Chapter 15
Jacob Herman braced his scissor jack under the boulder and inserted the ratchet handle. Down here, space was tight. Every
quarter turn, the handle clicked against rock.
Turn.
Remove.
Reinsert.
At first nothing seemed to happen—and then, just when he was getting frustrated, the suspended boulder shifted with an ancient
groan. Loose grit peppered his helmet. With every slow quarter turn, the block was gradually lifting, the twelve-inch gap
underneath widening. Soon Jacob would be able to fit his body through.
Behind the obstacle, he heard movement. The trapped woman heard him and knew she was no longer safe. She was retreating, crawling
deeper inside the cave.
So Jacob worked fast, flat on his belly. He tried to keep singing as he worked—The man downstairs, he waits and he waits—but the cottony tinnitus in his brain kept crowding out the tune. He’d fired his pistol hours ago, but his eardrums still
throbbed with pain. Warmth dribbled from his right ear, a clear but yellow-tinged liquid that wasn’t quite blood.
Firing his gun underground had been a mistake. A big one.
The whole thing was supposed to be easy.
A carefully timed ambush in the tunnel, some scare tactics and zip ties to make her compliant, and a stab-and-twist to the windpipe to bleed her out quick.
Five minutes, tops. Then Jacob would’ve been a ghost, disappearing back down the mountain to burn his clothes and dump his weapons in a lake and hide out in his travel trailer.
That should have all happened hours ago.
Instead, his ostensible victim had escaped the ambush and crammed herself deep underground.
The scissor jack creaked with pressure. He felt the growing tension in every quarter turn. He smelled cracked rock in the
air, a smoky gunpowder tang. The entire tunnel felt volatile, a single misjudgment from a fatal collapse. Using an auto jack
to lift underground rock debris was probably a Darwin Award in the making, but Jacob didn’t have time to play it safe. He
had to reach this woman and cut her throat. Fast.
“Don’t worry,” he huffed. “I won’t hurt you.”
With a final quarter turn, the jack reached its maximum height. The boulder was suspended roughly eight inches higher. This,
he knew, was as good as it would get.
Jacob flattened his body, flinching at the cold water on his exposed belly, and wriggled through the gap like a two-hundred-pound
salamander. He had to be careful—very careful—not to nudge the scissor jack on his way through. Even twenty inches was a snug fit; the gun in his crotch holster
dug painfully into his nuts. He carried his KA-BAR knife in his left fist, the steel blade scraping rock with a rhythmic click-click. His headlamp cut into the darkness on the other side, the red glow revealing pale walls and glistening streams of water.
And, deeper back . . .
“There you are.”
The woman lay prone on her elbows, her eyes reflecting horror. She scooted backward on her stomach, inches from his reach.
“Why are you afraid? I told you, I won’t hurt you . . .”
She kept scrambling farther away from him in the confined space, squirming between loose cobble, fighting to stay ahead of him, ahead of his knife—until something lurched her to a dead stop. Her clothes had snagged.
She was stuck.
Jacob grinned. “Uh-oh.”
She thrashed, a surge of trapped-animal terror.
“Caught on something, huh?” He scraped closer. “Let me see.”
The woman looked around, her helmet thudding against low limestone. She searched her body and patted herself down with frantic
hands, trying to find the snag. Her harness was a tangle of buckles and straps—somewhere, someplace unreachable on herself,
a loop must have hooked on a protruding rock. It’s the little things that get you killed.
Jacob would insert the knife just under her jawbone. You shouldn’t slit a throat from the front like in the movies. The most
efficient access point is actually from the side, where there’s minimal muscle protecting the carotid artery, jugular veins,
and trachea. Sever those and a victim loses consciousness in ten seconds.
Click. Click.
He crawled the final few inches. The woman’s face shone brightly in his red headlamp now, her eyes brimming with tears. She
shook her head, pleading and helpless. Close enough to touch her now, Jacob could smell the black coffee on her breath. The
shampoo in her hair. The onion-sweet odor of her sweat. He’d always loved how girls can stink so delicately.
“It’s okay. I’m your friend.”
As Jacob said this, he tilted her head to expose her throat.
“I pretended to be stuck,” Tess tells the detective. “And then, once he was close enough to reach, once he thought he had
me—”
Her voice hardens.
“—I plunged Allie’s knife into his face.”
Jacob scuttled backward.
Her knife had stabbed his balaclava, the surprise attack barely halted by the reinforced rubber. He’d felt the pressure against
his upper lip. He gasped with surprise.
“Bitch.”
Now she held the knife out with a trembling hand, the three-inch blade pointed at his face. She caught her breath. No more
tears, no more begging. The ruse was over, her intentions clear: Try that again. I dare you.
With his free hand, Jacob touched a deep groove in his mask’s faceplate. Christ, he’d gotten lucky. She’d missed his right
eye by barely an inch. Next time, she wouldn’t miss.
She glared at him. Come closer, asshole.
He held his own knife, the much larger KA-BAR, low and ready to mirror her stance. Lying on their bellies in this narrow space,
he was eye to eye with her.
But Jacob realized with a jolt: he couldn’t kill this woman without simultaneously exposing himself to a deadly swipe of her
own. To attack here was to go knife to knife, one hand on offense, one on defense. There was no space to stand up or even
crouch, no alternate angles to strike from. The single-file tunnel allowed for only frontal attacks.
She jabbed her knife at his face. “Back up.”
He grinned, feeling the dented faceplate against his lips. “I like you—”
“Back the fuck up.”
“You’re a tough girl. Maybe even tougher than your friend.”
This got a reaction. Rage flashed behind her eyes, personal and white-hot. Did he hit a nerve? Good. He’d keep pressing, keep her off-balance: “How good a friend was she, anyway? I bet you thought you knew everything about her.”
She glared back.
“She had secrets. Things she never told you.”
No reaction.
“Who was she really?”
Nothing.
She wasn’t allowing him under her skin. She was too smart to lose her composure. And, Jacob was realizing, in this bizarre
scenario it didn’t matter anyway. The cave imposed its own rules on both sides alike.
We’re scorpions in a bottle, you and I.
That was the true dilemma: whoever struck first opened themselves up to a lethal counterattack. It would be near impossible
for one scorpion to sting its enemy without receiving a fatal sting in return. Hemmed in by the stifling rock walls, she knew
it, too.
Jacob grinned, tasting blood. “She was your best friend. But were you hers?”
“I kept crawling backward,” Tess remembers. “Scooting on my hands and knees, staying ahead of him. Just out of his reach.”
As described by rescuers, the two-to-three-foot crawlspace of the Drainpipe has only a few small pockets with enough space
for a crawling human to crouch or turn around. It’s more of a waterslide than a cave: cold, cramped, clogged with muddy sediment.
Washington has never particularly cared for waterslides, but with everything she’s learned about this section of the cave, it feels like the closest comparison.
Years ago she took her kids to a local waterpark, and her oldest teenage son had wanted to ride the highest slide.
It had looked like a five-story tangle of blue hamster tubes atop metal legs, precarious and leaking.
The Torpedo, it was called. She’d watched him climb the stairs and enter the top, but then he never exited the bottom.
Apparently he’d crossed his arms wrong in there, or he’d tried to sit up or something. Those are details you forget as you
get older. What matters is: her son got stuck a third of the way down the stupid slide, stalled in a low dip without enough
speed to clear the next rise. Worse, he’d become disoriented inside the three-foot tunnel and hadn’t known which direction
to crawl. Forward or backward? The curved tube walls were too slippery to climb. He was trapped, panic rising. And what would
happen when the next teenager came hurtling down feetfirst like an oblivious human missile? All the while, Washington could
only stare helplessly at the blue superstructure, hearing her son struggle and scream inside.
The lifeguards turned off the water and fished him out through a special trapdoor, a process that took fifteen minutes and
drew a crowd. Someone made a dumb joke about calling in the Oompa Loompas. Her son was fine—pale with fright, his voice hoarse,
but fine—and it still breaks Washington’s heart trying to imagine what he’d experienced in there.
And he’d been trapped for only fifteen minutes.
“He knew I was afraid,” Tess says.
“But you almost killed him. That’s something.”
Inside the cave’s chokehold, Jacob’s gun was temporarily useless to him. Had his victim fled anywhere else, she surely would
have taken a bullet to the back. She’d saved her life by venturing deeper underground.
For now.
“The cave felt endless,” Tess says. “I wanted to turn around and crawl headfirst, but there wasn’t space to turn around. I knew I couldn’t turn my back on him anyway. He kept following me, face-to-face, just waiting for his chance.”
Tess, feetfirst.
Jacob, headfirst.
Locked in a crawling, slow-motion standoff inside the waterslide from Hell.
“Did he say anything else?”
“Taunts, mostly.”
“Every detail matters, Tess.”
“Stuff about Allie. Cruel things. He was trying to get into my head, I think, to make me lash out. He said he’d already dragged
Allie’s body up to the surface by his Jeep and that he’d done . . . things to it.” She blinks away a tear and stares at the
floor.
“I’m sorry, Tess.”
“He said . . . after he was done with Allie’s body, he’d wrap her in chicken wire and dump her in a lake. The same thing he’d
do to me.”
“Chicken wire?”
She nods. “I don’t understand why.”
Washington does. Chicken wire will hold a body together underwater as it decays and swells with buoyant gases, preventing
any body parts from floating to the surface. There are several deep freshwater lakes within a few miles of the cave, and in
such a remote location, they’d be difficult to fully search. A body might never be found. Worse, such specific knowledge suggests
Jacob Herman has done this before.
Where did this guy come from?
Where does he live?
She doubts he slept in his Jeep. Even the most nomadic survivalists prefer to camp out somewhere—maybe a yurt in the woods, maybe an RV or camper, maybe a friend’s trailer.
This guy likely grows his own food, works odd jobs under the table, filters his own water.
With little in the way of public records or personal electronics, they might never find Jacob’s true base of operations.
There’s simply too much wilderness out there.
“And I noticed . . . the tunnel seemed to spiral downward.” Tess adjusts her pulse oximeter. “It felt like a corkscrew, going
deeper and deeper. The whole time, in the pit of my stomach, I knew that every foot I crawled down was a foot farther from
the surface.”
At this point, Tess and her attacker would have been hundreds of feet from daylight, crawling through an enclosed space with
millions of tons of rock and soil packed overhead. And still going deeper.
“He told me the farther down I went, the worse it’d get.”
This was accurate. With every foot of depth, the danger rises and rescue becomes more difficult. Eventually the chase would
lead to a chamber of jagged formations both fragile and dangerously sharp. Rescuers likened the passage, known as Razor Alley, to navigating inside a giant sausage grinder. Deeper still is the Chimney, a deadly forty-foot vertical drop.
Finally, deeper below, is a third and final challenge. This area comprises the lowest, least-understood region of the Devil’s
Staircase. Much of it remains undiscovered and unmapped. It’s where the sprawling rescue effort to reach the trapped woman
would be concentrated, where two team members nearly lost their lives. It has a name, too.
Worse Than Death.
In that moment, eye to eye with a murderer, Tess would’ve had to make a calculation—that for all its unknown dangers, the
cave was still less dangerous than the man who’d cornered her inside it. She would crawl deeper to keep ahead of him, descending to lower, more punishing circles of Hell. It was her only chance at survival.
Washington remembers the incident commander’s unsettling text message, sent during the rescue effort’s bleakest hours.
We’re losing her.
Things would inevitably get worse before they got better.
“And”—Tess shifts uncomfortably in her bed—“I realized it was worse than I knew.”
“How?”
“Even if I took my chances and tried to fight him head-on, even if I somehow avoided his huge knife and stabbed him in the
eye or throat and by some miracle killed him, he’d still made sure I’d lose, too. I’d never, ever escape the cave.”
“How so?”
“Because,” she says, “his body would block the tunnel.”
Sealing her inside the crawlspace with two hundred pounds of deadweight.