Page 94 of In Too Deep
The sinkhole was still growing.
A hundred and fifty feet across now.
Two hundred.
The spray-paintedX’s he’d marked were gone, swallowed into the crater.Evidence erased.Coordinates lost along with his favorite pack.
Teague’s chest hit the cold helicopter floor—hard enough to knock the wind out of him—and he rolled inside and gasped.Liam grabbed his leg and hauled him fully into the cabin just as the pilot banked harder and put distance between them and the collapsing plateau.G-forces pressed them sideways.
“You good?”
Liam’s face was sheet white, his hands still gripping Teague’s shoulders and trembling.The adrenaline crash already started.
Teague pushed himself up on his elbows and looked out the open door.The wind buffeted his face.Where the plateau had been thirty seconds ago—where he’d been standing, marking coordinates, doing his job—there was now a massive crater.Dust and debris billowed up in enormous clouds and obscured the destruction.But he could see the edges—nearly three hundred feet across and still crumbling at the perimeter.Chunks of limestone the size of cars tumbled into the growing crater.
“Yeah,” Teague managed, his voice rough.“I’m good.”
“You’re insane.”Liam laughed, but it seemed less in humor and more a rush of adrenaline.That hysterical edge.The sound people made when they’d almost watched someone die.“Completely insane.”
“Calculated risk.”Teague sat up fully with his back against the cabin wall.Cold metal against his bare back.His hands still trembled.Heart hammered.
He’d calculated that one very wrong.The margin for error had been about three seconds.Three seconds between escape and being buried under half a mountain along with his pack.Man, he’d miss that pack.
He turned to Meg, who was strapped into the jump seat across from him and stared at the other chopper through the window.The first helicopter was ahead of them and banked toward Flagstaff.Toward the hospital.Her head leaned against the glass with her hands limp in her lap.
He reached out and squeezed her shoulder to offer comfort.Connection.Something.“He’s going to be okay.”
She didn’t look at him.Just stared out with an empty expression—hollow, like someone had scooped out everything essential and left only the shell.
Teague didn’t know how to help her.Didn’t know what to say or what to do.And he was afraid that that experience—Noah bleeding out in her hands, Ryan’s gun, the knife, the explosions—may have broken something in her permanently.
Something that couldn’t be fixed with time or therapy or anything else.
He knew better than anyone that some breaks didn’t heal.
Pain woke him.
Not the sharp, immediate kind that demanded attention—the kind that screamed injury and danger—but a dull, pervasive ache that spread through his entire body as if he’d been run over by a truck.
Noah’s eyes cracked open to fluorescent lights—too bright, too sterile.
Hospital.
He was in a hospital.The smell hit him next—that particular combination of disinfectant and floor wax and human suffering that couldn’t be masked.
He tried to piece together how he’d gotten here, his mind sluggish and foggy.The IV in his arm.The steady beep of monitors.The tight pull of stitches in his side.
The cave.
They’d been trapped in the cave.Meg had been there, and Alex—the kid’s pale face, his swollen leg—and?—
Ryan.
The memory slammed into him with brutal clarity—unfiltered and raw.Ryan Bradley with a gun pointed at Meg.The fight—bodies slamming together and grappling for the weapon.The knife biting into his side, that hot punch of metal parting flesh.The gun going off between them—muffled and wet—and Ryan sliding down the wall.Blood spreading across his shirt.
Noah’s chest tightened, his breathing picking up speed.Each inhale was shallow and insufficient.
The explosives.
