The Maw

by Taylor Zajonc

  “The cannibalism and the head wound?” said Milo, completing her sentence.

  “Yeah,” said Bridget. “That. Can you help me try to put together what happened? Maybe this is confirmation bias, but I’m completely convinced we’ve found an important clue. Isabelle may well have sacrificed her life to lead us this far.”

  Milo nodded, closing his eyes to focus. In moments, a wave of profound giddiness flooded over him as he concentrated. Dizzy at first with intoxicating euphoria, he and Bridget once again locked eyes before his mind took a single stomach-wrenching turn toward oblivion, uncontrollable fear enveloping his perception as the surrounding room shifted, the walls around him freely warping into impossible configurations. Every detail of the chamber took on staggering importance, each scarred rock, footprint, every imperceptible man-made and geological disturbance magnified, his mind running through a thousand parallel scenarios as it recreated the final moments of the dead man’s existence.

  “Milo!” shouted the echoing voice, penetrating the depth of his unconscious mind. He slowly came to, as though swimming up through the darkest subterranean lake, each furtive push toward the surface blocked by rocky overhangs and constricting tunnels.

  Again the woman’s voice called his name, dragging him upward. He felt a pressure against the side of his face—a slap? There it was; the reflective surface of the imaginary waters, now within tantalizing reach. He kicked at the waters again, lungs bursting as he pushed himself toward—

  Milo slowly opened his eyes, groggy and weak, Bridget cradling him in her arms. He unconsciously wiped at his nose, his hand coming back with a thick smear of red blood. Everything hurt, especially his aching head.

  “What the fuck just happened?” mumbled Milo, coughing. His lungs burned, like he’d actually been underwater fighting for his life.

  “You’ve been out for nearly half an hour,” said Bridget, peeling his eyelids back to check his pupils. “Your nose started gushing blood—Jesus, Milo—at one point, you stopped breathing for almost an entire minute.”

  Bridget helped Milo up to a sitting position as he pinched his nose against the last of the dripping blood. The entire front of his shirt was covered in crimson, easily visible even over the weeks’ worth of caked filth.

  “Milo!” repeated Bridget, smacking him on the shoulder. “Talk to me—are you okay?”

  “The scratches on the wall, the marks on the body . . . it was all so fucking clear.”

  As he spoke, his returning headache began to throb, a sharp grinding behind one eye that radiated pain through his jaw and teeth. He winced as a new trickle of blood dripped from his nose as he once again teetered over a vast abyss of limitless information.

  “Whoa, whoa,” cautioned Bridget, her voice pulling him back from the edge again and into full, painful wakefulness. “Whatever you’re doing, ease the hell up.”

  “What’s happening to me?” croaked Milo.

  Bridget shook her head, still taking in Milo’s rambling, nonsensical speech.

  “It could be a byproduct of our eidetic memories,” she theorized, her tone betraying her uncertainty. “Maybe a heightened ability to process and evaluate new information, bringing subconscious cues to a higher level of processing . . . I imagine it could become too much for your conscious mind to handle. For the lack of a better word, maybe you short-circuited?”

  “That makes sense,” said Milo, more than a little relieved that she hadn’t dismissed him outright. “It was like the glowing golden room with the altar, only I wasn’t drowning in memories, I was drowning in information. I can’t help but feel like the explanation to everything is right under my nose. Every corner of this room screamed out at me at once; begging me to pay attention, put the pieces of the puzzle together.”

  “I hesitate to say this,” said Bridget. “But we’ve come this far. Can you try again? Safely, I mean?”

  “Maybe,” said Milo. “But I’d need you—your voice was the only thing that kept me from losing myself. You were my anchor.”

  Bridget started to speak but stopped herself as she considered the implications.

  “I changed my mind,” said Bridget, shaking her head. “I can’t ask you to do this. I can’t lose you.”

  Milo buried his hands in his face, teeth chattering. “Like you said—we’ve come this far,” he finally said. “We have to try something. Talk to me. Walk me through it; pretend you’re guiding a meditation.”

  Wordlessly, Bridget held one of his hands, using the other to place him in a sitting position next to the mummified body.

  “We’ll give it a try,” said Bridget. “But if you start to get into trouble again, I need you to pull back. I don’t care how close to an answer you are. Can you promise me that?”

  “I promise,” answered Milo.

  “Then start by closing your eyes,” said Bridget, her voice soft but clear. “Visualize the room.”

  The chamber instantly sprang into Milo’s mind in incredible detail, every square inch perfectly illuminated by voluminous light. He could see the land bridge over top, the muddy slide where he’d fallen, the mummy returned to where he’d first discovered it.

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m in the room,” confirmed Milo, teeth gritted in concentration. “It’s back to the way we first found it.”

  “Empty your mind,” said Bridget. The grinding in his brain faded, pain retreating from his jawline. “Allow your subconscious to evaluate everything that is seen and unseen.”

  The room was no longer screaming for his attention. Milo found the stillness within.

  “What do you see?” asked Bridget.

  “A thousand details—broken stalagmites no thicker than a needle—pebbles disturbed by soft footfalls—even the marks from where his fingernails brushed against the cavern walls.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “It’s a trail, Bridget. And I can follow it.”

  CHAPTER 32:

  DATA GAP

  Bridget stopped at a passageway intersection to mark their route, ignoring Milo as he impatiently shifted from foot to foot, waiting for her. She started to smear a thin chalk arrow across the cool, wet wall but the white nub crumbled to fragments in her fingers. The doctor gently blew the powder off her hands, the tiny particles glittering as they clung to the air under the illumination of her dimming headlamp.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Milo said, answering her silent worry as he spoke for the first time in hours. “You know we’ll remember the route—chalk, no chalk, there’s no difference anymore. Let’s keep going.”

  “It’s not for us,” argued Bridget. “It’s so they can find us down here, assuming anyone ever looks.”

  Milo turned his attention back to the tunnels without responding, but the trail had faded from his mind over the hours. As hard as he concentrated, he could no longer see the faint depressions of bare feet, the brushed-aside stones, the fragile and broken soda-straw calcite formations.

  “Shit,” said Milo, alarmed. “I think I lost the trail for good this time. Should we backtrack?”

  “Don’t ask me,” sighed Bridget, sitting down and taking off her backpack. “I never saw it to begin with—I’ve just been following you this whole time.”

  Milo thought for a moment. “I’m going to try and pick it up again,” he said. Summoning single-minded focus, he closed his eyes and pushed his perception outward, allowing his subconscious total reign over his mental faculties. He opened his arms, hands outstretched, fingers hesitating in the air like an orchestral conductor. Lost to his waking dream, Milo caught flashing glimpses of jostled stones, padded mud, faint marks, and gently disturbed dust—

  “You look like a weird magician or something,” Bridget interjected, failing to stifle a snorting giggle.

  “I lost it again,” said Milo, chuckling as he rubbed his dry eyes. It felt strangely comforting to laugh at the ridiculous pose he’d struck as he tried to conjure the trail. “Can’t hold all the details in my mind anymore.”r />
  “Sorry for messing you up,” said Bridget, giving him an apologetic half-smile. “But we may as well keep going. You can always try again if we hit another intersection.”

  The tunnel snaked ever deeper like a drainpipe, the earth beneath them wetter with each passing step. It became difficult and then impossible to avoid the water dripping from the ceiling, the droplets soaking through Milo’s muddy hair and tracing dirty streaks down his face and neck.

  “We must be underneath a body of water,” said Bridget. “Either that or this chamber is still draining out from the flood.”

  Milo grunted in acknowledgement as they rounded the next turn, their boots squishing clay beneath their feet. The passageway before them angled sharply downward as it narrowed. Bridget craned her neck to look over the edge of a steep, muddy chute that disappeared into the darkness below. A thin trickle of silt-laden water ran down the length, pooling deeply at the bottom.

  “Think we can get down?” asked Milo.

  “I know I can,” said Bridget, eyeing the slippery, rock-studded descent. “You’re welcome to give it a shot too.”

  Grabbing the first of the smooth stalagmites, they lowered themselves onto the slide. Milo squinted at the rocky handholds leading down into the darkness. It’d be like descending a pegboard, but using stalagmites the size of saplings.

  Fifty feet passed, and then a hundred. Milo and Bridget rested every few seconds, carefully positioning themselves for the step down. With each movement, the passageway further narrowed and was soon reduced to little more than shoulder width. Milo’s head knocked against a rough ceiling as they finally squeezed through the last tight section, the passageway again opening to a long, wide hallway.

  “Check this out.” Bridget bent down, eyes fixed to the ground. She reached into a clear puddle and gently retrieved a scrap of limp, blackened fabric. A partially melted, tarnished brass button still clung to the cloth by fraying threads.

  “Might explain why our friend was naked,” said Milo. “Looks like he burned his clothes for light.”

  Bridget wrinkled her nose as she carefully replaced the fabric. “Hard to imagine the desperation he must have felt. Wandering down here, alone in the darkness.”

  Milo nodded. He knew their waning batteries would soon put them in the same critical position. He shone his headlamp down the length of the passage, light playing across the flat cavern floor, narrow walls, and eroded, crumbling ceiling. Many of the smaller rocks had already come loose, lying scattered across the ground, growing in scale and frequency until the lamplight reached a fully collapsed section. The ceiling had fallen in decades previous, turning the corridor into a dead end.

  “I think this is as far as we can go,” said Milo, pointing to the cave-in with disappointment. “I can’t see a way through.”

  Bridget frowned as she approached the rocky avalanche. Climbing the loose debris slope, she stood up on her tiptoes and shined her light into a narrow gap near the top of the pile.

  “There’s a way through.” Her voice was muffled within the rockpile. “Come take a look.”

  Curious, Milo joined her on the slope, shining his light into the tight crawlway she’d discovered. Improbably, it appeared to run through the entire length of the caved-in section, leading to a new chamber on the other side.

  Milo didn’t like the route. Not only was it the tightest space they’d considered traversing yet, the collapsed rock could shift again at any moment. As he inspected the interior, Milo’s light fell across a small black object about the size of a postage stamp. He reached into the avalanche to retrieve it for Bridget.

  “Holy shit,” said Bridget, examining the find. “I think that’s a human fingernail.”

  “This is not a natural cavity. Someone dug through the collapsed section by hand. Maybe they were trapped on the other side after a cave-in?”

  “So not a dead end after all,” Bridget mused. “Our Japanese friend must have come through here.” As she spoke, a deep rumbling resonated throughout the chamber. Both nervously glanced upward as thin lines of dust trickled down around them.

  “I don’t want to hang out here long,” said Milo. “It sounds like rocks are shifting.”

  “What do you think—can we climb through?”

  “Probably—but it could collapse again at any moment.”

  “We made it this far. Boost me in.”

  Milo braced himself against his rocky footholds as he pushed her up into the hole. She wriggled up and through, accidentally kicking him in the face with a muddy boot.

  After an interminable wait, a small hand emerged from darkness, grasping Milo’s wrist and pulling him upward as he struggled to fit his shoulders through the gap. Though not large, Milo was forced to hold his breath almost entirely to crawl on his belly through the ten feet of hand-dug tunnel. Gasping, he finally pushed his way out the other end, sliding headfirst out of the squeeze and down a low scree-slope of loose rocks and dust. He flopped on his back and panted, getting his breath back as Bridget stood over him, scanning the new chamber with her light.

  It wasn’t much different than the other side, at least to Milo’s initial glance as he climbed to his feet. Though spared from the worst of the collapse, dozens of large rocks ranging in size from baseballs to refrigerators had fallen from the ceiling. Bridget crouched beside a boulder, light shining on the smooth, yellowed texture of a shattered human skull.

  “This isn’t the only body,” said Bridget, pointing over her shoulder. “I count five in all. There are Imperial insignias on their clothes.”

  “I think we’ve found our lost Japanese expedition,” said Milo. “Looks like this is where it ended.”

  “They must have been trapped in the collapse,” continued Bridget. “At least three of them were killed instantly when the ceiling came down. But one or more survived long enough to dig their way out.”

  “Why skeletons?” asked Milo. “Why aren’t they mummified?”

  “It’s wet in here,” said Bridget with a shrug. “Even the smallest populations of microscopic organisms could have taken hold, stripped the bodies to bare bone.”

  Milo pinched the bridge of his nose as she spoke, refusing to allow the full horror of the room enter his mind. His peripheral vision flickered, his consciousness preparing a flood of hallucinatory imagery of crushed bodies and screaming men. It could have taken weeks for the one survivor to tunnel through the collapse in the darkness. He experimentally brushed a hand against the rough walls, his fingertips returning with a thick veneer of wet dust. The cave was slowly digesting the collapsed section, eroding it into nothing.

  “Let’s not linger,” said Milo, shining his light at the loose, rocky ceiling of the passageway as it extended into the darkness. “One good sneeze and that entire section could come down.”

  “I get that our friend burned his clothes for light,” said Bridget as she stood up, brushing the excess mud from her knees. “But what about his boots? The mummy had bare feet.”

  “My guess is that he ate his belt and boots after supplies ran out,” said Milo as he slowly moved from one skeleton to the next, examining them under the harsh illumination of his flashlight. “Wouldn’t be the first starving explorer to resort to shoe leather. But he didn’t stop there. Some of these bones have knife marks—and one of them is missing two fingers from the left hand, probably the same fingers we found in his stomach. Undoubtedly cannibalism. Maybe he suffered the head wound in the initial collapse, but he could have fallen over the side of the land bridge just as easily.”

  “There’s a satchel over here,” said Bridget, calling Milo over as she opened up the stiff, decaying remains of a large canvas bag. Milo took a final glance at the partially fingered, skeletonized hand before tearing his attention away from the bodies. He watched as the doctor cast her light over yellowed labels, rusted tin cans, metal tools, and dusty bottles within the satchel. Then something caught his eye—modern, unblemished cans and plastic bags underneath the petrified Japanese su
pplies.

  “Goddammit,” swore Milo, pointing at the recent additions to the bag. “Some of this is our stuff!”

  “That asshole,” said Bridget, picking up a package of instant rice to get a closer look. “You think Logan holed up in here? Nothing was missing from camp—he must have scavenged these from the flood zone after he took off.”

  “Has to be Logan’s,” Milo said. “He might even have others. We should keep looking. But if we come across Logan, I don’t know if I’m going to hug him or kick his ass.”

  “You can hug him all you want,” said Bridget as she eyeballed the stolen supplies. “I’m kicking his ass.”

  But before they could say another word, a faint noise drifted from the tunnel behind them. Milo and Bridget froze. The light from an approaching headlamp appeared from the darkness, growing gradually brighter as a figure emerged from the darkness.

  CHAPTER 33:

  THE VOID

  Milo watched in shock as Dale Brunswick emerged headfirst from the hand-dug tunnel. He barely cast a glance toward them as he slid to the bottom of the rocky slide. Groaning as he drew himself to his feet, Dale reached back and pulled a ragged backpack from the hole and slung it across one shoulder. Short, patchy white stubble had grown across his formerly clean-shaven face since Milo had last seen him.

  “One must feel some admiration for these men,” said Dale, an almost lazy tone to his voice. “Despite their allegiance to a ruthless empire, they died scientists and explorers.”

  “Where’s Logan?” whispered Bridget. “Is he with you?”

  Dale just shrugged as he slumped against the cavern wall and ran a hand through his ivory hair. “No idea where Logan is holed up,” he said. “Haven’t seen him since he pulled the Houdini act.”

  “How did you find us?” Milo demanded, suspecting he already knew the answer.

  “Happy coincidence,” said Dale as he reached into the decaying canvas satchel to select one of the plastic containers he’d stashed. “Found the bodies a few days ago on one of my runs. Seemed like as decent a place as any to camp.”