I began cutting at a slight upward angle, attacking the overhang as if peeling an orange. Rock and sand appeared to melt away, creating a slow landslide that dropped beneath me as I progressed. Because it was important that I knew how my work was affecting Tomlinson and Will, I stopped after only thirty seconds. After a long pause, I tapped the nozzle of the dredge against my air bottle. Eight taps—probably not timed correctly, but Tomlinson would know what I meant.
The letters E-R. Everything okay?
Tomlinson’s response was barely audible, but I received eight taps in response.
Weird. It sounded as if he was now farther away . . . or deeper into the overhang. Maybe they had found a widening interstice—a keyhole passage. It suggested to me that they had moved from the site of the initial collapse. Perhaps they were following a tunnel—a tunnel that led to the surface—or even a cave that contained an air pocket. It was possible, and I hoped it was true.
More likely, though, if they had actually found a vent large enough for them both to negotiate, the tunnel would angle downward toward the subterranean river, not upward toward the surface.
As I began cutting again, I glanced at the murk below my fins, thinking about that possibility. At its narrowest point, the remnants of the limestone bridge were no more than twenty feet thick. Maybe I had been wrong to try excavating from the side. Would it have been wiser to attack the overhang from beneath? I imagined myself cutting through rock and sand until my friends literally fell to safety.
My eyes moved back and forth, monitoring the trench I was digging while also considering the geology of the lake.
No . . . I couldn’t risk excavating from beneath. It was smarter to stay where I was. I had seen the ledge from the vantage point of the wrecked plane. The lake’s hourglass scaffolding was too fragile, already compromised by the plane crash. Cutting from below would be like sawing through the load-bearing beam of a house. The entire structure could come crashing down.
For what seemed a long time, I worked hard, cutting deeper and deeper with the dredge, afraid to risk a glance at my watch. Internally, I was battling a welling panic. I vented energy by attacking the overhang, clawing away boulders and fossilized shell, ripping my way into the earth.
Finally, though, I knew I had to stop and assess. I looped the hose over my shoulder and banged the nozzle against my tank. Eight taps or nine—I wasn’t certain. My hands were shaking as I listened.
Nothing.
I signaled again. Then again. As I gripped the pipe, ready to continue dredging, I heard a very faint tink-tink-tink . . . TAP-TAP-TAP . . . tink-tink-tink.
It was Tomlinson, but only Tomlinson, and there was no mistaking the meaning of those nine distinct bell notes. He was now sending me an SOS. Emergency. Need help immediately.
Perhaps the pilot of the wrecked plane had sent out the same signal before crashing into this lake. It was a three-letter cry for help.
I checked my watch. The orange numerals seemed inordinately bright and stabbed at my eyes. Sixty-three minutes since we had begun what should have been an uncommonly safe dive on an uncommonly warm and calm February afternoon. The watch confirmed what I feared.
Tomlinson and I had been friends for so long, we had shared so many experiences, good and bad, that I knew he would not resort to an SOS unless he was at his end. Maybe Will was dying . . . or maybe the kid was already dead. Tomlinson would soon follow.
I shouted a pointless refusal through my regulator mouthpiece. “No!”
No—I wasn’t going to let it happen. Sometimes, the most dangerous option is the only option. I had made progress digging into the side of the overhang, but it was time for a more extreme approach. I had to risk cutting into the overhang from beneath. We were out of time, and it was my last best hope. Bringing the limestone bridge crashing down atop me was preferable to what I knew was the inevitable alternative. If I didn’t free them within the next minute or two, later, much later, I would have to wait while a recovery team retrieved the bodies of my closest friend and a sixteen-year-old boy who had already suffered too much trauma in his life.
I yanked hard on the hose, demanding slack, and realized as I waited that I was at risk of biting through my rubber mouthpiece. King’s instincts were still good, however. More coils of hose descended above me. Without pausing, I sprinted downward, kicking hard with my fins, towing the hose behind.
I knew that the thinnest section of the overhang was shoreward, midway. There, the composite of limestone and sand was only twenty feet thick. As I swam, I traced the contour beneath the wide ledge. Gradually, bands of sunlight that pierced the surface disappeared behind me. Ancillary light, mixed with water and shadows, created a turquoise gloom that soon enveloped me, but there was still enough visibility to make out details.
The underside of the overhang consisted of hardened marl and limestone. The facing was pocked like the surface of the moon. The formation suggested the slow-motion cataclysm that had formed our planet, the geological grinding of water, rock and wind over aeons.
When the plane had crashed, it must have been nosediving, because it had sheared off a pie-shaped wedge of the horizontal strata. Where the plane had made contact, the rock facing veered sharply upward, where the overhang had nearly been severed—a fault line.
I positioned myself beneath the fault line and jetted a few bursts of air into my BC—enough to create positive buoyancy. The vest lifted and anchored me against the rocks above. The hose was stretched so tight, however, that I couldn’t get a good working angle on the fault.
Once again, I tugged on the hose, demanding slack. Once again, I was prepared when King yanked hard in response. Instead of just a single, testing jolt, though, King continued pulling the hose, but now he was also kicking hard with his fins—he had to be, because I couldn’t stop his momentum. He began hauling me toward the edge of the overhang as if hauling in a fish.
I gripped the PVC pipe in both hands as he continued to drag me along the underside of the bridge. It went that way for several seconds, my aluminum bottle clanking as it banged against rocks. Finally, I managed to turn so that my fins were in front of me and I began kicking, fighting to reposition myself.
Above me, King was in an untethered inner tube. He had no leverage, only the swim fins I had loaned him, yet it wasn’t until I had freed one hand and jammed my arm deep into a rock vent that I finally stopped myself. As I battled, the strain on the hose was so great that I feared it would snap.
A rock vent . . .
In that instant, an image flashed into my mind: Will Chaser sticking his big teenage hand into a similar rock vent, then applying pressure as he tried to steady himself.
The image was detailed and luminous in my brain as I heard a sapwood-cracking sound, then a rumbling billiard-ball percussion.
I was still holding tight, one arm in the vent, one hand on the hose, when the ledge above me broke free. Then the entire overhang fell with the weight of a marble ceiling . . .
ELEVEN
WHEN WILL HAD RECOVERED FROM THE SHOCK OF being buried under a ton of rubble, his first thought was Not this again . . .
But it wasn’t the same. Not at all like a few weeks ago, his first moments sealed in a wooden crate, listening to the men who had kidnapped him shovel dirt onto the crate. He had never experienced such a sickening panic, which perhaps had numbed his threshold for fear. Because now, lying curled beneath the crushing weight of rock, Will felt in control. He was spooked and shaken, but he wasn’t crazy scared.
Or was he . . . ?
Will let his brain take stock, testing his appendages for pain or wounds, as he assessed his immediate state of mind. Nope, he was a little stunned, true, but he was not feeling the magnitude of fear that could be accurately defined as “scared shitless.”
Will would have been startled by his self-control had he spent more than a few seconds thinking about it, but he didn’t because he was too mad to waste time analyzing his emotions. Not just mad, he was furious—f
urious at the random, shitty bad luck and at his own uncertainty. He didn’t know what had caused the ledge to collapse on him or how deeply he was buried. All Will Chaser knew was that he had survived worse and he was going to survive this, by God!
At least he could move a little, and he did. Slowly, foot by foot, Will wormed and muscled his way into what might have been a rock crevice, where there was enough space around him to move his hands and find the little flashlight clipped to his BC. The flashlight was rubber coated, waterproof to thirty-three feet—or so the box had claimed—and he’d brought it on this trip even though he didn’t expect to get a chance to use it. Not underwater, anyway.
Will preferred using his own gear. It’s just the way he was, which is why he’d refused when Doc, the biologist, had offered to loan him two additional flashlights that looked expensive, with their flared lenses and dense metal tubes. Doc had tried to force him to carry the things, which at the time seemed stupid. Why the hell carry extra flashlights on a sunny winter afternoon? The lake didn’t look that deep, and they would be out of the water, packing to leave, long before sunset.
Well . . . turned out the biologist wasn’t so stupid, although there was now no doubt in Will’s mind that a weird, wild streak of bad luck stalked Doc Ford. Twice, Will had been with the guy, and both times the shit had really hit the fan.
Bey-HO-ayh. Back in Oklahoma, on the reservation, that was the word that the elder Skins used when referring to some pain-in-the-ass white guy who radiated bad luck. The word sure fit the man . . . And just when Will was starting to like the guy. Sort of.
When I get out of this mess, I’ll call Ford that—Bey-HO-ayh, and let him figure it out. Tell the man right to his face and watch how he reacts. Asshole!
Ford wasn’t an asshole, and Will didn’t really believe it. In fact, there was something solid and comforting about being around the guy. They’d had a pretty good talk the night before. The man had tried bullshitting him, telling the typical adult lies, but didn’t seem to mind at all when Will had called him on it.
Now, though, Will was mad and frustrated. Picturing himself confronting the big biologist gave him an immediate objective, one more reason to get himself free of this mess. He would dig his way from under the rocks, swim to the surface, and call to the man, “Hey, you—Bey-HO-AYH ! Take a guess at what that means, dipshit!”
It could happen. No, it would happen. Will felt certain of it when he found the hippie, Tomlinson, unhurt and alive curled next to him. Only a minute or two later, they heard Ford somewhere above them, signaling. If Ford wasn’t beside them or below them, he had to be free, out there, swimming around. Ford would help dig them out. If he didn’t, Will would manage by himself.
I’ve been in worse fixes than this.
No one could argue that.
Ten minutes later, though, Will had lost some of his confidence. The lake’s rock floor wasn’t solid as rock should be. It was as fragile as rotten ice. The floor kept breaking beneath them, first dropping him and the hippie into a small crevice, then a slightly bigger crevice, sort of like falling through the floors of an old house into progressively larger closets. As the water cleared, Will could see details when he or the hippie shined their lights, but the water was never clear for long.
The third implosion had dropped them in a limestone chamber, where the floor was littered with what looked like giant fossilized oyster shells. There were shells and rock packed tight all around them, with barely room to move, and the rocks overhead were too unstable to touch.
Will had tried digging upward, as had the old hippie. Remove a single chunk of limestone, though, and a barrel of sand and rock fell with it, pouring into the crater like water down a funnel. It destroyed visibility and gave Will a choking feeling, even though his regulator continued jetting air into his lungs when he inhaled through his rubber mouthpiece.
How much air did he have left? That was the question. And how long would the batteries of his flashlights last? That was another important one.
Will didn’t doubt that he could endure just about any damn thing bad luck threw at him, but his scuba tank lacked his heart. The thing was made of aluminum and had limits—the amount of air it could hold, for instance. Will knew it had to be getting low.
Using his flashlight, Will kept an eye on the pressure gauge that was attached to his vest. First time he checked, the needle pointed just below the 1400 psi mark. Moments later, though, he had sucked down a lot of air when, for the second time, the floor gave way. It was a shocking thing to experience, the earth collapsing beneath him. But that was several minutes ago, and Will decided to have another look at his gauges. He used his flashlight, careful not to blind Tomlinson, who had sensitive eyes apparently.
The needle on the pressure gauge pointed just above the 900 psi mark. The needle of the depth gauge pointed at 20 ft.
Damn. Not good. He was a novice diver, but the written exam was still fresh in Will’s mind and he knew that 1000 psi was dangerously low. Even if he had forgotten, that portion of the pressure gauge was colored red to remind him. When the needle touched red, it meant it was time to surface, no dawdling.
The fact that they were now twenty feet underwater, instead of at fifteen feet, also told Will that the lake floor had indeed been dropping them into progressively deeper pockets. Thirty-three feet was another important boundary, the entry into three atmospheres of pressure, which required the use of decompression tables and also caused a faster drain on the air supply.
Depthwise, at least, he and the hippie were in safe territory. They might drown, but there was no chance of them dying from the bends, which was almost funny if it wasn’t so damn true.
Will had confidence in what he had learned. He had aced the NAUI Open Water written test, much to the surprise of everyone but himself. A scuba class wasn’t like school. Learning something useful, information that could save his life—or even lure a pretty girl into bed if a willing female scuba enthusiast appeared—was worth the effort.
Getting Will scuba certified was the idea of his court-appointed therapist, a woman who wore loud, clanking Indian jewelry and was a closet smoker—Will could smell it on her clothes and in her hair. She had discussed the subject with his probation officer, then the Minnesota couple that was trying to adopt him and, finally with Barbara Hayes before offering Will a choice. He could take a dive course at the Seminole County Rec Center—Oklahoma, not Florida—or he could agree to more therapy sessions specially designed by her to deal with patients who had unusual gifts—Will being among the few who qualified, she said.
It was the therapist’s secret hope that Will would finally be forced to admit his claustrophobic anxieties and decline the dive course.
Fat chance.
“I’m immune,” Will had told the shrink, referring to claustrophobia. “Being buried alive in a box has cured me for life.”
The scuba course lasted three weeks, which had left Will’s hair stinking of chlorine and also delayed his plans to run away from the court-appointed “boarding school,” which is what they called reform schools in Oklahoma. It was worth it, though, because Will enjoyed diving.
He liked being underwater, in the silence of his own skull, even in an indoor swimming pool. Diving a coral reef, though, was a hundred times better, as he had discovered the day they had spent on Key Largo. Will had never experienced anything like it in his life, and it was something good to think about just before going to sleep.
That first dive was as clear in his mind as the water of the Florida Keys.
He could picture himself dropping down through a luminous blue gel, all those waxen coral shapes assuming definition as he descended, colors brightening in his brain even as they were dulled by filtered light. Fish, as they moved among coral canyons, were as animated as wildflowers, whole schools of fish that appeared wind-tumbled by tidal current yet were as symmetrical as geese in flight.
Take a look.
Tomlinson had just now written that on his dive slate,
then surprised Will by nudging him before putting the slate in Will’s face and using his flashlight.
Will had to lean closer to see the words, then he asked, Look at what?, speaking through his regulator, so it sounded like “Ook uh-hh utt?”
His eyes were already following Tomlinson’s flashlight to the narrowest part of the chamber, where there was a bowling ball-sized hole into which silt and sand created a small whirlpool as they were drawn downward by current.
Will had already seen the hole. In the last four minutes, he and Tomlinson had probed every inch of the chamber with their lights.
Tomlinson rubbed the dive slate clean and wrote, We have to move. Agree?
Will nodded. No doubt about it, they had to do something before their air ran out. It had been nine minutes since they had last heard Ford above them, once digging so frantically that Tomlinson had had to bang a warning on his tank—the biologist was causing more rock to collapse on them.
Next, Tomlinson wrote, Can’t go up. Agree?
Will shook his head. The idea of being crushed by the unstable ceiling scared the hell out of him. “Nooo ’uckin ’ay,” he responded.
Once again, Tomlinson used the flashlight to point at the bowling ball-sized hole. He wrote, You stay. Conserve air!, then banged a fist against his own chest, the gesture communicating Leave it to me.
The light went out. It was like being immersed in a barrel of oil—that kind of blackness. Aside from an occasional flicker of firefly green—Tomlinson’s dive watch, as Will had already figured out—the only respite from the darkness were the thought patterns flowing behind Will’s eyes. They created pulsing yellow blossoms, and a linear red thatching that streamed and throbbed in his brain.
The colors signaled frustration. Impatience, too. Will was getting angry again.
He spent a full minute listening in darkness as Tomlinson worked at the hole. He could hear the random clank of the hippie’s air bottle against rock; a digging sound, then a grunt followed by more digging. Finally, Will had to look. He pointed his flashlight at his fins before touching the switch, then shined the light toward the hole.
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