Page 58 of In Too Deep
He drew a few slow breaths through his nose and forced his mind to clear.
Panic wouldn’t help.He’d been trained for crisis situations, had drilled for this—for making decisions when everything was falling apart around him.
He could do this.
“Noah?”Meg’s voice was frantic and thin.
Noah scrambled back over the loose rocks, his boots slipping on the wet stone as he reached Meg and nearly fell.
She’d pulled his pack toward Alex and was kneeling beside the unconscious boy.She had slid a sweatshirt from the pack under his head as a makeshift pillow.Her headlamp created a small circle of light as she pointed to where a sizable rock had rolled against his shin and pinned his pant leg to the ground.
Noah leaned down, his muscles straining.With great effort, he rolled the rock away.
He couldn’t tell if the limb had just been pinned down or if it had taken enough of the weight to cause damage.
Meg glanced up at Noah.Her face was pale in the lamplight, but her expression was focused.Professional.Doctor mode.
“His pulse is good—steady at about seventy beats per minute.The head wound looks worse than it is, mostly superficial bleeding from the scalp.Pupils are reactive but sluggish, which concerns me.But until he wakes, I can’t really assess whether there’s serious brain injury or just a concussion.”
“Meg, I’m so sorry I let you come in here.”
Her head jerked up to look at him.“You didn’tletme.I made a choice.It was the right choice.We couldn’t have known…” She shook her head.“This is not your fault.”
“If I had come in alone, then?—”
“Then you would be trapped with an injured person alone.”She pulled away completely now and turned back to her medical bag.She yanked out gauze with more force than necessary.
Her eyes flashed with anger in the lamplight.“I’m not breakable.You trusted me to do my job.”
“And now you’ve been trapped in a collapsed cave by a madman.”
Noah reached to grab his radio from his belt.But it was gone.He scanned the floor around him.His stomach lurched as he caught sight of a shard of plastic among the rubble—black and cracked.That glancing hit on his hip must have taken out the radio.
Perfect.
He dug in his pack for another—a backup, anything—but came up empty.His jaw tightened so hard his teeth ached.
He gestured toward the blocked entrance.“No way out that way.And no way to contact the outside.”
Meg pressed gauze to the wound on Alex’s head.Her hands were steady, even though her voice wavered.“No way out?Are we buried alive?”She swallowed hard.
“No.”The word came out too fast, too sharp, too desperate.
Maybe.
But he’d never say that to her.Never let her see how scared he actually was.
“These caves have shafts.Some natural, some from miners back during the gold rush.”
“I thought there wasn’t any gold found this far north.”Meg’s voice was thin and stretched tight like a wire about to snap.
“There wasn’t.But that didn’t keep people from looking.”Noah stood and shone his light around the chamber in a slow arc.
Not looking at it like a crime scene with Jeremy’s photos scattered across the floor like evidence.
But as a maze with an exit they just had to find.
“They dug exploratory shafts all over this area in the 1870s and ’80s after gold was found in Prescott in the 1860s.Some of them broke through to the surface and created accidental skylights.We just need to find one.”
