“Oh, I am so very scared,” Henry said.
“Sweetie, don’t,” Adriana said, taking his arm.
“Please! Everyone quit arguing!” Sissy blared. In a softer voice, she said, “You’re scaring Emily.”
Emily had moved in beside her mother. She looked afraid.
“It’s okay, Emily,” Adriana said. “When you get older you’ll learn that men are all bark and no bite.”
Emily looked at Adriana with a shy smile.
Uno’s grating catcall continued. “Which leads me to my next point. Give yourselves up, and Mr. Mustache and I will spare the runt and her mother. We’ll release them the first chance we get.”
Cutbirth turned and yelled into the tube. “Your offer is generous, but we’ll pass.”
“This is a one-time offer,” Uno shouted. “It expires in 30 seconds.”
“Come closer to the hole, I can’t quite make out what you said,” Cutbirth said.
Mocking laughter.
Cutbirth turned back to Diego. In a quiet voice he said, “I am showing you my map because I want all of you to go ahead without me. I want you to hike to a place I call the Boulevard of Chandeliers.”
“Is this some sort of sick joke?” Diego said in little more than a whisper.
“Hear me out,” Cutbirth said.
“We’re listening,” Yong said quietly. “It had better be good.”
“At one point,” Cutbirth began, “I estimated—”
Another thunderous roar emerged from the tube like grapeshot from a cannon. The echoes faded, the marble-sized shotgun pellets came to rest, and in a few seconds, Uno yelled, “Time’s up!”
Cutbirth continued in a low voice. “I estimated we were about two hours ahead of the bounty hunters. That estimate was seriously flawed, and now—”
“Seriously flawed. No shit,” Henry interrupted.
“—and now,” Cutbirth continued, “they are within spitting distance. We need to buy ourselves some time.”
“Where’s your story leading, Cutbirth?” Diego said.
“It’s leading all of you to the Boulevard of Chandeliers while I station myself at the end of this tube and rain on Uno’s parade.”
“Details,” Yong said.
Cutbirth had not holstered his Glock and he held it up in the light from his headlamp. He was now whispering. “I’m going to station myself at this end of the tube and harass the hell out of them with a 10mm Howdy! every now and again. At some point I’ll slip away and catch up with you. Uno and Mr. Mustache will have no idea if I’m still stationed at this end of the tube or not. I can’t imagine them crawling into that hole unless they were a hundred percent sure I was gone.”
“And we’ll rendezvous at the Boulevard of Chandeliers?” Diego whispered.
“Exactly.”
They considered this for a moment.
Diego studied the map. BOULEVARD OF CHANDELIERS was handwritten clearly in the lower right-hand corner, not far from the words PICTURE ROOM, a reference, Diego surmised, to the pictograph chamber they had hiked through earlier. “What’s this so-called Boulevard of Chandeliers, Cutbirth?”
“You’ll know it when you see it,” Cutbirth said, finding Diego with his headlamp. “It’s about a 20-minute hike down that tunnel.” He turned his head and lit the tunnel that formed the right lane of the Y.
No one spoke and a silence fell over them. Somewhere in the network of caves came the gentle sound of dripping water.
“Let’s do it,” Diego said.
They gathered up their gear and headed out.
Henry said his ankle wasn’t as bad as before and he didn’t require Emily’s shoulder. Diego noted that Henry’s limp was now little more than the shambling gait of a hypochondriac.
***
Ten minutes into their journey, Diego tilted his head and turned his headlamp toward the ceiling. It rose to a distance of more than 30 feet and was decorated with a layer of coral-like formations. The wall to their right was dappled with tiny white stones that resembled hen’s eggs; the left wall with sheet-like scaffolding that bore a striking resemblance to living room draperies. The walls and ceiling could easily have been the work of some avant-garde artist. There was a strange smell to the place—not the normal cave smell—and it burned Diego’s nostrils.
“You smell that, Mom?” Emily asked, her nose wrinkling.
“Yes, baby. I smell it.” Sissy’s eyes traveled fretfully along the high walls of the rocky shaft.
Emily made the scrunched-up face of someone who had just sucked a lemon. “It smells like that stuff you use to clean the bathroom.”
“Ammonia,” Adriana said, “the waste product of” —something swished past Adriana’s head, then darted through the beam from her headlamp— “bats!”
“Bats?” Emily howled. “Yuk!” Her headlamp sketched the walls and ceiling.
Passing swiftly overhead, their wings rustling in the darkness, a colony of bats streaked through the gleam from their headlamps.
“Up there!” Diego said, shining his light into a ceiling crevice. A dark river of bats poured out of the long, thin fissure. Diego’s light beam and that of Adriana’s joined to illuminate the crack. The bats disappeared as suddenly as they had appeared.
That was like a scene from a Dracula flick, Diego thought, more awestruck than frightened.
“Are they gone?” Sissy asked with dazed timidity, one hand above Emily’s head.
“They’re gone,” Diego reported, his eyes fixed on the abandoned crevice.
They continued down the tunnel to a place where water seeping through the high ceiling over the many millennia had formed chandelier-like clusters of stalactites.
“This must be the Boulevard of Chandeliers,” Diego noted, his light bouncing from stalactite to stalactite.
That was easy, he thought. Too easy.
Emily raised her camera and snapped a picture. The flash ricocheted wildly through the clusters of stalactites that stretched the length of the long, high ceiling.
“Simply glorious,” Henry mocked, lighting a cigarette.
“Actually, they are,” Yong observed, his light scanning the hanging formations.
Diego had the uneasy feeling that one of the stone clusters might break loose at any moment and crash down upon them. Indeed, some of the heavier formations had pulled away from the ceiling at some point in time—Perhaps during yesterday’s tremor, Diego thought—their scattered remains strewn about on the tunnel floor.
Pools of water had formed on the smooth belly of the tunnel, and they carefully stepped around them. Thin shelves had been shaped along the walls by some long-ago underground river, and bouquets of tiny stalactites sprouted from the rocky eaves. The place had an eerie yet imaginative look to it.
The Boulevard of Chandeliers continued on, the face of it changing little.
The words “Okay, let’s stop and wait for Cutbirth” were poised on Diego’s tongue when they came upon a sight that brought them to a frightful, wide-eyed halt.
Her eyes fixed squarely on the hideous figure before them, Emily nuzzled in close to her mother, grabbing Sissy’s arm with a gasp.
“Diego...?” Adriana said in a small, tight voice.
Henry moaned over Diego’s shoulder.
Diego stared at the thing, and the thing stared back.
“Mom, I think I w-w-et my p-p-pants,” Emily stuttered, squeezing Sissy’s arm, her blue-green eyes riveted on what sat before them, her frosty breath coming in fast, little puffs.
Sissy tried to offer a word or two of encouragement, but her tongue seemed temporarily paralyzed.
Before them in the Boulevard of Chandeliers, positioned comfortably on a thin ledge three feet or so off the cave floor, sat a hideous corpse, the tattered remnants of gray overalls and red wool shirt hanging from its flesh-eaten frame like Spanish moss. It was not a skeleton, nor was it a person. It was something in between. A ghastly, rotting cadaver. Most of the nose had been eaten away, and both eyes hung from emp
ty orbits by a nerve or a tendon or a muscle fiber like rotting grapes dangling off a vine. Arms folded in its lap, the corpse’s legs were crossed with the genteel elegance of a well-bred gentleman. The odor of rotting flesh defiled the crisp air. A full set of teeth clinched a fat cigar, or what was left of one. The corpse seemed to be smiling.
“What is that?” The small, hollow voice was Henry’s.
“Everyone just stay put,” Diego said.
Henry said, “I don’t have a problem with that.”
Diego approached the thing cautiously, walking to within a few feet of the decaying corpse. He continued to stare at the thing in breathless silence, his legs threatening to buckle at any moment. Suspended from a thin wire, a wooden signboard hung from the cadaver’s neck. There was something written on the tiny placard, but it was turned at such an angle that Diego couldn’t make out the words. He leaned in carefully and turned the homemade sign slightly. A message had been scrawled in pencil on the wood:
Here sits Woodrow Faxson, a good man
from Bakersfield, California
whose lungs weren’t up to the task.
A scrawl at the bottom read: A. Cutbirth.
Diego released the tiny signboard. It fell gently against Woodrow Faxon’s chest. It wasn’t much of an impact, really no more than a whisper-soft bump of the placard hitting the decomposing body, but it was enough to dislodge one the decaying legs, which hung by a thread. The leg pulled away from the rotting corpse and fell onto the cave floor.
Diego jumped back with a gasp.
Like a fragile house of cards, the remaining pieces of the corpse began to crumble. The other leg had lost its hinge and it was the next to go—it dropped to the floor beside its brother appendage. Without the legs to prop it up, the torso was now top-heavy and had no sense of balance. It began to lean forward precariously before pitching onto the cold floor. It landed with a sickening CLUMP! One arm broke away.
Emily uttered a long, high-pitched shriek. The tumultuous cry was the loudest, most frightful scream Diego had ever heard and he wheeled about with a howl of his own. “Emily! Stop screaming!”
“Don’t you yell at my daughter!” Sissy cried.
“And don’t you yell at my husband!” Adriana shouted.
“EVERYONE STOP YELLING!” Yong trumpeted.
The distant sound of gunfire—a single, resounding BOOM!—ended the screaming and yelling and shrieking.
“That’s better,” Diego said, exhaling an anxious breath. Emily’s scream had quickened his heart and he could feel his pulse hammering both sides of his neck. “Yong, that shot…was it Cutbirth or the bounty hunters?”
Breathing hard, Yong considered the question. “Does it matter?”
“I suppose not,” Diego said, his legs trembling.
***
Diego and the others had been sitting on the thin ledge not far from where Woodrow Faxon lay scattered on the floor, but got to their feet as Cutbirth approached.
“A little heads-up about your Mr. Faxson would have been nice,” Diego said.
“Yeah, I heard screaming,” Cutbirth growled. “As did Uno and Mr. Mustache. Actually, the screams worked to our advantage because two seconds after the screaming began someone was in the tube and headed my way. Uno and Mr. Mustache must have thought everyone had left, and I could see someone’s light crawling toward me. Once again the Law of Unintended Consequences has prevailed.”
“So you shot?” Diego asked.
“Yes. Don’t know if I hit anyone. Hard to miss, actually,” Cutbirth said. “But when I poked my light down the tube, it was empty. Don’t know how I could have missed.”
“Maybe you killed one of them,” Henry said.
“Maybe,” Cutbirth said. “But you can bet they won’t be crawling through that tube again anytime soon.” He looked at the scattered remains of Woodrow Faxon. “What the hell happened?”
“He had a nervous breakdown,” Diego said.
“I’m sorry I screamed, Mr. Cutbirth,” Emily said. “I almost wet my pants.”
“Why don’t you take Mr. Faxson’s picture, Emily,” Henry said with a pitiless smile.
“You have a short memory, Henry,” Sissy said.
“Just poking a little fun at—”
“Shut up, Henry,” Yong said.
“Cutbirth, what’s the story with Faxon?” Diego asked.
“Mr. Faxon didn’t make it last year,” Cutbirth said. “Bad lungs. A smoker. I think pneumonia got him. He coughed all the way from Frisco.”
Sissy said, “If you shot one of them, maybe that means the bounty hunters are out of our hair for good.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Cutbirth said.
Yong turned and directed his headlamp back down the high, airy tunnel. In an eerily calm voice Yong said, “Something tells me they’re not out of our hair.”
I agree, Diego thought.
23
“How much time before the bounty hunters figure out nobody’s at the other end of that tube, Cutbirth?” Diego asked. They were walking briskly down the Boulevard of Chandeliers, their strides long and purposeful. “Yong’s right. I don’t think we’ve seen the last of them.”
Cutbirth looked back over his shoulder. “An hour? A day? I have no way of knowing. It depends on how hungry they are. Hungry and reckless. I still believe I may have killed or wounded one of them.”
Diego, like Yong, had lost all faith in Cutbirth’s hasty assumptions.
“And then what?” Henry asked between breaths. “One of them will...will make better time than the seven of us.” Despite the constant air temperature of 56 degrees, sweat bullets rolled down Henry’s gaunt face and into his graying goatee. He now walked with the limp of someone with a pebble in his shoe. It didn’t slow him down much.
“Less talk and more walk, Henry,” Cutbirth said.
Leaving the ghostly remains of Woodrow Faxson and the Boulevard of Chandeliers behind, they proceeded toward the next destination on the map, a strange site Cutbirth had chosen to call the Birthday Cake. Following Cutbirth’s handmade chart, they twisted and turned through a dozen subterranean intersections, seven bobbing headlamps pushing back the darkness. Some of the intersections formed a Y, others a W. Cutbirth consulted his map at each intersection.
The narrow tunnel in which they hiked soon opened up into a winding passageway, one as wide as a four-lane highway and 60 feet in height. Although he had only seen it on television, the broad concourse reminded Diego of the Champs Élysées in Paris. Boulders the size of Army tanks lay at the base of the walls on either side of the broad hallway. Cutbirth said the recent tremors had caused the boulders to pull away from the walls.
They paused at the entrance to the wide tunnel to rest and drink from their canteens. Diego and Adriana sat on an oval boulder the size of a dining room table that had found its way into the middle of the wide hallway. Despite Yong’s offer for help, Diego was again carrying Adriana’s backpack as well as his own. He dug her canteen out of the backpack and handed it to her.
Latitude 38 Page 28