The Cave
The thin streak of light Michael had discovered entering the cave’s inner chamber had not been there before the explosion. The force of the blast had not been enough to collapse the recess in the stone, but it had been enough to crack and splinter its furthermost wall. The light creeping in through the stone revealed just how far the angular recess of the second chamber folded back on itself: its far wall was in fact facing the cliff-face itself. The shock waves from Bell’s grenade had fragmented the shell, allowing exterior light an entry into the inner chamber for the first time in the thousands of years the cave had been in existence.
Chris approached, running his hands along the seam of light. He grunted with pain as he moved, but wasn’t about to cower motionless in the corner.
‘It’s narrow,’ he observed. ‘Couldn’t fit a sheet of paper through that. And there are no signs of it being anything more than a rift.’ The thin ray of light coming through the stone brought the reality of the desert outside tantalizingly close, but it still didn’t mean they had any way of getting to it.
‘If there’s a splinter here,’ Michael answered, ‘it means there might be weaknesses elsewhere.’
Emily stared at the tiny fracture of light. She hadn’t felt claustrophobic before: not when they were in the cave in the dark, not when the bomb went off and they found the entrance blocked in. But as she saw sunlight out of grasp, the crushing feeling of being trapped started to well up uncontrolled. She had the sudden, horrible fear that this might be the last daylight she ever saw.
Chris extracted his knife from its sheath and began using the blunt end to thump against the stone of the cave’s exterior wall, sounding for differences in the noise that echoed back. As he thumped near the slender crack that had formed, the sound was solid and deep. As he moved further away, it became deeper, less resonant, until at three feet away it was barely more than a muffled thud.
He repeated the procedure over the whole wall, moving out from both sides of the crack, stepping painfully and avoiding movement in his injured shoulder. When he was finished, he turned to Michael.
‘Nothing. The rock’s solid. The only weakness is at the break, but even there I’d make the stone to be a good eight inches to a foot thick. And it’s not brittle.’
Michael waited for Chris to elaborate further, offering a solution.
‘I’m sorry,’ Chris finally said, noticing his anticipation. ‘Short of a grenade of our own to blast it the rest of the way through, I don’t see this crack turning into an exit.’
The tightness in Emily’s chest constricted further. She commanded herself to keep calm, but Chris’s announcement sent her breath into short, faster cycles.
Michael simply stared at the slender strip of light coming through the wall. With his friend injured and his wife growing closer to panic, he felt the burden of responsibility for getting them out of the cave alive fell squarely to him.
‘We’re not dying in here,’ he suddenly announced. Swivelling on his heels, he turned to Chris.
‘The small spade you packed at the car. Do you still have it with you?’