The last thing I remember

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The Cave

I opened my eyes and a jolt of terror shot through me. I couldn’t see. Where was I? What was happening?

I had fallen asleep-I had no idea for how long. And when I came to-before I remembered where I was or even who I was-I could see nothing, absolutely nothing. It was as if I had gone blind.

Then I remembered. The torture room. My escape from the compound. The woods. The cave.

I was still in the cave. I had escaped the guards and fallen deeper underground. That’s why I couldn’t see, why the darkness around me was so complete.

As soon as it came back to me, the terror I felt was replaced by another kind of fear-a low, pervasive, sickening despair. How was I going to get out of here? What was I going to do now?

I sat up slowly. It hurt. Oh yeah, I remembered the pain too. The cuts and sores and bruises all over me, the ache all through me. Swallowing hard, I passed my hands over myself, checking the damage. I felt sore spots and frightening damp patches that might have been blood. But at least it didn’t seem as if anything was broken.

My hand stopped at my belt when I felt the gun. Now I remembered that too.

I reached down and felt the space around me. Stone: slick, cold, and damp. I moved my hand and felt a small puddle of water. I scooped some up and splashed it into my mouth. It tasted metallic, but it eased my thirst.

I reached out until I felt a wall of stone. Slowly, holding on to the wall, I stood up. I felt wobbly. My legs felt weak. I leaned against the wall.

Now what? I was afraid to move. It was so utterly, so completely dark, there could’ve been an open pit in front of me and I never would’ve seen it. I could’ve taken one step and dropped into nothingness, a longer fall this time that would’ve really busted me to pieces. I could see myself lying broken and immobile in the blackness with no one to hear me screaming for help.

These and other images kept flashing in my mind as the scattered memories came back to me. The torture chair and the thugs with the acid syringe. My karate demonstration at school. Grabbing the rat-faced guy by the throat and running down the cinder block hallway, running for the black square that was the window. Talking to Beth in the cafeteria. Arguing with Alex in my mom’s car. Stealing the truck to break out of the compound. The truck turning over. Grabbing the gun from the driver…

I caught my breath. There was something else I remembered now. Quickly, my hand went to my pants pocket. Yes, I felt it there. I reached inside and pulled it out: the keychain. The truck driver’s keychain. I had taken it from the ignition to keep the bad guys from using the truck. Before I’d shoved it in my pocket, I had noticed it had a flashlight on it.

No matter how close I held the keychain to my face I couldn’t see it, not even a little. I had to feel my way blindly along the shape of the keys, seeking out the flashlight. I moved my fingers carefully, resisting the urge to hurry. A frantic voice kept whispering in my head: Don’t drop it, don’t drop it! In this darkness, if I dropped the thing, there was no guarantee I would find it again.

But now, I felt it: the flashlight. My fingers made out its shape. I pressed the button. Hope sent my heart pounding wildly as a thin beam of white light shot blessedly through the dark. I shone it briefly around what turned out to be a small cave chamber. Then I pointed it up, looking for the place from which I’d fallen.

The hope in me died. I saw a slick, featureless slope of rock, too steep to climb without a rope. The narrow space through which I’d crawled was out of reach at the top of it. I could not get out the way I’d come in.

I scanned the light around the chamber again. There was only one other exit: a passage through the rock into more darkness. Everything inside me rebelled at the idea of going farther into the cave, moving away from the light and the air, dropping deeper into the earth.

But what choice did I have?

Much as I wanted to, I couldn’t leave the flashlight on. I had to preserve the battery. For another moment or two, I let the light play over the entrance to the underground corridor, trying to memorize the path between the rocks that would get me there. Then, reluctantly, I released the button. The flashlight’s beam vanished and the darkness was instantly complete again.

I began to edge forward, feeling my way along the wall of stone, trying to remember the path I’d seen in the light. Blind, utterly blind, I didn’t dare to lift my feet, but shuffled slow-by-slow like an old, old man. Stubbing my toe on rocks, I felt my way around them. Now and then, I would shine the flashlight to see how far I’d come.

I reached the entrance to the corridor. I moved into it. Step by shuffling step, I made my way. Every few minutes, I would lift the flashlight again. Pierce the blackness with that narrow beam. I would memorize the next few steps and make sure there were no gaps or obstacles in my way. Then I would let the light die and shuffle forward, one hand clinging to the corridor wall.

I went on like that a long, long time. It seemed long, anyway. My clothes were damp and the cave was cold, and soon I was shivering, my teeth chattering. I had to force my mind away from the cold and from the pain all over my body-and from the hunger, too, sharp pangs of hunger that were now beginning to eat at my belly and make me weak.

Just concentrate on the movement, I told myself, shivering. Keep going. Never give in. But as I edged deeper and deeper into that suffocating blackness, I heard another voice inside. Alex’s voice. It came to me as if from the heart of the darkness, a furious, sizzling whisper: It’s all a lie. There’s no hope. There’s no sense trying. You’re going to die down here, Charlie-down here in the dark where they’ll never even find your corpse!

Gritting my teeth, I forced Alex’s voice into silence. I stopped again to scan the area with the flashlight. My hands were shaking so badly now I could hardly hold the keychain, even using both hands. My thumb rested on the button…

Then the flashlight slipped out of my grip!

It was an awful moment. So much had happened to me that day-the torture chair and the fear and the gunfire-but this was as bad as any of it. I heard the keychain hit the stone at my feet. Panicked, I crouched down after it. I moved my hand frantically over the stone floor. I couldn’t find it. I could hear myself making a horrible whimpering noise. I didn’t mean to, but it just came out of me.

“Please, please, please,” I was saying.

Then there it was! I grabbed hold of the keychain as if it were a raft in the middle of the ocean. I stood up, trembling even worse than before, gripping that flashlight in my fist for dear life. For a long minute, I was afraid even to try again to find the button.

But I had to. I was completely disoriented now. I had no idea which direction to move in. Carefully-so carefully- I moved my thumb back to the flashlight button. I pressed it and shone the light in the dark.

I swallowed hard at what I saw. The corridor was narrowing down to nothing in front of me. No, not quite nothing. There was still a passage through the stone, but it was so tight I wasn’t sure I could fit into it. And if I did fit into it, I wasn’t sure I would be able to get out again.

But there was no hope behind me, so I had to go on. So I did.

I kept shuffling forward along the corridor, feeling the walls of it closing and closing on either side of me. Then I reached that narrow crevice. I put the flashlight into my pocket for safekeeping. I put my shoulder to the crevice opening. I squeezed my way in.

It was suffocating-almost unbearable. The rock walls pressed tight against my back and my face. I slid myself in farther, and with every inch I moved, the space got tighter. Soon I was gasping for breath as jutting rock pressed against my abdomen. It took an effort of both strength and willpower to keep cramming myself through the narrow space.

I couldn’t reach the flashlight anymore. I couldn’t even move my hands down to my pockets. I was pressed there like a butterfly in a book with no chance of breaking the stranglehold of the blackness. I couldn’t see anything, not anything. I didn’t know if the corridor would open again or simply end. And if it ended, I didn’t know if I would be able to squeeze my way back out the way I came.

Still-still-I shoved my way deeper into that tomb of rock. And then, finally, it happened. I reached a passage so narrow, so tight, that even if I managed to force my way through it, I knew I could easily be wedged in there forever.

I stopped moving, held fast, the stone pressed tight against my face, my arms pinned in position with the hands up by my head. I could hardly move at all anymore. I could hardly breathe. And-I don’t like saying this, but I have to tell the truth-I was now so terrified, so panicked, so frustrated and claustrophobic, that there were tears streaming down my face and I had to fight as hard as I could not to start blubbering like a child.

It was only a surge of anger that saved me. Anger and desperation that flared up from my belly. I didn’t want to die! Not here! Not like this!

So I bit down and an ugly noise squeezed out between my teeth as I shoved and worked my body even deeper into that black and narrow space. I was praying now, sort of a babbling, crazy prayer, snips and snatches of the Lord’s Prayer and the Twenty-third Psalm and anything else I could remember, anything that shone a light of hope through my panic. I shoved and twisted and struggled and groaned and babbled, and the walls pressed so tight I thought no, no, no, I couldn’t go another inch.

And then I broke through. Just like that. I squeezed past the narrow spot and the rock tomb seemed to open and release me. The breath came rushing back into my lungs. I stumbled once-and I was out of the corridor.

Relief made my legs go weak. I sank to one knee on the stone. Shivering uncontrollably, I tried to get my hand into my pocket, to get the flashlight, but I couldn’t do it. I kept missing the pocket, my hand snaking out of control.

I put my hands under my arms to warm them. I knelt there like that, breathing hard, staring into the blackness.

And I saw something!

At first, I wasn’t sure it was real. Even when I was sure, I could hardly believe it. I stared and blinked and stared again and there, for sure, it was. A patch of gray. A faint patch of gray in the near distance.

I swallowed hard. I tried to stay calm. I tried not to get my hopes up too much. I told myself: Even if there’s an opening, I might not be able to reach it. It might not be large enough for me to get through.

But all the same, my heart was hammering as I climbed back to my feet. This time, I willed my hands steady. I went into my pocket and found the flashlight. I brought it out.

The thin beam of white light picked out an open chamber. There were rocks strewn here and there, but the passage across looked fairly easy. Even the chamber’s ceiling was high, high enough so that I could walk without stooping. I jumped a little at a sudden fluttering noise. A bat had broken from its perch and flown to another. The beam picked out a whole cluster of the little creatures hanging up there in the dark.

I began to move again. Slow again. Preserving the flashlight battery. Picking out my path with the beam. Edging over the rock floor in the dark. I crossed the chamber. As I did, the patch of gray light on the far side grew nearer. As it grew nearer, it grew clearer and brighter, but still I couldn’t see its source.

I kept moving toward it, inch by inch. My flashlight now picked out a jutting boulder. I put my hands on it and felt my way around it.

I don’t think I have ever seen anything as beautiful as what I saw then. That circle of sunlight and blue sky. I thought it must’ve been something like what Lazarus saw when Death lost its hold on him. It felt like that to me, anyway. Like seeing a world of Life I thought I’d never see again.

It was another sinkhole in the cave ceiling, this one bigger than the one through which I’d come. A thin trickle of water was spilling over the edge of the gap. The droplets caught the light and twinkled as they fell. The sight of them was like visible music, like a song that you could see instead of hear. I laughed out loud at the sight. Or maybe I was weeping. I’m not really sure.

And the best thing-the best thing of all-was that the water was pouring down on what was almost a natural stairway formed by ledges and stones.

I moved toward that stairway wearily and began to climb up into the light.