Labyrinth

by Mark T Sullivan

  “Both routes lead to the same spot west of here inside Parker’s Ridge,” he said. The way right takes a solid six hours. You go across the bridge, it’s tougher going, but you save two hours. I don’t care one way or the other. Your call.”

  “We cross,” Gregor said. “Every step closer to the stone, I feel better.”

  Cricket did her best not to smile. She had heard about this place, about the two routes. The way across the bridge might save two hours, but it was supposedly beyond tough; it led through the sort of cave that could crush a man’s spirit.

  “You up for it?” her dad asked.

  Cricket nodded and her dad turned away.

  “You’re first, Gregor,” he said.

  “I’ll go after him,” Lyons announced.

  The sickly physicist took two uncertain steps out onto the narrow arch of rock that spanned the gorge, then got down on his knees and crawled. When he was halfway across the span a harsh, concussive sound coughed from the stone beneath him.

  Gregor’s face contorted. “W-what the hell’s that?”

  “Don’t know,” Tom said, confused as well. “Never heard that kind of noise in a cave before.”

  “The quake weaken that span?” Lyons demanded, rushing to the edge.

  “I don’t know,” Tom said again. “It looks okay from here.”

  Gregor said, “G-go back or—?”

  “Keep going, you’re almost there.”

  Gregor put his head down and scrambled to the other side. Lyons followed.

  “Kelly now,” Tom said.

  The swarthy inmate looked across the bridge, then shook his head. “I’m not letting you stay with the kid on this side,” he said. “You first.”

  Her father shrugged, then got down on his knees and began to crawl across the arch. Cricket watched her dad glance over the side at the long fall into the chasm and shudder. He slowed as he crossed the middle of the span, leaning his head closer to the rock, trying she supposed, to understand the source of the sound Gregor had triggered.

  He crawled several more steps and his face blanched.

  “What’s the matter, Dad?” she called.

  “The limestone out here—it looks like cracked porcelain,” he said. “Oh, shit.”

  Even from fifteen feet away, Cricket could see more fine cracks appearing on the side of the arch, like dominoes racing through the rock.

  “Go, Daddy!” Cricket shrieked. He scrambled forward. But the cracks became too complex. The stone ruptured, fragmented, and crumbled. Just as the center of the bridge disintegrated behind him, he threw himself forward, his arms and fingers outstretched. He caught the rim of the cliff and dangled there while an eleven-foot section of the arch crashed into the canyon below with an ear-hammering roar.

  The whole thing happened so quickly that no one moved at first. Then Cricket threw herself onto her belly at the edge of what had become an outcropping on the near cliff face. “Hold on!” she screamed.

  She could see her dad’s fingers slipping over the fine granular pebbles along the ledge above him. He grunted and kicked at the wall of rock, trying to find any toehold. Then Lyons and Gregor grabbed each wrist and dragged him up over the ledge to safety.

  “Thanks,” he gasped, looking from Lyons to Gregor.

  “No problem,” Lyons said.

  “We need you,” Gregor said, shrugging. Then he looked back across the canyon at Cricket and Kelly. “So three of us now.”

  Cricket saw her father jerk his head to look across the chasm at her and their eyes locked in horrible understanding. Their worst fears had come true. They were separated. Fourteen, maybe fifteen feet at most. But it might as well have been an ocean; there was no way anyone could jump it and they had no ropes.

  “Say your good-byes, Burke,” Gregor said.

  “No, Daddy,” Cricket said, feeling the panic well inside her. “Don’t go.”

  “Hey!” Kelly yelled from behind Cricket “You can’t leave me. We had a deal.”

  “Deals change,” Gregor said.

  “Burke!” Kelly cried. “You said this way ends up in the same place.”

  Through the tears welling in her eyes, Cricket saw her father nod. “Eventually it does.”

  “Tell us how to do it then,” Kelly yelled. “It’s the only chance you got of getting your daughter back, hear?”

  For the first time in her life, Cricket saw her dad exhibit true, gut-twisting fear. He had broken out in a drenching sweat and the muscles in his neck quivered. “You can do this, Cricket,” he said.

  “No,” she whined. “I want to be with you.”

  “I want you to be with me, too, but you can’t,” Tom said.

  Lyons said, “You listen to your father now, Cricket. Your life depends on it.”

  She ignored him, never taking her attention off her father. “Please, Dad. There’s got to be another way. I’ll get lost.”

  He shook his head and pointed a finger at her. “You’re not getting lost and I’m not losing you now. We’re getting out of here and we’re gonna see Mom. And we’re going to all be together again, you and me and Mom. This is just a little detour. You hear me?”

  Cricket nodded through a wash of tears. “Yes.”

  “Okay, now listen close,” he said, the waver in his voice echoing all around her. “The entire route is mostly big booming cave with one tight spot in the connection into Parker’s Ridge. At every major junction for the next two hours, you’re going to use your compass and you’re going to trend north-northwest. After two hours, you should find yourself in a crawlway that will slope west and down in elevation. When you feel the crawlway rise again, you’ll be in Parker’s. You’ll climb up into a big cave, almost below the caprock of the ridge. The passage there is dry, good walking, and you’ll head due south for almost a mile and a half. I’ll meet you somewhere along there. I promise.”

  “How long should it take?” Kelly demanded.

  “Five and a half, maybe six hours,” Tom said. “Give me the directions back”

  Cricket recited them until she had them down pat.

  “Good,” Tom said.

  “Let’s go,” Gregor said, tugging on Tom’s pack.

  He got to his feet, still looking at Cricket. She could see that the words he was about to utter were going to be the toughest of his entire life. “Go on now, Crick.”

  Cricket got up off her belly robotically She was barely aware of Kelly beside her when she reached the level bank above the gorge. She turned and stood there for a long moment, letting her light dwell on her father’s face.

  “You keep whistling, you hear?” she said.

  “I will,” he said. “ ’Bye, sweetheart.”

  Cricket stood there thinking that her dad had always had such a sure sense of direction that he hardly needed a compass underground. But right then he looked completely lost. Seeing him like that almost crushed her, but she told herself that her mom had been in a worse predicament than this one and had survived. Damaged, but had survived. “ ’Bye, Daddy.”

  8:15 A.M.

  FURNACE RIVER

  “C’mon, kid! Take the goddamned reading!” Boulter roared at Chester, still frozen in the passenger seat of the whaler, insensible with fear.

  Swain let go of the windshield struts to reach for the sensor himself, when his pudgy nephew suddenly spun out of the seat, and crawled along the deck beneath the low gunwale.

  “I’ve got you,” Swain said, grabbing the teen by the webbing of the life preserver. “We’re in this together.”

  Chester looked over his shoulder at his uncle. “Okay,” he said, then tossed the sensor over the side, letting fifteen feet of a nylon tether slide through his hands. He waited ten seconds, then retrieved the device and threw himself back away from the gunwale, peering at the screen. “Nothing stronger than what we got at the Orpheus Entrance!”

  “Give me the second series of coordinates, Doc,” Boulter ordered.

  It took them nearly an hour fighting the raging
current to check the outflows at the next three ridges—Hawkins, Munk’s, and Smith’s. At each of these locations, the sensors revealed no discernible difference in the electromagnetic readings they’d been getting at the dry ingresses to the cave.

  “We’re no closer to that stone than we were before,” Chester grumbled. “The three-dimensional map didn’t help us one bit.”

  “Nonsense,” Swain insisted. “We’ve still got five outflows to measure, Chester.”

  They were almost nine miles above the ferry crossing now, approaching the most remote section of the river, in the deepest part of the Labyrinth wilderness. The storm was still intensifying. The Furnace was like a wild foaming sea before them. The whaler pitched and rolled. And then a huge wave blasted over the hull, soaking all of them and forcing Boulter to initiate the automatic bailing device.

  “Maybe we should turn back and wait for the storm to subside before checking the rest of the outflows,” Chester moaned.

  “No,” Swain retorted. “We’re finishing this. Now.”

  “You’re sure?” Boulter demanded.

  Swain looked at his nephew, so wan and shaking. “Yes,” he said. “We can do it.”

  The outflow of Bailey’s Ridge occurred at the tightest point of the great bend in the river. The underwater cave exit lay at the bottom of a sheer cliff that rose nearly ninety feet. The river beat at the cliff as Boulter tried to tease the boat close enough for Chester to get a reading. Again, while Swain held him about the waist, the teenager leaned over the side and dropped the sensor into the chill water of the cave outflow. When he drew it up, the golden infinity symbol pulsed larger than it had at any of the other cave exits. “We’re getting closer!”

  “You sure it’s not in there?” Boulter demanded.

  “Could be,” Chester admitted. “But if it is, it’s in there awful deep. We need to keep going, take readings at the next four ridges to give us a comparison.”

  The outflow at Parker’s Ridge, the sixth of the Labyrinth’s nine, issued an even higher reading than the one at Bailey’s. The pulse at the outflow at Nyren’s Ridge was stronger still. With a sense of heightened anticipation, they pushed on toward Tower Ridge, the second-to-last mountain that contained the great cave system.

  The river conditions below the soaring semicircular rock outcropping that gave Tower Ridge its name were the worst encountered so far. The current and the wind battered the whaler so hard that its momentum ground to a creep. The outboard screeched and squalled trying to make headway. Finally, Boulter aimed the boat toward the river’s flooded north shore, where he found a back channel that allowed them to forge upstream parallel to where they believed the outlet lay.

  But between them and the submerged cave exit stood a series of what whitewater guides call haystacks, semi-static arches of seething water that form when flooding rivers pass over gigantic glacial-cast boulders. The biggest haystack before them was some fifteen feet at the base and more than twelve feet high. Three others below that one were almost as large. Between them twisted whirlpools.

  “Take the reading here,” Boulter yelled. “I don’t think we can make it across.”

  “No good,” Chester cried. “We need to drop the sensor right into the outlet”

  “Take the wheel,” Boulter barked at Swain. The physicist reluctantly grabbed the steering wheel, which wrenched and hauled against his grip. Boulter got out a pair of binoculars from inside his rain slicker. He cupped the objective lens with his right hand to ward off the rain and studied the pattern of the river between the four haystacks and beyond. After several tense moments, he turned and said, “This is gonna be tight.”

  Boulter took the wheel again, then mashed the throttle. The boat sprang forward and now they were battling their way upriver roughly parallel to the haystacks.

  They passed the first standing wave and the second. Boulter drove the whaler at an oblique angle past the third coming wave. White foam showed at the crest of the wave’s swirling brass flanks. Boulter cut hard toward the passage between the third and fourth waves and laid the throttle down. There must have been placid water in the current there because they surged forward so fast it caught them all off guard.

  The bow of the whaler bounced off an eddy, rose, and slammed down, throwing Chester from his seat. Swain reached for his nephew but missed as he tumbled toward the stern. Boulter tried to compensate at the wheel and throttle back, but it was too late; the powerful outboard had already thrust them straight up the steep face of the fourth standing wave. The boat climbed and almost made the crest before the prop lost purchase. The vessel hesitated, then slid back down into the trough at the base. The whaler jackpoled, standing nearly straight up on its stern, threatening to flip.

  Chester was ejected from the boat. He screamed as he flew through the air and into the churning river. Boulter wrenched the steering wheel hard to port. The boat crashed sideways into the gap, nearly capsizing, but then, incredibly, righting itself.

  Swain caught a glimpse of his nephew’s terrified expression as the river swept him away. Without thinking, the physicist dived into the raging water.

  8:22 A.M.

  BAILEY’S RIDGE

  LABYRINTH CAVE

  “Slow and quiet now,” Finnerty whispered. “We don’t want to bump them, let them know they’re being stalked.”

  Whitney winced at his choice of words. Stalking implied that, for the time being anyway, the marshal had put aside the idea of trying to rescue her family by ambush. She knew very little about Finnerty’s background, but there was no mistaking what was going on now: The marshal was acting as if he were still-hunting in a forest; he was getting whispered navigational instructions from Whitney, using Two-Elk to read the footprints left in the dust, and then moving all of them as a single, elastic unit through the cave.

  The marshal eased forward into the stooped passage off the last of the grand-opera hallways. Whitney slipped after him, followed by Two-Elk. They’d been moving in this caterpillar way for a little more than an hour. It took a maddening amount of concentration, and despite the fact that she’d slept a fitful seven hours, Whitney was already feeling the strain.

  “Feel totally exposed with these headlamps,” Finnerty whispered. “Let’s turn them down as low as we can.”

  They all adjusted their lamps until they could barely see one another.

  “Up ahead here,” Whitney murmured, “the way forks and doesn’t come back together again for nearly six hours. I’m betting Tom took them across the bridge into Endless Crawl. Terrible place. Could drive you crazy.”

  The marshal looked at her. “But everyone’s holding together just fine here though, right?”

  “Right,” Whitney said, feeling angry at the comment and surprised by that anger.

  “Just want to be sure,” Finnerty said. He took a deep breath, squatted, then scuttled out onto the rim above the narrow gorge. Whitney waited ten seconds, then followed to where he crouched behind a boulder. Their lamps barely lit the room.

  Whitney could feel the emptiness break away to the north, cast in deep charcoal shadows. As Two-Elk slipped in beside her, she strained her eyes, peering out there into the curtains of darkness, catching sight of something that shocked her to her core. She jumped up and ran forward, cranking her headlamp beam to high power.

  “Mrs. Burke!” Finnerty hissed.

  But Whitney ignored him and sprinted toward the abutment of the fallen bridge. She threw herself onto her stomach and slid out toward the edge. She whipped her head from side to side, looking for a body in the debris at the bottom of the canyon.

  Finnerty was right behind her now, very pissed off. “You’re going to get yourself killed, or worse, you’re going to get me killed.”

  Whitney spun and glared at him. “The bridge fell. This is my husband and daughter we’re talking about. What would you have me do, suck my thumb?”

  “I’d have you stay alive long enough to get your husband and daughter back,” he retorted.

&
nbsp; “Only two tracks going out of here on this side, boss,” Two-Elk called out. She was working her way up the flat rim of the canyon with the alacrity of a bird dog on a hot scent. “One of the inmates. And the girl.”

  “Cricket?” Whitney sprang to her feet, adrenaline coursing through her blood. “You’re sure it’s not Tom with her?”

  “He’s wearing those air-bob soles like she is, right?” Two-Elk asked.

  Whitney nodded.

  “The ones with her are lug sole, Vibram, size eleven. I saw their shoe sizes in the reports. It’s Kelly.”

  Whitney flashed on the brief profiles of the inmates Finnerty had shown her before they entered the cave. “The strangler?” she cried. Her hand traveled to cover her open mouth. She looked down over the edge of the canyon and almost tottered. Everything that mattered was disintegrating. She looked across the canyon to the gaping wound in the wall where Tom must have gone. She thought about the cave ahead on this side of the gorge, did a quick computation in her head, then bolted off, running north along the rim of the narrow canyon.

  “Son of a bitch!” she heard Finnerty growl behind her. A hundred yards later, she felt the marshal’s hand catch her beneath the elbow and spin her around. “Stop! We can’t go after them like this, half-cocked.”

  Whitney ripped away from his grasp and snarled, “My daughter’s out there forty minutes ahead of me with some sick fucking bastard who likes to kill people with his bare hands. So, no more creeping, Marshal. No more stalking. We’re gonna run and we’re gonna close the gap and we’re gonna rescue my daughter. Okay?”

  The skin on Finnerty’s face tightened toward fury, then he got a puzzled expression that broke over into a smile. “You remind me of my wife,” he said, shaking his head and scratching his temple, “always telling me what to do and most of the time right. Okay, Mrs. Burke, you lead. But when you think you’re getting close, you slow us down and we take over. Whatever we do, we don’t want an uncontrolled firefight in here. You could get killed. Your daughter could get killed.”

  Whitney’s jaw set. She broke into a hard jog out along the rim of the canyon, knowing that somewhere on the other side, Tom would be driving himself unmercifully to get to Cricket. She would, too.