Mortal Pursuit

42

Trish didn’t know how long she huddled with Ally, whether it was thirty seconds or thirty minutes, but finally the noise diminished and the debris settled.

Her ears rang. Her cheeks were wet with tears. Her whole body shook. She remembered sitting on the beach near the dock, racked by shivers and nausea. This was like that.

Come on, keep it together. No medals for quitters.

She decided she was okay. She wasn’t going to faint or vomit or fall apart.

And she and Ally were alive. They’d made it. They’d escaped from the cellar, survived a bomb, for God’s sake, an actual bomb.

Good job, Robinson.

The voice in her mind was Pete Wald’s. She wondered if he had been grinning when he said it-that smug, patronizing grin.

She didn’t think so.

Lifting her head, she looked around, beaming her flashlight through a gray sea of dust.

The ray, fanning wide, illuminated a limestone gallery opening on negotiable passages to her right and left. Winding conduits, lumpy and folded, glossy in the light, impenetrably dark elsewhere. She thought of a TV documentary she’d seen: a fiber-optic camera inserted into somebody’s digestive track, snaking through intestinal corridors.

In the belly of the beast, she thought, not knowing quite where the words came from or what they meant.

She felt weirdly isolated from her environment-deafened by the blast, barely able to see in the dusty gloom, smelling and tasting only the chalk that clogged her nostrils and mouth. With her hands manacled, she was restricted even in what she could reach out and touch. She was a prisoner in some bizarre dream without the reality of physical sensation.

Except for pain. No shortage of that. Pain in her every protesting muscle-and her left ankle, injured in the fall-and her back, slashed by one of the hailstones.

Not really hailstones, of course. But what

She aimed the flashlight lower. Littering the cavern floor were chunks of concrete and dislodged limestone, intermingled with sticks of blackened wood. Remnants of the Ashcroft heirlooms, glowing feebly, logs in a hearth.

And everywhere, strewn like seeds, were fragments of metal.

She picked up the closest one, dropped it instantly. Red hot.

It appeared to be part of a knife’s serrated blade, mangled by the blast and by multiple ricochets.

Only a few had trickled into the cave through the drainage hole, but the things must have been thick as locusts in the cellar.

If she and Ally had been up there …

Pincushions. Dartboards.

Handcuffed, she couldn’t reach behind her to examine the incision across her shoulder blades. But she hadn’t lost any mobility, so apparently no major muscles had been severed.

Rest would be nice right now, a long rest after a hot shower and something cold to drink.

No such luck. Despite exhaustion, despite the pain making multiple claims on her body, she had to keep going, had to get away from here-before Cain arrived to confirm his kills.

She turned toward Ally, curled like a shrimp, floured in dust. Cuts crosshatched her legs and arms.

Gently she shook the girl alert. Ally stirred, saying something, but Trish couldn’t hear it over the clangor in her head. Squatting close, she read Ally’s lips.

What happened

Trish formed one word in reply: Bomb.

Ally nodded, registering no reaction.

You okay Trish mouthed.

A shaky nod. You

Trish’s ankle hurt worse than before, but she merely showed a tight smile, then indicated with a sideways motion of her head that it was time to go.

Awkwardly they got to their feet, Ally rubbing dust from her eyes.

Trish tested her ankle. Though tender, it supported her. The ligaments had been stretched but probably not torn. She could walk.

Digging in her pocket, she produced the compass she’d taken from the boat. The handcuffs made it impossible for her to beam the flashlight at the dial.

She handed both the compass and flash to Ally, mouthing: Northwest.

Ally had said the other well lay in that direction. The girl turned in a half circle, then pointed toward the right-hand passage

Trish: You lead. I’ll follow.

Ally managed a smile. That’s a switch.

They walked single file. Entering the passage, Trish struck her head on a low stalactite. Just what she needed. More pain. No wonder spelunkers wore helmets.

Her bad ankle and the uneven floor made every step a challenge. She had to crab along the wall to keep her balance. The limestone was rough and yellowish brown and crusted with muck that slimed her uniform in gray-green stripes. She was already so dirty that an additional layer of filth hardly mattered.

At a bend in the corridor, she glanced back, alert to the possibility of pursuit. No one was there.

Cain wouldn’t give up, though. She was sure of that.