Nevada Barr - Blind Descent

Wonders flashed past in a sweating stream, caught in light fragments like views from a rain-streaked train window. Falls of liquid stone the color of old brass emptied into a lake so clear that the bottom, thirty feet down, looked no farther away than Anna's toes. There was no way around it, and the three of them stripped naked lest their filthy clothes sully water kept pure for millennia. Clothing was put in zipper-lock plastic bags to keep it dry. For the climb back out of the water filled room, they donned rubber beach shoes so they would not scar the perfect surface of the flowstone, tumbling in a waterless fall frozen in place for all time.

After the lake, they dressed and laced on their boots for Razor Blade Run. Aragonite bushes, white and as freeform as coral, bloomed in the utter stillness. The slightest touch by a passing caver was enough to snap the delicate crystals. Tunnels of these fragile, razor-sharp feathers were eased through with aching slowness and a constant mantra of "be careful. Look out. Big one. Take it slow…" from Iverson.

"Watch those big feet. Laymon says Oscar walks like an elephant on a pogo stick…" from Holden.

Anna's legs carried her. Hands grasped rope. She poured water down her throat. Miracles passed by.

By the time they arrived in Tinker's Hell, where Frieda lay, it was after two in the morning. Anna hadn't slowed the cavers down. She hadn't gotten hurt. And she hadn't gone nuts. All in all, a successful day.

Tinker's, where the survey team was camped, was an immense chamber; Shea Stadium could have been tucked inside with room left over for a taxi stand. Anna, Holden, and Iverson entered through a jumbled corridor devoid of decorations and uniformly dirt-colored. The passage emerged halfway between the floor and the ceiling of Tinker's, spilling onto a high balcony guarded by a natural parapet of stone. Oscar was astraddle this wall drinking water when Anna came into Tinker's Hell.

Every muscle in her body melted with fatigue. Aches and pains would come with rest. For the moment she felt only warm and liquid, her mind as pliant as her limbs. With a poorly concealed grunt of exhaustion, she dumped her pack and dragged herself up beside him.

Sixty feet below, in the immense room, was a scene of rampant destruction. Breakdown littered the floor; blocks of limestone, some the size of houses, lay one on top of the other like the building blocks of a spoiled giant flung across his nursery. Amid this majestic rubble were cones and pillars of gold and burnt umber, stalactites and stalagmites that had been growing for countless ages and now lay broken and scattered.

"Jesus," Anna said. "Earthquake?"

"Who knows? I've never seen anything like it. But the breaks are old, old, old. Whatever happened, happened a long time ago."

Holden joined them, his light weaving in with theirs as they looked at the magnificent ruin.

"Yup," Holden said after a few minutes' study. "It looks like a bomb hit a tinker's cart. Have you spotted the camp yet?"

From his pack Iverson dug a secondary light source, a powerful six cell flashlight, and played the beam over the jagged floor. Near the end of the great room, on a flat place tucked up near the left-hand wall, his light picked out the litter of humanity. Looking pathetically small and fragile in the confusion of elemental stone, six people lay in sleeping bags. The wrinkled forms were soft and shapeless, like larvae on a deserted patch of beach. The necessities of human existence- packs, stoves, water, and food-were piled neatly at one end of the clearing. The group had been there four days, one since Frieda was hurt. The camp appeared clean and well organized.

"Another twenty minutes and vacation's over," Iverson said.

They donned packs and started the tedious climb down to the cavern floor. This time Holden Tillman led.

Underground operations had officially commenced.

By the time they neared the camp, Anna was so tired she was stumbling. It was as if her brain, recognizing that the end was in sight, had quit holding her muscles together. The only workable mode of travel across Tinker's Hell was boulder-hopping. At each leap, she found herself keeping her center of gravity closer to the ground. When Dr. Peter McCarty came from the camp to meet them, she was traveling on all fours, the wolfman reverting to type.

McCarty and Tillman exchanged greetings, and introductions were muttered. Anna dredged up a nod. A handshake was beyond her. She was even too far gone to protest when McCarty took her pack to carry it the last ten yards. At that point she doubted she'd have put up much of a fight if he'd offered to carry her.

Even with the stamp of the cave on him and five days from a showerhead, Peter McCarty was a handsome man. Not matinee-idol pretty-Anna would have found that off-putting-but with enough flaws to keep his face interesting. His lips were chiseled but a little too thin, his jaw strong but with a crude boxiness at the angle of the bones. His voice was light but pleasant, with an adenoidal quality to it as if he suffered from a slight head cold. His curling brown hair was thinning at the hairline. Anna guessed his age to be forty, or near enough-it didn't matter.

He and Holden fell into a close, whispered conversation, needing to share information but not wanting to disturb the sleepers. They'd forgotten to douse their helmet lights, and feeling mildly righteous, Anna switched hers off and leached from them as she staggered in last and folded onto the floor. She was too tired even to sleep without being told to and sat lumpishly staring at them as they conversed in tones too low for her to make sense of.

At length, Holden broke away and came over to where she waited, beyond patience and nearly in a state of catatonia.

"Frieda?" she asked.

"No better, no worse."

"Good news," Anna said. With a wound to the head, it was. Deterioration of levels of consciousness or motor control augured evil, usually swelling or bleeding in the skull that, unchecked, would create deadly pressure.

Holden nodded. "Peter is putting her on a hundred percent oxygen with a non-rebreather. He's got things well in hand. He separated Frieda from the others to give her a little quiet and privacy. He wants you to bed down over near her. Don't talk to her, he said. Let her sleep. Just be there in case she wakes up."

"Got it."

Holden pointed out the recumbent form that was Frieda Dierkz. In his shielded light, Anna could see the leg, an air-splint from foot to mid-thigh. Dr. McCarty was fitting the non-rebreather oxygen mask over the woman's face. Frieda was fighting his attempts to help her, moving her head from side to side and moaning in such a way that Anna was overcome with an irrational fury toward her tormentor.

Biting back words she was bound to regret, she knelt in the dirt near her friend's head and laid her hand on her brow. "It's me, Anna," she said softly. "I got here as fast as I could. You couldn't have hurt yourself in the Bahamas or Paris, could you? It had to be here. You are such a pain in the butt, Frieda."

"Interesting bedside manner," McCarty said dryly.

Frieda stopped fighting. The tension went out of her muscles, and her breathing evened out.

"Ooh. Hey," the doctor said. "Maybe I'll have to give it a try."

Anna laughed. "Where are you from?" she asked on impulse.

"St. Paul, Minnesota." She couldn't have said why, but it didn't surprise her. "I'm glad you showed up," McCarty said wearily. "Let's go with the nasal cannula at six liters. I don't want her getting agitated again."

Anna handed him the appropriate tubing and, when he had it in place, turned the flow to six liters per minute. He watched her carefully. She didn't bother telling him she was an EMT. Doctors seemed to make a point of being aggressively unimpressed by that tidbit of information.