Swinging from the rope within reach of the top, Milo tried to calculate the distance of each frog-like movement as he had ascended up the rope. Maybe eighteen inches? That would make for roughly a thousand repetitions, maybe more. His improvised webbing harness dug into his groin, leaving a long line of thick blisters across the sensitive skin of his inner thigh, and the constant movement left every joint inflamed. It was too dark to read his watch; Milo estimated they’d been at it for hours. Between his raw palms and exhausted abdomen, he felt like he’d just rowed across the Atlantic. He could barely think through the pain and fatigue.
Gathering the last of his waning strength, Milo hefted himself up and over the edge, flopping down on the widest section, just below where the sole remaining rope line met the thick stalactites. The rest had all snapped—four frayed ropes had broken at their topmost knots, but one had managed to shear off an entire thick stalagmite anchor. Looking around, Milo found the chamber surprisingly dry—the floodwaters had come from the waterfalls further down the shaft, leaving the chamber misty but untouched by fresh mud or debris.
Milo extended a hand into the darkness, palm against blistered palm as he pulled Bridget over the top, then Joanne. In silence, they breathed heavily and untied themselves from harnesses and rope, unraveling the Prusik ascension knots.
He couldn’t help but grin like an idiot. After all, he’d earned his way out of the shaft, fifteen hundred feet of unceasing pain and exertion. Looking down into the vast abyss, he decided he’d never return. Perhaps it would be better to pretend that DeWar’s journal and the three masks never existed than try to explain the find to his peers in academia.
Joanne swiveled her headlamp toward a small equipment dump, an abandoned pile of a dozen shrink-wrapped crates and Pelican cases only partially rigged for lowering. The cave guide dragged herself to her feet, inspecting the hastily abandoned equipment and supplies.
“There’s no note,” she said, confused. “Why would they just leave it here? Why wouldn’t they lower it to us?”
Bridget and Milo shook their heads, unable to answer her.
“I’m going to try the radio,” said Joanne. “If there’s a rescue team nearby, they should pick up the transmission.”
The cave guide announced herself into the walkie-talkie, pausing for a response. Nothing came, not even a crackle of interference.
“Maybe we can try again closer to the entrance,” suggested Bridget as she got up to join Joanne. “We couldn’t have possibly missed them in the anthill, could we?”
“No way,” said Joanne, shaking her head. “They would have left a chalk trail, or at the very least seen ours.”
The doctor shrugged and turned her attention to the ample supplies. Milo helped her open one of the largest crates, shuffling through uncooked rice and dehydrated meals to find a box of thick, chewy granola bars. Bridget grabbed two and passed around the rest.
Milo ripped his open with incredible anticipation, closing his eyes to concentrate all his focus away from his pain-wracked body and to the simple pleasure of eating. “Found chocolate!” announced Joanne, waving a small pack of Hershey bars. She opened one and broke off a thick chunk for herself before handing the rest to Bridget and Milo.
“You are my new bestie,” said Bridget, gleefully snapping off a large piece.
“I’m my new best mate,” said Joanne with a laugh. “I don’t even care if I make myself sick.”
“Still, I feel guilty about eating this with everybody else still down at the bottom.”
“Believe me, they’ll be thanking us once we organize the rescue.”
“Chocolate for all!”
“Rescue first,” corrected Joanne with a solemn nod. “And then chocolate for all.”
All three lifted up their candy bars to toast the sentiment.
Revitalized, the three purposefully hiked through the tight, intersecting tunnels, barely glancing at the chalked directions. The muddy bootprints of the missing support team was trail enough. As they pressed onward, the reverberating, baritone roar of the waterfalls slowly gave way to claustrophobic silence. Within an hour, the trio emerged into the elephant graveyard, the fossil-flecked, high-domed auditorium with vanishingly distant walls. Milo slowly panned his light from side to side, again drinking in the forest of thick, crystal-filled stone columns, dripping stalactites, and spire-like stalagmites.
Then his light fell across a long, man-sized plastic tunnel, white sheeting supported by flexible PVC paralleling the deep crevasse, the open, unfinished end piled with loose piping and rolled plastic. The tunnel measured some eight feet in height at the peak and was nearly as wide. Piles of sheeting haphazardly covered the cave floor, with the tubular plastic piping left sitting on the fragile piles of petrified elephant dung and mummified bats. Before them, the tunnel extended far into darkness, disappearing under the mammoth limestone archway separating the gallery from the graveyard.
“What is that?” breathed Joanne in confusion.
“I was hoping you could tell us,” said Bridget.
Milo racked his mind for a theory. “Maybe it’s for the gallery,” he suggested. “Protect the fragile petroglyphs from increased humidity or carbon dioxide fluctuations?”
“I don’t know why they built the tunnel,” said Bridget. “But I imagine we’re meant to use it.”
Joanne stepped into the tunnel first, the clean plastic sheeting crunching under her muddy boots, plastic walls ripping with each footstep. Bridget and Milo followed, uneasily taking in the sudden shift from natural morphology to the laboratory-like cleanliness of the white plastic.
There was no way to tell how long it was; the tunnel went far further than the reach of their headlamps. After a few minutes of gingerly making their way down the artificial corridor, Milo guessed they’d long since passed underneath the natural arch stone barrier between chambers and were now well into the gallery. There was no way to be entirely certain.
Ahead, Joanne squinted and leaned in to examine a long, rust-colored stain on one of the white walls. Bridget quickly caught up and gently pulled the guide away from the dark splatter.
“Please back away,” said the doctor, holding up a sleeve to her mouth as she took Joanne’s place, examining the stain for herself. Milo looked down, seeing a flurry of dirty bootprints and drag marks on the plastic sheeting below their feet.
“It’s blood, isn’t it?” asked Milo, a chill going down his spine.
“It most certainly is,” confirmed Bridget, dropping the sleeve from her mouth. “It’s dry now, so less infectious, but still potentially dangerous. You can tell it was coughed up by the marks from the water droplets.”
“Why was someone coughing blood?” demanded Joanne, her voice now ice-cold and barely above a whisper.
“They must have collapsed here,” said Bridget, pointing to the floor and the drag marks. “Someone pulled them away, back toward the entrance.”
“Bridget, I need an answer,” insisted Joanne. “We expected to find a rescue team, not a bloody plastic tunnel and body fluids.”
“I don’t have one,” said Bridget curtly. “Not yet. I need you both to keep your gloves on. Touch as little as possible. We’ll make for the hatch; find out the full situation when we link up with Main Camp.”
In silence, the trio crept along the gallery chamber tunnel, careful to not brush the white plastic walls on either side. The tunnel was largely straight, but their lights still disappeared into the darkness without reaching the end. With no markers except for the blood splatter, it was useless to get any sense of sense of distance, no way to tell how far into the gallery they’d walked.
Milo began to notice a very particular smell building with each deliberate step. He looked over to see Joanne wrinkle her nose in disgust. The smell was sickly sweet, putrid. Only Bridget seemed unaffected, her movements tense and her silent attention fixed ahead. Milo’s eyes began to water as his gag reflex contracted in anticipation.
Ahead, the tunnel opened up a
s it reached the entranceway. No longer a tunnel, the white plastic sheeting was now pinned directly to the ceiling and walls, encompassing the entire thirty-foot breadth and twenty-foot height of the room. The skeletal menagerie of hyrax, antelope, and other animals had been hastily swept into one corner of the room and enveloped with plastic covering like the rest of the uneven cavern floor. The thin layer of glittering dust that had previously clung to the air was now gone, leaving an eerie stillness in its absence.
Milo thought back to what Logan told him when they’d first stepped into the gallery entranceway.
It’s a dead cave, the geologist had said. Encased in plastic and filled with the awful smell, the description felt disturbingly apt.
As he stepped into the room, Milo’s eyes fell on a pile of lumpy black bags. A new wave of putridity washed over his senses, almost driving him to his knees as he fought down a retch. Eight bulky body bags were stacked against the far wall. Another five were scattered across the floor with obvious evidence of haste. Three final bodies had been put on blankets and dragged through the narrow metal door, abandoned uncovered on the cavern floor.
Milo’s heart sank as his eyes fell across the closest of the uncovered bodies. Even with her sunken gray features and blood-flecked garments, he still recognized the blonde logistician who’d introduced him to Main Camp. It felt like he’d met her a lifetime ago. She’d died horribly, with thick rivulets of dried blood crusted at the corners of her mouth, eyes, and ears.
“These two are porters,” said Joanne, gesturing to the other uncovered corpses. “Dr. McAffee . . . what happened to our people?”
“Don’t touch anything,” ordered Bridget in a whisper. “They’re highly infectious postmortem. This has to be the work of Marburg virus.”
“I wish I hadn’t touched those crates.” Milo gagged as he fought down another wave of nausea.
“Let’s not jump to conclusions,” said Bridget. “None of us have presented with any symptoms. Marburg is a fluid-borne virus; no reason to assume we’ve been exposed.”
“I can’t believe this is where they thought to secure the bodies,” said Joanne. “Didn’t they take a moment to think about the expedition party?”
“Probably the only way to keep the bodies away from wild animals and scavengers,” said Milo. He shrank a little when the two women shot him an angry look. “Just saying.”
Bridget pointed at one of the porters, at the gritty black substance dripping from his open mouth, down his cheek, across the blanket to the plastic sheeting below. Unlike the others, his yellow, bloodshot eyes were wide open and cloudy with decay. “He was alive when they dragged him in,” she said, no emotion in her voice.
“Did they assume we died too?” asked Milo, the frightening thought hitting him with sudden urgency.
Joanne’s eyes darted toward the closed steel door between herself and the surface. “We need to get out of this fucking cave,” she said.
Careful to not so much as brush the walls, Joanne slowly edged down the narrow entranceway, the other two following close behind. Milo watched over her shoulder as she stopped dead before the steel door. Joanne reached out with a gloved hand and pulled at the wheel.
Nothing happened.
“What’s wrong?” demanded Bridget as an increasingly desperate Joanne yanked the wheel a second and third time without results.
Milo glanced down at the base of the door, seeing black rings of hydraulic fluid dripping from around the rubber sealing. Just above it, one of the metal hinges was cracked. The warped door had been subjected enough external force to knock it out of alignment and destroy the hydraulic actuators.
Gasping with frustration, Joanne pounded on the impenetrable door. “You motherfuckers!” she screamed, but even the blows from her fists barely registered, deafened by earth piled up on the other side. Breathing heavily, her narrowed glance darted to the others as she collected herself.
“Why does it sound so muffled?” asked Bridget, fear entering her voice for the first time. “Why won’t it open?”
Joanne just put her face in her hands, turned her back to the door, and slid down to a sitting position. “It’s been buried from the outside,” she finally answered in a whisper.
“A mudslide?” asked Bridget, her voice hollow. “Are they digging us out? Can you hear anything?”
Milo felt a knot thick grow his throat, fed by the most hopeless fear he’d ever experienced.
“I don’t know,” said Joanne. “I can’t hear anything.”
“It’s not a mudslide,” said Milo, his voice hoarse with fury. “Look at the door—it’s been almost knocked off its hinges. Someone used a bulldozer. They buried us alive down here.”
CHAPTER 25:
FRAGMENTATION
The cavers made camp at the top of the ledge, the roaring waterfall below now almost comforting in its familiarity. Milo couldn’t sleep; his searching eyes were wide open to the black nothingness all around, hallucinatory flickers dancing in his peripheral vision. If not for the rumbling cascade and the rocky protrusions jutting through his thin sleeping pad, it would be as if he were weightless in the world, drifting in unfathomable emptiness.
Milo heard a rustling behind him, barely audible. Small hands smoothly ran up his spine, cupping his shoulders and sliding down to his chest. Bridget crawled into the sleeping bag beside him, clinging to his body in the darkness as she rested her chin on the back of his neck. It reminded Milo of the last night they’d spent together—an unexpected embrace in the middle of the night, though they had barely spoken in days. By the end of the following afternoon, she’d moved everything she owned from their shared apartment and left the city.
“Do you blame me for bringing you out here?” she whispered, her lips brushing against his ear.
Milo just shook his head, rustling his short hair on the soft nylon of the sleeping bag. “Of course not,” he said. “You were trying to give me a second chance at what I’ve always wanted—nobody could have foreseen what came next.”
“I didn’t know how I’d react when I saw you again,” she said, a little louder this time but still too quiet for Joanne to overhear. “Still think about you more than I probably should. When I travel somewhere amazing for the first time, or when I read an article I really enjoy, I think, I can’t wait to show Milo. Like the part of my brain with you in it never quite shut off.”
Milo took her hand in his, brought it up to his mouth, and kissed it. “Mine too,” he admitted. “After you left, I felt completely unplugged from everything—had to teach myself to enjoy life again without you. I’m not sure if I ever quite succeeded. Always found myself wondering what you were doing—if you were happy, if you had anyone, if you still thought about me.”
A silence fell between them.
“Are you?” asked Milo. “Happy, I mean?”
“Sometimes,” said Bridget.
“I feel terrible about the way we left things,” said Milo. “I always wanted to reach out, tell you I understood, that I wasn’t angry anymore.”
“If you had, I would have listened,” said Bridget. “Or at least I told myself I would listen. But that was always our dynamic—you retreating into silence, me filling the void with resentment.”
“When you put it like that . . .” began Milo.
“We really were a shitty couple, weren’t we?” asked Bridget.
There was another thick pause between them before they both burst into stifled laughter.
“We were,” said Milo. “But maybe someday we can become shitty friends instead?”
“I’d like that,” said Bridget. “I should have told you that I missed you.”
“I’ve missed you too,” said Milo. He pressed her fingers against his lips again, but this time so she could feel his smile in the dark.
For the longest time, silence once again fell between them. He could feel Bridget stiffen again, muscles tense as her fears once again took hold.
“I’m not going to die down here,” she
whispered in his ear.
“We’ll make it home,” responded Milo. “I promise.” And for perhaps the first time, he felt total certainty in the proclamation.
Milo’s eyes closed. He dreamed of the eternal Tanzanian savanna, a sea of elephants, and the fertile oasis at the center of the world.
Milo stirred awake to the soft yellow light of a sunrise. Bridget had slept curled up in his arms but pushed him away as he shifted in the sleeping bag. He had little idea how long he’d slumbered, but felt refreshed, filled with new determination.
Blinking the sleep from his eyes, Milo swiveled his head toward the light. Joanne had taken her brightest headlamp, set it on the cavern floor, and smeared a dab of clear, amber honey over the plastic lens, filtering the illumination. Bridget stirred as well, stretching as she yawned, pulling her warm body away from Milo. Joanne sat on a rock staring at Milo and Bridget, watching as they withdrew their intertwined limbs from each other. It wasn’t a disapproving look on her face—it was one filled with a deep, longing sadness.
“Helps, doesn’t it?” asked Joanne, tilting her head toward the light. “A little yellow reminds the mind of dawn; makes it easier to get up. It’s a trick we use on . . . hard days.”
“Thanks,” said Milo. Bridget even managed a smile.
“Did you sleep?” asked the doctor.
“A few minutes here and there,” said Joanne as she absentmindedly picked up the lamp and smeared the honey off the lens and onto a finger, which she then licked. “But I wanted to make sure you two had your full eight. Can’t say when we’ll get the chance again. How are your blisters? Any pain or injuries beyond bumps and bruises?”
“I’ll live,” said Milo. “Still nothing on the radio?”
“I’ve been trying every hour,” said Joanne with a sigh. “There must be too much earth between us and the receiver, even at the hatch. I can’t raise anyone.”
“Or nobody’s listening,” mumbled Bridget, her brief smile long since faded.
“I hate to state the obvious,” said Joanne. “But we can’t simply disappear from the rest of the group. We’ll have to collect as many supplies as we can carry and rejoin our comrades. We’re no use to anybody holed up at the top.”
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