Subterrestrial (14 page)

“Someone give me a hand!”

Hart grabbed the rope and pulled as hard as she could, allowing Payton to once again brace himself against Thyssen’s weight. By then, Thyssen was already halfway up the wall and moving like a spider.

“There was something in the water,” Nabahe said. “I saw it.”

“I didn’t see anything,” Hart said.

Thyssen pulled himself up onto the ledge and doubled over to catch his breath.

“I
know
what I saw.”

“What did you see?” Thyssen asked.

Nabahe thought he heard the faintest hint of a challenge in Thyssen’s voice, but he couldn’t see the man’s expression in the shadows beneath his headlamp.

What had he seen? The dark shape became even more poorly defined the harder he thought about it.

“We need to find another way around.” Thyssen headed for the stone corridor. “We can’t risk going into the river after them.”

“If there was nothing in the river,” Nabahe said, “why did you climb back up here in such a hurry?”

Thyssen stopped and spoke with his back to Nabahe.

“You might be fine with leaving the others trapped down here, but I’m not. No one’s going to die on my watch.”

“You saw it, didn’t you?”

“I saw nothing.”

“‘Nothing’ doesn’t show up on your monitor.”

Thyssen stiffened.

He removed his backpack and drew the monitor from the pouch in slow, deliberate movements. He turned and held it up so Nabahe could clearly see the screen. What he’d mistaken for dots from a distance were actually pulsating circles from which concentric rings radiated. There were seven of them: four in the center of a grid without labels on either axis; three others higher and to the left.

“I don’t know what you saw. There are seven beacons. One for each of us. And these over here?” He tapped the screen for emphasis. “Their lack of movement suggests we’d better figure out how to reach them in a hurry.”

Thyssen hiked his backpack higher onto his shoulders and struck off through the tunnel.

“You must have been hallucinating,” he said. The tone of his voice left no doubt as to the implication of his words.

Nabahe hadn’t smoked anything since leaving Arizona and resented the accusation. He knew what he’d seen, or at least he knew he’d seen something. If the tracking devices were built into their suits and there were seven of them down here, then what was the source of the eighth signal?

Mitchell hung on for everything he was worth. If he lost his grip, there was no telling how much farther down the river they’d be carried. Or if they’d even be able to get out.

He shouted with the strain of hanging on to Duan, who himself barely had a grip on Calder. It felt like he was going to be ripped in half. Blood trickled through his eyebrow from where a chunk of the falling arch had struck his helmet hard enough to crack it and shut off his light.

“Can you reach the bank?” he called back.

“I’m trying!” Calder shouted. He could feel her swinging behind him on the current, threatening to take them all with her.

“Try harder!”

His hand slipped from the rock and he was swept backward a good ten feet before catching another outcropping. The pressure suddenly abated. They’d lost Calder.

He was just about to go in after her when he heard the squeaking of a wetsuit and saw Calder’s beam sweep across the ground in front of him.

“Now you!”

He dragged Duan closer to the shore. The rock prodded his back. Duan released his arm when he secured a grip on the limestone. Mitchell nearly sobbed with relief.

Something grazed his leg. Something that definitely wasn’t rubble from the broken bridge.

Mitchell recalled the shape he’d seen in the cavern, the way his light reflected off its eyes. He crawled out of the water on limbs that seemed barely able to support his weight.

Duan cried out.

Mitchell turned to see Duan’s light racing away from him.

Calder ran down the bank and dove for Duan’s outstretched hand. Mitchell propelled himself from the ground and into a sprint. He threw himself onto Calder before Duan’s weight pulled her in.

“
Môt cái gì đó căn tôi!
” Duan screamed.

Mitchell grabbed Duan by his backpack and pulled him onto dry land.

Duan scrambled away from the water, his headlamp swinging wildly throughout the cavern.

“Calm down,” Calder said, taking him by the arm.

He whirled on her with sheer panic in his eyes.

“
Môt cái gì đó căn tôi!
”

“Slow down. I don’t understand.”

Mitchell crawled toward Duan, who dropped onto his rear end and shined his light onto his leg. His wetsuit puckered around a series of gashes that glistened with fresh blood.

“Something bit me.”

Calder knelt beside him and briefly inspected the lacerations before pressing Duan’s hand firmly against them.

Mitchell caught the expression on her face before she turned away and started rummaging through her backpack.

“Here it is.” She dropped a first aid kit onto the ground and opened it. Inside was a standard assortment of bandages, gauze, medical tape, and small sealed packets. She grabbed the gauze and the tape and set to work bandaging the wounds. The blood soaked through the gauze in straight lines.

“The cuts aren’t very deep.” Her voice betrayed her words.

“They sting!”

“It does kind of look like a bite, but not like any I’ve ever seen.”

“Probably a chunk of limestone,” Mitchell said. “Those broken edges can be as sharp as knives.”

Mitchell hoped he sounded more convincing than he felt. Whatever brushed his leg mere seconds before Duan screamed certainly hadn’t felt like limestone.

“Can you walk?” Calder asked.

Duan gingerly stood and tested his weight on the leg. The gauze immediately darkened. Despite a noticeable limp, he nodded and thanked them with an almost embarrassed smile.

“I will be fine. I am just—how do you say it—jumpy? It’s not just me, right? You saw it back there, too.”

Calder looked away when she spoke.

“We need to figure out how to get back to the others.”

“Hey!” Mitchell shouted. “Can anybody hear me?”

His voice echoed off into the darkness. If anyone replied, he couldn’t hear it over the roar of the river.

“We won’t accomplish anything that way,” Calder said.

“Just because we can’t hear them doesn’t mean they can’t hear us.”

“That’s exactly what it means. You want to stand here shouting, be my guest. I’m going to do something productive.”

“I’m not sure being a bitch is as productive as you think it is.”

“What did you say?”

“Exactly what you think I said.”

“Then how about you find your own way—”

“There’s some gratitude for you. I take it the attitude’s my reward for saving your life?”

“I would have been just fine if you hadn’t—”

“Up here,” Duan shouted.

Mitchell turned toward the source of the voice. Duan stood on top of what looked like a waterfall made of molten stone, his light shining right into their eyes.

“Did you find a way out?”

“Better.”

Duan walked away from them and vanished from sight. The darkness tightened around them.

Mitchell started after him but pulled up when he heard the tone in Calder’s voice.

“What did you see back there?”

He turned to face her, a sarcastic quip locked and loaded. She looked so small and vulnerable that it took him several seconds to formulate his words.

“I don’t know.” And that was the honest truth. “Eyeshine. Low. Near the ground. A hunched shape. Or maybe nothing at all. I can’t be sure.”

“But it scared you enough to risk all of our lives in the river?”

“Look, lady, I—”

“I didn’t mean for it to sound like that. All I meant was that you were certain you saw something . . . alive?”

“Yeah.” Mitchell started to climb up the waterfall. “I think so.”

The flowstone was damp and slick but provided enough traction to climb from one ledge to the next until he stood where he’d last seen Duan. There was a tunnel through the rock. The passage grew tighter as he crawled. The exit was nearly clogged by boulders that had fallen down a slope and hardened into the limestone. There was a faint sliver of light at the top of the hill where the rocks nearly met with the domed roof.

Calder climbed up behind him. Her beam cast his shadow onto the rugged incline.

“Turn off your light,” he whispered.

“Why on earth would I do—?”

“Just do it.” He paused. “Please.”

After a moment’s hesitation, she did as he asked. The light up there wasn’t in the white spectrum, like their headlamps. It was a shade of violet so dark that he at first couldn’t be certain he was seeing any color at all. By the time he was halfway up the slope, his eyes had adjusted enough that he could tell that not only was there indeed something producing the purple light, but that something was actually
growing
across the mouth of the adjoining cavern as well.

He crested the field of boulders and stared dumbly at the leaves brushing his thighs. They reminded him of leathery fern branches growing from what looked like a massive pineapple. There were dozens of them all growing together in such a way that he had to raise his arms to fight his way through them. The purplish glare made everything appear black. He was surprised when Calder switched on her light again and the leaves turned green. They were wilted and crusted with salt, like the marshes of Prince William Sound after high tide. He turned around and saw the same look of awe on her face that he could feel on his own.

Bushy plants reminiscent of yews and flowering shrubs grew among them, while palm trees with giant pinecone-looking things and massive magnolias towered over them.

Mitchell watched the branches pass overhead. The light seemed to radiate from the cavern roof itself, where countless glowing strands of a phlegmy substance dangled like icicles.

“Glowworms,” Duan said. “Like
Arachnocampa luminosa
in New Zealand. They make strands like spiders make webs. Glow at night to attract prey. But that is not the best part. You see this?”

He gestured toward one of the pineapple-looking trees.

“This tree is a species of
Cycadeoidea
. I have seen fossils on the Isle of Wight. And this down here?” He brushed aside the branches to reveal wispy weeds with spade-shaped leaves that changed from green to red near the tips. “This is
Archaefructus
. You find it fossilized everywhere in China.”

“You’re saying both of these species are extinct.”

“Not just extinct. Extinct for sixty-five million years.”

Hart listened to the shouts of the others in her party fade into oblivion and tried to define her surroundings from the echoes. In her mind, the group traveled through a rocky spiral winding downward into the center of the earth, although she knew that couldn’t possibly be the case. The problem was she’d completely lost her sense of direction. Down here there was no north or south, only up or down, the relative degrees of which she could no longer clearly differentiate.

She would have gladly traded her headlamp for just a glimpse of the sun, about which she tried not to think for fear of embracing the despair. The sheer tonnage of rock and sea overhead was a physical weight compressing the air around her. Despite her best efforts, she couldn’t quite seem to take a deep breath. It was as though her lungs met resistance, which only served to increase the frantic beating of her heart and made the veins in her temples throb. Rationally, she understood her symptoms were the result of the increasing pressure as they penetrated the earth’s crust. She could relieve them with the oxygen mask anytime she wanted, only after what had happened to the others, she wasn’t about to waste a single molecule of her finite supply until she had no other choice.

Payton thought he had heard shouting, but that was a long time ago now. She could no longer even feel the rumble of the subterranean river through the bedrock, and Thyssen’s monitor served to show them a whole lot of nothing. They all agreed that it felt like they were heading in the right direction to intercept the river, but with the way the maze of tunnels and caverns dictated their course, she wouldn’t have been surprised to learn they were headed in the opposite direction entirely.

She focused on her memories of the hominin remains entombed in the wall in an attempt to evaluate every detail of what she’d actually seen before her imagination filled in the gaps. The elongated skulls were the result of more than simple hydrocephaly—chronic swelling of the brain—and the cranial sutures didn’t reflect any artificial malformation. The facial architecture was markedly simian and yet simultaneously unlike that of any primate she’d ever seen. In her mind, the face of a child materialized from the darkness, only when it smiled, it had the teeth of a gorilla and smooth skin where the eyes should have been.

She shivered despite the layer of sweat beneath her wetsuit. Were it not for the crisp air, she would have thought herself back in the jungles of Borneo instead of hundreds of feet beneath the frozen tundra.

A high-pitched sound stopped her dead in her tracks.

She turned slowly in a circle, sweeping her beam across the cavern walls. Strange speleothems cast bizarre shadows seemingly animated by her light. It was impossible to gauge how deep the shadows were. For all she knew, every one of them concealed yet another tunnel that would lead them into another endless series of passageways.

The lights of the others grew increasingly distant. It struck her that no one had even noticed she’d slowed down. How easy would it be to just sit down and never be found again? They continued to name each subsequent cavern after features in Greek hell, and while it was meant to be tongue-in-cheek, that was exactly how she’d begun to think of this place. Only instead of flames there was darkness, which somehow seemed infinitely worse.

Hart ran to catch up with them. She was by no means out of shape, yet the exertion took a steep physical toll. She was winded by the time she caught up with the others, who appeared startled by her sudden appearance.