by Sarah Ready
She shivers again and I make a decision. I have to get her warm and I have to get her to help. I think the most urgent thing right now is getting warm.
But how?
Body heat. But first we need out of these soaking wet clothes.
“Dang it.”
I kick off my shoes and socks and then pull off my T-shirt. I wring the water out of them and set them out on the rock. Then, I strip down to my boxers and wring out my shorts. I’m too cold to feel awkward. I jump up and down and rub my hands over my clammy skin. Then I kneel down next to the woman.
I untie and pull off her hiking boots and socks. Then I work the soaking wet long-sleeved shirt over her head. I wring it out and put it next to her socks and boots. I feel around in the dark for the buttons to her pants. The skin of her stomach is cold and taut.
I find the button.
Suddenly, her hand lashes out and grabs my throat. She squeezes and I freeze.
“Take off my pants and I’ll kill you and leave your body in the dark.”
I can’t see her. I can only feel her freezing cold fingers pressing into my Adam’s apple. I swallow.
“You’re awake,” I say. “Thank God.”
Her fingers shake and relax on my throat.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
“What are you doing?”
I take her wrist and move her hand from my throat. “When we fell we landed in water. It was forty degrees at most. I’m worried about hypothermia. I was getting our clothes off so they can dry. I’m not…” I clear my throat.
I hear her moving over the rocks and dirt as she pushes herself up into a sitting position.
“Are you hurt?” she asks. Then even though we’re not touching I feel her shiver violently.
“No. I’m fine.”
She shivers again.
“Dang it, you’re right,” she says. I hear her zipper and she kicks off her pants. I grab them and wring the water from them. They’re the quick-dry kind of material hikers like to wear so I think they’ll dry fast. I lay them next to the other clothes.
“What’s your name?” she asks.
“Sam,” I say automatically. Usually I introduce myself as Frederick to strangers. Frederick Knight. But this situation is different. I don’t want to be Frederick Knight down here. Not in this dark cave, freezing, cut off from civilization and possibly without a way out.
“I’m Veronica,” she says. “Figured we should introduce ourselves before we do the horizontal tango.”
I cough and sputter. “Ahh, what?”
“Kidding. Don’t they always have sex in the movies to ward off hypothermia?”
“Right.” I swallow.
“Seriously. Come here. My head hurts like a son of a gun and I’m freezing.”
I feel the ground and move across the damp rock. When I touch her arm she lets out a long sigh. It does feel good. She’s cold. So am I. But where our skin touches there’s a warm thrum that makes me want to press every inch of our bodies together.
“Feels better,” she says. “Do you mind?” She inches closer and presses her side to mine.
“No. That’s good,” I say.
I sit for a moment and enjoy the warmth between us, but then she shivers again.
“Screw this. Come here.” I open my arms and legs, and even though she can’t see, she can hear. She moves in between my legs and leans her back against my chest. I wrap my arms and legs around her and start to rub my hands over her skin. Then I rub my hands briskly together to create heated friction and run them over her again.
She burrows against me and lets out a sigh.
“Thank you,” she says against my chest and the heat of her breath and her body warms me.
“Of course,” I say and I keep running my hands over her.
After a while her skin warms and her shivers become less violent and more muted. When they do she shifts around and rubs her hands together. Then she moves them over my arms and my chest. Her hands are delicate, her fingers are long and thin with calluses at the tips. I shiver as she drags her hands down my chest.
“Cold?” she asks.
I nod, even though I know she can’t see me. I don’t think I can speak. She keeps creating warmth between her palms and then running her hands down my arms, my chest, my legs. I can’t see anything. Which is the only explanation I have for why I find her touch the most erotic thing I’ve ever felt in my life. I don’t know where her fingers are going to land next. And because I can’t see anything, my other senses are completely focused on her. The rhythm of her breath and the whisper of her shifting movements against the rock. The heat of her hands dragging over me and sending warmth coursing through me. Everywhere she touches, heat spreads. Her hands move up my legs, my thighs… I stop her progress by placing my hands over hers. She stills. Then I draw her in close and wrap her against me. My breath is harsh in the quiet.
She relaxes and leans into me. Her hair, damp now rather than soaking wet, fans out over my chest as she presses her cheek into my shoulder.
“Don’t worry,” I say.
She shifts in my arms then pulls away. I feel cold when she moves away, and it’s not just from the lack of body heat.
“My clothes are dry,” she says. I hear the fabric rustling as she gets dressed. I stand and pull on my shorts and shirt. They’re still damp and cold and feel uncomfortably clammy. I fold my socks and put them in my pocket, then slip on my shoes.
“Do you have a light?” she asks.
“My watch,” I say. I press the button and the low glow gives its dull illumination. I can see the outline of her. She’s about six inches shorter than me and athletic. I can’t tell she’s athletic from the light, I know that from the feel of her in my arms. And that’s all I know about what she looks like. I raise my arm and turn the display so that the light can reflect off the walls. Some of the white crystals catch and spark.
“I don’t remember…which way did we come from?” she asks.
I walk to the edge of the rocky shore. “Here,” I say. The water glows clear blue under the light. “We fell from up there. I swam us to shore.”
She lets out a long sigh.
“From what I could tell,” I say, “we fell thirty, maybe forty feet before we hit the pool. I don’t think we’ll be able to get back out that way.”
She walks to the edge of the water. I hold out my watch and try to illuminate the pool and the walls. I think we’re in a large dome. The walls slope up in a sharp curve and are full of twisted stone and spiked mounds. Somewhere in the ceiling of the dome, thirty or so feet above us, is the hole we fell through. It’s too dark to see where it is. The only thing I can tell is we aren’t getting out of here by going back up.
I hear rustling and turn to Veronica. She starts to pull off her boots.
“I’m gonna try. I’ll wade in, locate a route. Climb out, get help.”
I’m dumbstruck. “Do you see the wall? It curves like the inside of a sphere. You’d have to be Spiderman to climb that. Look at the condensation on the stones, they’re slicker than ice. And what happens when you fall? What if you’re hurt and I can’t find you?” The thought of her lost in the black water sends a chill through me. “It’s not climbable.”
She paces the edge of the water and peers into the blackness and up into the dark. Finally she stops.
“You’re right,” she says. Her voice breaks a bit, but then she turns and walks back toward our resting spot. I follow, breathing a sigh of relief. The only thing that would’ve come from attempting to climb the wall was injury or worse.
“Do you have any outdoors experience? Caving? Hiking? Anything?” she asks.
“My parents took me camping when I was eight,” I say. “We went on this trippy cave tour that dumped into a gift shop.” I hear her sigh. “No. No experience.”
“Why’d you go in this cave? What were you thinking?” she asks. She sounds angry.
“Hey. Why’d you? If you remember correctly, I was trying to save you
.”
“No. I was trying to save you. I saw you from the trail. I wanted to make sure you didn’t get hurt so I came after you.”
“Oh. Right.” I clench my hands, I shouldn’t have come in the cave. There was something about it that drew me in, but I should’ve kept walking. “You’re from around here?” I ask.
“I live nearby. I hike and camp along this trail nearly every weekend.”
“Then you know how to get out?”
She’s quiet. I know her answer before she says it.
“No.”
“What does that mean?” I ask, although I can already make an educated guess.
“It means we can stay here and wait for someone to find us. It’s not likely they will, though. Did you tell anyone where you’d be today?”
I want to kick myself. “No. No one knows where I am.” I was just going out for a short walk. I’d driven up from New York City this morning and wanted to stretch my legs and explore the woods around the new house. “No one will miss me. Not for a day or two at least.”
She lets out a long breath. “Me either. I mean, my friends know I’m hiking, but they’re used to not hearing from me for days.”
“We could stay here and wait, see if someone comes in, or if rescuers find us,” I say, thinking the situation through. A sense of doom closes around me.
“It would make sense to stay and wait for rescue. That’s usually the wisest course of action,” she says.
“Do you have food?” I ask.
“No. Do you? Water?”
“No.”
“Everything was in my pack,” she says. Her voice is full of recrimination.
“It’s alright,” I say. I point to the passage a few feet from where we stand. “That might be the way out.”
“Or the way deeper,” she says.
We’re silent for a moment and the enormity of the situation hits. It’ll take days for anyone to notice we’re missing, Evie might get worried after two or three days of no contact, but not any sooner than that. Then, it will take days more for rescuers to search the vast woods of the area, and it’s unlikely they’ll think to look in a cave a hundred yards off the trail. It could be weeks before we’re found, if ever. And we have no food. We could starve to death sitting here waiting for someone to find us.
Veronica starts to pace. “Eighty percent of survival is a mental game. We got this. The pool water probably isn’t clean, but we can drink the water drops coming off the stalactites. We can huddle together for warmth. But we have to decide, do we wait here or do we take the passage and try to find a way out?”
“Do many people come in this cave? A random hiker? Kids? Is there any chance of that happening?”
“It’s not likely. Two or three people hike this section of the trail per week. I’m one of them. The chances are close to nil that anyone will come looking in here.”
It seems pretty clear what we have to do.
“Let’s find a way out,” I say. Although my voice sounds firm, the sense of doom presses harder. “The entrance is probably only forty feet down this tunnel.”
“Right. Exactly. Let’s go then,” she says.
I pause. Wait for her to move.
“Hold my hand,” she says.
I do. I thread her fingers through mine. I hear her let out a low sigh.
“Thank you,” she whispers.
I squeeze her hand. “You’re welcome.”
Then we step into the low, tight confines of the dark tunnel.
Forty feet later we make it, not to an exit, but to a choice.
Left or right.
5
Veronica
Life definitely knows how to throw twists and turns. This morning I was running from the idea of my soul mate coming to town, now I’m just praying that I make it out of this cave alive. I want to get back to my friends, be there for the birth of my goddaughter.
I couldn’t care less about Frederick Knight.
I look over at the soft glow of blue light surrounding Sam. I wonder for a second if fate pulled a number on me and knocked me into this cave with my soul mate, but the man I’m with isn’t Frederick Knight. This man’s name is Sam and you can learn a lot about someone when put in a survival situation. So far I know he’s level-headed, he risks himself for others, and although he was reckless coming into the cave, he doesn’t strike me as someone who is careless. He seems decent and I think…I can trust him. I know I can. He saved me. Pulled me from the water when I passed out and kept me from hypothermia. My motto has always been love makes you weak. I usually extend that to not depending on men. Because they’re all players or wanna-be players—ad nauseam. Except…none of that seems to apply here. Nothing in my past relates to a situation where I’m lost in a dark cave with a man I don’t know and have to depend on. And who doesn’t seem like a player or a wanna-be player at all.
“There’s a draft coming from the right,” he says. He holds his hand in front of the tunnel entrance.
I feel it too. A slight pulling of air up and away from us. I don’t know whether that means it leads to an exit or farther into the cave. I think I remember some cavers telling me that it could be either, that drafts aren’t a reliable indicator of an exit. Cavers love to sit around drinking beer and reminiscing about caving. I sometimes run into them on my longer hikes. Right now, I’m wishing I paid more attention.
“I think…” I pause. “Can you hold your light over the ground? Look to see if there are any signs of humans or animals coming through before us?”
“Good thought.”
He squats down and holds his watch over the ground. I bend down and scan the earth as he moves the light over the dirt and rocks. The only sign of life is our own footprints. No other markings. No rubble, or grooves, or tracks, or anything. Nothing to guide our decision.
“Well, there goes that thought.” I squint at the ground. The cave is mostly limestone, a dull yellowish tinged white. The ground is a mix of dirt, some loose rocks, and solid stone. Already, everything looks the same. It will be so easy to get turned around in here. I bend and grab some of the smaller stones.
“I’m going to make a cairn. I don’t want to get turned around.” I start stacking the rocks at the entrance to the tunnel on the right.
“Right. I’ll make an arrow pointing back the way we came.”
We take a minute to stack a noticeable cairn, and a rock arrow pointing back to the pool. When we’re finished I stand and smack the dirt from my hands.
We decide that we should leave something at the pool in case rescuers rappel down. After a quick hike back and a discussion we leave a rock message stating Sam and Veronica, the date, and an arrow pointing the way we went.
Back at the fork we take the tunnel to the right. Sam leads. Before long we’re both stooped over and using our hands along the walls to pull us through the tight confines. The wet rock is cold and slimy and my hands slip over the stone. The air smells strongly of mineral, like you’ve held up a handful of gravel after a rainstorm and stuck your nose in it. Every so often, the soft glow of Sam’s watch hits a stalactite and it looks like a face, or an animal, or in one case, a fried egg. The only noise is the scrape and the echo of my boots and his shoes against the ground and our labored breathing.
This tunnel feels as tight and confined as a stone coffin.
The thought scrapes down my skin and lifts the hairs on my arms.
“Talk to me,” I say.
Sam stops and I pull up short behind him.
“What?”
I shake my head. “I don’t…” I pause, “I think it’ll be easier if we talk.”
“Alright.”
I pull in the mineral-tinged air. “Let’s make an agreement,” I say. “Nothing’s off limits. We can say anything. No judgments. Talk about anything we want. And then, if we ever make it out…I mean, when we make it out, what we said stays in the cave.”
“You have a lot of secrets?” he asks, and I hear the smile in his voice.
“No,” I say. I shrug. “I just don’t want to, okay I don’t think we’re going to die, but if we do, I don’t want to be with a stranger when I do. I want…I’d like to be with someone I know and trust. Someone I like. So…”
“I’m a computer geek,” he says suddenly.
And he says it in such a way that I start to laugh. “What?”
“I love computers. Programming, app development, the beauty of a perfect line of code. I used to sit in front of a computer for hours on end and go so deep in the code that I forgot to eat. Forgot the time and whether it was day or night.”
“Wow,” I say. “That’s pretty awesome.”
“It’s…what?”
He sounds surprised. I can just make out his head turning quickly back to me.
“It’s awesome that you love something so much. Lots of people don’t have that.”
He’s quiet for a moment, then, “You’re right.” Again he sounds surprised.
Then he starts moving forward again. I follow after him. He keeps talking, his voice echoing back to me and filling the darkness.
“I let some people convince me otherwise.”
“Who’s that?”
“Nobody.” He pauses. “That’s not true. No secrets, right?”
“Exactly,” I say. I stoop lower. My breaths grow shorter. I’m not naturally claustrophobic, but the walls closing in are starting to get to me.
“We’re going to have to crawl here,” Sam says. I hear him lowering to the earth. I drop down onto all fours and crawl forward. Suddenly, I feel tears at the corners of my eyes. We crawl forward and all I want to do is turn around. What if the ceiling caves in, we’ll be trapped, we’ll die in this rocky coffin. A tear slides down my cheek.
“Who was it?” I ask desperately. “Who made you believe that?” I need to hear his voice.
“I don’t remember when it started. I guess at school. I was awkward intelligent, not the kind that teachers like or kids admire, but the uncomfortable, socially unacceptable kind.”
“What does that mean?”