by Toby Neal
It took Sophie several seconds to understand what was happening as the quiet forest erupted in sounds of disturbance: the trees shrieked and moaned as they lashed back and forth, rubbing against each other. A sound like wind rushed through their branches, raining twigs and leaves on the heaving ground. Everything jerked around Sophie, as if being in a movie that was glitching. Sophie covered her mouth with a hand to keep from crying out.
“Earthquake!” Jake hissed from behind her.
Sophie’s gaze had been on the meth gang. Red Cap stayed on his knees, holding onto the fence, while Primo Beer howled in fright as he lay spread-eagled on the ground.
Jake surged up and over the log, running toward the men and the still open gate, only staggering a little as the uneven bucking of the ground continued—he’d apparently decided to take advantage of the distraction to make a move.
Sophie fumbled her weapon out and pushed up on the log, relieved to find that the earthquake was subsiding into a series of uneven shudders, even as she heard a tremendous rending crash of a tree falling in the distance. She couldn’t seem to steady her legs, but forced them to work anyway, jogging toward the gate.
Jake was already through the aperture. He’d punched Red Cap in the head, knocking the man into a sprawl of unconscious arms and legs, and now had Primo Beer in a chokehold in the crook of his elbow.
The man soon went limp.
Sophie slid her backpack off and took out a couple of zip ties, securing Red Cap’s feet and hands. Following Jake’s example, she tugged the man out through the gate and down, hauling him under the armpits into the depression behind the log where they’d so recently sheltered.
Jake was panting with exertion as he secured his captive, and Sophie was a little relieved to hear it as she was severely out of breath from dragging a couple of hundred pounds of human more than fifty feet into cover.
“Got the tape?” Jake asked.
Sophie nodded, pulling out a roll of heavy silver duct tape from her pack. She tore off a strip and covered Red Cap’s mouth with it, as Jake taped Primo Beer’s.
Jake looked at his heavy metal watch. “Five minutes. Thank you, earthquake.”
“It was a very handy diversion, but I’m worried what it means for an eruption in this area,” Sophie said.
“Agree. We need to get in, grab our girl, and get out. Let’s move.”
Chapter Five
Jake
Jake led the way forward, and paused behind a tree outside the cluster of buildings to assess the situation. He could feel the heat of Sophie’s body close behind him as he scanned the area.
The earthquake had acted like kicking an anthill would do.
The crew burst out of the buildings. Jake quickly counted them, looking for and taking note of a petite Asian girl with long black hair: the target.
“We have two options. We can wait until they go back in to whatever they’re doing, or we can rush them now. Grab her while chaos reigns.”
Sophie took a moment to watch the scene before them. He could almost hear her busy brain working. “Rush them now. They aren’t going to expect it.”
“I’ll handle the dealers, you get the girl, since you’re carrying the tranq.”
“Copy that.” Sophie fumbled the tranquilizer dart gun out of her backpack and slipped it into her pocket, leaving her hands free. “She might want to come with us.”
“Don’t hold your breath.” Jake pulled both of his pistols, and strode forward into the clearing. His voice cracked like a whip over the chaotic group. “Drop your weapons and no one gets hurt.”
He didn’t see any weapons, but the assumption had to be that everyone was armed.
Two of the men complied, their eyes wide with surprise as they dropped pistols and a knife on the ground, and raised their hands. One man, taller than the rest, bearded with handsome features, grabbed the target in his arms.
“Back the hell away!” O’Brien shouted, holding a pistol against the girl’s temple.
Lia Ayabe shrieked like a singed cat and writhed in her captor’s arms. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Some boyfriend,” Jake muttered, trying to get a shot at the asshole’s head.
Sophie, meanwhile, circled around behind the duo. She stepped up and placed the bore of her Glock on the back of the boyfriend’s head. “Drop it now.” If Jake’s voice had been a whip, Sophie’s was an icy stiletto.
O’Brien raised his arms slowly, letting go of the girl, and dropped his pistol.
Lia tore out of her boyfriend’s arms and whirled on him, ignoring Jake and Sophie. “What the hell was that about?”
The man pursed his lips and shook his head. “Just an act. Trying to get them to let us go.”
“I don’t care what you were trying to do! Don’t touch me!”
Sophie grabbed the target by the arm, keeping her weapon pointed at the boyfriend. “It’s okay, Lia. We’re getting you out of here.”
“Everybody on your knees.” Jake was already pulling zip ties out of a handy side pocket to secure the dealers. The men complied, grumbling, and he advanced toward them.
“Hey there, cowboy.” A deep voice with an Irish accent cut across the clearing. “I’ve got a shotgun aimed at your woman, and I’m hoping you don’t want her to die.”
Jake’s gaze flew to the doorway of the largest shed.
A tall man with a shaved head and a neat red beard stood in the doorway, holding a Remington Tac-13 semi-auto comfortably across his tight midsection. His eyes were on Jake, but that killer gun was on Sophie. “Drop your weapons and let go of my girl, or the lady gets it.”
The guy who’d grabbed the target wasn’t the boyfriend.
Sophie slowly raised her hands. The girl tore away from her, running to plaster herself against O’Brien. She looked tiny beside his bulk, and way too young, but the vicious tone of her voice gave Jake a chill. “Shoot ‘em, baby.”
“On your knees,” O’Brien said, his flat blue eyes expressionless. Who was this guy? Clearly, they’d underestimated him—Finn O’Brien was no stranger to violence.
Sophie glanced over at Jake. He held her gaze and gave a slight nod as he dropped to his knees, lacing his fingers on the back of his head. No contract was worth dying for.
Sophie knelt as well. “We were hired by Lia’s father to bring her home,” she said. “We’re not cops. Let us leave, and you’ll have no further trouble.”
“That’s not going to happen,” O’Brien said.
The other gang members scrambled to their feet. Eager to prove his worth, the one who’d grabbed the girl reached Jake first. He kicked him in the legs, cursing ripely. Jake went down and curled into a ball, his arms around his head. Pain detonated like explosions in his body as the bastards rained kicks and blows on him.
“Stop it!” Sophie screamed, but they didn’t stop, and there was nothing for Jake to do but take it and live to fight another day.
A blow to his head brought welcome darkness.
The only way Jake knew he was awake was the pain, because the darkness was as thick as it had been when he’d been knocked out.
He groaned, and his voice sounded funny—echoey and hollow.
“Jake. Are you okay?” Sophie’s voice came from right beside him, pressured with stress.
“Not sure.” Jake ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth, testing for broken teeth. He tasted blood and he’d bitten his tongue rather badly, but nothing else had been lost, thank the good Lord. He liked his teeth and his mom had paid good money for orthodontia in his teens. He breathed shallowly against sharp stabs of soreness from his ribs and abdomen. His thighs were one big mess of bruises, but when he stretched his legs out gently, he could move them. “Nothing’s broken. I think. Maybe a few ribs—those are the worst.” He rubbed his eyes, but nothing. Still couldn’t see. “What the crap happened to the lights? Am I blind?” He tried to keep his breathing even and calm, though he was blinking rapidly in rising panic at the total blackness.
> “No, you’re not. They pitched us into a lava tube. There’s no light down here.” Sophie’s hands touched his face, his head, and he hissed a sharp breath as she encountered the goose egg on the back of his skull. “I’m feeling for wounds.”
“Don’t bother.” Jake twitched away from her touch. “Let’s focus on getting out of here before you worry about first aid. How long was I out?”
“Not long. Fifteen minutes or so.”
Now that his eyes had been open a while, Jake could perceive a slight gray circle in the space above him. “That the way we came in? They covered the hole.”
“Yes. A plywood circle.”
A rank odor had been penetrating Jake’s awareness; a fruity but foul scent that felt like a slimy substance being rubbed all over his abraded skin. “What the hell is that smell?”
“I think this is their refuse pit.” He could tell Sophie was breathing through her mouth. “There’s human waste down here. Kitchen scraps. And, I think, some decomp.”
“Decomp? As in . . . a body?”
“Maybe it’s a dead animal,” Sophie said, but she didn’t sound hopeful.
A wave of nausea swamped Jake. He shut his eyes. He was lightheaded, disoriented by the totally black environment, and that smell . . . “Gah! I think I’m going to puke.”
“It would be better on your ribs if you didn’t,” Sophie said evenly. “Not to mention the odors we are currently subjected to. Though I expect in a few hours they will no longer seem so acute.”
Jake breathed slowly through his nose, counting to five on each inhale and exhale, and spitting out the taste of bile until the nausea receded.
“What have you been able to determine about this chamber?” He finally asked.
“They stripped us of everything in our pockets, so I don’t have anything to use for light. I didn’t want to start exploring because I have a sense that this is a roomy cavern, and I didn’t want to lose track of you while you were unconscious.” Sophie’s voice continued to be eerily calm. “I’ve established a five-foot perimeter around our drop site.”
Jake craned his neck to look up overhead. “How far up is that?”
“You’re wondering how we got in here.”
“Yeah. And how high we have to climb to get out.”
“I don’t think climbing out is going to be possible. The overhead hole is at the top of a sort of stone bubble. They threw you in first; I took a minute to look around while I had some illumination and could see that the walls were out of reach of the hole at the top. So there’s no way to climb back up to the opening from below.”
Jake swore; Sophie stayed silent, maybe because she’d had fifteen more minutes than he had to assess their situation.
“How are you staying so calm?”
“I was trapped in a lava tube for days on Kaua`i, remember? I mastered my fear and disorientation then.”
“I’m feeling really dizzy.” Jake lay back down. “I need a minute.”
“The disorientation goes away eventually,” Sophie said. “You come to trust that what you think are the edges of your body, really are what you think they are. But it’s a weird feeling, kind of like you’re floating in space or something. No one tells you how crazy it makes you to completely lose your sight.” Sophie patted Jake gently, establishing the position of his body, and then hooked an arm under his. “Let’s get out of the filth of the trash pile. They chucked everything in here; fortunately, it was a big enough heap to break our fall into the pit. But no reason for us to wallow any longer in their shit. Literally.”
Jake couldn’t control the nausea rolling through him this time. He dry-heaved into the slime, muck, and garbage as they crawled through it onto a dry, rough area.
The tiny, faint circle of light above them got even further away.
Chapter Six
Sophie
Sophie wished she weren’t so familiar with the bizarre subterranean environment of the lava tube, but she’d been involved with finding a boy who’d fallen into one of the tubes formed by underground rivers of lava, and been trapped there with him for a time until their rescue.
All of the disorientation from sensory deprivation that Jake was feeling was something she’d already experienced and, eventually, bested.
She helped her groaning partner out of the immediate area of the rubbish pile and into the darker edges of their prison as her mind ticked over their situation.
They had been chucked down here to die, and to judge by the smell at the edge of the pile, they weren’t the first. The feral grin on Lia Ayabe’s narrow little face as she supervised the disposal of Jake’s beaten, unconscious body into the hole, and then did the honors for Sophie herself, was not something Sophie would easily forget.
Sophie had fought to get away. No sense, anymore, in meekly letting them throw her in the pit when their only possible hope might be escaping to fetch help. She’d gotten in some good licks on the hired hands, but with Jake out of commission and possibly badly injured, she hadn’t wanted to make the situation worse. She’d been dragged to the edge and pushed in to fall twenty feet to land on the refuse pile by that evil little bitch, Lia, herself. Once they’d been searched and all weapons or useful tools removed, and their identities verified, O’Brien had cheered Lia on.
“These two aren’t even real cops,” he’d said. “Collateral damage in the game of love, my dear.” His lilting Irish brogue made his foul words even more repulsive. “We’re moving out, anyway. The lava’s unstable and I don’t like the look of the news reports out of Kilauea’s seismic monitoring center.”
The girl was only seventeen years old, but if she’d ever had a conscience, it had been wiped out by using meth and her relationship with a sociopath.
And now they had to find a way to stay alive and get out of here.
Kendall Bix, their President of Operations, had the coordinates of the camp. If they didn’t check in by tomorrow, he’d mobilize a rescue team. By the time he did, the meth gang would be long gone. They just had to hang in there and wait for help to arrive and find them.
Sophie no longer cared what happened to their target. That kid had made her bed.
“We need to stay alive until tomorrow, when Bix checks in and we’re not responding,” Sophie told Jake. The cavern was surprisingly large, but she finally reached the rocky wall and settled her injured partner against it. “We’re going to be fine in here until then.”
“Speak for yourself. I’ve definitely got some cracked ribs, maybe worse,” Jake said. “My nose is bleeding again.” He sounded stuffed up.
Sophie sighed. “They sure enjoyed kicking the shit out of you. But I didn’t go into the pit without a fight. I wanted to escape and get help, but that evil little girl shoved me in here herself.” The picture kept playing in her mind over and over: Sophie held up at the edge of the pit by two of the flunkies as Lia Ayabe, little and cute and young, had charged at her and slammed two hands into her chest, knocking her backward with only pinwheeling arms to break her fall.
She’d been very lucky that Jake had rolled part of the way down the trash pile, because she’d landed so heavily the trash still bore the imprint of her body. “I’m not exactly in great shape, either.”
They commiserated over each other’s injuries, but in this filthy dark cave there was simply nothing to be done about them.
“So. Let’s review. Tell me what I missed while I was knocked out. Did you pick up any actionable intel?” Jake asked.
“Not much. O’Brien told his men they were going to evacuate from the site due to our discovery of them and the troubling volcanic reports coming in from Kilauea’s monitoring station. Apparently, that earthquake was indicative of an imminent eruption.”
“Just what we need. A volcano going off while we’re trapped underground in a lava tube,” Jake groaned.
As if in agreement, the walls shuddered and the ground bucked. Sophie cried out as rocks crumbled from the ceiling and thundered as they hit the ground around them. She
threw herself over Jake, but he was already trying to shelter her. So they clung together, their heads hidden down below their shoulders, as a hailstorm of pebbles and dirt rained down on them.
At last the earthquake stopped.
Sophie raised her head. The gray circle of light was bright because the piece of plywood the gang had used to cover the pit had fallen in, along with some of the edges of the hole they’d been forced into. A haze of dirt and dust made both of them cough, and Sophie lifted her filthy shirt to breathe through it. “One good thing from the earthquake—some of the smell from the trash pile has been buried,” Sophie said, and coughed.
“We have to find a way out of here. Another one of these quakes, and this whole cavern could collapse.” Jake heaved himself up onto his hands and knees. In the dim gray light, covered with slime from the garbage pile, which the fall of dust and dirt had adhered to, he looked and smelled like he’d crawled up out of the primordial ooze. “Now that there’s a little more light in here, let’s do a recon of this cave and see if we can find anything that we can use to get out. I’ll go right, you go left.”
“Okay.” Sophie hated to leave his side, but there was no help for it. She staggered to her feet and navigated along the wall, one hand trailing over the rough stone. She was glad she’d kept her shirt up over her mouth and nose as the cavern continued thick with disturbed sediment; or was it new volcanic emissions, blowing in from somewhere?
She suppressed a surge of panic at the thought.
“This haze isn’t really clearing,” Jake hacked and choked from where he’d disappeared from her view. His voice didn’t sound as echoey as it had before; the part of the ceiling that had collapsed had introduced a muffling layer of debris, as well as the toxic air they were trying to breathe.
“Make a filter from your shirt,” Sophie said. “Tie it over your nose and mouth like I did.” She’d finally reached the roughly circular wall of the cavern and begun curving back around when she encountered another opening. This was roughly six feet in diameter and led away from their cavern. “I found a hole. Looks like it might lead somewhere, and the air’s slightly fresher here,” she called to Jake.