He was in grave danger of being fanged repeatedly with no way to get out. How long before they found his body? Or his bones? And then it dawned on him. That’s why they hadn’t just killed him and left his carcass to be found. Here he would die and never be discovered. People would just assume he had left town. No explanation or cover-up required. And yet there was more to it, he sensed. Whoever had done this could have just left him in the mineshaft with no way out; they didn’t have to use snakes too. Or they could have just shot him and left him here. There was a desire here to cause not only death, but terror as well. They wanted him to die horribly, and alone, and in the dark. Then the panic did hit him. But not for the obvious reason.

Abby.

He’d been with her. They might know that. They might think he had told her things. What things he wasn’t sure. But they might go after her just in case.

Stone felt around the ceiling until his fingers touched what he deduced was a support beam. The beams helped hold up the ceiling, preventing tons of rock from raining down and crushing him, for which Stone was understandably grateful. Yet more important, there was a light cage attached to the beam by a sturdy metal plate. The light obviously wasn’t working. Yet he didn’t need light, just the cage.

He moved backward, away from the rattles, holding his arm up to the ceiling. Roughly four feet later his hand grazed another beam and another caged light. Four feet later, another.

Figuring that the snakes would’ve been placed between him and the exit to the mine, Stone slowly moved back toward the sounds. A rattler was deaf so it couldn’t even hear its own rattles, but it was an instinctive signal to prey or predator that the snake was there, coiled and ready to strike. With each hesitant step he took Stone braced for the venom shooting into his legs. When he reached the first ceiling beam he’d touched, he reached up and gripped the metal light cage. Praying that it would be strong enough to hold his weight he lifted himself into the air, his legs bent and raised to chest-high. His injured arm ached badly, but he simply focused on what he was doing and willed the pain away. The Triple Six Division had been great at beating that technique into him at the Murder Mountain training facility, because they’d been expert at inflicting all types of agony, both physical and mental.