MacGyver and Willis raced back to the hidden passage as fast as they could without slipping on the smooth, damp stone. Their lights washed pale over the walls and formations, the shadows twisting sinisterly over the molten shapes. At last, they reached the entryway.

“Elisa!” Mac shouted. “Elisa! Can you hear us?”

“Yes!” came a distant shout, barely audible to her companions.

“Elisa, where are you?” Willis yelled. “Elisa!”

“Wait! I’m coming to you!” she shouted back. “I think!”

They waited for what felt like an hour before she finally emerged into the dim light of their headlamps, shivering and soaked to the bone.

MacGyver picked up on Willis’ quiet exhale of breath. A sigh of relief. He mentally agreed with the sentiment. “Are you okay?” Mac asked as Clarkson pulled herself back into the main passageway with them.

“I’m fine,” she managed to say. “I’m sorry I screamed. I didn’t mean to scare you. I was--- I was walking and I slipped into some running water. I th-think it was part of an underground river. I didn’t see it until it was too late. I lost my flashlight, and my headlamp went kaput. But at least I found the way back.”

“That’s the important thing,” MacGyver agreed. “You must be freezing. Here, we need to get you out of that wet jacket and get you into something dry.”

“You can use my jacket,” Willis said immediately, before MacGyver could even finish his thought. “And we have a blanket in our backpack, too. I’ll get it out for you.”

“If it’s n-not soaked or something by now, I have a Thermos in mine,” she said.

In a few moments, they had Clarkson bundled up in Willis’ coat and a fleece blanket with her Thermos of hot tea, with her purple jacket draped over a rock to dry. Not that it was doing much drying in this damp air, MacGyver noted.

“Feeling better?” Mac asked.

“Much,” she replied. “I wish I hadn’t taken a swim, though. I’m still so cold.”

“Do you need another coat?” MacGyver asked, starting to unzip his blue jacket.

Clarkson shook her head. “No, I’m fine. I think I’m more startled than anything.”

Willis nodded in sympathy. “I’m sorry that happened to you. You’re a very brave woman.”

She waved it off. “It’s fine. I don’t mind it so much. I like curling up with jackets and tea.”

“You should eat something,” Willis said. “You know, to keep up your strength.”

Clarkson plunged her hand into her dripping backpack, sifted through a plastic bag, and held up three candy bars. “I brought enough to share.”

“Thanks,” Willis said with a smile. “You came prepared, didn’t you? Thermos, snacks---what else did you pack in there?”

Clarkson grinned weakly. “Some notebooks, some pens, a textbook that I’ll never be able to sell back to the bookstore now, batteries for the flashlight that I’ll never see again, my car keys, and some sugar packets for the tea. That’s about it. No blankets!”

“Good thing you had us as backup.”

She nodded and nudged Willis’ shoulder with hers. “Yeah, we make a pretty good team, don’t we?”

MacGyver grinned as his friend looked away to hide his reddening cheeks in the darkness. “We should head back to the rendezvous point now,” Mac said. “Elisa needs to get back to the bunkhouse for something dry. It’s too easy to get hypothermia down here.”

“But---”

Mac cut off Elisa’s protest by continuing, “Besides, our time is almost up. We’ll have to check in soon whether we want to or not.”

“Okay, if we have to,” Clarkson said, getting to her feet and wrapping the blanket closer to her shoulders.

MacGyver reached for her backpack strap, but Willis beat him to it.

“I’ll carry this for you,” the scientist said hurriedly.

“I can get it,” Clarkson replied.

“No, no,” said Willis. “I insist.”

MacGyver rolled his eyes and began the trek back through the cavern, listening to their footsteps alongside him.

“How’s your magic doodad doing?” he heard Clarkson ask Willis. He smiled as Willis started to tell her all about the INS, spouting off technical jargon before backtracking and struggling to phrase things in layman’s terms. At least the guy was learning, right?

That was when the cave began to shake. Rumbling sounds, so low that they were creeping on the edge of perception, echoed through the tunnels. The slippery stone vibrated and trembled. The three of them lunged for nearby rock formations, struggling to keep their balance through the tremors.

MacGyver’s fingers curled around the soft limestone of a stalagmite, but he couldn’t get a tight grip on the slick surface. Losing his balance, his legs flew from underneath him and he landed on his back, his plastic helmet the only thing saving his head from colliding hard with the ground. As it was, the jolt was enough to knock the wind out of him.

By the time the cave had stopped shaking, MacGyver had recovered enough to sit up. He slipped the helmet off to examine it and frowned when he realized that his fall had broken the headlamp’s bulb.

“You okay?” Clarkson asked, unfolding herself from a limestone column that she’d been holding in a death grip.

“Yeah, I’m fine. Good thing we’re all wearing helmets,” MacGyver replied.

Slowly, Willis shook his head. “What was that?”

“C’mon, Willis, we both live in Los Angeles. That was an earthquake.”

“An earthquake?” Willis frowned. “But there aren’t any major---” Then his eyes shone in understanding. “The New Madrid Fault. Of course. I’d forgotten about it, since there hasn’t been any big seismic activity out of it in so long.”

“Ummm, that earthquake felt pretty big,” Clarkson said nervously.

MacGyver shook his head. “Not really. It probably seems that way to you because you’re not used to it, but that was probably only a magnitude 3 or 4. Enough to shake some things around, maybe put some cracks in a few houses, but nothing major.”

“But, MacGyver,” Willis said, “we are underground right now… and that puts us closer to the hypocenter.”

MacGyver nodded slowly. “I see what you’re saying.”

Clarkson blinked. “Okay, well, let’s pretend that I’m not a geology major and that I just volunteered for this for the extra credit, and tell me what you’re saying anyway.”

“The closer to the hypocenter we are---the belowground epicenter---the greater the risk of damage,” Willis explained.

“And it’s not unusual to see rockslides in this cave,” MacGyver finished.
She frowned. “So what you’re saying is, we might not be able to get back out.”

“What I’m saying is that we should be cautious as we make our way back, especially since there could be an aftershock,” MacGyver said firmly. “No reason to panic.”
“Right. No reason to panic at all,” Clarkson echoed. After taking a quick sip of sweet tea, she nodded. “Let’s just get out of here.”

“Agreed,” Willis said, taking the lead with their last working headlamp as they continued down the passageway out of Mammoth Cave.

As they walked, MacGyver fished his knife from his pocket and began to pry open the lamp on his helmet. Without a light shining directly down, the task was slow and difficult, but he managed to work on it by touch alone. The backup flashlight that he’d kept in his pocket still worked well, but having to carry it around wasn’t as convenient as having the light attached to his helmet---especially since, in order to get back to the cave entrance, part of their journey would be an almost vertical climb. Since the bulbs in both lights were about the same size, all MacGyver had to do was cannibalize the bulb from the flashlight to fix the headlamp.

His two companions had been absorbed in talking to each other, so Willis jumped a little when MacGyver’s lamp abruptly flashed on.

Mac grinned and placed the helmet back on his head. “Fixed it!”

“Of course you did,” Willis said in wonder.

“Just in time, too,” MacGyver said, looking up at the wall of rock that they’d descended from earlier. “Hard to climb with your hands full.”

Clarkson took her backpack from Willis and slung it over her shoulders. “Let’s---let’s get cracking.”

The three of them started the climb, easily finding footholds in the uneven surface. MacGyver reached the top first, and from the moment his hands curved over the top of the ledge, his heart began to sink. “This is not good.”

“What’s not good, MacGyver?” Willis asked, the frown evident in his voice. He pulled himself up to the ledge and stared. “Oh. You’re right. That’s not good.”

From beneath them, Clarkson said, “Let me guess: we’re s-stuck in here.”

“That’s right. A rockslide. It’s covered the entire passageway. I don’t see any light coming through at all,” Willis replied.

“And more importantly, I don’t feel any air currents coming through here,” MacGyver added, “which means that it’s blocked completely. We’re going to have to find another way.”

“I’m just going to stay here at the bottom then,” Clarkson replied, sliding down the rock face. “H-how are we going to get out?”

“We’ll think of something,” Willis said boldly. Then he cast an anxious glance at his friend. “Right, MacGyver?”

For a moment, MacGyver was silent. Finally, he said, “Of course we’ll think of something. There’s always another way. There are probably a hundred different ways out of this cave. We’ll find one.”

“What about the rescue team?” Clarkson asked. “Th-they’ll come for us, won’t they? When our time is up?”

“They’ll come looking for us, all right, but it’ll take them another two hours, and even then, there’s no telling how long it’d take them to get past this rockslide---if they could get past it at all,” MacGyver replied.

“So that’s it, then. We’ll have to get out on our own,” Willis said.

Mac nodded. “And we might have a long way to go, so we’d better get started.” After a moment’s pause, he added, “Willis, why don’t you keep walking with Elisa? Make sure she keeps drinking that tea and all. It’ll help keep her temperature and blood sugar up, and that’s a good thing, given her swim from earlier.”

Willis grinned at the both of them---but especially Elisa. “Well, you heard the man!”

She shrugged and lifted the Thermos to her lips. “Don’t have to tell me twice.”

Turning once again into the darkness, they set out into the unknown---this time, not for exploration, but simply looking for a way to escape the confines of Mammoth Cave.

“Okay, are you ready, Willis?” MacGyver asked as he spread the map of Mammoth Cave over the stone floor.

“Ready,” Willis said, flipping toggle switches on the inertial navigation device.
“I hope your magic doodad works,” Elisa Clarkson said.

“You and me both,” MacGyver muttered, ignoring the look of indignation that Willis shot at him. “Okay, what are our coordinates?”

As Willis read off the numbers churned out by the machine, MacGyver did his best to match up the coordinates with a landmark on the map. He marked their approximate location in inkpen with a little X. As he'd expected, their X was right in the middle of a blank area---unexplored. But Mac did catch something that gave him pause.

“Hey, Willis, take a look at this map, would ya?”

Willis shuffled over to peer down at the paper, some of it printed beforehand and some of it hand-drawn by MacGyver just hours earlier. “Of course. We’re not near anything recognizable.”

“Maybe closer than we think,” MacGyver replied.

Puzzled, Willis blinked behind his glasses. “What do you mean?”

“Take a look at this blue line here.” Mac slowly traced the line with his finger. “Look at the trajectory.”

Willis tapped his chin. “If that line did actually keeps going in that direction, then yeah, it looks like it would eventually meet up with us. But we have no way of knowing if that line goes that way or not. What’s it supposed to be, anyway?”

MacGyver grinned. “That’s the River Styx.”

Clarkson’s eyes widened. “And that river goes outside! We can follow it out!”

“Exactly. Willis, you can get the coordinates for the River Styx exit from this map, and your navigation system will help us stay on the right track while we look for a way around to that river.”

Willis glanced down at the little boxy machine beside his legs. “I don’t know, MacGyver… I mean, this is its first real test.”

MacGyver gently nudged his friend’s shoulder. “It’s been accurate so far. Have some confidence in yourself! Besides, if that thing helps us find a way out of here, then there’ll be no denying that your navigation system works.”

“I believe in you,” Clarkson added.

“Well… Okay. I guess it can’t hurt to try,” Willis said. “Can I get a better look at that map?”

MacGyver handed it to him with a smile. “We’ll be out of this cave before you know it.”

“I sure hope you're right,” Willis said nervously. He checked the map carefully and entered the coordinates into the navigation device. Then he took a deep breath.

Okay, MacGyver. This way.” He pointed down a damp passageway. Damp, but it seemed to be unblocked as far as they could see.

MacGyver nodded encouragingly at his friend. “Okay! That's good. Let's get moving.”
Willis nodded with a smile, and he and Clarkson followed MacGyver into the passage.

Continue...