Subterrestrial (31 page)

The stone gave way beneath her. The current sucked her backward with so much force that she felt as though she were in free-fall. She was repeatedly bludgeoned from behind. A blow to her head. She saw stars and somersaulted from the crevice into a larger body of water, where she flipped uncontrollably until her momentum waned enough for her to once more get her feet in front of her.

For the briefest of moments she thought she’d been carried into the open ocean, but her hopes were crushed when she saw stalactites in her peripheral vision as she streaked past. She grabbed for one. It broke and again sent her tumbling. She managed to catch the next one and held onto it for dear life.

A black streak to her right. She nearly didn’t recognize Mitchell in time.

She grabbed for his arm and caught the strap of his backpack. Her shoulder likely would have been wrenched right out of the socket had the stalactite not given way first.

They raced through the water amid a tangle of branches until Mitchell caught hold of a column.

Her hand slipped from the strap.

He reached back and latched onto her wrist before the current swept her into a fissure positively spiked with rocks.

Calder caught a glimpse of his face when she wrapped the hand holding the flashlight around his waist. His mask had cracked and several inches of water sloshed over his chin. The entire right side of his face and the inside of the Plexiglas were spattered with blood. But she’d seen something else, too: a flash of recognition in his eyes. A spark of hope.

His entire body tensed as he pulled their combined weight against the flow. He inched along the column, dragging them closer to what could either have been the ground or the roof for all she could tell.

The current momentarily abated. An eddy swirled around her feet. His next exertion brought with it a change in the direction of the current, which drew her feet up over her head until she was nearly perpendicular to him. The sudden shift caught her by surprise. She lost her grip on Mitchell’s waist and rocketed feetfirst through a narrow chute. The walls tightened around her, then released. She sped backward so fast that she couldn’t tell she’d been propelled into a larger space until her feet breached the surface and hammered the roof of the cavern. By the time she righted herself and got her head above the choppy waves, there was barely a foot of air left, which vanished before she could even consider taking off her mask. She glanced at the digital readout on her tank before she was once again immersed.

10:38.

And counting.

Calder flipped over, planted her feet against the ceiling, and pushed off, away from the flume of water.

Mitchell knifed through the churning sediment and organic debris and similarly used the ceiling to redirect himself toward the center of the cavern, where they hovered long enough to gather their bearings.

Although the flashlight could barely penetrate the murk, being able to distinguish up from down made all of the difference in the world.

Mitchell made on okay sign with his hand.

She responded by loosely closing her fist to make a circle and mouthed the words
I’m okay
.

He nodded and glanced at the air tank on his hip. She could only see the pale green glow of the readout. The bubbles gushing from the cracked seal obscured the numbers.

He twisted the tubing in an effort to reseal it. Pinched it between his fingers. Nothing he tried slowed the flow of bubbles.

Mitchell looked into her eyes as his readout changed from green to red. For the first time, she saw fear in his eyes.

She held both hands in front of her chest, her fingers curled slightly inward, the left higher than the right.

Buddy breathe
.

He shook his head and pointed at his chest.

She could have screamed in frustration.

A grim expression of resolve chased the fear from his eyes. He swam away from her and deeper into the darkness, leaving her to hurriedly catch up with him before she lost him for good. A line of bubbles trailed from his hip. He must have only just broken the line. She caught up with him and shined the light ahead of them.

The water eddying from the domed ceiling forced them downward to a point below the worst of the swirling sediment. The beam was barely strong enough to illuminate a flowstone formation, at the top of which was a narrow opening that inhaled sparkling dust in a vortex.

Calder pointed and Mitchell again made the okay sign.

The current increased as they neared until it sucked them inside the tunnel and fired them through a twisting passage. They contorted their bodies and guided themselves ever higher.

The current was little more than a gentle nudge when they swam from the egress into another cavern, inside of which the sediment hung like a brownish-gold cloud. She shined the flashlight into his face and read the situation. She didn’t need to shine it onto his hip to know that there were no more bubbles rising from the dead tank.

Calder made the sign to buddy breathe again. This time he reluctantly nodded.

She took several slow, deep breaths to completely fill her lungs and disconnected her hose. He attached his and closed his eyes. The relief on his face was clearly evident. She peeked at the readout.

7:46.

That was the remainder of their lives if they didn’t find a way out soon.

Air flowed into her mask again. She turned to see Mitchell holding his breath. The water inside his mask had risen nearly to his nose.

There was no time to lose.

Calder grabbed his hand and urged him through the cloud. The light barely provided a diffuse glow, and the sediment accumulated on her mask. Every second brought them closer to their last. Her chest tightened at the thought, and she had for force herself to relax, for all the good it did her. Acquiescing to the panic would only serve to burn through the oxygen faster.

She disconnected her hose again and held still long enough for Mitchell to attach his. She couldn’t bear to make eye contact with him.

The sediment swirled ahead of them, then became a cyclone that funneled upward through a chute in the ceiling that barely looked wide enough to accommodate her shoulders if she turned sideways.

The current grew stronger as they neared until she could feel it dragging her forward and had to actively swim against it.

There was no way Mitchell would be able to fit through there.

She looked at him and saw the recognition in his eyes.

A dark shape knifed through the cloud behind him.

Calder screamed out the last of her air.

Below Speranza Station

Bering Sea

Ten Miles Northwest of Wales, Alaska

65°47′ N, 169°01′ W

Nabahe climbed as fast as he could. The wave of water slammed into the escarpment to his left with a deafening crash and filled the air with spray. It was all he could do to hang onto the ledge as what felt like an entire river washed down over him. The muscles in his forearms trembled and his elbows threatened to give out. He wasn’t in any kind of physical shape to be pushing himself like this. Thyssen had been able to scale these walls like a spider and look how much good it had done him.

The rising water grabbed at his feet. He barely pulled them up onto the ledge before an uprooted tree scraped across the limestone below him.

“Give me your hand!” Hart screamed from above him.

The air temperature plummeted with the influx of freezing water, raising his goosebumps even under the Thermoprene.

He reached for her outstretched hand and retracted his arm when a spray of brine slapped him from the side. The smooth stone was already slick enough when it was dry; it was like trying to hold onto melting butter when it was wet. He steadied himself for another attempt and this time caught her wrist.

Hart groaned with the strain. There was no way she was going to be able to pull him up on her own. At least she gave him the leverage he needed to get his feet to an outcropping just a little higher, from which he was able to crawl into the cave beside her.

The entire back wall of the cavern was honeycombed with recesses. They’d blended into the shadows so well that at first he hadn’t seen them—not until he’d burst from the cover of the forest and the apes had launched themselves straight up the sheer escarpment and disappeared into the darkness. He never would have made it even as high as the lowest tier had the leading wave not lifted him from his feet and thrown him against the limestone.

Nabahe stood and smacked his head. He ducked again and switched on his headlamp. After so long in the dim violet light, the halogen beam temporarily blinded him.

Water cleared the ledge and raced past their feet, toppling the stones that had been stacked across the orifice and sending them clattering deeper into the recess.

“My God,” Hart said.

“What—?” Nabahe started, but then he saw it.

The walls of the cave stared back at him through the faces of generations of The Watchers, only they were unlike all of the others he’d seen. They weren’t designed to serve as signposts or warnings; they were meant to commemorate the lives of their deceased ancestors. Hands that had undoubtedly spent hours tracing those features in the flesh and had been able to work them perfectly into the soft stone lovingly recreated each rendition. Various shapes had been carved beside them in vertical lines.

“It’s a written language,” Hart said.

Another wave washed over the ledge. Hollowed gourds shattered against the rear wall, where potsherds accumulated against the stone.

He grabbed Hart by the shoulders and bodily turned her away from the tableau. The upper canopy of a magnolia tree streaked toward the opening and lodged itself into the gap.

Nabahe shoved through the branches as the water rose past his knees. A massive wave passed through the dense leaves and knocked him backward. By the time he found his footing again, he was pinned against the back wall.

He shouted with the effort and slogged against the current through the waist-deep water. He leaned out onto a thick bough and managed to open a sliver of space.

“Hurry!”

Hart didn’t need to be told twice. She scurried through and climbed out of sight to the left. Nabahe was halfway to where she’d disappeared when he saw the stone outcroppings. The water responsible for shaping the flowstone had been painstakingly rerouted in such a way as to create staggered steps on the wall, almost like gours. Vines braided into ropes hung down the sheer face and whipped wildly when the rising water caught their distal ends.

Another wave violently wrenched the tree from the mouth of the cave. He barely grabbed one of the vines before the trunk knocked his legs out over the open air. He slammed back into the wall, planted his feet on the steps, and scurried upward as fast as he dared.

These pseudo-dwellings were remarkably similar to those built by the Pueblo peoples of the American Southwest, only rather than erecting communal structures in a single cavernous vault, these primates had hollowed out individual rooms and mortared rocks across the openings with what must have been mud, for as quickly as the water had destroyed their work. Granted, the craftsmanship was painfully primitive by human standards, but the fact that the system of caves had been created by animals he would expect to find in a zoo was beyond his comprehension. Was it possible that these primates could actually be the ancestors for whom he’d spent the last decade searching at the expense of his career, hell, his life?

Had some version of these apes completed a journey thousands of miles to the south before emerging from the darkness and into the sunlight? Had their evolutionary path progressed unabated while that of those trapped down here veered in an entirely different direction?

There were so many questions, and yet even as he formulated them the evidence was being washed away by the floodwaters, their history scoured from the limestone walls.

Hart climbed from the trail into another cave. The water was already spilling over the lip when Nabahe scurried in behind her. His light cast her shadow deeper into the tunnel. Screeching sounds echoed from deep within the earth. The water rose so fast it swept them from their feet and carried them into the darkness.

His light flashed across an opening in the ceiling a split-second before a pair of simian arms reached through. One grabbed Hart’s arm, the other a handful of her hair. She cried out as she was hauled up into the ceiling.

Nabahe grabbed for her ankle and missed. Something caught him by the collar of his wetsuit and screeched with the strain of dragging him against the current and through the orifice. He braced his elbows on each side of the ledge and pulled his legs from the rising water, which spilled out all around him.

They were in a small enclosed space, one so cold he expected to see his breath. There were stacks of fruit and nuts against the walls. Various animal carcasses hung from what almost looked like nooses, presumably to be utilized as a food source.

The others had already reached the far side of the cavern. By the time he caught up, the water had carried the fruit past him and smashed it against the wall. The multicolored mess made the floor even slicker as he waded through the narrow passageway and nearly ran into Hart from behind.

She stood framed in an oblong orifice, through which he could see a vast expanse of black waves roiling with uprooted trees. There was nothing left of the forest, at least not that he could see. She stepped to the side and started climbing up another set of stairs.

Nabahe was about to follow when he heard a scream and turned to see several shadows struggling to remain in the branches of a flowering evergreen.

He glanced up at Hart. She continued her panicked ascent as though she hadn’t heard.

“Ch’iidii,” he said.

He grabbed one of the ropes for balance and leaned out over the water. The braided vegetation felt about as strong as a handful of grass, but it held his weight. The tree rolled and silenced the screaming. The animal emerged with a fevered screech, beneath which he heard a gasp and an almost human cough.