by John Darnton
They stepped inside to investigate, careful not to touch the walls and trying to tread lightly, as if walking on thin ice. Tizzie went first and Jude made no effort to stop her—he was finding it hard to breathe and took gulps of air into his lungs. She stopped and he came up behind her, and they shined their flashlights over the debris before them, hoping to spot a hole. They didn't see one. The wall of rock and dirt appeared impenetrable, starting at the ceiling of the tunnel and slanting down at an angle to the floor. Tizzie poked it gently with her foot.
"Christ," he said. "We've had it."
"Maybe we could dig our way out, if we were careful. We could pile the dirt inside the room."
He shined the beam up at the roof, where a thin trickle of dirt was still pouring down through a crack.
"Maybe, but chances are we'd just make it worse. Once the ceiling is cracked like that, there's nothing to stop more earth from pouring through. It's like sand in an hourglass."
"Let's go back," she said. He felt relief to be leaving the tunnel.
Inside the chamber, they examined every wall, looking for an indentation, a crevice, anything that might hint at a passageway out. Again, they found nothing, except for the single tunnel at the rear that led to their cave. Tizzie went to investigate it, but Jude stayed in the chamber, watching her light bounce off the narrow walls and then recede, getting dimmer until it disappeared altogether.
He badly wanted a cigarette, and felt the pack in his pocket, but he knew that would be foolish and selfish—under no circumstances could he use up the little remaining oxygen. He looked around the chamber again, trying to estimate the size. How long would the air last?
For want of anything else to do, he paced in a circle, trying to think and to run through the possibilities. It was like examining the tunnels—there was none that led anywhere.
So deep in thought was he that he didn't notice Tizzie's return. He was startled when she spoke.
"Nothing," she said in a tone of resignation. "No way out there at all."
¨
When Skyler awoke in the motel room bed, with the sheets twisted and damp with sweat, he knew that something was wrong—grievously wrong. His illness had taken a turn for the worse—more than a turn, he had entered a whole new territory. He was confused; he had been sick before, but never like this.
His head was burning and his chest was racked by pain. The violence of these fits of pain scared him; his teeth clacked together and the whole bed seemed to vibrate. He felt feverishly cold and wrapped himself in blankets, then suddenly so hot he had to toss them off. His throat was parched, and he was desperately thirsty.
Waiting until a shivering spell passed, he sat up, naked. He moved slowly to the edge of the bed and swung his feet to the floor. They fell like dead weights. Using the headboard, he pulled himself up and shuffled across the room into the hall. He managed to make it to the bathroom, flicked on the light, and turned on a faucet. He picked a paper cover off a glass and filled it with water, downing it in one long swallow. Then he took another. He was suddenly exhausted. His eyes lifted to the mirror, and he was shocked by the face that peered back. His eyes were lifeless, two glazed orbs set deep and rounded by blue-brown circles. His skin was loose and pallid; it hung in jowls from his sunken cheeks. His lips were cracked into pink and white strips, flaked with shards of skin.
A wave overtook him again—was it hot or cold?—he couldn't tell. But it was powerful. His knees buckled and he knelt on the floor, the glass falling from his hand and breaking in the sink. He fell and crumpled into a ball, lying like that until he felt the spasm pass. As the shivers subsided, his eyes fastened on a corner where there was a yellow plastic stand for a toilet brush. He stared at it, a fixed point, straining to regain equilibrium. A full minute passed.
He crawled out of the bathroom, sat for a while on the industrial carpet, regained some strength and finally made it to the bed, collapsing upon it. He lapsed into a half faint and then opened his eyes. The sheets were soiled—spots of something. He tried to focus: it was dark, red. Blood. He looked down at his thin, pale legs, his thighs, his arms. There was blood smeared on his chest. It came from his hand, which he had cut on the glass. He held it up and watched the blood drip from his palm.
He looked to one side and saw the side table with a lamp and the phone. He moved across and reached for the receiver and brought it to his ear, pulling the phone off the nightstand. The line was quiet. He saw a folded card of instructions and picked it up, but couldn't read the blurred letters. He pulled the phone up by the cord and dialed numbers at random, and the receiver gave a strange buzzing. It was hopeless. He dropped it and rolled over to the wall, made a fist and began banging upon it. Surely Tizzie would hear him and come to help him. But she did not. He lay back and tried to think. He cocked his arm over his head, then felt the liquid running across his face and sat up and looked: the wall he had been banging had red smears upon it. He saw that it was connected not to Tizzie's room but to the bathroom he had just been in. He thought he heard the water running.
He fell back onto the sheets and drifted off to sleep. It was not a peaceful, nurturing sleep, but a wild, rocky sleep. It seemed to seize him and shake him. He awoke once, saw that the room was darkening, and fell off again. He tossed back and forth in the delirium of nightmares: he was back on the island, pursued by the Orderlies and the dogs. He was racing through the swamp, the water grabbing his legs so that he made little progress as the hunting party got closer and closer. He came to a clearing, and the dogs came at him from all sides. They surrounded him, backed him into a tree, snarling, their fangs bared, about to leap for his throat.... He sat up in bed, breathing heavily and sweating.
He looked around, getting his bearings. The light was on in the bathroom, shining onto the carpet outside and casting long shadows upon the wall opposite. He heard water running. He turned on the bedside light and saw red streaked across the wall, soaked into the sheets, smear-dried upon his chest. He held up his hand and examined a gash caked with thick blood. He must have lost a lot of it. Perhaps that was why he felt so weak.
He tried to stand, felt the chest pain, sat down and tried again. This time he was able to rise to this feet, and he stood there almost motionless for a few seconds, leaning slowly first to one side and then another. He managed to walk to a chair where he had thrown his pants. Painfully, leaning against the wall and finally sitting on the chair and lifting first one leg and then the other, he was able to put them on. He rested for a while, trying to remember what it was he wanted to do. His mind felt waterlogged.
He stood again, still wavering, and walked slowly to the door. It was locked with a chain and he tried to undo it, but couldn't fit the sliding guide into the open track. He turned the doorknob and pulled it, so that the door lunged open five inches and then jammed. Through the crack, he looked out and saw a slice of parking lot and felt a hot, dry wind. It was already growing dark.
He closed the door and leaned against it with his shoulder, using his opposite hand to move the chain slowly away from him. Then he jiggled it, and much to his relief, it fell and swung along the door like a pendulum. He grasped the doorknob again and turned it slowly, stepping backward so quickly that he almost lost his balance. He pulled the door open. The air hit him, hot and heavy. He stepped outside, grabbed a railing and bent over it, holding onto it with both hands and shoving them ahead like a man planing a wooden plank. The railing bent into a banister and slanted down the staircase. He followed it down like a drunkard, one step at a time.
It took him a long time to descend the steps. He stopped three or four times, when he felt faint, and he held on for dear life with both hands, knowing that if he sat down, if he gave in to that overwhelming desire to rest, he wouldn't get up again. He didn't give in, and he made it to the bottom, but then he was confronted with another dilemma. He was there in the open with nothing to hold onto. There was no one around. How would he make it across the parking lot?
He took a de
ep breath and lunged ahead. He felt himself toppling forward and keep pumping his feet ahead of him to right the balance until he was practically running, bent at an angle like a tree that wanted to crash down. In this curious fashion, he loped across the lot, barefoot and stripped to the waist, covered with blood. He mounted the curb, tore through a line of bushes and came crashing into the motel office, looking up just in time to see the mouth of the receptionist form into a perfect oval. The scream seemed to come from her diaphragm—it didn't come out right away, delayed like a sonic boom, but when it came, it was full-bodied. It was a bloodthirsty yell, and it rent the gathering dusk like an ax.
Chapter 22
"You're sure you checked everywhere? Every crevice? Every hole?"
Jude asked largely just to be asking, to be doing something, to be raking over all the possibilities together instead of sinking separately into despair.
Tizzie, seated upon the metal table, didn't answer. Instead, she just nodded in an absentminded way.
He was walking around the chamber, looking at every object there with a new eye, thinking of how it might be used for some purpose other than for the one for which it was built—for escape. He felt his movements were a little too frenetic.
Above all, he was trying to push out of his mind the idea that would not go away, no matter how hard he tried—the suspicion that breathing was actually becoming a little more difficult, that the oxygen was already noticeably depleting. He wasn't good at taking a mental measure of cubic meters or figuring out how much time they had left. But he knew one thing: they would die of suffocation long before starvation. The image of them thrashing about and gasping for air and pulling long drafts of poisoning carbon dioxide into their lungs was too horrific to contemplate.
He looked at Tizzie, sitting there, her hair tousled, her legs swinging slowly underneath the table. Her eyes rose to meet his, and she smiled a little, at first weakly and then sweetly. He smiled back and walked over and sat next to her and held her to calm himself as much as her. He felt a rush of feeling for her.
"I've got to admit, you picked a hell of a place for reconciliation," he said.
She turned toward him and hugged him.
"I wanted your undivided attention."
"You got that, all right."
She became serious. "Jude, how much time do you think we have?"
"You mean, if we don't get out?"
"Yes."
"I don't know." He pretended to consider it for the first time. "Couple of days maybe, more or less." He knew it would be less.
"It's strange," she said. "As far as the world is concerned, we'll just drop out of sight, totally disappear. I guess they'd find your car eventually, maybe figure out what happened."
"Maybe."
"There's so much left undone. My parents. I don't know what they'll do. They need me. Skyler—he'll be lost without us. It's funny when you think about it—here I was supposed to live to a hundred and forty and I'm barely thirty.
"Me, too. 'Course I never thought I'd make it past sixty."
"I'm not leaving anything behind. There'll be nothing to show I even passed through. You—you're leaving Skyler. In a way, that's like leaving part of yourself."
"Maybe. It doesn't feel that way."
"But he's got all your genes, the same makeup. Maybe he'll pass it on to the next generation."
"That's something I'd rather do myself."
"But at least there'll be progeny of sorts. The line will continue."
"Some consolation."
It came out sounding bitter, and he hadn't intended that. He knew she was trying to salvage some ray of hope for him, and he appreciated the effort.
They lay back upon the cool metal table and stayed there side by side with an arm around each other, looking up at the rocks above.
"Hope this thing can hold us," she said.
Then she added: "Jude. I've got an idea!" She sat up excitedly. "I don't know if it would work, but it's worth a try."
She jumped off the table, and he did the same. Then she grasped the edge of the table with both hands and lifted it an inch off the floor.
"I remember reading that in old mines they sometimes built a second support system. It's like a second ceiling, with braces and beams right under the first one. We can use this table like that—it'll support the dirt while we dig underneath it."
He, too, lifted the table.
"If it's strong enough," he said. He let it go and it landed with a solid thunk. "We might as well try it. Anything's better than doing nothing."
He turned his back to the front end of the table and picked it up with his hands behind him. She picked up the rear. It was solid steel, heavier than he expected, which was good. They carried it across the chamber and into the passageway, stopping twice to rest. Once inside the tunnel, it was a snug fit. Not much dirt would fall through the cracks on either side—if only it was strong enough to hold. He continued walking, holding the lighted flashlight tightly under his left arm. When they reached the landfill, he set the table down gently. Then he scrambled back to where Tizzie was, and the two of them crawled underneath it. They arched their backs to raise it and moved it ahead another six inches, letting it come to rest at the foot of the pyramid of dirt. They backed out and returned to the chamber.
They selected a smaller table and carried it into the tunnel and placed it sideways on top of the other one so that it extended across the width of the passage, forming a backboard to catch falling dirt. Then they found some implements to dig with—a knife, a tin can, an ax handle and a large spoon—and two large cardboard boxes in which to haul the loose earth back into the chamber.
Jude went first. He crawled all the way under the table, stuck the flashlight into a small crevice so that the beam aimed forward, and pondered the wall of rock and dirt. Gingerly, he lifted the spoon and poked the wall. It was loose.
He pried out a spoonful of dirt and pebbles that fell onto the rocky floor.
Then another and another. Soon a little mound formed before him.
"I don't know," he said dubiously. "This is like Sisyphus pushing the rock up the damned hill. Every time I dig some out, more falls down to take its place."
"Try it higher," said Tizzie.
He did, and here the dirt was damp, so that he was able to burrow straight ahead and dig a hole abut a feet deep. He then widened it and worked down, while Tizzie used the tin can to pour the loose dirt into the cartons. She dragged them into the chamber and dumped them against a near wall. After an hour, he had scooped out a cavity slightly taller than the table and extending two feet into the cave-in. He crawled out and they took up positions to shove the table forward, bending on one knee and digging their back feet in for support.
"Both together," said Tizzie. "That's the key. And keep pushing—all the way."
They pushed, but the table didn't move. The front legs were stuck against ridges in the uneven floor.
"I'm about to enter my worst nightmare," said Jude. And he dropped down, crawled under the table and rested on all fours. "Together," he said. "On three." And he counted slowly but emphatically: "One... Two... Three"
At that, Jude pushed up with his back with all his might, raising the table a half inch or so, and just at that moment Tizzie shoved it forward, so hard that she lost her balance and slammed into it with her shoulder. It lunged ahead and smashed into the dirt wall, setting off a shower of stones and rubble that fell upon the tabletop and trickled down the edges on both sides of Jude. It turned dark. His flashlight was dislodged, and he had to sift through a pile of dirt to find it. Then he jumped out from underneath the table. When Tizzie shined her light upon him, his face was pale under the smudges of dirt.
"Sorry," she said. "I forgot—you've got this thing about being buried alive."
"I'm strange that way."
"Well, we made some progress. If the dirt is damp enough, we can keep going. I bet there's an underground spring somewhere up there—maybe that's what caused the ca
ve-in in the first place."
"Don't tell me you think it was natural. I could have sworn I heard something before—footsteps or something. I think someone was there."
"Maybe they were killed," she said sarcastically. "Maybe we'll find the body."
"Thanks. That's a hell of an incentive to keep going."
They switched places, Tizzie digging and Jude hauling the dirt away. She used the knife, which she hammered deep into the dirt using the ax handle, not at all fazed by the cascades of earth falling around her. Jude found that he could raise the table himself and carry it ahead a few inches at a time. Each time, it got harder to move, but their progress in digging their tunnel was much more rapid.
After four hours, they had penetrated so deep that the smaller table on top reached the upper wall of the cave-in. They went to the chamber, retrieved a third table, and set it in the passageway, end to end with the one they had been using. They rested for some minutes lying on the floor.
By now Jude dreaded it every time he had to crawl under the table. His phobia was rampant and he fell prey to the dark side of his imagination. What if the cave-in was so vast they couldn't tunnel all the way through it? What if the table—already almost immobile because of the weight it was holding—simply refused to move? Or if the oxygen finally gave out?
Tizzie, on the other hand, seemed imperturbable. Jude was filled with admiration for her. He remarked upon it and she stood up to reply, wiping her hands on the rear seat of her blue jeans: "It's just because I've been blessed with a lack of imagination."
Again, he was struck by a new appreciation of her—of her energy, her confidence and resilience, her strength and raw-boned beauty.
"If we ever get out of this..." he said.
"Then what?"
"You're going to have a tough time keeping me away."
She smiled. "First things first. Back to the salt mines."
It was Jude's turn to work the cave-in face, and as he hacked away, the surface seemed more permeable. He was able to scoop out whole handfuls of dirt, and as he did so, he imagined he could feel the weight of the earth above shifting and straining. Reaching his arm into the recess, he tried not to think of what he was doing and of the protuberance above, the thin crust that could crumble at any moment, bringing down an avalanche. He pulled out a rock the size of a fist and dislodged a heap of sandy dirt that showered down to cover his knees. After that, he slowed down and worked more cautiously.