Bone Rattle by Marc Cameron (best ereader for pdf .TXT) 📕

“Matter of fact, I do remember that,” Cutter said.

Maycomb’s jaw clenched, moving her helmet straps. “Well, this scares the shit out of me and I don’t mind telling you. It makes my groin ache and my head spin and I feel like I’m going to keel over dead.”

“Hey,” Cutter said, completely serious. “I’m no paragon of bravery. I want out of here as badly as you do. The map says it’s about three hundred yards to the down shaft. We’ll be able to decipher Horning’s code when we get there.” A sudden thought hit him. “Everything happened so fast, I never got to ask you. Did you recognize any of the men who were shooting at us?”

“The one with the black beard is Harold Grimsson,” Maycomb said, as if it meant the end of the world. “He’s the owner of the Valkyrie Mine Holdings.”

“The other two?”

“I didn’t get a good look.”

“Grimsson,” Cutter said. The name tasted bitter. “We need to get to Donita Willets before he does.”

Thinking about the missing woman seemed to take Maycomb’s mind off her own troubles and she followed dutifully, head down, behind Cutter.

Deeper in, the tunnel looked much the same as it had near the entrance. Here and there, a half-burned candle slumped in small alcoves along the wall, drips of snow-white paraffin running down the rock, frozen in time. Miners had written their names in soot from carbide lamps with dates going back as far as 1908. The remnants of an old dynamite crate made Cutter want to stop and look, but he kept going, methodically, checking every step for rotting boards and hidden down shafts – and all the other dangers Horning had warned them about.

Two hundred feet in, Maycomb’s steps grew heavier, trudging along, kicking the water as she walked. The beam of her lamp pointed straight down.

“We’re going to die in here,” she said, blurting it out like she was trying to rid herself of a heavy load. “These walls… They don’t seem to be getting closer to you?”

“The walls are fine,” Cutter said. “Let’s just keep moving forward. We’re not going to die.”

“You can’t know that.” Maycomb grabbed his sleeve, sloshing to a stop in her tracks. He turned and faced her. Logical arguments made little difference when someone was panicked. If anything worked, it was a calm, understanding voice.

“Let’s keep going,” he said. “Tom Horning’s map says this is a way out.”

She stomped her feet, splashing the ankle-deep water.

“Look,” she said. “I’m not a stupid person. I’m not trying to be dramatic, but let’s be honest. We could die right here in this mountain.”

“We certainly will if we give up,” Cutter said. “But it’s much more likely that my partner will check in with Horning when they can’t find us. They’ll see that one of the mines on his maps has caved in, and somebody will come dig us out.”

“You’re forgetting the guys with guns up there,” Maycomb said.

“That’s true,” Cutter said. He thought of Lola, coming to help him, and prayed she wasn’t walking into an ambush. “So let’s get moving and be our own rescue. We’ll find a way out of the tunnels ahead. We have food and water to last a couple of days if we had to.”

Maycomb sniffed, rubbed her nose with the back of her sleeve. “I’m just so scared.”

“Me too,” Cutter said. “But moving helps me keep that fear in check.”

She sniffed again. “As long as you have biscuits…”

“There you go,” Cutter said.

They began to walk again, side by side instead of single file.

Maycomb’s chest shuddered with a single sob, but she shook it off. She glanced up at him, facing slightly away to keep from blinding him with her headlamp. “If there’s a chance I’m going to die, there are some things I need to get off my chest.”

Cutter gave a somber chuckle. “As sin eaters go, I’m not much—”

“I can never make amends,” she said. “Not really. Not after all the things I’ve done to the people I love. But I’ve got to tell somebody, just in case… you know…”

“All right,” Cutter said, steeling himself. If there was one thing he understood, it was trying to make amends.

Chapter 47

Lola Teariki wasn’t exactly scared of heights, but she wasn’t keen on smashing into the toothy rocks below either. She gave the rope attached to the hand trolley a series of sharp hand-over-hand yanks, pulling it toward her.

The open cage – what there was of it – swung violently back and forth, but stayed on the cable as it rattled and squeaked across the ravine.

“Careful!” Rockie Van Dyke said.

“This is what careful looks like, sister,” Lola said. “If it’s going to fall, I want it to fall before I get on it.”

Other than the white marking on the pipe frame from an expended flashbang, the car looked in decent enough shape considering its age.

In the end, it held, and Teariki and Van Dyke pulled themselves across without incident.

Marks in the rocky ground that looked like several sets of tracks moved across the clearing and into the mossy undergrowth and chaotic deadfall. Scuffed moss and freshly broken ferns said at least one set of tracks, and probably two, headed straight up the mountain.

“High ground,” Lola said, half to herself.

Van Dyke was focused on the shadows ahead on the sidehill as she took a drink from a water bottle in her pack.

“What?”

Lola pointed uphill with an open hand. “I’m thinking Dollarhyde, or whoever it is in that other skiff, set off the flashbang to let them know if they’re being followed. Cutter would have expected them to come back, so he’d have looked for a high vantage point.”

“Did they?” Van Dyke asked. “Come back?”

“I can’t tell,” Lola said. “But I’m staying on what I think is Cutter’s track.”

“You seem to know what he’s thinking,” Van Dyke said, following, pushing aside brush. She kept her eyes up and scanning while Lola tracked.

“Cutter’s not particularly mysterious when it comes to tactics,” Lola