“The Grim fucking Reaper, bro. He can’t keep you down.”
My burnt hand rages again as someone pours water over it. And then over my stomach. Soon the actions of the hands moving over me become less frantic. They don’t push me down now when I try to sit up. “What’s the . . . damage?” I ask, my voice so weak it’s almost imperceptible to my own ears, as I move my good right hand over my parts.
It’s Kim who answers. “I’d bet on some broken ribs, Anton. Can you wiggle your toes?” I flop my feet around on the uneven ground when the cyclops beam focuses there. “Good. You’ve got burns on your leg and stomach. On your left hand, too. But I don’t think you were shot.”
“Where?” I croak.
“In the cave.”
“Sunny?”
“She’s here.”
“Let me see the light.” My breath is finally coming back.
Roberto, the cyclops, pulls the headlamp off his head and puts it in my good hand. “Are you guys all right?” I shine it at the faces around me. Roberto’s grinning, looking like an action-flick movie star who’s just filmed the climax. Kim is breathing hard, her face streaked with dirt and red with exertion. Her good eye is alight with something other than fear. Anger, or maybe victory. Sunny is huddled against her, sobbing with her face buried against Kim’s neck. Steam comes from everyone’s mouth in the cool air of the cave.
“We’re okay,” Kim says. “You’re the only one who’s physically damaged.” Sunny, however, is clearly an emotional wreck. Kim gently touches her fingertips to my forehead for a second and then drags them down across my face. The pleasure it gives me is as intense as a kiss.
I shine the light beyond them and then all around. It’s not a cave but a cavern. There’s just a single opening—the one they’d dragged me through, which is a mere slot in the wall. It’s just a foot and a half wide and maybe three feet high. Through it I can see the stars and hear the occasional snap of a rifle. Roberto tells me not to shine it there, not to give them any more of a target than they already have. I play the beam over my head and see a broken ceiling thirty feet high. I gasp again, but not from pain, when I shine the light behind us.
The cavern appears to extend back almost a hundred feet. The entire area is covered with crumbling mud huts. The ones directly behind us are low and squat; the ones against the cavern’s walls on each side rise to the ceiling like tiny three-story condos. The flat surfaces and the maze of low brick walls are covered with broken pottery and stones that have fallen from the ceiling. Once the rubble-strewn area near the tiny opening must have been a great, broad ledge, allowing sunlight into the south-facing ruin. A centuries-old rockfall must have buried the ledge and hidden the tiny village. All but for the window-sized slot. Looking around, I think that this is how Howard Carter must have felt when he found King Tut’s tomb. All that’s missing is the gold.
“Holy shit.”
I can’t tell if I say it or it’s Roberto. Maybe we both say it at the same time. But it’s what all of us are feeling—all but Sunny, who has seen it before and who is now too demented with the aftermath of her captivity to appreciate it. It seems unreal to find ourselves in a place like this—where people once slept, made love, raised children, cooked over wood fires, and hid from their enemies. Only we can’t hide here for long. Our enemies are more advanced. And they know just where we are.
“Is there another way out?” I shine the light at the cringing girl, hoping to somehow pull her out of her private pain. I’m thinking of the hole in the floor of the kiva she’d said Cal had shown her. A kiva, if I remember correctly, is some sort of ceremonial pit that’s purpose is debated by archaeologists. Sunny doesn’t appear to hear me—she continues crying into Kim’s shoulder. She doesn’t answer until I ask again in a harder voice.
“I don’t know. Cal and I . . . we didn’t get a chance to explore it.”
“We aren’t going out that way for a while,” Roberto says, jerking a thumb at the opening. Pops of gunfire come from beyond it.
“How long do you think they’ll wait for us?” Kim asks.
“As long as it takes. They can starve us out if they want. Or come in after us.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
MY WORDS PROVE prophetic. No sooner have they left my lips than the rifle fire dies away and a moment later we hear a rattle of small stones on the ledge outside the entrance. Kim tries to take the light from me but I turn it out. Roberto crawls toward the opening—his shadow blocking out the tiny strip of stars. Beyond him, I can hear the rasp of a rope against nylon, like a snake sliding into a sleeping bag.
I grope my way up onto my knees, gasping with the effort, and feel for my gun. But it’s nowhere to be found. I remember that I’d emptied it anyway. So I crawl behind my brother to the tiny opening. In a few inches of space over his shoulder, I can see the small ledge outside. Roberto crouches at the opening—a trap-door spider lurking in his hole.
Boots softly touch down on the ledge. A man’s silhouette, smaller than either Fast or Burgermeister, is backlit by the handheld lights aimed up from the meadow. The developer and Rent-a-Riot are too cowardly to do the dangerous, dirty work for themselves. I feel almost bad for the short silhouette until I see him slap a hand to his side and make out the form of a leather holster there.
Roberto eases out onto the ledge. The man sees or hears him and tugs frantically at the holster.
My brother steps right up to him. “Hi,” I hear him say, the way he might greet an acquaintance on the street. Then he pushes the man in the chest and laughs as the short shadow windmills on the edge for a moment before slowly teetering out into the night. A primal scream tears through the air. It’s cut off with a thump on the talus far below.
“Flatlander,” Roberto says disdainfully as he leans over the edge. “Didn’t tie his backup knots. Posers shouldn’t climb.”
The rifle fire starts up again with renewed fury. Roberto takes two quick steps back toward the opening, then dives through, hitting me with the force of a tackle. I try not to scream from the pain in my damaged ribs while he rolls off me, laughing.
“What happened?” Kim is shouting at us in the dark.
A bullet finds its way through the entrance and zips briefly around the ruins. After two or three ricochets it buries itself in a dried mud wall somewhere. All of us scurry away from the opening, tripping over the ancient steps on the cave’s floor. Our feet kick through a litter pile of pottery shards and shattered stones.
“They sent a guy down on a rope,” I explain, still racked with a myriad of sharp aches. “Roberto took care of him.”
“Fuckers won’t try that again.”
“What are we going to do?” Kim asks when we’ve all caught our breath. With the headlamp turned back on but shielded by our bodies, we’re huddled behind the hut closest to the entrance. I struggle to get back in my clothes. My body is wet with sweat and already starting to chill. Each movement, each inhalation, sends knives of pain stabbing through my ribs.
“I talked to Dad on the cell, ’Berto. When we were up on the ridge. He said he’s coming.”
Roberto is utterly still for a minute. He just stares into my eyes. I realize it’s the first time I think I’ve ever seen him not moving, not animated. But his eyes are indescribably bright, almost creating a pale blue luminosity of their own. “He said that?” he asks finally.
I nod.
“A lot of fucking help that’ll be.” But his eyes are still shining.
“Can he help us?” Kim asks.
I shrug. “I don’t know. He’ll do all he can. But first he has to catch a flight out, and with the sheriff blocking the road he won’t be able to get up here. And even if he can convince the Forest Service or the FBI that there’s been a kidnapping, it’ll still take time to get warrants and all that. Days, at the least. We’ve got to get out of here on our own. Before they figure out they can just lower some dynamite onto the ledge and blow this place away.”
Dad may not be able to rescue us, bu
t the look on my brother’s face tells me that for a few hours at least the family’s esprit de corps has been saved.
The rifle fire aimed at the tiny opening continues sporadically. Only an occasional bullet makes its way into the cavern. It would take a very fortunate bullet to ricochet into one of us. And we’ve already received more than our fair share of bad luck.
While Roberto guards the opening with a daggerlike rock in one hand, just in case any more of Fast’s men are foolish enough to try to rappel in, Kim, Sunny, and I explore with the single headlamp. We move huddled together within the radius of the tiny beam of light that I try to keep pointed at our feet.
The pueblo or cliff dwelling or whatever it is seems smaller once we start moving around. I doubt if more than ten families could have lived here. The rooms within the adobe huts we peek into are tiny, the openings so low that even the women have to bend in half to fit through the open doorways. Inside they’re all fairly regular and square in shape. There are some raised areas that I guess were used for sleeping. Ancient smoke has blackened some of the walls. The floors are littered with chunks of fallen dried mud mixed with broken pots. Everywhere there are hardened mouse turds.
“If the government knew this place really exists,” Kim tells me, her voice filled with wonder, “there’s no way they would even consider the swap. They would have laughed in Fast’s face.”
A sense of history is almost palpable. I can picture the huts swarming with lithe-muscled men, women, and children. They must have been very adept climbers to make this their home. The ruin has to be more than five hundred years old. I remember reading somewhere that the Anasazi are believed to have disappeared long before the Spaniards began marching up from the south, killing Indians, then perversely building Christian missions in their wake. And I remember some more recent, darker headlines about the Anasazi—some archaeologists suspect they weren’t the peaceable farming culture everyone had always romanticized them as. The articles referred to signs of clan warfare and ritual cannibalism.
The higher huts along the sides are inaccessible. Piles of rotten wood beneath them indicate that once ladders had been used to reach the openings high above our heads. I could probably hack hand- and footholds into the dry mud walls, but know it’s not worth the effort and destruction.
The only structure that’s different from these huts is all the way in the back of the cavern. A low, crumbling wall of large bricks has been built in a circle just ten feet in diameter against the rear wall. Enclosed within the circle is a pit. I shine the light down and the three of us lean over the wall carefully so that it doesn’t collapse.
“That’s the kiva,” Sunny tells us. “Cal was going to take me in it.”
There’s a broken floor twenty feet down, littered with the same fallen stones and pottery that we’d found in the huts. A trickle of water runs down the cavern’s back wall and into the pit but doesn’t pool at the bottom. Instead it runs right down through a small dark hole in the stones. The sound of falling water is barely perceptible from beyond the hole. I remember Sunny telling us about how Cal had been down there—how he’d reported that there were passages everywhere. And possibly a connection to the outside.
I scramble down into the pit—the sides are less than vertical, with lots of holds in the rough bricks. At the bottom, I move carefully to the hole, unsure if the entire floor is going to collapse beneath my weight. There’s a small pile of stones near the opening where the water runs through—I guess that Cal had placed them there when he enlarged the opening enough to slide in. I lean over it and point the flashlight down.
“What’s down there?” Kim asks.
The beam of light traces the trickle of silver water as it falls without touching rock for what I guess is about fifty feet. It’s hard to tell, though, as the light is reflected back at me off a pool of water at the bottom. It looks like another cavern below us, but there’s no way to tell how big it is because the hole is so narrow and long before it appears to open up.
“An underground lake or something. Maybe another cavern like this one.”
Roberto calls out, “Hey, Ant, you’d better hear this.”
I scramble back up out of the pit and the three of us pick our way back to him. Outside the rifle fire has stopped and a man is yelling. It’s Burgermeister’s voice.
“. . . one hour it’s all coming down. You don’t believe me, ask the girl. She knows we got the juice. So if you come out now, we’ll see if we can work something out. Otherwise, you’d better put your heads between your legs and kiss your stupid hippie asses goodbye.”
“He’s talking about the dynamite,” Sunny tells us. “They had crates and crates of it not far from the trailers. They showed it to me.”
“How are they going to get it in here?” Kim asks.
Roberto points at the opening. “All they got to do is lower it onto the ledge outside. That would be enough to bring the whole face down. The cave, too.”
“We can’t go out there. They’ll kill us no matter what he says.” Sunny’s voice is high and tinged with the onset of fresh hysterics.
Kim puts her arm around her friend and former lover. “Easy. We aren’t going out. It’d be better to stay in here, dynamite and all. Right, Anton?”
I lean out the opening and see the trucks backing away from the talus field at the cliff’s base. They turn and drive into the meadow and I think for a moment that we can rappel down and have a chance of disappearing into the woods. But then one of the trucks turns and once again aims its high beams on the cliff. I hear the distant sound of doors slamming and know the men are getting out with their rifles. They’d just been putting some distance between themselves and the imminent explosion. The other truck continues up Wild Fire Peak toward the trailers. It’s probably been sent to fetch the dynamite.
If we give up and go down, even if they don’t shoot us as we slide down the rope, I have no doubt we’ll all be killed. Fast and Burgermeister have nothing to gain by letting us live—and everything to lose. We have nothing to bargain with. And Fast knows about Kim’s hatred for him. I pick up the packs and sling a strap from each over my aching shoulders.
“Get the rope, ’Berto,” I tell Roberto with more confidence than I feel. “We’re going spelunking.”
THIRTY-NINE
“WHAT ARE YOU talking about, spelunking?” Kim whispers to me. “Are we going down the hole in the kiva?” The dark and the long-sleeping age of the ruin obliges us to keep our voices down.
“Unless you want to try and reason with those guys.”
With the rope gathered over one shoulder, Roberto climbs down into the pit. I hold the light for him while he examines the hole at its base. He comes back up and begins a search for a crack or a stone solid enough to serve as an anchor for a rappel. After examining several large boulders that have long ago been dislodged from the cave’s roof, he pushes his shoulder against the biggest. It doesn’t budge. It’s probably sat in the same spot for hundreds of years. He loops the middle of the rope over it and drops the ends into the pit. All four of us then scramble down to squat by the dark hole. I feed the rope’s ends into the unknown space beyond.
“Who’s first?” Roberto asks. “Step right up. Don’t be shy.”
“I’ll go.” It’s my idea and my responsibility.
But I desperately don’t want to go into that slender cavity. I can’t imagine anyone doing it voluntarily. I wonder if Cal had lied to Sunny about his trip into the depths—no one could have the courage to do such a thing, especially not alone. But I remember his mud-stained Gore-Tex shells and realize that he’d been a braver man than me.
I wish for another way—maybe Fast will listen to reason. Maybe he’ll find some way to restrain his murderous partner. And maybe Burgermeister will forgive the bullet I fired through his thigh. Maybe they’ll both forgive my brother his brutal punch and kick and Kim her years in search of revenge. Right.
This isn’t my element. I belong on high and wild rock faces, the
swirling wind all around me, not in some black pit like this. Especially not without light. But I have no choice and I hand Kim the headlamp so that each of them has light to tie in with.
I shove a bight of rope through my belay device and straddle the hole. Oh shit. I do everything I can to spend my life out in the open, unrestrained by walls and gravity, and here I am about to slide into an unknown hole that’s skinnier than my mummy bag. Belatedly, I realize I’m claustrophobic, terrified of tight, enclosed spaces. I remember the utter panic I’d felt as a child when I woke up in a sleeping bag for the first time. Even now, twenty years later, I still sleep with the zipper undone to my waist no matter how cold the night. I’m ready to change my mind, to take my chances on reasoning with the killers outside. Even if they just put a bullet through my head, it would be better than the terror that’s gripping my chest. Better than being buried alive.
Then Kim kisses my check. Roberto’s holding the light on my face and I’m embarrassed, thinking that they can all see just how scared I am. Kim must, because she kisses me again, this time on the lips. She even lightly touches her tongue against my teeth.
“We don’t have much time,” she reminds me when she pulls away.
Leaning away from the boulder that holds the middle of the rope above, I place one foot at a time into the hole. I start lowering myself. The cold trickle of water immediately soaks through my fleece pants and runs down into my boots. As I wiggle my hips into the tight cleft, I realize that this is what it really feels like to have Death’s bony hand grabbing my ankle. And here there is no room for me to kick.
The slot is even tighter than I’d thought. I squirm desperately against the cold, wet rock to fit my shoulders through. I almost get stuck and for a moment I want to scream. I imagine my body jammed into this cold hole at the bottom of the kiva, blocking the trickle of water as it slowly fills. But then I drop another inch. I turn my head to slide all the way in.
The fissure is probably only ten feet long but it feels like it goes on forever. It feels like I’m in the throat of some gigantic snake. Suddenly I notice that my feet are swinging free. Then my hips. And finally I’m released from its muddy grasp. But what’s around me isn’t much more comforting.
Point of Law Page 29