Subterrestrial (23 page)

“There’s no way out,” Calder said. There was a tremor in her voice, whether from her chattering teeth or the despair she visibly struggled to suppress, he couldn’t be sure.

Mitchell knelt and placed his palm on the ice. The sensation of water flowing beneath it was faint, but unmistakable.

Calder stepped cautiously out onto the ice beside him. There was a sudden popping sound, yet the ice remained firmly underfoot. The pool was maybe fifteen feet in diameter and gave no clue as to the direction the water flowed or where it might lead.

“Up there,” Calder whispered. Mitchell followed her light to the ceiling, where droplets of condensation had formed what looked like a curtain of ice at the edge of a ridge in the rocky roof. “Try standing over here.”

He stepped carefully to his left and followed her handheld beam to a point where it passed through the ice and diffused into its depths. There was a wavering blue glow at the farthest reaches of the light.

“That has to be the ocean,” Calder said.

“Through twenty feet of solid ice.”

“We can break through.”

“With what? Our hands?”

“We can use the climbing anchors. Or maybe the flare guns.”

“And even if we get through, we’ll only succeed in bringing the whole ocean down on our heads.”

“We have tanks—”

“With fifteen minutes of air.”

“Do you have to argue with everything I say?”

“If everything you say leads to us getting killed, then, yeah, I guess I do.”

“Then you can stay here for all I care.” She inched out onto the ice. “I’m getting out of here. With or without you.”

“If you say so.”

“I do.”

“So how do you intend to reach the opening, let alone tunnel nearly straight up through it?”

The ice groaned. She paused before taking another step.

“You know, if you don’t have anything helpful to say, you should really just keep your mouth—”

She was gone before he even heard the cracking sound of the ice breaking. Her light swung upward and traced a line across the wall to the ceiling before following her into the depths.

“Brooke!” Mitchell shouted. He tucked the flare gun into the pouch on his backpack, lowered himself to his belly to distribute his weight, and scooted as fast as he dared across the ice toward the hole through which she’d vanished. Fissures spread beneath him like lightning. The ice at the center was startlingly thin, as though it had only recently formed.

The vague aura of her flashlight drifted to his left as it sank into the depths.

Calder burst from the water with a splash that caused water to spread across the ice. She coughed and treaded comfortably enough. Her flashlight continued to dim, until, finally, it faded into the darkness.

“How deep is it?” Mitchell asked.

“I don’t know. I couldn’t feel the bottom.”

She raised her elbows onto the ice and attempted to pull herself up. It gave way with a snap that sent Mitchell scurrying backward.

“Don’t do that. You’ll only make it worse.”

“I don’t see how things could possibly get any worse.”

Mitchell opened his mouth to chastise her for tempting fate but didn’t get a single word out. The ice fractured beneath him and dropped him straight down into the frigid water. The cold came as such a shock that he nearly lost his grip on their lone remaining light.

He kicked back to the surface and spat out the brackish water. It reminded him of the taste of Cook Inlet near Anchorage, where the Susitna and Matanuska Rivers fed freshwater into the Gulf of Alaska. He tried to pull himself back onto the ice, but it broke and sent him right back under.

“Don’t do that,” Calder said. “You’ll only make it worse.”

Mitchell rounded on her, but didn’t have the energy to argue. Besides, it hadn’t accomplished anything so far, unless he wanted to count this unplanned dip, which, now that he thought up about it, might end up being a stroke of good fortune after all.

The current was weak, but he felt it pulling on his legs. It seemed to be stronger near his feet.

“Think you can keep from drowning us both for a few seconds longer?” Mitchell asked.

He didn’t wait for her reply. He sank beneath the surface, inverted himself, and used the ice to propel himself deeper. The flashlight barely emitted enough light to illuminate a three-foot aura in front of him, but he would have to make it work. The cold made the air in his chest heavier, especially at this depth. He looked as fast as he could for any sign—

There. An opening in the limestone. Barely wide enough to swim through.

He was about to return to the surface when he saw another one, and another one still. There had to be a half dozen, all branching from this one small pool. And then it hit him. This wasn’t a pool at all. It was a sinkhole, like the cenotes on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, where the water from the surface eroded straight down through the karst topography and seemingly never stopped. Some of them were so deep that divers had yet to reach the bottom, nor had they been able to fully map the infinite passageways that radiated outward beneath the continental shelf.

He flipped over and swam back toward the gap in the ice. They needed to think long and hard about their options. Fifteen minutes of air wasn’t enough time for any kind of exploration. If they guessed wrong, they could be swimming to their deaths. Maybe they should turn around while they were still able, see if they could find a different passage they somehow missed—

Mitchell froze.

A dark shadow fell upon the ice where his beam illuminated the underside. Cracks spread from the distorted shape, which almost reminded him of a maple leaf. And then it was gone.

He shined the light toward the hole in the ice and directly into Calder’s face. Her eyes were wide and bubbles trickled from between her lips.

Their choice had been made for them.

Payton hadn’t taken a deep enough breath before going under. Already the air grew stale in his chest and he consciously fought the urge to gasp. It was all he could do to swim with Thyssen’s added weight, and he was beginning to fear that he wasn’t going to be able to make it. The way Thyssen’s blood seeped into the water like crimson oil made him wonder if it wasn’t already too late.

What in the name of God was that thing? All he’d seen was a blur of motion and snapping teeth. The way it moved . . . the speed with which it attacked . . . he’d never seen anything like it. In his mind he saw it frozen in the flash of the discharge when he pulled the trigger of Thyssen’s gun. The way its mouth opened had been almost crocodilian, although its snout was blunted and positively serrated with teeth. He’d caught the impression of whitish-gray scales, smooth across the jowls and distinctly ridged above eyes he’d seen only in that fleeting moment but would never forget for as long as he lived. They were the color of cream with blood-red crescents radiating outward from an enormous pupil that constricted to a vertical slit with the sudden exposure to light. He’d studied eyes like that before, only on creatures nowhere near as large. They were the eyes of a gecko evolved from diurnal species that sacrificed the rods in their retinas in favor of modified cones perfectly suited for nocturnal vision, sensitizing them to light waves in the blue, green, and ultraviolet spectra.

Payton struck his head on the rock and instinctively expelled air through his nose. He felt tingling in his fingertips and couldn’t be entirely certain he still had a grip on Thyssen’s wetsuit. His legs grew heavier by the second and an overwhelming sense of panic swelled inside of him.

He was going to drown.

Darkness spread from the base of his skull, cold and inviting, urging him to just close his eyes for a moment and rest, to settle to the bottom and take a gentle inhalation of the warm water.

Then he saw an image of himself folded inside a hole in the rock and embraced the panic. He kicked and thrashed. Pushed off the slick sediment. Tore the skin from his fingertips on the walls. To no avail. The air in his lungs turned to fire and the feeling retreated from his extremities. He watched the ground rise slowly to greet him, his vision constricting onto a rock covered with a red bacterial mat. His mouth started to open of its own accord and he understood on a primal level that there was nothing he could do to stop—

A hand closed around his wrist. Another seized his backpack. He struck the crown of his head on stone and felt his face clear the surface. He gasped and drew a deep breath of air he was unprepared to accommodate. He coughed and retched with so much force that he could barely hear the words being shouted into his ear, let alone comprehend them.

Nabahe was in the pool beside him, his face lost to the shadows under his headlamp. He strained with the exertion of trying to shove Payton out of the water while holding Thyssen’s face above the surface.

Payton managed to get his arms underneath his chest and pulled himself onto solid ground, where he vomited into the shallows.

“Help me, for Christ’s sake!” Nabahe shouted.

Payton crawled toward him and helped drag Thyssen through the mire and onto dry land. The blood flowed freely from the deep lacerations on his forearms. Payton watched them helplessly as Nabahe commenced chest compressions, rising and falling like a piston, driving the man’s sternum—

A gout of water burst from Thyssen’s lips and splashed onto his eyes. He barely turned his head in time to spew the aspirated water between Nabahe’s knees. The archeologist already had his backpack open and the contents spread out on the ground beside him. He wrapped gauze around Thyssen’s forearms as fast as he could, but the blood saturated it even faster.

Payton grabbed the roll of cloth tape climbers used to support the tendons in their fingers and wound it over the gauze. It immediately darkened but stemmed the flow of blood.

“We can’t stay here,” Thyssen said. His voice was little more than a whisper and he visibly struggled to keep his eyes open and focused. When he sat up, the blood drained from his face and he looked like he was going to be sick again.

“Did you get it?” Nabahe asked.

“I think so,” Payton said.

“You think . . . ?”

“Yeah. I got it.”

“Where’s the pistol?” Thyssen asked.

Payton glanced at his empty hand as though somehow expecting it still to be there.

“I must have dropped it.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“You’ll have to forgive me for grabbing you instead.”

“We don’t have time for this,” Nabahe said.

He stood and swept his light across the cavern. It reflected off the water and cast eerie shadows onto the rock walls. It settled upon a black shape that barely breached the surface.

Payton leaped to his feet. It looked like a body, lying facedown in muck, at least until he got close enough to clearly see what it was. He looked from the backpack to the wall beside it, where a patch of the bacteria had been scraped away. The tread from a boot was clearly evident. The hole in the roof was directly overhead. He was about to state the obvious when he heard a sloshing sound.

He shined his light back in the direction from which they came and saw tiny waves lapping against the edges. They slowly settled and the pool was once more still.

When he turned to face the others, he caught movement from the corner of his eye, beneath the water. He shined his beam toward where he’d seen it, but there was nothing there. The only sign that there had been anything at all was the renewed waves traveling outward in expanding ripples.

“We have to go after her,” Payton whispered.

“We don’t know that she went up there,” Thyssen said. “She could have lost her backpack in a struggle—”

“Trust me. She’s up there.”

He’d recognized the fire in her eyes. Were their roles reversed, he doubted they’d have been able to lead him away in the first place, regardless of the promise to return. As it was, a part of him wanted nothing more than to swim back through the tunnel so he could evaluate the dead specimen and make sure he hadn’t been seeing only what he wanted to see. After all, it
was
dead. Wasn’t it?

Clack
.

Payton whirled toward the source of the sound. Nabahe’s beam converged upon the same point as his. Combined, their headlamps barely penetrated the darkness. He kept his eyes focused on the farthest reaches of the light when he spoke.

“Do you think you can make it?”

“There’s only one way to find out,” Thyssen said.

Clack
.

Clack
.

“Then I think now’s the time to do so.”

Payton wasn’t even sure
he
would be able to make it. Nearly drowning had sapped him of just about every last ounce of strength.

A splash behind him.

“You go first,” he whispered to Nabahe. “Someone’s going to have to help him get up there.”

“What about you?”

“You’d better believe I’ll be right behind you.”

Clack
-
clack
.

Nabahe jumped from the water, kicked off the wall, and grabbed the ledge. He grunted and groaned in an effort to pull himself up.

Payton didn’t dare look away from where the sound seemed to originate, not even for a second. If he was right about the functionality of its eyes, it wouldn’t be accustomed to the bright light from his headlamp.

Nabahe vanished into the stone chute with a scraping sound. His boots squeaked when he turned around.

“Hurry up,” he whispered.

“You’re next,” Payton whispered.

Another splash.

Soft, barely perceptible.

Followed by the unmistakable sound of dripping.

He was about to turn around when he heard a noise that caused the hairs to rise along his neck. It was low and guttural, machine gun–fast, and produced vibrations he felt in his chest.

Err-err-err-err-err-err-uhh-uhh-uhh-err
.

“Go,” he said. The chilling sound was answered in kind from behind him. “Go!”

Thyssen braced himself against the wall, boosted himself up, and dove for the ledge. He cried out when he caught the lip.

Payton turned and shoved Thyssen’s legs upward while Nabahe attempted to get a grip on the slick bandages from above.