And then it died.
KERRI: Masks! Put on your masks now! There’s no oxygen!
They immediately dropped their bags to the floor, frantically scattering most of the contents as they searched for the aviator masks and oxygen bottles. Kerri had hardly taken the first puff of O2 before fitting the dog mask around Tim’s head.
“How did you know?” Andy asked while assisting Nate with the valves, her voice muffled behind the mouthpiece. “Is this firedamp, like in coal mines?”
“No, firedamp would have exploded on contact with the flame,” Kerri said. She could notice strength coming back to her arms and legs, the oppression receding. “The most likely gas to displace oxygen without us noticing or Tim smelling it would be…” Her mind cogs stopped to an audible click. “CO2. Carbon dioxide.” She drove a hand to her chest. “How’s your heart rate?”
Andy queried her wrist. “High.”
“You sweating?”
“Yeah.”
“Vision?”
“Better than a minute ago.”
“And your hands were trembling just now. They’re all symptoms of hypercapnia—CO2 poisoning. Your body doesn’t react because CO2 is always in the air; it’s what you breathe out. But in very high concentrations it can make you lose consciousness before you notice it.”
“That’s what I felt yesterday,” Andy contributed. “At the lake, when we faced the creature in the fog. My legs were failing; I couldn’t focus. Same thing was happening just now.”
“It must come from fissures in the walls,” Kerri said, the dull rockscape suddenly interesting. “After all, we’re on volcanic…I mean, we’re inside volcanic rock; this is what…”
She sank for a second in the ellipsis, then reemerged.
“Fuck me,” she said, running out of expletives. “That’s it. They breathe CO2. The wheezers do. It makes sense! I mean, it doesn’t make sense; no known animal inhales CO2, but…that’s how they live underground, that’s how they’re able to come up. The Walla Walla myth says so: the fog carried the first dwellers. It’s not fog; it’s CO2 leaking from underground that allows them to emerge.”
Nate fathomed the blackness ahead. “So we’re on the right track. We have to go on.”
“No, we have to go back up,” Kerri dissented.
“Now?!”
“Al said if we needed the masks, we’d better turn back!”
“We’re carrying oxygen for a reason!” (Shakes the air bottle connected to his mouthpiece.)
“Tim has no oxygen! (Points at the dog’s mask.) This is only helping him not to get poisoned, but he still needs to breathe!”
The Weimaraner had chosen to lie down on a ledge, clearly unhappy with his new accessory.
NATE: Shit. Okay, you’re right. You take him up, we’ll go on.
ANDY: No. We don’t split up.
KERRI: Then we all go back!
NATE: We haven’t found anything yet, nothing we didn’t know! (He snatches the blueprints out of Andy’s pocket.) Look, the last depth mark we passed was 5,200, and the tunnel ends at…(Reading the map.) Oh.
He put the map down, switched back to normal prose.
“We’re exactly at the end. This is uncharted territory.” He turned to the girls. “We need to split up.”
The fly-face mask amplified Kerri’s already deep, dramatic sigh. “Okay, you take Tim up; Andy and I will go.”
“No, you take Tim; we will go,” Nate countered.
No eyes explicitly set on Andy this time (the masks prevented it), but she knew the decision was on her once again.
“This is uncharted territory,” she reasoned. “So…this is the loony’s playground, not the scientist’s.”
She pulled out her pistol and offered it to Kerri, along with the extra magazines.
“Take this; we’ll keep the shotgun. You click the safety off…Hey!” She had noticed the mask in front of her was fixed on her, not on the gun. “Listen to this, it’s important. Click the safety off like this, aim, shoot. To reload, you press here to release the mag, shove in the new one, pull here, aim, shoot. Okay?”
“Okay.”
Andy turned to Nate. “Ten minutes and we come back, no matter what. Go.”
She hardly heard Kerri’s voice behind her saying, “C’mon, Tim,” but even sifted through the breathing device, Andy could tell she was mad.
—
The depth marks chalked on the rock ceased after 5,400 feet. After another while, Andy noticed the absence of any supporting beams. The ceiling often forced them to crouch; the passageway never got wide enough to extend their arms. Condensation on the walls had not been extraordinary before, but now small puddles of water on the floor were becoming a frequent sight. The notion that they had long ago abandoned a man-made tunnel for a random rift in the earth’s crust was slowly growing into an evident, choking fact.
Andy lifted her mask for a second, just to feel something resembling air on her skin. She didn’t. The reflex to breathe overruled her will, the one that sometimes manages to wake sleepers in a gas-filled room before they pass out and die. She put her mask back on and enjoyed the canned oxygen.
Neither spoke a word until they reached the antechamber.
Nate had to scan the minimal room to make sure the opening continued. It narrowed into a bottleneck, or a drain hole, just high enough to crawl through.
Without comment, Nate shrugged off his backpack and his jacket. The resulting boy in a Conan T-shirt and an aviator mask faced Andy with unperceived poise.
“I’m ready.”
Andy took off her bag, almost empty now, and crawled in first.
She did not bother to fear for spiderwebs or critters—unless Kerri taught her different, she was sure nothing resembling animal life could survive down there. Her light found and bounced off the opposite end unexpectedly near, blinding her. The bottleneck was only four or five feet long, opening into a small, final chamber.
This was where their journey ended: a room the size of a phone booth in the entrails of the world.
The one remarkable feature was the writing.
Someone had literally covered the walls with script, all over the chamber, spiraling down, creeping up, orbiting around one single drawing directly facing the entrance: a circle with geometric lines or constellations inscribed in it and some disturbed child’s stick figures with their arms raised around it. This was the secret that lay hidden at the end of the wormhole.
Nate stood up in the white-lit egg-cavern, took a pencil and started scribbling on the reverse of the blueprints.
“Holy shit,” Andy commented. “Is this…prehistoric?”
“No, it isn’t.”
“How do you know?”
“Well, for starters, the Latin alphabet didn’t come to the Americas until Columbus,” he said. “And these symbols”—he pointed at the monograms around the circle—“they’re from the Necronomicon.”
“So, this side of Columbus…Is it Deboën?”
“I think so.”
Andy touched the drawing, only then noticing how smooth the rock was.
“How come this wall is so flat?”
“I don’t think it’s a wall,” he said, peeking up from his notes. “I think it’s a door.”
The danger, or the need for perspective, made her step back as far as the egg-cavern allowed. The wall looked a little too perfect to be natural; it must have been carved. And then there were the corners. Right angles were to be expected in a man-made slab, but on close inspection there weren’t any; all angles missed exact orthogonality by a few degrees, enough so that it gave the uncomfortable feeling of being both wrong and designed.
“What’s on the other side?” she asked.
“Something big,” Nate said in a significant whisper. “A city. A god. Nothing that’s supposed to see the light of day.”
“How does one open it?”
“I don’t think you’re supposed to open it. You knock.”
“Is that what Deboën did
? In ’forty-nine? (Thinking.) And the wheezers answered.”
“Yes, he probably didn’t expect that.” His pencil pointed at the drawing in front of them. “I think this schematic is the instructions. See, that’s a pentacle.”
“Looks like a circle to me.”
“That’s what a pentacle is, in essence—a circular field and a few symbols around it; the power comes from the sorcerer. See the five stick figures? They form the pentacle—five priests to summon the monster.” He let the light tour the whole room. “And these spells must be the equivalent of a doorbell,” he said, beginning to write them down. “I think that’s where it starts; ‘Ngaïah Metraton…’ Is that a G?”
“I think’s it’s a Z.”
“ ‘Zariat…’ ”
“ ‘Zariatnatmik,’ ” Andy tried.
“ ‘Zariatnatmik, Thtaggoa kchak’ui…’ ” he wrote down. “And then ‘Mflughua Mr, mflughua Ling, khtar mglofk’ui, nokt nrzuguk’ui…’ ”
“Nate?”
“ ‘Ia Thtaggoa gnasha uikzhrak’ui htag zhro…’ ”
“Nate!”
Nate froze, suddenly noticing the trickles of pebbles rattling off the ceiling.
“You’re reading spells aloud!” Andy shouted at him, mask to mask, over the crescendo of rocks stirring below them and above. “A-fucking-gain!”
The best of the quake clapped right then, just like thunder. Only it sounded right inside their ear canals. The cave had become a cocktail shaker.
“Out!” she yelled, kicking him into the bottleneck. “Run! Get the fuck out now!”
They crawled up a two-feet-tall gap between miles of vertical rock to find the antechamber leaking. Trickles of water were pouring from once-dry fissures. And new fissures were opening, slithering from under Nate’s palms as he toddled up.
Peter sat on the ledge where they had left their bags, swinging gracefully along with the bedrock.
“Nice going, Nate.”
“Shut up!”
“It’s okay. We all kinda expected it’d be one of your mistakes that would kill the club off.”
The next second Nate was flying above the sitting hallucination, ass-kicked forth by Andy as she grabbed both their bags.
“Go! Climb up, go go go!”
A new angry clash of tectonic plates made her lose her balance. She didn’t mind; she’d need to climb on all fours anyway.
“Kerri!” she shouted ahead above the castrophony. “Go up! As high as you can!”
She wasn’t sure they were within shouting distance of Kerri, especially with the world collapsing around them, but at her speed they would be in a matter of seconds. Nate felt that if they had been tumbling down the hole like Alice and the white rabbit, they wouldn’t have fallen as fast as they were climbing up. That was mostly thanks to Andy, who was practically dragging him by the hand, making him feel like his part should be extremely easy. And yet, once they had risen back to the level where supporting beams and carved steps were common sights, his arms and legs were whimpering in exhaustion. An ankle-deep river of water was now cascading down the passage.
At the first bundle of abandoned equipment they came across, Andy stopped to grab a pickax and swung it at a boarded wall that was sputtering water at them.
“What the fuck are you doing?!”
Andy kept striking the wall, twice, thrice, until the hole vomited a loud gush of water and earth, followed by a boulder the size of Utah that slid into the opposite wall with a titanic boom, inches from her face.
She turned to Nate, visage slashed by dark hair, spitting mud between her teeth: “Now it’s sealed!”
She pushed Nate forward, and he had to tell his limbs to stop whining and move again. On what seemed like his next breath, they came nose to nose with Tim and Kerri, peeking down into the tunnel.
“What just happened?!” Kerri asked, pulling Nate up. “What was that?!”
“Up!” Andy ordered as she crawled out the mouth of E-6. “Back to the surface, AFSAP!”
She was in the middle of the sentence when she noticed there was no need to shout.
She removed her mask. The quake had ceased. She didn’t know how long ago. They’d been running too fast to notice when the earth had stopped moving.
“What did you see?” Kerri said. She was as frantic as they were. “Was that a cave-in?”
“Some of it,” Andy said. “Put on your mask again. You’re about to do the climb of your life; you can use the oxygen.”
—
They had already started back up the Allen shaft ladder before Andy could notice they had skipped a few safety measures in their haste. They had forgotten to tether themselves together. They had freed Tim from his respirator, but they had not padded him tightly enough into Andy’s backpack; she could feel him dangling every time she hoisted their combined weight up a new metal vertebra inside the long vertical tract. Nate was leading the way again, though he could have done a better job at securing the flashlight to his belt. If he lost his grip and fell, he’d drop on Kerri, and both would land on Andy. Andy ground her teeth and made sure to grab each and every rung as tight as the steel could bear.
All she could hear were her muscles plotting their painful revenge on her the next morning. Which was okay by Andy. She was eager to live to the morning.
Her fingers were meeting Kerri’s heels more and more often.
“You okay there, Kay?”
“I think I’m gonna puke.”
“Okay,” Andy acknowledged calmly. “Please lean over to your right.”
“I can see the lights,” Nate announced from above.
Andy puffed out. She had expected those lights to be visible long ago.
“How’s Tim?” Kerri asked.
Tim shuffled inside his papoose and barked loudly, happy to be remembered.
“Good boy.”
Static cracked.
“Shit.” Andy stopped, her arm curled around a rung, and picked up the radio. “Al, can you hear me, over?”
White noise was the only response.
“Al, we can’t hear you, but we’re on our way up. I repeat, we’re fine and on our way up. Over and out.”
She hooked the transmitter back on her belt, ignoring the static that followed.
“Go on, Kay. Just a little more.”
“We’re close,” Nate shouted, farther ahead of them than she expected. “Like five or six floors.”
“See, we’re almost there,” Andy said. “We’re starting to pick up Al’s signal; that’s good.”
“Why is it cutting in and out like that?” Kerri wondered.
“It’s not me; it’s Al. We’ll see him in no time.”
“No, I mean, why doesn’t he just keep the speak button pressed?”
Andy frowned, then gave the matter ten seconds’ worth of thought. For five of them, the transmitter on her hip buzzed continuously. For another five, it crackled in short bursts.
“Morse code,” she said.
“What?”
“He’s speaking to us with the power button. That’s S…A…F…E.” The signal flatlined to a continuous buzz again. She picked up the radio. “Al, come again, over.”
“He just said it’s safe,” Kerri reasoned.
“He wouldn’t need to tell us it’s safe. I think he was saying ‘unsafe.’ ”
The static broke down to sparkles of dots and dashes again.
“I’m almost there!” Nate’s voice came from up above.
“Nate, wait!” Kerri called.
“I’m nearly at the platform, it’s fine! I can hear the bird.”
“Nate, wait for…” Kerri stopped, glanced down at the darkness where she guessed Andy would be. “Did he say the bird?”
Andy was un-spelling the Morse code. Most of the message had been lost to real interference, but she was now sure that the word preceding “safe” had been “not.”
“Nate, the bird’s not supposed to sing unless we’re fucked!” Kerri yelled.
> “Up!” Andy ordered, replacing the radio with the pistol and pushing Kerri; she could almost make her silhouette out against the feverish glow of the lights above. “Sprint up, up, up!”
Kerri sunk her teeth into her lip and ruthlessly squeezed the last out of her muscles, ordering them not to give up.
And they didn’t.
A rung did. The rock cracked and gave way just a couple of inches, enough for Kerri to lose balance and fall.
Andy was too close to see her come, but not too slow to try to grab her when she landed on her; in that split second she lost her grip on the pistol, releasing it to gravity. And then Kerri followed.
Andy’s hand caught Kerri’s forearm, automatically allowing a strap of her backpack to slip off her shoulder. The bag tipped over, Tim facing the whole depth of the chasm for the first time, yelping in panic at the sight of Kerri hanging in the void, digging his front paws into Andy’s back.
“Ah, shit!” Andy screamed, her left arm now holding the weight of two people and a dog, her muscle fibers tearing apart. “Kerri! Get a foothold!”
KERRI: Tim, don’t fall!
ANDY: Kerri, get a foothold, please!
Andy swung her against the shaft wall, Kerri’s feet and hands finally finding and curling around the rungs again. Andy held on with both hands and righted the backpack onto her shoulders, while Tim shouted into her ears.
“Calm down! Tim, calm down!” She looked down at Kerri, below her now. “Follow me closely!”
Kerri nodded, fear restricted to the inside of her mask, and tried to keep up with Andy as she ran up the last of the ladder.
Andy landed onto the catwalk, on her torso, and Tim immediately kicked his way out of the bag and ran away from the hole, his mind made up never to even be in the same state with a pet carrier ever again. Andy hurried to help Kerri up before even allowing herself to take a breath.
As soon as Kerri put a foot on the catwalk, she lifted up her mask and asked, “What the fuck is Nate doing?”
Andy noticed the scene into which they had just climbed. Nate was a few yards farther down, facing the drift, squatting, searching his bag.
Slightly closer, the bird in the cage was having a seizure.
Meddling Kids Page 20