Michael Koryta - Last Words

“I am growing tired of getting hit today.”

“You’re going to—”

“Have some fun with a police-brutality charge, if I want to. But I don’t. What I want to do is what you need to do: pull that Florida boy out of Trapdoor while he still has a pulse. I’ve already said I’ll keep you or any of your deputies at my side. The choice is yours, Sheriff. Remember that you had the chance to make it. Remember how things might have gone if you’d made a different choice ten years ago.”

“There’s a special hell for you,” Blankenship said. His voice was choked. “There just has to be.”

“We’ll find out one of these days,” Ridley said, but in truth he’d already found out. “Back to your choice, Sheriff. Time’s wasting. Decisions need to be made, and you’re the man who has to make them. The good people of Garrison County have voted on that. Make your choice.”

“I don’t need you, Barnes. I just need the maps.”

Ridley smiled and tapped his temple with his index finger. “I’ve got them archived.”

Blankenship’s jaw worked and he turned away from Ridley so he wasn’t facing him when he said, “Get your damn gear, then. Let’s you and me go for a ride. I’ll be curious to see how being back in that place works on you, Ridley. Might just sharpen a few of those memories you claim to have lost.”

Ridley managed to smirk at that, but he, too, was wondering how being back in that place might work on him. He’d suggested going in with the sheriff because he knew it was the only chance he had of getting in. Inside Trapdoor, though, back there in the dark, the sheriff might end up regretting being at Ridley’s side. Depending on how the cave worked on Ridley, that might wind up being a very poor decision indeed.

Mark’s technical understanding of hypothermia came from diving courses, but his visceral understanding of it came from memory, of carrying his mother over his shoulder, trying to rub warmth into unresponsive flesh. It was on that long walk that he’d sworn he would never return to the Rockies, that when he died, it wouldn’t be in the cold.

Now here he sat, half naked and shivering, remnants of an unknown drug from an unknown needle in his bloodstream. He’d become his mother.

You can’t run away from your family, she had told him when he’d left for the bus station, and maybe she had been right.

Then again, she’d survived the cold that day.

He started to laugh and when the echo returned it to him, the laugh sounded deranged. Sounded, in fact, like his mother’s.

“Get it together,” he whispered. “Keep your head.”

He thought that he should have reached the place he’d started from by now; he had been crawling away from the cliff for a long time, longer than it had taken him to reach it. Or maybe not. Time and distance were hard to judge in the blackness.

Getting cold. You are getting too cold.

The cave wasn’t frigid, it wasn’t the sort of alarming cold of the snowstorm above, but it could be just as deadly. Your core temperature came down slowly but steadily. You had to be aware of all the ways you might lose heat. Down here with no supplies and no clothes, Mark couldn’t fight many of them. Something as simple as keeping his skin from making contact with the stone was impossible. The only way to stay warm was to keep moving, and there was some danger in that as well. The more he moved, the more likely he was to sweat and breathe hard, which cost him heat, and the more he moved, the more glucose he sapped from his bloodstream. He needed the glucose, his essential fuel. All of this he had written in notebooks when he was studying for a diving-instructor certification, a course that he’d never finished. After Lauren was killed, he’d never gone back into the water.

He felt as if he were crawling against a breeze, and that confused him for longer than it should have. Of course there would be a breeze. Air didn’t just sit because it was underground. It still moved.

His thought process seemed clogged, mud in the gears, and he tried to blame whatever drug lingered in his system, but the more frightening possibility had nothing to do with that. Mental difficulties went hand in hand with physical difficulties in hypothermia. Simple thinking became complex.

He searched for a word that should have been easy to find, the one that explained what that cold cave air was doing to him, a word he’d written in one of those notebooks. He had crawled for quite a while before he came up with the word: convection. You lost heat via convection when air circulated. You lost heat via conduction when you came in contact with cold surfaces. You lost heat via radiation when you didn’t have sufficient clothing; you lost heat via evaporation when you sweat; and you lost heat via respiration when you breathed. Those were all the ways you could find yourself in a hypothermic state. Any one of them could kill you, and Mark was experiencing every one of them.

Stop thinking about all the ways it’s bad. Just concentrate on going forward. On doing the one thing you can do to help yourself. There’s nothing left of you now but the essential. The only resources you have are your mind and body. Don’t waste them.

It was hard to follow his own commands. Whatever confidence and concentration he might have been able to muster in other circumstances was drained by the darkness. It was one thing to summon the hope of salvation when you were crawling down a mountain or swimming away from a sinking ship; it was another to call it up when you were trying to escape blackness by moving into more blackness.

There’s a reason they bury people underground, he thought. It’s the place where they come to an end. And you’re there now.

So was Lauren. He thought of her casket being lowered into the earth, put into the blackness and sealed away. He was down there with her now. And with Sarah Martin. How sad it was that they’d put her back underground when her last moments had surely involved a desperate hope to return to the surface. In the end, they’d just sent her remains down to the very world she’d died trying to escape. How terrible.

Maybe not; maybe she was cremated and her ashes scattered somewhere high. You don’t know. She could be aboveground. You should find out, if you ever have a chance.

Strange thoughts, dark thoughts. Everything here was dark, though. There was no choice about that. He thought maybe his hands weren’t working as well as they had been earlier. Opening and closing a little slower.

Hands are just tired. That’s all.

Everything was coming at him in a swirl; a thought would be there and then something would spiral in and replace it and later the original thought would shoot back. He tried to do some simple math, addition and subtraction. Exercise the brain, keep it focused. No, wait, exercising it might be bad. Hadn’t he read somewhere that mental willpower drained glucose faster than physical exertion? That didn’t seem possible, but he thought it was what he’d read. They’d done a test, something involving weight lifting and problem solving. He was almost sure of it. So what should he think about? What took the least amount of will?

Quitting.

Sure. But it was cold on the stone, and he was warmer moving. When moving stopped being appealing or when he could no longer feel a difference, that was when he would know...

He stopped crawling and cocked his head. Something had changed. There were more sounds here.

He tried to quiet his breathing — it was more panting than breathing — and get a bearing on where the sound was coming from. No longer did he fear snakes. Any sound seemed friendly. It meant there was something else down here in the dark, meant that he wasn’t entirely alone. By now, this was only a good thing.