Claw

by Katie Berry

  “Ah, jeez,” Jerry said. He thought for a moment, then continued, “Listen, I certainly want you to rescue your friend and all, but I don’t know. I hope to God whatever it is you have will be powerful enough to stop this thing."

  "Well, that’s what the experts tell us," Trip said.

  "Well, let me tell you. It’s been so hard for me! I can't seem to get the massacre out of my head! I keep seeing it every time I close my eyes. I don’t know if I can bear to see that creature again, no pun intended.”

  “I can imagine, it must be very hard,” Austin commiserated.

  “But that being said, I owe you guys big time for saving my ass, so, yeah, I guess I’ll help you out. But, just so you know, I’m doing so under duress.”

  “Fair enough,” Austin said. “All right! Let’s get you out of here, then!” He grabbed the sleeve Jerry had been struggling with and helped him put it over his cast. “Where did you last have the GPS unit?”

  “Right! It was in my parka pocket.”

  Trip, standing next to the narrow clothes cupboard, opened it up and looked inside. A blue winter parka waited on a hook for its owner. He took it out and handed it to Jerry.

  “Thanks!” Jerry felt around in the jacket’s pockets for a moment and eventually located the GPS receiver. He pulled it out, his face brightening, the thought of them finding the beast and dispatching it from the face of the planet at the forefront of his mind.

  He hit the standby button. Nothing, the screen was dark.

  On the top side of the unit, he held down the power button instead, hoping to reboot it, but it was still inoperable. His face fell. The device lay cold and unresponsive in his hand -- his attempts at digital resuscitation via the main power unsuccessful. “Damn it! It looks like it was either damaged in the fall or else the battery’s dead” This wasn’t good news, Jerry knew that for a fact.

  “Can’t you replace the battery?” Austin asked.

  “It’s a sealed unit, and there’s no way to charge it! The friggin’ receiver has a proprietary charging cable, and I forgot to bring it along with me on vacation!”

  “Well,” Trip said, holding up Jerry’s parka his face set in a grim expression, “Looks like we’ll need you for sure now.”

  “You’re the only person who knows how to find Christine, quickly,” Austin added, grabbing Jerry’s boots from the cabinet.

  “Yay for me!” Jerry said half-heartedly, as his new personal valets finished assisting his getting dressed.

  When the three men arrived back down at the Works pickup, Alex greeted Jerry as he pulled the door open to enter the truck, saying, “Hi, Mr. Benson! Are you feeling better?”

  “Hi, kid, yeah, I’m doing a bit better.” He climbed stiffly into the truck. “Say, thanks for the stuff you picked up for me earlier,” Jerry said, acknowledging the goodie bag Alex had bought for him. The boy smiled. Jerry continued, “I heard that you guys have a friend in need, now, huh?”

  “That’s right, sir, she’s the new conservation officer in town, and we think she’s in danger.”

  Jerry closed his door and looked over to Alex, saying with a slight smile, “Danger seems to be a common thing in this area.” A small groan escaped from his mouth as he settled back into the seat of the truck. His smile morphed into a grimace of pain, his cracked ribs grinding together as he tried to get comfortable.

  Putting his seatbelt on, Jerry noticed the T-Rex rifle propped between the front and back seats of the truck. The large-bore muzzle was pointing up toward the ceiling of the cab. His encounter with the bear came flooding back to him as he looked its cold, grey metal and he shuddered, saying to Alex, “You’re going to need a bigger gun.”

  “Well, we’re hoping this rifle will do the trick!” the boy replied. “My Dad told me, if a T-Rex were alive today, this rifle could bring it down! It’s got a .577 millimetre, seven-hundred and fifty-grain shell that can travel at over five-hundred and fifty metres per second!” Alex proudly repeated, parroting the information he’d gathered about the weapon from hearing his father and Trip talking about it earlier.

  With a sigh of resignation, Jerry said, “Yeah, well, I guess we’ll find out, once we find that big, hairy piece of shit that is, pardon my language. Personally, if I had to wager on it being between the rifle and the bear, I’d put my money on the bear.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  With the natural ventilation provided by the entrance being cut off, the steam and heat created by the hot springs began to build inside the cavern. Christine noticed the effect only minutes after the quake occurred. She hoped that the steam would continue to build and allow her a chance to escape at some point in the haze.

  “Son of a bitch!” Ray Chance exploded. He unzipped his parka, saying “It’s hotter in here than my second wife’s body!”

  “Ray, do you really have to equate everything that happens in your life to your ex-wives?” Nichols asked.

  “Do you really have to be such a goddamned, nitpicking freak?” Chance retorted.

  “That’s what I like about you guys, you can really feel the love,” Christine said.

  “Shut up and get moving!” VanDusen barked, pushing the barrel of the gun into Christine’s back, giving her a hard shove. She stumbled a bit, almost going down onto her knees in the razor-sharp rock fragments scattered across the cavern floor.

  “Which way?” she asked over her shoulder, watching where she stepped at the same time. Up ahead, along the far wall, entrances to a series of different sub caverns branched off in various directions in the mist.

  “Straight ahead!” Vandusen said, pushing the gun’s barrel into the small of Christine’s back.

  The cavern floor was strewn with chunks of rock of all different sizes that had come loose and plummeted during the quake -- the path ahead was not direct by any means. They were able to step over some of the smaller debris, while other pieces were so large they had no choice but to go around.

  Soon, they found themselves before the openings to several tunnels. They varied from a man-sized entrance on the right to a much smaller entrance in the middle. On the left, a much larger opening yawned wide.

  Christine stopped once more, saying, “What now?”

  “All right, let’s see,” Nichols said, stepping in front of the group, taking control of the situation and making a decision using his mayoral powers of deduction. He shone his flashlight into the first entrance and after a moment backed up and shone his light into the next. He repeated the process with the third and then stepped back, saying, “I have no idea.”

  “Maybe our little conservation chickie here has an idea — she’s the outdoorsy type!” Chance offered.

  “Well?” Vandusen said, giving Christine a poke with the Versa Max for good measure.

  Moving into the first entrance where Nichols still stood, she asked, “Can I have your light for a moment?”

  “Certainly,” he said, handing his flashlight over to her.

  She stood at the entrance to the first tunnel and shone the light back and forth. She then repeated the process at the other two tunnels just as Nichols had and then stepped back.

  “Well?” Vandusen asked.

  “This one,” Christine said, indicating the entrance on the left.

  “How do you know?” Nichols asked.

  “Ancient Conservation Officer Secret,” Christine said, stepping through into the swirling mists. In reality, she'd been waving the torch back and forth in front of each opening and taking note of the tendrils of steam curling along the cavern floor, watching them ebb and flow around her legs. In front of the leftmost entrance, she’d noticed a more pronounced, but subtle shift in the movement of the vapour, indicating more airflow coming through there, so that was the one she chose.

  Still holding Nichols’ flashlight out in front of herself with VanDusen’s gun pressing into her spine, Christine reluctantly lead the group into the tall tunnel. After a short walk, it opened out into a new sub cavern. At just a little over thre
e metres in height, the ceiling in here was not as high as the main one, giving it a more claustrophobic feel.

  For several minutes, they pressed forward in silence, making their way around obstacles and following the cavern until it narrowed down into a smooth, natural corridor. Christine saw they now appeared to be walking in a dormant lava tube. Fortunately, this one was horizontal rather than vertical like ones in the main cavern. The tunnel took several twists and turns, and soon they arrived at the reason for the air circulation she’d noted earlier.

  Christine played her light around as it widened out into yet another new cavern. Quite a bit of rock had come down here during the quake, and many viable paths they could have followed were blocked. She and VanDusen played their lights around the walls and ceiling as they moved into the only accessible opening. More gold swirled its way through the rock in the passage walls.

  “Jesus! More gold! This place is unbelievable!” Chance was beaming, running his hand over the bright-yellow vein of metal next to where he stood.

  The passage ended in what might have been a dead-end in the past, but no longer. A sizeable section of rockface had crumbled away, likely during the most recent quake, or perhaps the one from several weeks before, exposing a new opening. As with most things in this cave system, the entrance to this new antechamber was obscured by steam pouring from it, no doubt from additional pools of super-heated water inside.

  “Ladies first,” Vandusen said, still stalking behind Christine with his shotgun.

  “You’re not a scholar or a gentleman,” she said, stepping tentatively through the opening. Waving her hand in front of herself, Christine tried to dissipate some of the mist so that she could better see. Once she was past the initial vapour barrier, the steam cleared considerably. The culprit here was just a small hot spring flowing near the entrance. The uneven floor sloped downward slightly and opened into an immense cavern, stretching out before her into its darkened recesses. Moving forward, she shone Nichols appropriated light here and there as the rest of the gang piled into the cavern behind her.

  “Oh, my God!” Christine said, stopping in her tracks. This was truly mind-boggling. She couldn’t believe it, but she now found herself standing on the shore of a sandy beach at the edge of a vast, underground lake. There was only the slightest hint of steam rising from this body of water, and it was obviously not as scalding hot as in the other caverns. Something was moderating the boiling water temperature. The mirror-smooth lake stretched out in front of her for hundreds of metres, as far as her light would shine and well beyond.

  But there was also something else very interesting that she’d noticed when she’d entered moments before. Extinguishing her torch, she turned to VanDusen, saying, “Turn your light off!”

  “What? Why?”

  “Just do what she asks, VanDusen!” Nichols barked. The chief complied, and an unearthly pale blue glow filled the cavern. They became still and silent, taking in the incredible sight before them.

  The lake was alive with life.

  On the surface of the lake, the water was clear and calm, its surface as smooth as glass. But beneath, bioluminescent algae illuminated the body of water from within, filling it with a spectral radiance. The glow descended into its depths for hundreds of metres, where sizeable patches of the algae appeared. However, what shocked the group into stunned silence was the internal glow of colour pulsing from the plethora of aquatic creatures darting and swirling before them in the geo-thermally heated lake.

  “Bah, it glows in the dark and has some fish, so what? Still more of the same crap,” Chance grumbled.

  Christine looked over to Chance and said, “Speak for yourself, Sparky. Why don’t you just have another snort since everything’s always the same crap to you once you reach the bottom of that flask, isn’t it?”

  “What do you mean by that?” Chance slurred.

  “Figure it out,” Christine retorted.

  “Are you going to let her get away with that?” Chance sputtered at the chief.

  A small smile played about the corners of VanDusen’s narrow lips, and he said, “Yeah, I think I am.”

  Still acting indignant, Chance said, “I vote we go back to the entrance and dig ourselves out.”

  “Whoever said you were in a democracy, Ray? There’s no voting around here!” Nichols snarled. You go right ahead and do what you want to do. And let me know how it works out for you once you try lifting those house-sized boulders blocking the entrance! Did you remember your hernia belt?”

  “Well, it doesn’t look like this is the way out with all this goddamned water and glow in the dark fish and crap. That’s all I’m saying!” Chance groused.

  Clicking his Maglite back on, VanDusen said, “Looks like there might be something else in here with us, too. He shone his light on the ground. Skeletal remains were scattered along the shore of the lake where they stood. “Hard to say whether something killed these things, or if the carcasses only washed up here on the shore then rotted - its anybody's guess,” VanDusen concluded.

  But Christine didn’t have to guess. “Those aren’t new; they’ve been here for a while.” She briefly flashed her light over them -- she’d seen them earlier. The bones were faded, off-white, with no sign of any meat or cartilage on any of them. They had either died here on the shore, many years ago or been picked clean by other predators. But if they were picked clean by something, then picked clean by what? What else was lurking in this cavern with them, sealed off from the rest of the world for countless millennia? There appeared to be an entire ecosystem at play here, one that had been existing for thousands and thousands of years before they’d stumbled upon it. But what lay around the next corner in this cavern of wonders was anybody’s guess indeed.

  Christine directed her beam away from the bones and along the cavern wall to her left. In the darkness of the far corner, a flat, rocky ledge about a metre wide ran along the lip of the lake for hundreds of metres into darkness.

  She stepped forward, wanting to explore the ledge along the back wall further when she felt a familiar poke in her back. Looking over her shoulder toward the Chief, she said, “I know you’re pretty excited and all, big boy, but do you think you might be able to pull your little boomstick out of my back for a second or two so I can check things out?”

  “I think we can accommodate you, young lady,” Nichols said. “Reggie, would you kindly allow our young lady-friend here a bit more freedom to explore?”

  “All right, but don’t you try anything else funny!” VanDusen jabbed his rifle toward her once more to emphasize his point.

  “Don’t worry; I think I’ve permanently lost my sense of humour.”

  “Watch your mouth, bitch,” the chief growled.

  “Sorry, I can’t watch my mouth because I can’t see my face. Suck it up, buttercup.”

  Leaving VanDusen fuming happily away, Christine moved out onto the ledge, slowly edging along it, her back to the far wall of the cavern. There was a section up ahead that appeared particularly intriguing, and she wanted to check it out. It looked to be white marble or something like it, extending several hundred or more metres away from her, running next to the ledge of the underground lake.

  Sidling closer to it, she was mindful of her step, not wanting to tumble into the lake of glowing bio-life herself. She wasn’t particularly curious to find out whether or not the lake contained anything of an aquatic equivalent to the monstrosity currently stalking the residents of Lawless in the outside world.

  Arriving at the gleaming marbled wall, she saw what she suspected was indeed correct; there was an alternate exit from the cavern they were currently in, but it was entirely blocked by millions of tonnes of blue-white ice from the Kootenay Glacier.

  Christine Moon marvelled at the process at work in this incredible cavern. The massive Kootenay Glacier slowly, but inevitably moved past this cavern entrance each day, scraping bits and pieces of itself away against the rock as it progressed. It had probably been doing so eve
r since the last ice age.

  Judging by the what lay on the small lip of the lake, every once in a while, a large chunk of ice would calve off and fall into the heated, luminescent mineral water next to it. Whatever was in the ice would then begin to thaw in this warm, living lake.