Milo pursed his lips in grim silence. With the hatch impassable, part of him knew it was only a matter of time until they were forced to rejoin Dale and the others. The supplies they’d bring back would be a big boost to morale, but he knew their situation would remain desperate as ever—especially for Isabelle.
“What happens when they get the hatch open again?” asked Bridget. Milo couldn’t help but notice she said when and not if—the doctor refused to give up an iota of hope.
“I’ve left a note by the door,” answered Joanne. “Told them we’re all still alive but Isabelle has been badly injured and is in desperate need of help. I included the date, of course.”
“Makes sense,” said Bridget. “I can’t think to add anything.”
“I almost told them to go fuck themselves for stranding us,” said Joanne with a smirk. “Bloody inconvenient, burying us alive.”
Milo couldn’t help but grin ruefully at the gallows humor. “Inconvenient” might well be the understatement of the century.
Milo’s heart plummeted as he rappelled back down the seemingly endless shaft, wet rope whistling through his gloved hands. Every few seconds the rappel rack would jolt, hitting badly damaged sections of rope where the sheath had come entirely apart, revealing the fraying core within. They wouldn’t get a second climb to the top again, not without a new line.
They’d been so maddeningly close to the surface, mere feet. But now he was returning to the dark, muddy hell of the deep. Last on the line, he plunged further and further through the misty waterfall, his feet finally crunching on the wet gravel below as he hit solid earth with a painful jolt.
Joanne emerged from the mist, balancing a heavy box on her back as Bridget followed closely behind.
“Never gone this long without a gonk day,” grunted Joanne, shifting the crate from one shoulder to the other.
“What’s that?” asked Bridget as she helped Milo unhook from his rappel rack, freeing the descent rope from his improvised webbing harness.
“Means a day off,” said Joanne, grimacing. “A bit of time to relax, gather strength. We could really use one. Duck is the best at throwing one—on our first caving expedition together, he waited until we’d spent four days slogging through waist-deep mud, absolutely knackered and bickering among ourselves like children. And then he pulled out his hidden stash of bourbon and dark chocolate. But before he’d give us any, he made us do the Macarena dance. Really! The Macarena, like it was 1996 all over again. Made us sing the song and everything. And then we drank and laughed until everyone forgot their petty quarrels.”
Joanne led the cavers out of the thick mists as though guided by preternatural sight, walking purposefully to the alcove where they’d first sheltered from the flood. She and Bridget had made good use out of the time it had taken Milo to follow them down the shaft. They’d already broken down most of the fresh crates abandoned by the porters, sorting and securing the contents within. But what was once base camp was now little more than a waterlogged floodplain barely illuminated by the exhausted light of the sole remaining balloon.
The guide let the final crate slip from her shoulder and slam on the rocky floor of the alcove ledge. It popped open, revealing a collection of tank tops and men’s underwear.
Milo didn’t see the point of grabbing another pair; he’d long since abandoned his own. Bridget experimentally pulled out a pair of large briefs, tugging on the elastic.
“You s’pose these are clean enough to use as dressings?” she asked, thinking out loud. “I’d really like to see Isabelle’s bandages switched out.”
“Your call,” grunted Joanne. “As for everything else—we can’t drag these crates; we’ll have to pick through and grab high-calorie foodstuffs, spare batteries, and any medical supplies. If it won’t keep us alive over the next seventy-two hours, it’s not coming.”
Milo figured any underwear would be better off applied to Isabelle’s wounds than to his ass, but packed a few anyway. Joanne took a last sweep through the supplies, spotting a few final cans and batteries to cram into their packs. The last of the resupply scavenged or packed into the alcove, the trio trudged in silence toward the entrance to the anthill.
Though burdened with an overstuffed pack and following last in line, Milo still felt as though he could have completed the brutal descent with his eyes closed. Tired and sore, he remembered each duck, twist, and bend; knew by heart every section where he had to take off his pack, loop a strap around his foot, and drag it behind him through the dark, airless passageways. Without speaking, the trio passed over the land bridge, ignoring the mummified body below it. Milo slogged onward through wet, descending passageways, past the hole to nowhere and ever deeper.
Joanne stopped cold as she reached the banks of the serpentine river, her headlamp fixed on a note hanging from the low ceiling by a long strand of parachute cord, the message impossible to miss. The cave guide yanked the note off the cord and read the message out loud.
“It says Established new camp,” Joanne read. “Follow arrows. Dale. Simple enough.”
“Looks like we’re not going to the cathedral,” said Bridget, clearing her throat to speak for the first time in hours.
Milo swiveled his light around the tunnel until he saw the first oversized chalk-mark arrow leading away from the main descending passageway. Joanne nodded toward the mark and followed it through the narrow rock corridor.
Dry, stagnant air increased with every step. Now well out of the floodplain, the walls and floor had become dusty and dry, even the stalactites and stalagmites increasingly ancient and withered. No water had flowed through the still passageways in a million years or more, transforming the maze into a subterranean desert.
The winding path ended abruptly at an open expanse, and Milo realized he was looking across the unimaginable length of a great chasm. The flat, vertical walls on either side were quite close, only twenty feet of emptiness between them, but the immense span disappeared into the darkness long before the light from his headlamp could reach the other side. With his struggling batteries, Milo couldn’t even make out the ceiling above or the distant floor far below.
Ahead, a dump-truck-sized rock with a flat top lay wedged between the canyon cliffs. It had dropped from the ceiling in ancient times, leaving deep grooves in the towering walls as it fell. But now it was wedged like a tension-set diamond, impossible in dimension. The cavers had rigged up a “nylon highway” of anchors and ropes from the passageway exit, up and along the vertical wall for a distance of thirty feet before reaching the flat-topped rock where they’d struck camp.
Joanne briefly eyeballed the ropes but ultimately ignored them, preferring to instead free climb the sheer cliff despite her heavy pack. Milo and Bridget opted to clip into their webbing harnesses in case of a fall, following slowly behind.
Dale and the others didn’t bother to get up from their thin sleeping pads as Joanne, Milo, and Bridget clambered up on top of the flat rock. Bridget went to Isabelle first, placing a comforting hand on Charlie’s shoulder as she sat down beside them. Milo joined the pair, looking down at the producer. It was difficult to see the true extent of her injuries as she lay wrapped up like a mummy atop her blanket-covered plastic backboard. Her eyes were open but unseeing, unsettling to watch.
“How’s she doing?” asked the doctor.
“The IV fluid you mixed up lasted a while,” said Charlie. “Another couple hours and we’ll probably need a new batch.”
“Good, good,” said Bridget. “No swelling, discoloration, or hardness around the needle?”
“Nothing worse than when we found her,” said Charlie as he adjusted a handkerchief to cover Isabelle’s open eyes. “Dale checked her heart rate and blood pressure every hour, just like we discussed. No change.”
“That’s the best we could hope for,” said Bridget, sneaking a glance toward Milo. The story of their journey to within meters of the surface was a terrible, burning secret to keep.
“She’s started mumb
ling,” added Charlie. “I can’t understand a word of it—she’s not conscious as far as I can tell.”
“There are levels of consciousness,” explained Bridget. “She may be trying to communicate—or it could just be unconscious manifestation.”
“It sounds like . . . clicking,” said Charlie. “A stream of consonants and vowels. I can’t understand any of it.”
Silence fell over the three as Milo glanced up toward Joanne and Dale. The female cave guide had taken their leader to the side, quietly whispering to him as he reddened in anger. The other cavers began to stir.
“You went where? Are you insane?” Dale shouted, loud enough that every caver suddenly turned to stare. Joanne didn’t rise to the bait, instead simply crossing her arms as she gazed across the gathering party. Milo did a quick headcount, seeing everyone but Logan.
“Well, I suppose it’s out of the bag now,” said Joanne. “We went for the surface to get help. The rope held.”
Milo and Bridget stared at each other, his mind flashing back to the gruesome find at the hatch.
“That’s good news, right?” asked Charlie, desperation entering his voice as he rocked from side to side. “They’re coming soon? When is help getting here? Did they already re-rig the main shaft?”
“We found an abandoned supply drop at the top of the shaft,” continued Joanne, ignoring Charlie’s rapid-fire questions. “But once we reached the elephant’s graveyard, we found this . . . plastic tunnel—”
“None of this makes any sense,” interrupted Duck.
“Our people on the surface were trying to build a passageway through the viral convergence zone,” interjected Bridget. “There must have been some sort of outbreak up top. We found more than a dozen bodies just inside the hatch. Marburg virus, by the look of the symptoms.”
“Get to the point,” snapped Dale. “Who’s coming for us, and when is rescue getting here?”
“Nobody’s coming,” said Joanne, her voice hoarse and solemn. “They bulldozed over the hatch. They buried us down here. We’re stuck until they open it back up again. Dale’s drone IR-scanned every inch of savanna within a ten-mile radius of the entrance—there’s no other way in or out.”
“Oh fuck,” mumbled Charlie, looking up from Isabelle’s side. “Oh fuck, this is a nightmare. They bulldozed over our only way out? What the fuck?”
“I’m certain it was temporary; just until they can get a handle on the pathogen,” added Bridget, trying to inject some cold rationality back into the conversation. “Joanne left a note—she said we were still alive, told them our situation. They’ll see it when they open the hatch.”
“Might be a hundred years until they open it again,” sputtered Charlie. “They must think we’re dead down here. How do you even know you didn’t bring the virus back?”
“Because we’re not bleeding from our eyeballs,” snapped Bridget. “I do this for a living, Charlie.”
“Who was dead?” demanded Duck. “We have friends up there, man!”
Joanne shook her head. “I only recognized a couple of them,” she said. “We didn’t open up the bags. The bodies lying out were mostly porters. But it got Kylie too. She’s dead.”
Guilt washed over Milo as he remembered the blonde logistician’s name. Charlie started moaning again, his guttural tones piercing the stillness, filling the echoing subterranean canyon with grief and fear. Milo allowed himself to slowly look from caver to caver, trying to ascertain their reactions.
Charlie was already useless, lost to his fear and shock. Joanne and Bridget had slipped into dispassionate professionalism, focused wholly on immediate, solvable problems. Milo couldn’t tell if Dale was more upset at the fact that they were buried alive or that his orders had been flagrantly ignored. Duck was only afraid.
Finally, he looked back to Dale. And all he could see was anger.
“I told you not to go up there!” shouted Dale, red-faced and furious. “Why would you risk your lives like that?”
“To organize a rescue,” hissed Joanne through clenched teeth. “For all of us.”
Dale swore loudly as he reached into the interior breast pocket of his khaki vest, removing a small piece of crumpled printer paper. Milo caught a glance of it as Dale passed the paper to Joanne, recognizing the printout as a supply drop inventory list.
Joanne held up the inventory to her headlamp, close enough for Milo to sneak a look over her shoulder and catch the timestamp. It dated from the final scheduled drop, just before the deluge hit. Joanne flipped it over to read the handwritten note on the other side.
Milo’s heart sank. Dale had known all along. By all appearances, the note was written not long before the situation on the surface turned critical. His mind spun through a web of potential scenarios, trying to piece together what had happened. Milo figured Dale wouldn’t have had time to respond to the note before the flood hit. And it would have been easy to assume the worst when people started dying at the surface camp; they had no way of knowing how bad the flooding had become. After all, the dozen plus bodies dumped in the cave entranceway could have been a mere fraction of the total death toll.
“You knew.” Joanne’s voice had turned icy cold. “You knew and you didn’t tell us.”
“I didn’t know it’d gotten that bad,” admitted Dale. “There was nothing we could do about it from down here. I didn’t see any sense in worrying the group. I told Duck; he disagreed. The flood hit before we could work it out.”
“Are you serious?” demanded Duck. “Does this mean nobody’s coming for us?”
“I could have expected this from Dale,” Joanne snapped at Duck, pointing a single accusing finger. “But not you.”
With that, she slammed down her backpack, spilling the looted supplies all across the flat rock. Duck dove to his knees, saving a box of dehydrated beef stew from plunging over the edge and into the chasm. By the time he looked up, Joanne had already hopped onto the rope line, swung herself down to the entranceway, and disappeared into the anthill.
“What’s the big deal?” protested Dale. “We sit tight—just like the note said. They’ll get things at the surface under control soon enough.”
Duck glanced toward Milo and Bridget, shooting each a rueful, resigned smile. “I’d better go,” he said. “Make sure Joanne is okay. She looks pretty pissed.”
Bridget and Milo stood in silence, watching Duck as he easily down-climbed the sheer rock wall after her.
Without another word, Bridget turned away, walking across the long flat rock toward Isabelle. Charlie was beside the patient, fast asleep on a thin foam pad.
Milo walked over to Dale, who had begun sorting through the salvaged supplies from the aborted drop.
“You have anything to add?” asked Milo, sitting down.
Dale just shrugged. “You know everything I know.”
“Getting rations ready?” asked Milo.
“Yeah,” answered Dale. “Hope you’re ready for a thousand-calorie-a-day crash diet. We’ll need to make this last. Once we’re out of food, all we’ll have is each other.”
“I really hope you’re not talking about cannibalism,” grunted Milo.
Dale just chuckled. “So you three made it all the way up the shaft on Prusik knots and a web harness?” he asked.
“We did,” confirmed Milo. “My balls will never be the same.”
“That’s because they just turned to brass,” said Dale, stopping the count to stare at Milo for an uncomfortably long time. “Welcome to the fraternity. If that feat doesn’t make you a caver, nothing will. I had my doubts about you. No offense, but you come across as kind of an indoor kid.”
“Thanks,” said Milo, though not certain he entirely accepted the premise of the compliment.
Dale just nodded and cleared his throat. “Got something for you,” he said, moving a few feet to the left and rifling through his pack. His hand withdrew an object carefully wrapped up in a small fleece blanket.
Milo unconsciously gulped as the blanket fe
ll away, instantly recognizing the leather-bound journal he’d discovered atop the altar.
“I’m sorry we didn’t have more time to discuss this or the masks,” continued Dale, eyeing him intently. “Logan and I discovered the book in your bag as we left the cathedral chamber. You can imagine our surprise . . . it doesn’t exactly look like the sort of thing you would have brought with you. Is this what I think it is—Lord DeWar’s honest-to-God personal diary?”
“It would certainly appear so,” said Milo, masking his own uncertainty. “It was completely waterlogged; I was in the process of preserving—”
“It looked pretty dry, so I went ahead and opened it, couldn’t help myself,” interrupted Dale with a knowing smile before Milo could try and convince Dale he’d planned to tell him about it all along. “Almost can’t believe it’s in such good condition, considering . . . they must have made diaries pretty durable back in the day. I read as much as I could. Starts out like you’d expect. Travel notes, observations of exotic animals and cave geology. All noblemen of that era seem to have considered themselves citizen scientists of some variety or another. They found the golden glow, Milo—same as us. We were following in their footsteps the whole time!”
“That’s incredible,” breathed Milo. “And then what?”
“And then the writing becomes . . . different. He’s excited, almost euphoric. DeWar and his team start digging, trying to break their way into the next chamber. They’re just about to make it through when everything changes.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. The normal entries end, and the rest is pages and pages of complete gibberish. I can recognize words here and there, but can’t make heads or tails of it otherwise. I need someone who knows the man—really knows him—to take a crack at it, see if there is anything there or if DeWar just lost his goddamn mind.”
“Did anyone else try?”
The Maw Page 18