Damian groans. “I don’t care if being stuck in the cabin drives you crazy and you blow half of it up; every time you go outside something bad happens.”
“Guys.” Hunter’s harsh whisper has my eyelids flying open, immediately finding his worried gaze a few feet away. “Don’t move.”
Sabrina’s muscles tense up beneath my hand. “Let me guess; scorpion? Poisonous snake?”
An ominous rumble vibrates through the earth and into my bones. “Sabrina. Very carefully, crawl towards Hunter. Try to keep your weight as distributed as possible, okay? Like if you were on ice.”
With a nervous swallow, Hunter shakes his head. “It’s not any better here. Better shot heading past Damian, I think.”
Slowly, she pushes herself off of her stomach. “I’m not abandoning you guys.” Immediately, the sound of shifting dirt sounds beneath us, the rumbling intensifying behind us as a few pebbles tumble down the cliff.
“You’re not abandoning us, you’re going to find somebody with a rope. That way if we fall you can pull us out, and if we’re still here when you get back, you can play hero, okay? Get moving.”
She manages to slink a few more inches before there’s a massive crack behind us, stones rushing down the mountain in a landslide and the ground gives out, the four of us plummeting into the darkness below.
***
Coughing up a mouthfulof dirt, I spit off to the side, my hand slipping on a wet patch of stone. “Shit.”
Hunter’s voice rings out somewhere in the darkness, but it’s so pitch black I can’t see a single thing. “Everybody okay?”
Nearby, Sabrina’s groans. “Pretty sure my bruises have bruises, but nothing’s broken. You guys?”
The shifting sound of dirt has us all tensing in anticipation, but it’s followed by a sputtering Damian. “Motherfucker.”
As we get to our feet, the trickling of water and the occasional pebble shifting offers a little help navigating the space. Carefully, I feel my way towards Sabrina, peeling off my shirt and putting the wadded-up mess in her hands. “Here, set this on fire.”
Thankfully, she manages to actually light it up instead of immediately reducing it to ash, so at least she’s learningsomerestraint despite how much stronger she’s gotten in the past week. Lifting the makeshift torch, shadows dance around the space, but it offers enough light to see.
The tunnel we’re trapped in I only manage to clear by about six inches, so at least I’m not stuck crouching indefinitely. At our feet is a small stream of water following the downward slope behind us before curving off out of sight. Ahead, Damian is finishing pulling himself out of a mound of dirt and debris, barely a foot away from the pile of rocks that block off the other half of the tunnel.
With a weary sigh, Sabrina whispers, “I really do only blow stuff up, don’t I?”
Damian swipes at his dirt-stricken face, but it hardly makes a difference. “You say that like it’s a bad thing. Just focus your energy on blowing up Ash next time instead.”
Crouching down, Hunter eyes the slow trickle of water managing to slip through beneath the blockade. “Good news and bad news. We have a source of water, but if the water builds up behind it, it can destroy the unintentional dam we created, forcing all of the boulders down on us along with a deluge of water if we don’t find a way out of here first.”
“I don’t think it’s that bad,” Sabrina argues, bringing the flaming shirt ball near the walls of the tunnel to prove her point. “The ground is smooth stone underneath, but it’s only about a foot wide before the moss and dirt take over, so the water doesn’t even reach the walls on the best of days.” Checking the ceiling, it’s the same firmly packed earth as the walls. “It’s not like an underground river made the tunnels, more like they were already here and over the years as the mountain became more unstable, one of the landslides probably caused a fissure under the lake or river somewhere. If we were down here for a month or something, yeah, be worried, but I’m pretty sure our biggest concern is the others losing their minds. They’ll dig us out long before we die down here.”
I’m not sure if he tilts his head in agreement simply because he really wants her to be right, but he does, taking the makeshift torch from her. “Let's see where this tunnel leads then, I guess.”
Sabrina lets him take the lead, falling into step beside me. “Ahh yes, the part of the movie where they walk into the creepy basement, my favorite.”
Clapping a hand over her mouth, I shoot her a pointed look. “Remember what we said about joking around out loud with this apocalypse stuff? Happy thoughts only, please.”
She cringes, wiping dirt off of her mouth when I remove my hand. “Sorry. Maybe if I think about wanting a way out really hard it’ll all magically work out?”
“Please don’t, I want to live.”
She takes a playful swat at my arm, but it helps change the mood from worried we’re all going to be buried alive and have to resort to cannibalism, and more towards accepting this is yet another bump in the road.
Hunter isn’t buying into the attempt as easily though, and I feel for the guy. He got the short straw of being in charge, and Sabrina is a hell of a lot harder to keep alive than any wolf I’ve ever met. Cinjin may have given Slade a run for his money over the years, but our mate blew his record out of the water after only a couple of months.
“Let's just see where this leads,” he decides. “It’s riskier for us to start shifting things from the bottom to dig out ourselves, so we’re better off waiting for the others to find us. We’ll play the waiting game and look around in the meantime.”
Following the path the water cuts downhill, we keep a swift pace before my shirt is rendered to ash and we’re plunged into darkness again. All the while, I make a mental map in case we need to find our way back later and run out of things to burn or the water ceases to flow completely, but so far, it’s looking like there aren’t any other tunnels branching off of this one, and the concern is moot. It may not be a straight shot, but can’t exactly get lost when there’s only one path.
“Sorry I got us into this mess,” she repeats, keeping her gaze firmly forward. “If we’d stayed home, none of this would have happened.”
