Chapter 5

Davo actually felt the vibrations from the initial small explosion.

He was perched on hands and knees, ready to lower his skinny, indigenous arse and tall, lanky frame, down over the metre-high ledge. Water had undercut the opening of the tunnel they had been following. The others had already fanned out to investigate the largest cavern they had been in yet.

They all spun around when Davo screamed out, “Oh fuck! Get down, get down.”

They watched as he dropped over the edge of the ledge and then dived under it. They then looked up as a bright light, headed in their direction. Then there was a second, more considerably stronger blast.

Feeling the reverberations of the explosion under their feet, they dropped to their bellies. Bambie watched in horrified fascination, as the fireball blew into the cavern with shards of rock that then rained down.

The rolling boom, as it was forced from the smaller space into the larger one, shook the cavern. Smaller shocks snaked under them as the fireball died. The sudden blinding brightness had totally screwed their night vision.

They all experienced the flash of bright lights on their eyelids as their retinas tried to come to terms with what they had just witnessed. Bambie suspected that the fireball was going to appear in many nightmares in the future.

She then gasped and thought, ‘If they had a future! They were trapped for sure.’

Davo was the least affected and once things settled down, he scuttled back out from under the ledge and aimed his lamp down the tunnel. He crawled back onto the ledge and down the shaft. Stuart was only a few seconds behind him.

“Hot damn!” Sandy exclaimed as she gained her feet. “I’ve heard of having fireworks for Halloween, but that was just fantastic.”

Bambi groaned, “I hate Halloween.”

Sandy came over and sat beside Bambie, who had sat up and was hugging her knees. Sandy offered her a water bottle. She wasn’t so worried about them drinking it since they had a stream in the cavern. To be honest, she wasn’t that worried about them being trapped.

The cavern was vast, and they still had air movement. They could last for weeks before starvation got them. Having the LED’s with them meant they would even have a measure of light for a long time too.

“Why is that?” she asked Bambie.

“My father died on All Hallows Eve. When I was six, a boy in our neighbourhood had an altercation with some bullies. They lived next door and they had played a mean trick on him. To pay them back he set their house alight. My father tried to save the family, but he died too. I hate Halloween,” she finished morosely.

Sandy hugged her. “That’s tough luck, Bambie. What about your mum, where is she?”

Bambie gave a deep sigh. She sniffled as tears trickled down her face. “Cancer, four years ago, she,” she wept. “She died too. The same day as my father,” she got out before she burst into racking sobs and buried her face in her hands, which she had placed on her lifted knees.

She felt an arm go around her back and one under her knees and then she was being picked up. She knew instantly that she was being cuddled by Stuart’s strong arms.

He sat with her arse in his lap. “Shush, it’s okay. You’re not going to die today. We will be fine my lovely, we will be fine,” he crooned as he hugged her tighter and let her cry.

Bambie buried her head into his hard chest and sobbed for some time. She truly missed her parents. She knew some people thought that her fear of Halloween was irrational, but she considered it well-founded.

Once she settled down, she looked around to see Davo and Sandy sitting across from them. Davo had his arm around Sandy and she was leaning against him with her head on his shoulder.

“Where is Mark?” Bambie asked when she realised, he wasn’t with them. She glanced down the cavern and noticed an odd little light near a corner in the tunnel. She ignored it, thinking it was just her retina’s adjusting after her howl. Davo’s answer distracted her.

“Hopefully, he is on the other side of the collapsed tunnel. It was very weird that the pocket of gas blew. He must have done something. I didn’t detect enough for a spark to ignite. The breeze was strong enough to blow the tiny amount leaking into the tunnel away,” Davo told them grimly.

“Well, I guess we won’t know what happened until we find him. In the meantime, we need to find a way out of here. I tried the radio, but I’m not getting a signal out.”

“It’s about three o’clock so they won’t even miss us for a few more hours yet. I suggest we follow the stream, as it is most likely heading to the lake and will provide a way out,” Smithy said.

Davo and Sandy agreed, and they all stood and readied themselves to move.

Smithy suggested that Sandy lead and that he and Davo would turn their lights off to conserve batteries.

The floor of the cavern wasn’t even, and every so often, they had to clamber over outcrops of rocks. At one point, Bambie caught a flicker of light to her right. Her headlamp picked out a wide chasm that headed back the way they came but on an angle.

She ignored the urge to go that way. Following the stream made sense and with luck, they could come back later to look down that crevasse. Doggedly, she soldiered on, over the rocks and uneven flooring.

At one point, they had to wade across the stream when the way was blocked. The stream varied from ankle to knee-deep in places. It was also several meters across to the other side of it.

Bambi looked back and guessed they were close to where she had first seen the glimmer of light but couldn’t fathom why she had thought it was here as the only light in the cavern was from their headlamps.

As she went to move again, Bambie slipped on a loose stone, and she went down before Smithy could grab her. As he went to lift her back up, she stopped him. Since she had her lamp on, she could see into the shallow stream.

The flashes of blue, red and bright yellow caught her eye, and she pulled the palm-sized, half-inch thick stone from where it was trapped under a boulder in the stream. The small boulder rolled over when she pushed it.

Bambie put her other hand down into the elbow-deep water and picked up four smaller coloured pieces that were about equal to an Australian fifty-cent piece in size but of similar thickness to the first piece.

She surmised that the gems couldn’t have been in the water very long, as being submerged for a long time would have ruined the opals. She then showed them to Stuart as she looked back at the walls to see where they may have come from.

“Holy cow!” he gasped as he turned his own light on to inspect the large specimen.

Sandy and Davo came back to see why they had stopped and examined the finds. “Amazing, the big one has a complete Myriapod fossil embedded in the back of it,” Sandy said.

“And it’s a black opal, one of the best I’ve ever seen. You have found a very rare beauty there, my love,” Stuart said to Bambie as he hugged her and kissed her on the lips. They moved out of the stream at the first opportunity so that they could sit and examine the opals she found better.

Bambie heard a beeping from her pack. She retrieved her phone, “Hey! I’ve got a signal,” Bambie said gleefully.

“Why haven’t I got one?” Sandy asked after looking at her phone.

Bambie grinned, “International satellite phone, it has a more powerful aerial. Wow, I’ve even got a GPS location. Goodness, I didn’t realise it was so late. It’s nearly six o’clock.”

“Hey, Smithy, do you have the pictures of the cliff-face under the platform for the entrance cave?” Davo asked.

“Yes,” he replied and pulled a tablet out of his backpack. He turned it on and accessed the pictures.

Davo got Bambie to read out the location from the GPS and then had Smithy stop at one of the pictures. “I think that is where this stream goes. If we can get out on that ledge there, we can climb back up. It’s only six metres to the platform and we probably won’t even need ropes.”

“They will already be looking for us. How about we see if we can get out of here before we totally lose the light?” Smithy said while putting the opals in Bambie’s pack.

They all agreed. The boys even turned their lamps back on. With the extra light, they made their way around a shallow bend. Five metres further on, they grinned as dim sunlight reflected back into the cavity ahead of them, from the metre high and four metres wide opening that stretched over the shallow stream.

Davo, made the others wait and he crawled out under the low-lipped roof. He disappeared down the shallow ledge that ran beside the stream. It had been created when the stream flooded and ate into the rocks. They waited several minutes and finally, they heard him call for them to follow him. Sandy went next, then Smithy and then Bambie.

By the time, Bambie scrambled out onto the short shelf of rock, which hung over the lake, Davo was already more than halfway up the deeply shadowed cliff-face. Sandy was only a body length behind him.

Smithy waited with Bambie until the other two had reached the platform. Davo tied a rope over the safety rails and dropped the other end down to Smithy. Stuart tied it onto Bambie and then encouraged her up the cliff, telling her that he was right behind her.