Cave Dogs (Pachacuta Book 1)

by Brian Falkner

  ‘Eels,’ said Dennis, although I had already guessed. ‘Quite tame. The guides feed them.’

  ‘Anybody hungry?’ Tupai said with a laugh. ‘Time for some kai’

  ‘Not that one,’ smiled Dennis, indicating the bulk of an eel at one end of the pool. That’s Elvis. The King. He’s been here as long as anyone can remember.’

  We walked over rocks. We walked around rocks. We crawled under rocks and through narrow canals. We inched down passageways lined with fossilized oyster-shells and whalebones, and eventually came to a great jumble of rocks, floor to ceiling, in a cave high enough to stand comfortably.

  Dennis took off his helmet and scratched his head. He sat on one of the rocks and indicated that we should do the same. Stalactites lined the cave, and their floor-growing counterparts, stalagmites. I seemed to remember from history class that Stalag was a German word for a prisoner of war camp. I hoped that it didn’t turn out to be too appropriate.

  ‘About ten metres further into this cave there is a small black hole in the ground,’ Dennis said, a little gravely. ‘Below it is a river that is the next stage of our journey.’ He was silent for a moment.

  ‘How do we access it?’ Jenny asked. I had a horrible premonition of what Dennis was going to say next and I was right.

  ‘We don’t. We can’t. The tremor has brought down the roof here and without a team of diggers we’ve got no way through. We’ve got to go back.’

  I was exhausted. We’d been making double time through the caves trying to get out quickly. My entire body felt as through it had been stripped of all its muscles and just bones and tendons were holding it together. I could see that Phil and Jason were feeling the same and I knew that Jenny would be suffering too. She’d never admit it of course. Fizzer had found a flat piece of ground and was sitting, lotus position, meditating. He didn’t seem too bothered by all the exhaustion, but that was a mind-over-matter thing for him.

  Only Tupai looked un-bothered by the arduous trek. He looked as though he had barely raised a sweat. He stretched a little though, easing the tension in those giant muscles.

  The roof of the caves had started to bother me the last hour or so. They had seemed to be pressing in, regardless of their height. A mild form of claustrophobia I thought. I wanted more than anything to be out of that place.

  ‘We go back, and Reiko will call in the helicopter to winch us out.’ It really was good to have a backup plan. ‘We’ll rest here for a few minutes if you like.’

  ‘No.’ Jason stood up. ‘No, let’s get going. It’s a long way and there’s nothing to be gained by delaying.’

  ‘I don’t think my legs would agree with you.’ Phil scowled.

  ‘You could rest for an hour and you’d still feel like crap,’ Jason said. ‘We’re better off to keep moving.’

  Tupai was nodding and I nodded too.

  Dennis said, ‘He’s right, and the sooner we’re out of here the better I’ll feel. I’ll lead the way.’

  The trip back lacked the element of discovery and just became a slog. Once during the trip I thought I felt the start of a tremor, but it seemed little more than a slight vibration in the walls. Dennis didn’t slow down.

  I lost track of where we were, and seemed to drift off in a kind of a walking, crawling, climbing daze. So I was pleasantly surprised to find the remnants of the ladder at my feet, and to realize that we were close to the big cavern. Close to the tomo.

  Reiko’s voice sparkling on the radio was a welcome lift to our spirits, a link finally, with the outside world. She and Dennis busily made plans as Dennis and Tupai led us out and down the valley towards the Jesus Rock.

  And that’s when the thunder of hell reached up from deep inside the earth and grabbed that little underground cabin and shook the living shit out of it.

  3. Flea’s Dance

  By Jason Kirk

  There are many kinds of rock. Limestone, formed over thousands of years by the remains of animals and shells. Granite and Basalt are cooled lava. There are many other kinds. But all have one common feature. Rock is hard.

  Logic, experience, and basic fourth form geology told me that the walls of the Mangapu cavern were made of solid rock. My eyes told me the walls were made of rubber.

  Long shuddering ripples in the massive walls spat out loose rocks as if shot by a cannon. The roof of the cave itself was undulating, the floor shaking violently. The air in an instant choked with dust and huge chunks of the cave began crashing in on itself. I saw boulders, impossibly, bounce upwards in the great cavern.

  We were seven soft, squishy insects in a giant child’s rattle filled with hard and sharp things.

  ‘Run!’ Dennis screamed at us, ‘Back, back, back!’

  Phil and Jenny had somehow ended up behind me and Jenny didn’t hesitate, she turned and ran, skipping over the shaking ground and loose boulders as if it were hot. Phil stood there, petrified and I didn’t have time to muck around so I just pushed him violently in the chest. He stumbled backwards but somehow caught his footing on the quaking rock floor, spun around and followed Jenny.

  A boulder smashed down just where he had been standing, tiny shards of stone splintering off and spraying in all directions, the boulder blocking my path. I twisted, desperately searching for a place of safety, anything.

  A hand grabbed my arm, Fizzer Boyd. He shouted something that I couldn’t hear and pointed at the Jesus Rock. A massive rock fall earlier in the day had smashed into the side of it, forming a pyramid shaped shelter. We ran together, Fizzer and I, across the shaking ground, rocks crashing around us. A massive chunk hit a fallen boulder just behind Fizzer and a shockwave, like the blast of an explosion, propelled him forward. I latched onto his arm as he fell and stopped him from diving headfirst into a solid chunk of granite. He re-gathered his footing and sprawled into what protection the Jesus Rock offered us. I followed him, sliding underneath the Jesus Rock itself. One of my legs disappeared into space and I found myself slipping into a deep-looking hole that had perplexed us earlier.

  The gods smiled though, in the shape of Fizzer’s strong right arm. He pulled me carefully away from the hole and into the rear of the small cave formed by the two massive rocks.

  I don’t know if I liked this place any better, as it occurred to me that it wouldn’t take much for one of these massive stones to lose its balance, and then this supposed saviour would become a killer. I could not only hear but feel the impact of boulders smashing into the top of our shelter. The huge, protecting rocks shook, but didn’t fall, so far, and I peered out in the dust and explosions of rock to see how my other friends were doing.

  Tupai and our Sensai, Dennis, were the farthest down the valley and were trying their best to fight their way back up. Flea – Daniel Scott – my best friend, I could not see.

  I glanced back at Fizzer and was amazed by his calmness. The world was exploding around him and his expression was as if boating on a sunny canal. I looked at his eyes and I knew why. He didn’t have to say a thing. It wasn’t his time. Fizzer believed the Universe had a well-ordered plan for every little thing, including himself, and this simply wasn’t his time to die. I kind of know where he is coming from, about the Universe that is. It is hard to believe that there is not some grand design. Flea didn’t think so. Flea thought it was a lot of new-age mumbo jumbo. But I thought Fizzer might have a point. I just wish I had his knowledge of whether or not this was my time to die!

  Tupai and Dennis gained a few metres on the rocking, rolling ground and I tried to shout to them above the thunder of the earthquake. Then I saw the unseeable, the unimaginable. The whole side of the cavern above them just peeled off. It pulled away, a huge solid sheet of rock, and hung there for a moment, as if balanced on the lip it had broken from, before it slowly toppled.

  I screamed at Tupai and Dennis, but they had no way of hearing me above the roaring earth and so they had no warning as the Mangapu cavern ate them alive.

  The world for a moment seemed to stop. Tupai White
and Dennis Cray. It was their time. The Universe had spoken.

  I had never seen anybody killed before. I had never wanted to see anybody killed. The thought that a living, breathing human being could be one moment, and simply not be the next moment was unthinkable. But when the side of the cavern wall, maybe thirty tonnes of rock, smashed down over my friends, I knew that I had seen death. Violent, sudden death.

  I coughed and vomited all at once, and the vomit, thick with dust that I hadn’t realised I was breathing into my lungs, formed a sludge pool in front of my face, then there was another shake and I was thrown sideways against the base of the Jesus rock. That’s when I saw Flea.

  Flea has this ‘thing’. At least that’s what he calls it. It is as if he moves in another dimension, a dimension where things just happen much faster than they do in our dimension. It’s not that, of course, but it seems easiest to describe it that way.

  What I think Flea’s thing is, is this. If you have ever been in a car accident you may have experienced it. At the moment of impact you have the feeling that everything is happening in slow motion. The screech of the brakes, the sliding of the cars sickeningly towards each other, the mouths opened to scream. It all happens frame-by-frame. Or let me try this way. You may have read stories of people who have pulled off seemingly superhuman feats, the granny that lifted a tractor off her grandson, the passenger who lifted a helicopter to free a trapped pilot. Feats that are simply not possible, but that someone loaded with an extraordinary adrenalin surge, has performed.

  That’s what I think Flea’s ‘thing’ is. Some kind of extraordinary adrenalin surge that he can control at will. I don’t mean that he can lift tractors or helicopters; I simply mean that it sends his metabolism into overdrive. He’s on fast-forward and we’re stuck on slow motion.

  You might think I’m making this up, but my friend Daniel Scott is the same ‘Flea’ Scott who joined the New Zealand Warriors for a year of professional football at the age of thirteen, and that’s well documented. He couldn’t have done it without his ‘thing.’

  Flea was doing his ‘thing’ in the crazy-bouncy-castle of the Mangapu cavern and I think the cavern was trying to kill him.

  The wall of rock that had destroyed Tupai and Dennis must have crashed down just a few metres away from him and the shockwave of compressed air from that exploding rock had hurled him bodily forward against the moss-covered wall of the cavern.

  He picked himself up and dived to one side just as a jagged spear of granite obliterated the place he had been. I saw his helmet light spiralling in the dark cloud of dust as he bobbed and weaved and spun out of the path of the rocks the cavern was throwing at him. It was curiously, terrifyingly, beautiful in a strange kind of way as he waltzed with Mother Earth in the fractured shards of rock that punctured the billowing clouds of dust. Sometimes two rocks would arrive almost simultaneously, surely impossible to dodge, but Flea would be diving underneath this one and rolling out of the path of that one, leaping back to his feet to spring forward from under a granite slab that toppled from the wall.

  Then there was something different in the sound and feeling of the cavern and it took me a moment to realise what it was. The noise was less, but more importantly the ground had stopped moving.

  The rain of boulders continued, as did Flea’s bizarre dance, but only for a few more seconds. Then, apart from the occasional crash somewhere down in the valley, there was a piercing, ringing silence. The silence was as raised voices united in choral harmony, and somewhere in the distance I could swear I heard the tolling of a bell.

  I started to move out of the Jesus Rock shelter, but a steady hand on my shoulder and Fizzer’s voice, unnaturally loud in the weird silence, in the confines of the small cave, ‘Give it few more minutes.’

  Flea stood there, dust drifting to the ground around him, his eyes raised and his helmet lamp probing the ceiling for more dangers. His wetsuit was torn and there were long scratches and grazes down his chest. Blood trickled, but didn’t flow.

  Few days have gone by since that time that I don’t think of, and wonder at, Flea’s dance with the cavern.

  Then from out of the depths of the great silence came the high-pitched screaming of a girl. ‘My God!’ I thought, Jenny and Phil. Flea was already moving, bounding over the rocks up towards where the other two had been.

  Fizzer followed me, slipping and sliding on loose stones underfoot, trying to find a path over or around the rubble of the earthquake. We were only a few seconds behind Flea, and found him and Jenny, shoulders hard up against a large boulder that crushed the legs of Phil Domane.

  Phil was lying face down; it was him that was screaming, not Jenny at all. They had been making for the exit to the smaller cavern, but they hadn’t made it. The exit was gone anyway, buried under tonnes of rock. Strangely, I thought the rock that had landed on Phil had probably saved both Phil’s and Jenny’s lives, deflecting most of the other debris that had crashed around them.

  The boulder that was crushing Phil was oddly rounded. Most of the rocks that had been hurled at us had had square-ish, jagged edges. It was impossible to see the damage to Phil’s legs but it looked serious. The boulder was massive, wedged up against two others. It rocked a little under Flea and Jenny’s urgings, but didn’t look close to moving.

  ‘Jason! Fizzer!’ There are few words that come close to describing the look of immense relief that shone from Flea’s dust covered face. He didn’t ask about Tupai or Dennis. I think he may have seen it too.

  All four of us combined our strength against the rock that pinned Phil’s legs, and lost. The screaming was constant now and I perversely felt that if he would just shut-up we might do better.

  Don’t take that the wrong way. I like Phil. He’s certainly not as bad as Daniel makes him out to be, but Daniel has his own personal reasons for painting a poor picture of Phil. You need to make allowance for that when you read Daniel’s words.

  It was just that the effort and concentration needed to try and move the stone seemed diminished by the noise Phil was making. We couldn’t concentrate, we couldn’t focus. We certainly couldn’t move the rock.

  Flea disappeared for a moment and when he returned he was holding a long length of, something. It may have been a tree-root of some kind, or a whale-bone, I couldn’t tell. But it was long and looked strong and one of the first things we had learned in physics was to use a lever to move a stone.

  I found a small boulder that I could lift and Fizzer helped me move it into place as a fulcrum. He and Flea leaned on the root/bone lever and Jenny and I put our shoulders back to the rock.

  I wished to hell that Phil would shut up.

  The rock shifted a little and the end of the lever slipped a little deeper underneath. I kicked at the fulcrum stone, shifting it into a better position. They hauled on the lever again, putting the full weight of their bodies onto it. Whatever it was, it was a strong one, as it didn’t splinter or break. Jenny and I shoved and the rock rolled forward a bit more, held there for a second by our combined strengths, then slowly rolled back to where it had been.

  Phil’s screams intensified and I looked grimly at Flea. He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking down the valley, as was Fizzer. I turned, following their eyes, and saw a ghost.

  It was a massive ghost, a barrel-chested, broad-shouldered, tree-trunk-legged ghost that strode steadily up the valley shedding layers of dust as it came. Tupai White had somehow taken on thirty-odd tonnes of cavern wall and Tupai had won.

  ‘Tupai!’ It was intended to be a shout, but it came out as a small breath.

  Fizzer asked ‘Dennis?’

  Tupai shrugged those big shoulders as if he didn’t know, but I was watching his eyes, and he knew all right.

  He didn’t stop, this ghost-like creature, white with the dust of the cavern, he just marched up to the boulder without a word, sat down on the floor of the cavern with his back up against the wall and put those huge ham-like legs on the rock. Blood was pouring from a ga
sh in one of his calves, but he didn’t seem to notice.

  Dust eddies still swirled through the air around us as Tupai began to push. Fizzer and Flea leaned back on the lever and Jenny and I added our weight to the side of the boulder.

  The muscles in the legs of Tupai – he who had once been the strongest kid in primary school - rippled, and incredible the rock moved, and this time it kept moving. Somewhere it passed a point of no return and topped away from the other rocks it had been wedged against, rolling a few metres down the hill before crashing into an even larger rock and coming to rest.

  We all took a few deep breaths, getting our air back. I found I was still coughing, the dust that was everywhere, in all of our lungs. I hadn’t realised it but I was hacking and spitting like an old man.

  Jenny was the only one who didn’t stop for a breather. She was at Phil’s legs immediately and thank God he had stopped screaming.

  I guess Jenny knew a little more about medicine than the rest of us. Her father was an ambulance driver and she had plans to become a doctor. She certainly seemed to know what she was doing as she probed Phil’s legs with her fingers. He remained strangely silent and I suddenly realised why. He had passed out.

  There was a massive crash from way down in the valley, near the tomo. I ignored it but Fizzer got up to look.

  Jenny looked up with what could only be described as relief. ‘Phil’s going to be OK. His left leg is fine, it was the right leg that was crushed, but as far as I can tell the bone is not broken. He’ll have severe bruising, but no more. As far as I can tell.’

  I suppose that brought relief to us all. I had had visions of his legs being flattened raspberry pancake under the weight of the huge boulder, but I suspect now, thinking about it, that the rounded shape would have helped. As long as his legs were not under the absolute curve of the boulder, most of the boulder’s weight would have been resting on the ground.

  There was another crash from down in the valley and Fizzer returned with grim eyes. For someone who didn’t think his time had come, this was the most frightened I had seen him.