I reflected on seeing Dupree sneak away yesterday. Now it made sense; he must have been looking for evidence of the congressman’s drug smuggling.
“What do you mean running out of time?” I asked.
Something sounded above us. We both startled. “GO!” Dupree pushed me forward.
“Where?”
Without another word he tugged me into the tunnel and turned off his light. We disappeared into the darkness. My breath caught in my chest. “What was that?” I managed to gasp as Dupree yanked me into a small cavern on the right.
“Shhh. Sound travels like crazy down here. We’re doing this blind. Whatever happens, don’t turn on your cell phone light.”
I wondered if he was slightly crazy. Was I putting my trust in the wrong person? I wasn’t afraid of him, but he did have a tendency toward conspiracy theories and a distrust of the government. Could he be imagining that Congressman Riley was involved? Was he delusional?
He didn’t give me a chance to reconsider. My arm felt like Silly Putty as he pulled deeper and deeper into the darkness. “Duck,” he commanded, easily contorting his body and dropping to the ground.
I reacted one second before my head would have slammed into a twelve-inch rock protruding from the cave wall.
“Do you know where we’re going?” I whispered.
At that moment it sounded like a bomb exploded. The cave walls shook violently. Rocks smashed into one another. Instinctively I covered my head and dropped to my knees. My ears began to ring. It felt like the sound cut straight through me. The sound of rocks slamming into one another sent a wave of terror through my body. Had the entrance caved in?
“What was that?” I asked Dupree. “Did something cave in?”
He didn’t respond.
Panic began to rise in the back of my throat. Had he been hurt? I felt wildly around me. “Dupree?” I yelled.
There was no response.
I felt around me again, reopening the cut in my hand. “Dupree? Are you okay?” Even though he told me not to turn on my cell phone light, I couldn’t help it. I fumbled through my pocket, found my phone, and turned on the flashlight app. Scanning the area around me I moved my phone from the ground to the top of the cave wall and back down again. There was no sign of Dupree anywhere and no sign that the cave had collapsed. Where had he gone?
“Dupree!” I shouted with more intensity this time.
The cave echoed my frantic voice back to me in eerie waves. I was paralyzed with fear and had no idea what to do next. Going deeper into the hidden recess of the cave didn’t sound like the wisest plan, but neither did retreating to the main tunnel. What if Dupree was right? Maybe that wasn’t an explosion I heard. Maybe it was gunshots.
As I considered my choices, I felt a hand yank me toward the cave chamber. I let out a scream, and a hand covered my mouth. The taste of blood sent me into a moment of panic until I realized it was from my cut.
“It’s me, Dupree.”
“Where did you go?” I asked, willing my heart rate to return to a normal pace.
“I had to make sure that he wasn’t cutting us off from the other side.”
“The other side?”
“Come with me,” Dupree said, forcing my head under the arched entrance to the next tunnel. “This drops into a lower chamber.”
“This goes through?”
“Yeah, crazy, huh? It comes out way on the other side of the forest. These caverns and chambers go on forever. There have been rumors that some old guy used to live here. I wouldn’t doubt it. You could walk for miles and miles down here and never find your way out.”
“Wait.” I grabbed for his shirt in the darkness. “Where are we going and what are we running from?”
“Gunshots. Didn’t you hear them?”
“That’s what that explosion was?” I felt sick to my stomach.
“Yeah. A bunch of them, but the thing is, you can’t trust sound down here. It tricks you. The shots could have come from behind us, or they could have come from ahead.”
“And you ran ahead to check?” That sounded like something I would do. “What would you have done if you ran into someone with a gun?”
“Not someone, Congressman Riley.”
“Okay, what would you have done if you ran into the congressman?”
“I wouldn’t have. I know how to move like a cat in these caves. I know every place to hide down here.” He shook himself free from my grasp. “Come on, we’ve got to keep moving. The shots didn’t come from this side of the cave. We’re going to have to go in deeper and hide.”
“Deeper, why?”
“Because if we stay here we might get shot.” Dupree continued forward with a leap.
I shuffled after him. Those had been gunshots? That must mean that Congressman Riley knew that Dupree was searching for evidence. Had he killed Kira for the same reason? The more pressing question was, Would he do it again?
As much as the thought of venturing deeper in the cave made me ill, the thought of coming face-to-face with Congressman Riley and his gun was even worse. What choice did I have?
Chapter 31
It took every ounce of effort I could muster to keep up with Dupree. His body moved in ways that mine couldn’t imagine. He sprang over rocks and darted under overhangs. He slinked through tunnels and contorted his body to fit through slivers of the ancient lava flow. I wasn’t as flexible or willing to risk a panic attack by squeezing into the tiny crevasses that Dupree slipped through like butter.
“Man, it smells down here,” Dupree said. “Bats.”
“Bats?” My voice sounded squeaky. “There are bats?”
“Yeah, totally. Thousands of them. Tourists don’t see them. They stay out of the main shoot. You might see some droppings, but otherwise they hide out here where it’s deserted.”
Great, just great. As if being chased through endless caves more than 150 feet belowground wasn’t enough, now I needed to worry about being dive-bombed by thousands of bats.
We got to a crack that a snake could barely squeeze through, and I hit my limit.
“No way.” I shook my head. “There’s no way I’m going in that.”
Dupree sucked in his already concave stomach and twisted one shoulder through the tiny gap. “See? Just shift your body like this. Do one shoulder, then the other. It opens up a lot on the other side, I promise.”
“You can promise all you want, but there’s no way I’m going in there.”
He paused. Although I couldn’t make out his face in the dark I knew that he was trying to figure out what to do with me. “Okay.” He sighed. “Let’s find a safe place for you to hide. I’ll go ahead and scout out another option. There are a few spots that are wider, but I need to make sure they aren’t waterlogged right now.”
“Do you mean filled with water?”
“Yeah, some of these caverns become swimming pools when it rains or when we get a good snow melt in the mountains. How do you feel about swimming?”
“I can swim.”
“No way, I’m not serious. The water would be like ice. We’d catch hypothermia in about two minutes.”
“Right.”
“It’s okay. There are other ways out, but let me go do some scouting.”
“Do you think that Congressman Riley would follow us all the way back here? I mean, how far have we come?”
He shrugged. “Not that far. He’s ruthless and he’s killed before. I’m not willing to take any chances on him having a change of heart, are you?”
“But what if it wasn’t him? It could have been someone else.” I was cold, sore, and starving. I didn’t want to squeeze through Dupree’s paper-thin exit, but I also wanted out of this dungeon—now.
“It was him. Stay put. I’ll be back, but it might take a while.”
“What’s a while?” I heard the trepidation in my voice.
“I don’t know. Thirty minutes. An hour. It just depends on how much water there is and how long it takes me to navigate around it. S
ometimes you have to backtrack forever to find another route.”
“Okay.” I heard myself agree while internally I wanted to scream for him to stay.
Dupree was gone before I had a chance to reconsider. I slunk closer to the cave wall and pushed my back onto its icy surface. I couldn’t remember the last time I felt this cold and alone. What had I gotten myself into? Fear flooded my system. What if Dupree didn’t come back? I could never find my out without him. Or what if Congressman Riley found me before Dupree returned?
I shivered and curled my knees into my chest. The dark was endless. Is this what death felt like? I was less than proud of some of my past choices, but nothing as bad as this. In an attempt to manage my anxiety, I called on Gam. She has always said that our souls are connected with energy.
“Physical space isn’t a barrier, Margaret,” she once said. “Our energy systems are always connected. To access them we simply need to be still, go inward, and visualize that energy link.”
Gam often practiced distant healing on her clients. In her words, she would “dial them up” and send them a shot of healing energy. I had watched her do it. A serene look would come across her face as she closed her eyes and swayed slightly, as if her head were being rocked gently by an unseen calming force. Some people might think that the work Gam did was out there. I understood that, it sounded strange, but there was no debating her transformation and the results that it produced. She had helped people heal the common cold, manage depression and anxiety, all by the simple act of deep meditation and calling on her guides.
I called on her energy now. Gam, if you can feel me please send me some healing vibes, I whispered internally. Almost immediately my forehead began to tingle and a surge of heat spread from my toes up to my body. Was it just my imagination or wishful thinking? Or had it really worked that fast? Had I tapped into Gam’s intense energy field?
Either way it didn’t matter, I allowed the soothing waves to radiate into every cell in my body and breathed deeply. You can do this, Meg.
I’m not sure how long I waited there, curled up in a tight ball and practicing relaxation breathing, but after a while my ears perked up. I heard something bouncing off the cave walls. I sat up and rubbed my ears. Were those footsteps? Was Dupree on his way back?
Listening intently I tried to place the sound, but Dupree had been right: It was impossible to decipher where it was coming from. As the heavy thudding continued, my moments of ease vanished. The footsteps were too solid to be Dupree. He moved like a delicate jungle cat. These were pounding and harsh.
My heart rate picked up as I creeped closer to the sliver that Dupree had wanted us to squeeze through. Stay calm, Meg, I said internally. You’ve got this. Those steps could be hundreds of feet away or on the other side of the cavern.
Then I saw a flash of light dance off the far wall and the shadow of a man devour the light. This was bad. Really bad.
Chapter 32
Never before had light seemed menacing, but this light was different. Congressman Riley’s silhouette appeared larger than life on the cave wall. He looked like a giant, well-dressed Sasquatch. The logical side of my brain tried to rationalize the fact that the light was playing a trick on me. Congressman Riley was tall in real life, but not as towering as he appeared reflected on the ancient rock wall.
There was nowhere to go, unless I wanted to try to shimmy my body through the narrow slit in the rock face. Which I didn’t. I held my breath and squeezed in my stomach. There was a three-inch overhang in the section of cave that I was hiding out in. Not enough to conceal me completely, but if I stayed perfectly still and as close to the back of the cave as possible he might not see me if he didn’t come any closer.
I pinched my fingers together. Don’t move a muscle, Meg, not a single muscle.
The congressman’s flashlight danced off the walls. For a second I considered playing dead. Maybe if I dropped to the floor and pretended I had passed out he would figure that I was a lost cause and move on. But that would require moving, and I couldn’t risk it.
A yellow glow swept across the outer cavern walls. It reminded me of a movie prison scene, in which prisoners attempted to sneak under the blinding reach of rotating searchlight. I could tell that Congressman Riley was doing a methodical search. His light ran across one stretch of wall and then back and again. He repeated the motion from the top to the bottom of all three walls.
He was almost done and about to turn his light in my direction. My heart pounded so hard in my chest I thought it might burst. My hands shook, and my stomach churned with dread. This was it. I was about to meet a very untimely end, and all because I’d made a stupid move and followed Dupree down here. If I had just stayed out of it I never would have been in this position. These might be the final moments of my young life, and I had no one to blame but myself.
The steady light inched across the overhang. I inhaled and braced myself for what was coming. I didn’t have a weapon or any way to protect myself. We were miles underground, and there was no chance that my cell phone would work. Not to mention there was no one anywhere nearby.
His light started to shift down just under the overhang. I threw my hand over my mouth as a squeak of fear escaped from the lips. Oh, my God, this is really it.
Just as the light was about to illuminate my face, a huge thud echoed in the cave. Congressman Riley dropped his light away and swiveled it in the opposite direction.
Oh, thank God.
I didn’t trust myself to move or even breathe. I kept my hand clasped tightly over my mouth and waited as Congressman Riley halted and scanned the cavern with his light again. He looked as if he was trying to figure out where the sound came from. He turned in all directions. I froze as his light made its way back around the cave toward me, but again at the last minute he flipped it around and headed out in the direction that Dupree had gone.
Not wanting to take a chance that he might come right back, I waited in my statuelike pose for another few minutes before I finally let out a sigh of relief and pried myself out of the corner I’d been crouched in.
Now what?
Had Dupree banged something intentionally to save me? Did he know that Congressman Riley was close?
I know that he told me not to leave under any circumstance, but this was a very special circumstance. If I stayed, there was no place that was safe. If the congressman came back he would find me. Despite Dupree’s warning, my only chance was to go back the way we’d came. I tiptoed out of my hiding hole and scanned the darkness. Then I used my hand as a guide and crept back toward the main exit. Turning on my cell wasn’t an option, so I was going to have to do my best to navigate in the dark. I knew that as long as I kept my hand to the right side of the cave wall I could find my way out of this tunnel. After that I wasn’t sure what to do next.
Take it one step at a time, Meg, I told myself.
It was hardly astute advice. I had no other options. Hopefully, there would at least be other places to hide farther down one of the offshoot tunnels.
My hand dug into the wall. I didn’t care that the friction made my cut from yesterday worse. Something wet trickled down my wrist, I assumed it was blood, but I ignored the pain and stumbled ahead. I kept my other arm out in front of my face so I didn’t smack into a stalactite or bump into the ceiling when it lowered. It was slow going. Running in the dark uneven and changing tunnel would only lead to disaster, so I crept forward one foot at a time.
I stopped every few minutes to listen. The only sound that met my ears was a trickle of water and the sound of my desperate breathing. Wherever Dupree and Congressman Riley had disappeared to must not be close, although Dupree had mentioned that some of the caves connected and intertwined. I hoped I wasn’t setting myself on a path to run straight into the congressman.
You can’t turn back now. I took another timid step forward. I couldn’t tell how far I’d come. I knew that I should probably be approaching the first fork in the tunnel. The problem was, I had no idea
which way to turn once I got there. Dupree had led the way through each switch and turn. I counted my steps as I went. The act of doing something basic like counting helped keep me calm and maybe would give me a sense of how far I had gone.
Since I’d gotten at least a hundred feet away from where I’d seen Congressman Riley, and because I hadn’t heard any other movement in the cave, I decided it was worth the risk to turn on my phone and at least quickly assess my surrounding.
I paused again, listening carefully, and then turned on my phone. The dim light almost hurt my eyes. I blinked twice and tried to get my bearings. Up ahead about ten feet the cave broke into two tunnels. I had been right, I was close. Now the question was which tunnel to take.
My gut told me to stay to the right. Isn’t that what Sam had advised yesterday? Pick one direction and stay the course until you hit a dead end? The difference today was that I hadn’t paid any attention to how many turns we’d made on our escape. I’d been too consumed with fear, and Dupree knew where he was going.
When in doubt trust your gut would be Gam’s advice, so I continued on to the right. The cave narrowed. I racked my brain trying to remember the tightness of the tunnels that Dupree had led me through. This felt right. Well, that’s not entirely true. It felt as if it were closing in on me, but the feeling of claustrophobia felt unnervingly familiar.
Another centering technique that I had learned from Gam was to hum a positive mantra in times of stress. Gam believed that we attract what we put out in the world. If we spread negativity, we attract negativity. In kind, if we spread light and joy, we attract light and joy. I could use a healthy dose of light and joy at the moment, so I hummed, “I’m safe, the world is love, light, and joy for me, watch and see.”
I mumbled the words in a partial song as I crawled on the hard cave floor and tried to ignore the fact that my head was starting to skim the ceiling.
Suddenly, I heard a sound. I froze. Was that just my voice echoing back to me? Why had I been so stupid to sing aloud?
In Cave Danger Page 19