Heartbreaker (31 page)

Rory and her mother would cry at her funeral.… But of course there would be no funeral. In eighteen hours there would be nothing at all.

Tearing frantically at the barrier, Lynn fought back terror. The urge to breathe, to exhale and then inhale even though she knew she was surrounded by water rather than oxygen, was overpowering. It took every bit of mental strength she possessed to fight it.

If she surrendered to the foolish demands of her body, she would not survive.

If she even allowed herself the luxury of releasing the stale oxygen inside her, which her burning lungs screamed at her to do, she feared she would not be able to keep herself from inhaling again.

She had always heard that drowning was an easy way to die. Whoever thought that had never experienced the searing pressure in the lungs, the sense of suffocation, of panic, that came with not being able to breathe. Not being able to try to breathe.

Her body was undergoing excruciating torture.
She had to breathe
.

A hand grabbed hers, pulling her forward. Woozy, disoriented, she knew that she was being propelled through a tiny opening in the rocks, but every bit of her consciousness that remained was focused on battling the urge to fill her lungs with whatever substance was available.

She had to breathe
.

Her kicking toes smashed hard into stone. The bottom! She could feel the bottom of the passage! Had she sunk, or … Pushing off with her feet, Lynn launched herself upward.

Crack!
The top of her head hit the roof. The pain was sudden, sharp. She totally disregarded it, because her mouth and nose were above the waterline. Opening her mouth, she emptied her lungs and filled them again with air.

Sweet air.

Treading water, she breathed in and out, in and out, in and out. With the restoration of respiration her senses sharpened, and she realized that the wheezing sounds beside her were Jess and Louis doing the same thing.

Breathing. How precious was the ability to breathe!

“We made it,” Jess said, his voice hoarse and rasping. “We’re in the passage, above the waterline.”

He moved, his hand on her arm drawing her forward. Lynn’s toes hit rock again, then her knees. Weak, shaken, soaked to the skin, and nearly frozen, she half swam and half crawled from the water, then fell forward, eyes closing as she lay prone on the hard stone floor.

Jess sprawled beside her, breathing as greedily as she. Crawling up behind them, Louis gasped and gurgled as he, too, made it to dry land.

They lay there for what seemed like a long time, though when Jess got to his feet and said it was time to go, it wasn’t long enough to suit Lynn.

Physically and mentally, she was exhausted. Her body felt like it had been run over by a Mack truck. Her mind reeled when she tried to form a coherent thought. She simply could not go on. She had to rest.

“Get up, Louis,” Jess said. Louis muttered a protest. From the ensuing sounds Lynn got the impression that he was being dragged to his feet.

Then Jess knelt beside her, touching her arm with a gentle hand.

“Lynn, listen. We’ve got to go. There’s only so much time.”

Jess’s words cracked her torpor. The memory of what they were up against broke it wide open.

“I’m coming,” she said through her teeth. Summoning every scrap of willpower she possessed, she got unsteadily to her feet. For a moment she had to stand with her hand braced against the wall.

“Do you still have the lighter?” Jess asked out of the pitch darkness.

“Wait.” Lynn felt inside her bra. The lighter was there. She pulled it out and tried to flick it to life. No such luck. The lighter, soaked through like the rest of her, was out of commission. “It won’t work. It’s too wet.”

“Okay. I think I know where we are anyway. Stay close.”

The gauze still tied to her belt loop left her little choice. With one hand pressed to the clammy rock wall for guidance, she followed in Jess’s wake, shivering as she felt her way along, stumbling at the rear of their little trio. Jess kept Louis in front of him, presumably so that he could keep tabs on the man in case he should try anything.

Which suited Lynn fine. Total blindness enhanced all her other senses, including her sense of fear. Whether he was temporarily on their side or not, Lynn was afraid of Louis. He was a full-fledged nut case, and a murderer as well.

What if Louis changed his mind about the Lamb being mistaken and decided to turn on them, right there in the dark? She didn’t fancy getting clobbered over the head with a rock.

They were in the twisty passage that led to the chamber they had first entered, walking uphill where before they had traveled down. Lynn thought they must have surfaced about a third of the way along it, because as they progressed she recognized various landmarks by touch: a splintery timber here, a rocky outcropping there, as well as several slick spots hollowed out of the stone floor by years of wear.

“Careful,” Jess’s voice warned. From the sound of it—it no longer seemed to be coming from the bottom of a well—she thought he had reached the chamber. Remembering the difference in heights from one floor to the other, Lynn moved cautiously, feeling for the drop-off with an inquisitive set of toes. Her care was rewarded as she found the edge and stepped down.

“Lynn?”

Jess was waiting for her. His strong hand closed around her badly chilled arm, steadying her as she descended the eight inches or so that separated the cavern floor from that of the passage. For a moment after she was on level ground again she permitted herself the luxury of letting her body rest against his.

His arm wrapped around her waist. She was so tired, she thought, leaning. Nothing less than a life-or-death emergency could compel her to take another step.

Unfortunately, a life-or-death emergency was exactly what they faced.

Jess had to be tired too, and probably weak from loss of blood as well, but he showed no sign of it.

“Come on,” he said, about five centuries before she was ready. His arm left her waist. Setting off across the chamber, he pulled her with him, his hand gripping hers.

“Keep going, Louis,” he prodded, and Lynn realized that Louis was stumbling through the dark just ahead of them.

“I’m tired. And I can’t see anything,” Louis complained.

“The entrance should be on the left. We had to crawl through the passage, remember, so it must be really low,” Lynn said, mostly to Jess, as her outstretched hand touched the opposite wall. By dint of sheer willpower she was regaining her strength. She had to go on, and she would.

Without light the only way to find the opening was by feeling along the vertical rock, which consumed precious minutes. Finally Jess made a triumphant sound.

“Got it!” he said. “Louis, you go first. Don’t forget to duck.”

“Ow!” Seconds later a dull thud and Louis’s cry underlined the wisdom of Jess’s advice.

“I’ll go next. You come after me,” Jess said, having no apparent sympathy to spare for Louis. From the sound of his voice his head was no higher than waist level.

“Okay,” Lynn answered, crouching. A tug on the gauze that still connected them told her that he was moving.

“Watch your head.”

Lynn followed him into the passage on hands and knees, her head carefully lowered. The example of Louis’s close encounter was strong.

The floor was as wet and slippery as she remembered. Crawling uphill was less treacherous than crawling down, however, if more tiring. Minutes later Lynn saw the first glimmer of daylight. With a quirk of her lips she realized that she was looking at the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel.

“We made it!” Jess said exultantly as Louis reached the opening. For an instant Lynn pondered the wisdom of letting Louis exit first into a world of rocks and sticks and who knew what other potential weapons. Jess apparently had the same thought at the same time, because he grabbed Louis by the ankle when the man would have crawled out.

“Wait just a minute, buddy,” he said, and the two left the passage in tandem, pushing through the leafy forsythia branches that masked the entrance. Lynn brought up the rear.

Even beneath the thick forest canopy the brightness of the day was so intense that it hurt Lynn’s eyes. Squinting as she emerged, she could see practically nothing. A gentle breeze caressed her face. Redolent of pine and fresh summer growth, it was doubly welcome after the musky dankness of the mine. Despite the warmth of the afternoon she was freezing. Soaked, chilled to the bone, she shivered uncontrollably under the touch of that soft wind.

Jess’s hand on her arm helped her to her feet. She leaned against him again, and his arm went around her waist in a gesture so natural that it warmed her heart. Her body, however, remained dog-tired. And she was still so
cold
.

Jess had to be as cold as she. She was wearing his shirt, which left him bare above the waist. Despite his recent submersion, though, his skin felt warm against her hand and cheek.

“I see now that it was Yahweh’s will that I join forces with you,” Louis said. Lynn’s adjusting eyes found him sitting on the ground not far away, knees up, his back against a fallen log. Seen by clear daylight in such a prosaic position, he did not look like a maniacal killer. He looked … ordinary. And rather pitiful. His thinning black hair was plastered against his skull; without his spectacles his eyes had the rheumy, lashless look of a rabbit’s. His skin was pasty white, his torn clothes showed glimpses of the even paler flesh they imperfectly hid, and like themselves he had lost his shoes. He was cadaver-thin. “You have been sent by Yahweh as His instrument to take me to the Lamb.”

His gaze was on Jess, who was also soaked, pale, and bedraggled but presented a far different picture than Louis. Shirtless, his sodden, ripped jeans clinging to his legs, scratched and scraped and dirty, Jess was handsome still. With his broad shoulders, muscular chest, and arms, and lean, fit build, he could have been a poster boy for virile masculine health. Except, of course, for the wound in his shoulder. The two dime-size holes that pierced him front and back were surrounded now by twin mounds of swollen purple and black flesh. Just looking at them made Lynn wince.

He needed a doctor. He had to be in pain, and what if infection set in?

“Yeah, well,” Jess said dryly. “Yahweh works in mysterious ways.”

“He does, doesn’t He,” Louis replied with perfect seriousness. Jess rolled his eyes at Lynn. Lynn would have smiled if she hadn’t been so tired—and so scared.

“What time is it?” she asked, pulling away from Jess’s side to stand upright. She discovered that her head hurt and she felt slightly nauseous, but she could function, because she had to.

“Three-thirty—
one
, to be precise,” Louis answered, glancing at his wrist.

They—and most of the rest of the country—had approximately seventeen and a half hours left to live.

Lynn and Jess exchanged wordless glances. They both were thinking the same thing.

“Let’s get going,” Jess said, his arm dropping away from her waist as he took a couple of restless steps forward.

“First I’ve got to find Rory,” Lynn demurred. “Anyway, before we do anything I think we need a plan.”

Realizing what she had said, Lynn glanced up to find Jess looking at her.

“Don’t say it,” Lynn warned as their gazes met.

She knew the situation was dire when he didn’t reply.

“Want a plan?” he said instead, sounding impatient. “Okay, here’s a plan: We go as fast as we can to the nearest phone and call the cops and the ATF and the FBI and the freaking White House, if necessary, and tell them that a lunatic has hatched a plan to blow up the country at nine in the morning. Then we let them figure out how to stop it.”

Lynn thought for a second. “How far are we from anyplace where we might be able to find a phone?”

Jess grimaced. “At a guess I’d say about fifty miles.”

“We can’t possibly walk that far in time! Wouldn’t we be better off trying to hook up with your brother and the rest of the group? At least they have horses!”

“Owen will come looking for us sooner or later, but it may be later and it certainly won’t be before morning, because when we don’t turn up he’ll figure that Tim drove us straight into town to see a doctor, or back to the ranch, or somewhere like that. We could try to find them, but I’d guess they’re about twenty miles away and halfway up the next mountain by now. It would probably take us the whole seventeen hours or more to get there on foot. And we might miss them on the mountain.”

“I don’t suppose there’d be a cellular phone or a CB or anything like that in the Jeep?” Just the thought of what else was in the Jeep caused Lynn to repress a shudder.

“Nope.”

“Then what do we do?” Anger at Adventure, Inc.’s absolutely inexcusable failure to have any means of communicating with the outside world in an emergency sharpened her voice. She glared at Jess.

“We walk,” Jess said, tight-lipped. “That is the plan. The whole plan. The entire plan. The only possible plan. You can stay here and think about it some more if you want, but I’m walking out of here. Maybe we’ll get lucky and somebody will give us a lift once we get closer in.”

“I have to find Rory,” Lynn said. “I can’t leave here without Rory.”

“Rory is going to be toast, as we all are, if we don’t get this thing stopped,” Jess said. “Anyway, you sent her for help. If she has a brain the size of a flea’s, she’ll be walking along the road. We’ll catch up to her. So let’s go. Louis, get up.”

“Don’t upset yourselves. Yahweh will help us,” Louis said serenely, getting to his feet. Jess started off, discovered that he was still tied to Lynn, stopped, and tried to break the gauze.

“Hold still,” Lynn said when it became obvious that wet, twisted gauze was difficult to break. Moving close to Jess, she picked delicately at the knot encircling his left front belt loop with the ruins of her nails.

“To hell with that,” Jess snorted, hooking his fingers in the belt loop and ripping it loose. He passed the torn-off belt loop, gauze rope attached, to Lynn.

“That works,” Lynn said, accepting the offering. Gathering up the trailing ends, she didn’t bother to try to free herself—there wasn’t time—but instead wrapped the gauze around her waist in a makeshift sash and knotted it.