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The beam of the flashlight revealed some beer bottles and graffiti on the rough rock wall, but they looked old and faded. I pointed the flashlight down the cement lip of the path beside the canal-like waterway. The path continued for at least a football field and then seemed to disappear to the right.
“You sure the other side isn’t blocked or anything?” I asked.
“No way. The other side is even more open than this one. It would take an earthquake,” Rosalind said.
We walked deeper into the eerie, dead-silent cave. The rough rock walls had a lunar quality, seeming to shift as the light moved over them. Some sections had weird patterns and folds. Embedded minerals in other areas glittered and threw back the light in disco-ball constellations.
Even on a day when I’d had a gun to my head, in this claustrophobic space my nerves ached to turn around. It was like we’d just walked in through the gates of hell.
“Marshall, Will, and Holly, on a routine expedition,” I sang, as I pointed the light up at cone-shaped rock stalagmites—or were they stalactites? It had been a while since I’d been underground, in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night.
“What’s that?” Rosalind asked.
“From a show I used to watch when I was your age called Land of the Lost. Ever hear of it?” I asked.
“No,” she said, leading onward into the dark. “We don’t have a TV. Grandpa says TV makes people stupid.”
“He may be onto something there,” I said. What a brave and capable little girl.
We finally reached the opening. When we stepped into the glorious open air from the long and nightmarish tunnel, I saw that the canal led into a huge lake. We were on the other side of the hill now. We’d walked straight through the mountain.
I looked back. The roof of the tunnel was an almost perfectly rectangular slab of rock about ten feet thick. It looked like a knocked-over monolith, like the roof of Stonehenge half-buried in the earth.
“People actually paid to do that?” I said.
“So I’m told,” Rosalind said, shaking her head.
“How long is it to this town? What’s it called?”
“Chapman. About eight miles around the other side of this lake.”
“Wait! Get down!” I said. “I see something.”
About a mile away, along the left shore of the lake, there was a light. A flashlight. Somebody walking, coming toward us. Worse than that, I thought I heard a short bark.
“You gotta be kidding me,” I mumbled. What are we going to do now?
I looked back at the mouth of the cavern, then toward the slope of the hill above it. It was steep, filled with trees, but manageable.
“But that heads right back up the hill to their camp,” Rosalind whispered. “Don’t we want to go away from there?”
“We have no choice. C’mon,” I whispered, and slung the shotgun over my shoulder.
Chapter 27
Dawn was breaking as we topped the crest of the ridge.
The whole top of the mountain was covered in a silver mist that turned to a spectacular rose-gold in the light of the rising sun. If I wasn’t being hunted down like a rabbit by a group of what had to be Special Forces soldiers, I bet I would have appreciated it even more.
Rosalind and I were freezing and exhausted. We’d only slept a little the night before, forty-five-minute catnaps in two different spots up the hill. We’d heard the helicopter twice, but it hadn’t sounded very close, thankfully.
There wasn’t a peep out of Rosalind or Roxie during the climb. I couldn’t believe what a great dog that setter was. She, too, knew we were in very deep trouble.
We had been walking down a small wooded rise for about twenty minutes when the mist started to lift. You could actually see the moisture rising slowly, like a stage curtain showing the feet of the trees.
And then a few seconds later, we stopped when we suddenly saw something.
Ahead of us about a hundred feet away, there was a man sitting on the ground, his back turned, leaning against a blown-over tree.
