Subterrestrial (33 page)

Stalactites shattered against her shoulders, split her scalp. Slowed her momentum. Left her spinning against the current as the rubble tumbled across the limestone.

Calder cried in agony and anguish. She was going to die—alone—in this awful place.

The blood flowing from her scalp raced ahead of her on the current, leading her through the maze of stalactites. The ground was stained orange and ringed with red, blue, and yellow, which marked the high-water line of a thermal spring. Bubbles rose from crevices in the rocks, where vents issued superheated water. The sudden influx of heat felt positively divine on her bare skin.

There was something beautiful about the coloration, about the organisms that had somehow survived the scalding temperatures and the utter darkness. It was a triumph of nature that such beauty could thrive where there should have been only death. If this was her time, there were far worse places to meet her end.

1:18.

Something tumbled across the ground beneath her. She glanced toward the source of the movement and saw Mitchell’s mask. The Plexiglas was broken and the straps were torn. The cracks were lined with crimson. The current swept it beyond the range of her light.

No, she wasn’t going to die. Not now. Not like this.

She wove through the stalactites, pulling on some and kicking from others to generate as much speed as possible. The clock continued its countdown inside her head.

Forty-nine
.

Forty-eight
.

The speleothems receded and once again she was able to swim unimpeded. Plumes of steam forced increasingly larger bubbles from the mantle. She caught flashes of orange. The lava cooled when it hit the water and metamorphosed into gray globs that grew into cairnlike mounds. The water became so hot around the vents that she had to dodge them. The moment she saw the slightest hint of orange, she propelled herself away from it, and even then it felt like she was swimming through molten fire. The entire subduction zone was tearing itself apart from the inside out.

Twenty
.

Nineteen
.

Her pulse throbbed in her temples and rushed in her ears.

There was only darkness ahead.

If she was going to die, she was going to die swimming.

Sixteen
.

Fifteen
.

She blew out her breath. Drew another as deeply as she could. Filled every little nook and cranny of her lungs with air.

Twelve
.

Eleven
.

She reached to her hip and dialed off the flow with ten seconds of air left. The effect was psychosomatic, she knew, but the physical sensation of the air growing stale and leaden in her chest was real enough.

Calder swam through a crevice and into a cavern where ice-cold currents intermingled with the warm. Piles of rocks and debris routed her closer to the granite roof. Lengths of rebar stood from sections of broken concrete like the tentacles of so many squished octopi.

Her vision dimmed from the corners of her eyes, where red blebs moved sluggishly. Numbness spread from her toes into her feet. She held out as long as she dared before cranking on the air.

She gasped and struggled to slow her breathing long enough to completely fill her lungs again.

Seven
.

Six
.

Five
.

She killed the flow again and pulled herself through a narrow gap above the rubble and below the roof. There was nowhere else to go. Either this tunnel led somewhere or it would serve as her tomb.

The concrete. It was manufactured, which meant she was either near the surface or—

The tunnel.

She should have recognized it immediately. The rebar was for structural support, and the only thing down here that needed it was the infernal tunnel that had caused this nightmare in the first place.

Calder flipped over and swam with her back to the debris. She swept her hands across the stone, searching for a way through.

Nothing. Not so much as a single crack.

The initial flooding must have washed the rubble into the cavern, but from which direction? There had to be a gap large enough to accommodate chunks of concrete larger than she was, assuming they hadn’t clogged it.

She slowly bled out the last of her air through her nose in an effort to make it last a few precious seconds longer. It only served to tighten her chest and make her heart feel like it was hammering against the walls of a shrinking cage.

Calder dialed on the air again.

Four
.

Three
.

She stopped the flow before she’d recovered enough to take a deep breath. She’d be lucky if it lasted even a fraction as long as the last.

The rubble blocked her passage. There was no holding back the panic now. She rolled over and threw herself from one side to the other, searching desperately for any sort of opening in the rubble, any way through.

This was where she was going to die.

She grabbed the fractured edges of the concrete and dragged them down. Shoved aside boulders and rocks and—

There!

A sparkling line of sediment twirled past her and through a seam between two rocks.

She tucked the flashlight into her sleeve so she’d have full use of both hands and attacked them in a renewed frenzy. Her fingertips split on the sharp corners and became slick with blood. Still she grabbed anything she could and hurled it aside, sending it tumbling underneath her. She dug in with her feet and used them for leverage.

Her chest bucked with the instinct to gasp for air. She resisted it for as long as she could before taking a deep inhalation of nothing. It felt like her lungs collapsed in upon themselves.

She had no choice but to release the last of the oxygen, which flowed into her mask with the force of a child’s exhalation.

It wasn’t enough. Not even close. No sooner had she inhaled it than her chest started to ache.

She grabbed the jagged edge of a concrete slab and saw the blood a heartbeat before she felt the pain in her palm, yet she battled through it and dragged the concrete far enough toward her that she could see into the darkness behind it.

The current sucked at her from inside.

There was no time for hesitation.

She squeezed her shoulders through the gap. Kicked at the stone. Grabbed onto anything she could.

The darkness constricted around her. It didn’t matter that she could no longer see. Nothing mattered but squirming through the rubble until she either reached freedom or died trying.

Calder suddenly realized that no one would find her body. The rubble would continue to shift and bury her where no one could physically search. More people would come and they would share the same fate, assuming the creatures didn’t find their way out in the meantime.

Her body grew colder by the second. She clung to the last of the air for as long as she could, riding out the muscular contractions until she simply couldn’t do so any longer. She gasped, but there was no air. She felt like she was choking, like her throat had closed. Her chest burned.

A faint glow in the distance.

Calder reached up and found nothing to grab. The current pulled her higher. She tried to make her arms stroke but wasn’t sure if they did.

She lashed out with her leg. Struck her foot against something strangely soft and used the last of her strength to push herself upward. If she could just . . . reach it.

Sharp pain in her right ankle. A tug from behind.

No! She was so close!

She watched the light fade away as she was dragged down into the abyss.

Payton tumbled through the freezing water. The current bludgeoned him against the ground and the walls until he couldn’t tell which way was up. It took every last ounce of his strength to hold his breath.

Impact from behind knocked the wind out of him.

Panic kicked in and he thrashed. Retched. Gagged. Only succeeded in breathing in even more fluid.

The current slammed him into stone and momentarily pinned him there before dragging him to his left. He tumbled sideways. Felt the current build, pulling him harder and harder.

His body tried to vomit the aspirated fluid to no avail.

He reached for the oxygen tank on his hip, but he must have lost it when the wave hit.

This was it. There was nothing he could do, nothing left. His head became too heavy to hold up. He felt it loll backward into the current, which carried the rest of his body behind it.

Acceleration.

Limestone grazed his shoulders, his back, and then disappeared from beneath him.

A sudden sensation of weightlessness, then of falling.

Air on his face.

The roar of a waterfall.

Payton landed squarely on his back. Hard. Tumbled across a hard surface. Sputtered water and barely rolled to the side before vomiting all over the rock. He heaved until it felt as though he’d turned his body inside out, then he succumbed to the pain.

He cried out and drew his knees to his chest. Cradled his ribs.

Falling water assaulted him from seemingly every direction at once. He pushed himself to his hands and knees and saw wet limestone. He couldn’t gather his bearings with all of the water and spray, and dragged himself in what he hoped would prove to be the right direction.

He crawled from the water and scrutinized the rumbling sound. It seemed to come from both behind him and beneath him at the same time. When he reached the ledge, he understood why.

The cavern was enormous and vaulted, reminiscent of a European cathedral with stalactites. A flume of water fired from an orifice high up on the far wall with enough force to cross the entire cavern and strike a limestone overhang so thin that he was lucky it hadn’t shattered when he hit it. The overflow poured from it in a great curtain onto a body of water that rose toward him at an alarming rate.

A dark shape drifted out from behind the curtain. Hart’s face breached the surface before she rolled over again and her wetsuit blended back into the darkness.

Payton threw himself to the precipice and reached for her before she floated out of sight, but she was too far below him. Even as fast as the water was rising, he wouldn’t be able to reach her in time. So he scooted as far forward as he dared, until the stone lip bit into his chest. Stretched as far as he could. There was a gash on his forearm from which a steady stream of blood flowed. It dripped from his fingertips and pattered the water around her head.

Just . . . a . . . few . . . more . . . inches . . .

A scream from behind and above him.

Payton couldn’t risk taking his eyes off of Hart, who made only the slightest conscious effort to swim. He pushed with his toes to a point where he knew that any farther and he wouldn’t be able to maintain his balance. And if he fell in with her, he didn’t see any way that either of them would be able to get back out.

He groaned with the strain as he reached—

Crack!

The overhang broke and dropped him into the water. He surfaced with a gasp and paddled toward Hart. Rolled her onto her back to get her face above the choppy waves. Her head flopped limply onto his shoulder. Her cheek was startlingly cold against his.

“Hang on, Emily.”

He stroked with one arm toward the fractured ledge. The waves splashed over his mouth, but he lacked the strength to even raise his chin. All he could think was that he needed to get her onto the ledge if he was to have any chance of forcing the water from her lungs.

It was still too high, though. He tried to reach it and ended up submerging them both. All he could do was tread water and pray it raised them to the overhang before his legs gave out.

A scream from directly overhead.

Why-ahh!

The large male primate held his hand in front of the seamless flesh where his eyes should have been to shield them from Payton’s headlamp. There were dark orbs behind the translucent skin, which might have been vestigial but had retained some acute measure of functionality. They must have still contained active photoreceptors, whether they responded to light and dark as absolutes or as varying degrees in between. There were so many things he wanted to know, but none of them mattered if they drowned first.

“Help—”

A wave broke over his mouth and he coughed it out. He wasn’t going to be able to tread much longer.

Whealp!

The male gripped the edge with his handlike feet and reached for Hart with his disproportionately long arms. Payton raised Hart as high as he possibly could. The primate grabbed her beneath her armpit but lost his grip. He again screeched and several others appeared at the precipice. Together they pulled Hart from the water and onto the stone shelf.

Whealp!

This time the male extended his arm toward Payton. It almost sounded like . . . surely he wasn’t attempting to imitate his language . . .

Was he?

Whealp!

The male repeatedly curled his fingers to his palm in a beckoning gesture until Payton grabbed his hand. The animal was surprisingly strong and provided the leverage he needed to climb up the cavern wall and onto the ledge.

The primates stood in a circle around Hart, screeching. They darted in and nudged her. Hopped back and screamed again.

Payton scurried toward her, but one of the animals lunged across his path and slapped the ground in front of him.

“Get out of the way!”

It screeched and bared its teeth.

“Please.”

Payton attempted to crawl past it, and it swatted him across the face. Stinging lacerations opened on his cheek.

He attempted to shove it out of the way. It hopped back, screeched, and slashed the back of his hand.

The male bounded between them and smacked the ground.

Whaah! Wheah!

The smaller animal screamed at Payton, then scampered away. The male tugged at his upper arm.

Wheese!

Payton crawled to Hart’s side. Felt for a pulse. Her skin was so cold . . . so very cold . . .

He found a pulse. Faint and thready but a pulse nonetheless. Cocked her head back to open her airway and started chest compressions.