Greg Cox: Loose ends

Max wasted little time contemplating the lieutenants corpse, instead searching the dimly-lit cave for clues as to the whereabouts of liz and her abductor. He had no flashlight, but he didn't need one; with a moment's concentration, a silvery halo radiated from his hand, lighting up the area around him. His eyes swiftly spotted footprints in the dust, leading farther into the cave. The smaller prints he recognized as Liz's, while a series of larger bootprints indicated that Morton had gone deeper into the cavern as well.

"Liz!" he called into the shadowy throat of the cave. "It's Max! Can you hear me?"No one answered, leading him to wonder how far Liz and Morton had descended into the unexplored depths ahead. She's down there somewhere, he knew, convinced by both the footprints and his own undeniable sense that the girl he loved was nearby. He didn't know why the kidnapper and his victim had chosen to disappear into the lower regions of the cave, but he knew without hesitation that he had to follow them.

"Max! Where are you? Wait!" Michael's voice invaded the primitive confines of Morton's hideout. Max heard his best friend, who had obviously taken the lead among the others, scrabble up the gravelly ridge outside. "Hang on, Max! Wait for me! I'm right behind you!"Sorry, Michael, Max thought. No time, liz needs me now.

Like an alien Orpheus, braving the underworld in search of his Eurydice, he charged into the waiting darkness, using his gleaming hand as a torch to light the way.

"I'm coming, Liz! I'm coming!"

The deeper she descended, the colder it got. Liz knew from her goose bumps and trembling arms that she must be several hundred feet beneath the surface. She was lost as well, not at all certain that she could ever find her way back uptop, even if she wasn't being hunted by a crazed, gun-wielding killer.

She could hear Morton rampaging down the sloping passages behind her, perhaps following her oozing footprints through the bewildering network of tunnels. She had hoped that her trick with the bats would have discouraged him for good, but instead it only seemed to have made him even more insanely driven to kill her and regain his merchandise. "Run, you alien slut! Run while you can!" he bellowed, completely out of his mind. "You can't get away!"The beam of his flashlight nipped at her heels, and Liz constantly had to shift directions to avoid giving him a clear line of fire. She darted left, right, then left again, taking any turn offered by this never-ending limestone labyrinth. I really have become a mouse in a maze, she realized, remembering what she had written in her journal many hours ago. According to her watch, it was almost five p.m., which meant that Morton had been chasing her through the uncharted caverns for at least an hour and forty-five minutes. How much longer can I keep this up? she thought, exhausted and scared. Or do I have to keep on running through these endless catacombs forever? Max's palm print blazed upon her bare stomach, its phosphorescent radiance warning her right before she ran over the edge of a dangerous subterranean cliff. Yikes, Liz thought. That was close. No helpful guardrails protected travelers from the sudden drop-off, whose ultimate depth Iiz couldn't even begin to guess. The yawning abyss stretched before her farther than her meager light could penetrate. Looking both left and right, Iiz was dismayed to discover that the only way remaining to her appeared to be a narrow ledge running along the length of the chasm, at the base of a towering wall of petrified limestone draperies. The ledge was maybe a foot wide at best, making it extremely risky to venture out onto.

She looked back quickly over her shoulder, hoping she could still backtrack to a more promising escape route. In horror, she saw instead the darting beam of Morton's flashlight. He was only minutes behind her! There was no time to look for another path, nowhere else to go. Swallowing hard, her back pressed tightly against the overlapping limestone drapes, Liz eased onto the ledge, trying with all her might not to look down. The darkness concealing the height of the chasm was a blessing, sparing her from vertigo, as, facing the abyss, she inched along the ledge, the tips of her sneakers actually extending an inch past the brink of the precipice. She felt like some silent-movie comedian climbing around outside the top windows of a twenty-story skyscraper, except that there was nothing at all humorous about her dire situation. Don't look down, she warned herself. Short, fearful breaths misted before her lips in the chilly subterranean atmosphere. Even if you can't see anything, don't look down! Mortons cowboy boots pounded the floor of an adjacent tunnel. "I'm getting closer!" he threatened loudly. He sounded practically just around the corner. "I can smell your fear, you glowing freak!"Liz looked down at her luminous belly, wondering if she dared cover her only available source of light. I guess it's too much to hope for, she thought bleakly, that Morton will accidently fall over the edge of the cliff. Alas, the batteries in his flashlight still seemed to have plenty of juice in them.

Creeping sideways along the narrow sftelf, with Morton closing in and no place else to go, she experienced a brief surge of hope as the ledge eventually widened beneath her feet, so that she could actually face forward witnout toppling over the brink, thus allowing her to flee faster and less gingerly. Her relief was short-lived, however, when she abruptly ran into a dead end straight ahead.

"Oh my God," she whispered. Her precarious trek along the ledge had led her only to a couch-sized limestone balcony overlooking the bottomless crevasse. Walls of solid rock blocked her path on her left and to the front, while the deadly precipice dropped away on her right. She was trapped, with no way out except the way she came. What do I do now? she despaired. I've run out ojcavel "Liz!"The unmapped caverns were a labyrinthine network of detours and false trails. In theory, it should have been impossible to track a missing person through all these convoluted tunnels, yet Max intuitively sensed that he was on the right course. He could feel Liz's presence in the dank catacombs, the very molecules of the air seemed to vibrate with the lingering reverberations of her recent passage. He knew that she had tread the exact same path he was taking now, and not very long ago.

He also knew that she was in terrible danger. The silver nimbus around his left hand, the same hand that had once brought Liz back from the verge of death, flared brighter than it ever had before, as if urging him onward to ever greater speed. Through some sort of subliminal psychic link, he felt her raw terror and hopeless desperation as though they were his own. At least she's still alive, he thought emphatically, hanging onto that conviction as he descended deeper and deeper into the underworld. But for how long? A bullet hole defacing the wall of one limestone corridor proved that he was following in his quarry's footsteps, as well as confirming that Joe Morton was indeed armed and dangerous. Max gulped apprehensively, but did not slow his pursuit of the vicious killer and his captive. Squeezing through an unnervingly tight fissure in the Earth, he entered a sizable grotto that reeked like an animal's lair. His lambent hand illuminated an empty chamber whose floor was literally carpeted in excrement. This must be where all those bats came from, he realized. Glancing up, he saw that a handful of winged mammals, perhaps less excitable than their fellows, still hung upside-down from the ceiling. As before, he couldn't help wondering-and worrying-what had frightened all those other bats.

Morton's gunshots? Hurrying across the grotto, he found disturbing evidence of recent violence. Fresh bloodstains mingled with the accumulated bat dung, leading across the sludgy floor to a darkly opaque exit at the bottom of a slippery slope. Did the crimson stains come from Liz, he wondered, or from Morton? The sight of small, muddy footprints, proceeding rapidly away from the bat cave gave him renewed hope that Liz was still unharmed. Even better, the trail of bloodstains seemed to accompany Mortons larger bootprints more than they did Liz's much more petite tracks. Had Liz somehow managed to injure Morton? Good for you, Max thought.