Blind Faith - Sharon Sala Page 0,19

certain he’d never met him.

“Hi.”

“So, what’s going on?” the man said.

Tony shrugged. “I’m waiting.”

“Oh yeah? Who are you waiting for?”

“I’m not sure,” Tony said, then looked at him closer. “Do I know you?”

“Not really, but I know you, and your dad and granddad.”

Tony looked back at the setting sun. The sky was turning vivid shades of yellow, and red, and orange. He took a deep breath and then slowly exhaled.

The man put his arm around Tony.

“You can do this, kid. It’s your choice, but if you want to stay, you’re tough enough to do it.”

“Thanks,” Tony said.

“Hey, no problem, kid. It’s what I do for the people I love,” the man said, and then he put something in Tony’s hand and closed his fingers around it.

Tony stared back at the sun. It was almost gone, and the pull to follow it was easing. He’d chosen to stay.

“Thanks, mister,” Tony said, and then realized he was alone.

He opened his fingers. There was a military dog tag in the palm of his hand with the name Grant Dawson on it.

And then all of a sudden the pier was gone, the sun had set and there was nothing in his hand. He was in darkness, and in a kind of pain he didn’t know a human could endure.

He opened his mouth to call for help, but the only thing that came out was a moan.

Then he stilled, struggling to stay conscious, because he could hear someone calling his name, but what if it was them, coming back to finish him off? He didn’t want them to know where he was. Then he heard the voice again...a man’s voice... Was it a real person, or was it a dream?

Someone was shouting—shouting his name. He needed help or he was going to die. He wanted to answer, but he was too weak to shout.

He heard the voice again...and in his mind, he remembered the man at the pier. He’d chosen to stay. Now he had to choose to live.

With every ounce of strength he had left, he rolled over onto his back. The scream that came up his throat was born of pain—fired by the guts it had taken to move all his broken bones. But the pain was too great, and he slipped into unconsciousness again.

* * *

Charlie was moving at a jog, trying to cover as much ground as he could and still search. Twice he saw what he thought was an opening to a cave, only to discover it was nothing more than a deep crevice below an outcrop of rock.

And each time the spurt of adrenaline he’d felt downshifted to a growing feeling of defeat. Time was running out for Tony Dawson. He could feel it, and in desperation, he paused, cupped his hands to his mouth and started shouting over and over at the top of his voice.

“Tony! Tony Dawson! Where are you?”

When he first heard the scream, he thought, Old Leroy’s banshee, and spun around and started running through the brush and trees toward the direction of the sound, still shouting all the way to the canyon wall.

Scrub brush grew in clumps against the wall, and even more had grown up between the dead branches of a fallen tree. He began searching for an opening behind it, and then looked down the wall to his right and saw a gap in the rock and ran.

The opening was long and low, barely five feet high. He shed his backpack, grabbed the LED lantern he’d brought with him and turned it on, then crawled inside.

He swept the area before him to make sure he wasn’t crawling in on snakes, but when the light fell on the partial skeleton of a deer, he wondered if he’d stumbled into a cougar’s lair instead.

Had he mistaken a cougar’s scream for a human one? He knew from his childhood that the scream of a cougar was often mistaken for that of a woman. Hesitant, he lifted the lantern as high as he could, trying to get a look at how deep this tunnel went, and that was when he saw the boy.

“Oh God, oh God,” Charlie muttered, and started crawling.

The first thing he felt for was a pulse. It was there!

Then he moved the light down to the boy’s legs. One foot was bare and purple with bruises, swollen to twice its size. The broken bones at the ankle were unmistakable. He knew the boy had somehow crawled in here, but he didn’t know if