I wiped my eyes. Why was I pretending they had dust in them? I was alone in a cave—just as I’d been alone in the cabin. Wait … it started to come back. I’d been lying facedown on the cot, wrestling, tortured by the same thoughts that suffocated me now. But I’d gotten up, walked out … and …

Something hovered on the edges of my memory. What was it?

In Nam I thought I’d faced the toughest obstacles life could muster. “Dig deeper,” Sarge said as I studied his craggy old face.

“You can always find the will to survive; you can always do what you think you can’t. Just dig deeper.”

The last few years made Nam seem like kindergarten. I dug as deep as I could. Nothing was left.

Dig deeper. I’d started believing I might be better off beneath the cold, dark ground than on top.

“No!” I was too angry to let Death win the war he always won. Not me. Not now.

A second chance. Is that really too much to ask?

But who could I ask? I’d always heard words about God spoken by that church full of hypocrites, but what did words matter? If there was a God—and I had no reason to think there was—he was irrelevant. Besides, he owed us all an apology for a world of hurt. And I knew better than to expect an apology—or anything else—from God.

If he expected me to come groveling to him, he’d better not hold his breath.

“Did you hear that?” I screamed, jumping to my feet and hitting my head on the cave ceiling.

As I stretched out my hands to keep from falling, my fingers brushed past some indentations on the cave wall behind me. Hesitating, I carefully lit the last match.

Rough letters were scratched on the wall, as if inscribed by a nail. Three lines, one above the other, forming a triangle:

FORWARD
RED ROAD HOME
BE CAREFUL WHO YOU TRUST

They were in plain English—evidence I wasn’t on another planet after all. But who put them there? Some lonely lunatic, some desperate prisoner groping in the dark?

I touched every word with my forefinger. Then I flung the match away just as it burned me, and I sank down into the cold, damp darkness.

The throb in my neck yanked me into consciousness. A reddish light from the cave’s mouth blinded me. I pulled myself up, amazed I’d managed to sleep on that cold rock bed.

I’d kill for a triple latté.

Once I could keep my eyes open I stared at everything bathed by the warm light pouring into the cave, which now seemed even smaller.