Page 52

Jessa

Twenty-six hours, fifty-eight minutes buried

“ What ’ s that?” Bonnie asked in a small voice, breaking into my thoughts.

My heavy eyelids tried to open, but it was too difficult a task. There was nothing to see anyway. So instead I just listened, trying to focus, even as my blurry mind kept drifting back to Sophie. There was a faint rumbling, the earth vibrating ever so slightly beneath our heads, and a dull growling sound getting louder overhead.

“ No, no,” the kids shrieked as more dirt began raining down onto us.

That made my eyes pop open. Whatever was up there was putting more pressure on the cave-in. A car, driving on top of the mud-filled shaft?

Something scraped across the top of the sheet metal in an eerie squealing sound, followed by the thump of something heavy.

More clods of dirt showered down through the hole in the plywood above us.

They ’ re burying the entrance the rest of the way, my mind whispered. So that nobody will ever find you.

“ Rose, Ben, Ked, hurry. Prop the mattresses up and make a shelter for us to hide underneath!” I shouted, doing everything I could to make my voice louder than the rumbling noise and the dirt clods pelting us.

That shelter would only buy us a few precious minutes until the thick plywood board Sage had dug her way through at the top of the bunker fully collapsed with the weight of the mud avalanche and the weight of whatever was making that rumbling noise above us.

A few minutes was a few minutes, though.

I closed my eyes and imagined taking pictures of Sophie and her date by the porch on prom night. Hugging her tight at graduation. Dipping our toes in the sand at Bear Lake, Soph ’ s favorite vacation spot. The last place I remembered hearing her squeal with delight.

Just a few more hopes that were about to be crushed.

But that didn ’ t mean I ’ d let them slip between my fingers.