‘I want them, too.’ She forced herself to chuckle, and it echoed strangely in the darkness. ‘But they’re both too fat to come down.’
It was a terrifying experience, trying to hold herself still in the harness and talking into the dark. She had a floodlight on her cap, and the beam of light swung wildly as she looked about her. There was another small torch in her hand which she used to carefully examine Sam. ‘You have got yourself into a pickle, haven’t you.’
‘I’m…I’m scared.’
‘You and me both,’ Em said solidly. There was no use pretending. Sam was too intelligent a kid not to pick up on a lie when he heard it. ‘But we’re in this together, so let’s make the best of it.’
The best case scenario-the one they’d hoped against hope for when they’d lowered Em-was that somehow she could rig a harness around Sam so that he could be winched up.
It wasn’t remotely possible.
One arm was out of sight. The other hand had been forced up and was wedged at an odd angle between his shoulder and the wall. Em could see his wrist and hand but that was all. The extra width of his arm was what was wedging him. If he moved that hand…
He couldn’t. She was almost scared to touch him, much less try and gain a hold. She knew disaster would result.
They just had to play a waiting game.
If he started to slip, she told herself, she’d just grab him around the neck and that one hand and pull. She risked breaking his neck by doing so, but if he was going to fall it was the only chance he had.
Please, let him not slip.
‘Is this the arm that hurts?’ she asked, and touched his fingers with a feather touch.
‘Yes. It hurts so much. It just jabs and jabs.’ She didn’t need to examine him to know it was true. She could hear the agony in his voice.
‘I can help that.’ She forced her voice to be as matter-of-fact as possible. ‘Sam, I’m going to pop an injection into your neck. A pinprick-that’s all. It’ll make you feel really sleepy, but that’s OK. You can go to sleep if you want. The men are going to dig down to reach us and it’ll take ages so it’s better if you sleep. And the injection will stop the pain really fast. Do you think you can hold very, very still and not even wiggle when you feel the needle?’
‘I…I’ll try.’
‘Good kid.’
Great kid.
Please, let him not fall…
Em wished she could sleep herself.
Hour upon hour she waited. Sam slept and stirred and she comforted him. Over and over.
Once she knew she could reach his wrist, she called up to Jonas and he sent down what she needed to set up a saline drip. Somehow, and afterwards she could never figure out how, she inserted a needle into one of the little boy’s crushed arms, then hung the saline bag on the pouch at her midriff.
Please, let him not have any internal injuries, she prayed over and over again. His pulse was thready but that might be shock.
She hung on in the dark and there was no answer to her pleas.
If Jonas hadn’t been right there above her, she would have gone quietly crazy.
He talked to her. Over and over. He lay on the planking above her head and he talked her through every stage of what was happening. How they’d decided against drills because of the fear of vibrations in the unstable soil. How they were digging by hand-teams of men-every able-bodied man in the district seemed to be here now, taking turns to dig, to heave soil to the surface, to shore the new shaft, to chop timber for shoring…
It seemed everyone in Bay Beach was here. Lori. Shanni. Erin. Wendy. All her friends. They took it in turns to talk to her-Lori had even brought Bernard, for heaven’s sake, and she described him as frantic. Bernard? Frantic?
‘Well, he’s scratching his butt,’ Lori told her. ‘In Bernard-speak, that’s frantic.’
She smiled, but she couldn’t smile for long.
But always there was Jonas, speaking softly over everyone else.
‘Em, here’s Lori to talk to you. With your weird dog. And Nick. Nick’s been digging-you ever seen a magistrate with mud on his face? Em, Ray’s been here, demanding to dig. How many weeks after a bypass? I reckon he’s crazier than you are. I’ve told him he has to wait until you come up because I need another doctor if he’s going into cardiac arrest again…’
And sometimes there was just Jonas.
‘Em, I’m still here. We’re all still here. We won’t leave you.’
And then an even shorter message as the night grew longer and the darkness deepened. Over and over.
‘I won’t leave you.’
And then… ‘Em, I’ll never leave you.’
The discomfort was unbelievable. Em hung in her harness and kept her increasingly desperate vigil. Her hand ran through the little boy’s hair over and over again, the only contact with him that she dared.
It had been almost impossible to put in the saline drip. He’d jerked once and it had scared the life out of her. So now she monitored the drip, gave him pain relief as he needed it and kept in contact with him by touching his curls.
She was starting to need the contact with Sam as much as he needed it from her.
The walls were closing in on her.
As night fell, the light from the top of the shaft dimmed and died. The shaft seemed to close in still further.
‘Jonas,’ she whispered, and he was there. Of course he was there. He’d promised.
‘We’re down fifteen feet,’ he told her. ‘We’re moving faster than I thought possible. We’ll have you out by dawn, Em.’
She took a deep breath. ‘I need some light.’
‘You have your flashlight. Are the batteries dying?’
‘No… I mean up there. So I can see…you.’
Her voice trailed off but he had it in one. Claustrophobia was impossible to predict, and when it happened it was almost impossible to control.
‘Do you need to come up?’ His voice was harsh with anxiety.
‘No!’ No way. She couldn’t leave Sam. Firstly, to drag her up past that narrow passage would risk debris falling down on him, and to come down again would be impossible.
Her claustrophobia was something she had to control all by herself-and she had to control it.
‘I just need to see…the top,’ she said.
‘You will.’ And then Jonas’s voice rang out, curt with command, and there were suddenly floodlights playing over the top of the shaft. She could look up and see his face-his smile. He was shining the torch over his face so that he was no longer in the shadows, and she could see him clearly, even though he was so far away.
‘It won’t be long, Em,’ he told her, his voice willing it to be the truth. ‘We’re boarding up the new shaft as we go, and that’s what’s taking the time. We can’t move too fast or we risk a tragedy, but we’re going as fast as humanly possible.’
Twenty feet…
She could hear them-muffled shouts, swearing, snapping commands from the top.
Twenty-five feet, Jonas told her.
Thirty feet.
And then, finally, she heard faint, muffled and far-away noises through the dirt and rock by her side, and she knew they’d reached her level.
Still they didn’t come near. They were digging a good ten feet away from the side of her shaft. They would go deeper and then across.
‘It’ll take two more hours,’ Jonas said, and his voice was filled with confidence. It demanded confidence in return. ‘Can you hold on that long, Em?’
What could she give him but confidence in return?
‘Of course I can.’
At last, blessedly, there was the sound of scraping, and falling dirt, and a chink of light played up from under Sam’s chin. Someone was under him.
Em had gone past discomfort. Every muscle in her body had reacted at some time and now she was cramping and tired and desperate to go to the bathroom-but Sam was shifting and he mustn’t move yet.