Hoyle moved out at once.
The trail leading down into the cave was twisting and narrow. The heat rolled into the opening after them. In short order, though, the temperature started to drop rapidly. The perspiration that had settled under Ryan’s clothing suddenly turned to mobile ice beads that tracked shivers along his skin.
“I hear running water,” Mildred said.
Ryan heard it, too, a rapid splashing that sloshed wetly against stone. He blinked his eye in an effort to speed up the change to night vision. The rock floor split into a V, widening rapidly. In the mouth a raging torrent gushed from an underground schism and overfilled the space left between the legs of the V. Water twisted and spilled over the rock ledges on either side of the river, making the way chancy, its roar rendering conversation difficult.
The incline grew sharper, tilting down into the shadows that swallowed up the other end of the cave system. Debris choked the river in a handful of places, flotsam and jetsam from civilization in the form of timbers, chairs, bits of clothing and toys, all of it knitted together by clumps of weeds and tangles of branches, some of them still carrying leaves.
Ryan glanced over his shoulder and saw Mildred and J.B. working their way after him. “How much farther to the raft?” he asked Hoyle.
“Fifty yards mebbe. Hard to tell in this.”
Gunfire flashed near the mouth of the cave. The men standing in front of it were skylined by the sunlight beyond, broken shadows against the darker and deeper silhouettes of rock. The positions of others were given away by muzzle-flashes.
J.B. cut loose with the Uzi and zipped a line of deadly demarcation in the middle of the group. There were at least six shadows, maybe more.
The next turn in the tunnel caught Ryan by surprise. One instant Hoyle was moving in front of him, light against the black rock, and in the next the man had disappeared.
The breaking wave of whitecaps smashing against the ledge gave Ryan an indication of where the turn was. He pressed in close against the rock and followed it. Water swirled up to his knees, fighting against the gravity and the insistence of the force spewing it out of the underground crevice.
“Lover.”
Squinting, Ryan peered past Hoyle and spotted Krysty standing under a low overhang of rock. Jagged fangs thrust down from the rooftop, closing the cave up like a man dying of lockjaw. Scarcely four feet remained above the surface of the churning river.
The black water spread across thirty or forty feet of the cave opening, well out of the regular channel it had carved over decades. Judging from the way the white waves crashed against the walls with dulled roars, then swirled madly back in on themselves, the water level wasn’t dropping. It was rising dramatically. The cave widened out at this spot, at the bottom of the incline. A bowl-shaped depression created by the regular fall of water over the years had left worn rings in the pale alabaster of the limestone. The shaft where the river continued was eight or ten feet across. The water roared into the spillway like a thing possessed.
“Dark night!” J.B. breathed.
“Hasn’t gone down,” Hoyle said. “Only a crazy fucker would try to go down that river in the shape it’s in.”
“Where’s the raft?” Ryan demanded.
“You can’t be serious.” Hoyle stared at him wide-eyed. “We’d all die.”
Krysty walked through the water with difficulty to join them.
“If we stay here,” Ryan told him, “we’re dead for sure. With a raft mebbe we got some kind of chance. That water’s going somewhere, bastard quick.”
“It goes underground.”
Without warning, a large wave of water rolled forward, drenching them. A scream sounded behind them, then a brushwooder came hurtling over the fall, limbs flailing in the weak light as he shot out into empty space for an instant. The man hit the water and sank in the churning depths. A moment later he reappeared, yards from where he’d gone under, only long enough to suck in a breath as he was swept toward the bottleneck. Then he went under again and didn’t come back up.