Throwback

by Edward J. McFadden III

  Max estimated that seventy-five days had passed since they’d crash landed, and on the seventy-sixth day the jungle thinned and they arrived at the base of the mountains. Off to the north the volcano spewed lava and smoke, and the stench of it filled Hawk’s nostrils. Rivers of orange fire burned rock lava beds into dark stone, and every few minutes a massive explosion shook the ground. Ash fell like rain.

  The three companions camped in the jungle and saw and heard nothing unusual. When they woke, they ate, broke camp, and headed for a thin mountain cleft that rose into the blue sky.

  14

  Smoke mixed with steam snaked through the jungle, making it difficult to see more than ten feet ahead. Hawk was on point, one of the Ash 12s held before him. The forest grew thin, and no animals frolicked and crawled within the underbrush. The sounds of rending and cracking stone, the ripping of fire, and the languid push of the wind created an eerie melody that made Hawk uneasy, the erupting volcano only forty miles or so from their position.

  Lava and sulfur vents appeared in the jungle, releasing heat and toxic fumes. The land was still forming, and every few moments the ground trembled as the immense geological upheaval that formed the continents of this time continued. For all Hawk knew, he could be standing in what would become his backyard millions of years in the future.

  The future. There it was again, staring at him like an unblinking eye, always evaluating and measuring, making him feel like he wasn’t doing enough, wasn’t trying hard enough. These doubts had driven him his entire life, but somehow the fear of failure no longer motivated him. Sometimes he thought he suffered from some type of PTSD. He’d certainly been in enough battles, but they’d never affected him, or so he’d thought. He was able to fight, kill, and move on, not something a normal person should be able to do. Was he normal? What type of person left their family alone so they could go kill? It was Viking-like, and the reason for the killings, all the war, was so buried in his past he hardly remembered them. He’d come to understand that there was no valid reason. Killing another person was a crime against nature, and he’d done it for reasons he thought he’d understood, but now knew were nothing but justifications to do his master’s bidding. Now helplessness was his new fear, and one he couldn’t control or abate.

  His nose stung from the heat of the smoke, but the steam felt good. Stray beams of sunlight fought through the thinning canopy and smoke, ethereal rays that looked to be from Heaven. Heaven. If God presided over this lost world of the past he’d showed no sign to Hawk. On the contrary; Hawk felt abandoned and alone, despite his two companions that followed dutifully behind.

  The mountains loomed up before them, and as the jungle gave way to the underbrush covered mountain slopes, Hawk saw for the first time the full difficulty of their ascent. Sheer rock faces provided no clear path, and the valleys and depressions had no clear entry points. The climbing would be hard, but Hawk didn’t doubt their ability to summit the peak that was their destination.

  Max was a problem. Svet was an experienced free climber, and she regularly risked her life on some of the most difficult climbs, and all with no ropes or safety lines. Hawk wasn’t so adventurous. He climbed a few times, but always with a harness and a guide rope, which was much different than what would be required to get over these mountains. They had rope, and that was good, and Hawk figured he could tether himself and help the scientist when needed.

  The jungle ended at a rock wall, and the party headed south, away from the volcano and its spewing lava. They discovered a thin cleft in the rockface where they could start their ascent, and thus turned upward. They ate a light meal of fruit and dino-jerky, with a salad of yellowed leaves from a lush plant that yielded romaine-like lettuce. Svet had made a dressing from rendered animal fat and the citrus juice of a hard-brown fruit that looked like a coconut. It had none of the nourishing flesh, but twice the juice. Though bitter, the fruit served as a source of water, and when Hawk used his imagination he could almost fool himself into thinking the stuff tasted like lemonade.

  Refreshed, the party began their trek into the mountains. The cleft was bordered on both sides by sheer rock walls that rose two hundred feet, and there appeared to be no outlet.

  “An old lava bed?” Hawk asked.

  “Most likely. Doesn’t look like it’s been used for a long time. These rocks show no signs of current stress. Those dark lines and the porousness of the stone are indicative of dried lava, but the color is odd.”

  “Da. No black?”

  “Svet’s right. Normal hardened lava takes on a blackish hue,” Max said.

  “Different chemical makeup?” Hawk said.

  “Most likely. I think—”

  A loud explosion froze the three companions in place. The ground trembled, then fell still.

  “I wish we could see what was happening,” Hawk said. From within the hallway of stone the activity of the volcano wasn’t visible.

  The pathway plunged through a thick section of rock and emerged on a broad plain devoid of life. Hardened lava had claimed the area, and the remains of blackened trees stuck from the stone like rusty nails. To the north, the top of the volcano was obscured by thick black smoke, and it looked to Hawk like a secondary cone had formed because lava poured from the main cone’s side in a new direction.

  The spacefarers pushed on, using the rope several times to traverse difficult spots, and by lunch they’d worked their way high above the jungle. Hawk climbed atop a huge boulder while Max and Svet rested, and from his new vantage point he saw the land from which they’d come; the lake, savannah, and the vast, never ending jungle beyond.

  They traveled through a patch of stunted trees covered in black ash, and came upon volcanic vent with thick fumes pouring from it like a smoke stack. The plants closest to the vent were brown and dried from the intense heat. Several smooth caves of varying sizes pocked the mountainside, lava tubes formed when the mountains sprang from the ground.

  “You think we should head further south?” Max asked.

  “Nyet,” Svet said. She motioned to the south where several unclimbable walls of stone blocked the way. To the north, a thin valley cut through the stone and it was clear it had once been a lava bed, so unless they wanted to get closer to the geological monster, the forward path was the only one available to them.

  The party pushed upward into the clouds, trekking west over jagged boulders as the explosions of the eruption grew closer. The path grew tighter, and the sheer rock walls taller. Hawk choked from the smoke, his eyes stung, and he rubbed them until his vision blurred. Max had one of his socks pulled across his face, and Svet wore a breathing mask she’d made from a leaf and some moss, but nothing stopped the smoke from penetrating, or the steam from drenching everything through.

  The cut in the stone the party walked through narrowed and made a right turn, heading north. Small bushes and tall flowers with firework tops grew in every crag, or patch of dirt, but there were no trees or other long-established vegetation. The sky was overcast, and ash fell like the faintest of snow showers. Thick black clouds blanketed the horizon like a menacing storm.

  The path ended at a steep wall of stone that rose two hundred feet or more. A wide groove had been formed at the upper edge of the wall, and it was clear a lava falls had once spilled over the precipice.

  Thick raindrops fell, and Hawk called a halt. “I’m concerned about a flashflood. If water starts running in here we're trapped with nowhere to go.”

  Svet and Max said nothing, but Hawk knew what they were thinking. What if the flood wasn’t of water, but of molten lava?

  Fissures appeared along the path, great rents in the earth that released steam and smoke, and clouded the area. Vents were becoming more frequent as the newly risen mountain range took shape. This led to a warning from Max. “Maybe we should back off.”

  “What do you suggest? Turning around?” Hawk said.

  “The land here is still transforming, still being molded by the shifting continents and the fu
rther away we can get from the lava the better.”

  Svet shook her head no, but said nothing.

  Hawk looked back the way they’d come, then up at the rain drenched cliff face, then down the narrow path that no longer went toward the summit, but north toward the volcano. “I don’t know. I feel confined here, but it’ll be difficult climbing these faces. We either climb, head back, or take the path north and risk the lava trail.”

  Another explosion shook the ground, and a rock tumbled over the cliff’s edge and sent Hawk and his companions running for cover. The boulder landed with a crash, broke apart, and dust rose around the stones.

  Hawk took that to be a sign. “Yeah, I guess we should be safe rather than sorry.”

  Svet didn’t like the idea of going back at all. “How you know another way is not worse?”

  “I don’t, but the further we are from the spewing lava the better off we are. Nyet?”

  Svet shrugged and Hawk waited for Max’s vote. Not that their party was a democracy, but at this point calling him the leader meant something entirely different than it had up in space.

  “I say we climb. We’re not close to the volcano, and going back would be a guaranteed hardship.”

  “OK then.”

  They climbed steadily for the rest of the day, and once they got up the cliff face they were only forced to use the ropes twice. Once on a steep, slippery incline, and the second time the rope served as a railing as the party moved along the edge of a ravine with black bubbling molten lava flowing in its basin.

  Large birds and pterosaurs circled above, and an occasional rodent darted between the rocks, but that was the only wildlife. The animals knew to stay away from danger, unlike humans.

  A large lava vent pushed through the greenery, and as the party passed it, a section of ground adjacent to the vent collapsed, sending the trail behind them plummeting into the earth. The party pushed on, and soon found themselves overlooking a river of lava that flowed deep within a channel of rock. The black magma bubbled and churned, orange glowing cracks released heat and steam.

  There was no way forward, and no way back.

  The plateau the spacefarers stood on was roughly five hundred feet wide, and a hundred feet across. Large boulders, weeds, and an occasional flower fought for survival on the barren ledge, but there appeared to be no way down.

  An explosion lit the fading day, and it was close. Spatters of lava crested the mountain on the opposite side of the channel, and the flow of magma below doubled as it rose toward the ledge where the party stood.

  Hawk backtracked to see if he’d missed an outflow, or another way up the side of the mountain, but the vent they’d passed had collapsed, and getting back down using the path was no longer possible.

  The lava continued to rise, and Hawk’s stomach went cold, even as the intense heat made him sweat. He rubbed smoke addled eyes, and sat on the ground and let his head fall in his hands.

  “What we do?” Svet asked.

  Hawk was despondent, but Max jumped in. “Let’s look around, maybe there’s another way.”

  A large chunk of the precipice on which they stood cracked with a deafening screech of rock being cleaved, and it fell into the lava below and disappeared. The ground shook, and black smoke rolled over the precipice. Hawk lost sight of Max and Svet as they searched.

  A trickle of molten rock leaked from the rock face, and Hawk watched the new tunnel form.

  “Here!” yelled Max.

  Hawk couldn’t see his friend through the thick smoke and steam, but he went toward Max’s voice and found him staring up at a cave mouth twenty feet from the ground. The tunnel’s dark maw beckoned, but Hawk hesitated. It reminded him of the dwarf caves in The Lord of the Rings, and how the party had no choice but to go beneath mountains.

  We cannot get out. We cannot get out.

  They are coming.

  The trickle of lava spewing from the cliff face doubled, and rock came raining down, the pitch burning Hawk’s clothes and arms. He spun around and almost fell, panic filling him with doubt, sweat rolling into his eyes, his skin scorched with heat.

  There was only one way they could go.

  Moria.

  15

  Hawk had only gone ten feet into the cave when he halted. It was so dark he couldn’t see his hand in front of his face. The batteries in the flashlights had long since gone dead, so Max had made torches, the tips of which were wrapped with dried vines and dipped in tar, but they had no means of lighting the brands. Dripping water and the tilt of the wind echoed in the confined space, Hawk’s pounding heart filling his head. In the darkness he was alone, despite his companions, and he had an urge to sit down and give up.

  “What to do?” Svet said, the whites of her eyes next to Max’s.

  “I know,” Hawk said. “Give me one of those torches.”

  “But how—”

  “Just give me one, fast.”

  A shuffling and scraping in the dark as Max put down his bag and rummaged through it. Seconds later a stick was pressed into Hawk’s hand.

  “Wait here,” he said.

  He inched back toward the cave mouth, his hand running along the smooth wall. Fire and daylight lit the opening. Flames and brimstone, dark smoke, steam, falling rocks—all greeted the astronaut as he exited the cave. The drip of lava that pushed through the cliff face was now a torrent, and soon the precipice on which they’d stood would be consumed by fire. Black lava bubbled and hardened as it dripped over the rocks, and Hawk thrust the end of the torch into the nearest conglomeration.

  The torch caught and blazed to life. Hawk ran back into the cave, the fire from his brand throwing dancing yellow light about the lava tube.

  “That’s better,” Max said.

  “Da.”

  “We’ll see how long it lasts. How many more do we have?” Hawk asked.

  “Three. I only brought them in case we needed to move about at night. I didn’t plan for extended use.”

  “We’ll have to use them sparingly.”

  “If we can,” Max said.

  Hawk played the torchlight around the tunnel. Black striations marked the smooth walls, and the path ahead looked like a rollercoaster track as it twisted and rose. Bugs like giant cockroaches scuttled on the cave walls and in several spots water dripped from an unseen supply.

  “Argggg,” Max yelled.

  Hawk spun around and shone the light in Max’s direction.

  An animal that looked like a small chicken stripped of all its feathers moved languorously up the wall, the roach-bugs clearing a path for the creature. The odd albino beast had two sturdy legs and two forearms, and short black antennas flopped over its head. The creature turned and round globular eyes that were too large for the beast’s head stared at him. Its front claws clicked against the volcanic stone, and it whistled and squeaked as it worked its way up the wall and disappeared into a hole.

  The ceiling was full of fine stalactites that looked like rain that had frozen before it reached the ground. Piles of stones blocked the way, and the party was forced to climb over. There were no other passages, and as the tunnel twisted and turned upward, Hawk felt the temperature rise. He didn’t voice what his companions were surely thinking: if this was once a lava tube, couldn’t it be one again?

  The tunnel gave way to a natural chamber much larger than the lava tube. Hawk tripped over a stone and almost fell. The darkness was thick, the scent of dirty moisture saturating the air. Their shadows disappeared into darkness as the path widened, but there was still only one path.

  “What is that?” It was Svet, and she pointed up at the ceiling.

  Dark figures the size of large birds were wedged within the stalactites. Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. They didn’t move, or make a sound, but as Hawk lifted the torch to get a better look, the beasts were disturbed.

  As if the creatures had a single brain, their wings opened as one, and a dark cloud dropped from the cave roof. Pounding wings and high-pitched screeching
filled the cave, and before Hawk could react, the flying beasts were among them.

  They looked like baby dragons, a cross between a pterosaur and a bat. A single row of sharp teeth gleamed in pelican-like beaks, and tent flap wings pounded the air, their red eyes glowing in the darkness.

  Hawk ran up the tunnel, which narrowed as he went, becoming no more than ten feet side to side. The echoes of the pursuing dragons pushed down the cave, and he heard Max and Svet behind him. Even with the torchlight seeing what lay ahead was difficult. There were many dips in the floor, and the twists and rises of the tube were unpredictable, and Hawk almost took a tumble several times.

  One of the bat-things grabbed Hawk’s shoulder and he used the torch to knock it off. The beast shrieked, but didn’t attack again. The creature was on fire, and as it took to the air it collided with several of its friends and set them ablaze.

  Hawk ran on, not heeding the dark or the possible pitfalls and dangers. The air reeked of rot and burning flesh, and he gagged. The torch went out and he put his hands out, feeling in the darkness for obstructions. The sounds of pursuit eased, and Hawk slowed and ran his hands over his shoulder, ensuring he wasn’t wounded. His shoulder hurt from where the dragon had grabbed him, but no blood trickled from the area.

  Max and Svet came even with him, and Hawk slowed to a jog. The howling and chirping of the batsaurs faded.

  “Guess they didn’t like fried bat,” Hawk said.

  “Those things weren’t bats. I don’t know what they were, but they weren’t bats. Bats have rodent-like bodies. No, those things we saw had elongated bone structure, and their torsos were thin.”

  The three companions halted and stood in the darkness panting, the glow of the extinguished torch providing little light. Hawk blew on the torch, lightly at first, then harder, and soon the brand was ablaze again and the tunnel filled with orange flickering light. They took a break and rested, ate some food, and plunged on. They hiked an hour or so when the torch sputtered, and Hawk was forced to use it to light a new one.