James Tabor - The Deep Zone

“Hallie!”

He tried to blind her with his light but she was on him in a second, hauling him to his feet, shaking him, slapping his face. He reached for the Taser, but, with nothing to fear after disposing of her, he had stuffed it into his pack. She hit him on the side of the neck with a rock, smacking the brachial nerve bundle, stunning him. His legs collapsed and he fell, dropping the helmet, kicking it inadvertently and sending it spinning out of reach. It came to rest twenty feet away, the light broken. They were plunged into complete darkness. He scrambled away from her, scuttling like a crab.

“You can’t be here!” he yelled.

Her reply was a rock the size of a grapefruit that whisked past his head, missing by inches, crashing into a stalagmite on the other side of the clearing. Cahner rolled onto his belly and crawled to the right, trying to make no sound, stifling his breathing. He wanted to find a rock, stalagmite, anything to hide behind and let him gather his wits. Another rock struck the cave floor just inches from his face, spraying him with sand and gravel. He rolled left, slid backward, covered his head with his hands and just lay there, trying to become part of the cave.

Hallie’s attack had been fired by rage and adrenaline, but the fighting had burned through those and now she was winded and nauseous. Her intent was not to kill Cahner but to render him helpless and bring him out of the cave as a prisoner, to answer for his actions. Or maybe she would leave him in the cave and let somebody else come back for him. She really hadn’t thought through the possibilities by the time she had caught up with him, the sounds of her approach covered by those of the river flowing nearby.

She had lost her own helmet in the scuffle, so now they were both blind. She heard Cahner roll off to her left, but then soft sand muffled the sound of his movements and she no longer had any idea of his location. He could be standing right behind her, for all she knew. Instinctively she waved her arms all around, felt nothing, dropped to her hands and knees, and scuttled several feet to one side. Then she stayed absolutely still, listening for any sound that would reveal Cahner’s location.

So we are reduced to this , she thought, crawling around in the dark and trying to kill each other with rocks . Cahner might not need a rock if he had the Taser. But if he had it, he would almost certainly have used it already. So why hadn’t he? The only possible reason was that he did not have it in his possession. That meant either he had lost it or, more likely, had stowed it in his pack. Did he carry a knife? She could not remember seeing one on his belt, but that did not rule out a pocketknife. He wouldn’t need either one of those to kill her, though. A rock would do that just as well. He could even break off a sharp stalagmite and use it like a spear. Suddenly she heard a grunt, a half second of silence, and a rock smashed against the cave wall off to her left, not even close to where she lay. But she understood that Cahner was trying to frighten her into revealing her position. Another rock struck a few feet closer. He was working his way around the clearing like the sweep hand of a clock, hoping either to hit her at random or to frighten her into making noise. Moving very slowly, she began searching the cave floor with her right hand, looking for a rock to use as a weapon. She moved her hand and arm through a full arc, from shoulder to waist, but felt only soft sand. She repeated the motion with her left arm, but again found nothing.

Another rock hit the cave wall directly behind her. Whatever his location, Cahner’s throws were surprisingly precise, the rock impacts moving from left to right with about five feet between them. Without knowing where he stood, she could do nothing but wait for him to find and attack her. Furious with herself for not having planned her own assault more carefully, she could only lie in the sand and stare into the darkness.

Then she began to see, not with her eyes but with her mind, the snapshot that her brain, out of long habit, had taken when Cahner’s helmet had gone spinning away into the darkness. She closed her eyes and began to perceive images, outlines, shadows. Judging from the sounds he had made while throwing the rocks, Cahner was sidling from her left to her right, picking up rocks as he went, pausing to throw and hoping to hit her without really knowing where she was. That was all helpful, but still did not tell her where Cahner was at that moment, which was the one thing she needed to know.

Then Cahner told her himself. Not with his voice, but she heard him pick up a rock. It was just the slightest scraping noise, like one fingernail brushing a desktop, but it was enough. She did not hesitate, because she knew that it would take only a second or two for him to throw the rock and move again. She came up out of the sand and launched herself toward the sound Cahner had made, thinking to run into him with her shoulder and knock him down.

Her snapshot was not detailed enough to show every feature of the cave where they were, and so halfway to Cahner, her right foot twisted in a small hole in the floor and she went down, falling hard on her chest. Cahner was on her in an instant, straddling her back, grabbing her forehead with both hands and pulling up, trying to break her neck, but she was slick with water and sweat and his hands slipped off. She flipped onto her back, clawed at his groin, squeezed with strong rock climber’s hands.

He screamed in pain, twisted out of her grasp. She heard him stumbling to his feet and jumped up herself, remaining in a crouch, hands up defensively.

“Goddamn you!” Cahner rushed toward her in the dark. She jumped to one side, felt him brush past, shoved him that way, turned to face the direction in which he had gone, fully expecting him to spin around and come for her again.

Instead, there was a gasp and then sudden silence. Terrified, she crouched down in the dark, felt around her for a rock, found one, clutched it. She knelt there like a Neanderthal, defenseless except for her rock and muscles and brain, her face twisted into a snarl, waiting for the attack of whatever horror might come at her out of the dark.

Nothing came. She knelt and waited, listening, trying to feel the dark for motion, but there was nothing.

After a while she said, “Cahner?”

No answer.

“Al?”

Still no answer.

She tossed the rock ten feet to her left, waited for him to throw one of his own at the sound. Nothing happened.

“Cahner.”

He did not answer.

She decided to search for the helmets and their lights. Dividing the chamber into quadrants in her mind, she moved back and forth on her hands and knees as if she were mowing a lawn. By sheer luck she found her helmet in less than a minute. The impact on the cave’s floor could have broken its lights. Holding her breath, Hallie turned one on. Blue-white light flared from the LED bulbs.

“Thank you,” she said softly. “Thank you, Chi Con Gui-Jao.” She put the helmet on and stood up cautiously, scanning for danger.

And then she screamed.

Cahner was lying facedown, legs splayed and arms thrown out like those of a skydiver, held several inches above the cave floor by the base of the waist-high stalagmite onto which he had fallen. The impact of his body had broken off the stalagmite’s slender tip, but the thicker shaft at its base had pierced his body and he lay now, impaled, the bloody stone spear protruding from his back.

Unbelievably, he was still alive. She saw that the shaft must have missed his heart by inches. One of his feet was twitching. Blood dripped from his nose and mouth, gathering in a dark red pool on the cave floor inches beneath his face. He turned his head slowly toward her, and she saw in his face the agony of hell, so horrible she had to look away. He tried to speak but made only a guttural, animal groan. His blood gave off a ferrous, rusty smell, the iron in it reacting with oxygen molecules.