Nevada Barr - Blind Descent

Schatz did as he was asked. In the confined crawl space leading back to the Trade Route, there was a scuffle and some wailing when he tried to detach himself so he could move ahead. Anna took a bandana from her pocket, tied one corner to the end of Curt's bootlace, and gave the other to Sondra. Tenuous as the tether was, it gave her confidence to go on.

Back in the crumpled space whence this side trip had begun, Anna got a container of ravioli from her pack and let Sondra eat half of it. The rest she set aside to see if her patient could keep the food down.

Anna had brought Sondra's helmet and pack out. Curt put fresh batteries in her headlamp. With her own light strapped to her head, she calmed down significantly. Given light, food, and the promise of salvation, she showed signs of regaining the rudiments of human intercourse.

The ravioli stayed down. Anna let Sondra have what was left, her cautions to eat slowly totally disregarded.

"Can you tell us what happened?" she asked.

The brown eyes filled with tears fat as summer raindrops. They dripped from the narrow jaw, splashing onto her trousered thighs with audible plops. Tears were an improvement. Tears were human; they helped to melt the unnatural rictus of her face. Still, Anna didn't want to risk a setback.

"You don't have to talk about it," she said quickly. "You just eat and get your strength back."

Curiosity might have rendered her less kindly, but she had a pretty good idea what must have transpired. Sondra had heard someone- Brent or Oscar, or Brent and Oscar-talking about the original injury to Frieda. She'd put together that Frieda had been attacked to keep her from finding something they didn't want found. Sondra sneaked away in search of an exclusive story. Her disappearance was noted by someone wishing her ill. During the night the rescuers had been trapped in the Pigtail, this person had slipped away while the others slept. By the simple expedient of removing the tape, he had seen to it that Sondra would not come out.

Anna had awakened that night. Brent had been gone from his sleeping place. Another reason guilt might have driven him to what became his own death. Killing would be hard to live with. Burial alive, impossible.

"Did you get all the way to Tinker's Hell?" Anna asked.

Sondra shook her head, her mouth full of ravioli. In a shuddering gulp she swallowed it. Her eyes refilled, and she whimpered, "There was somebody following me." Memory, mixed with trauma, was drawing a veil over her mind.

"Don't," Anna said sharply. "Stay right here. Right now. With us. Eat. Talk to her, Curt."

Curt, still tied to their acquisition by Anna's handkerchief, began telling stories of the incredible abuses perpetrated on the English language by his students. The talk was pointless, mildly amusing, and just what the doctor might have ordered. That is, if the doctor wanted his wife back.

Harmless male chatter was a balm to frayed nerves. Sondra's eating slowed, and her eyes dried. Stretching her legs, Anna mingled the muddy soles of her boots with those of her companions. Closing her eyes she invited a catnap to recharge her batteries. Tinker's Hell was close-no more than a twenty-minute trek from where they sat. She needed to get there; otherwise the whole trip was for nothing. Mentally, she apologized to Sondra. Saving a life, even one as irksome as Sondra McCarty's, was probably worth something. Mind drifted. It would be not only cruel but, more significantly, unwise to ask Sondra to go deeper into the cave. At best she'd be an anchor. At worst she'd flip out and become a serious liability. In her fragile state she couldn't be left alone. The briefest sentence back in solitary confinement could do irreparable harm. The mind-breaking solitude of the underground was stressful for the healthy and well balanced.

Anna enjoyed a peculiar sensation of simultaneously floating and weighing five hundred pounds. Ten hours' sleep would have been a boon, but if anything she'd read about long incarcerations in the dark was true, Sondra had been sleeping fifteen to twenty hours out of every twenty-four. Leaving her alone even through the act of becoming unconscious didn't sit well. Anna would have to make it out of Lechuguilla on catnaps. Once outside, she promised herself, she'd spread a sleeping bag on the open desert and sleep till Christmas.

"Christmas."

She'd been talking in her sleep. Curt's "Ho, ho, ho" woke her up.

"How long was I asleep?" she demanded.

"Maybe ten minutes," Curt told her.

"Ten years would be a drop in the bucket," she confessed. "How are you doing, Sondra? Do you feel up to heading out?"

"Is anybody there?" She sounded like a frightened child.

"Peter, you mean? He's there." Anna tried to reassure her.

Sondra pushed her face into her hands, hid behind a clotted mat of hair. "No. No. Not Peter." Her voice was creeping up the scale, on a collision course with hysteria.

At a loss, Anna got ready to slap her. Curt was quicker to understand.

"Not Peter," he said. "It wasn't Peter. Listen to me." Catching her by the wrists, he pried her hands away from her face. "Anna meant Peter is waiting for you outside. Nobody's waiting in the cave. Nobody's here but us. The guy who followed you is dead. Shot dead."

Anna thought the violence of the image might further derange Sondra, but she absorbed the words, then donned an expression that looked a lot like smugness. Mrs. McCarty's personality was beginning to reassert itself.

"I've got to go into Tinker's Hell," Anna announced, putting it into words so she couldn't chicken out. Sondra screwed up her face. Before she could weep or wail or whatever it was she had in mind, Anna stopped her. "I'll go alone. You guys go ahead and wait for me at the overlook at the Cocktail Lounge. It's not more than a half hour back. I shouldn't be more than two hours going and coming. Then the three of us go home. What do you say?"

"No."

It took Anna ten minutes to argue Curt around, but she finally did it. He took Sondra and began the tortuous wind toward the Cocktail Lounge.

Tying one end of her surveyor's tape to his and anchoring the knot with a rock, Anna pointed her lamp into the dizzying tunnels.

Never had winning an argument left her in such a foul mood.

From where the three of them split up it was a fairly straight shot to Tinker's Hell. Anna took it slow, leaving line in her wake. Fifteen minutes' scramble brought her to where the original tape had been severed. It hadn't taken Sondra long to become disoriented, then lost. Paranoia made Anna leave small pieces of her own tape in addition to what remained, strategically located at the junctions lest what befell Sondra should happen to her.

Tinker's Hell was bigger than she remembered, and more chaotic. Taking huge gulps of air in an attempt to assimilate the spaciousness into the recesses of her bones, she rested and drank. Twenty minutes more and she arrived at the base camp where Frieda had awaited rescue.

After several fruitless stabs under boulders all looking alike in shifting and limited light, she found the lead Frieda had been returning from when the rock struck her. Around the three-by-three-foot crack in the floor, the earth had been scuffed by those laboring to bring out the unconscious woman.

Having secured one end of the orange tape to a sizable rock, Anna chimneyed down an enclosed staircase designed by a mad Cubist. Five minutes in, it leveled off, a sloping belly-crawl. She tied her pack to her ankle and shimmied along, mentally marking off each foot claimed to keep her mind off greater evils. At what would turn out to be the halfway point, she lost her bearings. The space was big enough for her to sit upright. Two channels led through the rock. One slanted up and back toward Tinker's Hell, the other down and away. The faint breath of a living cave drifted through each; the stirring that cavers learn to wait for, moving air hinting at a going lead. With a nod to Alice's white rabbit, Anna chose the crawl down and away.