The Survival

Chapter 46

My body freezes and my eyes open wide as soon as I hear the scream. Beth almost jumps on top of me as I try to decipher from where the agonizing sound came from.

"C'mon girls!" Nathan joins as quick as he can, he puts himself in the middle of us and grabs one arm from each of us pulling us forward.

I can see Ed and Dylan looking at the ground and both seem really worried and quiet agitated, another scream is heard and this time I realize that it's from a girl. My brain is starting to work once again and the panic that I felt first is dismissing slowly... or maybe with everything that happened to us I already learned how to deal with the panic.

"Take me out of here! Please!" Nathan keeps pulling us toward the others and then I see... where is Lucy? A bling is heard on my head and I make the connection and find the missing piece of the puzzle.

"Oh my God Lucy." I say out loud when I realize that the female scream was from her, I jog to the boys with Nathan and Beth right on my heels and that's when I see a huge hole in the ground and deep inside of it is Lucy screaming and crying for her life.

"Hold on." Dylan says to a very frightened Lucy. The curly blonde remains frozen in the middle of the place I can see her eyes tightly shut and her arms are around her body as if protecting it.

Beth kneels by my side and we both try to calm Lucy down, but she isn't even hearing us she keeps mumbling to herself or so it seems, the hole is quiet deep and we can't reach her just by lying on the ground and stretching the arm so we need something stronger and longer to take her out of there.

While I'm looking from over my shoulder to Nathan, Ed and Dylan trying to come up with a solution I hear Beth gasping by my side before giving me a small touch on the arm. I turn to look at her, but she never looks me in the eye, instead she keeps her focus on the hole where Lucy is.

I look at it and try to see what is making her so... I observe the expression on her face and what I see is surprise? Disgust? Maybe even fear...

I try and search for what's on the ground in this dark hole, I don't find anything interesting or scary enough to make Beth have that look on her face but when I squint my eyes tighter I see the white in it... covering the whole bottom of the cavity.

"Oh Lord." Is the first thing that leave my lips when the sight before of me becomes clear. However, I don't have much time to think and watch it because seconds later I'm being pulled from the ground and moved from the verge of the hole by Dylan.

I look at Ed and Dylan and they have on their hands what seems to be a vine, Dylan positioned himself behind them and is given a bit of the vine.

"Okay Lucy, where are going to throw something to you, grab it and don't let it go so we can pull you out. Got it?" Nathan says to her, I don't hear her answer and I'm not close enough to see if she nodded or replied with any similar movement, but when the boys start pushing on the vine I know that she most likely said something.

Two minutes is all it takes for her to be out, she lays flat on the ground with her back to the dirty snow, her breathing is uncontrolled and so is her heart beating so Beth and I try to calm her down. Her eyes are really wide, and she doesn't even look at us she keeps looking to the sky.

I should have had stayed with them and do my job of bringing her back to Earth and prevent her from having a heart attack, but what I saw on the hole made me uncomfortable to say the least but still curious to why it's there.

The boys are surrounding the opening and I join them.

"I'm going to check what's down there." Ed speaks.

"I think we all know." I say quietly. Ed turns to face me and even opens his mouth to speak again but ends up to shut it, any other time I would dare him to say what is on his mind but with the loss of Sarah still very present in my mind I can't even think of a comeback.

"This was covered, this whole thing..." He gestures to it, "was covered with snow, branches and leaves, so I bet that what its inside is more than what the eye meets. I can feel it."

"Don't tell me that you have feelings like women" ... Okay maybe I can comeback.

He ignores me and doesn't gives me a response instead he turns to Dylan and Nathan, "Pull me when I tell you." They both nod and with a leap of faith he jumps into the cavity, you can hear cracking under his feet, and we all know that it isn't only branches breaking.

With his feet he cleans the leaves and snow only to see what I saw earlier and what I think they also found not too long ago.

Bones.

"Holy shit," Dylan mutters, "that much bone could build a dinosaur."

As stupid as his comment might be, there is truth in his words, the amount of bones that are lying there is... well incredible and frightening to be honest. I never saw so much bone together except on a museum.

"It doesn't seem like we have to worry about it, the bones are from animals, or so I think." Ed tells us from down there.

"You're kidding me right?" I say, "You just told me that this was covered so no one could see and that was why Lucy fell in it in the first place, then we find a huge amount of bones and you tell me with the most calm way possible that we don't have to worry about it?"

"It was probably an animal that ate all this." Dylan remarks.

"An animal wouldn't build a hole like this and throw the rest of his prey in here, not to say that an animal can't definitely build a fake soil to cover this up." Nathan speaks what is on his brilliant mind and I couldn't agree more.

"It doesn't really matter, Ed said that we don't need to worry about it."

"Oh, wake up mate, if Ed said that it would do you good to jump from a bridge would you do it? The proofs that something is wrong about this place is right in front of your eyes, yet you prefer to ignore it." I can hear Nathan's tone of voice getting louder and louder and I know that he is getting anxious and not in the good way.

I place my hand on his bicep and give it a small squeeze, he immediately calms with my touch and I get surprised to say the least when I realize the quick effect that I have on him. He takes a step to the side and presses his side to mine as if in need of my touch.

"What the f..." We hear Ed from down below and we shift our attention to him in a blink of an eye. What we see makes my heart skip a beat, right next to his foot is a skull.

A human skull.