Labyrinth

by Mark T Sullivan

  “Now we give the supercomputers back at the university a few hours to do those calculations, and in the meantime the laser prisms I ordered should be arriving from the lab and we should be in business.”

  “You’re sure in your calculations?” Swain asked. “In your coding?”

  Chester threw his uncle a look of irritation. “Yes, I’m sure.”

  “We’ll see then, won’t we?”

  Before his nephew could come back with a retort, a flash of lightning lit up the entire tent, followed by a walloping thunderclap that made them all jump.

  “Son of a bitch, that was close!” Angelis cried.

  “Are these tent poles metal?” Swain asked, then he stopped, puzzled, as if hearing something confusing from afar. A rumbling noise, but not thunder. He recognized the sound from his childhood. “Earthquake!” he yelled.

  The pulverizing roar of the first shock wave built and pulsed through Jenkins Ridge. The porch of the dilapidated farmhouse swayed, then tore away. The roof of the main structure lifted and bucked inward. The meadow crested and troughed like a stirred-up sea. All along the forest edge, trees uprooted, tottered, and fell. The generators providing electricity to the encampment convulsed. Several detonated. The explosions threw fireballs high into the sky.

  Twenty miles upstream on the Furnace River, deep within the rammed earth dam that held back the waters of the Hermes Reservoir, fourteen of the eighty-seven pilings supporting the structure cracked under the incredible pressure and moved nine inches off-center. Water rushed into the cracks and began to gnaw at the base of the destabilized embankment.

  Inside the Mission Control tent, Swain saw Boulter tossed through the air like a rag doll. A wire whipped Chester across the face. A light stanchion struck Swain in the head and upper back, knocking him to the floor. Then the tent’s ridge-support poles, guy wires, and stake lines all snapped at once and the whole thing came crashing down.

  The shaking went on for eleven seconds, then stilled. Clouds of black noxious smoke billowed above crackling electrical fires. Hundreds of birds, spooked from their roosts, circled and called madly in the pouring rain.

  Swain got to his hands and knees, choking on the electrical smoke, shaking his bleeding head from side to side like a prizefighter who’s just taken a devastating uppercut to the jaw. All around him he heard the cries and moans of the wounded.

  “Earthquake in Kentucky,” he mumbled. “How the hell is that possible?”

  Then he flashed on the image of his sister and panicked. “Chester!” he yelled. “Chester, where are you?”

  4:10 P.M.

  KING’S CASTLE BREAKDOWN

  MUNK’S RIDGE

  LABYRINTH CAVE

  Whitney curled on her side beneath the ledge that ran below the summit of the underground mountain. She gazed after her headlamp beam, which disappeared into the cloud of fine white dust that now hung over the lake in the great cavern.

  In her mind, she kept seeing Sanchez arch backward off the breakdown pile, the incredulity at his coming death etched across his face. Sanchez’s visage became Jeannie’s and then Tom’s and then Cricket’s. Whitney clenched her eyes shut against the sobs that erupted out of her.

  She heard the sound of rocks clopping and sliding against one another again and she curled up tighter, thinking an aftershock might be under way. But the jolt never came. She heard rocks move again, opened her eyes, and was blinded by two headlamps shining at her from just below the ledge.

  “Mrs. Burke?” Finnerty called out “Whitney?”

  A fragment of stone had gashed the marshal above the left eye and it was swelling shut. He was coated in the white dust. It made him look like a bleeding ghost. Two-Elk appeared alongside him her left hand badly discolored.

  “People who go underground with me always die,” Whitney said dully.

  “You didn’t kill Amador,” Finnerty said in a voice filled with emotion at the loss. “He was done in by a freak of nature, trying to save your husband and daughter. We’ve got to honor him by pushing on.”

  In her befuddled state, Whitney gave scant attention to a question that flashed through her brain: How was it possible that an earthquake had hit Labyrinth Cave? Tom’s research had revealed only the slimmest of fault lines in the area.

  “How do I know Tom and Cricket aren’t dead, too?” Whitney asked in a choked voice. “How do I know they weren’t chewed up by this god-awful hole in the ground?”

  Finnerty shook his head and turned angry. “Whitney, you’re sounding to me as if you’re willing to give up without even trying. Don’t Tom and Cricket deserve more? Don’t they deserve for you to keep trying, no matter what the odds?”

  Whitney tried to see Tom and Cricket in her thoughts, to imagine them still alive. Cricket’s image surfaced as if in a cloud. Her daughter seemed lost frightened, and alone. Then the image changed. Cricket was just born and Whitney was holding her to her breast while Tom and a half-dozen firefighters looked on.

  “Okay,” she murmured, getting to her knees.

  In a stupor, she inched her way along the ledge to the east. All around her the breakdown pile groaned and shifted as the rocks settled into new positions. Where the overhang ended, Whitney stopped, scared to move beyond its protection should the ceiling cry and the stone rain fall once more. She saw again the image of Cricket as a baby. Only this time Tom was giving Cricket her first bath, carefully swabbing the area around her umbilical cord. Those memories enabled her to ease out into the chimney that led to the top of the breakdown. Once she was in the shaft, she summoned all her skills and started to climb. Below her, Finnerty and Two-Elk watched her every move, then mimicked them exactly.

  When Whitney at last reached the top of the underground mountain, she lay on her back, gasping for air, taking in the venous fractures in the cave’s ceiling not four feet over her head. In the glare of her headlamp the dust was as dense as the smoke coming off a greenwood fire. She coughed and hacked, the fit in turn triggering a foreboding she did not grasp at first.

  Finnerty hoisted himself up out of the chimney, then turned and reached down to grab Two-Elk below the wrist of her injured hand. The marshal grunted, pulled, and soon his deputy was lying on the crest as well.

  “Where now?” Finnerty asked.

  “Back that way,” Whitney said, throwing her thumb over her shoulder.

  Two-Elk shook her head. “Nothing but rock back that way, Mrs. Burke.”

  Whitney rolled over and shone her light into thickest part of the dust cloud. She crawled forward, searching for the passage that led to King’s Castle Cavern. But all she saw was fresh rubble. And then she understood that foreboding generated by the dense grime that just seemed to hang there in the air, unmoving.

  “The cave’s stopped breathing,” she said in disbelief. “The passage collapsed.”

  Finnerty stared at the cloudy pile of rocks. Then he smacked his open palm on the wall and shouted, “Dammit! This is the goddamned story of my life these days. Close but not enough!”

  Whitney stared into the rubble and dust. Then she turned away from the choked passage. She walked toward the chimney she’d climbed to get to the cliff top. She stopped several feet short of the edge and aimed her headlamp out into the void of the great cavern. The light from her lamp picked up the dust still swirling in the pitch darkness. She watched it fall and waft Hypnotized.

  She cast her headlamp up and saw where the big boulders had coughed free of the ceiling. She thought of Sanchez. She thought of Jeannie. She thought of Cricket and Tom somewhere on the other side of that caved-in passage. For a moment, all Whitney felt was despair, then her gloom mutated into fury.

  “Haven’t you done enough?” she screamed at the cave. “Haven’t you taken enough of me?”

  She stood there shaking and thought of throwing herself over the cliff. Then the anguish that swirled within her fed itself with adrenaline until it became an overwhelming desire to fight She pointed her finger toward the fractured ceiling.
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  “You’re not taking any more of me,” she vowed. “Nothing more.”

  She reached inside her cave suit and pulled up the silk kerchief she always kept tied about her neck when underground. She wrapped it around her mouth, then clambered back into the depths of the dust cloud and began pulling away rocks with the possession of a peasant woman whose husband and child have been buried in a landslide.

  4:11 P.M.

  DANTE’S TUBES

  LABYRINTH CAVE

  Tom leaned over the edge of the flat-topped tower of rock, yelling, “Cricket! Cricket, can you hear me?”

  She dangled by her safety line against the tubular cave wall. The shaft fell away four hundred feet below her boots. The subterranean waterfall rushed a yard way.

  “Can you hear me, Cricket?” he called again.

  But she did not move. From far below her, just audible against the sound of the waterfall, Tom heard Lyons bellow, “What’s going on up there?” His headlamp beam shone up from the bottom.

  “Cricket’s hurt!” Tom screamed. “She’s unconscious and—”

  Cricket tilted her helmet back and looked up at him, dazed. “Dad, what—?”

  “It’s okay,” Tom said. “Earthquake. Unbelievable. But it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters but you’re alive. Thank God you attached your safety line.”

  Tom looked back over his shoulder at Kelly. “Hold my ankles,” he ordered, then he reached down and got a grip on the safety rope and hauled his daughter back up onto the spire. He bear-hugged her, then laid her on her back Kelly came around on the other side. His face was scraped and raw from being hammered against the cave wall during the earthquake. “Get away from her,” Tom said.

  “I used to be a medic,” Kelly said.

  “I don’t care,” Tom said. She was coming fully conscious now. “Stay away from her.”

  “What happened?” she asked, sitting up and resting her elbows over her knees.

  “Earthquake, I think. Extraordinary, isn’t it?” Tom said. He was very concerned about her condition, but as a geologist, he was flabbergasted at the scientific implications of the event. “There isn’t a major fault within two hundred fifty miles of here. The last known earthquake to hit anywhere in Kentucky was way out west near the Ohio border almost two hundred years ago. We’re just lucky you weren’t on rope when it hit.”

  “Who was on rope?” Kelly demanded.

  Cricket startled. “Gregor.”

  Kelly darted to the edge with Tom right beside him. Together they shone their lights down the length of the wriggling rope to where it disappeared into the ripping emerald curtain of the waterfall. Tom grabbed the static line and tugged on it. The shaking on the rope turned intense. Then, weakly, from out of the din of the cascade, they heard Gregor yell for help, followed by Lyons’s frantic exhortations from far down the tube. “What the hell’s going on up there!”

  Tom leaned over the edge. “Gregor’s caught on rope!” he yelled. “He’s conscious, but getting pounded by water. Even with the NASA suits, he’s only got minutes.”

  “Save him!” Lyons roared. “Whatever you do, save him!”

  Tom looked down the rope and shook his head

  “You heard Lyons,” Kelly said. “Save him before it’s too late.”

  “Can’t save him,” Tom retorted. “We don’t have another rope.”

  “Then go down the rope he’s on.”

  “Not a chance,” Tom said. “You’ve got to get three bars of a rappel rack onto a rope to be safe. That can’t be done with a loaded line—you can’t bend it.”

  Kelly drew his pistol and stuck it in Tom’s face. “I didn’t come all this way, take all these risks, not to get that gold,” he said. There’s got to be a way to save him. Either think of one or the two of you die. The girl first.”

  Tom said, “You kill us, you die too.”

  “So what?” Kelly sneered. “I got nothing to lose. You got everything to gain.”

  “Okay, okay,” Tom said, pounding one gloved fist into the other.

  “You can save him?” Kelly said, brightening.

  “No,” Tom said. “You can. You’re lighter than me. I’ll talk you through it.”

  Kelly glanced at the rope. Tom’s hopes soared. If Kelly took the bait and went over the side, he and Cricket would be free to run. Lyons could never climb the rope, not with two men already on it. It would be tough, but he and his daughter could rig a climbing system and go back out the way they had come. Their rations were dwindling. But at least they’d have enough water to survive the trek back to the Orpheus Entrance.

  Kelly gestured at Cricket. “She’s lighter than me,” he said. “She goes.”

  “No!” Tom protested. “She’s too shaken up.”

  Kelly pressed the muzzle of his pistol between Tom’s eyes. Then he glared at Cricket. “Go down that rope, girl, or I’ll shoot your old man where he stands.”

  4:58 P.M.

  NASA ENCAMPMENT

  JENKINS RIDGE

  LABYRINTH CAVE

  Outside, in the distance, the fading rumble of thunder sounded against the thrum of the driving rain on the canvas roof of the Mission Control tent. The caustic stench of electrical fire still tainted the air inside the pavilion. And everywhere rescue workers shouted and the wounded groaned, ambulances wailed and helicopters chugged to landings out in Jenkins meadow.

  Dr. Swain winced as a NASA medical tech sewed the nasty gash on the back of his head. “Hurt, huh?” Chester asked. His nephew had been one of the lucky ones. He’d survived the earthquake with no more than a raised welt across his face where the guy wire had whipped him. Swain had found the teen within minutes, hiding under the computer table.

  “Forget what hurts,” Swain snapped. “What have you got on the earthquake?”

  “Jesus, so much for caring, Uncle Jeff,” Chester said.

  “I need information, not emotion, Chester,” the physicist replied. “I need to understand what’s happened and why.”

  Chester opened his mouth, then shook his head and slammed himself down in front of one of the few computers still capable of running.

  The tech stuck a needle deep into the cut and Swain almost cried out, but bit his cheek instead. Ten feet to the physicist’s left, Boulter wrenched off his headset, reached up gingerly to touch his broken nose, then looked over at Angelis. A second medical tech was working on the shoulder of the Mission Control chief, which had suffered a third-degree separation.

  “My men are reporting complete collapses at the Orpheus and Paradisio Entrances,” Boulter said. “Nautilus is still open, but just barely. They don’t dare try to dig yet; the rubble’s still settling. Any change in the position of the burst transmitters?”

  They’d managed to get part of the big tent back up in the first minutes after the quake, but the electronic map that had hung on the lighting stanchions had been destroyed. Angelis glanced at a tiny version of the map on a computer screen next to him, then shook his head. “Still getting no signals from Burke, his daughter, or the inmates,” he said. “Weak signals from Finnerty’s team, but they haven’t moved in almost an hour.”

  “What does that mean?” Boulter asked. “Or don’t I want to know?”

  “I can’t answer that,” Angelis said. “They could be trapped. They could be hurt.”

  “What you’re saying is that they all could be dead,” Boulter said, closing his eyes. “How in God’s name am I going to tell Damian’s wife?”

  Swain said, “We have to proceed on the assumption they’re alive.”

  “Absolutely,” Angelis said. “I’m betting the quake destroyed some of the transponder repeaters, so the signals we’re getting could be garbled.”

  Chester turned in his seat and nodded. “The size of that quake, that’s a real possibility.”

  The tech finished applying a bandage over the twelve stitches in the back of Swain’s head. The physicist stood immediately and walked to his nephew. “How big are they calling it?”


  Chester gestured at a web page up on the screen. “National Earthquake Information Center at Memphis is pegging it at 6.2 on the Richter Scale. Here’s the weird stuff, Uncle Jeff—the only known fault line east of the Rockies capable of producing that magnitude of quake is the New Madrid system more than two hundred miles west of here. But they aren’t calling the epicenter anywhere near the Ohio-Indiana border. They’re saying it’s roughly 37.37 longitude, 83.912 latitude, at a depth between three hundred thirty-two and six hundred fifty-seven feet.”

  Angelis pushed away the medical tech who was trying to work his arm into a sling. “That’s right here, somewhere inside the cave.”

  “That’s right” Chester pushed his eyeglasses back up the bridge of his nose. “Now take a look at this: NEIC records show minor seismic activity in the same area three months ago. And here’s the strangest thing of all: check out the quake graphs.”

  They all huddled in behind him as he typed in several commands. Swiftly, a drawing like an EKG printout appeared on the computer screen.

  Swain frowned and leaned in for a closer look. “That’s not normal seismic activity.”

  “No, it isn’t, Uncle Jeff. You’d expect to see long, undulating waves, wouldn’t you? These are short. Whippy. Like an explosion.”

  “An explosion?” Boulter said.

  “What’s going on down there?” Angelis demanded.

  “I have no idea,” Swain replied, perplexed.

  “I do,” Chester said. “Wild theory, just a crazy guess.”

  Swain stared at his nephew, feeling an irrational sense of irritation rising inside him. “What could you possibly—?”

  “Don’t listen to him, kid,” Boulter said. “Out with it.”

  Chester looked at the trooper and smiled, then sobered and looked back at his uncle. “Remember Gregor’s log notes, Uncle Jeff? His theory was that moon rock 66095 had the ability to amplify and accelerate energy.”

  “I remember,” Swain replied, now openly peeved.

  Chester pointed out through the open flaps of the Mission Control tent. Lightning flashed, followed by a thunderclap. “If a lightning bolt hits any of these ridges, it goes to ground, right? But the ground here isn’t solid. It’s hollow. There was a big lightning bolt just before the quake, remember?”