Shit. No way. In spite of the rockets of pain shooting up his leg, so bad he had to cling to consciousness and breathe deep to keep himself from hurling. One hard push and he was sitting up unsteadily, sick, but not flat on his back. He forced himself to run a hand down his leg. Warm, slick and sticky with blood, but there was nothing sticking out, like a bone. He hadn’t impaled himself on anything. All good things.
That girl doesn’t want you, Rainer. His mother always knew how to cut right to the quick. If you follow her to that place, you’re just asking for heartache.
But his heart was already aching. It never stopped aching for Finley. From the minute he saw her, he was hopeless.
If you want her, if you love her, go get her, his dad said. If it doesn’t work out, at least you’ll know it wasn’t for lack of trying. Otherwise, you’ll always wonder. That’s why he’d followed her from Seattle to The Hollows, because he never wanted to wonder. Now he was wondering what would have happened if he’d just stayed in Seattle. At least he wouldn’t be down whatever hole he’d just fallen in.
Rainer felt on the wall for something to hold on to and found a grip. What was it? Wood, like a two-by-four. He knew where he was then, in one of those abandoned mine tunnels that Finley was talking about. He’d looked at the maps, marveled at how vast was the network, how deep and far the tunnels stretched. Finley had said that a kid falls into one nearly every summer, in spite of repeated warnings not to veer off park trails, in spite of the rangers’ attempts to find and cordon off weak areas. She said that a man hid down there for months while the police hunted for him. Did she say if they ever got him? Was he still down here? Surely not.
His heart was pumping—with fear, with effort—he tried to slow his breathing. He’d heard Jake talk about the mines, too, hadn’t he? Jake was some kind of history expert about The Hollows, was a total geek for the place, a lifelong member of The Hollows Historical Society. He said that there were climb-outs, places where ladders had been placed and led to openings, many of which had been sealed off by the park rangers.
Was it better to stay near the opening into which he’d fallen? Or feel his way deeper into the tunnel, hoping for a climb-out? He thought of the maps he’d looked at. There was a major mine head that Finley had circled, somewhere near the trail that he had been on. Had it been North? Rainer wasn’t great with directions.
“Finley,” he called, hearing his voice bounce around. “Finley, are you out there?”
His phone. Where was it? He patted at his pockets and found them empty. It must have fallen from his pocket when he fell. He reached around on the ground for it, finding only the damp and bumpy surfaces, not the slick, flat one he wanted.
“Come on,” he said. “Where are you?”
He kept feeling around. Please, please, please. Come on. Then, as if in answer to a prayer, the phone started to ring, just out of his reach to the right. It vibrated, filling the small space around him with its light. He reached, straining, and with effort and a nauseating wave of pain, he grabbed it. Finley’s face smiled out at him, a picture he’d snapped when she first loved him. Every time she called, he got to see the look that he didn’t get to see on her face in real time anymore.
He slid the answer bar. “Finley,” he said. “Hello?”
But there was only static and then the click of the line going dead. He had no signal bars at all. Then one flashed, tantalizingly, but then was gone. He tried to call back. “Calling Finley’s Mobile” it read, teasing him with an expectant line of ellipses. But it hung there. Call failed. He tried again, and again, and finally slumped back against the dirt wall.
He’d watched that movie about the kid who’d gone out in the desert, fallen into a gap between rocks, got pinned, and wound up cutting off his own foot to survive. Or was it his hand? Either way, Rainer knew that he was not that kind of guy, not that he had any call to cut off a limb at the moment. But if it came to that, he knew he was not going to be the guy who did “whatever it took to survive.” He just didn’t have that kind of energy, the “belly of fire,” as his father liked to call it. In fact, if Rainer had a light for the joint in his pocket, he’d be smoking right now to take the edge off his fear. Then he’d probably pass out, wake up too dopey to even think about how he might get out of this. Generally that’s what he liked about pot; it softened the sharp edges of anxiety and fear and worry. You didn’t forget about any of the things that nagged at you; you just stopped caring about them. When he was high, he was less angry, too. Yeah, but all of that energy? Finley countered during an argument about his pot smoking. That’s what keeps people from just lying around all day, eating Doritos and playing Call of Duty.