Ardore
With almost the last of his strength, Blume rolled the heavy log table across the floor, trying to get up some speed without losing aim. It hit the door full on, but without much force, and the weakened hinge stayed firmly in place. He heaved the log away, realizing that he would never manage to gather the strength to try again.
He lifted the lantern and examined his handiwork. Around the hole he had chipped away, the pozzolana cementing the metal frame of the door to the wall of the cave had cracked and begun to crumble. He was able to pull away quite large slabs of it, though some of it stayed hard and unyielding. He went back to the table and took the final lantern as backup. He was pleased at his foresight when the third one died. For a while, he worked in the dark, pulling and punching, breaking his nails and bruising his knuckles. A hot trickle down his arm told him he had reopened the gash in his hand, but he continued working in the dark, putting off the moment of truth.
Finally, he switched on the last lamp to see what he had achieved. Between the frame of the door and the wall was a gap large enough for him to insert his arm and shoulder. He sat down, placed the lamp beside him, leaned his back against the overturned log, and rhythmically, but without violence which would lead to injury and desperation, started kicking at the edges of the gap he had opened. Pozzolana dust and shards of limestone fell on his leg. The frame showed no signs of giving way, but its position relative to the wall seemed to have moved very slightly. He kept at it, alternating from left foot to right every thirty kicks, until the misalignment between the bottom part of the steel frame and the cavern wall was a question of inconvertible fact and not blind hope. A lump of cement, biscuity and welcome, fell on his leg. He rested, slept, had no visitations, woke, and continued.
Eventually there was space for his head. What was the rule? If a cat could fit its head through a crack, then the rest of its body could follow? Or was that a rat? At any rate, he didn’t think it applied to large policemen. And yet, he was going to try. He stretched out his arms and clasped his hands religiously together, then pushed them through the gap and followed with his head before he could stop himself. Immediately he was stuck, but he had been expecting this. Using his elbows and pushing with his foot against the log on the other side, he half turned, and his right shoulder slipped through the breach, wedging his body very firmly against the sharp upper part of the gap, but the sensation of one shoulder going through had given him courage. If the only barrier was pain and not the laws of physics, he would get through. He pushed and heaved and thrashed, and then something came loose in his shoulder and he screamed and cried, and found to his chagrin that he was calling for his mother. But the dislocation of his shoulder saved him. His upper body was out, the rest followed. Weeping with pain, he started edging forwards, realizing that he had left the lamp burning in the darkness behind him out of reach.
He got to the partially collapsed section of tunnel, and was so overcome with anguish at the idea of pushing his head into the jaws of the rock, that he thought he might prefer to die where he was. He remembered the hope he had felt when his hand, emerging from the narrow space, had touched the warm polymer of his pistol.
He pulled Pietro’s lighter from his pocket and used it to illuminate the space around him. Right in front of him, touching his feet, though he had not felt it, lay Pietro’s shotgun, cracked open and discarded by Curmaci before entering the narrow space. He pulled the shotgun to him and poked and pushed it into the black hole in front of him. It came up against an obstruction that had not been there before. He probed at the blockage, which yielded. Curmaci, deliberately or not, had caused a small avalanche of rubble to fall. As he bent down, an unmistakable taste of fresh air streamed into his dry mouth, and it was this that drove him on. Squirming like a worm, floundering like a fish on dry land, and scrabbling like a rodent, he managed to make his way through the narrow section and emerged in the first section of tunnel that had seemed so dark before, but now seemed bathed in soft light. The tunnel roof rose in height, and he walked the final part stooped but on two legs.
The light that came down from above was green, filtered through the corrugated plastic cover that hid the entrance from police helicopters and anyone else who might be interested. The ladder had been drawn up. This did not surprise him, yet it brought tears to his eyes, and he felt ashamed. The glistening rocks and silt that formed the walls of his new prison were appalling in their smoothness. Even with both arms functioning, he could never have scaled them.
He took the phone out of his pocket again and slid the cover back. The small antenna symbol flashed at him, and the reception bars were still absent. He walked around the walls, holding the phone above his head. Nothing.
Blume retreated to just inside the tunnel entrance, and banged the shotgun barrel against the dry rock shaking out as much dirt as he could. He cleared out the left bore and, holding it up to the green light from above, peered into it. The barrel was filthy, but it was a shotgun. With no rifling in the bore, even quite a lot of dirt would not be a problem. The only thing that needed to be precise was his aim, because he had one shot only. He put the left barrel of the shotgun into his mouth, and blew down it. That was as clean as it would get.
He could not suppress the thirst that was taking over his whole being, but in between thoughts of water, he patiently gazed at the green plastic above, watching the play of the sun and shadows on its surface, looking for the hinges and for signs of any objects weighing it down. The best point to hit it would be where the border of the plastic rested on the rim of the hole. He fixed the spot in his mind, stared at it, and imagined how, when he had blasted a hole through it, the sunlight would come in as an angled beam hitting the walls of his deep prison halfway down like a searchlight.
He fished the cartridge out of his pocket, inserted it into the left chamber of the shotgun. The only way this was going to work was if he was lying down. He pressed the recoil pad against his right shoulder and slowly, pausing now and again to let the pain subside, brought his left arm over to steady the barrel. No. He was shaking with pain, and would bury the shot in the sides of the pit. He set the recoil pad on the ground below his armpit and, crooking his arm, pressed the stock into the side of his body. He focused on the pain in his left arm. It was all in the shoulder, not in the finger that was going to pull the trigger. The finger that was going to pull the trigger was steady, and firm. Steady and firm. He looked upwards and fired.
The roar deafened his ear, the shotgun leaped away from him like a pogo stick and a pile of dry dirt and stones tumbled down onto his face, and for a desperate moment he thought he had hit the walls. Instead, he had blasted a patch of blue sky into the green trapdoor and a sunbeam was shining down, not at an angle but straight down upon his face.
He tried to shout for joy, but his voice came out as a dying croak.
He slid open the phone, worked out its menus. There was one bar left on the battery. He found the option for redial, and set it to maximum, which was just five. The phone would dial the same number five times, then give up. And there was no point in calling emergency services, since none of the operators would give a second thought to hanging up on a mute call from a mobile phone.
Blume tested the phone by lobbing it up half a yard and allowing it to fall. As the phone hit the ground, its front panel snapped closed and the call was shut down. Even the slightest bump snapped it closed. He scraped at the earthy parts of the walls till he had come up with some twigs and pieces of root. He shoved them under the sliding panel of the phone, pushed in small pebbles and dirt, and let it fall. The panel stayed open. He stripped his shoelaces from his shoes, and using his teeth and his good hand, bound them tightly around the battery cover.
Blume only had one phone number in his memory. He dialled it with reverential care and lobbed the phone upwards towards the hole he had blown in the corrugated plastic. He missed twice. The first time he caught the phone one-handed before it hit the ground. The second time, it clattered at his feet, but the battery cover stayed on and the panel stayed wedged open. He brushed it down, pressed disconnect, kissed and blessed the phone, then dialled the same number again. He could already see the message flashing no signal as he lobbed it skywards again. This time, it sailed through the shining gap above.