Where She Fell

by Kaitlin Ward

  “Good,” he says. “I would really love it if you come.”

  When he puts it that way, how can I possibly say no?

  I cannot believe I got suckered into going hunting.

  My dad hunts. He loves it. He goes out with his gun and his camo and sits in the woods for hours waiting for something to shoot at. I cannot think of anything that sounds more boring than that, to be honest.

  I’m not doing quite the same thing. And actually, the sitting-for-hours-in-the-woods situation might be preferred.

  “You won’t have to actually do anything,” Grayson told me yesterday afternoon. “We’re just looking for cave insects, and everyone takes a turn being part of the hunting party, even Mary. I promise, it’ll be fun.”

  And because I’m a totally pathetic human being who latched completely on to how nice he is and how cute he is, I agreed to join. He briefed me, a little, on what was going to happen, but it all sounded like science fiction to me. Something about ambushing a cavern of cave insects after a series of tunnels … I didn’t listen as well as I should have. I just stared at his mouth while he talked.

  Now, as the small group of us walks quietly along one of the tunnels with only a single torch for light, I think I should have asked more about what the hell constitutes a “cavern of cave insects.” I mean, where was my scientific curiosity?

  It’s too late now, though, because we’re supposed to be quiet while we travel. I’m not clumsy or anything, but I’m feeling a lot of pressure on this quiet thing and I’m worried I’ll accidentally trip and ruin this for the whole group.

  We squeeze single file through a narrow space. Grayson’s before me; Alice is after. Grayson seems to be a regular with the hunting party, which doesn’t surprise me, but I was a little surprised that it’s also true of Alice. She wields a large, dangerous-looking knife carved from stone.

  “It makes me feel like a prehistoric cavewoman,” she explained to me before we left. “I’m no good with a bow and arrow, but I sure can stab things.”

  Grayson brought his bow, but he doesn’t have many arrows, given the lack of materials, so he saves it for emergencies, he says. Like Alice, he carries a gigantic knife. I’m not carrying a giant knife or a bow, but Colleen gave me a small knife before we departed. She said she didn’t think my ribs and I were ready, and Grayson argued that it was just walking and probably good for me, and I’m pretty sure she was mad when I decided to still go. But she gave me the knife.

  My ribs are sore. But they’re sore no matter what I’m doing, and I’m desperate to be part of things. I like working with Mary, but I’m afraid it’ll make me seem less like part of the group to the others. I’m restless. Stressed. Anxious.

  Alice touches her fingertips lightly to my arm when we’re through the narrow space. I match my pace to hers so she can put her face near my ear and whisper, “Be extra careful from here on. This is where a bunch of tunnels meet.”

  I see what she means. This tunnel branches into several. We swerve down the second from the left—I make note in case somehow I get separated from the group—and continue to pass more branching off this one, like a network of limestone capillaries. There’s a bit of a sulfuric smell here, different than the putrid corpse smell in the cavern. It gives me an irrational pit of fear in my stomach as I glance ahead at the torch bobbing with the steps of the man in front. Glenn, of course. They’ve obviously come down here before and know it’s not a problem, but I’m picturing sulfur lighting up and killing us all with its toxic gas.

  Glenn stops, and we all stop. There’s a tunnel to my left, a gaping black opening and I edge involuntarily to my right. My shoulder brushes Grayson’s and it distracts me, especially when he looks down at me and smiles.

  The smile is short-lived. His jaw drops open, face contorting in horror as his eyes dart past my face. Fix on something in the tunnel.

  I turn to look, too.

  The breath leaves my lungs at the sight of the biggest spider I’ve ever seen. The size of a large housecat, easily. Bulbous body. Long, thin legs. Mouth-pincers twitching. Eight eyes staring.

  Directly at me.

  I feel like I’ve come unstuck in time. My eyes are glued to the spider, and my brain’s cycling through all the possible ways this could go—most of which end with the spider sinking its fangs into my body and sucking out my innards like a bowl of tomato soup. All the possibilities layer over one another while I stand, gaping at the thing, doing nothing to stop it.

  Alice comes to her senses first. Her knife stabs downward in a swift, confident motion, sinking through exoskeleton just behind that nightmarish cluster of eyes. She holds on while the spider’s legs dance and jolt. I want to be sick. I don’t even mind spiders, usually. But this thing is unnatural.

  When its death twitches subside, Alice pulls her knife free. She looks over my head at Grayson, smirking. “What is this, your first day?”

  He looks sheepish and hurries to help another member of the hunting party who’s knelt beside the corpse, wrapping the thing up in twine made of sinew.

  “Thanks,” I say to Alice. “For, you know, not letting me get murdered by a spider.”

  “Oh, it’s nothing.” She waves a hand dismissively. “They’re disgusting, but they’re not deadly.”

  “I, uh, should have asked what Grayson meant by cave insects,” I say. “I figured they’d all be like the ones I saw Eleanor tear into the other day.”

  Alice laughs. “Spiders are actually not what we’re hunting. They’re kind of a pain, because you have to extract the venom glands before they’re edible.”

  “Venom glands?” I arch an eyebrow.

  “Hey.” She holds up both hands. “All I said was that they aren’t deadly. I didn’t say it wouldn’t hurt if one bit you.”

  I can’t help it; I laugh.

  And then the group is moving again. Like this spider thing is normal and no big deal. Grayson falls back into place beside me, his expression a little more serious than it was before.

  They’re all used to this. Experience things like this every day. The spider was a brief adrenaline spike and it’s already over.

  For me it isn’t.

  The spider might not have touched me physically, but it was another reminder of how completely different my world is now. Most of the time I’m cocooned by a fog of unreality that makes this all feel like a particularly vivid dream. But every so often, something hits and it’s like a tornado blows through, decimates my life, and removes the fog in its wake so I can see every bit of the destruction.

  My whole family thinks I’m dead.

  I will never see them again.

  I can’t blame anyone for this except myself.

  These three thoughts cycle through my mind more than any other since I’ve been down here. Especially that third one. I want to blame Sherri and Meg. And sometimes, I do. It’s easier. In the end, though, it all comes back to: I could have said no. But I came anyway.

  “Hey, are you okay?” Grayson touches my elbow with his fingertips. I’m torn between thrilled that he is voluntarily touching me, and the itchy panicky feeling I get when someone is close to me. “You’re shaking.”

  I hadn’t even noticed. My hands are trembling and my fingertips are numb. “I’m fine,” I say, trying to sound confident. “It just happens when I get stressed.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “Maybe Colleen was right and it was too soon for this, with your ribs and everything. I shouldn’t have—”

  “No, I wanted to come.” I interrupt him again. I keep doing that, like it’s totally normal and not at all socially awkward to just cut someone off when they’re speaking. “I’m glad I came. I want to see this stuff; I want to be part of things. I just wasn’t prepared, that’s all.”

  Shame creeps up from my toes, and I’m glad, as ever, for the darkness of this cave and the fact that no one can see the way my cheeks burn when I’m flustered. I wish I was better at hiding my anxiety. It could be different with the people here. I
could be Regular Eliza, not Anxious Eliza. Except that I’ve already given too much away. They already know.

  The tunnel we’re traversing isn’t the most interesting piece of cave I’ve ever seen. It’s slightly downward-sloping, rocky, narrow in places, wider in others. No formations, really; nothing of note. I get pretty jittery now every time we pass a branch on the side where I’m exposed, even though Alice has shifted slightly, almost protectively, which I do appreciate. Alice doesn’t always hang out with us. She’s a little bit older—twenty-three—so she’s not exactly a teen, but the next youngest adult is twenty-nine and Alice seems to feel more comfortable with the younger crowd than the older, most of the time.

  “Are we going to a specific place?” I ask, voice hushed. Everyone else is being so silent.

  Grayson nods. “There are a few tunnels down here that have high populations of insects. We’re close.”

  Glenn pauses again, and thankfully there’s no tunnel to my left this time. It’s hot down here; sweat beads on my skin and I feel disgusting. Disgusting and heavy and compressed.

  We veer left into an extremely narrow tunnel that widens out after a few minutes. It becomes quite bulbous, actually, and there are strange formations here. Instead of sticking up from the floor or down from the ceiling, they stab out from the walls. A hot, moist wind blows from in front of us, and I feel like I’m walking sideways through a set of jaws, the kind that could crush closed and grind me up at any moment.

  The feeling isn’t helped by a clicking noise ahead of us, growing louder. I know I’m not actually in the mouth of some giant beast, but the clicking noise sounds like …

  Well, like a giant insect, I guess.

  “Get your knife out,” Grayson says. He’s tensed, fist clenched around his blade.

  Suddenly, I want to laugh. It’s actually next to impossible to hold it back, even though it’d be beyond inappropriate right now. It’s just so insane—I’m in a cave and I’m holding a knife in my fist standing next to a boy doing the same, like a fantasy novel.

  Only he’s just a boy and I’m just a girl and neither of us is any kind of Chosen One and we’re not on a quest. We’re finding food, using the only weapons at our disposal, because we’re desperate, and we’re surviving. That’s it.

  The clicking grows louder, and I start to feel vulnerable. My ribs still ache and I’m no hunter anyway. What was I thinking?

  “Now!” Glenn shouts, and everyone surges forward. Grayson told me to just follow the group and keep my knife ready and “stab the crap out of” anything that comes near me. So I follow.

  Straight into a nest of the biggest insects I’ve ever seen.

  Bigger, even, than the spider. They’re the size of foals, and they look like a cross between a katydid and an ant. Their heads are ant-shaped, and so are their antennae, but their legs are long and curved and thin like a katydid’s. They also have big, folded-back wings, except they’re not leaf-shaped, they’re … stone-shaped. These insects are meant to blend in here, I realize. They’re meant to look like stalagmites.

  It’s one of the most surreal realizations of my life.

  Until one comes at me.

  It’s got spines around its mouth that look like the sort of thing it might use to cage its prey.

  And its legs have spikes that look sharp as saw blades. I’m in serious trouble if I don’t move.

  I do the only thing I can: I stab the thing directly in the mouth with my knife.

  It doesn’t die right away, but it does stop coming toward me. I try to pull the knife out, but it’s stuck, so I twist and twist and twist until the bug’s legs start to crumple and the mouthpart twitches seem less deliberate.

  I look up then and meet the eye of Alice, who’s looking duly impressed.

  There were six more of these beasts in this section of the tunnel, and we killed them all.

  Alice reaches my side in a few easy steps. She yanks out my blade and hands it to me. “Were you nervous?” she asks.

  “Not at all,” I say coolly, even though we both know it’s a lie.

  She laughs. “Admit it, though. This was pretty awesome.”

  I bite my lip, and then I confess: “I can’t lie. It was awesome.”

  “How can they grow to be so big?” I ask, back in the colony. Eleanor and I are sweeping the floor of the main cavern. “Shouldn’t their exoskeletons collapse under their own weight?”

  Eleanor shrugs. “I don’t think any of us could even begin to answer that question.”

  “During prehistoric times, there were dragonflies with six-foot wingspans.”

  I whirl around. Mary stands behind me, smiling patiently.

  “But dragonflies have shorter legs, though,” I say. “They don’t really walk.”

  “True.” Mary pulls a broom from a storage shelf carved into the wall and starts sweeping. “But they weren’t the only oversized insects that lived back then. I don’t know what would possibly cause insects to grow so large down here, to be honest with you. Except that once one started, evolutionarily, the others needed to if they wanted to survive.”

  I mull it over. “So to survive the spiders, the katydids had to be bigger.”

  “I’m not a biologist,” says Mary, “but it’s what I assume.”

  “What else is down here?” I ask.

  “Lots of things,” says Eleanor. She seems eager to participate, now that she knows the answer to one of my questions. “Insects are the most prevalent. But there are also some mammals. Like the thing that attacked you, you know, when you first arrived. We call those cave wolves.”

  I shiver, remembering.

  “And the firebreathers.”

  “What’s that?” I ask. I’m picturing dragons, as anyone would.

  “They’re …” Eleanor pauses, thinking. “Well, they breathe fire. Not literal fire, but their breath can burn you. I think it’s like an acid or something?”

  She glances at Mary, who nods.

  Encouraged, Eleanor elaborates. “They have fur but only on their chests and their faces, and a strip down their backs. They’re a little bigger than a beaver, and they’re a rodent. We don’t see them very often; they seem to stay deeper in the tunnels.”

  “Wow.” I push my broom more aggressively across the floor. “That’s … something.”

  “It’s a never-ending pit of wonders down here.” Usually Eleanor’s pretty upbeat, so her dark tone startles me.

  “There are some wonders,” Mary says, only she’s being serious. “This system of caves is a feat of nature. It defies nature, really. It’s also its own, perfectly preserved ecosystem, and we are a parasite, never meant to be here.”

  “You’re saying that like it’s fine,” I point out. “But parasites are destroyed by ecosystems where they don’t belong, or else parasites ruin the ecosystems.”

  “Yes,” Mary agrees. “But it’ll be interesting, won’t it, to see which?”

  The hair raises on my arms. I don’t think it’ll be interesting at all. Because from what she’s telling me, there isn’t a good ending. There’s us destroying this cave’s ecosystem—and then, let’s face it, ourselves, when there’s nothing left—or there’s the ecosystem destroying us. Either way ends with us dead.

  “We’ll just have to get back to our correct ecosystem before anything too catastrophic happens, then, right?” I say timidly.

  Mary smiles thinly. “That’s the plan.”

  And I believe her.

  I don’t really have a choice.

  Three days in a row, we have extremely successful hunts. I only participated in that first one; I’ll take a turn again when I’m asked. But it put a twinge back in my ribs, and once I was freed from the adrenaline of the moment, I started to think about how much less cool the whole thing would have been had I died. Which feels like it could happen pretty easily, despite what Glenn says.

  The only problem with several successful hunts in a row, however, is that the insects are starting to pile up. Colleen comes for
me before I’ve even left my tent in the morning. I usually use the time between the wake-up bell and the breakfast bell to reread my journal and sometimes to write in it. But I’ve only read about two pages before the knock on my tent pole, and a moment later, Colleen’s head poking casually inside. I shove the journal deftly under my pillow. I’m aware that there’s no privacy or security here, so I don’t write too much about the colony. Glenn wanted this journal when I first got here and that’s always on my mind. So I’ve taken an “out of sight, out of mind” approach, hoping everyone’ll forget I have the thing.

  “You won’t be with Mary this morning,” Colleen says without preamble. “We need you to help the other youths dress the insects.”

  “Oh.” I slide off my cot. “No problem.”

  Colleen smiles. “I didn’t think you’d mind.”

  Breakfast is a quick affair, and then Eleanor and I are set to work on a pile of spiders.

  “I thought we didn’t prefer spiders because of the venom,” I say.

  “We don’t,” says Eleanor, “but if that’s what we find, that’s what we eat.”

  I wrinkle my nose. I’ve been eating insect for days now and I’ve gotten used to it. But gutting this spider, with its hairy legs curled crisply into its chest and its eight eyes still unsettling even in death, puts me up close and personal with my food in a way I’m not sure I’m prepared for.

  “So with the spider, we have to extract the venom first,” says Eleanor. “Other than that, the process is the same as any other insect.”

  I nod, nerves curling in my gut. I don’t want to mess up.

  Eleanor shows me where the retractable fangs sit within the mouthpart, connected to the poison gland behind it. Carefully, she cuts through the exoskeleton where the mouthpart connects to the head and pulls it gently free, bringing fangs and gland with it.

  “But if you go too deep,” she warns, “you’ll cut the gland and the meat is ruined. Ready to try it?”

  “Might as well be.” I pick up a knife and grab a spider from the pile. The hairs covering its body are coarse but smooth, not as unpleasant to touch as I would have thought. I run a hand over one of its curled legs.