Deeper

by Jeff Long

  “What about Sam?” she said.

  “The children are three days ahead.”

  Three days. She had come so close.

  Clemens backed away. He and the creature resumed their insect chitchat. Her arm ached. She shifted her hand in the pooling blood.

  The hadal was strong, stronger than Jake, ape strong. But his strength was ebbing, Rebecca could feel it. His life was draining away, just like hers. If Clemens had not come along, she might just have outlasted the creature on her own.

  “Are you okay?” Clemens asked her.

  “Sam,” she said. “Is she all right?”

  “None of the girls has been killed,” Clemens said.

  “But is she all right?” Rebecca repeated.

  “She’s alive.”

  The world…weakened. Rebecca tipped her head back. Her cheek rested against the hadal’s cheek. They were dying together, like lovers. Another flare went up. Gorgeous light.

  Clemens went back to their strange language. The hadal’s voice softened.

  “They’re not going to the city,” Clemens said.

  “But you said,” she whispered.

  “I was wrong. They’re going someplace else.”

  “Where?”

  “I’m working on it.”

  “Will he tell you?”

  “I opened your vein. He thinks I’m on his side.”

  “You’re not?”

  “Stay with me,” he said. “This is almost over.”

  She hung upon his ravaged face. “Find my daughter.”

  “I’m doing my best. Can you hang on a little longer?”

  “It’s getting cold.”

  “Don’t go to sleep, Rebecca. I need to know when it gets too much.”

  Just then the hadal tensed. Rebecca heard footsteps. Hunter and his men approached from the shadows.

  “Stay back,” Clemens warned them.

  Hunter took a step, hands empty and on display. “Clemens,” he said. “Let’s talk.”

  “It’s under control here,” Clemens said. “Get those men out of here.”

  “You can walk out of here,” Hunter said. “You and your friend. Just tell him to let Rebecca go.” He took another step.

  “I’ve got him talking,” Clemens said.

  “She’s bleeding to death.”

  “She’ll be okay. I know what I’m doing.”

  Red laser dots flickered on Clemens’s face. Rebecca’s teeth chattered.

  “Let her go, Clemens.”

  “You don’t understand. Just back away.”

  Hunter took another step closer.

  Clemens said something to the hadal. Immediately the nails dug into her breast. The other hand started raking at her belly. The thing was trying to disembowel her. Rebecca cried out.

  Hunter froze.

  “Tell him,” Clemens said to her.

  “Go away,” Rebecca said to Hunter.

  “Not without you,” said Hunter.

  “We’re finding out,” she said.

  “Finding out?”

  “He knows where they are,” she said. “The children.”

  Hunter narrowed his eyes. He took it in. At last he signaled to the circle of men. The barrels of their weapons lifted. The fireflies left Clemens’s face. The men retreated.

  “Farther,” said Clemens. “All the way. Get in the boat. Take it out into the river.”

  The soldiers did as he said. The talons eased. Clemens spoke again, his tone soothing beneath the clicks and twitters. The hadal murmured by Rebecca’s ear. It seemed to go on a very long time. Her vision turned patchy. She was floating in and out.

  “Where?” she whispered.

  Clemens came closer. He asked again. The hadal’s grip slackened. With a shove, she could have freed herself. But her strength had drained away. She nestled back upon his body. She was cold. He was warm. The creature was her collaborator. Together they would find Sam.

  The hadal lifted his head to speak. Rebecca made room for his secret. Clemens bent to hear.

  The creature’s head exploded. It flew to bits. His grip let go. His secret, Sam’s location, abruptly died.

  The men looked at each other to see whose weapon had been fired. There were shrugs all around. The kill was like magic.

  A few seconds later a lone gunshot snapped in the far black distance.

  Clemens stood and opened his arms. “I think,” he said, “someone just killed your little girl.”

  “No,” she whispered.

  Hunter and his men swarmed ashore. The sky got very busy with flares and shadows and people who closed her wound and wrapped her in a sleeping bag and hooked her to an IV. The transfusion poured warmth into her. Warmth and rage.

  “Where is my daughter?”

  “I don’t know,” said Clemens.

  “But he told you.”

  “Not quite. Hunter put a stop to that.”

  But Hunter swore neither he nor any of his men had pulled the trigger. Her fury mounted. They were lying.

  The sniper arrived an hour later. “You’re safe,” Beckwith said. He looked proud even.

  “It was you?” said Rebecca. She had bled almost to death for the information. Only to have it killed by the lone ranger.

  “Ma’am?” Beckwith was confused.

  Hunter descended on him. He was trying to get back into her good graces. “Do you know what you’ve done?”

  “I would have taken the shot sooner,” Beckwith apologized. “I was at nine hundred yards. I needed to be sure.”

  “You crazy son of a bitch,” said Hunter. “How much more damage can you do with that rifle?”

  Beckwith looked from one face to another, bewildered. He faced her. “I don’t understand.”

  Rebecca turned from him, cradling her arm, sick at the seesaw of fate. He was innocent. He was guilty. He had saved her. He had killed her. Everything depended on Sam.

  “For God’s sake,” Hunter said to the sniper, “put us all out of your misery. Just eat your next bullet.”

  ARTIFACTS

  TELEVISION COMMERCIAL

  FORD TRUCK

  Rebecca Coltrane episode. 30-second spot. Hold for Super Bowl release.

  FADE IN:

  EXT. A STEEP MOUNTAIN RIDGELINE

  Off-road in the Rocky Mountains, a Ford 150 climbs the rugged slope. A series of shots: rocks fly, tires bounce and grab, the chassis rocks back and forth.

  CUT TO:

  EXT. A LOG ON RIDGELINE

  A fallen tree blocks the way. The truck climbs over.

  NARRATOR (VO)

  Nothing stops Rebecca Coltrane.

  CUT TO:

  INT. THE TRUCK CAB

  Rebecca is driving. Her jaw is set. She wrestles the wheel. She is a winner.

  CUT TO:

  EXT. TOP OF THE RIDGELINE

  The truck tops the ridgeline.

  NARRATOR (VO)

  Nothing stops a Ford truck.

  CUT TO:

  EXT. A FRONTIER MINE ON TOP OF THE RIDGELINE

  The truck approaches the mouth of an Old West mine. It pauses at the dark entrance.

  CUT TO:

  INT. THE TRUCK CAB

  Rebecca narrows her eyes. She is taking aim. She turns on the headlights and shifts into gear.

  CUT TO:

  EXT. THE MINE ENTRANCE

  The truck enters the mouth of the mine.

  CUT TO:

  EXT. THE MOUNTAIN SIDE (aerial, POV)

  Pull back from mine to show the wild mountainside. We have been watching the POV of…

  CUT TO:

  EXT. BLUE SKY

  A bald eagle drafts high overhead, watching over the mountains.

  FADE OUT

  30

  BENEATH EMPEROR LAKE

  JANUARY 14

  Ali left Gregorio’s grave at the foot of the sinkhole that had killed him. At a safe distance, she turned to say good-bye. The pile of stones looked forlorn and tiny. It pulled at her heart. Stay. She could practically hear
him.

  She fled his death, or tried to. But Gregorio found her.

  He wasn’t the only one.

  Mommy? Maggie’s voice sailed to her on the wind. “Help me, Mommy.”

  Ali leaned into the pack straps. She strained against her madness. The tunnel led down. Gravity was with her. But with the wind in her face and the voices in her head, it felt like an uphill battle all the way.

  The cave drip and the moist draft licked at her skin. Everything was body temperature, even the darkness. It was like fighting to fit into her own skin.

  Her only hope of exit lay in the unknown ahead. Gregorio had untied the rope before his fall. She could not climb that wall. There was no going back.

  At the same time it seemed there was no going forward. More than ever, the past ruled, beckoning from behind, from in front, from every side.

  Alexandra. Gregorio, pleading. Stay with me.

  Maggie cried. Mommy, I hurt. Come find me.

  Like that, pushed and pulled by her dead, Ali sank into the stone wilderness. She did not bother to invent ways to measure her descent. She just walked.

  Not long before her light gave out, a sign appeared. Beneath an overhang, scratched into the stone and grown over with red and yellow lichen, stood a jagged trick-or-treat grin.

  “McNabb,” said Ali, running her fingers over the initials. She searched for other signs, but there were no alephs or ICs or artifacts. McNabb had come this way, though. He had found some reason for continuing down this passageway. Ali was grateful beyond words for his company.

  Her headlamp died abruptly. The beam didn’t fade. It just blinked out.

  She should have been ready. She had thought she was. Cavers always carry a backup, if not two or three. But Gregorio’s fall had crushed her pack and broken her carbide lamp. And suddenly she couldn’t find her spare flashlight.

  The darkness was everywhere at once. It reached inside her clothes. She breathed it into her lungs. The pack suddenly weighed a ton.

  She knew the medical term for her panic reaction: dissociation hysteria. Blacklock, in the settler slang. Cave frenzy. People lost their heads. They imagined creepy crawlers on their skin. Some bolted to their deaths off cliffs or into rivers.

  Ali forced herself to be calm. If you can’t stand, sit. She shucked the pack. She sat. Her knees quit shaking. She counted her pulse out loud. It was a way to connect the inside with the outside, to do a rational thing. “Twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six…” A bubble materialized around her. With words alone, she managed to hold back the darkness.

  Taking the pack between her knees, she carefully sorted through every item by touch. “Socks,” she said aloud. “Spoon. Toothbrush.” Each syllable was a brick in the wall. In a side pocket, she found the plastic bag with spare batteries. Incredibly, not one fit her headlamp. And in her rush to leave Gregorio’s grave, she had left her flashlight.

  Ali stared at the blackness. She chided herself. Bear down. Do this thing. Survive.

  She returned everything to the pack, memorizing where each item lay. There was zero margin for error now. Standing, she worked on the pack. She took a halting step, and then another, hands outstretched. She found the tunnel wall. Victory. She spider-walked her fingers along the wall, feeling with her toes, taking more steps.

  Ike used to tell her that seeing was not always sight. The difference between the two was time. It took time—or the latest pharmaceuticals—for the human eye to acclimate to the abyss. Modern settlers swore by the drugs that amplified the photosensitive chemical rhodopsin, or visual purple, in the eye. Others took vitamin A injections, or used eyedrops that boosted the retina’s rod count. Minus the pharmaceuticals, Ali could only hope time might work.

  Keeping to the wall, she continued into the breeze. Waiting in the dark was not an option, not for her, not with the voices gaining force. If they resulted from sensory deprivation, then she was all the more vulnerable now.

  Gregorio called from his grave. Maggie pleaded.

  Hi, baby, said her father. It was him, his Lucky Strike voice. God I’ve missed you. I’m waiting down below.

  I remember when you were still inside me, said her mother.

  If they were simply snippets of memory, why did they all sound so full of misery? Their misery did not seem to unite them. Each clamored for her attention. That frightened her. They were hungry.

  Remember that time you broke your arm? said her father. I stuck with you.

  I loved you before you ever had a name. Her mother’s rock-a-bye murmur. You were my dream come true. Still are. Come find me.

  Help, Mommy.

  Alexandra.

  A chill shot through Ali. They were competing for her?

  “Seven hundred and seventy-nine,” she spoke to the gloom, counting her footsteps out loud. Floundering lower, she played crossword puzzles in her head. She sang songs. Anything to stifle their begging.

  She made camp in the dark, feeling for a flat spot. Animals rustled among the stones. They took on voices. Ali fought back. She named the flavors in her meal bar. “Brown sugar,” she said. “Oats. Peanuts.”

  But there was no escaping the voices. They followed her into her sleep. Ali dreamed so happily she never wanted to wake up.

  She rode a horse with her mother. She smelled her father’s Brut. She made sand castles with Maggie. She kissed Gregorio.

  The dreams were so perfect they almost seemed made just for her.

  But then blank spots began to intrude. They broke the dream flow, like empty frames in a movie. Except they weren’t entirely empty. She tried to avoid them. There was something about them. Something troubling. Something evil. Ali made a mistake. She looked inside the gap.

  Falling.

  It hit her.

  She was falling. Oh God. Falling into empty black isolation. She had never felt so ill. So cast away. The loneliness, it hurt.

  With a cry, she woke and grabbed for her light, then remembered it was dead. Dead. That was how she had felt.

  Her face was wet with sweat and tears, she could taste the salt. And bile. She had vomited. Her throat was raw with acid. She’d been weeping, no, howling with grief.

  Suddenly she wasn’t afraid of the lake sickness anymore. Because what if the voices were real? What if those famine-struck people that she and Gregorio had seen along the lake were actually talking to their dead? What if the lost souls were really souls, and the subterranean “hell” was really hell?

  What if they needed her for their escape?

  Maggie!

  Ali scrambled to her feet. The wind pressed at her. The voices swirled around her.

  There were more now. Her hearing had grown acute. The darkness was filled with voices. She heard rags of whispers. She heard syllables from the oldest edges of human language. Clicks and trills and guttural barking. There were hadal tongues in the mix, some she’d heard as a captive. And human languages. A bit of Latin sailed past. Mayan. Something like Chinese, tonal, but brutish, pre-Mandarin.

  Dead souls? Warehoused in the gut of the planet? Damned?

  She couldn’t accept it.

  The notion appalled her

  Maggie? Damned? A child? Doomed to churn through these hollow spaces for the rest of time?

  But what if it was so?

  Could she save just one? “Maggie?” she called.

  All at once, it seemed, the voices rushed at her in a mountain of noises. They drove at her, whispering, beseeching, inconsolable. It went on and on. They were telling her about infinity.

  “Stop,” she said.

  The voices stopped.

  She waited in the pitch-blackness, full of fear. They would return. They were like wolves circling a deer. But could they harm her? Did a dead soul have any power in the real world?

  Something touched her face.

  She batted at it. It touched her hair. She pulled her head away.

  The silence filled with animal sounds. Something slithered. Little feet tapped across the stone. A rock sh
ifted.

  She couldn’t stay here one minute longer. She found the wall and resumed her descent by fingertips, down into the gentle wind.

  Those invisible licks and kisses returned. She swiped at her hair and face and the backs of her hands.

  At some point, Ali realized they were Gregorio’s butterflies. Their wings brushed her cheeks, a few grams of touch. Their orange-and-black wings registered in her mind.

  She held one finger up in the darkness, and one perched there. More lit upon her knuckles and hair. Every time she stopped, they flocked to her. Just as Gregorio had said, a hatchery must lie somewhere ahead. She had to be getting close.

  Ali rested her hands on her knees. Her head was spinning. Even as the place unfolded its wonders, it was killing her. Lost souls and nocturnal butterflies. Grief and hunger. Her watch had stopped. The fluorescent hands stood frozen.

  Death was winning.

  She crept along the wall for what seemed like days.

  Gradually her eyes began to adjust.

  At first she saw only a bog of shadows. She thought she was seeing inside the vault of her eyes. Ever so slowly shapes appeared. Colors materialized.

  By the next morning, she could see with the beginnings of what the colonists called “nerve sight.” It gave strange vision, more plastic than crisp, more night than day. It was not the sunlit vision you found on the surface. But she could see!

  Her pace picked up.

  The butterflies came to her, lighting on her hair and shoulders and arms like an audience softly clapping. Their bleached markings, orange and black, were almost white. She was careful not to injure them. Then she felt the pinpricks of their mouths and saw blood running black down her arms. They were feeding on her. Everything hungered in this place. Thy will be done.

  Ali forged on through the welter of butterflies and voices. She battled them with her word puzzles and arithmetic and songs. She flung her arms in the air to scatter the butterflies. At some point, her food ran out. She barely noticed.

  The scent of cedar and orange blossoms and lavender and earthy loam came floating on the updraft. Incredibly a mourning dove cooed its song into the voices mobbing her.

  She saw a light at the end of the tunnel.

  Poor thing, she thought to herself. You’re losing your mind.