Page 52 of Preying Heart
“The entire hill and part of the valley beyond.” Heath spreads his arm in an arc. “My dad chose this site for the vantage point. It’s defensible because they can only come from the bridge.”
“They can also cut you off easily. Blow up the bridge and we’re left here to starve.”
“Maybe not,” he says. “You ever heard of the Idaho Gold Rush?”
“Can’t say I have. Thought everything was in California.”
“We have our share of abandoned mines. There are still plenty of claims up in them hills. Let’s just say there are tunnels and ways of disappearing.”
“I’m claustrophobic.”
“I’ll make a note of that.” Heath pushes aside the branches of a bushy tree that hangs too low over the pine-needle laden trail. “See how I camouflaged this? If someone didn’t know about this branch point, they would think you disappeared into thin air.”
“I feel like my world has disappeared.” I crouch down underneath the canopy of leaves and follow him into a narrow gully. Everything is muted and deathly quiet as if we entered another realm. “Does this lead to one of the mines?”
“Why don’t we see?” He sports a sneaky smile on his face.
“I told you I’m claustrophobic,” I complain but I don’t really mean it. Yes, I don’t like enclosed spaces, but with Heath as my guide, I know I won’t get lost. “Are there bats in the mines?”
“There might be.” He leads me on another twisty trail. We scramble over boulders and squeeze between rock walls until we come to a tunnel propped up by old wooden support beams. A weathered wooden sign with the remnants of the words, “Keep Out,” hangs from a single rusted nail.
“Is there a way out through here?” I ask.
“Yes, and it exits near a creek where if you follow it, you eventually get to a road where you can hitchhike.”
Glock sniffs the ground near the entrance and then pees against the support beam.
“What stops people from coming back through the mine to your place?” I try peering into the darkness but can’t see much farther than a few yards.
“No one knows how to find it from the other side. I know where it is approximately from the mile marker on the road, but the vegetation is so dense due to the water available that the hole is hidden. It doesn’t have support beams or grates or tracks on that side. It’s literally a hole underneath a rocky ledge that the creek covers partway.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
“Wanna go in and explore?” He grins and takes my hand, giving me no choice.
We wander into the tunnel, and the temperature drops. The air is stale and musty, and the scuff of our boots echo our muffled breaths. The darkness grows, looming ahead, and my skin crawls with the sensation of being watched, or it’s just my claustrophobia making me nervous.
Heath flicks on a tiny flashlight and points it at a pile of jagged rocks and twisted metal. “You’ll basically have to crawl over this to pick up where the tracks run.”
“What if it caves in?” I shiver at the thought of being buried alive.
“It’s been standing for over a hundred years.” He puts his arm around me and rubs my shoulder. “We won’t go in any farther. If you’re running from someone, you would follow the tracks until you come out through knee-deep water.”
“You sound like you’ve explored it all. It must be hard to scramble over the rubble and squeeze your way between the gaps.”
“It is, but once you get through the rubble it’s pretty level. I did it with a broken arm. Of course, my mom helped me most of the way.”
I lift my face toward Heath, wishing I can see his expression in the dark shadows of his flashlight beam. “What was your mother running from?”
He sighs and rubs the side of his head as if it pains him. “She wanted to get away from my dad. She was going alone, but I followed her. I broke my arm when I fell off that ridge we climbed down into the dry riverbed.”
“Was that the same place you fell a week ago?” I feel him tremble in my arms, and I lean my face against his neck to comfort him.
“Yes. I wasn’t careful.”
“What happened with you and your mom? Did you get away?”
His body is stiff and unyielding. I pressed him too far. It’s not my business, but at the same time, I want to know. I care, and I get the feeling he was also abandoned by his mom. Or at least she tried to abandon him.
