Page 29 of What Remains (John Worthy #3)

Roni let go of a shriek. “John!”

“Come on, come on !” Hauling her to his chest, he tried shielding her as the torrent came for them, advancing in an icy rush.

Water was gushing over rock walls that squealed and screamed and fractured with bony cracks right and left.

The torrent hammered the rock floor and John knew that the flow wouldn’t stop, not until the amount of water coming in from the neighboring aqueduct equaled that going out.

Because water is a force of nature and nature abhors a vacuum.

“Listen to me!” Clipping his light to his vest, he bawled into Roni’s ear as bone-chilling water swirled around their thighs and grabbed at their legs.

His feet were already numb. “We’re on a slope in the old aqueduct but once we get out of here and back to where we saw the kids, it levels out.

But we have to stay above the water! The current’s too strong; we’ll get tripped up and then—” He didn’t have to finish that thought.

Get tripped up and swept back downhill, and that would be the end.

But climbing would be hard. Water this cold would drain them of their strength much faster.

“I understand, but how?” Her face was contorted in a rictus of terror. “What if the water fills up the tunnel?”

“It won’t! Worthy’s right.” Panting, Driver searched the wall, scouring the rock right and left with his flashlight. “There’s a lot of water, but all we have to do is stay above it.”

“Oh, is that all?” Roni’s voice was tight with barely controlled hysteria.

“Take it easy. Here.” Driver sloshed to where Roni had perched to wait for them. “All we have to do is what you did. Stay above the water and we’ll be fine.”

“It’s one little shelf.” Roni couldn’t keep the despair from her voice. “We won’t all fit. The water’s only going to keep rising.”

“It can’t. The water will flow where there’s the least resistance and that’s back the way we came.

Besides, we’re not staying to find out. The rock’s got a lot of divots here where the guys who used the old wells to get down here and keep the aqueduct clear.

There are shelves all along here. Come on.

” Clipping his flashlight to his vest, Driver butted the toe of his right boot into a vertical cut and heaved.

Water sheeted from his waist and legs. Reaching with his left hand, Driver snagged a rocky spur and pulled himself up another half foot. “Follow me, come on!”

“Go. Driver’s right.” He remembered what Flowers had said just, what?

An hour and change ago? “We just stay above the flow, so we don’t get tripped up.

” He didn’t want to think about what might happen if one of them did.

Fall back into the water and while a person probably wouldn’t drown, the current might pull him further back into the tunnels they’d just left.

Even now, water swirled and tugged around his thighs. “I’m right behind you, honey.”

“You better be.” Roni’s tone was fierce, the cords taut in her neck.

Later, John would think that if this had been a movie, the director would’ve cued the heroine to knot the hero’s shirt in her fists and pull him into a desperate kiss.

But this was reality, and Roni only jabbed a finger into his chest. “ Right behind me!”

Don’t worry about that. Hauling up his right leg was like pulling against concrete.

Water sheeted over stone as he butted the toe of his boot into the cut Roni had just used.

Grunting, he strained against the suck and the pull of the current.

The water gave, though grudgingly. His muscles screamed with effort, but then he was moving, above the water level now, monkeying up the wall in what felt like slow motion.

The water’s roar was relentless, a bellow.

Waves hammered and broke against stone, sending up arcing jets.

What if Roni’s right? Wedging the toe of his left boot into the rock, he stretched to the right, grappling for a handhold.

There was a bark of pain as jagged rock sliced his palm, but he muscled that aside and kept moving.

As a kid he’d been to an indoor wall, the kind where they tied a couple ropes around your waist so if and when you slipped, you didn’t break your neck.

One of the instructors, a younger guy with ropes of muscle in his arms and thighs as big around as tree trunks, said he should always maintain three points of contact.

Whatever combination works. You forget that just once and you’re not roped?

“Kiss your ass good-bye,” he muttered now. What if the water just keeps rising? No, that wouldn’t happen, would it? Water would keep flowing downhill and whatever flowed alongside would peter out as the levels reached steady?—

The thought dropped out as something let out a high-pitched, grinding squeal followed by a sudden, loud, brittle crack .

The sound was like that of a dried branch broken over a knee.

He snatched a look over a shoulder in time to see the wall on the opposite side of their tunnel and about fifty feet from where they’d just exited split in two.

Chunks of rotten, pitted rock hurtled through the air.

Turning aside, he cringed, turtling his neck into hunched shoulders, while his hands clawed and dug in and held on.

Something whizzed past his left ear and smashed stone while the largest rocks plunged down, smacking the water and sending up watery coronets that sheeted over his body and doused him head to toe.

Close. Shaking his head to clear water from his eyes, he blinked then froze a moment at a new sound: a liquid fizz.

Turning, he saw that where the rock had given way, a new watery jet spewed.

It was like something from a movie about a submarine that’s gone below crush depth.

First, the bolts went and then water blasted through cracks and chinks and seams strained to the breaking point from the pressure.

That’s what is happening here. Limestone was porous, brittle, and there’d been just enough quaking and shaking for the stone to shift and cracks to widen as the walls buckled under the relentless pressure. But maybe that break’s enough to relieve the ? —

The thought hitched and skidding to a halt, and then he simply froze, right where he was, unable to truly process what he saw: an enormous pile of rubble spilling across the tunnel from left to right and reaching almost to the ceiling.

No. His heart shuddered against a pulse of fresh fear coursing through his veins.

The water kept coming, the flow smashing against rubble—and did not push through.

Dammed by rock and debris, the water fizzing through this sudden, new fissure was backing up and rising.

Even as he stared, he saw the water eddy and swirl, the slower current created by the barrier colliding with that jet spewing from the cleft left by the blow-out—and begin to spin.

“Worthy!” He tore his gaze away from the gathering whirlpool and looked up. Driver hung a good twenty feet above and to John’s left. To his right, Roni’s light winked as she spidered her way to the other man.

“Move!” Driver shouted. “Come on!”

He nearly followed. His left hand reached for a rill of stone, and then he stopped.

“That’s the wrong way!” he shouted, though his voice was lost even to himself in the water’s churn and bellow.

Why was Driver heading back? The man was heading downhill.

“It’s the wrong way, you’re going deeper. Driver, it’s the wrong way !”

Driver either didn’t hear or was determined to ignore him and only continued to crab his way left and up.

But Roni paused. Craning over her right shoulder, she peered down.

She’d followed Driver’s example and clipped her flashlight to her vest so that light both sprayed over the rock and illuminated her features: the white oval of her face, its features drawn tight with fear.

Although he couldn’t hear her over the water’s roar, he read his name on her lips.

“Roni! Honey!” He shook his head in a vehement negative and this time, he took his left hand away from the rock. “No, wrong way!” he shouted, slashing the air with an emphatic swipe of his hand. “That’s the wrong ?—”

With no warning at all, the cavern seemed to swell and then shudder and shake as if they were noisome fleas on the back of some gigantic creature determined to throw them off.

A surge of terror scrambled into his throat, and he slapped rock with his left hand and dug his fingers into stone with all strength.

He might even have cried out, but if he had, the sound was lost in another enormous squeal and then a hard crack and the thin geyser of a new and harder jet suddenly became a torrent as the opposite wall burst. Water, frigid and foaming, roared out on a hail of debris which cascaded into the whirling pool below. The cavern shuddered and bucked?—

And John lost his grip.

He was aware of falling, of peeling away from rock and plummeting backward into a maelstrom of water and stone.

If he had a last glimpse of Roni’s face, he never could remember.

What he did recall was the moment his body smacked the water hard enough to force all the air from his lungs in a sickening whoosh —and then a cold so intense it burned, and then the moment right after that when his body acted on instinct and his mouth opened for a breath of air that wasn’t there at the same instant his throat filled with frigid water—and then closed down tight so he couldn’t, wouldn’t drown.

Instead, he suffocated.