The Maw

by Taylor Zajonc

  “I’m not even sure where to begin,” said Milo as he stared at Bridget, trying not to look like he’d just been smacked in the face. The world was small, but not this small. “Why—when did you get here?”

  “Two days ago, when they were first setting up the camp,” answered Bridget with a half-smile. “But it’s my third expedition with Dale. Emory lets me take up to two months a year. Thought I’d spend them on vacations, but traveling solo gets pretty dull after a while. I eventually found out that archaeological and scientific expeditions are always looking for a volunteer doctor on staff.”

  “Wow,” said Milo. “How often do you get out into the field?”

  “As often as possible,” Bridget replied. “I’ve been to a Polynesian archaeological dig in the South Pacific, helped excavate a lost Buddhist cave temple in Myanmar . . . even cruised to the site of the Titanic with a documentary film team that dove on the wreck. Spent most of that trip sick in my cabin.”

  Milo couldn’t help but feel a wave of profound envy wash over him. He remembered the adventures they’d promised each other; it pained him to learn how many she’d had without him. She seemed so maddeningly unaffected as she spoke, as though they could pick right back up as reacquainted friends.

  “You always had the best summer vacation stories,” responded Milo, struggling to return her smile. Despite her friendly tone, her words still felt distinctly competitive, a direct shot at his identity and aspirations. Of course she knew his of romantic obsession with exploration, but he couldn’t tell if she had co-opted his dreams to memorialize their relationship or to throw it in his face.

  “I really do,” agreed Bridget. “Some of my superiors think it’s a bit much; they hope I’ll eventually outgrow it.”

  “I hope you don’t,” said Milo. It was an honest statement—whatever the motivation, she clearly loved the adventure, his irrational jealousy notwithstanding. “And how did you meet Dale?”

  “Oh, this is a good story,” said Bridget. “You won’t believe this—we met rappelling into an Incan cliff tomb in the Peruvian Andes. He asked me out immediately; I told him I wasn’t at all interested. Ended up friends anyway, and he always brings me on his expeditions. This is the biggest one by far, of course.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” said Milo. Part of him really hoped she wouldn’t ask him about himself, force him to reveal how uninteresting a life he’d led since they parted. Meanwhile, she sounded like she’d just stepped out of a glossy National Geographic cover story.

  “Still, this one feels a little different,” she added. “Dale had me study up on exotic viruses. Strange, right?”

  “That’s a little concerning,” said Milo. “But why? Wouldn’t he be more concerned about falls?”

  “Fair question,” sighed Bridget as she absentmindedly ran her hands through her long, dark hair. “I suppose he’s a bit paranoid when it comes to diseases. Caves are classic convergence zones where cross-species viral jumps occur. Bats and their guano, sheltering mammals, human hunters all passing in and out of a confined, humid, temperature-neutral space. Diseases love to make the first big leap from animal to human in caverns. Did you know the first major Ebola outbreak was ultimately traced back to a single cave in central Africa?”

  “I didn’t know that,” admitted Milo.

  “It’s legitimately scary stuff,” she said. “Emory handled a couple of Ebola-stricken US aid workers after the 2014 outbreak. Still, why not take the invitation? This is a long shot, but I think there’s a chance that we can trace the yellow fever outbreak that devastated Central and Western Africa in 1900 back to this cave. I’ll take some samples and see if anything comes of it. Could make for a hell of a paper. And how cool are supercaves? Some people even call them the eighth continent—that’s how vast and unexplored they are.”

  “Seriously? Yellow fever?”

  “Like I said, it’s a long shot,” she said. “But still worth checking out. Did you know yellow fever is a hemorrhagic? Same family as Ebola.”

  “I didn’t know that,” he said again.

  “You manage to get a call out?” Bridget asked, changing the subject. “Tell the family you made it?”

  “No,” said Milo. “They said it wasn’t set up yet.”

  “Not set up? Fat chance,” she said, laughing. “I left a message with that lurking blonde girl. I can’t even look up without seeing her with that clipboard computer thingy, asking me if I need anything. Your family good?”

  “Everybody’s fine,” said Milo. “Mom still asks about you sometimes.”

  “Pass along my love. You’ve probably heard enough about me—what have you been up to?”

  “Teaching,” said Milo. “Blogging a bit. Get some interesting contract work once in a while.”

  “Still studying the great explorers?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Rich guys do love their historical icons. I know Dale does.”

  “Speaking of whom, what can you tell me about Dale?” asked Milo.

  “Probably not much more than you already know,” said Bridget.

  “Don’t be so sure.”

  “I don’t know much more than what’s on his official bio,” said Bridget. “Wall Street tycoon, activist investor. He’s deep into pharma conglomerates, like investing in the development of ADHD meds, neurotransmitter reuptake inhibitors, and the like. Family money has been in it for a generation; they’ve been involved in the launch of a dozen or more extraordinarily lucrative product lines.”

  Milo nodded, again chastened by how little he knew about his sponsor.

  “Glad it keeps him smart about the cave,” said Bridget. “Like I said—classic viral convergence zone.”

  “I suppose the early archaeologists knew it,” reflected Milo. “You know about the mummy’s curse—opening up old tombs and getting sick. Most of those stories are bullshit, of course. But it was known to happen.”

  “But if it gets a doctor from Atlanta a free safari, why not?” said Bridget, grinning. “So, are you going to do it?”

  “Do what?” asked Milo.

  “Join the caving expedition! Go inside with the rest of us!”

  “I don’t know,” said Milo. “Maybe Dale wants me to consult from up here—analyze photos, do tabletop historical scenarios, that sort of thing.”

  Bridget sat silent for the longest time, considering Milo until he felt uncomfortable.

  “You really have no idea what you’re getting into, do you?” she finally said. “Milo, this is a supercave. We could be down there for weeks. There aren’t going to be any photos or tabletop theories going back and forth. We’ll be completely cut off from all contact, entirely on our own. I think you should come—it’s going to be unlike anything you’ve ever done.”

  CHAPTER 5:

  EXTREMOPHILE

  It wasn’t camp food; more like a visit to a gourmet cafe. Dinner was fresh salad, warm bread rolls, and a thin but expertly prepared New York strip steak. Milo even had a slice of cheesecake, baked in a solar oven and drizzled with a homemade strawberry reduction. Still foggy from the flight, he had selected the far corner of the mess tent, a couple of empty seats down from the next nearest person. Awkward small talk could only serve to remind him how little he belonged in Tanzania compared to everyone else.

  Sitting apart from the rest of the group made it that much easier for the blonde logistician to pick him out. She’d stepped up to the edge of the tent, swiveled her head once, and instantly spotted him, marching over to his bench with great intent as he swallowed a last bite of the dessert.

  “You’re missing it!” she said, leaning over and placing a hand on his shoulder. Milo struggled and failed to not look down her shirt.

  “Missing what?” gulped Milo, unconsciously reaching for his water glass.

  “The technical team meeting—it was on the white board.”

  “The what? Where?”

  She smiled at him and theatrically grabbed him by the hand, pulling him up from his seat. “You
’re coming with me,” she said, pretending to drag him away.

  Part of Milo’s mind consciously realized his palms were sweating. Another part couldn’t quite shake his desire for another slice of cheesecake. She led him past the other diners and down the narrow path to Dale’s oversized tent. Reaching it, she stuck her head in through the flap to look inside.

  “Shoot,” she said, her voice faint from the other side of the fabric. “I seem to have lost Dr. McAffee in the interim.” She pulled her head back out.

  “You going to hold her hand too?” asked Milo.

  “Get in there, smartass,” she said, playfully patting Milo on the shoulder, then shoving him in through the entrance and into the darkness. Milo desperately wished he’d remembered her name.

  As his eyes adjusted, Milo realized he was looking at the sitting form of none other than YouTube star Charlie Garza. The Internet celebrity wore a perfectly curated four days’ beard, immaculately styled to appear reckless and unintentional. Milo’s gaze was drawn to his $300 haircut and the compression shirt he’d tucked into his khaki pants. The rugged image was completed by a subtle tribal bicep tattoo peeking from behind a shirtsleeve and a simple seashell necklace.

  Though somewhat of a backbencher in his previous career—a nominally sponsored backcountry skiing, rock-climbing adventure junkie—Charlie had made quite a name for himself on his online channel, Extreme History. In his fast-talking, enthusiastic—and prominently muscled—style, he was a favorite of twelve-year-olds cramming for history tests, and his view count reflected it.

  The online series had started out with a bang, the damage from the first episode alone totaling one wrecked aircraft, two broken wrists, and a shattered ankle—and a full week of breathless cable news coverage during a slow news cycle. Under the tagline “History is Dangerous,” Charlie had attempted to duplicate the Operation Eiche raid in Italy, Hitler’s daring commando rescue of a temporarily deposed Mussolini from a castle in the Italian Alps, complete with a period-replica Nazi glider (albeit with the swastikas tastefully redacted.) Charlie’s re-creation didn’t quite live up to the original, ending abruptly when the glider crash-landed into the side of Gran Sasso D’Italia mountain. Charlie survived the crash and landed a hat trick of major corporate sponsors, much to the delight of his bankrolling father.

  Rumor had it that Charlie was a contender for the next cable adventure/documentary hosting slot, despite remaining a minor figure to few but the most craven of academic historians.

  “Hey!” said Charlie, looking up from his phone. “You’re the guy with the expedition blog! I read it all the time! Milo, right?”

  “Great to meet you,” Milo responded, stepping into the darkness and offering his hand. Charlie took it in both of his, shaking Milo’s entire arm in a gesture that bordered on violent.

  “Exciting, right?” said Charlie, waving around the impressively appointed tent. “This is all so cool—and I’m pumped to finally meet you! Been reading your posts for ages.”

  “Yeah, nice to meet you too,” answered Milo, though he was physically unable to muster the same degree of enthusiasm. “Love your YouTube channel.”

  Milo tried really, really hard to dislike Charlie but couldn’t. So what if Charlie wasn’t particularly original? At least he was memorable, and he really did seem to have a deep love of history. In person, Charlie wasn’t so much a prima donna as an overgrown kid.

  “Where’s Dale?” asked Milo, glancing around the room.

  “Not here,” came a voice from the far side of the tent. In the midst of Charlie’s gregarious introduction, Milo hadn’t even noticed the man in the corner fixing himself a well-aged bourbon from Dale Brunsfield’s impressively stocked wet bar.

  “That’s Logan Flowers,” said Charlie, pointing toward the bar. “Doctor Flowers, I mean. Doc—it’s Milo Luttrell, the guy I was telling you about.”

  Logan didn’t smile, just walked over, wordlessly shook Milo’s hand, and sat down on a folding chair, drink in hand. He didn’t sip it, just held it in one hand, condensation collecting at the rim. Logan had an unkempt, bushy red beard and thick black glasses and was noticeably overweight. If it weren’t for his piercing, intelligent eyes, Milo could have pictured him hanging out at a bus station in a bad part of town.

  “Nice to meet you,” said Milo, breaking the silence. “Are you another historian?”

  Dr. Logan Flowers snorted and shook his head. “No, not a historian,” he said. “Geologist.”

  “At least one hard science guy in the bunch, right?” said Charlie. “Keep the rest of us in line?”

  Nobody answered him; Logan was characteristically silent. Milo sat down, putting Logan between himself and Charlie.

  “What’s your specialty?” asked Milo.

  “Speleology,” Logan said. “I study caves. I focus on speleogenesis and hydro-morphology. Basically means I try to understand how caverns are formed.”

  “Don’t stop there,” interrupted Charlie. “I looked this guy up—he’s been with NASA for years. Studied the lava tubes they discovered on the moon. He’s the real deal—spends days, sometimes weeks underground.”

  “And he explores alone,” came a feminine voice from the entrance flap. Milo gulped as Bridget stepped in and found a seat across from the three men. “That’s his reputation, anyway.”

  “Hardcore,” said Charlie, nodding in appreciation. “Wicked hardcore.”

  “I think it’s quite suicidal,” said Bridget as she shot a glance toward Logan. Milo noticed she wasn’t smiling—Bridget wasn’t teasing.

  “What is darkness to you,” quoted Logan, more than a little defensive in tone, “is light to me.”

  “Dante?” asked Charlie.

  “Jules Verne,” corrected Logan.

  Bridget didn’t respond, but instead crossed her legs and flashed Milo a thin smile. He didn’t return it.

  “I’m pretty psyched about this whole expedition,” said Charlie. “About as extreme as history gets, right?”

  “Nice to do something outside the norm,” admitted Bridget. “I love Emory, but it has a tendency to get all-consuming.”

  “I’ve been dying to ask Milo this question,” said Charlie. “You really think we’re going to find Riley DeWar and his guys?”

  Milo let the silence sit for a moment as he thought about it. “It’s certainly what Dale believes,” he finally said. “And I have to say, the evidence he’s put together is highly compelling. Circumstantial, yes, but compelling nonetheless. The find would rewrite history—and prove DeWar didn’t steal money and disappear, but that he died taking on a challenge decades ahead of his time.”

  Barely paying attention, Logan stood from his seat and booted up the monitor bank, playing back recorded footage from the earlier robotic penetration of the first chambers. Milo couldn’t make any sense out of the film—the diminutive robot could barely capture more than the crushed and shattered stones immediately before the camera. The onboard light source couldn’t so much as reach the nearest cavern wall.

  Milo wasn’t done talking, but he could tell Bridget and Charlie’s interest was already flagging, especially now that he was in competition with the video feed.

  “But if he’s in there,” said Milo, trying to wrap up with some confidence and swagger, “we’ll definitely find him.”

  Logan just snorted.

  “I take it you disagree?” snapped Bridget, reflexively coming to Milo’s aid.

  “We’re not talking about a single missing caver,” said Logan. “We’re talking about an entire missing expedition. Every last man gone, vanished. One, two guys I can understand. Somebody falls, gets hurt, maybe their buddy panics, doesn’t keep a level head, and turns a simple screwup into a catastrophic fuckup. But an entire expedition, nearly twenty men vanished into this cave? I don’t think so. Something happened down there—something we haven’t accounted for.”

  “Could have been a cave-in,” said Charlie. “Trapped ’em.”

  “This cavern forme
d 150 million years ago during the Jurassic age,” said Logan. “It predates humanity itself. It has survived submergence in an ancient sea, continental drift, multiple ice ages, severe earthquakes. A significant interior collapse is very unlikely.”

  “Carbon dioxide poisoning,” suggested Bridget. “Or toxic levels of sulfur dioxide, ammonia . . . maybe even methane.”

  Logan shook his head. “Those gases are found in volcanic caves, not limestone. Look at the video feed—there are none of the crystalline structures associated with volcanism. Besides, our probe’s sniffers are capable of measuring down to the parts per billion. I’ve seen nothing alarming in the readings.”

  “They suffocated,” said Milo. “Camped out in a small chamber. Maybe lit a fire by mistake.”

  “Suffocation? Not with the amount of air exchange we’ve witnessed,” said Logan. “But let me stop you all there. You’re all using a conventional understanding to try to understand the unconventional—I don’t think you really get the environment we’re dealing with. Think about hydrography, the weathering forces that turn mountain ranges like the Rocky Mountains into smoothed-over Appalachians. These forces are turned on their heads underground. Water hollows out the earth like an acid, carries away particles by friction and gravity. While on the surface, weathering turns mountains—vertical features—into plains—horizontal. It’s exactly opposite underground. Gravity and friction dictate morphology. Horizontal passages are narrow and squeezed, where acidic waters collect between sedimentary layers, slowly eating away a lazy, narrow path downslope. But vertical shafts are swallowing and massive.”

  “Those vertical drops are called pitches, right?” asked Charlie.

  Logan nodded. “This is a classic pit cave. We’ll have more rope by weight than the rest of our gear combined,” he said. “It’s called riding the nylon highway—dropping pitch by pitch into the center of the earth, figuratively speaking. It’s incredibly dangerous. It’s said that everything about caves is the antithesis of life on the surface.”