Cave-in

by Joseph Monninger

  “If your head makes it, you can get the rest of you through,” Ms. Carpenter said.

  “Are you sure?” Sandy asked, her voice pinched.

  “Sure I’m sure,” Ms. Carpenter said. “Lift her a little higher.”

  Bob locked eyes with Mr. O’Connell and nodded. They lifted her higher.

  At least, Bob thought, she didn’t weigh much. He gave Sandy that much. In every other way, he thought, she was a waste of space.

  “She’s making it,” Mary Eihorn said.

  Everyone stood grouped around. It was late afternoon, Bob knew from checking his watch and from the light that spilled quietly into the underground cavity. He looked at Harry and Mary and wiggled his eyebrows. They didn’t see it, or didn’t care. Their eyes stayed fixed on Sandy wedging herself slowly through the slot.

  “Owwwwwww,” Sandy said.

  “You’re making it,” Mary said again.

  “It doesn’t feel like it. It feels like it’s crushing my head.”

  “A little more,” Harry said.

  “There are rocks outside here, too,” Sandy said, her head nearly out. “Owwwowowww.”

  “A little higher, Bob,” Mr. O’Connell whispered.

  Bob lifted. Sandy’s head finally went through.

  “There you go!” Ms. Carpenter said, her voice all cheerleader-y. “Way to go, Sandy!”

  “Owwwwwww.”

  But now she started moving forward. Bob felt her squiggling through the slot, little by little. In unison with Mr. O’Connell, he lifted her again. Her waist suddenly made it up onto the wall below the slot and she was suspended. Her legs stuck out like a scuba diver’s legs sticking out of a shark’s mouth.

  “Go, go, go, go,” Harry started chanting.

  Mary didn’t chant, Bob noticed. Mary didn’t do things like that.

  Bob stepped back and watched. The top half of Sandy’s body had gone through the slot. Ms. Carpenter motioned to Mr. O’Connell that she wanted to go up to help. Mr. O’Connell motioned to Bob to come help and give Ms. Carpenter a boost up. He did.

  “There you go, there you go,” Ms. Carpenter said to Sandy, her hand smoothing Sandy down so that her belt and boots went through. “You made it, you made it.”

  Then Sandy’s legs disappeared. A second later her face looked back inside.

  “Which way?” she asked.

  “Back that way,” Ms. Carpenter said, snaking her hand through and pointing. “Go ahead. You can do it. Look how much you’ve done already. Go ahead, get some water for us. That’s the big thing.”

  “I don’t know which way!” Sandy said, crying now. “I’m not some Girl Scout, you know? I don’t know which way to go!”

  Bob watched Mr. O’Connell squeeze his eyes shut. He was sick of Sandy, Bob knew. Everyone was sick of Sandy. It was ironic that they all had to depend on her now.

  “Down that way,” Ms. Carpenter said, trying to be calm, Bob could tell from her tone. Ms. Carpenter pointed emphatically toward the landing point. They were on an island, a spit of land, really, and Bob wanted to shout to Sandy that she wasn’t going to get lost. Nobody could get lost on an island this size.

  “Sandy, come here. Come down here, where I can whisper to you, okay?” Ms. Carpenter said, her voice going lower so Bob had a hard time hearing. He understood she brought her voice down so Sandy would calm down. Sandy’s face appeared near the opening, almost as if she were listening through a mail slot. “There. Now take a deep breath. We’re depending on you. We are. You have a chance to be a hero. All you need to do is go down to the campsite and bring back some water. Easy, right? Nothing to it. Now slowly get ahold of yourself. You’re the only who can do this….”

  “It’s blowing like crazy out here.”

  “That may be, but we’re not going to worry about that now. We need water. You can also go through Mr. O’Connell’s tent and look for his satellite phone. Is that clear?”

  “Which tent?”

  “It’s right near the wall of the fort. The highest one away from the water, I think. You’ll find it. Just be methodical. And we’ll need more lights. We’ll keep digging, and you can count on us getting out soon. Right now, though, we need water in a bad way. Get the water first, and then everything else will work out. Can you do that?”

  Bob Worm assumed Sandy nodded. He couldn’t really see.

  “You can do this, Sandy,” Ms. Carpenter said. “You ready to do this?”

  Sandy nodded again, Bob guessed.

  “Okay, we’ll be right here. Just take your time and move carefully. Walk back the way we came. It isn’t far.”

  “It’s getting dark.”

  “That’s okay. There’s nothing on the island that can hurt you.”

  Sandy didn’t move away. She didn’t say anything, either.

  “What, Sandy?” Ms. Carpenter asked.

  “Should I look for Azzy?”

  “No, not now. No, you just concentrate on getting water, okay?”

  Sandy became just a shadow moving away from the slot. Bob lowered Ms. Carpenter.

  “Think she’ll make it?” Mr. O’Connell asked.

  “Sure she will,” Ms. Carpenter said.

  Bob rubbed his hands against his pant legs. Before he finished, he heard Mary at the pile of stones, already back trying to dig her way out.

  Sandy sensed the wind rushing around her and felt confused. It was easy enough for everyone to point and tell her to go this way or that, but those people weren’t on this stupid island, standing in the twilight, wind buzzing all around you and the birds making sounds like an insane asylum. Plus, she was alone. It didn’t matter if people were inside the magazine, because she was out here, by herself on the fort grounds, trying to remember which way to go.

  Down there, Ms. Carpenter had said.

  Down where? Sandy now wondered.

  She ducked her head lower to keep the wind out of her eyes. The wind made her eyes water. She walked a few paces in the direction that seemed the most likely. What they didn’t know inside was that the landscape had changed. Really changed. The fort had splintered and shattered and stones now littered the ground. They must have fallen off the top tiers and rolled down toward the water. The place didn’t even look the same, Sandy reflected, not that she had taken a particularly sharp mental photograph in the first place. A few huge gaps had opened in the earth, places where the rocks underneath had shifted. One of the walls of the fort appeared caved-in and crooked.

  She turned sideways in the next gust of wind. It was cold. She had been cold before, down in the magazine, but now it was even colder. She didn’t have her gloves or hat. She had left them down below. She stood for a five count waiting for the wind to pass by her.

  When the wind let up, she walked downhill. She took her time, worried about falling, worried about things falling on her. Her eyes felt watery and dim, and she couldn’t tell if she was crying or merely tearing up from the cold and gusts. Either way, it made seeing difficult. Near the edge of the fort, she bellied out and tried to use landmarks to orient herself. It didn’t work. Whatever the fort had looked like before, it didn’t look that way anymore. She stopped and looked around. The wind struck her again and she squatted down, made herself small, until it finally let up.

  She saw a tent after she walked another fifteen paces. As easy as that. It was pretty close to the water and just around the end of the fort. She walked toward it, feeling more confident. Maybe she would be a hero, she thought. Maybe when it was all said and done, everyone would have to admit that Sandy Bellow was their savior. Maybe Sandy Bellow — she liked thinking this way, she realized — would come out on top, be the one who saved the day. Bob Worm would have to admit it, and that would grind his guts. Everyone would have to admit that a girl, one Ms. Sandy Bellow, had outdone them. She couldn’t wait for that.

  But those thoughts left her when she came around the end of the fort.

  A stone tongue stretched out from the bottom of the fort nearly to the water.


  Sandy stopped and didn’t move. She didn’t know what to do, and her mind felt squirrelly and unhappy. The wind continued hitting her. She squatted again, trying to get out of the full force of wind, but it was useless. The wall of the fort was gone, scattered like a thousand heavy dice in one throw toward the water.

  The tents were under the stones. Crushed. Crushed to smithereens.

  Two things came to her mind. The first was, We would have been dead. If the tremor had come at night they would have been asleep in their tents and the wall would have fallen on them. The end. It was that obvious. So in some weird and peculiar fateful twist, they were lucky to have been locked in the magazine. She wondered what the group would think about that.

  The other thing that came to mind was the simple understanding that everything they had brought, all the food and water, the satellite telephone, everything that meant comfort and any hope of safety of a sort, now lay below five feet of blocked granite. Gone. Obliterated.

  And the walls came tumbling down, she thought, her eyes going over the scene in amazement. Joshua fought the battle of Jericho, Jericho, Jericho / Joshua fought the battle of Jericho, and the walls came tumbling down.

  That was from an old song they sang at summer camp. She sang it softly in a breathy, strained voice, hardly aware of what she was doing. At the same time, she walked slowly toward the pile of rocks. The rocks looked like alligator skin. Like rough, horrible alligator skin that hid a breathing, hideous creature underneath everything. She felt too frightened to go near them.

  A gull snapped past in the wind and nearly hit her. She squatted down and felt her bravery slipping away. Let someone else do it, she thought. She stood and started back to the slot, back to the magazine. Let someone else do it, she thought again, and then the song came back, the walls came tumbling down, her mind on fire, her body as cold as it had ever been.

  Eamon O’Connell had to force himself to concentrate on the words that Sandy spoke through the slot.

  “The wall fell…. It crushed everything … all our supplies,” Sandy said, her head sideways so she could talk through the slot. He was aware of the group circled around him, aware of Sam Harding moaning loudly, barely conscious now, and that sound seemed to drown out everything else.

  “What are you saying?” he asked, though some distant, wobbly part of his brain understood very well what she was saying.

  They were marooned. That’s what she reported.

  “Did you check everything?” Ursula asked from a spot underneath the slot. “Sandy, everything?”

  “I didn’t lift the rocks, if that’s what you mean. It’s all crushed. I went through the one tent that was still standing. It was Sam’s tent, I think. It was just on the edge of the rock slide.”

  “We need to check everything,” Ursula said, speaking calmly, Eamon knew, to keep Sandy from flying off like a crazed kite into the wind.

  “It’s all over the ground. The rocks are everywhere. We would have been killed if we had been sleeping there.”

  “Are you sure …” Eamon started, trying to get a hold on what had happened.

  “Am I sure that we would have been killed? Yes!” Sandy said, her voice rising. “Yes, I’m completely certain.”

  It was nearly dark behind her head, Eamon saw. He felt a headache kick into a small pinpoint between his eyes.

  “Could you go back and check for water?” Harry said. “You said there was a tent. I can’t even say how thirsty I am.”

  “One tent down by the water. The rest are crushed. There’s nothing there, you guys. It’s all buried.”

  “Whose tent is that?” Ursula asked the group. “Who camped closest to the water?”

  No one answered. Sam’s, probably, Eamon thought. Just their luck.

  “If you could go back and do a full survey,” Ursula told Sandy, “that would be an enormous help. There might be a water bottle in the tent…. You never know. If you could just go back and take a look …”

  Eamon saw Sandy shake her head no.

  “I went through the tent and there wasn’t anything inside it,” she said. “I’m not going back down there by myself.”

  Then she started crawling back through the slot. It annoyed him to see her squeezing through, her panicked face grinding in pantomime to her body as she wriggled to rejoin them. He felt exhausted watching her.

  Bob Worm stepped forward and helped Sandy slide down the wall. She said owwwwww, owwwww, owwwwww half a dozen times. Then she was back among the fold. Eamon had to walk away from her to gain his composure. If only one person could fit through the slot, why did it have to be Sandy? he wondered.

  He sat on the rock he had come to think of as his place. Funny, but each of them had adopted a space in the dim interior. His space was a rock the size of a footstool that allowed him to sit with his back against the stone wall. He felt thirsty and angry and testy. It would be dark in under an hour, he knew. Even if he could talk Sandy into going out again — which he doubted — she would be useless in reconnoitering the situation. It was not even worth considering. He didn’t even know if she had really bothered to go through the standing tent.

  “We’re in a pickle,” Harry Cameron said, coming over.

  Harry always found a way to step away from removing rocks from the entrance, Eamon noted. He was a master at goldbricking. Harry always made it seem that whatever else needed doing was more pressing than the job at hand, but his real trick was escaping down and dirty labor.

  “I know that, Harry,” Eamon said, doing his best to keep his voice even.

  “No food, no water. That boat guy won’t be back for a couple days anyway.”

  “I know,” Eamon repeated.

  “Wow,” Harry said. “I’m dead thirsty already. I’ve never been this thirsty.”

  “I’m sorry about that.”

  “What’s our plan?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll get hungry enough to eat through the rocks.”

  “Whoa, sorry.”

  “I don’t have a plan,” Eamon said, checking his sarcasm. “Sorry. Wish I did. If I had a plan, I’d let you know.”

  “Just asking.”

  “The plan was to get Sandy out so she could bring back food and water.”

  “Okay.”

  Sam moaned loudly. He sounded like a ghost. His voice seemed to penetrate the walls. Eamon took a deep breath.

  “Eventually,” he said, letting his voice go loud enough so anyone could listen, “someone will come to find us. That’s not even an issue. A whole group of kids can’t go missing without an alarm being raised.”

  “That’s true,” Harry agreed. “We have that going for us.”

  Sandy came over and stood next to Harry.

  “It was really scary out there,” she said.

  “I bet,” Eamon said.

  “You still could have searched a little more,” Harry said. “At least checked the tent you talked about seeing. Someone might have kept a water bottle in there.”

  “You go do it if you’re so sure it’s so easy,” Sandy said scornfully. “You try it.”

  “Thanks anyway, Sandy,” Eamon said, realizing from her words that she hadn’t bothered to search the tent properly. “At least we know more than we did.”

  Then Eamon felt something in the chamber change. A sound stopped. At first he thought it was Sam leaving off moaning for a moment, but that wasn’t it. It was something deeper, something that had been going along at the edge of his hearing longer than he could recall. He pushed himself up. For the briefest instant, he worried another tremor had shaken the room. But that wasn’t it. It was something vaguely rhythmic that had now withdrawn. The fading light made it difficult to see, but then he sensed Ursula stepping across the interior.

  “There,” he heard Mary say, her voice resolute and strong. “We’re through. I can see out.”

  Eamon felt new, fresh air coming in from the entrance side. Mary, good Mary, had punched through at last.

  Dimly, Sam heard pe
ople talking. He could no longer be sure whether people talked in his dream, or talked to him in reality. That was interesting. His arm, for reasons he couldn’t fully understand, felt like a doorway that he could pass through backward or forward, upward or downward, into dreaming or into consciousness. He wondered, frankly, how he had gotten along so well and so long without his revolving-door arm. Yes, it was a strange thing to have. It was all confusing, no question. Moans came out of his mouth at unexpected moments, moments he couldn’t do a thing about, and sometimes he heard them from a distance, like a foghorn, and other times he knew they squeezed out of his own body.

  Interesting. It was all very interesting.

  “We’re going to carry you out,” Mr. O’Connell said suddenly, his mouth close by. “We’re going to get you out of here. You strong enough for that?”

  Sam nodded. Then he realized he needed to speak. But instead of words, the moan came out. It sounded like the croak of a bullfrog.

  “The hole isn’t that big, so we’re going to have to drag you a little. But we need to get out of here,” Mr. O’Connell said. “We’re going to get a fire going and try to get some food heated up and you’ll feel a lot better then, okay?”

  Sam moaned again. He didn’t want to moan, but he couldn’t help it.

  “What food?” he heard someone ask nearby. It was a girl’s voice, maybe Sandy’s.

  Sam didn’t hear the answer.

  Then a bunch of arms lifted him. It was awkward, too, because he kept falling through the arms and drooping down. Once, he felt his butt drag along the ground and dirt went down the back of his pants. They tilted him up and he felt cold air pushing on him. Very cold air. But it was fresh air, too, not bad, and then he was outside and he could see the stars and it was night.

  “Okay, okay, let’s put him down.”

  Sam had lost track of who was speaking when. Voices popped at him from different compass points, and it was all quite intriguing, really, but difficult to understand, too.

  He smelled woodsmoke. Just a little.

  “We need to keep him warm,” someone said close to his head.

  Then he saw the fire. It was not big, not big at all, and it looked peculiarly orange. People moved around its perimeter. They looked like dark goblins, shaded and indistinct.