These bones were picked clean. Their new feast lay back inside the
cavern. They swarmed back in that direction. He held the flashlight
out in front of him and pushed on into the mountain against the
squealing tide.
He lost his sense of direction. He hoped he was going roughly west,
but he couldn’t tell. The roof came down to a couple of feet. He was
crawling through an old geological seam, excavated long ago for its
ore. The roof came down even more. Down to a foot and a half. It was
cold. The seam narrowed. His arms were out in front of him. The seam
became too narrow to pull them back. He was crawling down a slim rock
tube, a billion tons of mountain above him, no idea where he was going.
And the flashlight was failing. The battery was spent. Its light was
fading to a dull orange glow.
He was breathing hard. And shaking. Not from exertion. From dread.
From terror. This was not what he had expected. He had visualized a
stroll down a spacious abandoned gallery. Not this narrow crack in the
rock. He was pushing himself head-first into his worst childhood
nightmare. He was a guy who had survived most things, and he was a guy
who was rarely afraid. But he had known since his early boyhood that
he was terrified of being trapped in the dark in a space too small to
turn his giant frame. All his damp childhood nightmares had been about
being closed into tight spaces. He lay on his stomach and screwed his
eyes shut. Lay and panted and gagged. Forced the air in and out
through his clamping throat. Then he inched himself slowly onward into
the nightmare.
The glow from the flashlight finally died a hundred yards into the
tunnel. The darkness was total. The seam was narrowing. It was
pushing his shoulders down. He was forcing himself into a space that
was way too small for him. His face was forced sideways. He fought to
stay calm. He remembered what he had said to Borken: people were
smaller then. Scrappy little guys, migrating west, seeking their
fortune in the bowels of the mountain. People half the size of
Reacher, squirming along, maybe on their backs, chipping the bright
veins out of the rock roof.
He was using the dead flashlight like a blind man uses a white cane. It
smashed on solid rock two feet ahead of his face. He heard the tinkle
of glass over the rasping of his breath. He struggled ahead and felt
with his hands. A solid wall. The tunnel went no farther. He tried
to move backward. He couldn’t move at all. To push himself backward
with his hands, he had to raise his chest to get leverage. But the roof
was too low to let him do that. His shoulders were jammed up hard
against it. He could get no leverage. His feet could push him
forward, but they couldn’t pull him backward. He went rigid with
panic. His throat clamped solid. His head hit the roof and his cheek
hit the grit floor. He fought a scream by breathing fast.
He had to go back. He hooked his toes into the grit. Turned his hands
inward and planted his thumbs on the floor. Pulled with his toes and
pushed with his thumbs. He moved backward a fraction and then the rock
clamped hard against his sides. To slide his weight backward, his
shoulder muscles were bunching and jamming against the rock. He
breathed out and let his arms go limp. Pulled with his toes. They
scrabbled uselessly in the grit. He
helped them with his thumbs. His shoulders bunched and jammed again.
He jerked his hips from side to side. He had a couple of inches spare.
He smashed his hands into the shale and heaved backward. His body
jammed solid, like a wedge in a door. He tilted sideways and banged
his cheek on the roof. Jerked back down and caught his other cheek on
the floor. The rock was crushing in on his ribs. This time, he
couldn’t fight the scream. He had to let it go. He opened his mouth