The Maw

by Taylor Zajonc

  Every member of the team fell eventually. It would start with a jolt and a quick yelp as their feet slipped out from beneath them. Plunging into the water, they were picked up by the current and slammed from rock to rock like a pinball until they snagged on something or were stopped short by the rope, the rest of the team straining to hold them.

  Second in line, Joanne noticed a smashed Pelican case wedged between clusters of thick stalactites. Yawning open, the case spilled a week’s worth of food across the wall and downstream; rice, dehydrated soups, dry pasta, and dented cans. Just below it sat the remains of the television camera. Though intact, it was wholly ruined, lens broken, casing smashed, dripping water down visible wires and circuit boards. Joanne pursed her lips as she retrieved the memory cards from the destroyed device.

  “Want me to grab any of the food?” asked Dale, gesturing to the smashed container.

  “We’ll have to come back for it,” said Joanne. “Keep moving.”

  Leading, Duck did not pause at a single intersection, instead following the river’s route at each. Milo noticed that half of the chalk marks were now gone, washed away by the flood. He supposed it didn’t matter—the rushing waters marked the only path that mattered.

  Scanning the passageway as she walked, Joanne suddenly stopped the group with a wave of her hand, flashlight aimed at a smooth yellow sphere a few meters away. Milo recognized it immediately as the top of Isabelle’s helmet.

  The group scrambled down the slope, ignoring the slippery surface beneath their feet. Now closer, Milo could see Isabelle wedged within a breakdown pile, still wearing the yellow helmet, her blue-tinged face barely above the water, open eyes rolled back into her head.

  “Be careful!” shouted Logan. “We could trigger a collapse at any moment—watch your step.”

  Ignoring Logan, Duck knelt down next to Isabelle and pressed his ear almost to her lips. “She’s breathing,” he announced with astonishment. “Holy shit—she’s actually alive!”

  Kneeling next to Duck, Milo surveyed the badly injured producer. Isabelle’s right leg was twisted grotesquely under a large boulder. Only one half of her chest rose and fell, and she seemed totally unresponsive to the flurry of light and noise around her.

  “Incredible!” exclaimed Joanne. “She’s a tough cookie.”

  “If she made it this long, she’s got a chance,” added Duck.

  “Get the rock off her!” ordered Bridget.

  Before the group could rally, Charlie braced himself under the rock, teeth gritted and veins bulging as he slowly hefted the oblong boulder from underneath. It shifted with a low rumble, rolling free of her leg.

  There was no hesitation from Bridget, no indecision. She issued a rapid-fire list of instructions, asking for pulse, spare webbing, bandages, tape, backboard, and blankets, ordering the team to ready any other medical supplies and cut Isabelle free of her clothes.

  Milo was startled by how cold Isabelle’s skin felt to the touch; she was freezing but not shivering. Then he remembered what Logan had said about hypothermia, the hours she’d spent in the water. It was nothing short of miraculous that she was still alive.

  Duck flicked open a knife and ran the blade from Isabelle’s pant cuff up through the thick canvas thigh and beltline as Bridget did the same with her fleece pullover. There was no consideration for privacy as he exposed her bruised, blackened chest and abdomen, her bloody, sliced-up hips and legs.

  “She’s bleeding internally,” said Bridget, using the end of the knife to point where dark blood had pooled under the skin beneath the worst of her injuries. Within seconds, she’d rendered the producer virtually naked. Milo forced himself to not avert his eyes.

  Without prompting, Duck rolled out a collapsible backboard, setting the thin plastic sled up beside Isabelle’s twisted form.

  “Helmet?” asked Joanne.

  “Cut it off,” ordered Bridget, flipping the knife around in her palm to pass it to her.

  Joanne grabbed the handle of the sharp instrument and carefully slipped it through each of the four helmet straps, leaving only the loose shell on top of Isabelle’s head.

  “Need cervical stabilization,” Joanne announced. Dale and Duck joined their hands behind the producer’s neck, holding it in place as Joanne carefully slipped the helmet free of Isabelle’s bleeding scalp and wet, stringy hair.

  “Holy fuck,” Duck exlaimed, examining the helmet as Joanne passed it in front of him. Milo caught sight of the damage—a baseball-sized circle on the side had been neatly punched in by a rock. The helmet had done its job, saved her from a collapsed skull, but she’d still likely suffered a concussion, maybe even a fracture.

  “Get ready to lift her onto the backboard,” said Bridget. “I want everyone around her in a circle—on three, gently but firmly lift her up and over. We don’t want to exacerbate any spinal injuries or internal bleeding. Remember: slow is smooth, smooth is fast.”

  The team scrambled around the producer, waiting for the order. Bridget counted off to three and everyone awkwardly lifted, pulling Isabelle’s body free of the rocks. The foot of her broken leg remained wedged, leaving the team holding her body in a dangerous limbo until Dale, swearing, cut her boot free.

  Within seconds of cradling Isabelle in the collapsible backboard, Duck and Joanne were busy tying her down. Joanne paid the most attention to her skull and neck, padding it with her ruined clothing as Duck and Dale ran the webbing back and forth over her form, firmly strapping her forehead down last. The resulting contraption almost resembled an open-topped kayak, at least until Dale and Joanne covered every inch of the producer in synthetic fleece blankets, followed by a second round of webbing and straps, wrapping her up like a mummy.

  Dale reached under the blankets and started rubbing warmth back into the freezing hands.

  “Don’t do that!” snapped Bridget, slapping Dale’s hand away. “You’ll send freezing blood right to her heart—it could kill her.”

  “Really?” said Dale, confused as he looked to Duck.

  “Better listen to the doc,” said Duck, shrugging.

  “Is Isabelle going to make it?” asked Charlie, almost pleading.

  “She’s in a bad way,” said Joanne. “But statistically speaking, she’s already survived the hour after her initial accident—if we can get her out of here fast enough, there’s every reason to believe she’ll live.”

  “Thank God!” exclaimed Charlie with profound relief. Smiles broke out across the group—except from Joanne.

  “There’s no way we’ll be able to get her back up to base camp,” she said, dropping her head in resignation. “We can’t fight the current and the tight squeeze, not with her on the backboard. We’re sitting ducks if we get hit by another flood in these twisting passages. Besides, we’re stuck on the wrong side of the main shaft until the surface teams rig up a new rope system. We have to go deeper and find a place to hold out—it’s Isabelle’s only chance.”

  CHAPTER 22:

  CONFESSIONAL

  2,625 feet below the surface

  Milo woke to the sound of clanking metal, again jolted from inexplicable dreams. Duck and Logan waded into the flooded cathedral chamber dragging a set of six oxygen tanks in a rubber drybag, the two-liter bottles loudly ringing with every footstep.

  Dale looked up from his sitting position at Isabelle’s side, annoyed by the rough treatment of the volatile aluminum pressure vessels. It was Duck and Logan’s second trip to base camp and back. The wading men were too exhausted to speak as they handed over the tanks and a few small packs of shrink-wrapped medical supplies.

  Bridget looked at the returning men and shook her head before turning her attention back to the patient. Leaning over a cracked glowstick, she checked Isabelle’s pulse and respiration for the half-hourly reading. Duck swayed from side to side as he watched, blinking his eyes too quickly as he tried to stave off collapse for a few more moments.

  Milo shot a glance toward the geologist. Logan had developed deep, dark
wrinkles under his hollow eyes, his expression distant, yet he seemed strangely at peace with the deteriorating conditions and physical exhaustion.

  “I think we set an underground speed record,” mumbled Logan. “We made it down here fast.”

  “No such luck, bro,” said Duck as he sank down onto one of the flat rocks that dotted the underground lake. “I set that record two years ago in Fool’s Day Extension in Huatla, Mexico. Had the taquito-shits.”

  With that, Duck stretched himself out and closed his eyes, falling dead asleep in his filthy clothes before Logan could even respond.

  “You need to rest and rehydrate,” ordered Bridget. “Someone else can take the next run. Another run and you two will be just as incapacitated as Isabelle.”

  “I know what I’m doing,” huffed Logan as he pulled himself up next to the sleeping Duck, flipped himself onto his stomach, and folded his arms under his chin. Bridget ignored his irritated retort.

  “And you need to be more careful with the oxygen next time,” added Dale. “You knock one of those nozzles on the rock the wrong way and it’ll go off like a rocket, leave somebody with a tank-sized dent in their head.”

  Now fully awake, Milo dropped off his rock and swam over to where Dale and Bridget attended to their patient. Charlie sat beside Isabelle, holding one of her hands and whispering to her; he hadn’t left her side for a moment since arriving at the cathedral chamber. Milo had no idea how long they’d been down there, probably just eight to ten hours, but it felt like days.

  “You get a chance to look at the ropes?” asked Dale.

  “Yeah,” said Logan without getting up. “There’s just one left, and it looks like shit.”

  “How is the patient?” asked Milo, dragging himself out of the water and crawling to join the circle around Isabelle. Strange how fully he’d adapted to the darkness; he hadn’t even bothered to switch on his headlamp during the swim over. The dim, struggling light from the single glowstick was more than enough.

  “In and out of consciousness,” said Dale, lifting up one of the blankets to expose half of her blackened, bare chest. Milo again forced himself to look. Bridget had placed a sort of crude flapper valve over the deepest chest wound, a small square of clear plastic taped on three sides, allowing air trapped between her damaged lung tissue and chest to bubble free. The previous batch of oxygen, fed to her through a nasal cannula tube, had kept her breathing, even allowing the collapsed lung to partially reinflate on its own.

  Dale tapped the oxygen bottle as the pressure valve dipped into the red, the tank almost empty. He quickly worked to replace it with one of the new tanks ferried down by Duck and Logan.

  “We’re still going to run out in a few hours,” said Bridget. “Hopefully she won’t need the extra oxygen by then.”

  Dale just grunted in acknowledgement as he adjusted an IV line. Milo didn’t bother to ask what would happen if Isabelle couldn’t work up the strength to breathe on her own.

  The IV line drew Milo’s doubts as well. They’d salvaged the needles and tubes but not any of the fluid itself, forcing Bridget to work up a batch from salt, honey, water, and a few dissolvable painkillers, all boiled over their single remaining gas jet stove. The liquid mixture was poured in a taped-up plastic bag and hung on a backpack frame, the jury-rigged apparatus slowly dripping down a tube and into the largest vein in the inner crook of Isabelle’s elbow.

  “We’ll need more IV fluid by then as well,” added Dale.

  “I can work up another batch,” offered Bridget.

  “I can’t keep the bag clean if we keep refilling it,” stated Dale, impassive. “Bacterial introduction is inevitable.”

  “We’ll bomb her system with antibiotics the moment we hit surface,” said Bridget, unfazed. “Right now we just need to keep her alive—infection is tomorrow’s problem.”

  It was strange the way they ignored Charlie, but Milo couldn’t blame them. The man was immobile, psychologically trapped by Isabelle’s side as she flickered in and out of consciousness. Unsolvable problems went unspoken—Isabelle could be suffering brain trauma, internal bleeding, cerebral swelling, cervical dislocation, even organ rupture. And yet she breathed without pause, deeply, her heavy, drugged eyes fluttering open every once in a long while to take in what little of her situation she could process.

  “You get any sleep?” Milo asked Bridget.

  “A little,” she answered. “Enough to stave off the nods for a few hours.”

  Milo grimaced. He knew what she was like when she was exhausted; in her current state he wouldn’t have put her in charge of changing a light bulb, much less sustaining a human life.

  “Can you two watch her for a bit?” asked Dale with a sigh. “I’m starting to lose it here. Hearing sounds, seeing lights . . . that kind of shit. I’ll be worthless if I don’t get a few minutes at least.”

  “She’s as comfortable as she’s going to get,” answered Bridget, nodding. “The oxygen is a big help. I’m going to start rationing the dosage, stretch it for as long as possible.”

  Dale pursed his lips, considering. “Duck and Logan really came through on those tanks,” he said. “Just wake me up if there are any developments.”

  With that, Dale slid off the side of the rock, waded to the far side of the chamber, and curled up on a small ledge.

  Charlie gently stroked Isabelle’s forearm, his lips moving inaudibly as her fingers gently twitched in response.

  “I think she knows I’m here,” said Charlie, his voice distant and hoarse.

  “You should get some sleep too,” said Milo. “We’ll let you know if she opens her eyes again.”

  “You know she changed her name?” said Charlie, breaking his vigil to look up at Milo for the first time in hours. “She was born Zuzanna Wieczorkowski. Brutal, right? Her parents came from Gdansk to San Bernardino in the early ’80s, back when she was just a baby. She told me about it years ago, back when we first met. We spent a weekend together in Mexico once, got wasted on sangria in a cheap motel in Acapulco, talked all night and watched as the sun came up over the parking lot the next morning. Fuckin’ Wieczorkowski . . . no wonder she changed it.”

  “Does she have anybody back home?” asked Bridget. “A spouse? Kids?”

  “No way,” said Charlie with a knowing chuckle. “Not Isabelle. She got married once for, like, a minute. It’s the job. She got to travel the world, meet amazing people, and see more in a year than most people would see in a lifetime. But it all came at a price.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Milo. “What price?”

  Charlie just shrugged. “It happened slowly,” he said. “I didn’t notice it at first. She was filming a Discovery Channel archaeology special in South America once, Skyped me from the site. Showed me an ancient artifact they’d just brought up. I said it was amazing; she said it was boring. Wasn’t gold, like the last one she’d seen. Nothing captured her imagination anymore.”

  “I get it,” said Bridget, nodding, distracted as she checked the levels of Isabelle’s home-brewed IV. “She was burned out. What’d she think of this expedition? Was it something special?”

  “This was just another assignment,” said Charlie bitterly. “She only did it as a favor to me; she was already making plans for the next one. Isabelle didn’t even think the cave would be that interesting, not after covering Son Doong caverns in Vietnam last year. She said maybe I’d bite it parachuting down the shaft and then she’d have a real story. We laughed about it.”

  Charlie didn’t say anything more after that. Milo sat with him, silent, until Dale and Joanne replaced them for the next shift.

  Milo found his own flat rock and tried to sleep. There wasn’t anything else to do. With no recharger station, floating balloon lights, or extra batteries, all light was strictly rationed. They were left in near-darkness, illuminated only by the faint green of the fading chemlight beside Isabelle. Milo wondered how long it would be before he started seeing things like Dale.

  A realization h
it Milo: he wasn’t bored. In fact, far from it. In the passing hours everything around him had become increasingly . . . interesting.

  In the darkness and with virtually no visual distractions, Milo was inundated by remembered details about the surrounding cave—chemical compositions, geological terminology, species adaptation, hydrological forces. It soon felt as though he could dive into an undammed river of information, bathe in it, every bit of data at his fingertips, just waiting to be plucked and savored within the mind. Enjoying the sensation, Milo concluded that the effect of the cave might be not unlike that of an isolation tank—albeit considerably more perilous.

  Not tired and unwilling to sit still, Milo removed the leather-bound journal from the sealed plastic bag, letting the waters drain out off the side of his rock and into the subterranean lake. The fibrous hemp within was entirely intact, allowing him to slowly peel back a few pages at a time, placing absorbent paper napkins between each. The ink itself was faded but legible, a testament to the insolubility of iron gall ink, and would likely be easily readable once the book dried. Milo finished by placing the journal on top of a smooth rock and weighing down the cover with a few additional stones.

  He finished just in time to hear splashing from behind him. Bridget pulled herself out of the water and up onto his rock, dripping as she sat beside him.

  “Can’t sleep?” she asked.

  Milo shook his head. “Feel like I should do something to keep myself occupied,” he said.

  “I haven’t been this exhausted since med school finals,” said Bridget. “Almost like I’m so tired I’m not even tired anymore.”

  Milo considered her for a moment, hesitating. “I don’t quite know what to make of this,” he said, “but I almost feel . . . energized. Focused, even.”

  It was Bridget’s turn to look quizzically at Milo for a few moments before answering. “I actually feel the same way,” she finally said. “And I’m remembering things too. Like the formula for the IV fluid. The recipe came from an offhand comment made by a professor at the end of class, not the sort of thing anybody expected on the test. I never even wrote the formula down. But when I thought about it, it came back to me so clearly . . .”