Page 98 of High Water
We duck down, narrowly avoiding the bats we’ve disturbed, and there’s another soft string of cursing from my side. She pulls her free hand over her head and peeks out at me from behind her fingers.
“I could do without that.”
“They’re not my favorite either.”
“Don’t tell me you’re afraid of bats.” She smirks.
“Not afraid, just not a fan.”
“They’re kind of cute when they’re not dive-bombing you.” She nods at one that’s still neatly tucked in the rafters, its thin wings folded around its body so it’s cocooned as it hangs upside down, oblivious to our presence.
“Kind of,” I admit. The little ears and nose aren’t half bad, but I’m still fairly sure they’re just rats with wings.
Once the little guy’s friends have cleared out, spinning their way through the tunnel and into another cavern, we stand again, carefully peeking our heads over the precipice while holding the beams behind us to keep us centered. Beams I don’t entirely trust, and I grab Aspen’s belt to keep her rooted to me.
“Damn.” She admires the steep drop, using her flashlight to illuminate the bottom. “That’s a long way down.”
“One we’re not trying.” I nod my head at the old wooden ladder that descends into the pit. It’s seen better days, and several rungs have decayed to the point of splitting into two or are missing altogether. Who knows how bad the rest are?
“Fair. But I want to get some pictures of this. See if it means whatever experts they hire can come prepared the first time they come out for all of this.”
“Gonna be hard in this light.” I look at her skeptically.
“You got me?” She glances down where my hand is firmly wrapped around her belt.
“I got you.” I nod.
She pops the flashlight into her mouth and inches forward, leaning over and flicking her phone’s camera on, switching it to video mode. She makes a slow pass through the space, treating it like a grid, back and forth, capturing all the angles, like she’s still slow-walking her GPR machine.
She only stops when her flashlight catches something that glints below. It’s not ice. There’s plenty of it down there. There’s another mass of snow flowing down from the hole in the ceiling, and water slowly drips into towering masses of ice, but this shimmers differently, practically glowing and sparkling.
“Oh shit!” she curses, forgetting her flashlight in her mouth, and it tumbles into the abyss beneath her. I yank her back from the edge. “Fucking hell. I was getting a good video too.”
“At least it wasn’t your phone.”
“True. But what the hell was that thing? It sparkled.” Her brows knit together as she looks at me. “Let me have your flashlight.” She holds out her hand.
“No. We can’t risk losing it. It’s the last one left. Which means it’s time to get back to the surface.”
“Bishop, please, just one more look.”
“No.” I refuse to give on this. If we lose the flashlight, making our way back to the surface with just the weak light from our phones would be difficult at best, dangerous at worst. “See if you caught it on your phone.”
She pulls the video back up. It’s still a touch grainy from the dim light, but it captured a remarkable amount of detail down here. She scrubs through the footage, getting to the end where she dropped the flashlight, and finds the glimmering object in the reflection of the ice.
It’s gold. Gold and silver. Sticking out from a mound of ice.
It’s difficult to make out what the object is, but it’s possible… and we both turn to look at each other wide-eyed.
“It looks like it, right?”
“It’s hard to tell for sure, but I think it could be.”
“We’ve got to get down there to look at it.” She presses her phone to her chest and looks down, squinting in the low light as if that will somehow allow her to see it better.
“We do. But not today.” I tug on her belt and then nod back to the tunnel that brought us here. “Let’s get back to the surface. I don’t like the air down here, and I don’t like us only having one flashlight. Something happens, and we’re stuck crawling out of here in the near dark, trying to feel for the walls.”
“No, thank you.” Her face screws up in disgust.
