Lewis scrambled up the tunnel on his hands and knees. The explosion sounded surprisingly distant, though he was only halfway up when the grenade went off. He caught the girl from behind just as she emerged from the mouth of the tunnel, grabbed her by the ankle, yanked her back under the overhang that kept the tunnel from flooding. She jerked one foot out of her rain boot; his hand closed around her skinny calf. She started kicking with her other foot; he grabbed that one, too, and flipped her over onto her back.
“I’m on your side,” he shouted, over the storm. “I got you out of there, didn’t I? I’m not going to hurt you. I’m on your side. I saved your life, and I’m gonna get you home safe and sound. But you have to trust me. They could be coming after us. I have to blow up this tunnel. Do you understand?”
Tough call for a six-year-old. But that get you home safe and sound resonated with Dawn. She wanted to believe him, she wanted to believe in him. She had to believe in him-they were in the middle of the deep dark forest and he was the only grown-up left. And he was blond and handsome and a friend of her auntie’s-he didn’t look like her idea of a bad man. She nodded.
He took his flashlight out of his pocket, switched it on. “Okay. I’m gonna give you this flashlight. When I say go, I want you to run that way, the direction we came from…” He shined the flashlight down the trail. “…until you get to that big gray elephant’s ear tree there. I want you to put the flashlight on the ground pointing back up the trail so I can see, then get behind the tree and cover your ears.” He looked around, found her rain boot, helped her tug it on, handed her the flashlight. “Okay, go!”
Dawn scrambled through the beaded curtain of rainwater runoff dripping from the overhang, got to her feet, splashed downhill through the mud. She reached the elephant’s ear tree. She wanted to keep running. She shined the flashlight back up the trail, saw Mr. Apgard crouched in the mouth of the tunnel behind the watery silvery curtain. He gave her a nod and a thumbs-up. She put the flashlight down, beam pointing toward him, ducked behind the tree-the trunk was ten feet in diameter-and jammed her fingers in her ears.
Emily stayed behind to tend to Bennie, while Phil went back to explore the damage from the explosion they’d heard. As he’d feared, the light from his headlamp revealed that the blast had brought down a wall of earth and rock, effectively sealing them off from the only way in or out of the cave complex that they had discovered in nearly eighteen months of exploring and mapping.
Even worse, their packs, his and Emily’s, were also on the other side of the collapse, along with anything else that wasn’t in Bennie’s knapsack. They’d have to dig their way out, he reported back to Emily.
“What with?” she asked him. Bennie was still dazed, still deaf.
“With our bare hands, if necessary. What do you think happened?”
She shrugged. “I’m going back to the cross chamber, see if there’s anything there to dig with.”
“I’ll get started on the cave-in,” said Phil.
For the second time that night, Lewis felt himself suffused with the certainty that against all odds, things were going to come out just fine. The girl obviously trusted him; on the way back, he’d inoculate her with his version of events. Instead of being a victim, she’d be an eyewitness and a character witness all rolled into one.
He took the second grenade out of his trench coat pocket. This next part was going to be tricky. Have to blow the tunnel high enough to bring down that overhang without blowing himself up in the process. He lay facedown with his feet to the entrance, reached as far as he could, set the grenade down tentatively in the darkness of the tunnel. It started to roll down the slope. He snatched it up again, took off his Dolphins cap, put the grenade in that to keep it from rolling down the slope. Perfecto.
Lying half-in, half-out of the rain, Lewis extended his arm as far as it would reach again and set the cap down. He picked up the grenade, squeezed the striker lever, pulled the pin, extended his hand, felt around, then lowered the grenade into the cap, still squeezing the lever.
Now all you have to do is open your hand, then skedaddle, me son, he told himself. Just open your hand and-
Somebody groaned, down in the cave. Pender or Bennie? Could either of them have survived the blast in that enclosed space? Didn’t matter: Lewis opened his hand, scuttled backward out of the tunnel. He slipped in the mud, scrambled to his feet, ran toward the light.
The downward slope of the inner passageway, by deflecting the first blast upward, had saved Pender from the storm of metal fragments, if not from the concussive force of the explosion, which rendered him unconscious again just as he was coming to his senses the first time, after his pistol-whipping.
He didn’t know why his ears were ringing and his nose was bleeding when he regained consciousness the second time. He couldn’t hear himself groaning and didn’t hear the second grenade go off either. Nor could he see the resulting shower of dirt and rocks that blew backward into the pitch-black chamber, but he felt the force of it flying past and thought somebody had fired a shotgun at him.
Pender crawled backward out of the presumed line of fire, covering his head with his hands, and realized that his scalp was bleeding badly from the pistol whipping. He felt around until his fingers brushed against the aluminum frame of a backpack. He pulled it closer, unzipped it, found a roll of toilet paper, pressed wads of it tightly against the back of his scalp to stop the bleeding.
Dragging the pack with him, he scooted backward until he reached the wall. Still woozy-the worst part of a concussion (as Pender, or any NFL quarterback, could tell you) wasn’t so much the headache, nausea, or dizziness as it was the panicky, suffocating feeling that came with not being able to think clearly. And this was his second or third concussion of the evening-this was probably what it felt like to be in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, thought Pender.
He was also terribly thirsty. Sitting up with his back propped against the wall, Pender felt around in the pack until his fingers closed around a plastic water bottle. He drank greedily, not even thinking about conserving his resources. He still believed he could feel his way around to the tunnel, then crawl up the slope to safety. As soon as his head stopped pounding, that is. As soon as he could think.