Point of Law

by Clinton McKinzie

  I’m suspended in a chamber that is smaller and higher than the one above. But it’s hard to tell all the details because the light Kim’s shining down the hole is growing dim. In the pale, dispersed beam I can make out steep walls that are riddled with holes, hopefully one of which is a passage. Pointed shapes are hanging beside me, like hanged men or jagged teeth. More sharp spikes rise up from the floor on the dry sides of the pool below. Directly beneath me is the water, which I pray is shallow. It appears clear and cold. The bottom of the pool is full of flakes of white stone.

  “Hurry it up, Ant.”

  My brother’s voice echoes off the walls and I remember that the dynamite could go off anytime now. I forget my own terror and am overtaken by fear for my brother, the young girl, and my potential lover above. I drop down the now wet rope and splash into the frigid water.

  To my relief it’s only knee-deep. My feet crunch on the strange white stones as I jerk the rope out of my belay device. I splash my way through the water and step up onto dry ground. It’s a small, flat limestone shelf that encircles the water. There I wrap my arms around myself, trying to control the shivering. The whole world goes black as either Kim or Sunny fits into the hole in the roof.

  FORTY

  WE STAND CLOSE together on the dry ledge beside the pond. Roberto holds the dripping ends of the rope, which trail from the ceiling fifty feet above.

  “Should I pull it?” he asks.

  I don’t want him to. I know it’s at least possible that we could reascend the rope using prusiks made out of the slings of nylon webbing in my pack. By pulling it, I feel as if he’ll be cutting us off from light, even from air. But we have no choice. With an explosion imminent, we sure as shit aren’t going back out that way. I raise my hands over my head and feel a faint breeze on the burnt skin of my palms. Somewhere, somehow, there’s got to be another way out.

  “Do you feel that?” I ask them. “There’s just a tiny bit of wind. I think I can even smell it.”

  “Sorry. That was me,” Roberto says, trying to amuse us. For the millionth time I’m envious of his élan, of his total lack of fear. Not even a million tons of unstable earth over his head can suppress it.

  We all hold our hands in the air, ignoring his comment. “I can feel it,” Kim says.

  “Me too,” Sunny adds.

  “Pull the rope,” I tell my brother. “We might need it to find a way out.”

  While Kim holds the light on him, Roberto begins tugging on one end of rope. The rope doesn’t shift. Putting all his weight on it, he ends up penduluming out over the pond. When he swings back toward us I grab on, too, and the rope gives a little until we splash down in the cold water. Kim shines the light at our feet, intending to help us maintain our footing on the brittle white stones, as we pull together.

  Suddenly Sunny screams. Again and again. The terrified keening coming from her mouth seems to push the air from the cavern.

  The light jerks up so that it’s in our faces. “What?” I shout.

  Sunny stops screaming, but she continues making noises like a wounded cat. Beside her, Kim tries to keep her feet on the dry shelf as Sunny tears at her clothes. They are both breathing so hard it sounds as if they might be running in place. Or fighting.

  “What?” I shout again, trying to whirl around in the shallow water to see the new threat. But I’m blinded by the light that Kim still manages to hold aimed at my eyes.

  “Bones,” Sunny says, her voice now a ragged whisper. “Bones. You’re standing on bones.”

  Kim slowly lowers the light from our faces until it’s once again illuminating our feet, knee-deep in the clear, icy water. I realize what all those flat-looking white stones are—the delicate rocks that had been breaking beneath my boots. I feel a shiver that comes from somewhere beyond simple cold and fear.

  Roberto pushes up one of his jacket’s sleeves. He reaches deep into the water and pulls out a human jaw. He holds it up and Kim keeps the light on it. It’s a little brown but otherwise perfectly preserved. The teeth, what would have been the bottom set, are painfully uneven.

  “Dude needed a dentist. Bad.” Roberto drops the jaw back in the water with what seems like a disrespectful splash. “Don’t worry,” he tells Sunny. “He can’t bite. Not with those fucked-up teeth.”

  “This must have been their cemetery,” Kim says, calming somewhat. “They must have pushed the bodies through the bottom of the kiva.”

  I have another, even more unpleasant idea. Some of the bones clearly show the long nicks of blades. From where flesh had been peeled from the human bones. This was their trash bin—nothing more. I keep my thoughts to myself in the cavern’s gloom.

  When we go back to tugging on the rope, ignoring the bones crunching underfoot, the headlamp’s beam starts to flicker and dim. I wade over to Kim and Sunny while Roberto finishes with the rope, which is sliding easier now. I take the zip-locked extra batteries from my soaking pack and put them on my lap with the headlamp. Then I dry my hands carefully on my shirt. The shirt is already crusting with blood and pus from the open burn on my belly. I have to do this just right—if I drop anything there is no doubt we’ll die in the gloom surrounded by the spirits of the cannibalized dead. After warning everyone as to what I’m about to do, I twist off the light. It feels like once again I’m falling in the total blackness. It rears up over us like a breaking wave.

  Either Kim or Sunny staggers beside me, probably feeling the same lurch in her stomach. Although my numb fingers shake with cold and tension, I manage to replace the batteries and twist the light on again. That narrow beam of light is Hope—our only weapon against the dark. Without it the blackness just swallows everything.

  There’s a long, gentle splash as the rope comes trailing down out of the ceiling. Our only known connection to the world outside has been cut.

  I play the light over the cavern’s walls, studying the deep holes there. The slight breeze seems to come from a tunnel-like opening near the shelf where we stand. The four of us move together over the broken floor, huddled close together within the radius of light I try to keep aimed at our feet. Sunny requires extra effort from both Kim and Roberto because she won’t take her face out of Kim’s jacket. She’s willing to move her legs but she must be balanced with each step. I think we’re all relieved to be away from the pond and the bones.

  What appeared to be a tunnel soon becomes very un-tunnel-like. After thirty feet the passageway narrows to just a refrigerator-size slot and rises in a series of jumbled steps. From the ceiling more white stalactites hang like dripping fangs. We continue into the fissure, trying to follow Kim’s exhortation not to touch them with our hands. She warns us that the oil on our skin could discolor them, but right now I’m more concerned for my life than about vandalizing some future tourist attraction. And I’ve already violated every environmental and archaeological precept by stomping through the bones. My jacket rasps against the smooth stone as I have to turn sideways to fit through one particularly narrow opening.

  The slot ends abruptly in a barrel-shaped chamber. The floor is a punji pit of low, pointed stalagmites. I play my light over the walls, still thinking I feel a faint breeze. There’s a noise, too, a sort of distant moan. Wind somewhere on wet rock.

  Up near the room’s ceiling, ten or so feet above us, is a small hole. I slip the headlamp over my head so that the elastic straps grip snugly. Finding small edges on the cool stone wall, I work my way up to it. I move cautiously, trying to keep three points of contact with the rock at all times. I’m terrified of falling the ridiculously short distance onto the points of a hundred tiny stalagmites. But I’m even more terrified of the blast that could come roaring through the caverns any minute.

  “Give me a second. This might go,” I whisper into the darkness over my shoulder.

  The hole is tiny. It’s just eighteen inches by one foot, barely big enough for a badger. But there definitely is a breeze coming from it. And on the wind I can smell the faintest scent of pine. Nothing ha
s ever smelled so sweet.

  “You’re fucking high,” Roberto tells me.

  I explain the wind and the pine smell. Kim says she smells it, too, that it’s worth a try. The three make themselves as comfortable as they can next to the wall beneath the hole while I shed my jacket and rub my hands together, trying to warm them. I’m going to have to take the light with me into the hole, and I don’t have to warn them not to stumble over the stalagmites in the dark. It would be like falling on a bed of nails.

  I grip the hole’s edge with my fingers and hesitate. The light from my headlamp reveals nothing down the narrow canal but a sharp turn a few feet away. If it weren’t for the breeze blowing through it, it would be impossible to believe it could lead anywhere. I can’t shake the feeling that I’m going to get jammed in there. Stuck.

  Don’t do this! a voice shouts in my head. But I slither in anyway.

  For eighty feet I belly-crawl on my elbows and knees with my head banging into every irregularity on the fissure’s ceiling. Strapped to my forehead, the delicate headlamp takes most of the impacts. I pray it doesn’t break. The floor is thankfully mud-covered and soft instead of carpeted with sharp protrusions. The path winds to the sides like a fallen S.

  Imagine twenty coffins lying end-to-end. Kick each place where they touch, so that they don’t quite fit together. Then drop a mountain on them. That’s what the part I’ve already crawled through feels like.

  And it gets worse. I’m forced to drop all the way flat onto my belly, wriggling forward with my arms extended like a diver’s. The closeness of the stone walls, the millions of tons of rock and earth above and around me, begins to push in on me. It’s more than a physical pressure that robs my limbs of movement and my chest of air. It seems to press in on my mind, squeezing away my intellect and my rational thoughts. Instead the pressure focuses itself in my brain and then expands outward exponentially. Even when I try to lie still and rest, my heart rate keeps accelerating. My lungs huff faster and faster but they still can’t seem to draw enough air. I force myself to wriggle some more.

  And it gets tighter still. I have to turn my head to one side and splay my feet flat. The fissure pinches my bruised ribs. I have an urge to roll over onto my back but can’t. My shoulders can’t roll more than an inch or two. It’s probably for the best, though—for some reason the thought of exposing my belly like a whimpering dog to the pressure and weight of all that earth above seems even more terrifying. I gain just an inch at a time.

  A horrible thought keeps tugging at the edges of my mind, threatening to rip away my sanity. It’s going to dead-end! And there’s no fucking way I can squirm out backwards. There’s no way Roberto, so far behind me now, could ever get the leverage in this death trap to pull me out. I’m going to die, plugged in this foul, muddy hole. I’m going to die screaming and howling. I’ve never felt anything like the fear that crawls along with me.

  My breath comes in fast, mad pants. I can feel a bubbly froth gathering on my lips. I try to will my body to calm but my pulse keeps increasing until it’s throbbing at what seems the speed of a hummingbird’s wings—and each new beat seems to swell me tighter in the hole. It takes all my strength and will to keep from losing my mind.

  In my mind I shout at myself: Anton, you conqueror of mountains, you cheater of Death, are you going to let a little fucking hole get the best of you? Are you going to lie down without a fight while it squeezes the life out of you? Coward! You’re going to die crying and gibbering, and they’re all going to die with you. Fight, you stupid son of a bitch! Fight!

  Only the thought of my brother and Sunny and Kim saves me from the ultimate freak-out. I concentrate on them, huddling together in the pressing blackness of the round room with its floor of pointed rock stakes. I gasp and heave, squirming forward another inch. And another. Roberto. Kim. Sunny. Their names go through my mind like a mantra of salvation.

  The pressure eases on my ribs. For the first time in what seems like hours, my lungs are able to fill all the way with dusty air. I gasp at it desperately, restraining sobs, and ignoring the awful pain in my ribs that comes with each full inhalation. Lifting my head, I look up to see the hellish tunnel emptying into a small room. The beam of light from my headlamp traces through it, measuring, and although it’s not much bigger than a closet, it seems to me to be big enough to hold the entire universe.

  I worm out of my prison and crash onto the rubble-strewn floor chest-first. Sitting on the sharp stones with my knees pulled against my chest, I try to hold back tears of relief. The scent of pines is stronger now. High on one wall is a couple of inches of space that remains black even when I shine my headlamp there. I turn out the light for a moment and see stars.

  For some time voices have been calling my name. They reverberate toward me from the terrible hole. Twisting the headlamp back on, I aim it into the fissure. “Come on,” I shout back in a shaky voice. “It goes. No problem.”

  FORTY-ONE

  “YOU EVER HEARD that expression, the ‘bowels of the earth’?” Roberto asks as he wriggles last out of the hole.

  “Yeah?”

  “If these are the bowels, then what are we, crawling through them?”

  “Anton,” Kim says, “please tell your brother to shut up.”

  The small chamber is crowded with the four of us in it. All three of them came through the rock without apparent trauma. Even Sunny made hardly a sound as she squirmed out of the tunnel with Kim close at her heels. But the claustrophobia still has a hold on my chest, and I sweat heavily as I chip away at the dirt near the starlit opening with a softball-size rock. It’s not the warm sweat that comes of exertion, but the sick, chilling sweat of lingering fear.

  I’m grateful when Roberto pushes me out of the way and takes over with a rock of his own. I’m even more grateful when Kim, somehow sensing my unreleased panic, puts her arms around my waist and pulls me down to huddle between her and Sunny. Whenever Roberto pauses in his work, we can hear the chirp of crickets in the night outside.

  “What time is it?” I ask, finally regaining some of my composure.

  Kim pulls her jacket up over her wrist and illuminates it with the light. “Three in the morning, if this thing’s still working. Those assholes must have been bluffing about the dynamite. They probably think they can starve or freeze us out, then ‘discover’ the cave in a few days or weeks when the deeds are exchanged and the swap can’t be reversed.”

  It will be dawn in a few hours. If we’re in the valley somewhere like I suspect—we can’t be far—then we’ll have to hustle to get far enough away to be safe from Fast and his pals.

  Something we don’t discuss is staying down in our hole throughout the coming day and until the night comes again. Sooner or later, Dad would come looking for us. We have enough food and water in the pack that we’d pulled through the hole using the rope, but I think everyone shares a little of my desperation to get out from under the earth.

  Roberto’s making a lot of noise as he pounds his handheld rock against the tiny opening in the wall. It can’t be helped. The stone he’s cutting through is the same crumbly sandstone that makes up the red cliff by the entrance to Cal’s ruin. Every now and then he tosses over his shoulder a piece he has hacked free. I can see that the hole is slowly widening when I aim the headlamp’s beam around him. It’s now big enough for maybe a large rabbit.

  “Can you see anything?” Sunny asks him. They’re her first words since she screamed about the bones. I take it as a good sign.

  Roberto turns to us, his face streaked with dirt and his black hair tangled and filthy, and grins. “You aren’t gonna like this, kids, but it looks like another tunnel.”

  Fresh fear floods through me. I don’t know if I can handle another coffin-crawl. And if we meet solid rock, we’re doomed. There’s no way in hell we’ll have the strength to crawl back through the slot and find another passage.

  “Just kidding. We’re almost out.”

  I can’t decide whether to punch or hug
him. So I just lie limply in Kim’s arms while Roberto goes back to work.

  When he tells us he’s finished, I slither out first. The night caresses my filthy face like a lover. The darkness of it is so different from that inside the cave. It seems to welcome me. Come out, come out and play. Overhead the sky is so filled with beautiful stars that just a glance at it makes me dizzy. There are several pine trees on the rocky slope where I stand, and I want to hug them all. Strangely, the crickets aren’t chirping anymore.

  I don’t take the time to hug the trees or wonder where the crickets have gone. We need to get the hell out of here as quick as we can. I close my eyes and take one deep breath, then stoop to help pull Sunny out of the ground. And right behind her Kim and Roberto. It takes just seconds before we’re ready to run.

  I hear a sound behind me. A boot brushing through grass. Just as I turn, something strikes my ankle with enough force to kick my leg out from under me and send me sprawling in the grass. The blow may have even broken my ankle. I fall on my back, trying to stifle a shout of warning and pain. Looking up, I see a huge shadow blocking out the stars overhead.

  “Is that how it felt, motherfucker?” Burgermeister repeats my last words to him in his dead man’s voice. “Is that how it felt when I shot your dog?”

  Two more shadows step up behind him. One big—Fast—and the other very small. A higher-pitched voice says, “You dumb hippies sure make a lot of noise.”

  FORTY-TWO

  SUNNY IS CURLED in a fetal position in the grass. Burgermeister had knocked her down with a brutal shove when she was unable to kneel with the rest of us. She’d been too scared to follow his commands, totally paralyzed and unbelieving that she was suddenly back in the hands of her tormentors. The giant laughed at her. “Welcome home, honey,” he said. “I knew you couldn’t keep that sweet young ass of yours away from us. You had to come back for more, didn’t you? Just like your friend Ms. Walsh, although it took her a little longer. Twelve years, right, Dave?”