Sinkhole

by Deborah Jackson

  “Turn off your flashlight,” he said.

  Kat balked, but when she looked at his wide-eyed expression, she hastened to comply. Without the beam, the world around them lit up.

  “My God!” she exclaimed. “They’re everywhere.”

  The columns teemed with greenish phosphorescence. Beyond them the ground seemed to shift back and forth, spangled with capricious glimmers. It was as if they were in the midst of dancing fireflies; everywhere they turned the rock was dotted with light.

  Pete reached out, mesmerized.

  “Be careful!” Kat shouted a warning.

  “I know,” said Pete. “I’m a microbiologist, remember? I’ve even handled the Ebola virus.”

  Kat’s spider sense tingled ferociously. “You’ve handled Ebola? What labs have you worked in, Pete?”

  He chuckled. “Not a government one, if that’s what you’re inferring. I’m not engaged in finding biological weapons. I did a tour in Africa during graduate school. We had to identify the most lethal organisms and learn how to handle them. I’m not as stupid as Ray.”

  Kat opened her mouth to protest, but he continued without giving her the chance.

  “I would have gladly let you douse me if I’d contaminated myself. With a high pressure hose if you had it. These are amazing little bugs, aren’t they? I’d love to get them under a microscope, if we can find the damn way out. Shall we?”

  He held out his hand. It was amazing, but the luminescent creatures gave off enough light that they didn’t need the flashlight. “I’d rather we keep the flashlight off, from here on in,” he said.

  “Yes,” said Kat. “We wouldn’t want to brush up against these things until we know what we’re dealing with.”

  She shuffled forward, turning on the flashlight only for a second to take a bearing, then turning it off again. The flickering lights swarmed around the columns, but it was the shifting pattern in front that intrigued her the most. It acted like a gentle wave. As they approached, Pete suddenly grasped her flashlight and opened the beam.

  “Just as I thought.”

  In front of them lay a small circular pool. A congealed mass of biofilm stretched from one end to the other. It gently washed back and forth, and when the light was turned off, it looked like an ethereal emerald disk hovering above the floor.

  “The source?” asked Kat.

  Pete nodded, his eyes afire.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Mark could still hear the echo of Jorge’s words. “If that’s what it takes.” What kind of maniac was he chained to, depending upon to survive? Jorge said he wasn’t a terrorist, but he’d just spouted terrorist philosophy. If he believed so strongly that violence could answer all his problems, then why was he leading Mark down a wretched tunnel to the center of the earth? Why was he interested in helping them at all? Was he going to use them as hostages? What a painstaking way to collect hostages, if that were the case.

  Jorge ducked into a short passage, leaving the crystal cavern behind.

  Mark knew he should keep his mouth shut, but he couldn’t suppress his clawing curiosity about this man and his plans. “You’re not going to let us go, are you?”

  Jorge grunted.

  “I mean, you’re taking me to my death, aren’t you?”

  “Only if you want it,” said Jorge.

  What was that supposed to mean? “I don’t want it.”

  “You haven’t shown me that yet.”

  Mark clunked his head against the descending roof of karst and crouched even lower.

  “Is Kat dead?” He had to ask.

  “Now why would I be crawling through the most treacherous cave on the planet if I thought she was dead?” Jorge glanced back and shook his head. “Giving you misery, pleasurable as that is, is not worth the rigors of this trek.”

  “Somehow I don’t think rescuing Kat is on the top of your agenda either. What is worth the rigors?”

  “Answers,” said Jorge.

  “To what? The curse?”

  Jorge didn’t reply, which was probably answer enough. The man was crazy. How would solving a thousand-year-old mystery promote his cause? Mark opened his mouth to ask, then suddenly realized that a crescendo-ing gurgle farther down the tunnel was becoming a conversation-halting roar. He tapped Jorge on the shoulder.

  “What’s that?” he yelled.

  “Que?” asked Jorge, a quirk in his lips.

  “That noise!”

  “Ah,” said Jorge. “Our next drop.” He pivoted in the tight quarters and trudged forward, cutting off any more questions.

  Mark shook his head, exasperated, and followed meekly. The sound swelled until it drilled into his ears, as Jorge walked out of the passage onto a ledge. The narrow perch was enveloped in a soup of mist and spray.

  “A waterfall?” Mark shouted.

  Jorge smiled and gestured to the billowing curtain of water. “Twenty-meter waterfall!” he yelled. “The largest ever seen underground.”

  “Great. How do we get around it?”

  “Can’t,” hollered the guide.

  “What do you mean?” Had the madman taken him to a dead end?

  “Can’t go around. There’s an offshoot of the tunnel at the bottom where we can avoid the sump. But we have to go down the waterfall to get to it.”

  Had he heard correctly? Mark’s chest constricted, as if it were suddenly bound in elastic.

  “Through the waterfall?”

  Jorge nodded.

  “But that’s impossible.”

  Now he grinned. “Not impossible. Just difficult. Your wife did it.” He pointed to another peg and a rope dangling over the cliff.

  Mark felt his anger flare up again. The man was goading him. “But the pressure of the water—”

  “Might sweep you into the sump and drown you.” His Cheshire-cat grin grew even wider. “A shame if that happens. I might cry for a minute or two.”

  “You bastard!” Mark’s fists clenched. The temptation to launch Jorge into the drink was almost irresistible.

  “Do not fret, doctor. We’ll make it down in one piece. Just one very wet piece.”

  Jorge began to rig for a rappel: harness, carabiners, metal-toothed mechanical descenders, and a bolt anchor at the top. He obviously wasn’t trusting a mesh anchor for this splashdown. “Put on your drysuit,” he bellowed.

  Mark scowled, then bent over his pack and removed the neoprene suit. He slithered into it, a task made all the more difficult by the moist atmosphere, and positioned the mask over his head. After that he had to don the harness for the rappel.

  The waterfall was so forceful, it tripped up a shower of spray and steeped the entire cavern in fog. Mark couldn’t even glimpse the bottom, if there was one. Jorge tossed over the nylon rope, which for once appeared very thin and flimsy, and motioned for Mark to clip on.

  “I’ll lower you down,” he shouted.

  Mark couldn’t help shivering, not just from the backlash of water that beaded his drysuit and lathered his face, but from the thought of rappelling through Niagara Falls. It took another second or two of fumbling with the rope before he finally snapped the belay device to his harness.

  “Close your eyes,” yelled Jorge, “and drop off.”

  Mark couldn’t believe he was doing this. He’d backed to the edge of the scarp when Jorge pinched his arm and screamed, “Don’t forget to hold your breath.”

  “Why can’t we use the rebreathers?”

  Jorge shook his head, stripping the mask from Mark’s face and attaching it to his harness. “The force will rip the mask off. Don’t worry. I’ll send you down quickly.”

  “Small comfort,” Mark muttered. He inhaled, held his breath, and dropped off the edge.

  The line reeled out almost too swiftly. It felt like it wasn’t even attached, but at the same time the brute force of the waterfall smashed into him, swallowing him and thrusting him downward even faster. He kept his eyes sealed shut as the water beat at him, scrabbling and ripping at his pack and rebr
eather tank. The line kept playing out, but soon he felt the need to breathe, to open his eyes. He didn’t know how much longer he could harbor the oxygen bottled up in his chest. He didn’t know how much more pounding his battered body could take. It felt like he’d been flattened in the downdraft of a microburst. Or pinned beneath a swirling undertow, desperately fighting to gain the surface for that one gasp of air. But he kept plummeting downward, and only when he thought his lungs would rupture from the strain did his feet slam onto solid rock. They attempted to slide out from under him, but he clasped an outcrop of karst and clung, gaining a smidgen of stability. Edging to the right in the middle of the falls, Mark finally felt the jet subside from gush to squirt to splutter. He opened his eyes, blinked, and gasped. Relief rushed into his body along with the air.

  The chamber was still engulfed in fog, but stepping carefully, Mark found he could creep along a drier path. Still straining to catch his breath, he disconnected from the rope and called, “Off rope,” although Jorge probably couldn’t hear him. The release of tension would have to suffice to tell him Mark had found the bottom.

  Mark beamed his headlamp through the dense air and detected a wax-wall mirage and a strike-slip fault in the rock. This could be the continuation of the cave.

  Seconds later, Jorge slammed down beside him, streaming water from his neoprene suit, but grinning as if he’d just performed a bungee jump in a theme park. He unclipped his belay device and slapped Mark on the back. Then he beckoned him into the slick, knee-deep water of the side passage.

  Mark floundered in after him, anxious to leave the wretched jet-engine clamor of the falls behind. He scrambled over the path, feeling the drag of his saturated pack and drowned boots.

  “Nothing like it,” exclaimed Jorge.

  “Like what?” muttered Mark.

  “Nothing like facing death. Exhilarating, isn’t it?”

  “You’re mad. There’s nothing exhilarating about facing death. I’ve seen enough patients do it. It’s just terrifying.”

  “Is that what you felt, doctor? In the waterfall? And before, when the general held a gun to your head? Terror?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good,” Jorge said, now reaching an area in the tunnel where he could walk upright. “You now know how your patients felt. You know what my people feel every day. Many people pretend empathy, but they don’t really know how a person feels.”

  Mark clenched his jaw and said nothing. Was this man really taking him through this cave just to teach him a lesson? It was crazy, yet in a way it seemed fitting. It was a cave that had cracked his ego the first time and left him with all these bloody fears. Now a cave might rupture it once and for all. And the man who would teach him trust and humility was a man most people would never trust—a man willing to do anything to get his point across.

  The light brushed another tight cavern and illuminated another steep pitch. They were descending again.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Megan stumbled uncertainly behind Ray, who braved the darkness with determination, although he seemed unusually subdued. He was bearing toward the northeast, scanning the ground for obstacles that could trip them up, but still focused on the far wall, the area just beyond the pylons of limestone where the dome of the ceiling descended. As he plunged forward, he kept swiping at his neck, massaging it, dropping his hand again, shaking his head.

  “Ray, are you all right?”

  “Of course,” he growled. “Why do you ask?”

  “Well, your neck. The organism. Is it stinging or something?”

  “No,” he said, casting her a withering glance. “I’m just cold from the bath Kat gave me.”

  “Right,” she said, hardly convinced. “Maybe we should put some antibiotic cream on it, just in case. I have some in my med kit.”

  “It doesn’t need—” He squinted uncomfortably. “Oh, all right. If you have some with you.”

  Megan slipped off her pack and pawed through the contents. Socks, polypropylene p.j.’s, her trusty brush and tweezers for examining archaeological finds and, at the bottom, the med kit. Shoving aside the bandages and gauze, she extracted a tube of antibiotic cream and held it up in the wavering beam of Ray’s flashlight. Now why was it so unsteady? She followed it to its source—a shivering, shuddering Ray, who was filmed with sweat.

  “Ray?” she said, standing up and touching him tentatively.

  “I-I’m fine.” He gritted his teeth, but they began chattering anyway.

  Megan couldn’t believe this. She’d just made the most momentous discovery of the decade and her guide was going epileptic on her. She snatched a glove from her kit and yanked it on, tore the light from Ray’s shaking hand, and squeezed a dollop of cream onto her fingers. As she turned Ray around, she couldn’t suppress a gasp.

  Ray’s entire neck was sunburn-red and puffy. Whatever this organism was, it certainly wasn’t friendly.

  “That b-bad?” he asked.

  “Not good,” said Megan, trying to keep her voice even and calm. How the hell were they going to get out of here if one of them became violently ill? Particularly if it was their strongest guide.

  Delicately, she swabbed the area with cream, Ray cringing at her touch, and hoped the ointment would do the trick. But this organism was something they’d never encountered before. The medication might have no effect whatsoever.

  “There,” she said. “Should start helping soon.”

  Ray turned back to her, apparently attempting to smile, but all that came out was a grimace. “We’d better find that exit.”

  “I think we should return to the rendezvous point and wait for Kat. If you get any worse I’m going to whistle her down.”

  “No! Really, I’m fine. We have to find a way out before we start running out of supplies.” Ray gently removed the flashlight from her tight grip and plodded on, trembling and stumbling, muttering too, but driving his body to cooperate.

  Megan followed, chewing her lip. The last thing she wanted to do was nurse this stubborn man. Nor did she relish dragging his tall, muscle-heavy body back to their temporary camp. She was stout and hardy, but she wasn’t a Sumo wrestler.

  As they walked, the pillars became less clustered, fanning out from the center of the cavern. Slivered limestone and karst breakdown still littered the ground, but it was much easier to walk. Ray’s light, quivering though it was, eventually penetrated the gloom beyond the columns and found a sheer, smooth face of ivory stone.

  “Great,” she said. “We’ve finally found the perimeter of the chamber.”

  Ray nodded, hugged himself to contain an enormous shudder, then staggered along the wall, probing crevices with his light.

  “I hope,” he said. “I hope . . .”

  “We all do, Ray,” she whispered.

  “What?” Ray whirled around, his eyes red-rimmed and bleary.

  “We all hope to get out of here alive.”

  Ray stepped nearer and gripped her shoulder with a spasming hand. Megan felt the emotions rise, as they always did when a man touched her.

  “What are you doing? Leave me be!” She tried to wrench free, but his hand clamped even tighter.

  “Is that what you think?” he screamed. “That’s all we can hope for? You can hope for untold wealth. Celebrity status. Pete can hope for stock options on this organism. Kat can hope for the Nobel prize, if she lives that long. But what can I hope for? Just for one person to love me who isn’t going to leave me!”

  Megan shrank and tried not to meet his wild eyes. At first all she could focus on was the torment, the face bearing down on her and stripping away her dignity and her peace of mind. But soon the words sank in and she knew they weren’t directed at her.

  “Kat is married,” she said. “She obviously still has feelings for her husband, or she wouldn’t be able to resist you, Ray. You’re everything a normal woman would want.”

  “Normal?”

  “You’re not the only one who’s suffered,” she said, ignoring his query.
“You’re not the only one who’s been denied his heart’s desire. But right now, I don’t think we should be concerned about the injustice of life. What we need to focus on is survival. I don’t think the Maya in this cave did, because obviously they didn’t make it. I don’t know if it’s the organism that’s doing this to you, Ray, but you have to get a grip.”

  Ray glared, shivered again, then released her shoulder. Perspiration glimmered on his forehead and crept down his face. He dashed it off with a swipe of his sleeve.

  “I-I’m sorry. You’re right. I’m not feeling well at all.”

  “Maybe we should go back.”

  Ray shook his head, turned, and beamed the flashlight farther along the wall. His eyes widened and he was suddenly energized, racing forward. The beam bobbled wildly, making a clear view impossible, but for alternating seconds Megan could glimpse what Ray had already seen. A dark hollow arch, almost closed off with the jagged teeth of stalactites and stalagmites, but with one maneuverable gap wide enough to crawl through.

  “A way out,” she gasped.

  Ray grunted and ran toward it, still panting but apparently under control again. “This is it. I know it. It looks large enough to crouch-walk through.”

  He ducked his head and prepared to leap into the opening, when Megan clutched his arm and pulled him back.

  “What?” he demanded.

  She didn’t answer, just reached over and flicked his flashlight off. The entire circumference of the tunnel blazed with bioluminescence.