Die Trying by Lee Child

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