Blind Descent

by Nevada Barr

  “What was in it for you?” Anna asked to distract him.

  “Money. A whole lot of money.”

  “Oscar isn’t with Curt and Sondra, is he? Nobody is.”

  “Smart girl,” Laymon said. “Too much smarts isn’t healthy in a woman.”

  Anna was in no position to argue the point. The cavalry had gone the way of John Wayne. The god from the machine was relegated to a line in Greek history. Screaming would be an exercise in futility. In the wake of two corpses and an elaborate coverup, the odds of talking him into repenting the error of his ways were nil. Sixty sounded old. But Laymon was in superb physical condition. He was rested. And he was a big man.

  Throwing dignity to the wind, Anna ran. Behind her she could hear the smash of his boots on the flowstone. He’d not bothered changing footwear. That in itself should have tipped her off. No point in rearranging deck chairs when you know the ship’s going down. Scrambling up the slide that had gentled her into this false paradise, she passed her boots, leather sentinels at the backdoor of Tinker’s Hell. No time to retrieve them.

  An explosion, intensified by the closed space, knifed through her eardrums. A piece of flowstone the size of a fist vanished from the rock by her left knee. The air shivered with a faint tinkling as of distant wind chimes: crystal trees trembling in the echo of the blast, and the high-pitched singing of rock and ricochet. Laymon had a gun. That possibility hadn’t crossed her mind. On the surface it would have been one of her first considerations. Firearms didn’t seem part of this world. “Whither thou goest, I shall go.” Anna couldn’t remember who’d said that to whom, but it would have made sense had the god of war whispered the words into the ear of man.

  Like Br’er Rabbit, Anna dove into the confines of the exit tunnel, her personal briar patch. She’d railed against the claustrophobic embrace of Lechuguilla’s tight places. Now she welcomed them. She was small; she could move quickly. Rocks cut through the rubber slippers. Razor-backed walls scraped her elbows as she pushed with feet, clawed with gloved hands. More than once she cracked her helmet hard enough that noise pinged in her vertebrae. There was no pain. That would come later. If she was lucky.

  With each movement she made came the sound of pursuit, always right at her heels. So close, she looked for Laymon’s light, expected his breath on the nape of her neck. The sidepack caught and dragged. In the long belly-crawl before the halfway point, the strap snagged and held her fast. Unhooking it, she squeezed on, sans water, food, surveyor’s tape, and batteries.

  Gone too was the insistent shuffle of her pursuer. The sounds that had driven her to the point at which heart and lungs threatened to burst were made by the contents of her pack shifting close to her ears.

  Reaching the room with two leads, where Brent had cut off Frieda’s return, Anna stopped, held her breath, and listened. Though not yet on her heels, Laymon was coming. At a guess, she was sixty seconds ahead. Beyond the tunnel was Tinker’s Hell. Open areas with lots of places to hide. That was the obvious gambit. She would leave him to figure it out. Taking precious seconds for stealth, she crept not out toward Tinker’s but up the passage that Brent had used to get from his elevated lead down to the passage Frieda traversed.

  Having squeezed fifteen feet into the rocky maze, Anna wedged herself tightly into a crack and turned off her headlamp. Covering mouth and nose, she tried to smother the rasp of her breathing. As it ebbed, she was overwhelmed by a different, greater noise. Thrumming, distant and roaring, as if a dam had broken and water poured down into the rooms and passages of the cave. Water or gas. Could Laymon’s bullets have damaged the pipe, killing him, her, and the cave? The sound grew more intense, an explosion forced through arteries and veins of stone.

  Caught in a terror she could neither run from nor outsmart, she waited, mind curiously blank, muscles knotted as her body readied for an impossible battle.

  The bellowing rush sustained, not growing closer, not receding. Through it, she heard gasping: Laymon prying himself out of the bellycrawl. With a start, she realized the roaring that had sounded like part of the earth itself was the beating of her own heart. She’d been told of the phenomenon, but didn’t grasp how alien and frightening it would be. Hands clamped over her mouth, she fervently hoped the machinations of Laymon’s own heart would mask the jungle-drumbeat of hers.

  Furtive sounds penetrated the steady hum of blood in her ears. Whether he climbed toward her, moved on, or adjusted his pack, she couldn’t tell. Inquisitive as a live thing, light streaked up the rock beyond her feet and across where the lead made a hard left creating the shelf on which she hid. The round of gold probed closer, Tinkerbell’s evil twin. Cringing, she resisted an impulse to swat it away.

  If the light sensed her presence, it had the good taste not to inform its master. Flickering, the gold slithered back down the rocky chute and was gone.

  “Anna!”

  Her name, shouted so close, startled her. Too tired for perfect discipline, muscles twitched. Gravel skittered down the rock.

  Maybe Laymon heard it. Maybe he didn’t.

  Maybe he knew she’d caused it. Maybe he blamed the resonance of his own voice.

  She waited for the noises that would set her again to running till she was gunned down, could no longer lift one foot after another, or a better idea came to her. Reprising Brent’s act with the stone was her first choice, but every rock in her cubbyhole was firmly attached.

  The evil Tinkerbell light never came back. Laymon’s skritching and scraping grew fainter. Anna took her hands from her mouth and breathed cautiously. Her legs were cramping, her feet beginning to tingle, but she was afraid to move. Playing possum wasn’t exactly an innovative tactic. If she could think of it, so could he. He might be waiting not twenty feet away, light out, breath hushed, invisible.

  Paralyzed by the idea, she stayed where she was. Utter darkness and exhaustion conspired against her. Morpheus wanted her. Minutes crept by, and she became less able to tell the difference between unconsciousness and sensory deprivation. Bodily aches and pains were apparently shared by both the waking and the sleeping states. She could not afford to fall asleep. The mental picture of waking alone padlocked in Lechuguilla spurred her to movement.

  Switching on her light she waited a moment to see if it brought any response. It didn’t. Two choices: go up, attempt to retrace Brent’s trail, and emerge high on the wall above Tinker’s Hell, or go back and take the more familiar trail Frieda had blazed. The first carried the risk of becoming lost, the second of stumbling into an ambush.

  Anna opted for ambush. If one had to go down, it was cleaner to go down fighting than whimpering in the dark.

  No Laymon.

  No tape.

  Anna blessed her paranoia. She’d not only left line but, in honor of Sondra and Hansel and Gretel, she’d continued to shove an inconspicuous scrap of flagging into a crack at each junction. Expecting every moment to have a rock crash on her or a hand shoot from a crevice to clutch at ankle or throat, she climbed, crawled, and wriggled through.

  Sticking her head up into Tinker’s required courage. Feeling slightly foolish, she reverted to the old cowboy trick of a hat on a stick. Lechuguilla having nothing in the way of vegetation, her arm took the place of the stick. She pushed her hard hat, lamp on, above floor level and rotated it as one would turn one’s head. No shots were fired or stones thrown. She repeated the exercise with her head in the helmet. Near as the brownish orb could tell her, Laymon did not lie in wait, at least not in the immediate vicinity.

  Several yards away, over more or less flat terrain, was a big friendly rock. Anna switched off her lamp, levered her body out of the hole, and crawled across the floor. Three yards—less than twice the length of her body—was an eternity. Mere seconds passed before disorientation set in. She banged body parts with painful results. Light on, she was a sitting duck. Light off, she was as good as dead. Her vision of night, of darkness, was shaped by a world aboveground. There, even indoors, there was light. It had o
ccurred to her to sneak through Tinker’s in darkness, the way she might slip through a midnight field or an unlit gymnasium. That was not a viable option. No light. None. No faint outlines. No lighter places. No rational angles and planes to follow. No architects or interior decorators to second guess. You traveled with your own light source, or you died.

  She could wait Laymon out. If the falling pebble had tipped him off to the fact she was behind him, and he’d stopped short of the far wall, he could no more negotiate the remaining distance without giving himself away than she could. But if he’d made the exit, and, though Anna couldn’t be sure, she guessed enough time had elapsed that it was possible, he could turn his back on Tinker’s and walk away undetected, leaving her to wait till hell froze over. Anywhere along the way, at his leisure, he could stop again, rest, eat, drink some water, and wait. Anna would never know where until his bullet dropped her.

  Already she was missing her pack. Thirst was nagging. Each time she moved, the lacerations on her feet made themselves felt. Suffocating darkness seeped into the crevices in her brain. If this was a waiting game, Laymon won; Anna had to go on.

  The hat trick was the only one left in her depleted bag. She put it to use one more time. Having unbuckled her helmet, she turned on the lamp and held it away from her. Aimed at the light, Laymon’s first shot should go wide. On some level she craved gunfire. It would let her know she wasn’t alone.

  The shot didn’t come. She crossed Tinker’s, drawing on reserves of strength she didn’t know she had, climbing over an endless parade of table-sized boulders. Sweat no longer poured from her. Thirst was constant, and she chose not to think about it. From the way her feet hurt, she suspected she left bloody footprints. She didn’t dwell too long on that either.

  Reaching the far side, she rested, her lamp extinguished. There was no sound other than that of the life coursing through her body. Twice she turned on the lamp and waved her hard hat, fishing for Laymon. Nothing. Once she hollered his name but got only echoes in reply.

  The conviction grew that he had heard the pebble, had known she was behind him; that he never intended to waste time lying in wait. He didn’t need to. He only needed to leave her behind. The cave would do the rest. Numbing fear washed over her. She forced herself up on trembling legs. Caution was gone. Pushing as hard as her worn muscles would allow, she entered the twisting nest of passages that led from Tinker’s to the relatively simple and open spaces beyond.

  Her guess had been right. Laymon had already passed this way. The surveyor’s taped she’d laid to mark the route was taken up. Not so the paranoid flags hidden at the junctions. As batteries dimmed and eyes fogged with weariness the flags became harder to find, but knowing they existed kept her from giving up. The last of these scraps was laid at the entrance to the area where she and Curt had stopped to seek the source of the crying.

  Laymon couldn’t have known it, but this was the one room in Lechuguilla with which Anna was intimate. On her first try she located the shadow-camouflaged exit. From there on, the route was less confusing. Within ten minutes she heard the unbelievably beautiful sound of human voices. Curt and Sondra were still alive. George and his two incognizant captives were waiting to descend into the spiky gullet of the Cocktail Lounge. Without gear, Anna doubted she could make a descent of nearly a hundred feet. She knew for a fact she could not freeclimb ninety feet up the far side. Along with bullets, burial, and bruised feet, that bit of information had been relegated to the dump reserved for things she wasn’t thinking about.

  Shrouding herself again in perfect darkness, she took off her hard hat and carefully set it down. Nothing else was left that might clank or jingle. A spill of light from ahead indicated direction. On hands and knees, she followed. The passage opened sufficiently that she could have walked on her hind legs, bent over simian-fashion. Afraid an over-used body would fail her and she’d stumble, she settled for the less evolved form of locomotion.

  Above the Lounge was a recess where ancient waters pooled, releasing acids that ate away rock till the water could trickle down to form the pit. This subterranean aerie was oval, perhaps seven feet high and twenty across at the widest point. Pillars of limestone divided the room. On Anna’s right a deep trough had been carved, a natural drainage. A low, ridged formation spiked by embryonic stalagmites separated it from the main body of the room.

  Curt, Sondra, and George Laymon sat in the chamber’s center, where flat space afforded them a modicum of comfort. Curt’s lamp was off, Sondra’s gleaming. The woman would probably sleep with a night-light for the rest of her natural life. Laymon’s lamp had been extinguished, and Anna saw him only when Sondra turned in his direction. Packs were off: Laymon’s close by his side, Curt’s near Sondra. Hers was back ten or fifteen feet as if she’d shed it precipitately on entering the rest stop. George and Curt were arguing. The heat of the words but not their meaning reached Anna.

  Surreptitiously, she slunk into the trough. A painful inching process that seemed to wear on for hours and produce racket equivalent to that of gravel trucks speeding over railroad trestles brought her midway into the room. Raising herself up on her elbows, she hazarded a peek over the serrated bulwark of stone. Directly in front of her, less than ten feet away, was Laymon’s broad back. Curt sat cross-legged to his left, his face visible in profile. Sondra was masked by her own light, merely a beacon teetering on a vaguely human form.

  Laymon was talking, low, logical, intense. It was by Curt that the heat had been generated.

  “She broke it all right, and maybe her collarbone as well. I left her with plenty of water and batteries. Anna will be better served by a quick rescue than by you getting yourself hurt and adding to the rescue effort.”

  George Laymon was one hell of an actor. Many people the Screen Actor’s Guild would never hear of were brilliant practitioners of the art. Without lights and cameras, it was called lying. Laymon’s lie was superb. He captured all the elements: drama, pathos, credibility, and tied it up neatly with an appeal to the listeners’ better selves.

  Anna had pushed on alone. An irresponsible act. Anna had injured herself and so, by her stupidity, would prove costly and dangerous to those who must bail her out.

  Somebody to blame. Most people love to believe the worst of others. The rest worry, deep down, that it might be true.

  Laymon had found her, made her comfortable, traveled out at a grueling pace to procure her safety. A hero. But only enough heroics to enhance credibility: he’d not added any spectacular flourishes to spark jealousy in other men or distrust in women.

  And the final implication that whosoever disagreed with him was no better than, and would suffer the same fate as, the foolish and willful Anna.

  “I don’t like the idea of leaving her,” Curt said. Anna was touched by his obstinacy. Given a performance the caliber of Laymon’s, she’d have been the first in the audience on her feet yelling “Bravo!”

  “I don’t like it much either,” Laymon said with just the right touch of sadness. “But it won’t be for long. Oscar and the others went on down the North Rift in case that was the direction you two had taken. We’re meeting this side of Glacier Bay in a couple of hours. We’ll get Mrs. McCarty out of here. Oscar can go out with her and set the carry-out team in motion. You and I will come back to where Anna’s resting. She shouldn’t be alone for more than five hours. Six at the outside. She’s prepared for it. I told her to meditate on her sins. This whole escapade is out of line. If I have any say about it, she will be billed for her rescue. The taxpayer shouldn’t have to carry the burden for criminal negligence.”

  That last bit, reluctant sympathy tinged with righteous indignation, was stellar. Anna wondered if he intended to use his ill-gotten gains to finance a career in state politics. New Mexico wouldn’t have a chance. In other circumstances, she would have voted for him herself and bragged to her friends of having met him once.

  “Who all is with Oscar?” Curt asked. A barely discernible insecurity tinged the wo
rds. Anna heard it and had no doubt that Laymon did. It was the first step in capitulation. Anna was relieved. A falling-out now would end with two bullets and two more dead bodies. Without any warning, Curt’s musculature and youthful reflexes would not save him.

  “A can of worms,” Laymon said regretfully. The big head nodded in a halo of light. “Anna told me her suspicions regarding Oscar. Frankly, I’m not sold. But we’ll look into Oscar’s activities. Send a team into Tinker’s to find this mysterious secret. That’s all I can do. And that’s for later. Right now we need to concentrate on getting Mrs. McCarty home safe and getting a crew in to bring Anna out. God, what a day. I hope I don’t have another like it anytime real soon.”

  Throughout this performance Sondra was unresponsive. Occasionally her light moved from face to face as the players entered the game, but always a beat or two late. Over the years Anna had been exposed to a number of mental aberrations fomented by stress and exposure. Burial alive was beyond her experience. Sondra’s body was tight, muscles squeezing on bone, yet her movements were languid, as if she were in viscous liquid. She spoke now, and her voice projected the same lackluster retardation. It took Anna a second to realize what was missing: vibrato. Her voice was absolutely flat, like that of the most skilled medieval chanters. “I have to go to the bathroom.” The words were as dead as a computer-generated warning. She looked only at Curt. For her, Laymon hardly existed, a mere ripple on the surface of her consciousness.

  “You can go,” Curt said. “It’s all right.” Patience blotted out the confusion he must have been feeling, and Anna was proud. He was what her mother would have called a natural husbandman. He took care of things: cars, cats, people, and did it in such a way it went unnoticed and unsung.