Hunt picked up the handle of the cart again. “Could be. All I know is, if what we’ve been talking about is correct, then we have a long way to go. We’d better buckle down and get to work.”
Jayden got back on the pump again, too, and Maddy resumed her post as lookout up front. The scenery seemed unchanging and never-ending. Hunt remarked after a time that it was night now, and so it was dark outside.
“Not that it makes a difference in here,” Jayden said.
“About eight more hours until we reach the U.S. mainland of Florida. More if this is going to the Bahamas.”
“The Bahamas? You think this could go all the way back to the Bimini Road area?” Maddy sounded incredulous.
Hunt spoke over the steady creaking of the hand pump and the rumble of wheels over rails. “It’s possible, I mean the two sites are connected and this railway system goes a very long way regardless of where it takes us; they probably could have built it to go there if they’d wanted to.”
“I guess we’re going to find out,” Maddy said.
Hunt nodded as they rode on into the darkness beneath the ocean floor.
Chapter 37
Hunt had torn away part of his T-shirt to wrap around his hands in order to prevent blisters from pumping the cart. Jayden had done the same thing, except using paracord. In the front of the rail car, Maddy used what was left the single remaining torch — the one Hunt had used had burned all the way down hours ago — to eyeball the tracks ahead in case she needed to tell them to slow down because of a broken rail section or some other obstacle. So far, they had come across no such inconveniences, but she knew they couldn’t afford to take chances by assuming that everything would be perfect the whole way. After hours of this activity, her eyes were strained and tearing up, and yet, like a ship’s crewmember on night watch, she knew she had to stay alert to let Hunt and Jayden know what might lie ahead. They were physically exhausted from powering the cart, while she was mentally fatigued.
That’s why she thought she might be hallucinating when she saw the track coming to an end up ahead. A rock wall blocked the way and the track ended without ceremony; it simply butted up to the limestone wall and ended there. She held a hand up behind her and said, “Stop the cart!”
The rail car had no actual brake, but whether by design or accident, the slope of the tracks inclined for the last hundred feet or so, acting as a natural gravity-powered break, like an incline road at the bottom of a long highway slope for runaway trucks. Hunt and Jayden were all too happy to let go of the cart pump. They moved to the front of the car alongside Maddy, who showed them the fast-approaching dead-end.
“End of the line,” Jayden called out as they began rolling uphill.
“Don’t say that,” Maddy said.
“I mean for the tracks, not for us, geez!”
“Still freaks me out.”
“Let’s jump out before it starts rolling back downhill, okay?” Hunt said. As the cart slowed, they jumped up onto the edge, Hunt taking the single remaining torch. They paused until the cart stopped at the apex of its uphill coast, and then jumped off onto the limestone ground. The cart rolled away from them back downhill, slowly at first, but then gathering more momentum until it coasted away on the flat track.
“Here we are,” Hunt said, looking around. “Looks like there’s only one way to go.” Indeed, a small vestibule area lay in front of them.
“I sure hope it goes somewhere,” Jayden said,” because I’m sure not looking forward to pumping that thing all the way back to where we came from.”
Hunt walked forward while holding his torch out in front of him. “Let’s see…” He entered the small-looking area and immediately saw faint light coming from the right. Looking in that direction, he saw another small room, but this one was flooded with…
“Daylight! Not a whole lot, but I definitely see daylight!”
While Maddy and Jayden’s excited footsteps caught up with him, Hunt examined his new surroundings. There wasn’t much to see. It was a small enclosed space with a coral floor. So he looked up to where rays of filtered light came from, and saw a now familiar sight: a vertical chute with holds chiseled out of the wall on one side.
“It’s another ladder chute! We’re getting out of here.”
Maddy and Jayden’s celebratory hollering reverberated around the chamber while Hunt continued to assess their way out. “It’s high, though, maybe a hundred feet.”
“I’d climb a ten story building to get out of here right about now,” Jayden said, entering the vertical chute room.
Hunt dropped his torch, which had burned ninety percent away, on the floor, leaving it to burn out since they now had enough daylight streaming in from above. Barely enough, but it was sufficient and was better than climbing with the torch which was on its last legs.
Without further adieu, Hunt positioned his hands and feet in the hewn rungs and started to climb for the outside world. Soon Maddy, and then Jayden, joined him on the upward journey. Aside from being extra-careful with their footing and handholds once they were higher up than they’d like to fall, there wasn’t much to think about, except for…
I wonder what’s up there?
Hunt stopped climbing a few feet below the edge of the chute. He could see now why only scant rays of light made it down to the bottom: the top of the vertical space was set so that it angled slightly up and away from the main chute, and the opening was narrow, barely big enough to fit his body through. The top of this was grown over with vegetation. He listened for clues as to the new environment they were about to enter. He could hear seagulls calling, and a breeze blowing. His leg was shaking with the effort of the climb without having eaten much, and he knew it must be even harder on Maddy, so he didn’t linger quite as long as he would have liked.
“Going up and out,” Hunt called down to Jayden and Maddy. Then he wriggled through the angled portion of the chute and pulled himself out of the ground into the daylight outside. Looking back at where he had just climbed out of, he was amazed that he would never have known it was there, so grown over with plant life the narrow opening was.
His first reaction was one of disappointment, as he dropped onto yet another low-lying, hardscrabble, sunbaked piece of piece of coral that was little more than a glorified sandbar. There was nothing here. He stepped away from the chute exit to make way for Maddy and Jayden, and then took a short walk around. But there was little need for exploring. The island itself was featureless and flat, and not very large. But it was what lay beyond it that attracted Hunt’s attention.
Another island, a short distance away. Except that this one was not a deserted little clump of coral. Hunt caught his breath as he watched a massive ferry boat dock at a long pier where crowds of people waited to board. Looking closer at the island itself, Hunt could make out a large structure made of brown brick that extended along the island’s perimeter for a long ways.
Jayden and Maddy walked up next to him, still winded from the climb out of the chute.
“Looks like some kind of tourist site,” Jayden said.
“Where are we?” Maddy asked, getting right to the point.
“I’m not exactly sure yet.” Hunt tried to make out the lettering on the ferry but found it a little too far away to read. “But wherever it is, we need to get over there, and that means a swim.”
Maddy groaned at the thought of having to exert herself yet again in order to get out of a jam.
“Come on,” Jayden said, walking toward the water, “you know they’ve got a bar on that ferry.”