The Deep Zone: A Novel

by James M. Tabor

  She came to again. Pain indescribable. But her brain flickered to life and the small light in the darkness grew brighter.

  I’m alive.

  How can I be alive?

  She was lying on her back in the absolute darkness. Her wrists were still bound, but Cahner had tied her with lengths of parachute cord. It was dynamic—had a lot of stretch under load—and Cahner had not taken great care with her bonds. No reason to, really, since he had the Taser. Just enough to keep her from running away. Five minutes of stretching and wrenching, though painful, was enough for Hallie to work her hands free.

  She took stock. Both hands worked, and arms and legs. She was not paralyzed, obviously, but her head hurt as though someone had been hitting it with bricks. How long had she been unconscious down here? She looked at her watch, which Cahner had not bothered to remove. Why would he have? He expected her to drop a thousand feet. But the fall had done what Cahner did not, and the watch was broken. No way to know how long she had been out. She might have suffered a serious head injury, concussion, subdural bleeding. Nothing to do about that now, though. Just try to ignore the pain and think.

  She moved to hands and knees, groaned from the pain in her head and back, then cursed herself. For all she knew, Cahner might still be up there, listening to make sure she had died. She could see absolutely nothing, but she could feel, and the palms of her hands were touching something that felt like a thick, wet blanket. She moved to one side, gasping again with pain, and when she did the surface under her hands and knees moved. Terrified, she froze. What the hell was going on here? Experimentally, she pressed down gently with one hand. The surface gave beneath the pressure and then the rest of it undulated gently, almost like a huge water bed.

  Then she understood. It was a microbial mat. A thick, living colony of photophobic bacteria sometimes formed atop a body of mineral-rich water. Such mats metabolized the elements in that water, primarily calcium, iron, and carbon. They could grow to be two feet thick. Beneath the mat would lie another, foot-thick gelatinous layer of metabolizing matter and, beneath that, water. Together, the mat and that subsurface layer had absorbed the shock of her fall. They also explained why the rocks she and Cahner had dropped earlier had made no sound.

  So the biomass had broken her fall, like those giant cushions stuntmen landed on after dropping ten stories. Though from the way she felt, this mat may not have been as yielding as those Hollywood cushions. She lay back down, trying to still the pain in her head, breathing quietly, listening. She could hear, very faintly, the flowing water of the river that ran near the camp. She waited. When she judged that an hour, at least, had passed and she’d heard nothing but flowing water from above, she decided to try moving.

  Her first concern was inadvertently punching through the mat. But then she reasoned that if the thing had been thick enough to break her fall from who knew how many feet, it could stand her moving around on it. She crawled in one direction for about fifteen feet, until she found the pit wall. Then, keeping her left hand in contact with the wall for balance, she stood up very slowly. The mat moved under her, and when she took a step it moved more. But she found that she could stand well enough, and began working her way around the circumference of the shaft. It was smaller than she remembered the surface opening being, and that was a very good thing, because it meant the walls would slant away from the floor rather than overhanging it. Climbing out was going to be hard enough, but if the walls had been overhanging it would have been impossible.

  Having located the pit walls, she got down on all fours and began crawling back and forth in as close to a grid pattern as she could manage in absolute darkness, looking for anything Cahner might have tossed in after her. But there was nothing.

  Can I climb out of this thing without the Gecko Gear?

  Stupid question. You either do that or you lie down and die.

  So that was settled. The question was, how? She could see nothing at all. But she knew that blind people climbed, and that some of them were among the best pure rock climbers on earth. For one thing, their hypersensitive fingers and feet found holds where sighted people could not. For another, being blind, they were immune to exposure, the inescapable sense of dread that got worse the higher you went on a wall and, after a time, began to feel like a dead weight pulling you over backward.

  If they can do it, you can do it.

  With the decision made, she never looked back. Once committed to the climb, she could only hope that features in the rock would constitute a route she could climb to the top, wherever that was. It was remotely possible that the top was hundreds of feet above her, but she did not think so. For one thing, she could still hear the faint sound of flowing water. But equally, even with a cushion like the thick microbial mat, there was a limit to the vertical distance a human body could fall without sustaining fatal injuries on landing. That was why the stuntmen who specialized in high falls topped out at about ten stories, or one hundred feet. Drop farther than that, and no net or cushioning system in the world could save you. It wasn’t always broken bones that did the damage so much as injuries to the brain and internal organs, slung around inside the skull and body cavity by the sudden impact.

  She walked around the circumference of the pit again, this time more slowly, feeling for the best place to begin. It turned out to be at about three o’clock from her starting position. There, the wall offered two good handholds and one good foothold. It wasn’t perfect, but it was the best this wall was going to give.

  The handholds were protrusions, the foothold a shallow hole in the wall at about knee height. Hallie put her right boot toe into that, grasped the two handholds, and stood up. In rock climbing on the surface, where you could see the route and plan your way up it, the best way to go involved maintaining continual upward momentum, so that very good climbers looked as though they were flowing right up the wall. In the dark, though, where the route remained invisible, there would be none of that. Her climb would be a series of starts and stops, and going up that way would be both more tiring and more dangerous.

  Her first task was to find a placement for her left foot, now hanging free. She searched with the boot toe, running it up and down systematically, as though she were painting the wall with brushstrokes.

  Lucky, she thought, when half of that boot slipped into a smooth-edged hole two feet above her other foot. You won’t be that lucky twice. Hallie stood up straight, weighting that foot, looked for and found a ledge over which she could hook the fingers of her left hand, and locked her right fingers over the lateral continuation of that ledge. She had braced for an explosion of pain in her bandaged left hand, but it wasn’t as bad as she had expected. Nothing she couldn’t handle. She repeated the search with her right foot, looking for a new placement for it. At first she thought there was none to be found, but eventually she felt a rounded nubbin about the size of a grapefruit. If the wall had not angled away from her slightly, making it a few degrees from dead vertical, she would not have been able to support her weight on that round, slick surface. She placed the boot carefully and pushed herself up another two feet.

  When she had climbed what she judged to be about thirty feet, she found four holds secure enough to allow her to rest. Her left leg had started doing the sewing machine, and her ungloved fingers were raw and bleeding. Every once in a while her head spun, inducing vertigo, and she could only cling to the wall and hope it would pass.

  As she had been climbing, the sound of the river above had been growing steadily stronger. Hallie had no way of knowing for sure, but she estimated that the top was still another forty or fifty feet away. Though it was nothing but a wild guess, she settled on that distance. It felt manageable, yet not overly optimistic.

  She understood that this was a rock climb with a margin of safety afforded by the microbial mat below, which had saved her earlier. But she also knew that she had been very lucky to survive that fall. Cahner had thrown her over with enough force to propel her away from the walls of the pi
t. If she had hit those jagged rock walls on her way down, that probably would have been the end of it. And if she felt herself starting to fall from the wall where she clung, it was possible she would have time to push off and fall free all the way to the bottom. But climbing falls did not usually give you fair warning to get yourself together. Most of the time you were in the air before you knew it. If that happened here, she would hit the wall all the way down, and if the impact did not kill her it would certainly cause serious injury. And would she be able to try the climb out a second time, hurt even worse than she was now?

  As she hung there, her left leg jerking up and down, her fingers burning, her side stabbed with pain, a tiny thought sprang up deep in her mind.

  Let go.

  It would be so easy.

  Just let go.

  She could let herself fall over backward, making sure that her head hit the rock, and there would be just that one blinding impact, so quick that she would probably not even feel any pain, and that would be it. Her mind played with the thought briefly, like a tongue cautiously tasting some new and exotic morsel.

  But then her father’s face flared up from memory, and his voice, and, in quick flashing succession, her mothers and brothers and Mary … When she focused again she was already climbing, and now she started to become one with the rock. Her hands and feet felt the wall in slow but continuous motions, seeking and finding placements, gaining a foot here, six inches there, two inches somewhere else. The wall smelled like cold, wet metal tinged with a faint hint of rotten eggs, the cave’s sulfur lending that scent. At about sixty feet, the wall’s outward slant increased, making the climbing a bit easier.

  It also made a mistake easier to make, and she climbed with even greater caution than before. Sooner than she expected, her right hand reached up and felt no more wall, just space. She reached farther, felt the pit’s edge and then cave floor. She got her other hand on the flat surface, pulled herself up, and flopped down onto her stomach, gasping.

  AFTER RIDDING HIMSELF OF HALLIE, CAHNER BROKE CAMP and started up, taking his time, no need to hurry now. He traversed the ledge above the Acid Bath and worked his way back to clear air. Cahner had taken Hallie’s map from her pack and had traveled the same route, but following her lead and finding the way himself proved to be two very different things. Fatigue slowed him and wrong turns forced him to retrace his steps several times, wasting precious energy. As it turned out, exhaustion stopped him sooner than he’d expected. His legs simply would not move anymore.

  He dropped his pack at the first clear space he could find, not much bigger than a one-car garage but with a soft, sandy floor. The ceiling above this area of the cave was exceptionally wet, and so much mineral-rich water dripping over the eons had created a forest of stalagmites about his campsite. Some were no bigger than scallions, some were as high as a man’s waist, and a few massive columns rose all the way to the ceiling. He liked being in the midst of so many stalagmites. It gave his camp a safe, secure feel, like a stockade of stone.

  A watercourse flowed close by, loud enough to fill Cahner’s camp with the sound of the stream jumping over rocks, tangling in currents, flowing and bubbling down into the depths. He ate a dinner of MRE beef Stroganoff, then set about brewing tea. As he was trying to light the little stove, he dropped his yellow butane lighter. Locating it in the spot of his light, he bent over to pick it up. Just as he started his downward motion, something smacked the back of his helmet, knocking it off. It felt like someone had hit him with a baseball bat. Then something smashed him squarely in the back.

  He was down on his belly and the something was on top of him. A forearm closed around his throat, cutting off his air. He flailed back wildly with his fists, felt one connect hard with his assailant’s face, heard a grunt of pain. He bucked with his hips and rolled and got out from under the attacker. Instinctively he dropped to his hands and knees and felt for his helmet, which, by sheer luck, he grasped almost immediately. Without putting it back on his head, he flashed the light around, trying to spot the person who had come after him. When his light found its target, he could not believe his eyes.

  “Hallie!”

  He tried to blind her with his light but she was on him in a second, hauling him to his feet, shaking him, slapping his face. He reached for the Taser, but, with nothing to fear after disposing of her, he had stuffed it into his pack. She hit him on the side of the neck with a rock, smacking the brachial nerve bundle, stunning him. His legs collapsed and he fell, dropping the helmet, kicking it inadvertently and sending it spinning out of reach. It came to rest twenty feet away, the light broken. They were plunged into complete darkness. He scrambled away from her, scuttling like a crab.

  “You can’t be here!” he yelled.

  Her reply was a rock the size of a grapefruit that whisked past his head, missing by inches, crashing into a stalagmite on the other side of the clearing. Cahner rolled onto his belly and crawled to the right, trying to make no sound, stifling his breathing. He wanted to find a rock, stalagmite, anything to hide behind and let him gather his wits. Another rock struck the cave floor just inches from his face, spraying him with sand and gravel. He rolled left, slid backward, covered his head with his hands and just lay there, trying to become part of the cave.

  Hallie’s attack had been fired by rage and adrenaline, but the fighting had burned through those and now she was winded and nauseous. Her intent was not to kill Cahner but to render him helpless and bring him out of the cave as a prisoner, to answer for his actions. Or maybe she would leave him in the cave and let somebody else come back for him. She really hadn’t thought through the possibilities by the time she had caught up with him, the sounds of her approach covered by those of the river flowing nearby.

  She had lost her own helmet in the scuffle, so now they were both blind. She heard Cahner roll off to her left, but then soft sand muffled the sound of his movements and she no longer had any idea of his location. He could be standing right behind her, for all she knew. Instinctively she waved her arms all around, felt nothing, dropped to her hands and knees, and scuttled several feet to one side. Then she stayed absolutely still, listening for any sound that would reveal Cahner’s location.

  So we are reduced to this, she thought, crawling around in the dark and trying to kill each other with rocks. Cahner might not need a rock if he had the Taser. But if he had it, he would almost certainly have used it already. So why hadn’t he? The only possible reason was that he did not have it in his possession. That meant either he had lost it or, more likely, had stowed it in his pack. Did he carry a knife? She could not remember seeing one on his belt, but that did not rule out a pocketknife. He wouldn’t need either one of those to kill her, though. A rock would do that just as well. He could even break off a sharp stalagmite and use it like a spear. Suddenly she heard a grunt, a half second of silence, and a rock smashed against the cave wall off to her left, not even close to where she lay. But she understood that Cahner was trying to frighten her into revealing her position. Another rock struck a few feet closer. He was working his way around the clearing like the sweep hand of a clock, hoping either to hit her at random or to frighten her into making noise. Moving very slowly, she began searching the cave floor with her right hand, looking for a rock to use as a weapon. She moved her hand and arm through a full arc, from shoulder to waist, but felt only soft sand. She repeated the motion with her left arm, but again found nothing.

  Another rock hit the cave wall directly behind her. Whatever his location, Cahner’s throws were surprisingly precise, the rock impacts moving from left to right with about five feet between them. Without knowing where he stood, she could do nothing but wait for him to find and attack her. Furious with herself for not having planned her own assault more carefully, she could only lie in the sand and stare into the darkness.

  Then she began to see, not with her eyes but with her mind, the snapshot that her brain, out of long habit, had taken when Cahner’s helmet had gone spinning awa
y into the darkness. She closed her eyes and began to perceive images, outlines, shadows. Judging from the sounds he had made while throwing the rocks, Cahner was sidling from her left to her right, picking up rocks as he went, pausing to throw and hoping to hit her without really knowing where she was. That was all helpful, but still did not tell her where Cahner was at that moment, which was the one thing she needed to know.

  Then Cahner told her himself. Not with his voice, but she heard him pick up a rock. It was just the slightest scraping noise, like one fingernail brushing a desktop, but it was enough. She did not hesitate, because she knew that it would take only a second or two for him to throw the rock and move again. She came up out of the sand and launched herself toward the sound Cahner had made, thinking to run into him with her shoulder and knock him down.

  Her snapshot was not detailed enough to show every feature of the cave where they were, and so halfway to Cahner, her right foot twisted in a small hole in the floor and she went down, falling hard on her chest. Cahner was on her in an instant, straddling her back, grabbing her forehead with both hands and pulling up, trying to break her neck, but she was slick with water and sweat and his hands slipped off. She flipped onto her back, clawed at his groin, squeezed with strong rock climber’s hands.

  He screamed in pain, twisted out of her grasp. She heard him stumbling to his feet and jumped up herself, remaining in a crouch, hands up defensively.

  “Goddamn you!” Cahner rushed toward her in the dark. She jumped to one side, felt him brush past, shoved him that way, turned to face the direction in which he had gone, fully expecting him to spin around and come for her again.

  Instead, there was a gasp and then sudden silence. Terrified, she crouched down in the dark, felt around her for a rock, found one, clutched it. She knelt there like a Neanderthal, defenseless except for her rock and muscles and brain, her face twisted into a snarl, waiting for the attack of whatever horror might come at her out of the dark.