Chapter 2 - Scaling the Dark
“Can we climb up, Mom?” Sophie asked, looking up at the sheer timber-lined walls of the ventilation shaft. The vertical drop was intimidating, slick with moisture and rotting wood, but daylight was still pouring through the top.
“We have to,” I said, gritting my teeth as I forced myself into a sitting position.
The pain in my right side flared sharply, making me gasp, but the bones weren't broken—just severely bruised. I checked Sophie’s ankle. It was swollen slightly against her hiking sock, but when I rotated it gently, she didn't scream, just winced.
“Can you put weight on it, sweetie?”
She tested it, pressing her heel into the damp earth, and nodded firmly. “It hurts, but I can do it. I want to get out of here, Mom.”
“So do I.”
The ventilation shaft wasn't a sheer vertical drop all the way. Decades ago, miners had installed heavy wooden cross-beams and emergency ladder rungs to service the upper levels of the silver vein. Many of them had rotted away, but a few heavy iron rungs were still bolted into the stone wall to our left, half-hidden behind vines and crumbling shale.
It wouldn't be easy, and with my bruised ribs, every pull would feel like fire, but staying down here in the dark meant waiting for dehydration, hypothermia, or worse—my father and brother returning to finish what they started once they realized they needed proof of death for the probate court.
“Listen to me, Sophie,” I said, looking straight into her eyes, my voice steady and commanding. “We are going to climb up those rungs. I will go first, and I’ll reach down to pull you up every step of the way. If you feel like you’re slipping, wrap your good arm around my waist and hold on with everything you’ve got. Understand?”
“I understand,” she said, her young face setting into a fierce, unyielding expression that looked so much like my own mother’s spirit that it took my breath away. “Let’s go.”
It took us nearly forty-five agonizing minutes to climb the twenty feet to the surface.
Every pull of my arms sent searing jolts of pain through my ribs, and my fingers grew raw as I gripped the rusted iron rungs coated in cold mud and lichen. Sophie climbed with a focused, silent tenacity that shattered my heart and filled me with roaring pride. When her foot slipped once on a crumbling wedge of shale, she caught herself with a sharp gasp, gritted her teeth, and hauled her small body upward without a single tear.
Finally, my hands grasped the dry gravel at the rim of the shaft.
With one final, lung-bursting heave, I hauled myself over the edge onto the sunlit ground, immediately rolling clear of the drop-off and reaching back down.
“Give me your hand, Sophie!”
Her small, dirt-stained hand shot up. I locked my fingers around her wrist and pulled her out of the dark pit into the brilliant, blinding Colorado sunlight.
We collapsed together onto the rough grass behind a dense thicket of pine trees, chest-heaving, covered in soot, dirt, and dried blood.
Down in the valley below, about half a mile away near the rusted iron gates of the tourist entrance, my father’s black Ford pickup truck was still parked by the old assay office. Through the canopy of pine branches, I could see two figures moving near the truck bed.
They weren't leaving yet. They were waiting to make sure no search parties or rangers were around before they packed up and concocted their rehearsed disappearance story for the local sheriff.
“Mom, look,” Sophie whispered, pointing toward the truck.
I squinted through the branches. Daniel was leaning against the tailgate, holding a heavy iron shovel, while my father smoked a cigarette, pacing back and forth with a phone pressed to his ear.
They weren't just waiting. They were preparing to come back with a cover story—or worse, shovels to bury the shaft permanently.
“Come on, baby,” I whispered, gently grabbing Sophie’s hand. We stayed low to the ground, using the dense brush, boulders, and pine thickets to slip away from the ventilation shaft and toward our own rental vehicle parked on the outer ridge of the mining town.
My phone was still in my jacket pocket. When I pulled it out, the screen flickered to life.
No Service.
Of course. Silver Creek was a dead zone for cellular signals, tucked deep into a remote mountain basin. That was why my father had chosen this exact spot. There were no witnesses, no security cameras, and no way to call for help.
Except for one thing.
May you like
Car rentals equipped with satellite emergency communicators—a feature I always insisted on when traveling through remote mountain terrain with children.
If we could reach my SUV, hidden behind an abandoned equipment shed half a mile down the ridge, we could activate the SOS beacon, lock down our digital coordinates, and get off this mountain before they realized we had crawled out of the grave they dug for us.
