Labyrinth

by Mark T Sullivan

  “I don’t know,” Swain admitted.

  “I’ll say it again, Doctor: Failure is not an option.”

  “Everybody in the government has made that clear to me from the get-go,” Swain said, trying to control the rising anger he felt.

  “You have what you need to control that thing once we get in there?”

  “We think so,” Swain replied. “Again, General, as I’ve been saying since the beginning of this fiasco, we’ve never dealt with anything like moon rock 66095 before.”

  Angelis said, “You said it could destabilize if it was handled incorrectly.”

  The physicist nodded. “Gregor’s log notes indicate the stone reacts mercurially in the presence of quick surges or lapses of energy. But I think we’re okay as long as it doesn’t receive any more big jolts.”

  “All you keep talking about is this stone,” Chester shouted in frustration. “What about those people in there? Shouldn’t we be thinking more about how to rescue them?”

  At that, the general’s expression turned icy. “My orders are clear, young man. The people trapped inside the cave are not the primary concern of the U.S. government. The rock is.”

  Swain’s jaw dropped. “You can’t be serious.”

  “Dead serious,” Hayes replied, glancing at his watch. It was 7:20 exactly.

  “This is outrageous,” the physicist cried. “Nothing is worth those people’s lives.”

  “No?” the general snapped. “Wasn’t it you who told the President the rock could be the most important discovery since the splitting of the atom?”

  “But those people—” Swain said.

  “In the course of history, they will be nothing more than a footnote,” Hayes said. “The United States in possession of the rock will be all that matters.”

  Swain made to protest, then turned and walked away, feeling used and sullied for his part in all that had occurred. He felt Chester’s hand on his shoulder. “You couldn’t have known, Uncle Jeff,” he said.

  “I should have known, Chester, and that’s the awful part of it,” Swain replied bitterly. “If I hadn’t been so caught up in the science, in the glory of the remarkable discovery, I could have predicted what the politicians would do. They want it for its power. Nothing more.”

  A cool wind swept across the open slope below. Several miles to the southwest, jagged lines of lightning rent the sky. And above the caterwauling of the shaft borer came the explosive rumblings of thunder.

  Upriver, emergency workers and engineers did not hear the thunder. It was drowned out by a great cracking and heaving as the earthen dam holding back the Hermes Reservoir exploded outward and millions upon millions of gallons of water, a rolling wall the color of nickel, bore downriver, obliterating everything in its path.

  7:21 A.M.

  NYREN’S-TOWER CONNECTION ROUTE

  LABYRINTH CAVE

  Cricket crawled along a greasy passage descending deep inside the seventh of the Labyrinth’s nine ridges. Gregor was on all fours in front of her, creeping after her dad. Her knee was killing her, but she drove herself without mercy, doing everything to keep space between her and Kelly, who crawled behind her.

  The roof of the cave rose suddenly to eight feet and she found herself in a low, rectangular cavern. The walls and ceiling were topaz in color and showed signs of heavy anastomoses—scores of small, winding tubes connected in a mazelike pattern that made the rock look like termites had been at it. The pocking was heaviest where the left wall of the cave met the roof, so heavy that it looked like an overlay in the way a sculptor might use latticework to effect bas-relief.

  Cricket got to her feet and felt her knee give way. Her father caught her and held her while she moaned.

  “Keep her moving!” Gregor exhorted.

  “She needs to rest,” Tom said in a flat monotone that surprised her. “Just give her fifteen minutes.”

  “Sure, what the fuck, take fifteen,” Kelly slurred, a sleepy grin on his filthy, swarthy face. “Take a load off, Gregor. Eat a little.”

  Kelly’s pupils were dilated, his irises watery. He opened a plastic container, shook out two white pills, and swallowed them. During the night, they had reached the second cache and restocked their supplies. In the medical kit Kelly had found thirty-five doses of Percoset, a narcotic painkiller, and had begun eating them, not only for the high but their constipating side effects.

  “Ten minutes, no more,” Gregor snapped. The stone’s just ahead of us, Kelly.”

  Cricket leaned on her father, who helped her to a sitting position against a huge boulder near the center of the cavern. He sat beside her, staring down at the pocked rock between his legs. In that position, he reminded her of her mother in the aftermath of one of her waking nightmares, haunted, chewed up, and alone; and it shocked Cricket.

  “You okay, Dad?” she whispered. “You look awful.”

  “I keep seeing you on that stream bank with Kelly jamming his thumb down on that button,” he murmured. “I keep seeing myself unable to help you, Cricket. I keep seeing the blood trickling from Lyons’s head. I keep wondering why no one was there at the two rivers. Can’t seem to make those thoughts stop circling in my head. Can’t seem to stop thinking that once we reach that stone, we’ll be—”

  “Fine,” she said firmly. “We’ll be fine, Dad.”

  He smiled, but it was a grim smile. He did not look at her and said nothing. She’d never seen him like this. This wasn’t the man she knew as her father at all. This was someone beaten and Tom Burke had never been beaten.

  “We’re going to get out of here and see Mommy, right? Dad? Look at me. We’re going to get out of here, right?”

  At last he raised his head in her direction, and his rheumy, bloodshot eyes seemed to look right through her.

  “Don’t know, Crick,” he said. “Just don’t know anymore.”

  “But what about what Grandpa used to say,” she pleaded. “With each other we can get through anything?”

  “Don’t know about that either,” he replied dully.

  7:30 A.M.

  NYREN’S-TOWER CONNECTION ROUTE

  LABYRINTH CAVE

  Whitney, Two-Elk, and Finnerty, meanwhile, were less than a half mile behind Tom and Cricket, inching their way along a ledge above a horizontal chasm where the pewter-colored walls had been water sculpted into thin vertical flutes. They disturbed acrid dust that got into Whitney’s eyes and nose and burned at the back of her throat. When they cleared the ledge, Two-Elk knelt in the dust, examining the footprints.

  “How far ahead are they?” Finnerty asked.

  “Can’t tell,” Two-Elk replied. “I’m having trouble understanding how the tracks change over time underground. We should slow down, boss, or we might bounce right on top of them.”

  “You already were on top of them,” Whitney interjected bitterly. “Three days and you had them and did nothing!”

  Finnerty turned to her and spoke with great restraint. “We’ve been over this, Whitney. We had no clear shot. And I was not about to jeopardize the lives of your husband and daughter by taking a risk like that.”

  “You keep saying it’s about my family,” she retorted. “But I’ve thought about it Marshal. Your job is recapturing fugitives. To you, that’s the bottom line. Tom and Cricket could die and you could get those men and it would all be a success to you.”

  Finnerty’s face contorted and he spat out his response: “Mrs. Burke, you have no idea what I think about how I consider my job, my life. No idea! I’d venture to say my wife has no idea whether I’m alive or dead. I’d venture to say Two-Elk’s father and sister are in the same boat. As it stands, you know your husband and daughter are alive. You’ve seen them. Now you may hate me for making that decision back there, but I can live with that because I know I made the right choice. We’ll make another attempt to save your family at the stone. Period.”

  They stood there, glaring at each other.

  At last, Whitney said, “What if they get to that
stupid rock and those inmates kill my family before we catch up?”

  “I don’t deal in what-ifs,” Finnerty said. “I promise you, we’re not done yet. Not by a long shot. Now they’re getting farther away from us while you argue. Where do we go next, Mrs. Burke? Or do you just want to sit here and second-guess me until your family is dead?”

  Whitney felt her jaw tighten, then she gestured at a passage that led down and to the right. “We crawl through that hole and descend toward Pluto’s River. That’s the final part of the connection route into Tower Ridge.”

  Two-Elk looked at the sensor. “That’s where the rock’s got to be, boss. Signal’s getting real strong.”

  Finnerty did not wait for Whitney to lead, but dropped through the crevice in the rock going down into the tight passage that led into the deepest part of Labyrinth Cave. As Two-Elk disappeared behind him, Whitney told herself that no matter what the marshal said, if she got anywhere near Cricket and Tom again, she was going to scream at them to run. She was going to let them know she’d come for them. She would save them—or die trying.

  Two-Elk’s light faded and Whitney began to wriggle down into the crevice. Just before her shoulders twisted through the opening she swore she caught a flash of light sweeping through the darkness behind her. She whipped her head around, letting her headlamp explore the blackness, her heart pounding.

  But there was nothing behind her but rock and shadow.

  7:40 A.M.

  NYRENS-TOWER CONNECTION ROUTE

  LABYRINTH CAVE

  Tom eased his way feet first down a steep, twisting cavity in the rock His head felt squeezed, as if it were in a vise that altered his senses. Everything seemed blunted: his vision, his touch, his taste. Then ahead he heard what sounded like the muffled clash of cymbals in a concert hall.

  “What’s that noise?” Gregor demanded.

  “Don’t know,” he replied, genuinely confused. “Pluto’s River is right ahead of us a couple of hundred yards. But I’ve never heard it sound like that before.”

  Indeed, in Tom’s experience, the underground watercourse that marked the last 175 yards between Nyrens Ridge and Tower Ridge had never run higher than waist deep and always at a lethargic pace that produced a gentle gurgling. But when he emerged from the feeder passage onto a boulder above the subterranean river, he confronted a cataract of foaming bronze water, swirling and pounding against the walls of the cave. Less than two feet of air showed between the churning liquid and the roof. In a heartbeat, that viselike sensation left him and he felt his nerves go raw.

  “The storm up on the surface must have the Furnace out of control, backing up into its tributaries,” Tom shouted. “It’s too dangerous to cross!”

  Gregor looked from the river to Tom and back again. “Is this the only way to Tower Ridge?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then we’re going across.”

  “We’ll drown!”

  “The stone’s right there on the other side. I feel it in every cell in my body. We’re going. Now. Or we’re dying here. Now!”

  Kelly, who had been eating more of the pain pills, appeared unaware of the gravity of the situation. “Let’s go, let’s go,” he slurred waving the belly belt device and Lyons’s shotgun at Tom. “Time to take a dip, Burke.”

  Tom looked at Cricket. “At least let her stay. With her knee, there’s no way she’ll make it.”

  “No, Daddy,” Cricket cried. “If you’re going, I’m going.”

  Tom hesitated, then saw Kelly’s thumb move toward the belly belt’s transmitter. “Go,” he said.

  Tom climbed into the churning water. The river punched at the backs of his legs, spun him at the waist, made him stagger and almost go under. Then he spread his stance wide and got some semblance of balance. “The current’s strong! We’ll have to lock arms to cross!”

  Cricket looked out at her father in the water, then down at the hand that Kelly offered with a narcotic grin. “I’d rather stick my hand in acid,” she said.

  The strangler’s grin evaporated and he raised his hamlike fist. But Gregor got between them. “The girl stays with me,” he said.

  Gregor hooked his right forearm through Cricket’s left elbow and tugged her toward the water. She took one awkward step. Cold, muddy water filled her boots. At the second step, the water surged against her knee and it almost buckled. She hopped ahead and plunged off into the deep water, which reached the bottom of her rib cage. Like her father, she almost went under. But Gregor proved extraordinarily strong and kept her upright. Kelly came into the water and grabbed Gregor’s other arm, then her dad linked his with Cricket’s and together they set off in a shuffling sidestep out into a current that changed every few feet, gyrating and buffeting them from all angles.

  The beams from their headlamps were like those of lighthouses cutting back and forth across the flooding waters. By the time they had covered seventy yards, barely eighteen inches separated the surface of the river from the curved ceiling of the cave. At every step, the river beat at Cricket’s shoulder, torso, and knee, turning her, floating her, threatening to topple and pull her under.

  “This is what Mom must have felt in the Terror Hole,” Cricket said.

  “Worse,” her dad said through gritted teeth. “She had no room to move.”

  The current suddenly surged and pulled her from her father’s grasp. Her foot caught in a cavity in the riverbed. A hot knife of pain ripped through her knee, and despite Gregor’s iron grip on her other arm, she lurched forward, flailing to stay upright. The water flooded into her mouth and made her gag. It broke over her helmet and gushed in at the neckline of her dry suit.

  Her hamstring muscles, already so fatigued from compensating for her injured knee, now cramped at the effort of wading. Her father grabbed hold of her again and she got her balance. She plunged her hand under the water, trying to hold her knee steady, thinking it would not be possible to take another step. Then she saw her dad’s headlamp angle toward the ceiling as if he were looking for a way marker. Cricket labored to get herself upright and shine her beam alongside his. Their lights revealed diagonal arches carved into the stone that made the roof look like the ribwork of an old ship’s hull. And then their lamps found a long, jagged crack cutting at a forty-five-degree angle across the ceiling.

  Her father smiled down at her with his old confidence. “We’re gonna make it!”

  He led them crosscurrent, tracking the fissure. Ahead fifteen yards, Cricket saw where the crack became a crevice that cleaved the ceiling nearly three feet wide, and within that crevice a series of ledges led to higher ground. She felt strangely energized by the chaos. She was thinking of survival now, hers and her father’s and nothing else.

  “Wait here,” Tom said. “There’s a deep hole in front of us. Let me swim across and get up in that fissure in the ceiling before you come.”

  With that he pushed off, stroking through the current, stopping to tread just below the widest point of the opening in the roof. He bobbed then reached up and tried to get a handhold so he might hoist himself out of the water. But the wall there was nearly vertical. Every time he tried for purchase, his gloves slipped. At last, Cricket saw him draw in a big breath, then drop totally under the water. A second later, he thrust upward, bursting out of the river even as he threw both arms up and to the side toward the walls of the fissure. He shook there for an instant in an iron cross position, then managed to kick his foot forward onto a tiny nub of support. Another two moves and he was up inside the gash in the ceiling of the river passage, feet braced against both sides, looking back at them, holding out his hand.

  “Cricket first,” he called.

  “Not a chance,” Kelly said. He let go of Gregor and swam. When he got beneath Tom, he thrust up his hand. Her dad caught it and hauled Kelly to safety. Gregor pushed Cricket away from him and began stroking. Without his weight to anchor her, Cricket had to fight with every ounce of strength to avoid being swept away.

  “All right now, Cri
cket,” her dad yelled when Gregor had been lifted into the fissure. “Your turn!”

  Cricket took a deep breath, kicked off the bottom with her good leg, and stroked her way across the fifteen yards of spinning copper water toward his outstretched arm. The current was stronger, much stronger than she expected, like a riptide she’d once been caught in off Cape Hatteras. For a second, the idea that she wasn’t going to make it flashed through her. Then she shook it off, clenched her teeth, and punched her arms up and over, up and over, focusing on her dad’s hand. Nothing else mattered. Just the glove. Inches away now. And then she was right below it She tried to stand, but couldn’t. The water was too deep. She treaded, then threw her right arm upward and just missed.

  “Again!” her dad yelled.

  Cricket felt her strength waning. But she took a deep breath and flailed upward with her right arm toward his outstretched hand. He caught her by her fingertips. Cricket threw up her other hand and caught his glove and grinned fiercely when she felt herself being lifted.

  Her shoulders came free of the flooding subterranean river, then her torso and her thighs. Cricket could see the strain the move was putting on her father, so she tried to kick her good leg forward in the same way he had in order to get herself into the fissure. But instead of helping the situation, the jerking motion tore her dad’s glove free of his hand and she felt herself break from his grasp and fall.

  “Daddy!”

  7:45 A.M.

  NYREN’S-TOWER CONNECTION ROUTE

  LABYRINTH CAVE

  Whitney was concentrating so hard on squeezing herself sideways between the walls of sharp stone on the twisted route that wound steeply down into the west flank of Nyren’s Ridge that the noise echoing somewhere in the cave below her did not register at first.

  She slid free of the crack, took five steps after Two-Elk, then halted as the implications of the cacophonous sound curtain hauled back and pulverized her. Her tongue dried so fast she thought it would crack. Her vision wavered, then distorted toward hallucination when she stepped like a zombie around the last turn of passage and saw the raging torrent that was Pluto’s River.