A piece of fabric had snagged on one of the columns and was backlit by the work lights. The air movement in the cave had made it flutter, so she believed she knew where he stood. Now she was lit up, making her an easy target. She did the only thing she could think of to even the playing field. She shot at the generator and the cave went black.
“Clever, Lizzie,” the voice called out to her. His voice echoed through the cavern, even more terrifying as it came from all around her in the darkness. With the noise from the generator gone, only the sound of the river broke the oppressive silence.
Bet came to an abrupt halt and looked carefully for the first of the glow-in-the-dark arrows. She hoped desperately he wouldn’t realize she knew about them and that he charged them when he arrived. Spotting the first arrow, Bet slowed her breathing and crept toward the entrance to the tunnel.
Inch by painful inch, Bet moved across the pitch-dark expanse of the cavern floor. With her hands out in front of her, fearful of running into a column or tripping on the uneven ground, she moved toward the arrow.
“Don’t you want to talk a little more about your dad?” The voice came from Bet’s left. She didn’t take the bait.
Continuing her glacially slow progress, she spotted the second of the arrows and corrected her course. In front of her, she heard a click and the room around her filled with light as a flashlight turned in her direction. Michael had shifted around between her and the arrows, guessing where she planned to go.
“Following my little arrows?”
Bet fired toward the flashlight, but missed her target. The slide on the Glock locked open.
Now she was in the open and out of ammo. Bet launched herself in the direction of the river. She didn’t know what to do if she reached it, but for now it was the only direction to run.
Bullets whizzed past her. Caught in the beam of Michael’s flashlight, Bet let her forward momentum carry her up to her knees in the cold, rushing water.
“It doesn’t have to be this way, Lizzie. Maybe we can work something out.”
Not relishing a gunshot in the back, Bet stopped and turned around. The man stepped out from behind the rocks. Raising her flashlight, she saw a grotesque figure emerge from the darkness. At first Bet thought she faced a monster, one of George’s ghosts made real, but the man wore a breathing apparatus used for working in a mine. It covered the lower half of his face. He also wore a hat pulled low, and his eyes were shadowed. His body looked bulky, as if he wore multiple layers, obscuring his body type. Was this really Michael Chandler standing in front of her?
“Water getting cold?” The mask over Michael’s face muffled his words. It explained the sound of his voice, which turned coaxing. “You can come out if you want. I’m not going to kill you. I just want to know what you know.”
“Worried my corpse will float downstream and end up in the lake like Emma Hunter?”
That was a guess on Bet’s part, but it could be how Emma had ended up on the surface. Or there could be another river into the lake and this river remained underground.
“Who’s Emma Hunter?”
Bet tried another tack. “Dad wouldn’t like his old friend Michael Chandler killing his only child.”
“Your father saved my life once, did you know that? He was a hero. The genuine article.”
“Doesn’t that count for something?”
Bet waited, but the gun remained trained on her, steady in Michael’s hand.
“Funny thing about combat,” he said. “It does different things to different people. It made Earle despondent. It just made it hard for me to come back home. It made me abandon my son. I couldn’t pick up where I left off like Earle did with you.”
The water numbed her above the knees. Slowly Bet stepped backward, farther into the water. It beat against her, the current strong enough to make it difficult to stand. The cold contrasted with the fire she felt in her arm from the bullet wound. She gritted her teeth against the pain and stepped backward again.
“I wouldn’t go any farther if I were you,” Michael said. “I’m a good enough shot to put a bullet between your eyes from here.”
Bet’s mind returned to the memory of him standing in the Clark Fork River in Idaho, pointing out the beauty of the fish, how some things shouldn’t die. Was this really the same man?
Shoving the memory aside, she focused on her current predicament. She knew she wouldn’t make it out of the water to the other side without getting shot in the back. If she stayed in the water any longer, hypothermia would kill her where she stood. Getting out of the water on Michael’s side just made his job of killing her easier.
“Come on out of the water, Lizzie,” he said, lowering his gun. “We can—”
Taking a deep breath, Bet fell backward. The current took her immediately, and when she surfaced again, the last thing she heard before the river sucked her into the side of the mountain was the sound of his voice shouting behind her.
Then everything went black.
She dropped her service weapon. Her father was right; out of ammunition, it was just a chunk of metal heavy in her hand. She hung on to her flashlight, though, and, after surging into the hole in the rock wall held it above her, out of the water. The ceiling of rock sat only a few inches over her head, but it left enough room to breathe. When she turned on the light, the smooth stone flashed by above her.
The cold enveloped her completely, and sodden clothing began to pull her down, boots like leaden weights on her feet. She’d started to think she would die from the cold when she streaked into another cavern. Pulling herself from the water, she removed her boots, belt, and holster, then stripped down to her underwear. At this point, no clothes beat a waterlogged uniform.
The wound on her arm continued to seep through her makeshift bandage, but the cold brought it mostly to a stop. Bet didn’t think the wound too serious, especially compared to being stuck in a cavern, wet and cold, with no way to get back to the surface.
Bet shined her flashlight around, thankful it still worked despite the dousing. The space was hardly bigger than her bedroom, but the walls glittered. She looked closer at the granite walls and saw what looked to be veins of gold coursing around her.
“Gold won’t help me now,” she said through chattering teeth.
A quick inspection showed no exits other than how she’d come in and the tunnel in front of her. She knelt down, wrapping her arms around her legs to try to generate some warmth. She was probably not going to live through this. She couldn’t wait and go back up the channel she’d come through. Even if she was strong enough to swim back up against the current and wasn’t felled by hypothermia and shock, Michael might still be in the cave waiting to put a bullet in her head.
The only other option was forward. She guessed the river came out in the lake; the question was, how deep? How long was the tunnel into the lake? And if she did make it into the lake, how far would it be to the surface? Twenty feet or three hundred? Bet thought about other options, but nothing better came to mind.
I’d rather die in the water on the move than sitting here waiting for help that will never come.
That’s my girl.
Bet wondered if that would be the last thing she’d ever imagine her father to say.
Before she could dwell on it too much, she removed her underwear and slid back into the water. She didn’t want the clothing to catch a snag on the rocky surface. Better to swim the River Styx naked, going out of the world the same way she’d come in.
Bet hyperventilated while she still had air to breathe. Free divers used the technique to stay under longer, and any edge it might give her seemed worth the risk. She held on to her flashlight as long as she could, but the time finally came when there would be no air above her. She took one last deep breath and dropped the light. Blackness engulfed her as the current sped her on.