Inhabited (22 page)

His feet slipped.

Justin’s body swung down and he lost his grip. Four fingers were all that kept him from falling down into the squeeze.
 

Flailing his feet, one caught a point of rock and he was stable for a moment. He swung his other hand back up over the lip. His muscles were almost useless. Justin began the slow process of inching his way up to the lip. He moved his feet with extraordinary care. He was panting by the time he got his elbows up over the edge. When he finally pulled his torso onto the ledge, he rolled to his side. The lamp sputtered as he turned it upwards.

Justin smiled and then laughed as the light flickered.

He sat up and looked at the gap.

It was wider than when he had started.
 

“Impossible,” he whispered.

It was completely impossible, but it was also true. He was sure of it. This wasn’t just a perspective shift because he was on the other side of the gap—it was at least fifty-percent farther to the opposite edge than when he had started.

“No going back,” he said.

He rolled his shoulders, self-massaged his arm muscles, and stood. He set off down the crevice.

-o-o-o-o-o-

Justin walked with his head down. He followed the footprints in the dust. He stopped when he came to a place where lots of scuffed footprints covered the whole floor of the passage. Justin looked up. There was no reason to stop there—the passage continued on around a corner.

Justin kept walking.

After two more corners, his passage squeezed down into nothing.

Kneeling, he could still find traces of the footprints, but they moved into a space where the walls closed together, making passage impossible. Distrusting his eyes, he felt the walls. He felt where they came together and blocked his escape.

He sank down and leaned against one of the walls, trying to think through the problem.
 

Justin was tired and thirsty. He found his canteen and poured a little water into his open mouth. It was slightly gritty and tasted a bit of sulfur, but it quenched his thirst. Justin let his eyes drift shut.

After a second, his eyes flew back open. He’d had the distinct sensation that he was falling. He spun and looked at the wall behind him.

“Did you move?” he whispered to the wall.

Justin got back up. He retraced his steps to the place where he’d found the confused footprints and looked around. It only took him a second to deduce what had happened. Someone had climbed. He saw burn marks on the walls from the headlamps. He saw scuffed footprints on rocks above his eye-level. That was the direction that Miguel and Travis had gone, he was almost sure of it.

But, if his theory was correct, their path might not be reproducible. The walls of this crevice weren’t behaving.
 

Justin moved back to the spot where the fissure squeezed down. Using a few of his matches, he marked the narrowest part of the passage that he could reach. He laid the matches end to end across the width of it and then settled back down with his back against the wall. He turned down the drip of his headlamp and let it burn low.

Justin waited.
 

“I
MEAN
,
THIS
IS
it, right?” Roger asked.

“Not necessarily,” Florida said.

He turned away from the hole.
 

“Are you suggesting we go back down the hangman’s noose?”

“We could,” she said. “That’s all I’m saying. We could go back that way instead of committing ourselves to this path.”

“There’s something down there, remember?” he asked. He lifted his foot for illustration.

“Your shoe?”

“My shoe and whatever was pulling on that rope. I have no interest in finding out what that was. I swear to you that it wasn’t a snag.”

“You were panicked—it’s understandable. I was cranking the noose higher, your foot was caught. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

“I’m not ashamed. I’m telling you, there was something bad down there. I’m not going back that way. We’ve explored every inch of these crystal tunnels, and I think it’s safe to say that there are only two ways out. We can go into this giant room and try to track down that guy we saw, or we can go back through the hangman’s cave and stare into the face of evil.”

“Don’t be so dramatic,” Florida said.

“I’ll send help for you if I find it,” he said. He didn’t give her a chance to object. Roger pushed forward and let himself drop through the hole. It wasn’t far down to the sloping wall of the enormous room. They had found many holes into the room, but this one had only a short drop to where the wall began to slope away.
 

He landed on bent legs and threw himself to the rock to increase his friction. Even on his back, he slid several yards before he came to a stop. He glanced back up to the cave where he’d dropped in. He saw a glow there, but couldn’t tell if it was from the crystals or from Florida’s light. Glancing around, he saw the glow from several of the other holes. It was an unsettling sight.

Roger scooted down the sloping wall until he got to a place level enough to stand easily. He was starting to figure out Florida. She didn’t respond to cajoling or requests. His best bet was to keep moving forward and wait for her to join him. If she didn’t, then so be it. He had fresh batteries from her pack, and that was the best he could hope for.

He swept his light around to orient himself.

The place he was looking for was off to the right.

-o-o-o-o-o-

Roger slowed as he approached.

He heard Florida come up behind him, but he didn’t turn.

“Thanks for waiting for me,” she said.
 

“I’ve never seen a dead body before.”

“What?”
 

She moved around him and walked forward on the tips of her toes. Roger envied her two shoes and uninjured hips.
 

“I thought it was just a shirt on the ground,” she said.

“No,” Roger said. “Look there.” He pointed with his toe.

Where the shirtsleeve ended, he could see the arm bones disappearing into the rock. Florida, perhaps unconvinced, walked right up to the shirt. She tried to lift it from the back, but parts of the fabric were actually embedded in the stone floor. Instead of lifting, the shirt ripped. She continued the tear and revealed the twisted spine and ribcage. The flesh was gone and all that was left was a half-exposed skeleton.
 

Florida knelt.

“I don’t believe it. This is solid rock. I would have assumed it had been here for thousands of years, but this shirt is modern enough,” she said.

“If I had to guess, this isn’t rock, but some kind of supercooled liquid. Like glass, you know? Is it wrong that I’m less upset about the body and more upset that his shoes aren’t exposed?” Roger asked.

“Yes,” she said. She turned her light back and looked at the giant room. “That man we saw—this is what he was looking at.”

Roger nodded. “I think so. I wonder why he didn’t hear us.”

“He went this way,” she said, pointing.

She led the way.

Where their sloping wall ended, they stood at the edge of the white sediment that made up the floor of the giant room.

“You think it’s safe?” Florida asked. She turned her head and sneezed.

“Nothing about this place is safe,” he said. “We’re not going that way unless we can walk on this shit.” He pointed to the tunnel that led to the right. The vertical walls came right up from the white floor. He put out his socked foot and touched it to the white power a little puff swirled around his toes.
 

“Fuck!” he shouted. Roger limped backwards away from the white floor. He fell to the sloping rock and pushed himself up and away. Florida followed, looking puzzled as Roger tore off his sock. Once it was off, he used the sock to wipe at the sole of his bare foot. “Look at this,” he said. He held up the sock. In the center of the bloodstain, the threads of the sock were gone. They had been eaten away and they were still smoking. He tossed the sock down.

“Whoa,” Florida said. She sneezed again and wiped her nose on her arm. “Oh shit.” There was a streak of blood on her shirt. She tilted her head back and pinched her nose.

“Shit,” Roger said. “It’s the powder. It’s some kind of acid or something. We have to get away from it. It must be in the air, too.”

Florida nodded. They climbed as high as they could up the sloping wall. Roger leaned back against the rock to take the weight off his foot.

“Those rocks over there. We can climb then and maybe get close enough to jump to one of the holes,” Roger said.

“Then back down the hangman’s rope,” she said. “It’s the only way.”

Roger sighed and nodded. He looked at the bottom of his foot. He had a spot where the skin looked irritated, but it wasn’t any worse than a minor burn. He set it down on the rock. He glanced back in the direction of the corpse that was embedded in the rock. The thought of it made him push back up to his feet.
 

“Hey,” Florida said. She nudged him with her elbow. When he looked over, she was pointing to across the bowl. There was a shape moving there.

“Hello!” Roger shouted.
 

Florida put her hand on Roger’s arm. “Save your breath.”

“Huh? Why?”

She didn’t explain. She just nodded towards the shape. Roger couldn’t tell if it was the same person they had seen earlier. The person was too far away both times. He assumed it was a man, but it was honestly just a guess. The shape was climbing up the wall on the far side of the impassable tunnel. He must have walked all the way around the perimeter of the bowl.

Roger blinked and shook his head slightly. The person was gone. Then, before he had a chance to express his confusion, the shape was back again. But it had backed up several feet and was repeating the same move.

“What the fuck?” Roger whispered.

“I don’t know,” Florida said. “I’m not sure that’s a real person. It looks more like a movie of a person or something.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know. Let’s go—it’s a long way around to where he is.”

She turned and started hiking along the steep slope.

“Wait, we’re following him?”

“Yup,” she said over her shoulder.

“What about climbing back up so we can go down the hangman’s rope?”

“We’ll never make it,” she said. “We’re going to follow him.” She pointed across the cave.

“S
TOP
!” K
RISTIN
SCREAMED
. S
HE
stood ten paces from the mouth of the mine. It was as close as she was going to get. When Kristin had been a kid, her father had raised Alaskan Malamutes. The dogs were an absurd choice in the summer. They spent every day panting and leaving little drips of spit on the carpet. It didn’t matter how cold her father turned the air conditioning—the Malamutes did nothing but slobber and shed. Her father could make them lie down, rollover, and present their paws to be wiped off before they came in the house.
 

Kristin couldn’t even make one of the dogs sit for a treat.

Her father always said that you don’t
ask
a dog to do something, you
tell
them. She heard it, eventually. There was a tone of voice he used that demanded obedience. She had never learned the trick until just that moment. When she yelled, “Stop!” to Ryan, it had been an undeniable
command
.
 

He was standing right at the mouth of the mine, and he jerked to a stop. He turned around to face her.

Kristin put her hands on her hips and summoned the tone again. “Listen to me, Ryan.” She shook her head and lowered her voice so he would have to really listen. “Joy is dead. She’s not going to care that I wrecked her Jeep, because she is somewhere on the floor of that mine, split open right now. Carlos is missing, and I don’t have any idea where the others are. I’m going to walk back to the road and hopefully flag down a car. All I’m asking is that you don’t go in that mine. Stay out here and wait. Maybe the others will get lucky. Trust me, it’s not safe to go in there.”

“You’re serious,” he said.

It wasn’t a question, but she nodded. She felt pride and hope welling up. She had convinced him. He took a slow step towards her and then seemed to finally commit to the decision. He nodded with her and advanced.

“I’ll stay here in case they come out.”

“Good,” she said.
 

There was a noise from the mine. Ryan turned and cocked his head.

She saw the darkness emerge from the cave entrance and snuff his light. Before she could scream, the black cloud had enveloped Ryan. As quick as it had emerged, it was gone. Kristin’s arms dropped to her sides as her jaw fell open. She blinked.

Kristin turned and ran for the road.

-o-o-o-o-o-

Ryan heard the thing approach. It sounded like an enormous sigh.

The darkness grew from the center of the mine and it ate the ground, the rock, and the sky. The inky black swallowed his light and left his eyes useless. The air was forced from his lungs as he was jerked forward.

The sensation of movement only lasted a second. After that, he felt like he was floating in the ocean. The water was warm around him and all he could hear was the gentle sound of surf caressing the beach.

This wasn’t the ocean though. He was in the mine. Kristin had been right to be afraid. If he’d listened sooner, he would have been fine. There was no sense in dwelling in that thought—he had to do something.
 

Ryan stretched his arms out, convinced he would find the walls of the mine. He felt nothing. He spun around in his weightless environment. His eyes detected no light.
 

A sensation—a light tickle—began on the backs of his legs. The feeling spread up to his back and then down his arms.
 

The tickle flared with heat and turned to pain. Ryan tried to scream. He heard nothing coming from his lips. The sound of his own racing heartbeat filled his ears and blocked out the sound of the gentle surf.