At the edge of the pool of yellow light created by the lantern, a man’s forearm was visible on the ground. It emerged from a pile of jagged black rocks that rose to the ceiling. A pistol was still grasped firmly in the hand. The elbow joint was at a deeply unnatural angle.
“Oh no. Oh my god,” I said, nudging the man’s wrist gently with my boot. It didn’t react. Whoever was attached to that arm was buried under thousands of pounds of solid rock. There was no blood, thankfully, but it was immediately apparent that the injuries created from that much weight were not survivable. I bit down my nausea and my curiosity about which of the men was buried there. “He’s definitely dead. They… they must have caused a larger cave-in with the explosion?”
We stumbled to our feet, looking around and trying to understand what had happened. We’d somehow managed to survive, and our attackers—at least one of them—was dead right in front of us.
“I think I see what happened,” David said after a moment. “Instead of sealing us in, they collapsed the entire entrance. Including where they were standing.” He pointed at the solid mass of fallen stones in front of us. “This was the way out. It’s gone now.” Then David turned and pointed at a smaller pile of stones blocking the passageway behind us. “At the same time, they poked through to the tunnel beyond.”
“They crushed themselves with the explosion?” I asked. It should have horrified me, but at the moment I couldn’t spare any sympathy for the group of people who had just tried to murder me. They deserved to get crushed. Fuck them.
“Maybe so. Or maybe they just collapsed part of the passageway and most of them escaped. But at least one of them got crushed.” He stared at the arm with an expression of blatant discomfort. I wished we had a blanket or something to cover it up with. I felt like it was watching us.
“Oh, I hope she got crushed,” the uncharitable thought escaped my lips without thinking. Once it was out in the air, I couldn’t bring myself to regret it. I’d never actually wished someone dead before, but there was a first time for everything. Righteous anger was what I needed at the moment. It was staving off the despair and helplessness.
“Me too,” David replied. “Especially considering that we have no idea whether this passageway even leads out of this cave.”
“But Alicia used this cave to cut us off, so there must be an exit that leads down the mountain,” I said excitedly, realizing that we had a chance. “All we have to do is follow the passageway she was using, and we’ll be able to leave where she entered. It can’t be far. Then we can just walk down to the village.”
David shook his head. “I wouldn’t bet on that. Both Lachlan and Alicia said these caves are basically a maze of swiss cheese. This could be a totally different passageway than the one Alicia used to cut us off.”
He was right, although I didn’t want to contemplate the alternative. We had two or three days of food and water, limited light, and a radio that wouldn’t work through solid rock. In other words, we were totally on our own. This was no longer about finding the fire leaf fern. This was about surviving before we ran out of air, water, and food. We stood in silence, staring at one another in desperate disbelief.
“What’s our alternative, digging?” I finally asked, looking at the solid rock ahead of us and the dark passageway behind. “I don’t know about you, but I don’t think that’s going to be a winning strategy.”
David looked at the enormous pile of rocks and swallowed hard. “Casey, I’m so sorry—” he started to say.
“No,” I interrupted. I shook my head, sending dust and little bits of volcanic rock flying loose. “No ‘sorry’s’. Not right now. We have to act. We can’t think about anything else but getting out of here. We’ve basically got two hours to get back to the village before a hurricane hits this island. We have to catch that ferry tomorrow. I want to go home, David.” My voice rose and then broke at the end of my sentence, and I felt my eyes burning. I blinked the tears down and willed my breathing to be even. We both needed to stay in control of our emotions. If we were going to make it through this, we had to keep calm.
David nodded after a moment. “Ok. You’re right. There’s no digging out. There’s only moving forward and hoping we manage to find a way out of this cave. And we have no time to spare.” His voice was determined, and it lifted my spirits that he wasn’t melting down like I was threatening to do at any second. He pried the fingers of the dead man open and pocketed the gun. What use that gun was going to be in this cave was a mystery to me, but if we found Alicia in here, I wouldn’t be sad if David did shoot her.
He turned and squared his shoulders at the dark tunnel. “Let’s get going.”
34
David
The passageway away from the pile of rocks and the dead man’s arm led into a faceless black abyss. With only the little camping lantern to illuminate our steps, we could only see three for four feet ahead of us. A sudden hole or solid wall could show up with little warning. At least the passageway was wide enough and tall enough to walk through, although that was hardly an indication of much. We had no idea what lay ahead.
Time within the cave was impossible to track. My watch had been cracked by the force of the explosion, likely ruined. Both of our phones were dead. The camera had an electric clock on it, but we had so far avoided turning it on and wasting any precious battery power. Our journey seemed endless in the dark, silent cave.
“It’s so quiet in here,” Casey said as we walked in the black. We were holding hands, both out of necessity and for affection. I squeezed her hand to comfort her. “It’s like the walls just absorb all the sound.”
“It’s weird, isn’t it? Even our footfalls don’t make noise.”
“I don’t like it. It’s creepy.”
“Can I say I’m sorry yet?” I asked her.
She shook her head and pulled her hand away before I managed to snatch it back. “No. None of this is your fault, David. I made the choice to keep going up this stupid volcano with you. Besides you didn’t ask some crazy woman to try and blow us up and then bury us alive.”
I hadn’t thought of being trapped in the cave as being buried alive, but now that Casey said it, my palms became sweaty. I pushed down the fear down until it formed a hollow pain in the pit of my stomach. It was important I stayed calm. Both for Casey and for myself.
“We’re going to get out of here soon,” I said, faking a confidence I didn’t feel. We’d been walking for about fifteen minutes, maybe, but it felt like we were walking upwards, not down like we’d been hoping. “I’m sure the exit is just around the next bend.”
“Yeah,” Casey said with similarly thin optimism. “I’m sure you’re right.”
In the pale light of the lamp, Casey looked tired and frightened, but her eyes still flashed with determination. Her blue t-shirt and white shorts were almost grey from the dust created by the explosion, and her hair was coated in the same dark soot. Her bare legs were covered in shallow scratches and bruises, and her arms were similarly battered with little wounds. I’m sure I looked no better. I even had a fairly nasty scrape on my forearm. We looked like we’d been hiking through a warzone, which considering, was not that far from the truth. But even beneath all the dirt and grime, Casey was still the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. She held her head high when I wanted to curl up in a ball. Her courage through this was the only thing holding me together.
I’d brought her out here in pursuit of something new and spectacular and that was exactly what I’d found, only to realize that I’d been by her side all along.
“Casey?” I asked her after a few more minutes walking in silence.
“Hmm?”
“Will you tell me about your family?” There was so much about this woman I needed to know. I had endless questions for her.
She stumbled in surprise before righting herself. “Why do you ask?”
“I’m curious by nature.”
“I’ll tell you about my family if you tell me about yours.”
<
br /> I shrugged. My family was all over the tabloids. There was probably nothing about them that she didn’t already know. “Ok.”
“What do you want to know?”
“You said you have siblings, right? Tell me about them.”
Casey smiled. “I have four siblings. Three brothers who are younger than me, Austin, Travis, and Troy, and an older sister, Tanya. The boys are nine years younger than me, fifteen, and Tanya is twenty-six.”
“That’s a big family. A big spread age spread, too.”
Casey smiled. “My brothers were a surprise. My mom was forty-five when she found out she was pregnant.”
“The women in your family are very fertile,” I said dryly.
Casey giggled. “We are. My sister just gave birth to her second kid. She’s only been married for as many years.”
“Do you like big families?” I found myself fascinated to know. The one benefit, the only benefit, to being trapped in a cave with Casey was that I got to spend time with her.
Her expression turned shy. “Yes. I do.”
“How big?”
She shrugged. “Big. Five maybe? I liked being one of five.”
“Five,” I repeated, stunned. Despite being Catholic, no one in our family had produced big families in the past few generations. I suspected a lot of secret birth control had been utilized. I tried to imagine Casey and I raising a huge brood of kids and found that I was able to visualize it fairly easily. We were certainly off to a strong start with the twins.
“What else do you want to know? Or is it my turn?” Casey asked when I fell quiet, imagining the size of vehicle I was going to need to cart around a family of seven. Nathan wasn’t going to end up with the minivan, I was. The thought was almost horrifying enough to distract me from the fact that I’d been buried alive.
“It’s not your turn yet. What are your parents like? You said they were Baptists, right? And you’re from Arkansas?” I tried to imagine Casey in Arkansas. It wasn’t surprising to me that she’d moved west.
Casey looked over at me as if wondering why I was asking so many questions. “Curious, remember?” I told her. She smirked at me and shook her head.
“Yes, they’re Southern Baptists. I grew up in Arkansas, outside of Little Rock. The whole area is fairly conservative. Really, my folks are pretty liberal for where they live. They’re normal. They aren’t crazy or anything.”
“Do you really think they’ll be angry about your pregnancy?” I asked. “Our pregnancy,” I corrected.
She elbowed me. “It’s my pregnancy, unless you’re planning on pushing them out for me.” She paused. “I’m not really sure if they’ll be angry. They’ll probably just be, you know, disappointed. I’m not who they wanted me to be in a lot of ways.”
“What do you mean?”
Her smile turned brittle. “I’m not like Tanya. She’s a teacher in the next town over from where we grew up. She married a local police officer. She volunteers at the church. I moved to the center of elitist, liberal fascism and work in media production.”
“You’re successful!”
“And in their way, they are proud of me. I think they just would have preferred that I be more like my sister.”
“That, I can understand,” I told her. “At least your brother isn’t the world’s most famous astronaut.”
A sidelong look. “Are you jealous? You’re very successful, too.”
“I’m not exactly propelling humanity into the spacefaring age. Nathan founded a company that is building spaceships. You can’t turn on the TV without seeing him breaking a record of some type. I’m on TV too, sure, but I’m cooking chicken parmesan with Laura Linney.”
“I love Laura Linney!”
She had been a delightful guest, extremely gracious and nice. I shouldn’t complain. “You know what I mean.”
I didn’t see her roll her eyes since she was facing forward, but I knew she was doing it. “Did your brother use family money to build his space company?”
“Durant Aeronautics? Yeah.”
“Did you use family money to build your restaurants?”
I knew what she was getting at. “No, I didn’t.”
“Have you ever used your family’s wealth for yourself?”
“Not until recently.” If my voice was dry and resentful, it was because I was resentful. I hated that my legal issues had propelled me to this point. Taking a loan from Alexander II was torture. Even though I may have gone a bit too far with my plan to escape from my imaginary debtor’s prison, I still couldn’t stomach the thought of being beholden to my uncle or family dynasty for money.
“And it’s only temporary,” Casey said confidently. “We’re going to find this dumb fern and your money worries will be gone. You’ll probably get a Nobel Prize for your discovery.”
“Our discovery. If we get out of here.”
“Well not with that attitude—” Casey started to scold me when a sudden crackling sound distracted us from our conversation. We looked around ourselves in confusion. It sounded like static.
“It’s the radio!” I exclaimed, figuring it out after a few moments of staring. I pulled the unit from Casey’s shoulder to confirm. For the first time since realizing Casey was alright, I allowed myself to feel relief.
“We must be close to the surface now if it’s working again,” Casey said, walking faster. “Look I think I can see some light up ahead!”
“Hello? Can anyone hear me?” I asked into the radio. “Over?”
“This is Dr. Cruz. Is that David? Over.” Casey froze where she was and turned to face me and the radio when the tinny voice issued from the receiver.
“Yes, this is David. We’ve had an… incident on the volcano. We’re safe, but we’re lost in a cave. We think we see an exit. Over.”
“You what?!” Dr. Cruz exclaimed.
“I can’t explain right now,” I said, shaking my head. “We need to get our bearings. What time is it?”
“It’s eighteen hundred hours. We’ve been trying to reach you for hours. Your friends arrived just after noon.”
Casey grabbed the receiver from my grip. “Is Curtis ok?”
“Is that Casey? Yes. Curtis is fine. He has a small fracture, no sprain.”
Casey and I exchanged a relieved look. Curtis’ accident seemed forever ago. I felt guilty that I’d almost forgotten about him in all the craziness since we parted ways.
Eighteen hundred hours was… six p.m. A thought occurred to me. “When is sunset? We need to get back to the village… Over.” I was not good at this radio protocol. We’d also been in the cave a lot longer than I thought. The day was almost lost.
“The sun sets in half an hour,” Dr. Cruz replied. “You can’t travel in the dark. It’s too dangerous. Stay where you are. Make a camp. Don’t take any risks with your safety. You can still try to make the ferry tomorrow.”
“Ok.” I said into the radio. “Look, we need to turn this thing off. We didn’t realize that it was on all this time, wasting power. Let Curtis and Trevor know that we’re ok. Make sure they get on that ferry tomorrow even if we aren’t on it.”
Casey nodded. The thought of being stuck here for god knows how long was scary, but there was no reason Curtis and Trevor needed to join us.
“Make them get on that ferry tomorrow,” Casey repeated. “Promise us.”
It was a long time before Dr. Cruz responded. “Alright. But be safe up there. Don’t travel at night. Signal me when you’re safe and bedded down for the night.”
Before we could consider making camp, we needed to get out of the cave. But Casey was right, there was light up ahead. For the first time in hours, there was a literal light at the end of the tunnel.
35
Casey
The good news was that we were no longer trapped in a cave within a volcano while a typhoon raced toward us. The bad news was that we were now inside the cone of the volcano while a typhoon raced toward us.
“Holy shit.” David perfectly encap
sulated my thoughts on the topic.
We emerged gratefully from the thick blackness, blinking against the light. Our tunnel emerged from the cave’s interior to become a path on the upper edge of the summit, within the cone of the volcano itself. We were now on a narrow ledge, about eight feet wide, that overlooked the deep, smoldering heart of the volcano itself. Above us was the tortured grey-black sky, half obscured by the sharp, black rock wall. We were only about twenty feet from the lip of the summit, but it might have been a thousand.
As a small child, when I’d first learned about hell and thought of everything literally, this is more or less what I imagined. A deep, dark, hot hole in the ground from which hardly any light escaped. The smell of sulfur. Smoke. No devil had emerged yet. I hoped he was busy greeting Alicia, his latest acquisition.
“I think this might actually be worse than being in the cave,” I said to David after a moment as we gazed into the molten heart of the earth. There was no glowing lava, no bursts of fire, but there was plenty of smoke. And heat.
“At least we’ve got a path,” David answered, gesturing to the winding path that continued around the inner lip of the volcano.
“This looks man-made,” I said. The tunnel through the cave had looked natural, but this looked like it had been hewn from the rock by hand. The path was too even, too regular. It rose at a regular, reasonable pace uphill, very much like the path on the exterior of the volcano.
“You’re right.” David pulled out his binoculars from his pack and tried to see through the mist and smoke to where the path might lead. “It’s definitely going up, but it’s too windy. I can’t see where it actually goes.”
“Well I’m not going back in that cave,” I said adamantly. “Not to camp. Not for any reason.” He nodded.
“Yeah, I think I’m pretty much finished with caves for the rest of my life, too.”
As David was talking, my eyes were drawn to the only non-black, grey, or brown thing in sight.
Lost and Found (Scions of Sin Book 4) Page 19
