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.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Angeline
“Angeline!”
A clear, sweet woman’s voice came to me as if through a mist.
“Angeline! Where are you?”
I was lying with my face planted in a thin carpet of damp leaves. I had climbed out of the cave—I don’t know—maybe fifteen minutes before. I was conscious, I guess, if you can call it that, but it was an awfully dim consciousness. Cold, exhausted, hungry—so hungry it was like a high, annoying siren going off in my brain. I couldn’t seem to muster the energy to move anymore. I felt empty, as if I’d been hollowed out, as if there were no more muscle or bone or sinew inside me to give me the strength I needed.
“Angeline, sweetheart!”
I couldn’t tell at first if that voice was real or something in my imagination. It was all mixed up with the other things swirling around in my brain: memories of the karate demonstration and the talk with Beth and the argument with Alex and then the rest: going home to dinner, writing my paper, IM’ing with Josh, and talking on the phone with Rick and then going to bed, my own bed, for the last time . . .
“Angeline! Where’d you go to, you mouse?”
For another few seconds, I lay half-awake and confused. I guess there was a part of me sort of hoping that voice was my mother’s voice. Maybe she was calling my sister, Amy, and soon she’d call me to wake me up for another day at school.
“Wow,” I’d tell her. “I had the weirdest dream . . .”
But then I took a deep breath and lifted my head out of the leaves and looked around me.
I was still in the forest, but it was different here. The trees were farther apart. They were mostly birch trees with peeling white bark. The underbrush was not as dense. There were open spaces covered with leaves. I could hear a brook bubbling happily nearby and birds chirping. The sun was low, but it wasn’t blocked out of sight like it was before. I could see it clearly through the branches, a reddening ball among the clouds.
I turned my head to scan the area—and stopped.
There was a little girl standing there, gazing down at me.
She looked like she was about five years old. A solemn little creature with a pink woolen cap pulled down over her brown hair. She had a pink Windbreaker on and purple leggings marked with patches of dirt. She was holding a small ball in her hand. She was sort of turning the upper half of her body this way and that. She seemed mesmerized by the sight of me.
I stared at her as if she were a vision. I was half-afraid she was. Slowly, I pushed myself up onto my knees. I reached out to her. I wanted to touch her, to make sure she was real.
She just stood there, turning this way and that. She moved her gaze from my face and gazed at my reaching hand. She seemed fascinated by it, hypnotized.
I let my hand fall. I didn’t want to frighten her. I didn’t want her to run away. I tried to smile. It wasn’t easy. My face felt encrusted in dirt and pain.
“Hello,” I managed to say. My voice sounded hoarse and rasping. “My name is Charlie. Charlie West. What’s yours?”
The little girl hugged her ball tighter. She tucked her chin down as if she wanted to shrink up and hide behind the ball. She swiveled her body this way and that.
I kept staring at her. She was real, all right. She was really real. And if there was a little girl here, there must be an adult nearby, someone who could help me.
“Is someone with you?” I asked her, unable to keep my voice from trembling with hope. “Is your mother here . . . or someone?”
The little girl didn’t answer. Only now did it occur to my muddled brain that the voice I’d heard, the woman calling, must be . . .
“Angeline! There you are!”
I followed the sound of her voice and saw her. A tall, slender lady in her thirties. A kind, pretty face with pretty red hair falling to her shoulders. She was wearing a navy-blue overcoat and jeans. Having finally found her daughter, she was stepping toward her. She hadn’t seen me yet.
Then she did. She spotted me. She froze in her tracks. She stared at me with wide blue eyes.
She looked at her daughter again. Very quickly, she said, “Angeline! Angeline, come here right now. Come to Mommy right now!”
That broke the spell. Angeline turned away from me and ran to her mother, her pink sneakers crunching on the dead leaves. Clutching her ball in one hand, she clung to her mother’s overcoat with the other and tried to hide in the folds of it.
The red-haired lady licked her lips. Staring at me, she be
gan to back away. She was leaving me! She was going to leave me here!
“No! No, wait!” I said.
I managed to get to my feet, reaching out a hand to her. The mother took another step away, pulling her child with her.
I called out, more harshly than I meant to: “No! Stop! Don’t go!”
The mother froze at the tone of my voice. She clutched her daughter to her more tightly. Her eyes traveled over me.
I took a stumbling step toward her.
“Please,” she said. She spoke in a near-whisper, as if she could barely get the words out. “Please don’t hurt us.”
I stopped moving. I’d been so desperate for help that it hadn’t occurred to me what I must look like to her. A filthy, bloodstained, battered young man—and with a gun stuck in the waistband of his pants! I must’ve looked like some kind of madman or escaped convict or a killer or something. The sight of me must’ve terrified the poor woman out of her wits—but I hadn’t thought of that.
“Hurt you?” I said, confused.
“Do you want money? I can give you some money. Please . . .”
“No, no . . .”
“Please. My daughter. She’s just a child. You can do anything you want to me, but don’t hurt her.”
“Mommy!” the little girl cried out tearfully. She clutched her mother’s coat tighter in fear.
Openmouthed, I stared at one of them and then the other. Finally, some understanding worked its way into my befuddled brain. My eyes misted over. I shook my head.
“No, no, no,” I said. “Listen to me, listen. I swear to you, I swear: they could give me all the money in all the banks in all the world, and I wouldn’t hurt a single hair on your head or on your daughter’s. So help me. So help me.”
She clutched her child even tighter. She took another step away, eyeing me suspiciously. “What do you want then?”
I stopped moving. I held up my hand to show I wouldn’t come any closer. “Help. Please. I just need help.”
The lady’s lips trembled. Her eyes were swimming. She was so scared of me she was close to tears. I could see she was a nice lady, and it hurt my heart for her to be afraid of me. But I was desperate for her not to leave.
“What sort of help?” she asked. “I can give you some money. I don’t have much. But I have some.”
“Have you got a phone? If I could just call my mom and dad . . . They’ll come and get me. They’ll take me home. Please.”
She licked her lips again. I saw her eyes go to the gun in my waistband. I put my hand on it.
The lady let out a cry of fear and turned her body to shield her daughter from a bullet.
“No, no, no—here!” I said. I drew the gun out of my waistband. I took it by the muzzle and held the handle out to her. “Here—take it.”
There was another moment before she dared to turn around and look. Then she did. A look of surprise came over her face as she saw me holding the gun out to her.
“Take it,” I said. “I would never hurt you. Never. You’ve gotta believe me. I just want to go home. Please. Take the gun.”
I could see in her eyes that she was confused now. She didn’t know what to think of me. She just stood there, staring at the gun, trying to figure out what to do, how to protect her little girl.
Finally, she edged toward me cautiously. She reached for the gun gingerly, as if she was afraid I was trying to trap her, lure her in and grab her or something. When her fingers touched the gun, she snatched it quickly and leapt back out of my reach. She pointed the gun at me. It made me pretty nervous. It’d be just my luck today if I escaped from, like, a million guards and then got shot by a mom who pulled the trigger by mistake.
She just stood there, pointing the gun, not really knowing what to do next.
“Look,” I said. “There are men after me. Bad men— dangerous. I don’t know how far away they are, but they may still be looking for me. If I could just use your phone . . .”
Holding the gun on me, the lady swallowed. “It’s . . .
It’s in the car,” she said uncertainly. “I don’t have it with me.” Then she added: “It doesn’t work out here anyway. There’s no signal.”
“Well, listen, I really need to call . . .”
“All right, all right,” she said. She thought some more. I could see she was making a plan. “You can come with me. We can drive back down the road. It usually picks up a signal at the bottom.”
I nodded. “Great. That’d be great, ma’am, really. Uh . . . Do you think you could stop pointing the gun at me now?”
She looked down at her hand as if she’d forgotten the gun was there. When she saw it, she considered it a long moment. Finally, I guess she came to a decision. She took a deep breath. She slipped the gun into the pocket of her overcoat. I took a deep breath too, relieved.
“Okay,” she said. “Come with me.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Dateline
I followed her out of the woods. It wasn’t easy. I was hurting all over and walking slowly. A few times, the red-haired lady had to wait up for me, even though she was walking with the little girl. She’d pause and watch me hobbling as fast as I could, trying to catch up with her, and I thought I saw a little mom-like sympathy come into her eyes. It was a nice thing to see. I was in need of a little mom-like sympathy at that point.
When we came out of the trees, there was a rolling slope of dirt and grass. There were picnic benches here and a rusted, dilapidated swing set. After everything that had happened, it was the oddest sight to see. So normal, you know. If it hadn’t been for the pain and the blood and the muck all over me, I would’ve wondered if my whole ordeal that day had been a dream.
Beyond the grass there was a dirt parking place. There was only the one car there—her car, a Ford Explorer, just like my mom’s, even colored brown like my mom’s.
I waited while the red-haired lady strapped the little girl into the child seat in back.
“Is the man bad, Mommy?” I heard the little girl ask softly.
“No,” the red-haired lady said. “He just needs help. Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be fine.”
I sat in the front passenger seat as the lady drove over a narrow dirt road. It was a long road, strewn with rocks, and slow going. The Explorer bounced and jarred as it hit holes in the earth and up-sticking boulders. Every bounce went through my body in a flash of pain.
The lady and I were silent at first. But then I decided to try to make conversation. I wanted her to see I was a good guy so she wouldn’t be so scared of me.
“My mom has an Explorer too,” I said to her. “It’s the same color.”
She glanced over at me. I thought maybe she started to smile for a second, but I guess she stopped herself.
“I’m really sorry I scared you,” I said. “I guess I must look pretty gnarly at this point.”
She glanced over again. Things were improving, I could tell. She was a mom, you know, like my mom, so I could kind of read her, tell what she was thinking. She had that little quirk at the corner of her lips that moms get when they don’t want to forgive you for something but they can’t help it.
“My name’s Charlie,” I told her. “Charlie West. I go to Spring Hill North.”
She peered out through the windshield, the Explorer bouncing and tossing over the boulder-strewn path. “I’m Cathy Simmons,” she said finally.
“I really appreciate you helping me, Mrs. Simmons. I don’t know what I would’ve done if you hadn’t come along. Thanks.”
This time, she took a longer look at me, more curious, you know. I think she was beginning to get it. I think she was beginning to see I was just a kid, maybe like some of the kids she knew.
“What on earth happened to you, Charlie?” she asked. “When I saw you in the woods . . .”
“I know, I know. I must look like a zombie or something.”
“Or something—yeah. What happened? What are you doing with a gun?”
I shook my head. “I kn
ow this is gonna sound weird, but . . . I don’t know what happened, Mrs. Simmons. I’ve been trying to figure it out. I mean, some guys must’ve captured me in my sleep or something. I went to bed last night at home and I just woke up today and . . . everything was crazy. They had me tied up and were trying to kill me and I had to run for it and there was this cave . . .” I couldn’t explain it, couldn’t put the words together. Just thinking about it made me all confused and upset. I ran my hand up through my hair. I could feel the dirt and twigs tangled in it. “It was pretty bad,” I said.
She gave me another “mom look”: it was the one they give you when they don’t believe you, when they can see you’re making up a story to get out of trouble and they don’t want to call you a liar but they don’t want you to think you’ve fooled them either.
“It’s true!” I said—which is pretty much what you say to moms when they give you that look. It sort of comes out automatically. But then I had to admit: “I guess it does sound pretty lame.”
Mrs. Simmons nodded, but one corner of her mouth lifted in a kind of wry mom smile. “Where are you from, Charlie? Where are your mom and dad?”
“I guess they’re back home. In Spring Hill.”
She shook her head. “I don’t know it.”
“It’s the Whitney County seat.”
She gave me a strange look. Then she said: “You’re a long way from home. We’re just north of Centerville here.”
I gaped at her. “Centerville? No way! That’s on the other side of the state!”
That got me another soothing blast of “mom sympathy.” Then Mrs. Simmons nodded her head at the glove compartment. “The phone’s in there. Why don’t you see if you can get a signal?”
I got out her cell, a Razr. I flipped it open.