A quarter mile. Four hundred forty yards.
10:14 A.M.
SPAGHETTI WORKS
BAILEY’S-PARKER’S CONNECTION ROUTE
LABYRINTH CAVE
“Bitch!” Kelly bellowed.
Cricket sprinted the rise in short, choppy, wide-stanced strides. She crested, found level ground, opened her gait, and poured it on.
She heard a strange crackling noise and glanced to the belly belt bobbing off the cloth loop around her wrist. Inside the girdle, from the metal nubs that faced both hips, the belly, and the base of the spine, corkscrews of blue-white electricity unwound and sparked. Kelly was jamming his thumb on the transmitter trigger over and over again.
But he was falling behind. Cricket could hear the off-kilter pounding of his footsteps fading. The ground dropped away again. She sensed that the cave was getting damper, and the slope a steeper grade than she’d first anticipated, but the slickness did not register until it was too late. The entire floor of the descending passage was coated with a whipped chocolate of mud mixed with sharp gravel. In midstride, Cricket’s right foot kicked out from behind her and she was cast forward in a long spinning fall down the slope toward a puddle that filled the passage side to side.
Her cheek glanced off something hard and sharp. The belly belt tore from her wrist. She cartwheeled. Her left leg whipped down and struck the slope flush. She heard something in her knee go pop, then she cartwheeled again and splashed into the puddle.
For a second she lay there stunned, her knee a searing rush of pain. “No,” she moaned. “Not now.”
Then she heard the huff and slap of Kelly running. The first flickers of his headlamp showed on the ceiling of the cave upslope. She scrambled out of the puddle, trying to get to her feet, aware of a bitter salty liquid seeping into her mouth. She spat it out. Blood. She put her hand to her cheek and felt the seams of a long gash. Cricket forced herself up, spitting out more blood, trying to see how her knee would do. It held weight but felt destabilized, as if she’d torn something in there.
Kelly crested the ridge in a low running crouch, holding the belly belt trigger in his left hand like a baton. He caught sight of her hobbling away from the puddle and howled with the confidence of a predator that has sensed wounded prey, “You in big trouble now, girl!”
But Kelly too misjudged the greasiness of the terrain, and both his feet flung out from under him parallel, like a gymnast working the horse in a pike position, and he went down hard on his right hip and shoulder with a cracking noise. His pistol yanked free of his pack belt and spun into the puddle. The belly belt transmitter went flying from his hand, across the puddle, and landed next to Cricket. She reached out and grabbed it as a weapon even as Kelly, bleeding from jagged bits of gravel that scored his chin, was rising to his feet, rubbing his shoulder.
Below his headlamp beam, his slate-colored eyes blazed. He looked at the belt trigger she held. “What do ya think you’re gonna do with that?”
He tore off his gloves and cracked the knuckles on his great gnarled hands, then held them before him like a Greco-Roman wrestler. “Ever seen what a python does to pigs down there in the Amazon?” he said. “Way it wraps ’em all up and hugs ’em tight?”
“No!” Cricket sobbed.
She turned and made to run, but with her knee she was no match for him. Kelly splashed across the puddle in two leaps and grabbed her by the back of her neck, then reached around the front with the other and lifted her in a swinging, throttling arc. For a second, Cricket hung in his grasp, choking for air. Her eyes felt so much pressure she was sure they would pop. Her spine stretched toward snapping.
“Gonna have to teach you a lesson ’bout being an inmate,” Kelly growled in her ear. “Rule number one—guard’s always right.”
Cricket saw spots before her eyes. She felt the weight of the belly belt trigger in her hand. She swung back and drove it butt first into the gap between the angle of Kelly’s jaw and the muscles of his neck. The blow hit some kind of nerve gathering there and Kelly grunted, shifted his feet, and dropped her. His head swung low and dazed like that of a ram that has just butted horns. Cricket cocked back her good right knee and rammed it as hard as she could straight into his groin. Kelly buckled over. She kneed him in the face. He stumbled backward and sat down hard in the puddle, cupping his testicles with one hand, his bleeding nose with the other. He sat there stunned for a second, then his eyes focused. “Fucking bitch!”
Cricket turned to run again, but her feet got caught in the girdle of the belly belt lying there in the muck beside the puddle. She looked at it, then up at Kelly, who was still grimacing in pain, but getting to his feet, the dripping pistol somehow in his hand. His lips drew down tight against his teeth and he seethed. “You, my friend, are about to have a serious attitude adjustment.”
Cricket kicked the belt into the puddle beside him. Kelly looked at it, puzzled, then his eyes got wide in understanding and he jerked his head back up.
“Attitude adjustment’s all yours, asshole,” she said. She punched the trigger.
Fifty thousand volts coursed out the belt’s contact points and electrified the puddle at Kelly’s ankles. The strangler convulsed, fired the pistol with a deafening roar, was thrown three feet through the air, and landed in a heap up the greasy slope.
A nauseating stench filled the air.
11:00 A.M.
SPAGHETTI WORKS
BAILEY’S-PARKER’S CONNECTION ROUTE
LABYRINTH CAVE
“We should have caught up to them by now,” Whitney said, stopping and bending over to take deep gulps of air. She hadn’t run like this since the accident.
Two-Elk and Finnerty were blowing hard as well. They’d been going at a strong jog for more than an hour and a half and still had not caught up with Cricket. The tracker went forward, sweeping her headlamp across the floor, coming to rest on Cricket’s flashlight, then flicking ahead to reveal tracks and deep gouges in the sand.
“She’s running!” Two-Elk cried. “Cricket’s got the electrical belt off and she’s running!”
They were all sprinting now, the marshals holding their machine pistols and Whitney’s head blazing with fear and wonder at the gall of her daughter’s escape. They came over the rise and Two-Elk saw the steep slope and the polished places where Cricket and Kelly had fallen. She skidded to a halt. Whitney tried to surge ahead, but Two-Elk caught her. “You hold up and let me do my job now, ma’am,” she said. “Caves may be your world. But the tracks are mine.”
Whitney wanted to argue, but nodded.
Two-Elk eased her way down to the puddle, swinging her head back and forth, reading the cuts, grooves, and wedges in the wet banks around the puddles, reading the smoky tendrils of silt in the water.
“What happened?” Whitney cried out in desperation.
“They fought here and from the looks of it your daughter won,” Two-Elk replied, shaking her head in admiration. “She hit Kelly with something and he’s bleeding. He went down hard. So hard he shit his pants. Literally. There’s feces there.”
“He’s got to be in shock of some kind,” Finnerty said, fingering the trigger guard on his gun. “Where’d he go?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” Two-Elk said. She crossed the puddle and went up the bank to where the passage began to rise again. “Dammit, she’s hurt, too.”
“What!” Whitney cried. She ran down the slick hill, feeling herself on the verge of tears, then forded the standing water to where the tracker crouched. “How hurt? Is she bleeding?”
Two-Elk did not reply for nearly a minute as she studied the evidence left in the sediment. “A little, but it’s not gouts of it, probably a blow to her mouth,” the tracker said. “But her knee’s injured. She’s limping badly and—”
Her face screwed up in concern.
“What?” Whitney demanded.
“Kelly’s up again, slowed, but he’s still after her, and from the looks of it, he’s moving better than
she is.”
Finnerty raced by Two-Elk, his gun raised before him, then shouted at his deputy, “Permission granted to shoot to kill!”
11:45 A.M.
SPAGHETTI WORKS
BAILEY’S-PARKER’S CONNECTION ROUTE
LABYRINTH CAVE
Cricket gritted her teeth at the pain. In the bottom of her pack she found a rectangle of dense foam called a SAM splint, used to immobilize ankles and sprained wrists. She sliced the foam in two, then cut off strips of her undershirt and tied the foam pieces to the sides of her knee, making a simple brace to help stabilize it. The device worked after a fashion, but every once in a while as she forced herself along, step by painful step, she felt a sickening slip and the threat of buckling.
It was more than an hour since she had escaped from Kelly, and she was worn down by fatigue and pain and the stress of constantly being afraid. She knew she had to keep going north-northwest until the passage dropped, then she would change her course to west-southwest. She glanced behind her, knowing that Kelly might be back there. She had taken his pistol, but at the moment of truth had been unable to pull the trigger. She had left him there on the bank moaning, sick, the stench of shit all over him.
Now the passage ceiling lowered. Cricket winced in anticipation of the pain, but went to her knees. She told herself she had to be deep in the connection route now. Soon the way would begin to rise in elevation, and when it did she’d be within an hour of finding her father.
However, after fifty yards of knee walking, despite her every effort to keep going, her weariness and the throbbing in her joints became overwhelming and she had to lie down and close her eyes. Just for a minute, she told herself. Just for a minute. She shut off her headlamp and fell into an uneasy sleep.
She dreamed of home. She saw the door to her parents’ bedroom open and her mother come out. It was dark and Whitney had her hands raised out in front of her, feeling her way toward a door she recognized that led to her own bedroom. Her mother opened the door and looked inside. The bed was empty and the window was open and her mother began to cry, “Cricket! Cricket, where are you?”
“Here Mom,” Cricket mumbled. “I’m here. Right here.”
She startled awake in the darkness, aware of the echoes of rocks snapping against one another somewhere not far behind her.
Terror stricken, Cricket turned on her headlamp to a weak glow, then scrambled forward, feeling her knee pound horribly, finding herself at the top of a stone staircase that dropped two stories to a three-way intersection of passage. Time to go west-south-west. The left passage. Get to it.
She scrambled down, wincing in agony at every step. Her knee had stiffened while she slept. She couldn’t run.
Behind her, toward the top of the staircase, she saw the beam of a headlamp coming. He’d be on her in seconds. She had the pistol, but she still didn’t think she could use it. Think. Think.
Cricket looked again at the sandy floor. She hobbled forward as fast as she could for ten yards, then walked backward in her own prints and eased up onto the stone flange below the middle and right passages. She hesitated for an instant, then whimpered to herself, “Please, please let this work”
She limped into the far right gash in the rock, the passage leading northwest, away from her father, away into the complete unknown.
1:04 P.M.
SOUTHERN PARKER’S RIDGE
LABYRINTH CAVE
Tom arched his back and extended his boot, gripping the outcropping, nosing the steel toe up and over onto the parapet of stonework that led into Grand Boulevard, an awesome arched cavity that ran north-south the entire length of Parker’s Ridge, high in the guts of the geological mass, just below the caprock.
He got over onto the rock and lay flat on his belly, his arms and legs racked with spasms. Gregor came over the top and lay beside him. He was worn down, but to Tom’s dismay nowhere near beaten; indeed, his skin had a rosy, healthy patina to it now.
“Something kind of sh-shifted inside me back there,” Gregor announced, rolling his head around with his eyes closed. “Haven’t felt this strong in years.”
Lyons boosted himself up beside them. His face was dusted salt white. His eyes were irritated and red. He’d rolled up the sleeves of his cave suit to expose his massive forearms.
Tom got to his feet and Gregor sat up. “Which way?”
“Cricket will be coming toward us from the north,” Tom said. “So we go north to find her and Kelly.”
Gregor appraised Tom. “Is that the direction we need to get to Tower Ridge?”
“No,” Tom said.
“Why are we backtracking, then?” Gregor demanded, anger suddenly in his voice.
“Because that’s my daughter back up that passage.”
Gregor’s face soured. “I don’t give a shit about your daughter.”
“I figured that out,” Tom said, growing more furious by the moment, but forcing himself to contain it. “But here’s the deal. We can either go look for her or we wait right here for her. Either way, I’m not taking you west until I find her.”
Gregor leaned back as if to backhand Tom across the face, but Lyons caught the scientist’s wrist. Gregor wriggled against the powerful grip but could not wrestle free. “Let me go, Lyons. Let me go or you’ll get nothing. Nothing!”
“We’re gonna help him find his kid,” Lyons said. “Then we go get the stone.”
“You’re not in ch-charge here.”
“The fuck I’m not, you little physics dick,” Lyons said, shaking him. “We don’t help him get his daughter, we don’t get to the stone. You under stand, Mr. Ph.D.?”
Gregor hesitated, then turned sly, like a cornered rat fighting for escape. “Two hours. We give him two hours, then we turn around.”
“Can live with that,” Lyons said, lowering the scientist’s wrist. He looked at Tom. “Two hours, my friend.”
For the next hour and forty-five minutes, Tom led them north nearly three miles along the far reaches of Grand Boulevard, his headlamp scanning, his eyes straining for any sign of Cricket. She had to be there. She could not fail, could not be injured or lost or …
His mind almost seized up as these thoughts spun in on him from all sides. Was this what Whitney had felt seeing Jeannie Yung in those last moments before the flood took her? Like she was trapped in a whirlpool, spun in ever-accelerating ever-downward spirals? Regret seared through him, true regret for what his wife had had to endure the past thirteen months and what she must be enduring now, frantic on the surface, praying for their survival; but most of all regret for every moment he had worked on the Artemis Project when he should have been with her in the aftermath of the accident. He vowed that things would be different if he just got the chance.
“Fifteen minutes,” Gregor said. “Then we turn around.”
“The other passage out of Smith’s is just ahead,” Tom said, jogging forward. He emerged into a large domed cavern that put him in mind of the ruins of the Colosseum in Rome, with an abruptly rising grandstand of stone. Set in the grandstand were the mouths of nearly a dozen converging passages.
“Cricket!” Tom called into the vast reaches of the cavern.
No voice came in return, and Tom called again and heard nothing but the fading tremor of his own voice. He turned and looked blankly at Lyons. “She should have been here by now.”
The guard’s normally granite face softened by several degrees. “How long ago?” he asked.
“Hour, maybe more.”
“I’m f-f-feeling sick,” Gregor said, and indeed, the glow that had bussed his cheeks in the southern passages of Bailey’s Ridge was gone. His skin had turned once again to that waxy pallor. “I want to turn back. I need to go back. Lyons, you agreed.”
“We’re waiting right here,” Tom insisted.
“No, we’re not,” Gregor said, suddenly beside himself with agitation. He plucked the pistol out and aimed it directly at Tom.
Tom knelt and held his arms up, palms out in front o
f him. “Go ahead, you stupid fanatical bastard. Shoot. I just don’t fucking care anymore.”
1:45 P.M.
NORTHERN PARKER’S RIDGE
LABYRINTH CAVE
“That’s the wrong way!” Whitney exclaimed, staring into the black hole that marked the cave passage heading northwest.
“Just telling you what she did,” Two-Elk replied. “Real smart kid, real tough kid, walking backward like that in her own tracks. It threw Kelly, at least for a while.”
“Where does it go?” Finnerty demanded.
“No one’s ever explored that passage,” Whitney replied. “I don’t know.”
“How far behind are we?” the marshal asked.
“Half hour behind the girl,” the tracker replied. “Maybe twenty minutes behind Kelly.”
“Which way’s your husband?” Finnerty asked.
“Back there, to the south, I’d expect,” Whitney said, gesturing toward the far left passage. She hesitated, looking from one black hole to the next, horrified at the choice she was having to make—go after her daughter or her husband. Then she made her decision and hardened herself to it. She turned toward the passage Cricket had taken.
“You’re sure?” Two-Elk asked as she passed.
“I know Tom, he’ll survive,” Whitney said. “Cricket is just a little girl.”
Two-Elk looked at Finnerty, whose attention lingered on the passage going southwest. “Let’s go, boss.”
Whitney’s senses immediately heightened. Every nerve in her body felt ignited by the danger of not knowing the way. She groped into the earth, seeing Cricket’s tracks in soft sand here, a smudge of a displaced rock there. She tingled, then broke out in a sweat, reading the direction of the scalloping in the walls, bringing all her skills into play to anticipate where the cave might lead them. She imagined the underground rivers, streams, and creeks that had once coursed through these passages.
She imagined Cricket passing these walls, which had never seen man, not thirty minutes ago and began to run again.
2:15 P.M.
PARKER’S RIDGE
LABYRINTH CAVE
Labyrinth Page 24