Gabriel Hunt - Hunt Beyond the Frozen Fire

Outside, Gabriel was marched across the clearing to the pit where he had fought Millie. Where the hell was the big man anyway? Still doing his duty with the other women of the tribe? Looking around, Gabriel could see no sign of him anywhere. But he didn’t have time to wonder for long before being prodded over the edge.

He turned in mid air as he fell and managed to land on his feet, rolling backward and slapping his arms out to either side to dissipate the impact; even so, the jolt from the twenty-five-foot drop was still painful. He sat up as the pain slowly subsided. The pit was just as he’d left it, except that the loose stone he’d used to clobber Millie was gone. The murky half-light, the awful smell, the damp chill, all unchanged. The mossy stone walls just as impossible to climb.

Gabriel fought to remain calm. To think. He had to find a way out, a way to save Rue and stop Velda. There had to be one. But how?

Chapter 23

Gabriel’s thoughts circled helplessly in his head as he paced the perimeter of the pit. He still felt there had to be a way out—but if there was, he’d made no progress toward finding it.

He had made several failed attempts at scaling the slippery walls, jamming his fingers and toes into the narrow mossy cracks between the stones. Each time he’d barely gotten six or seven feet up before losing his grip. If only he had some basic climbing gear—even a pair of sturdy sticks that he could jam into those cracks and use as handles, like peg climbing back in high school gym class. But there was nothing, not a branch, not a bone.

He was about to try again with his bare hands when he heard a sound from above. The flat, dragging sound of something heavy sliding across the dirt at the edge of the pit. He looked up just in time to see his circular view of the crimson sky blotted out by a bulky shape. Someone else was being shoved into the pit—someone large.

Gabriel hadn’t met too many people that size, and as far as he knew there was only one in this village at the moment. He bent his knees, braced himself against one wall, and did his best to cushion Millie’s fall, taking some of the impact against his chest and letting the big man roll off onto the ground in a heap.

Nursing his bruised ribs, Gabriel went to where Millie lay, sprawled on his side, moaning softly. He still wore the kilt like get up but it was now quite disheveled, several of the barkcloth slats missing, and the paint on his body was smeared and mostly rubbed away. Gabriel could see one of the feathered knockout darts protruding from Millie’s neck just below his right ear.

“Millie,” Gabriel said, pulling the dart out and tossing it aside. He rubbed the big man’s wrists and slapped his cheeks. “Millie, are you all right?”

No response. At least he was breathing normally and seemed uninjured beyond the various scrapes and bruises sustained on the way down—but there would be no waking him until the drug wore off.

It took the better part of an hour for this to happen, and when it did Gabriel was clinging to the wall some eight feet off the ground, desperately trying for a higher handhold and failing to secure one. He heard a groan from below and let go, dropping to the ground.

Millie groaned again, turning his head from side to side. He moved his hands to touch his neck, feeling for the now absent dart. Then finally his eyelids slowly peeled open, his blurry gaze struggling to focus on Gabriel.

“Christ,” Millie said. “I thought…”

He made a move to roll over and let out a roar of pain. When he rolled, he revealed the leg that had previously been folded beneath him. His ankle was turned at an angle that it wasn’t meant to go.

“Don’t move,” Gabriel said. “Your ankle’s broken.”

“Yeah, I noticed,” Millie said. He was starting to sweat profusely, his face pale. “Damn it, I go to sleep in the arms of three beautiful women and I wake up with you and a broken leg. What the hell happened?”

Gabriel quickly filled Millie in on everything that had taken place from the moment they had been separated.

“Their new queen?” Millie said. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Wish I were,” Gabriel said. “Here, sit up.” He helped Millie to a sitting position, leaning against one wall of the pit. He reached for the waistband of Millie’s kilt.

“Whoa, slow down there, boss,” Millie said. “Just because we’re in this hole together with time to kill—”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” Gabriel said. “There’s nothing else down here to splint your ankle with, and we’re not getting out of here if you can’t walk.”

“Why can’t we use your kilt?”

“Yours is bigger,” Gabriel said.

“Well, as long as you admit it,” Millie said, forcing a pained smile. “All right, boss. Do what you’ve got to do.”

Gabriel untied the big man’s kilt, layered the stiff strips of barkcloth on either side of the fractured bone, and cinched the leather waistband tightly around them. Millie grimaced as he pulled the knots snug. “How’s that?”

Millie tested it, gingerly at first and then with more confidence—though he leaned heavily on Gabriel’s shoulder as he did. “Bad. I won’t be clog dancing for a while. But I should be able to hold myself upright.”

“That’s something, anyway,” Gabriel said, looking around once more. He thought about the offhand comment he’d made the first time they’d been down here, about standing on Millie’s shoulders. Between them they totaled nearly thirteen feet; with his arms outstretched over his head, call it fourteen and a bit. Add the eight feet of free-climbing he’d managed at his most successful and you only got to twenty-two feet—close, but still well short of the top. And that was assuming Millie’s splinted ankle could support not only the big man’s own weight but Gabriel’s hundred eighty pounds on top of it.

Fine. If they couldn’t go up, how about down? Gabriel bent to the task of inspecting the ground at the bottom of the pit, peering closely at every crevice and declivity in the dirt.

“What in god’s name are you doing?”

“Wasting precious time,” Gabriel said as he completed the survey. He stood up and worked the circulation back into his cramped thighs. “But I had to try. Last time I needed to get out of an underground trap, there was a secret tunnel with a hidden entrance you could barely see unless you knew it was there.”

“Boss, if you’re looking for a tunnel down here, you don’t need to go searching so hard,” Millie said. “There’s one right there.” And he pointed toward the drainage hole.

Gabriel looked at it. The opening was much too narrow for either man to fit through—but Millie was right, there was presumably a tunnel of some sort behind it. The villagers would sluice water down into the pit to wash away blood that had collected, along with other detritus, and the water had to come out somewhere, maybe in the stream they’d seen near the waterfall.

Could the channel behind this opening be wider than the opening itself? If they’d had to dig it without modern boring tools, it would have been easier to make it wider—specifically, the width of the person doing the digging—rather than narrower.

He bent to look at the space where the stone they’d knocked out used to be. On the other side he didn’t see more stone, he just saw blackness.

“I don’t suppose you could kick out any more of those stones,” Gabriel said.

“Not with this foot,” Millie said, slapping one thigh. “But with the other…? I could give it the old college try.”

He lay on his back, taking all pressure off his broken ankle, then aimed the tough, calloused sole of his other foot at the wall. He slammed it home. The first kick didn’t do much—but by the time he’d dealt out a half dozen thunderous blows, another stone was coming loose. Gabriel dug around its edges with his fingers and pried the heavy block of stone free. He laid it on the ground.