Twenty-Seven Bones

movement. He glances up, sees a flicker of red: the girl is crawling toward the tunnel. One second elapsed.

Bennie reaches for the gun next to him as Apgard begins to whirl to his left. Two seconds.

Bennie’s hand closes around the gun. As he raises it, he sees a dark roundish object in Apgard’s right hand. Apgard bowls it underhand; it rolls in Bennie’s direction. Three seconds.

Bennie throws himself to the side, tries to squeeze off a shot, but the gun is on safety. The grenade, its striker lever released, has rolled across the floor of the cave toward the inner passageway. The striker has ignited the percussion cap inside the grenade; the fuze has begun to burn. Four seconds.

The girl is scrambling up the tunnel on her hands and knees, Apgard behind her. The grenade comes to rest in the mouth of the inner passageway. Bennie glances back and forth between the grenade to his left and the tunnel to his right. In about the time it takes a synapse to fire, Bennie grasps the magnitude of the choice that now confronts him. To the right, up the tunnel, safety, freedom; to the left, down the passageway, Ina Emily and the spirits of his ancestors. Five seconds.

Bennie drops the gun, grabs his knapsack, throws it ahead of him into the passageway, dives over the grenade-six seconds-hits the ground rolling, scrambles down the passageway dragging the knapsack behind him. Seven seconds.

Bennie throws himself flat, using the bulky knapsack for as much cover as it will provide. He hears a tick-boom! behind him-that would be the fuse inside the grenade setting off the detonator that in turn set off the plasticized PETN explosive. Eight seconds have elapsed, but it will be another ten seconds or so before Bennie looks up to see Ama Phil and Ina Emily standing over him. Their mouths are moving, but no sound emerges over the roaring in his ears.

No matter. On the other side, his ancestors will make him whole again. Providing, naturally, that he has crossed the bridge with enough tribute. That’s why he’d risked one-eighth of what might have been the remainder of his life in order to bring his backpack along: for Bennie, all that mattered in this world was his money, his hands, and of course Ina Emily’s dying breath.

6

Holly’s life had not been without its difficulties, even tragedies. She had been outed-humiliatingly-in high school by a girl she’d loved and trusted. She had buried both parents. She’d left behind everything she knew and loved in California to bury her sister and care for her niece and nephew.

But this-knowing your child had been kidnapped while you were locked in your room smoking dope-this was despair. Biblical, tear-your-hair-out and rend-your-garments despair.

If possible, Marley was in an even deeper circle of hell. Watching out for Dawn had only been Auntie Holly’s job for a couple years-it had been Marley’s ever since he could remember. And he was the one to whom their mother had whispered, Take care of your sister-it was practically the last thing she’d said.

When he’d heard Holly screaming in the Crapaud he had raced out into the storm in his pajamas. He’d banged on doors with his feet until there were no doors left to bang on, gone as deep as he dared into the forest, calling for his sister until his voice was hoarse, then searched the Core with his flashlight in his mouth until he spotted Pender’s gun by the side of the path behind Andy’s A-frame. And when Officer Winstone draped the yellow SLPD slicker over his shoulders and told him to watch over the gun, a team of oxen couldn’t have dragged Marley away, at least until Marcus Coffee’s Auntie Layla arrived to take charge of the crime scene.

For Dawson, who’d loved Dawn since birth and Pender since last night, Mysterianism just wasn’t cutting it any longer-she found herself praying for the first time in years to a God/Goddess/Whatever.

“Listen,” she told the God/Goddess/Whatever. “This isn’t about me. But I’ll make you a deal anyway-let them live, let them be okay, let this just be some kind of a misunderstanding, I don’t care how you work it, and I’ll… I’ll…”

But there was only one thing Dawson had to offer that any G/G/W she could have respected or believed in would have accepted. So she offered it-then she put on her poncho again, grabbed her twelve-volt lantern, and walked back out into the rain to search for her friends.

7

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.