Labyrinth

by Mark T Sullivan

  Seven hundred yards to the west, Cricket navigated the cave, hearing echoes of her father’s and mother’s teachings, echoes that gradually faded to murmurs as she heard that new voice, her own voice, the one that seemed to be getting sturdier with every painful step. Still, it was creepy being there in the cave alone; the water scribing on the roof was so tight and undulating it looked like the surface of the brain of a fetal pig she’d had to dissect the month before in biology class.

  She reached the bottom of a breakdown pile that stretched up nearly four stories. She craned her neck to shine her lamp up its face, seeing what appeared to be a gouge in the rock heading west-southwest. That was good, she thought. The passage was trending back roughly in the direction of her dad.

  Cricket jammed her fingers into a tight crevice and hoisted herself up, kicking and wincing and doing everything she could to keep her left leg on stable ground. She’d gotten no more than twenty feet up the side of the rubble pile, however, when a cramp seized up both sides of her lower belly and down the insides of her thighs. She doubled over, gritting her teeth, then felt herself go faint and she had to fight off the urge to throw up. At last the cramp ebbed and she straightened at an insistent warm, sickening pressure building below her navel and then boring down between her hips.

  She knew.

  Here of all places. Now of all times. She flashed on her mother, wishing she were there to guide her. She wrestled out of the coverall and dug into the bottom of her pack for the tampon. She got it in, then struggled her way back into her coverall, still more than a bit uneasy at the feeling of it all, when she heard again the sound of rock against rock somewhere in the passages behind her.

  Then Kelly’s loathing, taunting voice burst from the darkness: “You’re up this way somewhere, ain’t you, you little bitch!”

  Cricket twisted, saw his headlamp cut the gloom, and started clawing her way up the hill, her knee threatening to snap again with every jerked action. She got up over the top of the hill. Ahead twenty yards, there was an opening facing south.

  A crash of rock froze her. Kelly was already on the breakdown pile, the belly belt itself hanging from his pack. He climbed like a gorilla, legs spread wide, shoulders bowed, arms swinging and grasping and tearing rock, all the while glaring up at her, his bruised face cavitating with wrath.

  “My ankles are burned!” he roared. “My nose is broken. I shit my fucking pants! Now you’re gonna pay!”

  Cricket threw her good foot against a boulder poised at the top of the bank and kicked it free. The rock bounced and cracked toward Kelly, causing him to dodge and lose his pace and balance. But it did not strike him, and after a moment’s pause he came on even faster.

  She kicked free two more stones, then got up on her feet and faltered and straight-leg strode her way under the arched opening in the wall. The passage was shaped like a cane resting in a corner, handle down; she descended it into a tight swale and confronted a smooth, slanted wall about fifteen feet high that had the consistency of moist chalk. She got her fingers and boot tread into the surface and began to climb up it in a watch-gear, back-and-forth motion.

  She was nine feet up the side of the chalk cliff when Kelly raced into the chamber beneath her, leaped, and swatted. She felt his fingers brush against the sole of her boot like a flame.

  “No!” she screamed, throwing her arms up and over, wrenching and kicking herself one-legged up the side of the precipice. Showers of moist clay balls struck Kelly in the face and had him wiping at his eyes and nose. Six, maybe ten feet above Cricket, the ceiling opened up into another passage.

  Kelly cleared his vision and with a grunt tried to plaster himself onto the wall. His stance was too narrow. He slid and crashed. Cricket gained another two feet on him. Then he figured out the strange motion needed to ascend the chalk cliff and he spidered his way up a quick eight feet. Cricket fought off the urge to give in. She reached and pulled and her head thrust up through the hole in the ceiling into a barrel of a head-high passage with a dry sandy bottom.

  Kelly batted at her boot again. With one great effort she pulled herself up and over into the sand. She rolled twice to create distance, snuffed out her headlamp, then dug into her pack and came up with the pistol. She aimed it shakily at the hole. Just as the top of Kelly’s helmet appeared twisting right and left, she yanked on the trigger. The explosion felt like nails being pounded through her eardrums. Kelly’s headlamp disintegrated.

  She lay there panting in the pitch darkness, listening, wanting so desperately to hear silence. Then she heard him curse. She’d shot the light off his headlamp and succeeded in sending him on a quick slide to the bottom of the moist clay incline. But he was not dead. A light quickly showed in the hole. He’d found his flashlight. He was coming again.

  Cricket looked at the gun and spun the cylinder. Empty.

  She struggled to her feet, snapped her headlamp beam on again, and threw the pistol down the hole. Kelly dodged it, then grinned and kept climbing. Cricket dragged herself down the tube, sensing that it would open into a vast space just ahead.

  “Got you now,” Kelly bellowed. He rolled over the lip of the hole in the floor of the barrel passage and sprang to his feet, brow hooded and shoulders sloped, insane with rage, coming right after her.

  Cricket looked over her shoulder. Kelly sprinted behind her, driving his body low like a linebacker preparing for tackle. She reached the entry to an expansive cavern shaped like an arena. Her leg buckled and she stumbled forward and down, hysterical with fear. Kelly planted one foot solidly, preparing to dive and drop his shoulder and forearm squarely on her chest

  Cricket caught a blur of motion in the shadows. Lyons lunged out from behind a boulder, his left arm extended straight out, catching Kelly square across the throat. The strangler’s feet kicked straight out in front of him and he landed stunned on the dense sand floor.

  Tom dived onto Cricket and gathered her in his arms. “Oh, oh my, thank you,” he said. “Thank you for being safe.”

  Cricket blinked, unbelieving, then the smell of her father broke through to her and she collapsed in sobs.

  “It’s okay, we’re gonna be okay,” he said, tears seeping down his cheeks. Cricket let herself melt into her father’s arms, thinking she could sleep there forever, heal and mend there forever. “We heard the shot and the sounds of running and Lyons ordered us to turn off our lights and wait. But we’re together again, Cricket. Together.”

  “Enough of the family reunion,” Gregor snarled. “We move.”

  “She’s hurt.” her dad said. “She needs rest.”

  “She can’t be that hurt or that tired,” Gregor said, playing his headlamp over Kelly, who was slowly coming back to consciousness. He looked thrashed, with a purple nose grossly distorted, burn marks circumscribing his shins, and a livid bruise at his Adam’s apple. He stank of shit.

  “I can get along on it, Dad,” Cricket said. “I just have to be careful rolling to the outside of my foot. Running hurts. Down climbing, too.”

  At the sound of her voice, Kelly’s eyes focused and he made to get up and attack her. Lyons put his boot in the middle of Kelly’s chest holding him to the floor. “Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

  Kelly’s rough paws closed round Lyons’s ankles and he attempted to throw the guard. Lyons flipped the shotgun off his shoulder and held it an inch from Kelly’s nose.

  “She fucking escaped,” Kelly seethed. “She shot at me. She used the belt on me. Burned me. Broke my nose. Made me shit my pants!”

  “Yeah, we can tell,” Lyons replied.

  Kelly’s oily face turned ruby. “You listen, Lyons, I’m gonna get my due with her.”

  “Not now you’re not,” Lyons growled.

  “All things in good time, Kelly,” Gregor said. “Let’s push for the stone before it’s too late.”

  Kelly hesitated, then the greed showed in his face again. He glanced from the scientist to Cricket huddled in Tom’s arms. “How far?”

/>   “This time tomorrow, it will be yours to hold,” Gregor said.

  Kelly pointed at Cricket. ‘This time tomorrow, you and me got a date. Meantime, put her in the belt again. And I’m carrying the goddamned transmitter.”

  3:14 P.M.

  PARKER’S RIDGE

  LABYRINTH CAVE

  Somewhere in the distant cave ahead, Whitney heard the whoosh and the thud of what sounded like a gate slamming. It echoed all around them, over and over and over.

  “Gunshot,” Finnerty murmured, then he looked at Whitney. “Be calm. I’m sure she’s okay.”

  “Quiet!” Two-Elk demanded. “The echoes, boss. Listen for the last one. It will tell us the direction.”

  The echoes slowed and the last one sounded and died. All three of them pointed south. Two-Elk and Finnerty got out front, their guns poised before them, headlamps barely glowing. Whitney felt beside herself with frustration. She wanted to grab one of the guns and go after Kelly and the hell with the marshals and their slow, methodical approach. This cave was her ground, not Fmnerty’s, not Two-Elk’s. She should be leading.

  Moving again in that caterpillar fashion, it took them nearly twenty minutes to reach the bottom of the breakdown pile and another twenty to climb it and reach the chalk cliff, where Kelly had tried to grab Cricket by the ankle. Two-Elk picked up the spent pistol lying in the sand on the floor of the cave and looked all around. “No blood. He could have just dropped it from his pack and it discharged.”

  “Or he missed,” Finnerty said.

  “Or Cricket did,” Whitney said.

  They ascended the wall and soon emerged into the cavern that resembled the Colosseum. There was no sight of Tom or Cricket, and Whitney felt despair begin to settle over her like a fog. Two-Elk passed down the slope, studying the cave floor. She looked up at Whitney and beamed. “One good thing: Your daughter’s back with your husband!”

  Whitney rushed to the tracker and stared down at the two pairs of air-bob-sole tracks side by side in the sand. She felt a flood of conflicting emotions. She was overjoyed that they were together again. But it was also so unfair, so cruel, so grueling to be going on and on like this, seeing the story of her lost family written in footprints and suggestion and supposition. She sank to her haunches and held her head in both hands.

  “Whitney, I know this is tough for you,” Finnerty began. “But …”

  “You want to know where they’re going,” she replied wearily.

  “That’s right,” he said softly. “I won’t give up.”

  She looked up at him, saw sincerity and determination in his expression, and she thought that he was very much like Tom, an essentially good man who did not quit, no matter what the odds arrayed against him.

  “They’re heading south, Marshal, toward the connection into Nyrens Ridge and the second cache,” she said. “It’s an easy-walking cave for many miles. Depending on Cricket’s condition, they could move quite rapidly through that part of the ridge. We could keep pushing the pace, trying to catch up, but it hasn’t worked yet.”

  “What do you suggest then?”

  “I suggest we creep along as best we can until we get to the confluence of those two rivers Tom described on that digital video back at cache one,” Whitney replied. “If Two-Elk says they’ve gone through toward Tower Ridge, we keep following. If Tom’s led them off course, we do what he wanted us to do in the first place—we wait in ambush.”

  Finnerty thought for a moment, then nodded. “How far to the two rivers?”

  “Three, maybe four hours.”

  “I’ll take point,” Finnerty said to Two-Elk

  “No,” Whitney said. This is my cave. I will.”

  7:50 P.M.

  HERMES RESERVOIR

  Helen Greidel clutched the lapels of her bright red rain parka, which flapped and billowed in the howling wind and whipping rain. Behind her, in the glare of headlamps, men in slickers emblazoned with FEMA across their backs passed sandbags up the steep bank of a levee. Beyond the levee, a vast body of water churned with whitecaps.

  “It has been a story of wild reversals of fortune here in day three of a subterranean drama that has gripped the world,” Greidel shouted into the camera. “In the most remarkable of those turns of events, NASA has just announced that it has regained signal contact with two separate groups of people trapped deep inside Labyrinth Cave.

  “Nearly two days ago, in the wake of a devastating earthquake that sealed the entrances to the largest cave in the world, NASA lost signal contact with fugitive inmates holding Tom Burke and his daughter Cricket hostage and with a rescue team composed of U.S. marshals led by Burke’s wife, Whitney,” Greidel went on. “No one on the surface knew whether they were dead or alive. Now NASA is telling us that they are receiving clear signals from Cricket and Tom Burke, who appear to be accompanied by only three of the four captors who took them hostage in a deadly attack involving an experiment designed to help man mine the moon. NASA says it is also receiving strong locator signals from Whitney Burke and two of the three marshals who entered the cave nearly three days ago as part of a daring rescue attempt.”

  Greidel paused, pressed her earpiece to her head, and nodded. “NASA officials are refusing to speculate on what has happened to the missing marshal or the missing escaped convict, but they are now saying that both groups trapped inside the cave appear to be moving westward toward Nyren’s Ridge, about an hour apart.

  “While all this is welcome news indeed, a new threat to those trapped underground appears to be building here some twenty miles to the northwest of the cave system.” Greidel turned and gestured to the FEMA workers toiling behind her.

  “That is the Furnace River, the river that drains Labyrinth Cave, and is also fed by this fourteen-hundred-acre reservoir. Federal disaster workers and a team from the Army Corps of Engineers have been mobilized out of fear that the reservoir’s dam, damaged in the earthquake, might now breach, sending hundreds of millions of gallons of water downstream and thrusting floodwaters high into the interior of the hollow mountains where those trapped are already engaged in a life-and-death struggle.”

  The screen switched to a shot of a flatbed truck diving through the night. Squatting on the truck was a giant rock-drilling machine.

  “NASA, meanwhile, has confirmed that it is building a road for a huge machine called a tunnel borer up the side of Tower Ridge, site of the collapsed entrance closest to those still alive underground. NASA says it hopes to begin an effort to reenter the cave in a second rescue attempt within hours.”

  Indeed, twelve miles to Greidel’s southeast, high on the flank of Tower Ridge, Jeffrey Swain watched as skidders and bulldozers churned up mud and knocked down trees, trying to flatten a way for the hulking metal torso of the boring machine, which was being winched slowly up toward the rubble pile that was once the Virgil Entrance to Labyrinth Cave.

  “The kid’s got the sensor running,” Boulter said, and the physicist turned to see Chester, who had refused to go to the hospital, now crouched in front of the thousands of tons of rock and dirt that blocked the way into the mountain. Swain’s nephew was colorless and haggard, still showing the physical effects of his near drowning earlier in the day. But as the analog and digital readouts fountained across the screens of the sensors he held, Chester’s face became so animated that the physicist could not help but smile.

  “It’s in there, Uncle Jeff, no more than a mile,” he crowed.

  “You’re sure it’s that close?” Swain asked, coming closer.

  “Look at the scans,” Chester replied. “We’re fluctuating between seven and nine megavolts. Low photoionization, relatively weak neutron and gamma-ray production. And look at the quark decay. Just incredible.”

  Indeed, the golden infinity symbol was expanding and contracting in even larger pulsations than had been present at the outflow on the Furnace River, and the peak of the bell graph was almost off the charts.

  The state police captain knelt to get a better view of th
e screens and said, “I still don’t understand why we didn’t get these readings when we came up here two days ago.”

  Chester shrugged. “Maybe Gregor’s got it on a timer and it wasn’t running then.”

  Swain shook his head. “More likely the cave-in had the place sealed up tight,” he said. “But the earthquake dislodged enough of the impacted debris that the stone’s unique electromagnetic signature must have begun to escape and be registered.”

  “They’re heading this way!” a voice cried out from the stormy twilight.

  Swain stood and looked downslope to find the pit bull figure of Angelis scrambling his way up through the muck, his arm still in a sling. When the NASA mission commander reached them, he explained about the signal transponders suddenly resurfacing on the cave map and the approximate location and direction in which the two groups were heading.

  “Gregor’s coming for the stone,” Chester said.

  “We’ve got to get in there first,” Swain agreed. “Gregor can’t be allowed near it. How long until they can get that tunnel borer up here?”

  Angelis looked down the hill. “At least another two hours.”

  But Boulter was barely listening. “You’re sure about Sanchez?” he asked Angelis.

  The mission commander sobered and nodded. “I’m sorry, Captain. There’s no signal showing.”

  Swain watched the trooper hang his head in stunned silence and felt anger build within him. So many people had died over this moon rock: Carson MacPherson, the three guards from Eddyville, the woman at the Laundromat, the missing inmate, the deputy marshal. Chester had almost been the eighth casualty. He knew the stone could mean so much good for mankind. But that was just a concept. Now he was beginning to see the rock as a symbol of death and lies and greed and—

  The physicist stopped in midthought, attracted to and bewildered by the sight of a half-dozen military tanks and armored personnel carriers emerging out of the rain and fog from behind the tunnel borer. Soldiers began pouring out of the carriers. The tanks chugged by the bulldozers and skidders and ground to a halt twenty yards away.