Michael Koryta - Last Words

He moved a little. Just enough to wedge his upper body in even tighter. He was upside down behind the wall now, and he was stuck.

Come on, Ridley, come on!

His face was pressed right against the stone. When he tried to wet his lips, his tongue licked across the rocks and brought the taste of wet earth into his mouth.

There’ll be a day when you’re too old. When your heart can’t take it. There’ll be a day...

“This ain’t that day,” he whispered, his lips brushing the stone. He braced his toes again and drove forward and, finally, earned a bit of relief. The steel bands around his chest loosened just a touch, and after some more scrabbling, he got to the point where he could use his elbows. The point where he could lift his chin off the stone floor. This must have been what he meant when he’d said it opened up a little once you got going.

And there it went, widening enough that he could lift his head and extend his arms. It was amazing just how free he felt. A few inches made a world of difference down here.

“Anmar? You good?”

“Working through it. Son of a bitch, this is tight.”

“It gets better.”

The idea of bringing Novak through here reared up again. He was taller than Ridley, but he wasn’t stocky, thank God. Muscled but lean. That was good, because they weren’t pulling anybody of girth through this crawl. Trying to get him through that squeeze Ridley had just left behind was going to be hell anyhow. He wasn’t sure they could make that with Novak.

The chute bent slightly to the right and widened, and now he could hear water. Soft drips and trickles. The last time — the only time — he’d made it down here, he’d found a chamber filled nearly to the ceiling with water. That had been after a series of strong rains, though, and the water table had been higher than it was tonight. He’d run out of time then, but he’d left the cave and told Pershing MacAlister that he thought he might be on the verge of a breakthrough, a discovery that would take Trapdoor into the ranks of the longest caves in the country. There had been great excitement that evening, sitting on the deck of MacAlister’s place and sharing beers and musing about the possibilities. Then the cave turned into a homicide scene, and then Pershing shut it down for good.

Sarah Martin had been there that night. She’d come down with Evan Borders, had sat on his lap and listened to the caving talk, looking impossibly young. That was the last time Ridley saw her alive. He thought. He hoped.

But it wasn’t. You know that it wasn’t.

It depended on your definition of see , he supposed. After the light died, when he’d met her in a blackness that was darker than any night in history, he hadn’t seen a thing.

“You good, Barnes?”

Anmar’s voice shook him back into the present.

“I’m good,” he called. “Almost to the bottom.”

The water sounds were louder now, and Ridley could see a yawning gap in the rock just ahead. His headlamp beam reflected off murky water beyond. The chute was tall enough here that he could rise to his knees, and the sensation was a sweet relief. On his hands and knees, he slipped through the gap, looked left, and saw Mark Novak’s body on the rocks.

“Novak?” Ridley said. “Novak!”

There was no response. The body was motionless, and Novak was naked except for water-soaked underwear. His skin had a faint blue tint against the beam of Ridley’s lamp, an almost ethereal glow, like a ghost.

“Shit!” Ridley shouted. The cave threw the word back at him, mocking.

“What’s wrong?” Anmar cried from somewhere in the chute.

Ridley cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “Get back up there and tell them to have a medevac unit ready. Not an ambulance, a helicopter.”

“You can see him? Is there a chance?”

Ridley was about to say no, was about to resign himself to bringing a second corpse out of Trapdoor, when Novak lifted his head to look in the direction of the sound, then raised a hand to block the glare from Ridley’s headlamp. Ridley dimmed it immediately.

“You’re alive.” He said it with true surprise, because he hadn’t anticipated that Trapdoor would release Novak once she’d gotten him this far. He’d hoped she might — it would be a shame to lose Novak so early — but he hadn’t counted on it. In fact, this was the most fascinating development he had encountered underground in years. Trapdoor had allowed Novak in, and then kept him alive? There was an element of trust there that Ridley hadn’t expected. Perhaps the old girl didn’t mind the occasional visitor.

And perhaps she didn’t appreciate that locked door at the entrance.

Ridley entered the water, which rose swiftly to his knees and then to his waist, and an odd thought passed through his mind: You’ve been here before.

He pivoted away from Novak, who was struggling to get upright, and stared at the water-filled passage ahead. They were off the maps now, at least the maps that everyone else had seen, but Ridley remembered this room, and he remembered the swim he’d made to get here.

He’d lost his first light in this room. Since he adhered to the rule of three, he hadn’t worried over that too much, because he’d been equipped with two backups. At that time, he hadn’t understood what Trapdoor thought of light, just how strongly she resisted it. At that time, Ridley Barnes had yet to meet the dark man.

“You came close, Novak,” he said. Anmar was struggling down the chute, sweating and gasping, a smashed backpack of first-aid equipment with him. He looked at Ridley and then at Novak, who had managed to get himself into some semblance of a sitting position but was staring at them with uncomprehending eyes.

“I lost her,” Novak said. His voice was a dying man’s rasp to which Trapdoor refused to even grant an echo. “I almost caught up to her, but then I lost her.”

Anmar said, “We’re never going to get him back up through there. It’s too damn tight.”

“Don’t need to,” Ridley said. He brightened the headlamp once more and pointed across the eerie aquamarine waters that carved through the stone and led away from Novak’s resting place. “He was nearly out himself. Wouldn’t that have been something, if he’d made it out alone? I wouldn’t have thought it possible.”

Again he wondered why Trapdoor had granted such favors, but Anmar interrupted his thoughts.

“What are you talking about, we don’t need to? I thought that chute was the only way down here.”

“Of course not. You have something to warm him up and keep him covered? More covered than he is, at least?”

“Yes.”

“Get to it, then. We’re going through the water, and we’re going to need to hurry.”

Anmar stared at the place where the water vanished around a bend of rock.

“You think that water passage goes anywhere good?”

“It’ll take us right out to the place where they used to end the boat tours. It’s a cakewalk for the medics from there.”

“How in the hell do you know that?”

“Because I swam it once. The water table was higher then, and it required diving equipment. It’s lower now, and we’ll be able to find air. There’s not a chance in hell we’d get him back up that chute. Time is the ticket, and we can get him out of here in a hurry if we go through the water. It’s not far at all, and it’s easy going. Trust me.”

“How long has it been since someone did that?”

Ridley turned to him, let his glance linger for just a moment, and didn’t answer the question.

“Clock’s ticking,” he said instead. “Let’s move.”

When Mark woke, he was in a bed with metal rails and there was an IV tube in his arm. He felt an incredible thirst and indescribable muscle aches. There was a call button beside him that would summon a nurse, and he considered it but didn’t punch it, trying to take stock of his circumstances and recall how, exactly, he had ended up here. Events existed in his memory like scattered snapshots, all out of chronological order and some badly out of focus. The road back from Ridley’s house — that was where it had started. A truck behind him, a van up ahead. Men with black masks and black shotguns. A field of windswept snow, and then...