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“Okay—what do I do?”

Frantic but determined, I stalked the perimeter of the pit.

“Throw me the flashlight,” Nick said. It seemed like the least I could do, so I dropped it down and he caught it.

“What are you doing?”

“Get out of here. ”

“What are you doing?”

“Get out of here!” He was rummaging with the duffel; he was pulling the shells out of the towels that wrapped them. He set the shell on a board.

“Tie them together! Tie them together, we’ll use them as a rope. Throw them up and we’ll pull you out, goddamn you!”

“Not long enough,” he said. “The floor won’t hold us, anyway. ”

“It’ll hold,” Malachi insisted, creeping around the opposite side of the lip. “Man, tie the towels together!”

Below us, Nick flexed an arm and there was a ripping sound where he’d pulled off the hem of the towel. He held the strip of fabric in his teeth and pointed the flashlight down at one of the sheets of paper we’d swiped from beneath the ball park.

He read quickly, then dropped the paper and examined the shell, all of this so fast, like he didn’t know what he was doing but he figured he’d better learn in a hurry. “We’re not going to get more than one chance at this. Keep looking around up there. Look for something—a ladder or a rope, something real that might be useful. I haven’t got but another minute or two and I’m going to make it count!”

Now well beyond frantic, I stood up and stared around at the storage—at all the trash, all the warped crates, and the disused leftovers of long-forgotten cleaning instruments and construction tools.

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Nothing looked promising, but Malachi was rifling through the stash on the other side of the room with the pure tenacity of a terrier on a rat.

“Wait a minute,” he said, stopping and turning to dash right back outside.

“What are you doing? Get back here!” I shouted, but he was already gone so I kept thrashing around, looking for something—anything.

Seconds later my brother returned with a long red cable wound up around his arm. “Like this?”

“Like that!” I reached out and took them from him. “Jumper cables?”

Big, long jumper cables—good ones. “I saw them inside a car on my way here. I broke the window, but I figured this was an emergency. ”

“Indeed. Good job,” I mumbled, unwinding them and looking for a solid spot to brace myself. “I’m going to need your help here,” I told him. “We’re going to do this the long way, the stretchy way. I don’t think the floor will put up with anything else. ”

“Just tell me what to do. ”

“Back to the hole. Back to solid ground—lie down and grab my feet. ”

I put myself belly-down on the dusty, muddy, messy floor and twisted one end of the cables around my wrist, then for further leverage, I clamped the alligator jaws to my leather belt.

Then I used the other end like a lasso and threw them over the edge. “Get my feet, Malachi—get my feet!”

He took them and held them hard.

“Nick?” I called, almost glad I couldn’t see what he was up to. “Nick, do you see the—”

“I see them. Just a second. ”

“Have you got a second?”

“Yes, shut up. Hang on. ” He tugged at the cable end, and he was quiet for a moment before hollering more. “When I say ‘now,’ do your damnedest—but if it doesn’t hold, or if I let go, you’ve got to run. ”