Project BTB

by E. G. Ross

  PROJECT BTB

  By E.G. Ross

  SALVO PRESS

  * * *

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  SALVO PRESS INFO

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  E.G. ROSS BIO

  MORE SALVO PRESS TITLES

  * * *

  PART 1: Lost in the Caves

  * * *

  CHAPTER 1

  Everything has a reason. If you persist, you can find it. I try to remember that. I know it's true. I just don't always understand how to make it work, at least not right away. It takes practice, I guess. Patience, too, because life can test your trust in reason. Can it ever! Take this weird business with Darkhorse.

  How was I to know way back then that I'd stumbled into what became World War 3, into what the historians sometimes called the Engels Extension Conflict? How was I to know that I'd helpcause that war? Me, a stupid teenage kid! How was I to know that an out of the way town was the secret base for some of the oddest-

  Well, just a minute now. I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me calm down and start at the beginning. My name is- Uh, no, that doesn't matter. Not yet. Probably best that you don't know for awhile. That no one knows.

  Let's see, then. Where do I start? With Dan, I suppose. It always seems to come back to him.

  I don't remember how my cousin Dan and I first discovered my half of the caves. Maybe it'll come to me as I start to tell it. I hope so. It seems that I ought to be able to remember more. However, as Dan used to say, the difference between "ought" and "can" is sometimes a canyon. The simple explanation is that subsequent events overshadowed the discovery; dampened my recollections. They say traumatic events can do that. Lately I try not to consider it too intensely. I'm afraid that if I got started on it again some Saturday morning after one too many beers during the all-night Friday poker game, I might be tempted to tromp up to Darkhorse Butte and take a look in my half of the caves once more.

  No matter how waxed I got, Dan couldn't go with me. Not anymore. I haven't seen Dan in-what's it been? Thirty years? Yeah, about that. Been awhile. Common sense tells me I'll never see him again. I hope, though. Because everything has a reason. Dan used to pound that into me. Reason wins, he said, even if it doesn't seem like it at the time.

  Guess I'd better step back. Explain a few things.

  Oh, by the way, excuse the glitches in advance. I'm an ordinary guy with a cheap digital recorder. I'm trying to make sense of what happened to me. That's why I'm recording this on my own, secretly, because I have to get it out there somehow, soon. I don't have a lot of time. They're after me, you see, and that means-

  Well, never mind aboutthat . Later on that.

  Okay, when I said "my half of the caves," I put it like that on purpose. There's a lot I don't remember clearly, but some things stand out. I know for sure that "my caves" are up there in old Darkhorse Butte. I truly don't recall where "Dan's caves" are anymore. Not exactly. The psychologists would call it a mental block. If I got put under hypnosis or shot up with one of the new drugs or zapped with a virtual therapy program, maybe I'd be able to remember more than that Dan's caves were near his old farm somewhere southeast of Salem, Oregon. That's about forty miles up the Willamette Valley. Darkhorse Butte, where my caves are, is due west of my old home town of Lebanon. That's where I live again. Well, I do and I don't. Later on that, too.

  If you're not familiar with the Willamette Valley, merely by looking at the heavy blanket of flora - the fir, cedar, oak, maple, alder, and shit 'em chitum - you wouldn't know that there's a different, less inviting landscape down underneath. Below this Garden of Eden greenery there's a natural hell. Not many people ever see it, or want to, but it's there. It's a dark, damp underworld honeycombed with thousands, maybe millions, of tunnels and vents and caves. Believe me, you don't want to go there. If you do, you want to be damned careful; bone-breaking careful. That underworld is deep enough and twisty enough, and spooky enough, to make getting lost as easy as slipping on an icy sidewalk. Like that sidewalk, the caves can look fine when you start out. Then suddenly, WHAM! Your world goes upside down. Some people have never come back from Darkhorse. It's an aspect of Eden that the tourist bureaus tend to de-emphasize in their pleas for out-of-staters to bring their money andCome Visit!

  Anyway, Dan and I were about fifteen when we stumbled onto something under Darkhorse-something that at first was fun, but bit by bit started to scare the living skin off us.

  Now please understand something. Whenever Dan and I went into the caves, we knew enough Boy Scout and camping lore to blaze our explorations. Maybe not in the conventional way, but we did it. We were careful in both in Darkhorse's tunnels and in the ones near Salem. Darkhorse was by far the more complex system, though. That's where it was most critical. Blazing was a simple process. We got cans of orange and green fluorescent spray paint from the autobody shop that Dan's older brother ran over in Albany. (For you out-of-staters, that's the Linn County seat.) Using the paint to blaze the rock walls of the tunnels and vents was easy enough. Every few yards, we'd spray on a backwards arrow. It was orange at Dan's caves and green at mine. That way, if we got into trouble and needed to get out fast, we could follow the trail of arrows without having to think. That's important, because when panic wiggles down your backside and pokes you in the ass, thinking gets tough.

  These days, they've got hand-held, inertial guidance positioning computers. They're supposed to be amazingly accurate. Nothing against 'em, I guess. But it's hard to go wrong with a blaze mark. Not impossible, but hard. Unlike computer directions, blazes don't disappear if the battery runs out or a software bug starts getting hungry at the wrong quantum moment.

  Despite our best efforts at preparation, I think we were incredibly lucky to have survived. That bothers me a little, because I don't know where luck fits into the reason equation. I guess luck is that number you never see coming. Ido remember how rambunctious and eager we were to explore the caves. Especially Dan. But given our state of mind, there's no way we could have sprayed enough arrows-or done a half-dozen smarter things-to be as safe as we ought to have been. On the other hand, our ignorance helped us come on 'em down there. The things. The things that never should have been there, not by any science we were taught. Not by anything we could grasp at the time. You see, it was our ignorance that enticed us to look into a side passage that we otherwise would have missed. If we hadn't dipped into that tunnel, I wouldn't be telling you any of this. Everything would be different.

  As it was, we went deeper into Darkhorse, and ourselves, than we'd imagined possible. So, no, although I don't remember how we originally found the entrance to the caves, I clearly recall when we discovered that bizarre tunnel. It was the one with the voice. The voice that howled in perpetual pain.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 2

  We were on a roll that summer vacation. Regular junior spelunkers. Nowadays they'd call us cavers. I hear some of the cavers use the term "worms," but I don't go for that one. If the other cavers had experienced what we had, I doubt they'd go for it, either.

  We'd just finished a few days of poking around at the caves near Dan's place. They had proven to be dreadfully disappointing; just a few straight passages and a lot of dead ends. Too simple to be interesting. Or so we'd thought at the time. "Boringsville," as Dan had put it. We shrugged it off and decided to tackle Darkhorse instead. Action was the game back then. We hoped that
Darkhorse would provide more of a challenge, a few dares, and perhaps some stories we could brag up at school. That's what I wanted, anyway. Dan usually had more exalted scientific interests.

  Mind you, while we were amateurs we weren't running a Tom Sawyer operation with candles and hope. Dan's family wasn't rich, but was certainly well off. So he'd purchased miners' lights and hard-hats, good nylon ropes with grapples and mountain tackle gear, including pitons for the steep passages and drop-offs, good back packs, first-aid kits, and so on. The point is, as young and eager as we were, neither of us was stupid. Inexperienced, sure. But we had more than bullshit for brains. Truth is, when the chips are down, I think most kids are smarter than adults typically anticipate. And when we went into those caves, we had every intention of making it back with our body parts intact. Bragging rights bruises, yeah. But nothing more.

  We hadn't considered that it might be necessary to take precautions to protect ourminds .

  Okay, where was I going with all this? Let's pick it up down in Darkhorse. A few more things are starting to come back to me. I remember the factthat the caves existed was an open secret. More of a legend, really. Darkhorse had evolved into the grist for threats from parents who couldn't get their kids to quiet down at night. I recollect how my own mother told me that the "Darkhorse Demon" would get me if I didn't go to sleep. We didn't have the boogie man in our house, but believe me, the Darkhorse Demon served well enough in our young imaginations. As they got older, the Lebanon kids transformed the Darkhorse Demon into stories of ghosts of lost prospectors and crazed, escaped killers, rapists, and molesters. Because of their nasty reputation, not many people ventured into the caves-not thirty years ago, not now. Childhood legends had a way of sticking with us when we grew up. Just to make sure, the city had put up a sign outside the caves, urging extreme caution and telling people that they were on their own as far as liability was concerned.

  As you might guess, that sign was a neon invitation to Dan and me. We'd both read Ayn Rand'sAtlasShrugged the previous summer and we were suddenly "men of intransigent reason." We didn't buy the legends about demons, gods, ghosts, or poltergeists-at least not consciously-and delighted in any opportunity to debunk them. In our respective high schools-Dan at South Salem, me at Lebanon Union-we developed minor reputations for annoying everyone from UFO fanatics to young Christian missionaries. As far as we were concerned, it was all in the same box labeled "superstition." Hence, to go into the caves was to strike a blow for the ideals of the rational mind-of which we were, of course, the self-appointed vanguard. True, the idea of defying the authorities' fuddy-duddy conservatism added a certain spice to the adventure, but we'd convinced ourselves it was for a nobler purpose.

  The caves' entrance was small, maybe four feet square. It was largely overgrown. Even the sign was mostly buried in the brush. Ah, okay! Here comes a memory shard: we would never have known about the cave entrance if it hadn't been for Dan's older brother Sam. He was a great guy, but also a blooming alcoholic. Shitfaced Sam was his nickname. But for us, there was an advantage to his condition. After consuming his third or fourth beer in a row, it was possible to get Sam to tell us almost anything. One hot, slow July afternoon out back of his shop, he mentioned that he'd been down under Darkhorse when he was a kid. He said he'd heard screams and moans in there and was convinced that something wasafter him, something he never actually saw but couldfeel coming. He swore it was true. Well, that certainly whetted our appetites. We kept at him until he laughingly, but somewhat nervously, told us how to find the entrance. Despite the booze, his directions had proven remarkably accurate.

  Anyway, we took the first day to blaze what we called the ground floor. That was a level of the caves with a few, short dead-end passages. It wasn't much. Not a single demon. No dead bodies of crazed crooks or unlucky prospectors. No slobbering molesters. So we headed down to the second level. To add intrigue to our adventure, we called that one the basement. You needed rope to get there.

  The connecting passages, two of them, were sheer drops. The first opened directly above an underground stream that gushed from beneath a rock face and then disappeared into a gurgling drainhole a few yards farther on. We took turns lowering each other, but it was a bust. There were no side vents from this tunnel and nowhere to go. Worse, the water reeked of fresh pig shit. Dan said the stream probably drained through from a hog farm up higher on the butte. It sure wasn't the kind of water you'd want to lug around in a canteen. The first passage into the basement was clearly a no-go.

  Taking the other drop down was a quick, 20-foot rappel. The next two days we spent in that part of the basement. It was more like what we'd been hoping for. There were dozens of unexpected turns and smaller passages, branching and breaking off in intriguing ways. There was a huge room large enough to play tennis in. I recall how utterly awed we were, gazing at that cavernous space. Dan said it would have been a good place to be during a nuclear war because of the rock above and around us. He said it might be possible to seal it off from the outside.

  At one end of the room there was a cold, clear spring. It bubbled up from the rock and ran along the side. It eventually emptied with a roar into a wide, deep passage. We never did find out where the other, contaminated stream ended up, but it had missed this part of the basement.

  At first, we thought that the basement was it, the sum total of the Darkhorse system. Teenagers are easily bored and we were getting antsy already. However, Dan insisted that because the spring emptied down, there must, naturally, be even lower levels. He said we had to keep looking.

  "Dan," I asked, "don't you think maybe that springwater is falling into theonly way down? Maybe that's all there is below here-just an underground stream tunnel."

  In the yellow glow of my miner's light, I could see Dan shake his head, a slight frown on his wide brow.

  "No, ol' bud, I don't think so," he replied in that prematurely deep voice he had. "That's not how these cave systems work."

  I took his word for it. This is a good place to mention that Dan was what you and I would call a super-genius. He had an IQ that soared out over 200 and an almost infallible memory to boot. A year earlier, he'd done us both a favor by auditing some classes on West Coast geology at Oregon State University in Corvallis. He was always taking classes over there. The professors loved him. Any one would have rolled out a four-inch thick red carpet for Dan on the hope that when he finished high school in Salem he'd come and be a star pupil.

  Standing there in the dim light, I looked at Dan and knew his giant brain was probably thinking of five times as many things as mine. In a couple seconds he said, "Come on!" and trudged off towards the low end of the room.

  We went past the drainhole and Dan aimed his light along one wall as he walked, touching the surface now and then with his fingers, looking for something. I didn't know what, so I asked.

  "Clues," he said.

  Great. For all his mental firepower, Dan was usually not a chatty guy. Although, when you got him a bit looped with alcohol, it could be like Hoover Dam opening its floodgates. That made it difficult for Dan to get any action because the only time he'd get looped was when he got horny and then the poor guy would talk the ears off a girl instead of figuring out how to get her clothes off. If Dan was any example, I think high IQs are like veins of ore; they run really rich in some places and mighty poor in others.

  Dan had stopped about twenty feet ahead of me when I saw his headlamp suddenly disappear and I heard a muffled, "Jackpot!"

  I hurried forward as he stepped back into view from around a little hidden bend in the wall.

  "Find another way down?" I asked, feeling like an idiot as soon as I'd said it. What else would he have found?

  Dan always took my normal mental speed in good cheer, though. I was grateful for it. I knew he could have left me choking in his exhaust, but he never did.

  "You got it, ol' bud. But it looks like it's going to be ropes and pitons all the way."

  "How far is down?" I a
sked doubtfully, peering into the dark. For some reason, there was a tiny red warning light blinking at the back of my brain.

  He brushed my question off with, "Who knows? Let's do it!"

  I presumed that was supposed to make everything more fun. But then, seeing the worried look on my face, he slapped my shoulder and laughed.

  "Hey! Just kidding!" he said. "It looks like about a forty-foot drop to another floor. No big deal. You ready?"

  "Well, uh, what about the time, Dan?

  "Forget thetime , man! This isadventure !"

  I tried to force a grin of agreement. After all, we did have food and sleeping bags and we would surely find enough spring water. Even if the water turned bad, we had chlorine tablets to sterilize it. I guessed that we could stay down another week if we really had to, although it wouldn't necessarily be a stroll on the street. That's what reason told us-and we were Rational Men, weren't we?

  "Okay, just a second," I said, pulling out a can of green spray paint. I marked the entrance to the next level with a backwards-pointing arrow.

  "Good guy," Dan complimented me, winking. It made me feel like a million bucks. He was my age, but I always felt younger, like an admiring little brother. No matter what their actual ages, I think super-smart people seem much older than the rest of us. Not in all ways, no. But in more than you can count on both hands.

  We drove a piton into a thin crack in the dark gray volcanic rock just above the drop-off, secured the rope, and rappelled down, Dan first. The floor sloped about ten degrees at the bottom. We found ourselves standing in a small, angled chamber. There were a half-dozen vents and tunnels leading out of it. Two of the vents were too small to get through, even if we wriggled on our stomachs. So, spraying arrows as we went, we started exploring the other four openings. We went systematically, moving clockwise.