by Jeremy Bates
No time to put the flames out.
No time to bury him.
Hanns, it seemed, had been alone, wandering the tunnels and doing whatever he did down here by himself. But the others were coming. They would find us soon.
Once again I considered making a stand here and attacking each of our pursuers one by one as they wiggled out of the hole. But this, I decided, was not a good option. They wouldn’t come through like lemmings. We might kill one, maybe two. But they would adapt. They would likely try to wait us out. How long could the three of us remain vigilant? We would have to sleep at some point. Also, that hole wasn’t the only way into the room. A hallway extended from the opposite wall. They might know a dozen other ways to reach that hallway—and, consequently, us.
I picked up Hanns’ torch and bone-weapon and turned to Danièle. She finished pulling her T-shirt back over her head and blinked at me with the eyes of someone who had just watched a tornado wipe out their home and all their earthly possessions. “We have to leave him,” I told her. Then, to Katja: “Are you coming?”
She nodded mutely.
Chapter 65
The hallway ran straight. We passed several small rooms on alternating sides of us. They were bare and led nowhere. This discouraged me, as I had hoped to find branching passageways, which we could take at random, losing ourselves, and our pursuers, in the maze.
Seventy-five or so yards on the tunnel ended at a cavernous grotto. The ceiling must have cleared thirty feet. I couldn’t be certain, because even with Hann’s bright torch, it remained layered in thick shadows. The rocks walls were bulging and irregular, as you found in nature, leading me to believe this was some naturally forming underground pocket.
“Is that water?” Danièle asked me, her voice tight.
I had entered the grotto looking up, not down, and I hadn’t noticed the ground before now. I took a few steps forward, sweeping the torch low. Danièle was right. Stretching ahead of us was a mirror-smooth pool of black water. It covered the entire ground save a narrow ribbon of land that followed the wall to the right of us.
“Must be some sort of reservoir,” I said.
I was already moving along the ribbon, praying it linked to a connecting hallway. It climbed gradually, melding into the far wall, which rose in staggered sheets. I could continue left, jumping from one cleft to the next, like a mountain goat. But what was the point? It couldn’t lead anywhere.
Cursing, I returned the way I’d come, running over our dwindling options in my head. We had to head back down the hallway, back through the cat hole. If we could get there before our pursuers, we could continue the way we’d been going, the way Hanns had come from. When I reached Danièle and Katja, I said, “We have to go back—”
An enraged shriek shattered the hushed silence. A handful of others joined it.
“They found Hanns,” Katja said softly.
“Shit!” I said, going cold with panic. It was too late. There was nothing we could do now, nowhere to go, we were as good as dead.
For a brief moment I wondered if I could take them all out. I was bigger and stronger than them, and I would be fighting for my life.
Nevertheless, this hope was extinguished almost immediately.
There were too many. They would overwhelm me.
I wouldn’t stand a chance.
“Shit!” I repeated.
“What is that?” Danièle said. She was pointing across the water.
I didn’t see anything. “What?”
“That! Look! The darkness!”
The darkness? But then I saw what she had indicated. A patch of black, where the far wall met the waterline. The torchlight didn’t penetrate it.
A deep shadow? Another fissure? Perhaps if it extended far enough into the rock, it would conceal us. But that meant we had to cross the water…
Danièle searched her pockets and produced a book of matches. “Do not make any ripples,” she told me. She popped the matches in her mouth, then waded carefully into the water. After three steps the water reached her waist. Another two it was to her neck. She swam silently forward.
I waded into the water reluctantly. The temperature was close to freezing, but that wasn’t why my body was locking up, my stomach churning with dread.
A couple months after the boat accident on Lake Placid, I’d been with Bridgette on the ferry crossing New York Bay to Staten Island, to visit the zoo, and I’d gotten violently seasick, something that had never happened to me before. After that day, the mere sight of water, in any volume larger than what a bathtub held, made me nauseous until I looked away from it. I had not been on another boat, or swimming, since.
I glanced over my shoulder. “Follow me, Katja, we’re going to hide.”
She stood board-stiff. “I can’t swim!”
I hesitated. We couldn’t leave her behind. She’d give away that we came this way. Moreover, Zolan would grill her until she told him where we were hiding. “Climb on my back then,” I said. “I’ll carry you.”
“I’ll sink!”
“Not if you hold onto me. Hurry!”
She stepped slowly into the water and wrapped her arms around my neck. I disposed of both the torch and bone-weapon under the water. The flame went out with a hiss, and blackness swallowed us.
“I’m scared,” Katja said, her breath warm on my ear.
“You’ll be okay.”
“Do you promise?”
“Yes,” I said, slipping deeper into the water, trying not to think how far down the bottom was. “Now hold on.” She tightened her grip around my neck, and I began to swim.
The pool was roughly twenty-five feet in diameter. I crossed it quickly. When I touched the far rock I whispered Danièle’s name.
“Here,” she replied.
I followed the wall to the right. It curved into what I guessed was the fissure. Maybe ten feet farther on the ceiling pressed down until it was mere inches above my head. “Danièle?”
No answer.
“Danièle?”
No answer.
“Where is she?” Katja asked in a small voice.
“I don’t know!” I said. “Danièle? Danièle!”
Something brushed my leg. I cried out, spinning, kicking. Katja tightened her hold around my neck, choking me. I struggled to stay afloat.
Then Danièle’s voice: “Will! Quiet! Stop it!”
I pried Katja’s arms from my throat enough so I could breathe again, but I continued to splash and pant, my eyes bulging. The water suddenly felt mawkish, like quicksand, and I knew I was going to drown.
“Will!” Danièle said. “Quiet!”
“Can’t!”
“Will!”
Somehow I managed to calm myself enough to resume treading water—though it was a fragile calm that could still abandon me again at any moment. “Where were you?” I whispered, tilting my chin to keep my mouth above the surface.
“It continues underwater.”
“What…the fissure? How far?”
“I do not know,” she said awkwardly, and I realized she was speaking around the matchbook in her mouth. “I didn’t go to the end. Are you ready?”
“For what?” I said, knowing exactly what.
“We have to follow it.”
“No!”
“It might lead out of here!”
“Forget it!”
“You think Zolan and the others have not been here before? Of course they have! They will know about this fissure. They will search it.”
She was right, I knew, and the dread in my stomach bloomed to fill me completely, suffocating me from the inside out. I was nauseous with it. I couldn’t dive beneath the water, beneath the rock, with no guarantee of surfacing again. I couldn’t. I simply couldn’t.
“Katja can’t swim,” I said.
“She does not have to. She only has to hold her breath.”
“Danièle—I can’t do this.”
Faint light appeared, blacks edging to grays.
S
omeone had entered the grotto.
Chapter 66
DANIÈLE
Danièle took a deep breath and sank below the surface of the water. She kept her eyes open, but everything was black as an eclipse. She swam forward with a breaststroke, her legs frog kicking. This made her think of Rob for the briefest moment before she blinked him out of her mind. The passage she followed was narrow. At the peak of her outswept arms her fingertips brushed the rocks walls.
She knew she could hold her breath for roughly two minutes—she and Dev used to time each other when they went to the Aquaboulevard on their birthdays as kids—which meant she had some sixty seconds to see where this passage led before reaching the point of no return.
She began to count.
Chapter 67
The light grew brighter. The grays bled into yellows. Still, our pursuers weren’t making any sound. Did they know they had us trapped? Were they expecting an ambush? And where was Danièle? Had she emerged on the other side of the rock?
If I hesitated any longer I knew I would never be able to make myself follow her lead, so I whispered, “Take a deep breath, Katja—”
“No!”
“Yes!” She either came with me, or she’d have to let go: it was her choice. “One, two—three.” I filled my lungs and sank below the surface just as Danièle had done.
The water slipped over my head and droned in my ears and immediately disorientated me. I didn’t know up from down, left from right, couldn’t recall which way I was supposed to go. I might have chickened out, crashed back through the surface, if I could find the surface, had it not been for Katja. She had not let go. Her thin arms remained wrapped around my neck. She was putting her complete trust in me, and I wasn’t going to fail her.
I stretched my arms wide, touched the sides of the fissure, and began to kick. After a few yards I felt for the ceiling. It was submerged, confirming I had gone in the right direction.
A pressure began building in my lungs quickly—too quickly—so that soon my lungs felt as if they were about to burst.
I was going to have to turn back…but turn back to what? To Zolan and his mob? They would kill me. That was a given. The only question was how they would do it.
Likely slowly and excruciatingly, revenge for Hann’s death.
Drowning, on the other hand, would be relatively painless. The TV depictions of swimmers flailing around in panic and agony underwater were wrong. That only happened to those who had not yet gone under (like me a minute before); it was their body’s last-ditch effort to obtain air. The actual act of drowning was more often quick and unspectacular and silent.
Without oxygen reaching my brain, my body would shut down and I would lose consciousness. My breathing would stop. I’d go into respiratory arrest and sink. Then I would enter the hypoxic convulsion stage. My skin would turn blue, notably in the lips and fingernail beds, and my body would go rigid. Finally my heart would stop pumping blood, and I would be clinically dead.
That’s what happened to Max anyhow; it had all been in the coroner’s report.
I could see Max and everyone else killed on Lake Placid gliding alongside me, phosphorescent shapes darting in and out of my peripheral vision. I could hear them too, their voices ghostlike echoes inside my head, telling me of all the things they would never able to do. Karen would never become a dentist and meet Mr. Right. Brian would never earn his MBA and prove himself at his father’s investment management firm on Wall Street. Gina would never visit her older sister in Italy. Tommy would never bike through Central America. Eddy would never finish restoring the 1998 Porsche 911 Carrera he’d bought from a police auction, while Joseph, the sixty-three-year-old retired accountant who’d lived year round on the lake, would never catch the monster largemouth bass that had snapped his line and gotten away the summer before, and that, according to his wife, he had been hunting the night he died. And Max, of course, would never graduate the Manhattan School of Music, never play in Carnegie Hall, never achieve her dream of becoming a New York Philharmonic cellist—
The pressure around my throat lessoned.
Katja! I thought, momentarily clearheaded.
I snagged her wrists with my hands before she could float away and kicked on with my legs. I only managed to continue for another five seconds before my breathing reflex reached the breakpoint and I opened my mouth and took a futile breath. Water gushed into my stomach and lungs. I experienced the briefest moment of relief, followed by the faraway acceptance that I was about to die.
Chapter 68
DANIÈLE
Danièle’s knees and hands brushed rock beneath her as the ground angled upward. A moment later her head cleared the water. She wanted to whoop with relief. Instead she spat the matchbook from her mouth into her hand, took the candle from her pocket, and lit the wick on the second try.
The pool she stood in was tiny, only a few yards in diameter. The inky water came to her waist. She stared at the rippling surface, praying for Will and Katja to appear. The swim, physically, had not been very hard. It had taken her fifty-five seconds, and now that she knew how long the tunnel was, she could do it again no problem. It was the mental aspect, the doubt, which had been the tough part. At forty-five seconds she had begun to panic, but she’d told herself just a bit longer, a few more seconds. And thank God she had listened to that little voice. But what if Will hadn’t? What if he hadn’t even followed her? No, he would have. He knew as well as she did there was no choice. But he had Katja on his back. She would have slowed him down. Maybe he’d panicked or lost his nerve as she almost had—
Pale appendages appeared in the dark water in front of her, then Will reared to his feet, crashing through the surface with a sharp intake of air. Danièle caught Katja as she fell off his back and dragged her onto the dry ground. The girl was limp and unresponsive. Danièle felt for a pulse in her neck. She didn’t find one—or was she doing it wrong? She put her ear to Katja’s mouth. Nothing.
“She is not breathing!” she cried to Will, who was doubled over coughing and wheezing.
Danièle had taken a first aid course years before, but she couldn’t remember the particulars of CPR. Different number of compressions for children and adults? More or less? How many breaths did you administer? Did it matter?
She placed the heel of one hand on Katja’s breastbone, between her breasts. She placed the other on top of it, palm-down, and performed ten chest compressions. She covered Katja’s nose holes with her hand, tilted her head back to open her airway, and blew into her lipless mouth. She performed more compressions. On the seventh one Katja coughed and spasmed and heaved water from her lungs. Danièle rolled her onto her side and slapped her back.
Will waded out of the water and collapsed beside them.
“Is she okay?” he asked.
Danièle nodded because she didn’t trust herself to speak yet. Then, “Are you?”
“Yeah—” He commenced coughing.
Katja opened her eyes. It took a few moments for them to focus and for her to register their presence.
Will coughed a final time and gave her a forced smile. “Brave girl.”
“Did I…fall asleep?” she mumbled.
“Sort of,” he said.
“I hate…swimming.”
“You and me both,” he told her, kissing her affectionately on the forehead. “You and me both.”
Chapter 69
We started along the rock wall, searching for an exit from the new cavern, and after a short distance came to several scattered candles on the ground, a discarded torch, and a pair of old boots.
“Zolan’s?” Danièle said.
Zolan! I had forgotten Danièle had mentioned him earlier. “Are you serious about Zolan being behind for all this?” I asked her.
“Yes,” she said simply.
“Zolan Zolan?”
“Yes!”
I pictured the old guy in my head: the green bandana, the missing teeth, the shark-tooth necklace, the bad BO. He was Katja�
�s father? He was responsible for Pascal and Rob’s death? Setting these absurdities aside for a later time, I said, “Well, if they’re his boots, then that means he’s been here before. He knows of that underwater passage. He’ll be coming.” I picked up the torch and sniffed the dirty cloth wrapped around the end of the stave. “Still smells of kerosene. Try lighting it with the candle.”
Danièle obeyed and a flame whooshed into existence, dwarfing the candles. I looked away from the light until my eyes could adjust to the brightness—and found myself staring at an old foot ladder, affixed to the wall, less than ten yards away.
I ascended the ladder first, climbing with one hand because I held the torch in the other. Thirty feet up the ladder reached the ceiling and continued through a shaft in the rock. I glanced down. Katja was only about five feet or so off the ground and seemed reluctant to go any farther. “Come on, Katja!” I said. “You need to move faster.”
She looked up. “I’m scared.”
“You’ll be fine. Just keep coming. I’ll wait for you.”
Danièle encouraged Katja from below until she began inching upward.
“Good work, Katja!” I said. “Keep coming—”
Suddenly Zolan stood behind Danièle. He’d appeared so quickly I didn’t have time to warn her. He bear-hugged her from behind, pinning her arms to her sides. She shrieked in surprise and kicked futilely. Then another figure emerged from the gloom next to him, and another, and another, the entire mob.
A male removed Katja from the ladder and set her on the ground.
“Will!” Danièle cried.
Zolan passed her, kicking and screaming, to a different male, who held her firmly against his body.
“Come down, Will,” Zolan called to me. He held a hand against his stomach and appeared to be in some sort of pain. “There’s nowhere to go.”
I couldn’t do as he asked, of course. It would be suicide. But what of Danièle and Katja? What was going to happen to them? I couldn’t leave them—could I?
