Five minutes later, the water was so deep she had to turn her head and raise it, using her stiff, burning neck muscles to do so. She tried to talk once, but failed. Making herself cough helped, and she said to Adan, “Keep your head as high as you can. The spiders are getting less. If you can put your head on my heel, I’ll try to help keep you up.”
“Okay.”
The water was a stream now, and ice cold. The spiders seemed to have left, but the water sapped their strength every second.
Hunter held her breath and turned her head, putting her mouth and nose under water so she could see up the shaft. Only the faintest gray indicated the opening. Checking her phone showed three minutes of power left.
Fear pumped adrenaline through her, and Hunter moved faster, keeping her head turned to the right and as high as she could. The water reached her chin, and still rose. Adan coughed and sputtered, but came on, still holding her ankle.
Hunter’s phone failed when they were several feet from the entrance. The coldness and the dark filled her with despair. A brilliant flash of lightning lit the sky and let her see how close they were, maybe ten feet from the opening.
The lightning also brought a heavy deluge of ice cold rain, so much that the shaft filled at a rapid rate. Hunter pushed and crawled as fast as she could, but the rain continued to fill the shaft.
She heard Adan gurgling, she raised her legs to lift his head as water covered her mouth and one eye. With time for one last breath, Hunter hooked her foot under Adan’s arm and pulled him forward as she continued in the dark and without air as the water closed over her.
Her lungs burned and panic gave her strength to continue. When she pushed again, her hands, reaching as far out in front of her as she could, broke the water’s surface.
She pushed forward while pulling a limp Adan with her feet, and her face broke the surface. She gasped several huge breaths while climbing out of the hole and reaching down to grab Adan. She lifted his head from the water as she shivered and her teeth chattered.
As soon as she turned him on his side and called his name, the boy coughed out a cup full of liquid, choked a bit, then breathed. He said, “Are we alive?”
Hunter stroked his head and helped him sit up. Both were waist deep in the water as she said, “Let’s not do that again, okay?”
With their bodies numb from cold, they crawled out of the bowl-like depression that housed the shaft entrance. She said, “So that’s why all the water.”
They crawled on hands and knees to the lip of the bowl and looked around. Short brush crowded the rim and provided good protection.
Adan hugged himself and said, “I am so cold.”
Hunter said, “Me, too.” She motioned with her hand for him, “Come here.” They hugged each other for body warmth as she looked around for shelter.
Adan’s teeth chattered. That’s when Hunter spotted a small overhang along the side of the mountain. She told Adan and he squinted, trying to see it. Hunter pointed with her forefinger and said, “Look along my arm to the finger, like sighting a rifle. Its right at the end.”
Adan finally saw it, then said to Hunter, “How could you see that?”
“Eating lots of carrots,” She smiled at him. They started across the hillside, and moved up to the slope, along a shelf of stone that stood out from the side.
When they reached the shelter forty minutes later, both were exhausted. Hunter climbed into the shelter, a stone ledge undercut where softer stone and caliche had washed out to leave a space six feet high in the center, and ten feet in depth to the back wall and extending for twenty feet to where the ends tapered down to the ground.
Evidence of prehistoric Indians showed with the burned rock that had been shoved out the mouth of the shelter and down the slope. A large, abandoned rat nest was along one portion of the back wall. Hunter knew it would supply a lot of dry wood and tinder so they could start a fire.
She searched around the pile, found a dry sotol stalk, and a flat piece of some hard wood, she thought mesquite. The abandoned nest was comprised of fine pieces of grass, hair, downy feathers, and bark. She arranged a handful on the stone floor, and used the sotol stalk to rub the mesquite and make a friction fire. They had flames in less than two minutes.
Adan fed the flames with twigs to create a small, almost smokeless fire, with room between it and the back wall to reflect the heat. They sat between the fire and wall, and within twenty minutes were dry and comfortable.
Hunter spotted a pitaya cactus nearby and went to it to pluck the strawberry-flavored fruit. Animals and birds hadn’t gotten to it, so the cactus was full. She carried them in her shirt front, holding it like a basket, and brought them to the fire, where she and Adan ate, relishing the tart sweetness of them after their ordeal.
Adan said, “Do we walk to the border now?”
Hunter held up her phone and saw the batteries were dead. “I think so. We’ll have to be careful in case Ellis or his men are looking for us.”
“They believe we’re dead inside that mine.”
“Uh-huh, and we want to keep them thinking that way until we get somewhere safe.”
They sat in silence after that, both exhausted, and watching the sun go down. As the burning orb dropped to the horizon, it turned the bottoms of the low clouds an incredible, deep red so rich it appeared they glowed with a vermillion inner light.
Hunter motioned Adan to her and they scooted close to the fire that had burned down to coals. She positioned Adan so his back was to her front and her arms over his chest to put her body heat around him. The night grew cool, then cold, with the fresh rain’s humidity making it feel even colder. They soon fell into exhausted sleep as the now clear, cloudless sky full of stars turned like a gigantic, slow-motion wheel through the night above them.