THIRTY-SEVEN
I
’
M SLIDING DOWN
the rope so fast that the skin of my left palm begins to slough off as the rope burns through it. At first there’s no pain, only the sensation of flesh peeling off like hot wax. Then an agonizing jolt of pain rips up my arm. I bite back a scream as I continue to drop down the cliff’s face but don’t let go of the rope. My abseil into the darkness is nothing more than a barely controlled fall.
Three pickups are visible far below me and to one side, parked where the flat meadow’s grass ends and the forested hillside begins. A few doors have been left open. The cabs appear empty. Their headlights blaze into the woods. For a moment I think maybe we can steal one. But then I notice in some of the refracted light that reaches the cliff that it’s far bigger than I remembered. There’s no way a regular-length climbing rope will reach the ground. I pray either Roberto or the men above have tied a knot onto the end of the line, because I’m descending so fast that I’ll just slide right off the end of the rope.
Suddenly it’s no longer an issue. I really am falling. The rope is no longer searing through the belay device—it’s clenched and locked in the raw muscle of my palm. Burgermeister has cut the rope.
I’m toppling backwards in the night, starting to turn in a slow back flip, and hoping I’ll at least turn all the way around before I deck out—I don’t want to hit headfirst. But then maybe it’s better to die clean than risking fifty years in a wheelchair. Headfirst doesn’t seem so bad after all. Some barely conscious instinct has my free right hand whipping the slack rope around my thigh as the wind roars in my ears with the approach of terminal velocity.
This is how I’ve always known I will die. My mother, in moments of anger when she raged at my father for the needs and skills he taught Roberto and me, had predicted it long ago. She told him this addiction would kill us all, that Death waited for us in the great voids beneath rock walls. And for so many years I’ve teased that ugly cloaked skeleton, letting him snatch at my ankles and laughing as I rudely kick at his face.
WHAM!
I’m jerked to a stop, then thrown into the cliff. My body hits it with such force that the air is torn from my lungs. I want to howl in pain but air won’t come back to me. The pain almost takes away my consciousness, too. A horrendous throbbing is shooting up my arm from my burnt left hand, my spine and ribs feel as if they’ve shattered on the wall, my lungs won’t work, and where the rope’s wrapped around my thigh it feels as if my leg’s being crushed by some impossible weight. And that weight starts increasing with tiny jerks.
It takes me a minute to draw a haggard breath and figure out what’s going on. There’s no doubt I’m still alive—death could not possibly hurt so much. I’m hanging upside down with the cut rope wrapped around my thigh and locked in my belay device. Something has caught the other end. A new pain, a kick to the stomach, makes me realize that the belay device, overheated from the wild rappel, is burning through my jacket and shirt and is pressing against the bare flesh of my stomach. The tiny tugs keep constricting around my leg—suddenly I’m aware that I’m being slowly dragged into the sky.
I want to call out, to ask who’s doing the hauling, but there’s not enough air. It can’t be Fast and Burgermeister, as they’d been the ones who’d cut the top end of the rope. So it must be Roberto. He must have gotten to a ledge or something and tied in with the lower, free end. I’d like to help but even the smallest movement is far beyond me right now.
I moan uncontrollably with each new tug. Staring out over the dark valley, I see men running down the hill and out of the trees now, running toward the two trucks. Engines rev. I watch their headlights swing out, then in, coming closer to focus on the base of the cliff.
The sound that comes from my mouth is what I remember Roberto once describing, after I’d taken a mogul full in the chest in a youthful attempt to ski a double-black-diamond run at Jackson Hole without turning, as a moose-call. The headlights below bounce like crazed puppies until they’re aimed somewhere beneath me. I hear men’s voices shouting. Then handheld deer-spotting lights are turned up toward me and the air around me becomes like the Fourth of July—there are the stars in the sky, stars in my head, and a whole new light show of other violent flares and explosions.
They’re shooting at me.
I recall that in my two previous gunfights I’d felt like Superman, able to dodge bullets. Now I just feel like some celestial black hole, pulling them toward me with a force stronger than gravity.
Hands grab at my clothing and drag me over a sharp edge that tears at my ribs. Kim’s voice is loud in my ear but still sounds very far away. Too distant to comprehend. Even though I’m finally on a relatively flat surface, the pain doesn’t ease. The grasping hands, the shouting voices, they pull me up and over what feels like a low staircase before I’m shoved into a dark hole and dumped into total blackness. The only light comes from the stars swirling in my head.
“You shot? Anton! You shot?” It’s my brother’s voice shouting at me now. His words echo off the darkness in such an odd way that I figure I’m in a cave. Cal’s cave. Cal’s Bad Cavern. I want to respond but nothing will come from my lips but that low moose-call. I don’t know what my response would be anyway.
A single blazing eye—the cyclops beam of a headlamp—begins cutting at me like a laser while hands roughly tear the rope from around my thigh. Then my clothes are being dragged off. I try to sit up but am shoved back down.
“I’m all right,” I finally manage to rasp. “I think.”
“No,
che,
you’re totally fucked up.” But my brother chuckles at my attempt to speak. “He knocked you down, but he didn’t knock you out!”
“Who?”
“The Grim fucking Reaper, bro. He can’t keep you down.”
My burnt hand rages again as someone pours water over it. And then over my stomach. Soon the actions of the hands moving over me become less frantic. They don’t push me down now when I try to sit up. “What’s the . . . damage?” I ask, my voice so weak it’s almost imperceptible to my own ears, as I move my good right hand over my parts.
It’s Kim who answers. “I’d bet on some broken ribs, Anton. Can you wiggle your toes?” I flop my feet around on the uneven ground when the cyclops beam focuses there. “Good. You’ve got burns on your leg and stomach. On your left hand, too. But I don’t think you were shot.”
“Where?” I croak.
“In the cave.”
“Sunny?”
“She’s here.”
“Let me see the light.” My breath is finally coming back.
Roberto, the cyclops, pulls the headlamp off his head and puts it in my good hand. “Are
you
guys all right?” I shine it at the faces around me. Roberto’s grinning, looking like an action-flick movie star who’s just filmed the climax. Kim is breathing hard, her face streaked with dirt and red with exertion. Her good eye is alight with something other than fear. Anger, or maybe victory. Sunny is huddled against her, sobbing with her face buried against Kim’s neck. Steam comes from everyone’s mouth in the cool air of the cave.
“We’re okay,” Kim says. “You’re the only one who’s physically damaged.” Sunny, however, is clearly an emotional wreck. Kim gently touches her fingertips to my forehead for a second and then drags them down across my face. The pleasure it gives me is as intense as a kiss.
I shine the light beyond them and then all around. It’s not a cave but a cavern. There’s just a single opening—the one they’d dragged me through, which is a mere slot in the wall. It’s just a foot and a half wide and maybe three feet high. Through it I can see the stars and hear the occasional snap of a rifle. Roberto tells me not to shine it there, not to give them any more of a target than they already have. I play the beam over my head and see a broken ceiling thirty feet high. I gasp again, but not from pain, when I shine the light behind us.
The cavern appears to extend back almost a hundred feet. The entire area is covered with crumbling mud huts. The ones directly behind us are low and squat; the ones against the cavern’s walls on each side rise to the ceiling like tiny three-story condos. The flat surfaces and the maze of low brick walls are covered with broken pottery and stones that have fallen from the ceiling. Once the rubble-strewn area near the tiny opening must have been a great, broad ledge, allowing sunlight into the south-facing ruin. A centuries-old rockfall must have buried the ledge and hidden the tiny village. All but for the window-sized slot. Looking around, I think that this is how Howard Carter must have felt when he found King Tut’s tomb. All that’s missing is the gold.
“Holy shit.”
I can’t tell if I say it or it’s Roberto. Maybe we both say it at the same time. But it’s what all of us are feeling—all but Sunny, who has seen it before and who is now too demented with the aftermath of her captivity to appreciate it. It seems unreal to find ourselves in a place like this—where people once slept, made love, raised children, cooked over wood fires, and hid from their enemies. Only we can’t hide here for long. Our enemies are more advanced. And they know just where we are.
“Is there another way out?” I shine the light at the cringing girl, hoping to somehow pull her out of her private pain. I’m thinking of the hole in the floor of the kiva she’d said Cal had shown her. A kiva, if I remember correctly, is some sort of ceremonial pit that’s purpose is debated by archaeologists. Sunny doesn’t appear to hear me—she continues crying into Kim’s shoulder. She doesn’t answer until I ask again in a harder voice.
“I don’t know. Cal and I . . . we didn’t get a chance to explore it.”
“We aren’t going out that way for a while,” Roberto says, jerking a thumb at the opening. Pops of gunfire come from beyond it.
“How long do you think they’ll wait for us?” Kim asks.
“As long as it takes. They can starve us out if they want. Or come in after us.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
M
Y WORDS PROVE
prophetic. No sooner have they left my lips than the rifle fire dies away and a moment later we hear a rattle of small stones on the ledge outside the entrance. Kim tries to take the light from me but I turn it out. Roberto crawls toward the opening—his shadow blocking out the tiny strip of stars. Beyond him, I can hear the rasp of a rope against nylon, like a snake sliding into a sleeping bag.
I grope my way up onto my knees, gasping with the effort, and feel for my gun. But it’s nowhere to be found. I remember that I’d emptied it anyway. So I crawl behind my brother to the tiny opening. In a few inches of space over his shoulder, I can see the small ledge outside. Roberto crouches at the opening—a trap-door spider lurking in his hole.
Boots softly touch down on the ledge. A man’s silhouette, smaller than either Fast or Burgermeister, is backlit by the handheld lights aimed up from the meadow. The developer and Rent-a-Riot are too cowardly to do the dangerous, dirty work for themselves. I feel almost bad for the short silhouette until I see him slap a hand to his side and make out the form of a leather holster there.
Roberto eases out onto the ledge. The man sees or hears him and tugs frantically at the holster.
My brother steps right up to him. “Hi,” I hear him say, the way he might greet an acquaintance on the street. Then he pushes the man in the chest and laughs as the short shadow windmills on the edge for a moment before slowly teetering out into the night. A primal scream tears through the air. It’s cut off with a thump on the talus far below.
“Flatlander,” Roberto says disdainfully as he leans over the edge. “Didn’t tie his backup knots. Posers shouldn’t climb.”
The rifle fire starts up again with renewed fury. Roberto takes two quick steps back toward the opening, then dives through, hitting me with the force of a tackle. I try not to scream from the pain in my damaged ribs while he rolls off me, laughing.
“What happened?” Kim is shouting at us in the dark.
A bullet finds its way through the entrance and zips briefly around the ruins. After two or three ricochets it buries itself in a dried mud wall somewhere. All of us scurry away from the opening, tripping over the ancient steps on the cave’s floor. Our feet kick through a litter pile of pottery shards and shattered stones.
“They sent a guy down on a rope,” I explain, still racked with a myriad of sharp aches. “Roberto took care of him.”
“Fuckers won’t try
that
again.”
“What are we going to do?” Kim asks when we’ve all caught our breath. With the headlamp turned back on but shielded by our bodies, we’re huddled behind the hut closest to the entrance. I struggle to get back in my clothes. My body is wet with sweat and already starting to chill. Each movement, each inhalation, sends knives of pain stabbing through my ribs.
“I talked to Dad on the cell, ’Berto. When we were up on the ridge. He said he’s coming.”
Roberto is utterly still for a minute. He just stares into my eyes. I realize it’s the first time I think I’ve ever seen him not moving, not animated. But his eyes are indescribably bright, almost creating a pale blue luminosity of their own. “He said that?” he asks finally.
I nod.
“A lot of fucking help that’ll be.” But his eyes are still shining.
“Can he help us?” Kim asks.
I shrug. “I don’t know. He’ll do all he can. But first he has to catch a flight out, and with the sheriff blocking the road he won’t be able to get up here. And even if he can convince the Forest Service or the FBI that there’s been a kidnapping, it’ll still take time to get warrants and all that. Days, at the least. We’ve got to get out of here on our own. Before they figure out they can just lower some dynamite onto the ledge and blow this place away.”
Dad may not be able to rescue us, but the look on my brother’s face tells me that for a few hours at least the family’s esprit de corps has been saved.
The rifle fire aimed at the tiny opening continues sporadically. Only an occasional bullet makes its way into the cavern. It would take a very fortunate bullet to ricochet into one of us. And we’ve already received more than our fair share of bad luck.
While Roberto guards the opening with a daggerlike rock in one hand, just in case any more of Fast’s men are foolish enough to try to rappel in, Kim, Sunny, and I explore with the single headlamp. We move huddled together within the radius of the tiny beam of light that I try to keep pointed at our feet.
The pueblo or cliff dwelling or whatever it is seems smaller once we start moving around. I doubt if more than ten families could have lived here. The rooms within the adobe huts we peek into are tiny, the openings so low that even the women have to bend in half to fit through the open doorways. Inside they’re all fairly regular and square in shape. There are some raised areas that I guess were used for sleeping. Ancient smoke has blackened some of the walls. The floors are littered with chunks of fallen dried mud mixed with broken pots. Everywhere there are hardened mouse turds.
“If the government knew this place really exists,” Kim tells me, her voice filled with wonder, “there’s no way they would even consider the swap. They would have laughed in Fast’s face.”
A sense of history is almost palpable. I can picture the huts swarming with lithe-muscled men, women, and children. They must have been very adept climbers to make this their home. The ruin has to be more than five hundred years old. I remember reading somewhere that the Anasazi are believed to have disappeared long before the Spaniards began marching up from the south, killing Indians, then perversely building Christian missions in their wake. And I remember some more recent, darker headlines about the Anasazi—some archaeologists suspect they weren’t the peaceable farming culture everyone had always romanticized them as. The articles referred to signs of clan warfare and ritual cannibalism.
The higher huts along the sides are inaccessible. Piles of rotten wood beneath them indicate that once ladders had been used to reach the openings high above our heads. I could probably hack hand- and footholds into the dry mud walls, but know it’s not worth the effort and destruction.
The only structure that’s different from these huts is all the way in the back of the cavern. A low, crumbling wall of large bricks has been built in a circle just ten feet in diameter against the rear wall. Enclosed within the circle is a pit. I shine the light down and the three of us lean over the wall carefully so that it doesn’t collapse.
“That’s the kiva,” Sunny tells us. “Cal was going to take me in it.”
There’s a broken floor twenty feet down, littered with the same fallen stones and pottery that we’d found in the huts. A trickle of water runs down the cavern’s back wall and into the pit but doesn’t pool at the bottom. Instead it runs right down through a small dark hole in the stones. The sound of falling water is barely perceptible from beyond the hole. I remember Sunny telling us about how Cal had been down there—how he’d reported that there were passages everywhere. And possibly a connection to the outside.
I scramble down into the pit—the sides are less than vertical, with lots of holds in the rough bricks. At the bottom, I move carefully to the hole, unsure if the entire floor is going to collapse beneath my weight. There’s a small pile of stones near the opening where the water runs through—I guess that Cal had placed them there when he enlarged the opening enough to slide in. I lean over it and point the flashlight down.
“What’s down there?” Kim asks.
The beam of light traces the trickle of silver water as it falls without touching rock for what I guess is about fifty feet. It’s hard to tell, though, as the light is reflected back at me off a pool of water at the bottom. It looks like another cavern below us, but there’s no way to tell how big it is because the hole is so narrow and long before it appears to open up.
“An underground lake or something. Maybe another cavern like this one.”
Roberto calls out, “Hey, Ant, you’d better hear this.”
I scramble back up out of the pit and the three of us pick our way back to him. Outside the rifle fire has stopped and a man is yelling. It’s Burgermeister’s voice.
“. . . one hour it’s all coming down. You don’t believe me, ask the girl. She knows we got the juice. So if you come out now, we’ll see if we can work something out. Otherwise, you’d better put your heads between your legs and kiss your stupid hippie asses goodbye.”
“He’s talking about the dynamite,” Sunny tells us. “They had crates and crates of it not far from the trailers. They showed it to me.”
“How are they going to get it in here?” Kim asks.
Roberto points at the opening. “All they got to do is lower it onto the ledge outside. That would be enough to bring the whole face down. The cave, too.”
“We can’t go out there. They’ll kill us no matter what he says.” Sunny’s voice is high and tinged with the onset of fresh hysterics.
Kim puts her arm around her friend and former lover. “Easy. We aren’t going out. It’d be better to stay in here, dynamite and all. Right, Anton?”
I lean out the opening and see the trucks backing away from the talus field at the cliff’s base. They turn and drive into the meadow and I think for a moment that we can rappel down and have a chance of disappearing into the woods. But then one of the trucks turns and once again aims its high beams on the cliff. I hear the distant sound of doors slamming and know the men are getting out with their rifles. They’d just been putting some distance between themselves and the imminent explosion. The other truck continues up Wild Fire Peak toward the trailers. It’s probably been sent to fetch the dynamite.
If we give up and go down, even if they don’t shoot us as we slide down the rope, I have no doubt we’ll all be killed. Fast and Burgermeister have nothing to gain by letting us live—and everything to lose. We have nothing to bargain with. And Fast knows about Kim’s hatred for him. I pick up the packs and sling a strap from each over my aching shoulders.
“Get the rope, ’Berto,” I tell Roberto with more confidence than I feel. “We’re going spelunking.”