Gunther's Cavern

by Edward Etzkorn

  “Down,” he said.

  Leaving the others to carry out his order, he swiveled to look at Thomas. The tardigrade’s body had been jabbed a dozen times in all three middle segments of his body, and fluid leaked from several holes. Fragments of what Gunther guessed were intestine oozed from one or two of them, along with some kind of brownish material. A look at the top of Thomas’s upper segment—his “head”—showed that Hood’s assessment could have been correct. Thomas had died with his mouth open. An inner tube—the buccal apparatus, he thought Rad had called it—protruded from it. Its circular edges appeared sharp, and were rimmed with blood and the fragments of brown hair.

  “Tardigrades attach themselves to their victims and suck out their juices,” he said, half to himself. “At least, the microscopic tardigrades do.”

  With sudden awareness, he said, “Everybody—quiet!”

  The sound of nine children hyperventilating masked any other sound the cave might have offered.

  “Stop breathing!” he ordered.

  At once, total silence. Not even the sound of a foot stirring the dust. Driving all other thoughts from his mind, Gunther focused on the silence. Focused, and focused harder.

  “We’ve got to move fast,” June said.

  “What?”

  “Ssshh!”

  And then he heard it. A distant shuffling sound from deep within the cave, as of creatures moving. Creatures on the march. Water bears on the march.

  The realization struck him with the force of a revelation, one so obvious he wondered how he could have missed it. “Instant army,” he said.

  In the same moment, Rad understood. “How did we miss it? The glowing green masses—a hundred thousand Tardies in cryptobiosis. Add water, and they’re ready to defend your cave against all attackers.”

  Gunther could hardly think. “Oh my God! Rad! June’s right. You’re right! We’ve got to move fast.” As an afterthought, he said, “Oh, yes—breathe!”

  As the group gasped, he turned his attention back to Kara. Called her name. Shone his light in her eyes. Her pupils reacted briskly, going from wide-open black to nearly shut in a fraction of a second. He did not fully understand what that meant, but he knew it meant her brain was working.

  “We got to carry her,” Hood said.

  Hood directed Giles and Van, with Kara between them, to move into position behind Gunther, followed by Sass and Rad, and then June, Tiff and Rocky. “I’m in back,” he said. “Any Tardy sneaks up behind me, he’s dead meat.”

  Giles and Van stepped forward, handing their knives to Sass and Rocky. With the muffled thud of hundreds—or thousands—or hundreds of thousands of water bears marching in his brain, Gunther vaulted back to the head of the group. Once again, this time with even more urgency, he began the tedious climb upward toward the auditorium where the giant insects awaited.

  Moving Kara through the maze of passages proved even more difficult than he’d imagined, requiring frequent stops to shine the light back so Giles and Van could see a particularly tricky portion of the trail. It took nearly an hour to reach the auditorium. Most important, though, they reached it without injury to Kara and without further interference by the Tardies.

  With the noise of the kids behind him, Gunther could hear no sounds from up ahead. A hundred giant insects could have been pattering about in anticipation of their arrival and he would not have heard a thing. Although he could no longer hear the sound of Tardies moving deeper in the cave behind them, his mind created the sound of their marching. Marching toward him and his friends. Marching, marching, marching, their bodies changing shape to squeeze through every obstacle. Every second that ticked by brought them two seconds closer to a Zero Hour when they would make contact.

  The auditorium lay ahead of them as Gunther remembered—the limestone curtain on the far side, the ceiling of white and ivory and gold, the floor speckled with the most bizarre formations he’d seen in the entire cave. The auditorium indeed formed an appropriate stage for this final battle between tiny humans and giant insects—and perhaps an army of microscopic tardigrades turned huge.

  Gunther waited for his group to collect behind him. He directed them to fan out over the edge of the wall that lined the auditorium. “Keep to the wall,” he whispered. “The instant we step out into the open, they’ll attack.”

  Sass’s eyes shone in the meager light. “Gunth, there’s green on the other side.” Her voice was almost pleading. “Through that narrow passage. Maybe if we run out one at a time …”

  “No!” he said in a hoarse whisper. “We can’t make it if we run—especially not one at a time. They’ll pick us off like birds scarfing up beetles. Watch this.”

  He grabbed a fist-sized stone and hurled it into the middle of the auditorium. With barely a sound, the giant springtail sprang from its hiding place to their far right and leaped in three bounds to the spot where the stone landed. Several of the kids gasped, and shrank backward against the wall.

  With a sound like thundering hooves, the beetle, now appearing longer than the five feet Gunther remembered, charged across the floor. And a giant slimy thing—perhaps an overgrown slug—began inching across the floor from the left.

  Gunther awaited the arrival of the winged insect, but it didn’t come. At least, he’d made his point.

  “They’re all blind,” he said. “But they hear everything. They know exactly where we are. They especially react to sounds of movement.”

  He looked ahead to the right, to the feature that formed the major part of his escape plan. Just as he remembered it from his previous trip, there stood the giant jumble of rocks. Now that it lay so close, it looked insurmountable, and his escape plan seemed more like an event in a novel than one that could actually occur. Just as he remembered, the giant rock at the top teetered on its lower neighbor and if—a big if—he and his friends could manage to topple it, it might—just might—fall in the direction he wanted. It had to land smack in the middle of the stream, and divert the stream’s flow to a different part of the cave. Even if the rock did not fully cut off the Tardies’ water supply, the water diversion should cause enough havoc in the Tardy community that they would loosen their control of the giant insects that monitored the cave’s exit. Assuming, again, that he and Hood were correct that the Tardies, and not the giant insects themselves, were calling the shots.

  But circumstances had changed in a way he hadn’t predicted. He should have predicted it, but he hadn’t. The glowing green masses near the science lab were Tardy nurseries—loci where armies of Tardies waited in their encysted forms, needing only the addition of water to revive them. It was too late to destroy them. In addition to facing giant insects, slugs, and salamanders up ahead, the children now had to face even more formidable enemies from behind.

  Directing his headlamp toward the ground, so he could just barely make out the faces of his friends, he reviewed his plan. As he saw the skepticism building in Hood’s, Rad’s, and June’s eyes, the ifs in his plan seemed to grow in number and importance. But since he had no other plan—other than stabbing at their enemies with knives that could barely cut fish scales—they had to try. The plan had to work. If it failed, he would have to resign himself to a life—a short life—of bondage to 1.5 millimeter plankton that had outgrown their homes and overgrown the limits that the Mother Nature he knew had set for them.

  INTERLUDE 8

  When she replayed the scene in her mind, Dicey could not remember if she’d really made a sign of the cross, or just imagined that she had. In either case, her sign of the cross—real or imagined—followed Zeke like a kiss blown on the wind as Cal and Lionel lowered him into the hole until only his head and shoulders protruded aboveground.

  Along with the four other rescuers who were to follow him into the cave—Spike, Kelila, Jimmy, and Luisa—Dicey stood nearby, watching anxiously, while the other rescuers stood further off, waiting to see if Zeke had further assignments for them.

  “Hol
d the rope,” Zeke directed the two men. He called out to Dicey. “Dicey, you and Spike make sure everyone coming below has a helmet, diaper sling, backpack—the works.”

  “Got it,” Dicey answered.

  Zeke nodded. “See you underground, then.” He jabbed his thumb downward, and the two men resumed playing out the rope.

  Zeke had to twist his body about forty-five degrees to the left in order to squeeze through the entry hole. Like a cork, Dicey thought—pop in, pop out. Great song title. Maybe she could get Katy Perry to record it for her.

  Pop in, pop out,

  No sauerkraut—

  Crackers and cheese …

  Even with the twisting motion, Zeke had to raise his arms above his head to wiggle through the hole’s confines. Once his head disappeared, the men lowered him only another few meters before the rope fell slack. At once his voice returned—but muffled. Like the tick of a clock wrapped in a blanket. Or a voice from the other side of the world. Dicey’s parents used to tell her that if she dug straight through the center of the earth to the opposite side of the globe, she would emerge in China. Her investigations on this matter had proved them wrong—she would not emerge in China, but in the Indian Ocean some hundred miles off the southwestern coast of Australia. And she’d drown. Although she could now find this information on the Web, in her teenage years she’d had to find the antipodal point to Turtle Ridge by calculating latitude and longitude by hand.

  “Clear!” came Zeke’s voice. “Next person on-rope!”

  Dicey had been prepared to fight off Spike for the right to follow Zeke into the hole, but he stood back, deferring to her with a wave of his arm. In the instant she hesitated, Kelila grabbed the rope and, without a glance toward the rest of the group, slid down the hole. Miffed, Dicey pushed ahead of Luisa, who had established her position along the rock, hands twitching as if they, too, could not wait to grab onto the rope.

  Brains before beauty, she nearly said, then realized she would probably lose in both categories. “Mom first,” she said instead.

  Like an octagonal peg in an octagonal hole, Dicey’s narrow frame slid down the hole with ease. She landed far sooner than she’d expected on a slide of pebbles and dirt that angled downward at an angle of perhaps thirty degrees. She shivered with the unexpected cold, and nearly choked on the smell of rot and raw life.

  With a flick of her headlamp, she looked around. Her eyes blinked as the light illuminated the first of the white-and-gold curtains, some ten meters away. She blinked again, as if a repeat glance would prove the vision to be no more than a product of her imagination. But once again the curtains appeared, as beautiful as any vision she’d ever seen. Her eyes leaped to the next row of curtains, and the next, and the next, stopping along the way on the ceilings and turrets of limestone that no interior decorator could have conceived of.

  “Dicey, can you shut off the freakin’ light?”

  Startled, without thinking she jerked her headlamp toward Zeke. He was poised on the lip of a precipice, holding on with his massive hands, his legs dangling uselessly over the edge.

  “Dicey!”

  “Sorry, Zeke.” She flicked off her light. “I was just …”

  “Overwhelmed,” he finished for her. “There ain’t nothing in the world so goldurned beautiful as the inside of a cave.”

  She could not restrain her irritation. “Do all preachers talk like you?”

  “Only the good ones,” he answered. “God knows, there’s no words for the beauty of the things He created.”

  She couldn’t answer that. A tear or two in each eye misted her vision.

  “Are you off-rope yet?” came a woman’s voice from above. Impatient, and muffled, as if she were trying to yell clear through to the Indian Ocean.

  Dicey hurried to disconnect herself from the rope, tripping on a rock and raising a puff of dust. “Yes! Sorry! Yes, I’m off!”

  Luisa dropped next into the subterranean world, then Spike and finally Jimmy B.

  All eyes turned toward Zeke—or toward his voice—awaiting further instructions. In the relative darkness, Dicey could see him as no more than a shadow.

  “Jimmy, fix this rope here, will you? I’m at sort of the end of the world here, and one more step is gonna drop me off into Neverland. Might break a leg or two.”

  “Got it.” Jimmy grabbed the rope that Zeke held out and after a short hunt fixed it to a stony projection on the wall not far from Zeke’s head. Zeke grabbed the rope and tugged on it.

  “Solid. You’re beautiful, Jimmy. We’re ready to go deeper.”

  “This is wrong,” came Kelila’s voice. “We’re not supposed to be here.”

  Zeke’s voice bore a hint of annoyance when he answered. “Sister Smile, it’s too late. We’re already here. We need all the encouraging thoughts we can muster, not this negative stuff.”

  “It’s just wrong,” Kelila repeated. “I can’t tell you why. I just know.”

  Dicey could not see their faces, but her brain manufactured images of them. Kelila’s face conflicted, pleading—the little girl in crisis. Zeke’s strong, determined, unwilling to accept any plan other than the one he’d already established.

  Zeke’s voice emerged far less gentle than when he’d talked to Kelila earlier. “What do you know, girl? Spill the beans! Gunther and June are not here?”

  “They are here. But they’re just not …”

  “Not what? If they’re here, and they’re in trouble, why shouldn’t we go to help them?”

  Kelila’s voice remained unsettled. “This isn’t the right way. Gunther and June are here. They’re just not—I don’t know. There’s something wrong.”

  “Sugar doll, either you give me something solid to go on, or we’re going ahead.”

  Kelila fell silent. Dicey wished she could see her face. As often as the girl irked her, so many times had her intuitions been correct, Dicey could not ignore them. She wanted to shout at Zeke to stop badgering her, but at the same time she wished Kelila would yield and give her blessing to this outing.

  In the absence of a reply, Zeke’s attention shifted. “I’m assuming all of you have had some caving experience?” he said.

  “Dicey and me,” came Spike’s voice. “And Jimmy.”

  “I know about you guys. How about you, Luisa?”

  “I’ve been in a cave,” Luisa hedged. “It scared me. I cried and peed in my pants. But I was only thirteen.”

  “’Nuff said! Thanks for the honesty. Kelly?”

  Kelila answered eagerly. “I went with Gunther and June once.”

  “Should qualify you. You ready to go now?”

  Kelila sighed. “I guess so. Gunther and June are my best friends. I just don’t think …”

  “Then we’re on our way, Kell. I just moved your name from maybe midway up to the top of my roster of folks who’ll enter heaven with me. Just ahead of Dicey and Spike.”

  “Hey!” Jimmy said. “Where does that leave me?”

  “Jimmy, my friend, if you won’t take care of this young lady’s buzzing flies, then you’re not headed where we’re headed!”

  Zeke’s laughter more than filled the little space.

  CHAPTER 20

  Gunther would have appreciated more support for his plan, but no time remained to try to convince his friends. At least, no one was outwardly rebelling.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll lead the way. Everybody stick close together. Grab on to each other if you can. And keep to the wall. Two steps into the open and one of those giant insects will be on you.”

  June slapped him on the shoulder, harder than necessary, but no harder than usual. She whispered in his ear—harshly, but leaving him no doubt about her support. “So slars-mush tun ratta General Ike so cornock.” The troops are all behind you, General Ike.

  She spat on her thumb and waited for him to do the same. It took a few seconds for their thumbs to find each other in the darkness. “Farts be with you,” sh
e whispered.

  “Farts.”

  Aiming the headlamp toward the floor and feeling ahead with his hands, he started out. With his shoulder he hugged the wall to his right, ensuring that it bore no sharp outcroppings for his friends to scrape themselves on. Every fifteen or twenty steps, he stopped to shine the light back so his friends could orient themselves. He stopped once to shine the light into the auditorium, and verified that the slug and the two giant insects had not moved from their posts. They did not react to the light, but remained poised for action, alert for any mistake the children might make.

  At the stream, he stopped and motioned for the group to gather on the shore. “It’s slippery. Our shoes’ll get soaked, and probably the rest of us, too. I’ll cross first, then shine the light back across.” He looked the group over. “We might do better crossing in pairs—we can hold each other up if one of us slips. Tiff—come with me?”

  “Sure.”

  He gestured toward Van and Giles. “You guys still okay? You need someone else to take over for a while?”

  “We’re good,” they answered together.

  “You guys cross right behind me and Tiff, okay?”

  “Got it,” said Giles.

  Gunther braced himself for the cold before taking his first step into the stream. With Tiff’s hand locked in his, he followed the same route he’d followed on his first crossing—a few days and yet forever ago. As before, he slipped and fell a meter from the far side, and jabbed his shoulder on the same rock. Holding his arm up, he managed to spare Tiff the same fate. With a final splash, they sloshed across the last few steps to the far shore.

  A flash of his headlamp showed him that the insects’ attention had turned toward them. He worried that the splash of eight more kids—seven, not counting Kara—would prompt them to do more than simply refocus their attention. Perhaps he should have instructed the kids to come in threes or fours so they could cross faster—but it was too late to change plans now.