“Anything happen?” I asked.
“Other than Madison jumping every time someone snored? No, not much. Despite her claims to the contrary, she’s already asleep, just in the time it took me to cross the cavern.”
“That’s good. I’m sorry if it’s rude, but I think I prefer her asleep.”
He laughed. “Sometimes, I know exactly what you mean. She’s not a bad person, though. Just a little rough around the edges and different than most other people.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Different.” I sat up and rubbed my eyes. He had let me sleep for almost three hours, but I was still exhausted. I’d take my turn, though. We all had to do our part. I started to move over to wake up Sam, and he gently grabbed my shoulder again.
“Hey, Dani,” he said. “I wanted to thank you.”
“Thank me? For what?”
“You’re the heart and soul of this thing. Without you, we wouldn’t have gotten this far. Hell, we probably wouldn’t have made it through the first shadowling that attacked us. When the rest of us were confused about what to do, you took charge. I’m team captain in my sports at school. I recognize a good leader, and you are one. So, thanks. If we succeed in this, it’ll all be because of you.” He squeezed my shoulder softly, tried to make eye contact again—I was able to avoid it—then turned and went back to where Madison was mumbling in her sleep.
“Nice,” Sam said, startling me. I hadn’t realized she was awake.
“Nice what?”
“He likes you,” she said. “I think you’ve got a shot with him. If he realizes what a troll he’s dating. And, you know, if we survive.”
“Yeah, right. Come on, we have some guarding to do.” I snuck a look at Jacob settling down to sleep, lying on his side on the cold stone floor. The shoulder he had touched still felt warm to me.
Nothing happened on our watch. We talked about what kind of animals might be in the cave and decided there probably weren’t any. I knew for sure there wouldn’t be snakes or other reptiles. It was too cold for that. I doubted bats would come this far in, also, because all their food was closer to the surface. At least we didn’t have to worry about getting bitten by something.
When it was time, I woke my mom and Rick up to take over for us. I felt kind of bad for them. The middle watch got the raw end of the deal. Their sleep was split down the middle by their watch, so they didn’t get to rest as much as the others, not in one chunk. I had the same situation, though, so I didn’t let it bother me too much.
Mom smiled at me and kissed the top of my head as she and Rick went over to the flat stone shelf near the front of the cavern. I smiled back at her, said goodnight, and settled back into my place to catch a few more hours of rest.
“I can’t believe it,” my mom’s voice said as it carried across the cavern. They weren’t speaking loudly, but I heard it anyway because of the acoustics of the place. “He refused to come. ‘I have to take care of my daughters,’ he said.”
“Allie, don’t be so harsh,” Rick said.
I tilted my ear toward where they were talking. I didn’t want to miss this. I hadn’t known that Rick knew about my mom and her boyfriend. She had never told me about Jesse. I had to figure it out on my own.
“Don’t be so harsh?” she said. “I asked him to come with me, to protect me as I searched for Bobby. He actually forbade me to go.”
“It is a dangerous thing,” Rick said.
“All the more reason he should have come with me. He’s a cop, for God’s sake. He’s an expert with a gun, trained to handle dangerous situations. He should be here protecting me.”
Rick had apparently decided that the best way to deal with the rant was to remain silent and just listen.
“Forbidding me to go,” she continued. “He should know better than to try telling me what to do. I begged him to come, to help keep me and Dani safe. Do you know what he said? Do you? He said, ‘I have two daughters I have to keep safe, Allie. I can’t go and you shouldn’t either.’ I told him I was going, and all he could say was that I shouldn’t.
“He told me he loved me. I guess that was a lie. How can you love someone and still turn your back on them when they need you most?”
I heard the rustling of Rick readjusting his position. I think he was uncomfortable in more than one way.
“Well?” she said, turning her anger on him.
“You’re doing the same thing,” he said so softly I almost didn’t make it out over the distance.
“What do you mean by that?” I could picture in my mind what her face looked like as she said it. She was probably sitting with her arms crossed under her breasts, shoulders drawn toward the front, her eyebrows pinched down and her forehead furrowed, her mouth set in a tight line. I’d seen that posture many times, and I was glad it wasn’t directed at me at the moment.
“Allie,” he said, “you’re mad at him for putting his daughters first, before you. You’re mad that he isn’t willing to leave them unprotected to go with you to rescue your son. He claims that it’s not sound thinking to enter a mine and chase after monsters that have kidnapped one who you love.”
“Damn right.”
“Yet you are doing the same thing. No, let me finish.” I heard his jacket rustle and was sure he was raising his arms toward her to gesture her not to interrupt him. “You normally wouldn’t condone this type of thing, going underground and searching for trouble. I mean, look at the situation. You didn’t even ask all these kids with us, all minors, if they had their parents’ permission to go.
“You cast off all common sense, all logical thinking and rushed down here without much of a plan at all, all of it to save your son. If Jesse is a bad boyfriend for putting his daughters first, doesn’t that make you a bad girlfriend for putting your son first, even to the point where you are putting your daughter at risk? Does that make you a bad parent?”
My mother gasped as he finished. I waited for the explosion, for her to yell at him for calling her a bad girlfriend, for her to scream at him for calling her a bad parent.
The silence was deafening, finally broken by a sharp intake of breath from one of the sleeping boys and then a snort.
“I’m not calling you those things, Allie,” he said consolingly. “I’m just saying that when it comes to those we love, there are times when nothing else in the world matters. In those times, situations in which we would sacrifice anything for our loved ones, who can say if it is good or bad?” I heard the movement of his down jacket again and knew he had picked up her hand. “Give him the benefit of the doubt. He may be selfish and uncaring, but he also may just be scared to death over his children.”
“Yeah,” she whispered. “I guess.”
They were silent for the next few minutes, during which time I fell back asleep. I didn’t know anything again until Emily shook me awake at the end of her watch.
Chapter 17
I lay there on the cold floor of the cavern, my headlamp off to conserve the batteries. I guess it’s true what they say about getting used to things. Before this little journey, I had to have lights on all the time. But I had been so terrified for so many hours the day before, a little darkness hardly seemed threatening. Still, I turned my headlamp on and breathed a little easier in the light.
I did not want to get up. My whole body was sore from the fighting the day before. I groaned as I levered myself up with my staff. The others didn’t seem in any better shape. Except the three who had been on watch, that is. They seemed awake enough.
“Anything happen?” I asked Emily.
“No. Tyler and Zach were both trying to impress me.” She giggled. “It was hilarious, and adorable. You should have seen it.”
I smiled at her, but she cocked her head slightly. Okay, maybe it wasn’t a convincing smile.
“Anyway,” she said. “I better get my stuff together. I’m assuming we’ll be starting off after eating something.”
“Yeah,” I said. “We still have a mission to complete.”
&
nbsp; Her frown reflected my feelings. Our mission. To find and rescue our loved ones. The entire thing pressed in on me, making me want to curl up in a ball until it all passed. The shadowling still had Bobby, and we still had to get him back. They knew we were here, probably knew exactly where we were, but we still had to try. Why were they playing this game? Why didn’t they just swarm us and take us all prisoner? There was so much I still didn’t understand.
“The way I see it, these creatures know what we’re doing,” Rick said as we were all eating whatever breakfast food we had in our packs. For me, it was oatmeal made with water I heated up on my little backpacking stove. “I don’t know what they’re waiting for, but I’m sure there are enough of them to capture us all. That presents some choices. Do we continue? Do we go back? Do we change the way we proceed, maybe splitting into two groups or taking passages more randomly? What do we do?”
“I really don’t think any of that will make a difference,” I said, swallowing the spoonful of oatmeal I’d been chewing. “They’re in control here. It’s their cave, the darkness is theirs, and we’re way too unprepared to dictate what they do.”
“Are you saying we should go back?” Jacob asked, concern mixed with sadness on his face.
“No, of course not. Bobby and Allison and Zach’s dad are all still out there. I won’t stop until they kill me or we rescue the captives. I’m just saying that no matter how we change the way we search the caves, we won’t fool them. They are letting us roam free for now, but they could probably capture or kill us at any time. The question is why they haven’t.”
Everyone else was silent. Maybe they were thinking about what I said, or maybe their thoughts were off somewhere else. I heard Tyler humming—it sounded like the Beatles’ Here Comes the Sun—and knew at least one person was thinking of other things.
“I say there’s nothing for us to do but to continue on,” I said, “deal with things as they happen, and hope we’re not in over our heads. It sounds irresponsible, but I can’t see any other way we can do it. Can anyone else?”
Silence again.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s get going. I want to be out of this God-forsaken stone maze before another day passes.” There were grunts and other noises that sounded like affirmations.
We had barely gotten back into the main corridor before Sam, walking beside me, raised up her hands.
“Stop,” she said. “Wait.” She reached up and turned her headlamp on its strongest setting and then scanned the ground in front of us. Not satisfied with the light, she got out her super flashlight and flipped it on. She got down on her knees and moved her head from right to left as if following something. Getting up and walking to the edge of the cavern, she followed something with her eyes as she directed the beam up toward the ceiling.
My mother gasped.
I moved around Mom so I could get a better look at where Sam was shining her light. I finally saw it. Above us, suspended by some kind of cord, was a cargo net, its ends weighted. I looked more carefully at where Sam was looking on the ground and found a very thin, almost invisible line stretching across the floor.
A trip wire.
The creatures were tired of dealing with us. They would try to capture us without a fight. I felt several things at that moment. A little pride that they wanted to avoid combat with us. A little anger that they would do something like this, using the mine’s own equipment—nets used to hold down large piles of supplies—to try to trap us. Probably most strongly, though, I felt a little despair. These things were not stupid. At least one of them had the ingenuity to set a trap. True, it was a crude trap, but could I have done any better? I didn’t think so.
“I think we’re in a lot of trouble,” I said.
We made our way past the trap, Sam standing at the wire and making sure everyone carefully stepped over it. We inspected the area in front of us as we made our way out of the chamber, jumping at shadows and double checking every trick of the light that made it seem something could be in front of us. It was going to slow us down considerably.
“How did you even see that, Sam?” Zach asked. “I mean, even I, with my perfect vision—the best my eye doctor has ever seen, by the way—would have had trouble spotting it.”
“I’ve got pretty good eyes,” she said, shrugging. “I guess I just got lucky.”
“I think we got lucky,” I said, “that you were with us. I would have stepped right into it.”
Her face flushed and she looked away, down at the stone floor and to the left. That was why she saw the second trap.
“Shadowling!” she said, whipping out her super-flashlight and turning it on.
At least five of the creatures froze for a moment, holding their hands up to their eyes as the light bathed them. They had been waiting in a small alcove off the side of the passage we were in, hidden in the shadows.
I slid around Sam and struck at them while they were surprised. Someone to my left did the same, but I was focused on the shadowling, so I didn’t see who it was. It didn’t matter. The fact that someone was backing me up was good enough for me.
I clobbered two of them over the head with my staff before they started fighting back. Pushed up against the wall like that, they weren’t able to move effectively, so for every awkward swipe of a claw, we could hit them twice. I finally caught sight of who was next to me. It was Jacob. He swung the sticks almost like he knew how to use them. Nothing like a crash course to learn something.
As I jabbed my staff into the face of one of the creatures, a gunshot rang in the tunnel. Through the ringing in my ears, I heard sounds of a scuffle behind me. The shadowling must have been hiding on the other side of the tunnel, too. I wondered how many there were.
The attacker in front of me was looking around, eyes darting back and forth from my left side to my right. It was trying to find an escape path. I spun my weapon hard enough to knock its arm away and strike it a solid blow on the side of its head. It looked at me, an expression of sadness and resignation on its monstrous face, then it curled into a ball and waited for me to finish it.
Instead, I swung over it to strike the one next to it. Jacob was raining blows on the only other one still conscious, and it looked about to be knocked out. My new target hissed at me, swiping with its claws, but it didn’t have the room to do it effectively. I changed the momentum from a horizontal strike to flip the staff around for a vertical strike. It whistled downward, contacting the top of the shadowling’s head with a sickening crunch, and all the fight went out of the monster. It dropped to the floor, limbs splayed out beside it.
Jacob went to attack the shadowling that had curled up, but I stopped him.
“No. Don’t kill that one. I have a plan. Let it go.”
When no blows fell, the pitiful creature at my feet looked up through the claws it had wrapped around its head. There were still no attacks, so it bounded up and scurried into the darkness, as quick as a lizard.
The others were finishing off the other shadowling that had attacked them. I took a quick look around, saw everything was under control, and tore off after the escaped creature.
“I’m going to follow it,” I called over my shoulder. “Come with me as soon as you can.”
It was a scary run, and a short one. I tried to keep my prey in the beam of my headlamp at all times, but that was difficult to do. It was still a little dazed from the blow to the head, stumbling occasionally, but even with that, it moved effortlessly through the cave formations and tunnels of varying widths. It was like watching a monkey travel through a forest canopy.
I fell further behind and eventually lost sight of the creature completely. I stopped, panting. While I waited for the others to catch me—hopefully they kept sight of where I went, because I was completely lost—I took a good look around.
Some of the passages we had traversed were narrow and required squeezing through. At least, they did for me. That shadowling somehow zipped across them at nearly full speed. They were not the tunnels I wou
ld have taken. But then, I didn’t know where I wanted to go. I hoped the creature went straight for its home instead of where it thought it might be able to escape.
“Dani,” a voice echoed from where I’d come. “Are you down there?” It was Jacob. Of course, he was probably in the best shape of anyone else in the group. He’d be able to keep up with me in running after the beast.
I turned back toward him so my light would lead him to me. “I’m over here.”
I saw his light before I saw him. He walked up, squeezing through a narrow part of the passage, and stopped a few feet in front of me.
“Did you get it?”
“I wasn’t trying to get it,” I said. “I was trying to make it lead us to where we needed to go.”
“Oh.” He took a few deep breaths. “Damn, you’re fast. You should go out for track. You can just pretend you’re chasing monsters. You could win some meets for us.”
I laughed. “I’m not fast enough. I was hoping it would lead me right to where their lair is.”
“And did you ever think that maybe it would lead you right into another group of those things, or to another trap?” Sam said, huffing and puffing as she came through the narrow part of the tunnel. “Not very smart.”
“It was smart,” Zach said, “though maybe not very safe.” It seemed that the whole group was catching up to us.
When the last person, Madison, came through to the area we were all gathered, she had a withering look for Jacob. He shrugged, apology written all over his face. It didn’t do anything to soften that stance, though. Her feet were spread apart, hip cocked to the side, arms folded in front of her. She was the perfect picture of personal affront.
“Just what do you think you were doing, young lady?” my mother said. “That was stupid and brash, just running off like that.”
“I know,” I said, dipping my head to try to reduce the tongue-lashing I was about to get.
“You are not invincible, you know,” she said. “You can be hurt. Don’t go pulling any more stunts like that.”
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