Chapter One

…two, three, four…

Exhale.

One, two, three, four…

Exhale.

Charly repeated the mantra as the slimy walls closed in on her. She’d never been good in tight spaces, and the panic urge was threatening to overtake her now. The sound of rushing water filled the tunnel, and to Charly it sounded like death, like suffocation, like premature burial in a tight coffin—

No!

She squeezed her lids together. She had to think of Jake, had to think of her aching breasts, swollen with nourishing milk. Her baby needed her. Would die without her. She had to breathe…breeeeathe…

One, two, three, four…

Exhale.

One, two, three—

She clapped a hand to her mouth when Jake’s cry sounded from ahead. My God, she was getting closer! Charly scrambled forward on elbows and knees despite the diminishing space, the cave swallowing her like some insatiable serpent. The tunnel had mostly tended downhill, with occasional meanderings right and left, and now the grade was steepening. The swooshing rustle of her poncho was magnified by the narrowness of the space, and she strained to hear over it, to detect the horrible, blessed sound of Jake’s wails. The water roared below, and coupled with her stupid poncho, it drowned out Jake. Charly tugged the poncho over her head and crawled over it.

She stopped and strained to hear her boy.

Nothing.

She started forward again, the tunnel so close now on all sides that she feared she’d hit a slick spot and slide right into a wedge. Then she really would suffer a premature burial, and what kind of a blasphemous irony would that be, dying a tortured death shoved tight in a stinking cave tunnel while her baby wailed helplessly nearby?

Stop it! she ordered herself. That’s doing you no good at all.

But the fear would not abate. She heard the cry again, but the other sound, the thunder of rushing water, reduced it to a background noise, ambient and barely audible. With a jolt of self-condemnation she realized she’d been so busy listening, she’d hardly been looking. Now she stopped and aimed the flashlight down the tunnel.

She sucked in breath.

The tunnel ended just ahead.

Clicking off the flashlight, Charly wriggled forward and listened for Jake. She knew she should be concocting some brilliant rescue plot, but there simply wasn’t time. She had to go forward, had to get to her baby before something happened to him. She was almost there, she could hear the water roaring below. The tunnel squeezed around her, and Charly surged ahead now with straining jerks and lunges. Droplets of water spattered her face, a cool, drowsy mist filming her cheeks, and she wiggled forward, forward, nearly to the terminus now, forward—

Her fingers grasped the outer edge of the tunnel. She scooted toward it, her head poking through, her hips working their way against the wet tunnel rock. Her shoulders popped through the opening, her ribcage. She planted her toes and shoved, and then she was tumbling downward, vomited out of the tunnel toward—

She landed on the top of her head, her neck instantly numb.

Her consciousness dimmed, the flashlight pinned under her. Not that it mattered anyway. She hadn’t the strength to open her eyes, much less move her arms. The sound of the surf waned, and in the last moments of waking Charly strained to hear her boy’s voice.

She did.

Then another sound tore through it, scattering it like chaff.

A deep, feral laughter.

 

 

Sam moved through the tunnel, thinking, You don’t know for sure she went this way.

But the footprints led here.

What if they weren’t her footprints?

Who else’s would they be? The goddamn hobbits of the Shire?

His Maglite picked out something ahead. Something blue.

He exhaled relieved breath and muscled his way forward, his broad shoulders now a serious hindrance to his progress. Those shoulders nearly killed your mother, his dad had been fond of saying.

Yeah, he thought as the grainy walls bit and snagged at the fabric of his shirt, now they can finish the job with me.

A couple more feet…

Sam halted, reached forward and ran his fingers over the smooth, blue poncho, perhaps to verify its existence. Charly couldn’t be far ahead.

Purposefully now, Sam wormed forward. A tightening in the tunnel impeded him a moment, a ringed ridge that made him angle his shoulders diagonally, strain ahead with bared teeth…

There. His lower body slipped through easily, but he saw ahead that worse was still to come. He shifted his shoulders again, leading with his left arm and keeping his right arm tucked at his side like some kind of subterranean Superman.

The flashlight was in his lead hand. He took a moment to pause, arrow the light at the tunnel ahead.

“Oh hell yes,” he muttered.

The opening was less than ten feet away.

Still squeezing forward in that awkward, shoulder-wrenching manner, he made it to the end, felt the cool tang of the water spray slicking his upper lip. He licked the moisture off, closed his eyes at the way it soothed his dry throat. The water down there sounded wild but it also tasted chilly and pure, and he elbowed toward the opening excitedly now, not only to catch up to Charly but to plunge his face into the spring and drink deeply.

Sam got his head through. One shoulder. The other. Before he went farther, he gripped the slick rim of the tunnel and pointed the Maglite downward.

Just in time to see the creature seize Charly’s prone body by the hair.