“He’s sending his moneybag first?” Henry blurted out. He had been sitting, but now he climbed unsteadily to his feet. “I don’t like that. No, no, I don’t like that at all.”
Yong and Diego stared at one another. Diego said, “We don’t have any options.”
Henry said, “What if you told him you’re not going to send his moneybag through until everyone is through?”
“That sounds reasonable,” Sissy said.
“No, we don’t have time for games,” Diego said. “If he means to take the money and run….”
“You’re right,” Yong said. “No time.” He hurriedly tied the end of the rope around the strap of Cutbirth’s gym bag. “It’s ready!” Yong yelled down the hole. The rope drew taunt and the moneybag disappeared.
Seconds later, Cutbirth yelled, “Send someone through!”
“Thank you, God,” Yong whispered.
Diego said. “Adriana, you go first!”
“Send Emily,” Adriana insisted. “And don’t argue.”
Diego looked at Emily. “Okay, Emily, off you go.”
Emily pulled on her gloves, stowed her camera inside her backpack, and then dropped to all fours at the entrance to the tube. Sissy strapped Emily’s dolphin-stenciled backpack to one ankle.
“I’ll go next,” Henry blurted, his light framing the entrance to the tube.
“No, you won’t,” Diego said. “You’ll wait your turn.”
“We’re wasting time!” Cutbirth yelled from the other end of the rocky tube. “Send someone through!”
Diego looked at Emily. “Ready?”
Emily nodded. She grasped the rope with both hands and pressed herself flat.
“Hold tight, baby,” Sissy encouraged.
“Pull!” Diego shouted, and Emily slid into the dark tube, her backpack bumping along behind.
Everyone slipped on their gloves and strapped their backpacks to an ankle. Sissy went next, followed by Adriana (after some prompting from Diego), then Henry. It seemed like it was taking forever—Cutbirth had estimated correctly and it was taking about one minute for each person to be transported to the other side—and Diego expected to see the flashlight beams from the bounty hunters bouncing off the walls behind them at any moment.
Yong was preparing to go into the tube when he and Diego heard voices.
“They’re right behind us,” Yong whispered.
“I think that was Sissy’s voice we heard,” Diego said softly. “Or Adriana’s.”
Voices had a brassy quality in the cave. It was difficult to distinguish one voice from another. It was also difficult to know where a voice had originated.
“Are you sure?” Yong asked.
“No.”
Yong laid flat at the entrance to the tube, wrapped his gloves around the rope and said, “Pull.”
Diego didn’t know if Cutbirth had heard Yong or not—Yong had voiced his readiness in a normal voice—but in the next second Yong disappeared into the tube, his backpack dragging along behind him.
Diego turned away from the opening and expelled a curdled stream of vomit, his claustrophobic hysteria giving him a world-class case of nausea. The fear was nightmarish.
In a few moments, Cutbirth yelled, “Ad Man, hurry!”
Diego wiped his lips clean with the sleeve of his wool shirt and pulled on his gloves. He was faced with a claustrophobic’s nightmare of all nightmares—total confinement. What in God’s name could be worse than negotiating a 30-foot-long tube the diameter of a beach ball? Maybe being strapped into a straightjacket and buried alive would be worse. But only slightly.
Diego’s anxiety level was off the chart and he puked again.
It was a noisy puke, as pukes go, and prompted a reply from somewhere down the long, dark tunnel: “I hear you!” The taunting female voice was close, perhaps no more than a few hundred feet down the tunnel.
“Uno,” Diego muttered, fear tearing through him.
Gasping for air, Diego turned and directed his headlamp back down the tunnel toward the sound of Uno’s chilling voice. It was still deserted, but he thought he saw the white blur of a flashlight beam. He hadn’t tied his backpack to his leg, and he knew he didn’t have time to do so. He shoved it into the tunnel. He would push it ahead of him with his head like a snowplow. He took two big gulps of air, dropped to his stomach, and began wiggling into the tube, the rope in his hands.
You can do this! his mind screamed. You have to.
“Pull!”
The rope tightened and he slithered forward.
“Again!”
Diego was only a few feet into the slender tube when the walls began to press into his shoulders and the ceiling pushed down on his back. The sweating began. Not the kind of sweating brought on by a hot and humid hike in the Missouri hills on a high summer’s day. No, this was a cold sweat, a terrified sweat. His heart had climbed up his throat and his mind was locked in the unnerving throes of a “Fight or Flight” standoff—Flight was winning. Except there was nowhere to run.
“Harder!”
Pale as death, Diego was wedged so tightly in the hole that he could barely breathe, and the all-consuming voice of panic overcame him. He remembered Cutbirth’s warning from the night before: “Caves have tiny crawl spaces so tight that a man inflicted with the disease of claustrophobia finds himself screaming forgiveness for some long-ago sin.”
Diego could move little more than his fingers and toes, and he felt a scream growing inside him. He was certain it was just a matter of seconds before he recalled some long-ago sin.
“Pull!” Diego shouted again, tightening his gloves around the rope. He felt the tug of the rope and he squirmed forward again.
Suddenly, Diego sensed someone behind him.
Horror-struck, his mind’s eye had lost all reason and pictured the bounty hunters on their knees and reaching into the tube. Dear God! They were about to grab his legs! They were about to drag him out of the tube like some wounded gopher! Then they would—
“Pull! Again!”
He inched forward.
“Again!” Diego yelled, a sad sickness in his voice. A third gagging heave of puke pushed up his throat, but he willed it away.
As he drew near Cutbirth’s light, the crippling wave of terror waned, and in a few seconds—Cutbirth pulling all the way—Diego crawled out the other side. He stood up next to Cutbirth, his heart racing wildly. His legs felt more like rubber than flesh and bone. He leaned against the wall for support.
“You don’t look so good, Ad Man,” Cutbirth said.
“I’m…I’m okay,” Diego said, brushing himself off. “I just hope that’s”—he gulped more air—“the last hole we have to…to crawl through.”
Adriana came over to him, but Diego waved her away.
He turned and puked again.
22
Fearing the presence of the two bounty hunters—Diego was certain he had seen the splash of a flashlight beam before entering the long hole and he had voiced his suspicion—Cutbirth suggested everyone stand clear of the rocky tube. They moved into one dark corner of the small cavern. Cutbirth said, “I think our friends the bounty hunters might send a shotgun volley down the tube when we least—”
At that very moment, a thundering wall of noise ripped out of the tube, and lead pellets the size of marbles sprayed the far wall. The discharge echoed for what seemed like minutes. Everyone shrank deeper into the corner.
“I rest my case,” Cutbirth said, his grim smile that of a man who had just predicted the future.
“Hello!” a female voice sang from the other end of the tube. “Anybody home?”
Cutbirth stepped over to the small opening. Standing to one side of it—he did not want his legs amputated at the knees by the next blast from Big Bertha—he removed his Glock from its shoulder holster, pointed the barrel down the tube and fired. He immediately withdrew the pistol and hugged the wall. The earthshaking roar of the 10mm Glock was on par with the shotgun.
“Missed!�
� the woman rejoiced.
Another shotgun blast ripped out of the tube. The bean-sized pellets again splattered the far wall and bounced across the cave floor. Everyone watched the bean-sized pellets scatter.
“Am I getting close?” the woman’s voice asked.
Cutbirth yelled, “There’s dead bodies scattered everywhere. Come take a look.”
Laughter from the other end.
Cutbirth said, “Am I talking to Uno, Queen of the bounty hunters?”
“You are,” Uno replied, her voice sounding young. “And you must be Arnold Cutbirth. The man with a face only a mother could love.”
Cutbirth merely smiled.
The fact that Uno and Big Bertha were only 30 feet away caused Diego to tremble with a quiet fear.
“Yours, Arnold Cutbirth, will be the first scalp to hang from my teepee pole,” Uno shouted.
“What’s Mr. Mustache say about all this?” Cutbirth goaded.
“Mr. Mustache, as you call him, is my deaf brother,” Uno yelled. “He lets his 30.-30. do all his talking. Come closer and give a listen.”
The tube then gave birth to a .30-.30 rifle slug and the accompanying thunderclap. The bullet ricocheted off the far wall, struck the ceiling, and fell to the floor hissing and spinning like a miniature top.
“More dead bodies!” Cutbirth announced.
“I feel compelled to make a citizen’s arrest for what you did to that poor Latino woman,” Uno said loudly. “Was she our mole?”
“She was,” Cutbirth said.
“I want to thank you for the goodie bag,” Uno continued. “Warm clothes and lights. Can’t thank you enough.”
“Just trying to make your job a little easier,” Cutbirth said with a sick laugh.
Diego found little humor in any of it.
“Too bad about the hillbilly,” Uno said. “He sneezed. I shot. I’ll claim him as a rabbit. Who’ll know the difference?”
“Murderer,” Yong said from the dark corner.
Cutbirth waited for several minutes. When he was convinced his conversation with Uno was at an end, he came over to where everyone was seated in the dark on their backpacks. He fished a crude map out of his own backpack and unfolded it on the cave floor. He knelt beside the map, lighting it with his headlamp.
“What the hell is that?” Diego asked, leaning in for a better look. He felt his stomach drop.
“What does it look like, Ad Man?” Cutbirth said, glancing at him with disdain. “And let’s keep our voices down. Uno doesn’t need to know our business,” he said quietly.
“It looks like a map,” Diego said in a low voice, clearly stunned by the existence of the handmade chart. “I thought you said you’d been through this cave before.”
His brow creased, Yong said, “That’s the impression you gave us, Cutbirth. You’d made eight trips.”
“I have, but this is no ordinary cave, my friends,” Cutbirth said. “She’s deep and long and riddled with false passageways. Regard this map as something of an insurance policy…a backup plan.”
“It looks like a treasure map,” Emily cheered. “I read a book called Treasure Island and there was a treasure map in it.”
“It’s no treasure map, kid. It’s better than that,” Cutbirth said.
“How so?” Yong said, sounding dubious.
“It’s a map to the Land of Dreams.” Cutbirth presented a smug smile.
“Listen to yourself, Cutbirth,” Diego admonished. “Land of Dreams. I thought you said it was more about the money, not the morality.”
“My comments are always subject to revision.”
Emily’s eyes brightened. “When will we get to the Land of Dreams?”
“One turn of Mother Earth,” Cutbirth said.
“When’s that?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Can I take a picture of the map?” Emily had fished her camera out of her backpack and it hung from her neck.
Diego could tell from Cutbirth’s frosty expression that he was in no mood for pictures, but he said, “Sure, kid, take your picture.”
Emily crowded in, and then snapped a picture of the map. “Cool!”
Everyone studied Cutbirth’s map and the cave’s intricate network of tunnels and rocky lairs. Drawn crudely on an 11” by 14” sheet of paper, the map had faded, its edges were frayed, and it was riddled with lines and words that had been crossed out and rewritten. The map reminded Diego of something a grade-school student might have drawn.
“Is this the place you mentioned? The exit point?” Diego asked, tapping a place on the map labeled CATHEDRAL.
“Yeah, that’s the exit chamber,” Cutbirth said.
The map did not instill in Diego a sense of confidence, and he looked at Adriana with a faint headshake. He studied the unnatural lines in his wife’s face. The boost that Adriana had received from the cool cave air had waned, and she was again fatigue’s poster child. Diego wondered how much stamina she held in reserve. Precious little, he guessed. Yes, once they were free of this goddamned cave, Diego was going to find a quiet place and scream his guts out.
“I don’t see a Y in this thing you call a map, Cutbirth,” Diego observed. He aimed his headlamp beam onto the rocky Y-like configuration that formed one end of the chamber 20 yards away. Two tunnels led out of the small cavern.
“I committed much of Mother Cave to memory,” Cutbirth confirmed.
“Oh, this is just dandy,” Henry complained bitterly. “Jim dandy. You’ve committed much of Mother Cave to memory.”
“Your ankle must be feeling better, Henry,” Cutbirth observed.
“It still burns a little.”
Yong turned and shined his headlamp on Henry. He said, “If I hear another complaint out of you, Henry, I’m going to kick your ass! I mean it! Right here! Right now! Bad ankle and all!” He doubled up a fist and shoved it under Henry’s nose. “And you can take that to the bank, Mr. Options Trader.”
Diego smiled inwardly. Yong had rekindled the fire in his belly.
From the other end of the limestone tube came Uno’s taunting voice. “Sounds like the natives are restless.” Her tenor voice was made brassy by the acoustics of the cave. “Maybe a group hug would help.”
“We appreciate the thought!” Cutbirth replied in a loud voice.
Seated on her pack, Adriana looked at Henry and frowned. “Stop your bitching, Henry. You’re making everyone very tense. Feel free to offer some helpful criticism, but please stop your whining. You sound like an old woman.” The short narrative would not have been exhausting for a healthy person, but for someone suffering from late Stage IV base-of-tongue cancer it was draining, and Adriana drew several labored breaths and leaned back against the wall.
“I paid my money,” Henry snarled, “I’ll bitch if I want.”
“Don’t talk to my wife in that tone of voice, Henry,” Diego warned.
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