“What’s in the boxes?” he asked.
Mary Ellen, rubbing her wrists, went to check while Cam watched the cats. She grunted in surprise. “Would you believe dog food?”
“A mountain lion eats dog food?” Cam asked.
“Those two would eat each other at this juncture,” she said. “I see deer bones in the straw, so this stuff was probably emergency rations.”
“Maybe if we fed them, they’d lose interest in us,” he said.
“Worth a try,” she replied, and went to work with a rusty can opener that was hanging by the door. The cats stopped pacing when she started opening cans and sat down.
“Nice kitty-kitty,” Cam intoned hopefully. They both hissed at him this time, but they were watching Mary Ellen. She found a steel feed bowl under the straw and filled it with six cans of dog food. “Now what?” she said again, echoing Cam’s own thoughts. How could they get the bowl through the door without losing an arm?
Mary Ellen solved the problem. She carried the bowl to the cage door. Holding the bowl in one hand and working the bolt with the other, she backed out the bolt and then yelled at the two cats, which promptly slunk back away from the door. She opened it, slid the bowl in, and then rebolted the door.
What happened next wasn’t pretty. The larger cat ran to the bowl, as did the smaller one. The larger one whirled on its haunches and attacked the smaller one with a thumping whirlwind of slashing paws. The smaller one shrieked once and then rolled away from the bowl. It lay down on the stone floor and licked its wounds, never taking its eyes off the rapidly disappearing dog chow.
Mary Ellen opened another can at both ends and threw it through the wire to a far corner of the room. The wounded cat pounced on it and began grinding the can in its jaws. It hurt Cam’s teeth just to watch it, but Mary Ellen simply opened up another three cans and threw them in the same general direction.
“Really starving,” Cam said.
“And tamed males,” she said. “And that’s the crime of taming a wild animal. Ultimately, somebody forgets, and they starve, which hurts.” She opened up one more can of dog food and threw it to the front of the cave, where it splashed.
Cam blinked. Splashed?
He stared through the dim light and saw water at the front of the cavern. There was a steady stream of water coming down the passageway. Mary Ellen saw it, too. She didn’t have to say “now what” again, either. The smaller cat was ignoring the water as it savaged the individual cans of dog food. The big guy had licked the bowl clean and was now headed over to the corner where the last can of dog food was being flattened. There was more growling and hissing, but they had evidently reduced the edge of their hunger to the extent that there was no more fighting. The big one started lapping water from what was rapidly becoming a small lake, and the smaller cat joined in. Some of the larger clumps of straw out in front of the cages were beginning to float.
“Does whoever’s coming know about this cave?” she asked.
“I doubt it. There are seals on the trailer door, but I didn’t see any signs of this little zoo being discovered. But there was no lock on the hatch, so if we can get by the cats, we should be able to get out.”
“Get by the cats.”
“Yeah, well, they’ve been fed. Sort of. And I have the forty-five.”
She gave him a look.
“I’m not going to drown down here,” he said. “I didn’t domesticate two mountain lions. I’m sorry about this whole weird business, but-”
“Where’d they come from?”
He started to answer but then stopped to think. Where had they come from? The narrow passageway, the one with no airflow. On the other hand, the other passageway had an airflow, which usually meant access to the outside. No, it had been the left door he’d pushed closed but not locked.
“That one,” he said, pointing to the left cage.
“Let’s throw meat in there; if we can get them in there, we can lock the cage.”
“Damn. I hate women who can think,” he said. “I’ll throw the meat, and you lock them in.”
She rolled her eyes at him and he pointed out that it was her idea.
It worked. The cats darted into the cage after the cans of meat and she slammed and locked the cage door right behind them. They started squabbling over cans and didn’t appear to notice they’d been caught.
Cam trotted up the entry passageway to shut off that water. Mary Ellen found him standing under the bare lightbulb, looking up. The ladder was gone and the hatch was shut. There was water pouring around all the edges of the hatch, and a good bit of it was dripping down the wire and onto that bare lightbulb.
“It’s gonna get dark pretty soon, he said. “Either we get up to that hatch or we find another way out.”
“There’re all those boxes,” she said. “Pile them up. You’re probably tall enough to reach the hatch if you stand on them.”
That also worked, but the hatch didn’t move. Cam did manage to pull the extension cord down far enough to form a loop, which got the water away from the bulb. But then the watersoaked cardboard boxes began to collapse, so he had to jump down. The floor was wet, but the water wasn’t accumulating in this room. It was all flowing downhill to the cage room.
“That right-hand cage had a tunnel behind it,” he said. “There was fresh air blowing in. The other one was stagnant. I think we have to try it.”
“With no light?” she asked. Her voice betrayed a fear of enclosed spaces.
“I have this,” Cam said, hauling a tiny Maglite out of his utility belt. “In a cave, it’ll look like a searchlight. Caves are really dark.”
“Don’t I know it,” she replied. “Well, at least we know where the cats are.”
But when they got back to the main chamber, the back door to the left-hand cage was wide open and the cats were gone.
68
They had to crawl on their hands and knees for about fifty feet before the passage allowed them to stand up. The left-hand passage had been a more attractive proposition, except for that one not-so-minor detail. Ankle-deep water rising in the main chamber had pretty much forced the decision: Stay there and drown, or give the other passage a shot.
They made better progress once they could stand up, but Cam was pretty sure they were going down, not up. The passage was only about two feet wide, so they had to step sideways most of the time. Cam led, shining the light alternately ahead and down so that they didn’t walk off a subterranean cliff in the dark. The air smelled of old rock and damp, and the walls seemed to press in on them constantly. He could hear Mary Ellen’s labored breathing behind him, and he was pretty sure it was not due to physical exertion. He tried to make a joke about her looking to see if her cell phone had a signal, but she didn’t laugh.
They finally stepped down into a small cavern. Cam shone the light around and saw that there were three other passages leading out of it. He had no idea which way to go.
He shone the light back into the passage they’d come through. A silvery ribbon of water was pushing toward them through the dust on the floor.
“Look,” she said. “If the water’s coming down here, it can’t flood that cage area, can it? You said people are coming. Let’s go back up there. At least that’s close to the surface.”
Her eyes were huge in the tiny white glow of the flashlight. He thought about it. “They’d never hear us underground. Not unless they’d come over to the chicken coop, like I did.”
“They won’t search?”
“I was prepared to pull that trailer off its foundations because I knew you were here. They’ll see my truck, see my dogs, and think I’m out in the woods somewhere. The trailer’s still sealed. They didn’t find the tunnels the first time.”
“So which way do we go?” she asked, her voice rising. “How do we even decide?”
Her voice was loud enough to create a small echo in the surrounding passages. It was answered by a distant guttural cough. Cam put his hand over her mouth before she could say anything more and pushed her roughly back into the passage from which they’d just come. He swung the light beam across the mouths of the other three tunnels and then turned it off. He bent down and whispered in her ear that a cat was coming. He felt her tense up. He signaled with his body that she needed to back up some more, then got the. 45 out, made himself as comfortable as he could, and waited.