“Do you know this area?” Jackie asked. They were saying goodbye to their last chance at shelter, so she fought against his impatience to leave if those ATVs would just move on to wherever they were going.
“Enough,” he said. “I’ve groomed a portion of the snowmobile trails nearby. The USFS land juts into our Bureau territory for only this bit. The rest of their land is all south of here. We need to cross north over the trail the ATVs used and we’ll be on the plateau. If we stick to the backside of it, closest to the trees there, we will be covered. Then when we get to the narrowest point we can rappel down.”
Jackie rifled in her pack. “I have one bottle of water left, a couple snacks and one of your ropes. But that’s it.” She gasped. “Shawn, my purse is still in my pack! Don’t you see? That means I still have my car keys. Even if we can’t find a phone, if we get to the control building, my car is there. We should be able to drive away.”
For the first time since the nightmare had started, she finally felt like they could do it. They could get to safety.
He grinned. “That’d be great, but let’s not get our hopes up. Driving in a blizzard—”
“I have chains in my trunk and a shovel.” She shook her head, beaming. “Nothing will be able to stop me.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Which tells me you’re still a survivalist. You just prefer the urban jungle.”
“And you prefer forestry over enforcer?”
He laughed. “Wrong agency, but yeah.”
She moved the key to the front zippered pocket of the pack, for quick access, and returned her pack to her back. She was ready to face the storm now that they had a plan and a backup plan.
The click of metal sounded and in an instant she knew their plans had been destroyed. “Hands up,” the gruff voice said. “No turning around.”
She dared to glance at Shawn, only to find his face pale. The man behind him pressed a gun into the back of his coat.
“Face forward,” he barked. The sound of static filled the air. “I’ve got ’em. Right at the tree line. Over.”
“Got it. Be right there. Over,” the younger voice answered.
The motor instantly died and only the sound of wind whistling through the tops of the trees took its place.
“Seems I owe my partner some money. He had the idea of running the ATV motor nearby so you two would think you were safe enough to find each other. Didn’t think the motor would cover up all my footsteps but guess he was right.”
The man in question joined them almost instantly, his rifle pointed right at Jackie. He’d been the one to shoot her pack earlier, then.
“They were just talking about the danger of hiking,” the gruff voice said. “I think that sounds like a fine idea. Get moving.”
She wrapped her fingers around the makeshift walking stick still in her hand and stared into the ever-darkening sky. Did she dare try to use it as a weapon? One little stick couldn’t overpower a rifle and a handgun before someone pulled a trigger, though. She dropped her head against the wind and took a step forward, having no idea where they were being led.
Shawn wasn’t the only one who warned against the dangers of hiking at night. Her father had drilled the sentiment in her own mind, as well. No matter what happened tonight, she knew without a doubt they were about to face death.
ELEVEN
Shawn zipped up the coat he was wearing as the man shoved him forward with the end of his gun. They seemed to want them to go straight ahead, away from the ATVs and the warming hut.
“I wasn’t kidding,” the man with the rifle said. “I don’t want to go out there again.”
“You don’t have to do anything but make sure they follow my directions.”
They trudged forward. Jackie took a step closer to him and their shoulders bumped. “Sorry,” she said. “The gusts are getting stronger.”
“Keep moving,” the man said.
They quickly discovered the bumpy portion of the terrain, tumbleweed, rocks and bushes hidden underneath the thick layer of snow. Jackie tripped and fell forward, crying out.
Like a punch to the gut, he couldn’t stand to see her in pain. Even for a second. He dived for her, but the man grabbed the back of his coat. “Oh, no, you don’t. Keep the hands up.”
“He still has a weapon,” the younger man yelled. He gestured wildly with the rifle. “Take it out of the holster and kick it.”
He pressed the release in his holster. There went the last bit of protection he could offer Jackie. He tossed the weapon to the side then leaned over to help Jackie. His eyelashes filled with flakes a second after he’d blinked them away.
“Are you okay?”
She nodded but didn’t attempt to speak. That wasn’t good. Jackie only stayed quiet when she was really upset or hurting. He wanted to pull her into a hug again. The way she’d reached out to him earlier...
The surge of feelings took him by surprise and left his throat and gut feeling hot and tense. She reached for his hand and he pulled her up to standing as the men started yelling for them to hurry up.
He adjusted his stride to match hers so she wouldn’t fall again without his arms there to catch her. Very few thoughts crossed his mind, since the work of hiking in the storm took great concentration, but their recent conversations replayed in his head. Even if he did get a do-over from that night he’d left, if he had a chance to properly say goodbye before they parted ways, he had a sinking feeling this time it would be much harder to let her go.
Still, she remained utterly quiet. Maybe she’d been injured and didn’t want to tell him. Like the splinters from earlier, she’d rather keep her mouth tight than complain of pain. Her competitive streak could be exasperating at times, but it served her well when grit and endurance were required. She’d never leave him without a fight. The thought took him by surprise, and with a jolt he also realized the gun wasn’t pressing into his jacket anymore. He glanced over his shoulder. The two men stood a good six feet behind them.
“Keep going,” the man yelled.
Shawn hesitated. Why would they make them walk all this way just to shoot them in the back? How would that ever be construed as an accident? This wasn’t hunting land. The snow grew thinner, smoother.
Tripping over tumbleweed, he let go of Jackie’s hand on instinct to catch himself. His hands sank into the packed-down snow.
“Shawn, are you okay?” She crouched next to him.
The winds eased but still blew her hair across her face. Her vibrant blue eyes made his heart pound harder.
He’d been the one to leave her without a fight all those years ago. He knew he’d grown up a lot since his teenage years, but the thought smacked him upside the head. Why had he never realized the irony before? The very hurt he’d been running from, the very hurt he’d been trying to prevent, he’d inflicted on someone else. On Jackie. Why couldn’t he have seen that before now?
Yes, she still hadn’t defended him that horrible night, but he hadn’t really given her a chance, had he? What if he’d stayed? It was a stupid question because he couldn’t change the past. Being submerged in ice water must have frozen some of his brain cells.
His hands sank deeper in the snow. He shifted to try to get up before the men yelled another threat. Jackie offered her hand and he accepted it. As he stood, he lifted his knee and stepped into a lunge to fully stand. The earth shifted underneath his front foot. His heel slipped forward. Jackie clung tighter to his hand. “What—”
The snow shifted and started to move, like quicksand. Jackie pulled on his arm then slipped past him. She screamed. The snow disappeared beneath them and they plunged into darkness.
Stale, cold, black air engulfed them. He tightened his fingers around her hand, determined not to let go, and reached out with his other hand to grab on to anything. Anything, please!
His grip found a hard ledge of some sort and
his fingers dug in deep, pain radiating down his forearm from the strain. His torso slammed against rock from the sudden jolt. He groaned at the impact and squinted into the dark. His feet dangled. Musty air swirled up and around him, escaping into a hole above, into the night sky.
“Jackie?”
“You can let go of me.” Her voice was quiet and weak.
“What? Never.” He tried to tilt his head to see her. He blinked rapidly, his eyes beginning to adjust. A mine. They had to be in a mine. A mine was always an unknown. The chute could be fifty to hundreds of feet straight down into the earth, depending on when it was built.
“It’s fine,” she whispered, gasping. “I think I’ve got something, but I need both hands.”
His left arm stretched as far as it could go without his socket threatening to jump ship, but if he let go and she didn’t have a good grip...
He couldn’t bear the thought. “Are you sure you have footing?”
“I think so. You have to let go, Shawn. My arm can’t—”
“Okay. One, two, three.” Their fingers slipped apart from each other. He moved his hand to join the other on what seemed like an old piece of wood. His feet tapped the tunnel or enclosure they were in. The walls had to be made out of rock. He found a foothold that helped ease the strain on his arms and tried to catch his breath. “You still with me?”
“I think I’m fine.” She broke into a coughing fit. “I’m standing on something. Where are we?”
“Shhh,” he whispered. He strained his ears to listen. The men knew about this mine. That was why they’d stopped when they did. They knew they’d fall right in it. That would make their deaths look like an accident, and he’d walked right into the trap. They’d never have justice. But on the bright side, they were alive. They just couldn’t let the men know it lest they tried harder.
Every second he clung to the side without being able to truly see his surroundings was like a python tightening around his ribs. It hurt to breathe. Finally, mercifully, he heard the slightest rev of an engine. The ground above them vibrated, dust and snow slipping past him. Were the men really gone or pulling a fast one again?
An ominous creak of metal echoed around them.
“Shawn?” Her voice wavered.
He pulled out the phone from his pocket and clicked the side button so the screen would light up their surroundings. His hand looked more like a claw gripping on to a rung of an old wooden ladder, but he was hanging straight down while the ladder was attached diagonally, as was the mine chute. He shifted to balance his foot on a ladder rung. He twisted carefully, and the wood creaked with every movement.
He tilted the light in her direction, this time flicking on the flashlight app for a more concentrated beam. Jackie clung to another partial slat of wood that served as a framework for the chute, but her feet rested on the trunk of a blue car, pointed vertically down into the earth. The car groaned and shifted, testing whatever rock formations temporarily suspended it.
She glanced down at her feet and cried out. “It’s my car!”
A couple of creaks echoed through the air. She screamed as the car plunged a few inches, and she barely was able to keep her fingers on the wood frame. Shawn dropped the phone as he reached for her. The light bounced all around the rock tunnel as he spun on the ladder and tried again, reaching for her with his other arm. He grabbed her wrist. “Let go of the wood!”
She looked up, her eyes wide. The car creaked against the rock again.
His phone had landed on the rearview window of the car. The light illuminated the inside of the vehicle and reflected off a construction vest on a dead man who was pressed in between the windshield and the dashboard. Shawn fought against a wave of nausea. He didn’t know the man well, but he’d been the associate field manager for the geothermal site. He had to be whose murder she’d witnessed in the first place.
Metal groaned again.
The walls of the tunnel shifted enough that rocks and debris sprinkled on them from every direction. “Jackie!”
She let go of the wood and her other hand grabbed his arm. She dangled from his grip, but he couldn’t let go of the ladder, despite the snow falling onto the back of his neck from above. He strained the muscles in his back, pulling her toward him. One of her feet found a foothold on the wall, and her other leg stretched to find a rung on the ladder.
A squeal of metal breaking apart pierced the air, and the car plunged. All the air rushed out of him in shock. The car must’ve dropped fifty, a hundred feet down. If not for his lost phone, they’d only see darkness. Jackie climbed up his arm. He had to stay bent over until she managed to get both feet on the ladder. She wrapped one arm around his right ankle. “You can let go of my hand now.”
“The ladder could go at any minute. Keep hanging on to my ankle.” He let go of her and moved to climb up the ancient wood.
“Okay. Let’s climb together. Move your right foot first.”
He did and her fingers stayed wrapped around his ankle. He could feel her movement on the ladder. They moved in slow motion during the precarious climb, until the tunnel curved enough that he could see how they’d slid down.
“It’s like the world’s worst underground slide,” she said.
“Something like that. An abandoned mine.” He reached the top rung. “Okay. This is the hard part.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me. Please don’t tell me we haven’t done the hard part yet.”
“I know.” He hesitated, panting, trying in vain to catch his breath. “I’m sorry. I’m going to lean over you, take the rope out of your backpack and give you one end. Then I’m going to need you to let go of my foot so I can rock climb my way out and pull you up.”
“Just another day at the gym, right?” Her voice shook, but her bravado kept him going. He embraced the attitude. Just one more pull-up. He could do it.
He had to or they would both die.
* * *
She couldn’t watch. The right thing to do was to encourage him, she knew that, but internally she was screaming. More rocks bounced past her and she bit her lip. Shawn groaned and she finally lifted her chin.
His feet dangled above her before he maneuvered over the final ledge and climbed out of the hole that had sucked them inside. The quiet and darkness of the mine seemed to amplify the moment she was left alone.
The packed-down snow area she’d thought was from snowmobiles had to be the earlier work of those men on ATVs, especially the one with the plow. They’d tried to cover up the death of the man she’d seen murdered by putting him in her car.
Her breathing turned shallow. If they succeeded at killing her, how likely would it be that her family would ever find her?
“I think I’ve got the rope secure,” Shawn called out. “Test it without letting go.”
Not exactly the best pep talk she’d heard. She closed her eyes and lifted up what seemed like the hundredth prayer for help. She twisted a section of the rope around and around her forearm and gripped it as she shifted.
“So far so good. Keep going. I’m holding it, too.”
She took another tentative step and the wood cracked but held. Each step challenged her trust in God, the rope and Shawn. She reached the ladder’s top rung and dared to look up. The space between the ladder and the ground above might as well have been hundreds of feet because she didn’t see how she could climb it.
Shawn took a deep breath, sprawled on his stomach in the mouth of the mine, his arms hanging down and holding the rope with both hands. The sight was enough to make her want to scream in frustration. “What’s to keep you from sliding down again?”
“I’ve got the middle part of the rope around my leg, and the last bit wrapped around a boulder. Ready when you are, Jackie.”
She held on to the rope tightly and stared right into his eyes as she stepped off the ladder, launching off the same foothold Shaw
n had found earlier. He let go of the rope with one hand and grabbed the back of her backpack. The brief halt to gravity pulling her back down was enough to find another foothold and press up. A moment later she collapsed onto the firm ground and cried out. Every fiber of her muscles felt like it had been stretched and pulled.
“Are you hurt?” Shawn checked her over, helping her stand. As soon as they were far enough away from the mine, he untied the middle of the rope that had been looped around his foot and freed the end tied around a boulder.
She groaned at the effort her abs required for her to get back to her knees. “I told you I never wanted to be out here again. I never wanted to be a survivalist.” She wasn’t sure if she was talking more to Shawn or the Lord.
“I know, but we can’t focus on that right now.” He reached for her hand, still gasping for breath, as well. “Come on, Jackie. I can’t do this without you.”
“Since when?” she asked. “You said you like to rely only on yourself. You don’t want to be needed, and here I am, utterly dependent.”
“I never said I didn’t want to help people, and we need each other.”
She shook her head, unwilling to process what he was saying. She couldn’t hold on to the pain in silence any longer. It all hurt. Physically, emotionally, mentally, she felt desperate to give up. To stop feeling pain.
She sucked in a breath and hated the cold air she had to breathe. “I can’t do this. I can’t. Did you see him? The man? Dead Geothermal Plant Employee Found in Journalist’s Vehicle in a—” Her voice trembled. “What’d you say it was? A mine? I can’t even finish the headline. And even if I could, it would be too long. Just like this entire weekend. It’s too much.”
Her heart rate and mouth wouldn’t slow down. They’d almost died. Never again. She’d promised herself she’d never again be in a situation like this. And yet here she was.
“Yes,” he said solemnly.
“Is that all you can say?”
“His name was Bob, and he was the associate field manager.” Shawn walked farther away from the hole and beckoned her to follow him. “Some mines go straight down like a chute or are hidden in rocks like that. Just breathe, Jackie. You’ve been amazing. I need you to hang on a little longer.”
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