Night Of Knives

Chapter 5

For a long moment Veronica doesn't understand what she is doing lying on a stone floor pressed between two other bodies. Then memory jolts her like a thunderbolt and she moans with terror, instantly wide awake.

She hurts seemingly everywhere: badly blistered feet, cuts on her legs, a big bruise on her hip, a pulled calf muscle, aching shoulders, skinned wrists, chafed ankle, headache, hunger, thirst, stiffness everywhere, an overall feeling that she has been hit by a freight train. At least her clothes are now mostly dry. The cave is dark. She has no idea how long she has slept. Jacob, Derek and Susan seem asleep, albeit uneasily. She hears but can't make out soft, frightened whispers from Tom and Judy. Veronica wants to lie where she is and sleep for days, and she is so exhausted that despite the hard, cold, uneven stone floor she probably could, but she needs to pee. At least she isn't dehydrated.

Just getting to her feet feels like climbing K2, but somehow she manages. Her right calf won't flex at all, she can barely walk, but that hardly matters, the chain on her left ankle keeps her from going more than twenty feet from the anchor rock. She isn't sure where to go, but she has to go somewhere, so she limps near the waterfall. Her chain clanks bleakly behind her, as if she's the ghost in a ghost story. She doesn't want to pee so close to the others, but tells herself they can't afford niceties like personal embarrassment anymore, and anyway the white noise of the waterfall swallows up the sound.

Veronica drinks from the waterfall, soothing her throat. The water feels cool and clear. She hopes it is also clean, that no upstream village dumps dead animals or feces into the water. Dysentery is all she needs right now. Maybe she shouldn't drink from it, but she already did last night, what the hell. She feels her way back to her slot between Jacob and Derek, lies laboriously back down, and starts to cry. It feels like an involuntary physical reaction, like sneezing. She can't stop, she starts weeping more violently. Derek wakes up and rolls over to face her.

"Sorry, I'm sorry," she bleats.

"It's okay," he mutters, and reaches out for her, wraps his arms around her, holds her close as she sobs against his shoulder. She tries to relax into his arms and let her exhaustion carry her back into sleep. It doesn't seem to work, she is not conscious of having fallen asleep, but somehow, when she next opens her eyes, the cave is filled with filtered dawn, the sun is on the rise, and others are up and moving.

The ceiling of the cave is barely high enough to stand, and except near the waterfall, it is so dark she has to squint. Veronica moves as close to the light and the water as she can, as quickly as she can, heedless of the pain in her strained muscles. Being buried alive has long been her greatest fear. Yesterday she was too exhausted to react to her surroundings, and fear of imminent death trumped claustrophic anxiety, but now just the thought of being in one of the dark corners of this cave makes her dizzily lightheaded and a little nauseous.

Once they have moved from lying on stone to sitting on a rock there is precious little to do. Jacob mutters, "I'm hungry," and there is general agreement. Otherwise everyone seems dazed and disinterested, too weak for conversation. Diane seems better, she's at least ambulatory, but she doesn't speak and her eyes are wide as a child's.

"You have to tell them to get me a phone," Michael says, breaking a brooding silence. "I'll get them money. Tell them I can get them a million dollars if they let us go."

Veronica wonders if the us in question means all of them, or just Michael and Diane.

"I will," Derek says. "When they come."

"I can do it fast. I can transfer fifty thousand dollars today, over the phone."

"What makes you think they'll let you go once they have the money?" Jacob asks.