You crawl around for a long time, hours it seems, and none of the passages you come to look like the one you'd been down before, and then you have to belly-crawl when the passages get narrower. It seems like you've got down to some old passages that nobody ever prowled around in, and you feel colder than you've ever felt in a cave. The further you crawl, the more you need your flashlight to see.

Rick checks his watch at one point, and it's been six hours since you left Ben's house. You don't know if you are going deeper down into the earth or heading back toward the cave mouth. Your internal compass seems to swing around in wild circles, like compasses that go haywire when aliens land nearby. Your chest tightens, you all crawl faster, breathing hard, no one saying anything. When none of you can pretend like you aren't for sure lost in the cave, you stop. You and Ben don't feel like telling Rick it is all his fault. And you don't need to.

"Damn it, damn it," Rick says. "I'm an idiot. I picked the wrong way."

"Naw, man." you say. "Could have been my route. We'd be in a different part of the cave, but we'd still be lost."

"Yeah," Ben says. "No telling which one was the right one."

"I got some candy bars in here," Rick says, as if it's a peace offering, opening his backpack.

"Dude, you've been holding out on us," you say. "Don't know if it's because I know I'm trapped here or what, but I'm suddenly hungry. Got any beer in there to wash this down with?"

"Nope," Rick says. "You know I don't touch that stuff."

"Sure would make being stuck in a cave a little easier right about now," you say. Rick is quiet.

 There are two Hershey's bars. What should you do?

You ration the Hershey's bars. You don't know when you're getting out of this cave.

You take one of the three candy bars, break it into three equal pieces, and hand Ben and Rick their allotments. You and Ben eat yours quickly, but Rick eats his slowly, as if savoring the taste. Then, it hits you: Rick just really likes the taste of food. You remember how he will order a soda at the McDonald's drive-through and ask for ketchup packets there even though you're headed to Arby's for a roast beef sandwich, all because Rick likes the taste of the McDonald's ketchup better. To you, there's no difference.

You turn on your headlamp and lead the way, feeling a rush of energy from your little bit of candy bar.

You become Introspective

As you crawl through the passageway, the light from your headlamp bouncing off the walls, you keep thinking about this guy they'd brought to your high school once, part of their tough love campaign. They brought in cops and military men to talk to students about the "real world" that you would encounter after graduation. Their speeches were always graphic, which was entertaining as hell, but you got the feeling they were exaggerating just to scare you straight.

The latest guy had been a POW in Korea. He told you they made him eat maggots and kept asking him for information he didn't even have, not that he would have given it to them if he had, he said. But you had to wonder whether or not he would have cracked. You have a theory that most people cracked, despite what TV and the movies want you to think. Those were the good stories, right? The bad stories probably never saw the light of day. With this guy, the North Koreans thought he was lying and so they jammed metal files under his nails or just beat him up all the time. The worst part, according to him, was being put in the hole, a 5-foot-by-5-foot box where he'd have to crouch for weeks at a time. All he gave them was his name, rank and serial number.

You all decide to take a break, sitting in the pitch black darkness to conserve your headlights, cold and shivering then because the damp has leaked through the top layers of your clothing and down to the skin. You're all quiet. Rick stretches out on the ground to take a nap. After a while, you decide to ask Ben about his dad. "Ben?"

"Yeah?"

"Think your dad might have been a POW?"

"Hard to say," he answers. "Most of my family just say he's MIA, like he's just lost in the jungle or something. Like once he finds a map, he'll be back. But he might have been killed during the war. Or he might be rotting in some moldy old jail cell. I think he's dead. There're thousands that are probably dead, their bones in some rice paddy."

"I can't imagine," you say.

"Can't imagine what?"

"Any of that stuff—dying in war, torture."

"Me neither."

"What's it like, man," you ask, "to grow up without a dad?"

"You don't miss what you never had."

"Yeah, but it's got to be weird, you know, not ever having a dad. Don't you think about it all the time? Don't you miss him?"

"Yeah, I guess." Ben pauses as if he's thinking about how to say something that has been on his mind a long time. "You know Skeeter and those guys up at the VFW hall?" he asks. "Talking about that phantom limb syndrome? They say they feel it tingling where there used to be a leg or arm or even a pinky finger. Like when your hand itches but you can't find the scratch anywhere. He went MIA when I was like three years old. I can't miss someone I never even knew. But it's like he's supposed to be there, you know?"

You think of your own father, who left your mother and is now shacked up with some chick he used to work with who's half his age, and you feel envious of Ben for not having to deal with a father at all. "Sometimes I wish my dad was MIA," you say.

Ben suprises you by grabbing your shirt, harder than he'd ever laid a hand on you before. "Don't say that shit," he says. "Don't say shit you don't mean."

You shrug off his hand. "How do you know I don't mean it?"

Ben is quiet a while, like he's trying to calm down.

"You and me," he finally says, "we're opposites. I don't know what it's like to have a dad who up and leaves. You don't know what it's like to grow up wishing you had a dad. I could tell you that I'd rather be in your shoes, but you'd probably tell me the same thing."

"Ain't that the truth," you say. "Do you remember him?"

"Just this one thing," he says. "I kind of have this shadowy memory of him dressed up as Santa Claus. I think I pulled his beard down, but it could be I just remember it from my mom telling the story. You know how that is. But it seems like I can remember him bouncing me on his knee; that's how I pulled the beard off. He was bouncing me too hard, and I thought I'd fall off, so I grabbed hold of the closest thing."

You pick up a dead root and start carving the dirt with it even though you can't see the shapes you're carving.

"You really don't think he's ever coming back, do you?"

"Nope."

"You guys never had a funeral."

 "My mom thinks he's coming back. She's still waiting."

The Cold Gets to You

None of you say anything for a bit, and you hear a little chipping noise, like a squirrel trying to crack into a nut. "You hear that?"

You crawl in the direction of the noise. Then you shine your light on Rick and laugh. "It's just Rick," you say. "His teeth are chattering."

Ben crawls over. Rick's teeth are going a mile a minute. He touches his face.

"He's ice-cold," Ben says. "We got to wake him up. He could go into hypothermia."

"Shit," you say, mad that you hadn't thought of it when Rick stretched out for his nap. "Wake up, Rick!" you yell. You shake him. "Wake the fuck up!"

Rick wakes quickly, looking confused. "Where am I?" he chatters.

You and Ben each grab a shoulder and lift him up. "Man," Rick says, shaking his head as if he is groggy. "I am trapped in a goddamn cave. I was hoping it was a nightmare. I don't feel so good, guys. I'm cold. Why'd you wake me up, anyhow?"

"No, Rick," you say. "You can't go to sleep. You'll go to sleep and never wake up, you know what I mean?"

"I wish we'd brought more clothes," Ben says. "A wool jacket or something. It's always colder than you think it's going to be in the caves. Bunch of idiots, that's what we are."

"Let's sit together," you say, scooting up close to Rick's side. "Use our body warmth." Ben does the same on the other side, and soon, Rick's shivering slows down. But you are aching with cold on the side away from Rick. "Let's huddle," you say, motioning for Ben to move around so that you are touching on all sides. It's weird, sitting that close to Rick and Ben, but you don't care.

"We're going to have to keep each other awake," Ben says. "Body temperature drops when you're sleeping. That's why Rick fell out like that."

You eat the second candy bar in an attempt to warm yourselves up.

You find a Way to Tough This Out

"Maybe we should sing," Rick says. "Might take our minds off the cold." 

"Maybe we should cook you up and feast off your excess fat," you say.

"Let's try the singing," Ben says.

"Shit," you say. "Singing sissies. Like that's going to help." 

"Bye, bye Miss American Pie…" Ben starts, and he and Rick sing without you. You give in when they get to the Elvis songs. They remind me of the part of your dad you can tolerate, maybe even like, the guy who sings at the top of his lungs when he's happy. You sing every song you know the words to, every damn song you learned in elementary school, every Christmas song, every church song, even the alphabet song. You sing every part of the Bohemian Rhapsody and Van Halen songs both pre- and post-David Lee Roth. You sing for hours and hours, pausing to take a breath or talk or relieve yourselves when you have to.

Or maybe days go by. You're beginning to realize there isn't any time in a cave. You break the last candy bar in half first and then into thirds, saving half for later, painfully aware of how little food it is. You're cold, a cold that seems to get into your bones, turn your blood to tiny frozen rivers. It becomes hard to sing through the chattering of your teeth.

"This ain't working no-more!" Ben chatter-yells. His voice sounds uncharacteristically uneven, as if he could break into a sob any minute. "I'm dying of cold!" he yells. "I'm going to die down here, and no one will know!"

"It's all right," Rick says. "We're not going to die."

You say nothing. Ben is yelling the same way you feel, and you can't conjure any encouragement.

"What the fuck do you know?" Ben says. "This is like my destiny. My mom will have two disappeared people in her life. A husband, then a son. That's it. Then she'll have two people to wait for!"