The Deep Zone: A Novel (40 page)

She moved to hands and knees, groaned from the pain in her head and back, then cursed herself. For all she knew, Cahner might still be up there, listening to make sure she had died. She could see absolutely nothing, but she could feel, and the palms of her hands were touching something that felt like a thick, wet blanket. She moved to one side, gasping again with pain, and when she did the surface under her hands and knees moved. Terrified, she froze. What the hell was going on here? Experimentally, she pressed down gently with one hand. The surface gave beneath the pressure and then the rest of it undulated gently, almost like a huge water bed.

Then she understood. It was a microbial mat. A thick, living colony of photophobic bacteria sometimes formed atop a body of mineral-rich water. Such mats metabolized the elements in that water, primarily calcium, iron, and carbon. They could grow to be two feet thick. Beneath the mat would lie another, foot-thick gelatinous layer of metabolizing matter and, beneath that, water. Together, the mat and that subsurface layer had absorbed the shock of her fall. They also explained why the rocks she and Cahner had dropped earlier had made no sound.

So the biomass had broken her fall, like those giant cushions stuntmen landed on after dropping ten stories. Though from the
way she felt, this mat may not have been as yielding as those Hollywood cushions. She lay back down, trying to still the pain in her head, breathing quietly, listening. She could hear, very faintly, the flowing water of the river that ran near the camp. She waited. When she judged that an hour, at least, had passed and she’d heard nothing but flowing water from above, she decided to try moving.

Her first concern was inadvertently punching through the mat. But then she reasoned that if the thing had been thick enough to break her fall from who knew how many feet, it could stand her moving around on it. She crawled in one direction for about fifteen feet, until she found the pit wall. Then, keeping her left hand in contact with the wall for balance, she stood up very slowly. The mat moved under her, and when she took a step it moved more. But she found that she could stand well enough, and began working her way around the circumference of the shaft. It was smaller than she remembered the surface opening being, and that was a very good thing, because it meant the walls would slant away from the floor rather than overhanging it. Climbing out was going to be hard enough, but if the walls had been overhanging it would have been impossible.

Having located the pit walls, she got down on all fours and began crawling back and forth in as close to a grid pattern as she could manage in absolute darkness, looking for anything Cahner might have tossed in after her. But there was nothing.

Can I climb out of this thing without the Gecko Gear?

Stupid question. You either do that or you lie down and die
.

So that was settled. The question was, how? She could see nothing at all. But she knew that blind people climbed, and that some of them were among the best pure rock climbers on earth. For one thing, their hypersensitive fingers and feet found holds where sighted people could not. For another, being blind, they were immune to exposure, the inescapable sense of dread that got worse the higher you went on a wall and, after a time, began to feel like a dead weight pulling you over backward.

If they can do it, you can do it
.

With the decision made, she never looked back. Once committed to the climb, she could only hope that features in the rock would constitute a route she could climb to the top, wherever that was. It was remotely possible that the top was hundreds of feet above her, but she did not think so. For one thing, she could still hear the faint sound of flowing water. But equally, even with a cushion like the thick microbial mat, there was a limit to the vertical distance a human body could fall without sustaining fatal injuries on landing. That was why the stuntmen who specialized in high falls topped out at about ten stories, or one hundred feet. Drop farther than that, and no net or cushioning system in the world could save you. It wasn’t always broken bones that did the damage so much as injuries to the brain and internal organs, slung around inside the skull and body cavity by the sudden impact.

She walked around the circumference of the pit again, this time more slowly, feeling for the best place to begin. It turned out to be at about three o’clock from her starting position. There, the wall offered two good handholds and one good foothold. It wasn’t perfect, but it was the best this wall was going to give.

The handholds were protrusions, the foothold a shallow hole in the wall at about knee height. Hallie put her right boot toe into that, grasped the two handholds, and stood up. In rock climbing on the surface, where you could see the route and plan your way up it, the best way to go involved maintaining continual upward momentum, so that very good climbers looked as though they were flowing right up the wall. In the dark, though, where the route remained invisible, there would be none of that. Her climb would be a series of starts and stops, and going up that way would be both more tiring and more dangerous.

Her first task was to find a placement for her left foot, now hanging free. She searched with the boot toe, running it up and down systematically, as though she were painting the wall with brushstrokes.

Lucky
, she thought, when half of that boot slipped into a smooth-edged hole two feet above her other foot.
You won’t be that lucky twice
. Hallie stood up straight, weighting that foot, looked for and found a ledge over which she could hook the fingers of her left hand, and locked her right fingers over the lateral continuation of that ledge. She had braced for an explosion of pain in her bandaged left hand, but it wasn’t as bad as she had expected. Nothing she couldn’t handle. She repeated the search with her right foot, looking for a new placement for it. At first she thought there was none to be found, but eventually she felt a rounded nubbin about the size of a grapefruit. If the wall had not angled away from her slightly, making it a few degrees from dead vertical, she would not have been able to support her weight on that round, slick surface. She placed the boot carefully and pushed herself up another two feet.

When she had climbed what she judged to be about thirty feet, she found four holds secure enough to allow her to rest. Her left leg had started doing the sewing machine, and her ungloved fingers were raw and bleeding. Every once in a while her head spun, inducing vertigo, and she could only cling to the wall and hope it would pass.

As she had been climbing, the sound of the river above had been growing steadily stronger. Hallie had no way of knowing for sure, but she estimated that the top was still another forty or fifty feet away. Though it was nothing but a wild guess, she settled on that distance. It felt manageable, yet not overly optimistic.

She understood that this was a rock climb with a margin of safety afforded by the microbial mat below, which had saved her earlier. But she also knew that she had been very lucky to survive that fall. Cahner had thrown her over with enough force to propel her away from the walls of the pit. If she had hit those jagged rock walls on her way down, that probably would have been the end of it. And if she felt herself starting to fall from the wall where she clung, it was possible she would have time to push off and fall free all the way to the bottom. But climbing falls did not usually give
you fair warning to get yourself together. Most of the time you were in the air before you knew it. If that happened here, she would hit the wall all the way down, and if the impact did not kill her it would certainly cause serious injury. And would she be able to try the climb out a second time, hurt even worse than she was now?

As she hung there, her left leg jerking up and down, her fingers burning, her side stabbed with pain, a tiny thought sprang up deep in her mind.

Let go
.

It would be so easy.

Just let go
.

She could let herself fall over backward, making sure that her head hit the rock, and there would be just that one blinding impact, so quick that she would probably not even feel any pain, and that would be it. Her mind played with the thought briefly, like a tongue cautiously tasting some new and exotic morsel.

But then her father’s face flared up from memory, and his voice, and, in quick flashing succession, her mothers and brothers and Mary … When she focused again she was already climbing, and now she started to become one with the rock. Her hands and feet felt the wall in slow but continuous motions, seeking and finding placements, gaining a foot here, six inches there, two inches somewhere else. The wall smelled like cold, wet metal tinged with a faint hint of rotten eggs, the cave’s sulfur lending that scent. At about sixty feet, the wall’s outward slant increased, making the climbing a bit easier.

It also made a mistake easier to make, and she climbed with even greater caution than before. Sooner than she expected, her right hand reached up and felt no more wall, just space. She reached farther, felt the pit’s edge and then cave floor. She got her other hand on the flat surface, pulled herself up, and flopped down onto her stomach, gasping.

AFTER RIDDING HIMSELF OF HALLIE, CAHNER BROKE CAMP
and started up, taking his time, no need to hurry now. He traversed the ledge above the Acid Bath and worked his way back to clear air. Cahner had taken Hallie’s map from her pack and had traveled the same route, but following her lead and finding the way himself proved to be two very different things. Fatigue slowed him and wrong turns forced him to retrace his steps several times, wasting precious energy. As it turned out, exhaustion stopped him sooner than he’d expected. His legs simply would not move anymore.

He dropped his pack at the first clear space he could find, not much bigger than a one-car garage but with a soft, sandy floor. The ceiling above this area of the cave was exceptionally wet, and so much mineral-rich water dripping over the eons had created a forest of stalagmites about his campsite. Some were no bigger than scallions, some were as high as a man’s waist, and a few massive columns
rose all the way to the ceiling. He liked being in the midst of so many stalagmites. It gave his camp a safe, secure feel, like a stockade of stone.

A watercourse flowed close by, loud enough to fill Cahner’s camp with the sound of the stream jumping over rocks, tangling in currents, flowing and bubbling down into the depths. He ate a dinner of MRE beef Stroganoff, then set about brewing tea. As he was trying to light the little stove, he dropped his yellow butane lighter. Locating it in the spot of his light, he bent over to pick it up. Just as he started his downward motion, something smacked the back of his helmet, knocking it off. It felt like someone had hit him with a baseball bat. Then something smashed him squarely in the back.

He was down on his belly and the something was on top of him. A forearm closed around his throat, cutting off his air. He flailed back wildly with his fists, felt one connect hard with his assailant’s face, heard a grunt of pain. He bucked with his hips and rolled and got out from under the attacker. Instinctively he dropped to his hands and knees and felt for his helmet, which, by sheer luck, he grasped almost immediately. Without putting it back on his head, he flashed the light around, trying to spot the person who had come after him. When his light found its target, he could not believe his eyes.

“Hallie!”

He tried to blind her with his light but she was on him in a second, hauling him to his feet, shaking him, slapping his face. He reached for the Taser, but, with nothing to fear after disposing of her, he had stuffed it into his pack. She hit him on the side of the neck with a rock, smacking the brachial nerve bundle, stunning him. His legs collapsed and he fell, dropping the helmet, kicking it inadvertently and sending it spinning out of reach. It came to rest twenty feet away, the light broken. They were plunged into complete darkness. He scrambled away from her, scuttling like a crab.

“You can’t be here!” he yelled.

Her reply was a rock the size of a grapefruit that whisked past his
head, missing by inches, crashing into a stalagmite on the other side of the clearing. Cahner rolled onto his belly and crawled to the right, trying to make no sound, stifling his breathing. He wanted to find a rock, stalagmite, anything to hide behind and let him gather his wits. Another rock struck the cave floor just inches from his face, spraying him with sand and gravel. He rolled left, slid backward, covered his head with his hands and just lay there, trying to become part of the cave.

Hallie’s attack had been fired by rage and adrenaline, but the fighting had burned through those and now she was winded and nauseous. Her intent was not to kill Cahner but to render him helpless and bring him out of the cave as a prisoner, to answer for his actions. Or maybe she would leave him in the cave and let somebody else come back for him. She really hadn’t thought through the possibilities by the time she had caught up with him, the sounds of her approach covered by those of the river flowing nearby.