girls over and over, night after night.

  Then she realized the girl was talking about "American monsters."

  Bailey had to concentrate to speak through her chattering teeth. She spoke aloud. Wanted to hear the sound of her own voice. "They lied to you! Everything they said to you was a lie. They lied about … whatever they told you to get you to leave your homes with them—"

  "To find good jobs, take care of children, but then …" someone said, maybe Ana.

  "That was a lie. So was what they told you about Americans using illegal immigrants for organ transplants — that's crazy."

  "Is … is not true?"

  There was such wonder in her voice Bailey had to remind herself she was talking to a child, a naive child.

  "Not one word! Americans don't … would never … they just said that so you'd be scared to run away."

  Bailey moved when she spoke and Lora moaned. She must have touched somewhere the girl was injured. But who knew where any of them were injured? She wouldn't allow her mind to dwell on her own pain, wouldn't try to move the fingers. She had broken ribs, too, probably. Who knew how badly or where the others had been hurt. Best not to think about it. In the darkness, everything was exaggerated. All she could think to do was huddle them all together as best she could. They had set Lora up, then wrapped their arms around her and each other.

  "They said you could see us from the sky … and hear what is whispered in secret …"

  "That part might be true — but it's not magic. It's satellites. And some gizmo microphone. Americans aren't monsters."

  Jeni said nothing then.

  Ana spoke. "You are American, yes?"

  "Yes."

  "Then is true, Americans aren't monsters."

  "Why is it you help us? And why did I hear you when you did not speak?" Jeni asked. "I did hear you. We all did, yes?"

  "You told us to fight, to use rocks," Christina gasped, her voice pain-ravaged. "How is that … possible?"

  What could Bailey say?

  "It's a long story. I will tell you someday, I promise. But now … it's too complicated for now."

  They fell silent and Bailey felt the cold, the pain, the darkness … and the fear more intensely in the silence. She should keep them talking.

  "How did you all get … here?" she asked.

  In broken pieces, from different girls, she pieced together the story of small villages in Bulgaria, very poor, very backward. Technology did not yet rule there. More than anything, parents wanted better lives for th
eir children. And when the big car had driven into town …

  "The priests, the elders, said not to listen," Ana said. "But my parents, my family … wanted so much …"

  Quiet settled back around them except for the water rushing by and the sound of Lora, squeaking out little cries of pain now and then. Or maybe it was Christina.

  Bailey closed her eyes. It was no darker with her eyes closed than with them open. And somehow she felt like the darkness was inside her if her eyes were closed, so she opened them again. She was shivering violently, they all were. Now she tried to still herself to calm her breathing and slow her heart.

  Then she looked out into the blackness and conjured up the image of Bethany's face — which wasn't really her face, of course, because the image was of a baby and Bethany was three. Bailey wanted so desperately to know what she looked like now, wanted to live every bit as badly now as she had wanted to die a few months ago.

  "Are you … afraid?" Jeni clamped her teeth almost closed to still the chattering.

  "Yeah, I'm afraid."

  More silence. Then Bailey heard her own thoughts as she spoke them aloud, and believed what she was telling the girl.

  "I was terrified in the water, and when I heard him laugh …"

  She shuddered and the movement seemed to confuse her trembling body and gradually she grew still. "I don't know how I know this … but I do. I know that … I don't believe we were meant to die here. We, all of us, we're survivors."

  "On the ship to America, I always want to know the day, what day it was," Jeni said. "And then one morning, I opened my eyes and realized I did not know. And I was, I panic. It was most awful fear to rise up in my chest, I could not breathe. Where we were, deep in a ship, was no windows, was no way to tell time, but for when they come to feed us. I was so careful to count, but that day somehow, I was confused, couldn't remember the number."