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

rock. Dollarhyde could see absolutely nothing, but the sounds and movements beside him made him picture Childers drawing back like a baseball pitcher and then hurling the rock toward the stone pillars at the back of the stope. The crack of rock against rock was extra loud in the blackness. Childers repeated the process, two more times, each time turning slightly to throw toward a different pillar. Dollarhyde took a half step back to be certain he didn’t catch one in the head from close range.

The third rock hit one of the pillars on the right, cracking like a gunshot. Between the clatter of stones and the splash as it hit the wet floor, Dollarhyde heard a sound that brought a smile to his lips.

A sudden rush of breath. Donita Willets, choking back a scream.

Chapter 51

Lori Maycomb stood over the flooded tunnel, gripping the sealed plastic bag tightly in a trembling hand. Cold, crystalline water swirled at her feet. Gray walls closed in around her. Her breath came in ragged gasps.

He’d abandoned her. Or, had she abandoned him? As terrified as she was to be left in the dark mine shaft, it had to be worse for Cutter. The pit in her gut told her to dive in and help him – but that was just crazy. She just couldn’t do it. It was too deep, too cold, too dark. She’d surely die if she stayed put, but there were few things worse than drowning alone, deep in the bowels of a mountain – except for letting yet another person down at the end of her short and miserable life…

Darkness followed Cutter. In front, behind, above, and below, everywhere outside the blue-green bubble formed by his headlamp and makeshift ziplock housing, was a blurry wall of impenetrable black.

Legs above his head, he flutter-kicked downward, working to stay in the center of the shaft to avoid clouding the water with silt.

His arm movements made the light move wildly at first, throwing shadows against the jagged rock, disorienting and causing him to lose time zigzagging down the shaft to keep from bashing his head. He’d run into the pool wall once at speed, racing with Ethan when they were teenagers. The impact had nearly knocked him out. Pain used up precious oxygen. Here, with no place to surface, such a mishap would prove deadly.

Cutter saw the portal for the drift seconds after he started his dive. It was arched, about six feet high, like the other tunnels and shafts in the mine. He pulled himself down and around with his free hand, fighting the natural buoyancy that kept pressing him into the ceiling of the tunnel. His foot grazed the rocks. He turned to plane downward, bashed a shoulder into a jagged edge. The impact traveled up his arm as an electric shock, causing him to drop the baggie with the headlamp. He flailed for it, missed, and watched it sink behind him while momentum carried him forward. He extended both arms, putting on the brakes, which caused him to rise immediately. Rolling sideways, ensuring that his shoulder struck the ceiling before his head, he pushed off with one hand while swimming toward the light with the other.

He scooped up the light with one hand, careening upward like a submarine on emergency blow.

Cutter had calculated he’d need about forty-five seconds to traverse the 100 plus feet once he reached the tunnel, but that hadn’t taken into account having to spend so much energy keeping himself off the top. His stupidity with the light had just added another eight seconds – an eternity when you’re running out of air.

Buoyancy semi-controlled, he fell into a kick-kick-adjust-plane-downward-repeat rhythm.

His heartbeat throbbed in his ears. Still less than eighty beats per minute. Slow, he thought, considering the effort he had to make to keep from shredding himself on the rough ceiling – not to mention the relatively high probability of dying alone.

Had he been in a pool or a lake, Cutter could have traveled half again as fast for the first dozen yards, maybe even the entire hundred feet, but he had no way of knowing if he would hit a wall at the other end – and be forced to turn around and swim all the way back on the same breath. If Horning’s map was right, a round-trip would be a little over two hundred feet – a little less than half the world record for underwater swimming. But records were set under ideal conditions.

Cutter pushed the possibility of a lonely death out of his mind and concentrated on his rhythm.

Seconds ticked by. His heart raced faster now, drumming in his ears until he could hardly hear himself think. His lungs screamed for fresh air. His throat tightened, begging to expel the carbon dioxide in his lungs, and the remainder of his oxygen along with it. To breathe was suicide, but his body was sending signals that it no longer cared about such logic.

He blew out a tiny cloud of bubbles, hearing them burble past his ears, a compromise with his lungs. Exhaling helped some with his buoyancy control, but cold and fatigue had cost him more than he’d thought.

There was no way he could make it back if he had to turn around.

Panic fell away at the realization. He sped up, eager to get to the end, one way or another. But the tunnel went on and on and on. The impulse to breathe was overwhelming, disrupting his kick cycle, impairing his ability to swim in a straight line, overriding all other thought.

The light flickered in his hand, went dark, then flicked back on again. Cutter kept kicking, but brought the baggie close to his face. As he suspected, the plastic bag had torn, probably when he’d dropped it or tried to grab it. Maybe it hadn’t been watertight from the beginning. It didn’t matter now. The headlamp was flooding.

Two more kicks and the light stopped working completely; the blackness closed in