BLIND DESENT Read online

  The first hint that something had gone wrong was the call "Rock!" carried down the black canyon on a gust of fear.

  7

  Like a flick of foam on the crest of a tidal wave, the shout was borne down on a thunderous roar. In the insulated chamber, sworn to long silence by the earth itself, the noise consumed everything in its path. The stone beneath Anna's boot soles quaked. The Stokes chattered against the limestone. Anna could feel the frame ratcheting in her hands. The feeble clacking of metal was lost in the greater chaos. Helmet lights slashed at the darkness, cutting across each other in the void, vainly seeking the source of the racket. In a second Anna saw those beams turn from gold to brown. In another instant they were smothered completely.

  Silt-out, she thought inanely, her mind grasping at a diving incident years before. Dust: the earth was reclaiming the canyon they crept through. Curling down over Frieda, Anna grabbed both sides of the Stokes and hung on. Her hard hat was pressed against the Plexiglas protecting Frieda's face. Anna thought she heard Frieda screaming, but it might have been her own voice.

  Ropes slipped, and there was a sickening skid downward. Then something broke loose, and they fell as one falls in a nightmare. Sudden weightlessness, a sense of utter helplessness, as all that was once real, once stable, is sucked away. Without sight, there were no walls streaking by, no floor rushing up. There were just the wind and the breathless drop.

  Without warning the ropes caught, and Anna was jerked above the litter, the webbing slashing at the soft skin of her groin. Upended, she snapped back against the canyon wall, elbow cracking into an unforgiving surface. The litter was still between her hands, the weight of it threatening to drag her arms from their sockets. Maybe lines still held it, maybe they didn't. Anna wasn't going to let go and find out. As long as the spider held, she could hold, she told herself.

  She lied. The leather of her gloves began to slip, a slow rotation that would pry her fingers from the metal. Squeezing with every muscle in her body, Anna willed her bones to weld to the aluminum. "I got you, Frieda," she said over and over, as if by repeating it it would continue to be the truth.

  By the light of her lamp she could see Frieda's face below her. Through the gauze of swirling dust she looked no more than twelve years old. "Grab me, Frieda. Grab my wrists." In what appeared to be slow motion, Frieda reached up. Anna could see the articulation of her fingers, opening like petals of a flower in time-lapse photography.

  Grinding as of enormous gears out of sync clogged her ears and squeezed the gray matter in her skull. Dust boiled down in an opaque swirl, burning her eyes and lungs. Frieda vanished in a noxious cloud. "Grab hold," Anna cried. Dust forced her eyes closed, stopped her breath. None of her senses would function. She felt a terror so primal she could no longer even speak. Fingers closed around her wrists. Good girl, Frieda, she thought, and clenched eyes and teeth and hands against the onslaught.

  Gradually the noise abated. The invisible freight train roaring down their canyon turned away, the rumble following it. Pressure lifted with the relative quiet. The sound of rocks skittering touched lightly on the ear like the burble of a mountain stream. Anna remembered to breathe and was rewarded by a hacking cough expelling dust-saturated air. She opened her eyes. In the brown glow of her headlamp she could see her left arm and Frieda's face. Through the Plexiglas Frieda looked up at her, and Anna saw her own fear mirrored.

  Stillness reigned. Anna craned her neck, peering over her shoulder. The lines held. The traverse rope was at a drunken angle, but it was taut, and the spider looked solid, a testament to Oscar and Holden's rigging expertise.

  "Whoa," she said. "They've still got us. We can let go. Easy." Frieda loosed her hold on Anna's wrists, leaving a burn where she'd gripped bare skin. "Me now. Sheesh. My hands are stuck in the 'on' position." Anna laughed shakily, and Frieda managed a smile. Before Anna could pry her fingers from the metal, another sound assaulted them, a screech like tires on pavement. "Jesus fucking Christ, what—"

  Grinding began again, pulverizing Anna's words. Irrationally, she thought she'd brought it on by offending the Hodags. That and an unformed thought about the eye of the hurricane were raked from her mind as the momentary stability of the Stokes was lost. Ropes that held them in their tangled web dropped half a foot, caught. For a heartbeat they rested; then those same lines that had kept them from falling snatched them from safety. Anna and Frieda didn't so much fall as hurtle. The foot of the Stokes was dragged down, towed into the inky depths as if hitched to a leviathan that dived for the bottom.

  Anna's neck whipped back with the suddenness of their descent. A rope burned across her cheek. She felt the drag on her flesh but not the pain. Heart and lungs were left behind. In the brief second afforded, she was disappointed her life didn't flash before her eyes. There had been times she would have liked to revisit, faces she wanted to see once more. On the heels of this spark of dream came a craven hope that if they had been buried alive, this fall would kill her.

  Black on black, she struck with a violence that knocked thought aside, hammered her knee into her chest. She folded. Her helmet struck something with such force she could feel her brain skid in its pan. Her left shoulder slammed against the rocks. A faint pop reverberated up through tissues to her ear—a break or a dislocation. No pain, not yet. Air gusted from her chest, the wind knocked out of her. She'd not felt that paralyzing inability to inhale since she was a little girl and had fallen off the horizontal ladder on the playground of Johnstonville Elementary.

  Through the panic of asphyxiation came a piercing realization: her earlier prayer for death was bogus. Regardless of where she'd landed, she wanted to stay alive. A line from Rosencrantz and Guildenstem Are Dead, a play her husband, Zach, had starred in Off-Broadway, reverberated in a voice she'd thought lost to her, something to the effect that life in a box was better than no life at all.

  Air returned in a trickle, and Anna sipped greedily till her lungs expanded. With oxygen came pain. Her shoulder throbbed down to her fingertips. She'd not let go of the Stokes, and her left hand was pinned beneath the metal. During the fall, she had become wadded up. Knees under chin, arms down around her ankles, she knelt in a ball on an unstable surface. As she fell—or, more likely, as she landed—her headlamp had been lost. Darkness was absolute, viscous. Of the three sources of light she'd been cautioned to carry, two were in her sidepack, somewhere above her. If above still existed.

  Frieda's lamp had been extinguished as well. Anna could not tell which direction was up and which down, whether they had landed on the bottom of the Pigtail or were caught partway down. She had no idea if she bled or was whole, if Frieda was with her or gone. Only sound remained to keep her company; a distant grumbling as if the people the earth had swallowed for her supper didn't agree with her.

  For half a minute Anna was unable to move. Blindness, dizziness from the blow to her head, left her with a sense of disassociation. The pain in her shoulder, fingers, the cramping in her thighs, were distant echoes from a body she had once inhabited. The only true sensation was stark terror. Fear if she moved she would fall again, farther this time. And fear that she was alone and would die alone in the dark.

  Anna was never to find out if this panic would have passed on its own, if she would have been able to function again without help. A light came through the dust storm of night and touched the wall several yards above her. "Down here," she managed. Her voice was so tiny she could scarcely hear it herself. Fear she would be passed over, the search plane would never again fly near her life raft, sent a spurt of adrenaline through her veins. "Down here," she yelled so loudly she wondered that she didn't set off another fall of rock.

  Lamps began appearing, brown muted smudges that came and went in the haze like will-o'-the-wisps. Shouts and cries accompanied them, but none reached to where Anna crouched.

  "Light," she shouted. "Get me some light down here."

  "Hang on." Oscar Iverson's voice cut through the fog, and she was comforted. She
could hear the scramble of feet and lines. A fine rain of dirt pattered down on her helmet.

  "Frieda?" she ventured. There was no reply. Keeping her right hand clasped tightly on a projection of stone above her shoulder and moving carefully so as not to dislodge them should their perch be as precarious as she feared, Anna worked her left hand from between the rock and the Stokes. The pain was intense but not unwelcome. It clarified her thoughts, burned through the mind-numbing terror. When her hand was free, she pulled the glove off with her teeth and began a tactile exploration of the territory beneath her.

  Between her knees was the cool Plexiglas of Frieda's face shield. Anna wiggled her fingers under the edge and felt the warmth of her friend's throat. Without help from her eyes she sought the carotid artery the way she'd been taught years before at a trade school for emergency medical technicians, feeling first for the hard shell of cartilage that protected the esophagus. Nothing but too-pliant flesh met her touch. Risking the fall, she released the stony projection and brought her right hand down. Using her left to hold the shield up, she felt Frieda's face. There was no stickiness of blood or slippery ooze of mucus or cerebral spinal fluid leaking from nose or ears. With gentle strokes, she checked the exposed parts of Frieda's skull and forehead. She seemed to be all in one piece. Anna's fingers tapped gently down over feathery eyebrows to touch Frieda's eyelids. They were wet.

  "Frieda?" Anna said softly. There wasn't a flicker of response. She moved a fingertip lightly down the lid to the bridge of the nose. Not blood but tears: Frieda's eyes were open. Anna's fingertip rested on the sclera.

  "Frieda?" Anna said again, and heard a note of hysteria in her voice. "Get Dr. McCarty down here," she yelled.

  "Almost there." Looking up she could see the boots and butts of two cavers descending in a halo of murky light. When she looked down again the illumination had spread. In diffused sepia tones, like those of an old photograph, she could make out the barest outline of where they had come to rest. Katie's Pigtail bottomed out a foot or two below the wide shelf where the litter had landed. The Stokes was at an angle, propped in the ell where wall met floor. Lines tangled around it, some vanishing into the dark like snakes fleeing the scene. Anna had landed on top of the litter, her knees on Frieda's chest.

  In the swaying shadows she could see Frieda's face. The shield had become detached from her helmet on one side. Anna lifted it off. Eyes open, lips slightly parted as if she meant to speak, Frieda stared at the limestone wall. Where her esophagus should have been was a shallow depression the size of a saucer. That was why Anna had been unable to find it in the dark. It had been crushed, smashed flat when Anna's knee had driven through the soft flesh of her throat.

  "I killed you," Anna said tonelessly.

  "We're almost there," came Iverson's voice. "Take it easy."

  "I killed her," Anna told them. "I killed Frieda."

  8

  With the gift of light, Anna found the courage to move. Her left arm was useless. Even if it wasn't broken, the pain was so great her muscles lacked all strength, and she couldn't put any pressure on it. Keeping the weight off Frieda with her right arm, she got free of the Stokes and knelt by her friend's head. With her weak hand beneath Frieda's chin, Anna pinched her nose closed and tried to blow air into her lungs. The trachea was too damaged. No air could flow through. Twice more she tried, then Oscar and Peter McCarty arrived.

  "Crushed esophagus," Anna said, and, "Emergency tracheotomy?" She'd seen Jane Fonda do it once in a movie about a doll maker. It was not sanctioned for EMTs by any state board in the continental U.S. Pocket-knife and Bic-pen procedures were frowned upon by a litigious society not given to trusting the kindness of strangers.

  In this instance McCarty echoed Anna's thoughts verbatim. "We've got nothing to lose."

  She moved back, making room for him. Lines weaving through gear and metal tied Anna and Frieda together, and Anna knew it would always be so. She no more blamed herself for ending Frieda's life than she would have blamed a rock that had effected the same end, but together they had traversed the Pigtail. Together they had shared the terror of the ropes giving way. Together they had fallen. Anna had not only been there at the moment Frieda's life had winked out but, however unwillingly, had been the instrument of her death. That connected them.

  "She's gone," Dr. McCarty said. "There was too much trauma. The spine may have been snapped."

  An involuntary shudder rattled Anna's frame. Graphic images, the mechanics of her kneecap cracking Frieda's bones were too much. To her embarrassment, she started to cry, not a quiet flow of seemly tears but salt water and snot and great gulping sobs. Her heart and mind felt as if they had burst, swollen tender blisters full of poison. She could no more stop her weeping than she could have stopped the litter from falling.

  Arms went around her. Hands removed her helmet. Fingers stroked her hair. A voice murmured in her ear. Still, she could not stem the tide of emotion. Grief she could have borne with silence if not dignity; she'd done it before. Pain she could carry without undue complaint. Even the shock and the fear might have been tenable. It was the helplessness that unmanned her. An overwhelming sense of being utterly lost.

  "I'm going to give her a sedative," she heard Peter say. From the movement against the top of her head she realized it was he who held her.

  "Not till we're out of here and have camp set up," Oscar returned. "She needs all her wits about her for the climb out."

  They spoke as if she wasn't there. With her tears she had abdicated. At least in the minds of men. They didn't understand tears; the difference between giving up and stepping down for a moment, collapsing and crying "I can't go on," then, refreshed, lifting one's burdens and pressing onward.

  Anna fought free of Peter's protective embrace and mopped at the mess on her face with the tail of her tee-shirt. The coarseness of the gesture went unnoticed by the three of them. There wasn't a clean hanky for a long ways.

  "I'm okay," she growled. An untimely case of the hiccups robbed her statement of its force. "Just a bad patch there. Frieda—" Tears yet unspent rose in her throat and eyes. Anna stopped trying to talk and breathed in slowly till they receded. "Frieda's dead?"

  "Dead," Peter repeated.

  "Can we get out of here?" Anna asked. "Out of the cave?" She kept her voice dead-level. She expected the answer to be "no" and did not want them to know how desperately she needed it to be otherwise.

  "I don't know," Oscar said. Peter turned his head to listen. His light fell on Iverson and Anna saw his face. Age had settled on him with the layers of dust. She wouldn't have thought his seamed, mummylike skin would have the elasticity to tell any more tales of use, but it was there. Exhaustion pulled at the rims of his eyes, responsibility pinched his thin lips, shock sucked the blood from his tanned hide, leaving it more gray than brown.

  Seeing him this way could have further demoralized her. Oddly it had the opposite effect. Had he been a paragon of strength, she might have been tempted to fall apart and let him pick up the pieces. Recognizing his humanity brought to the fore a playground sense of justice. It wouldn't be fair to fall apart. It wouldn't be kosher to make him carry her load.

  "Okay," she said. Given the context, the word was meaningless. She intended only to buy herself a little time, to indicate she heard and understood, that she could be relied on. Whether the last was true or not, she didn't know.

  With meticulous attention to detail, proving to someone—herself, probably—that she was still a viable member of the team, Anna began unhooking herself from the Stokes. Her fingers now opened and closed, the wrist and elbow moved without too much pain. Apparently her shoulder had only been badly bruised. She didn't mention that or the blow to her head to Peter McCarty.

  Distracted, he didn't press her. He asked questions about her and Frieda's fall but was easily satisfied. They had yet to hear what had occurred up near the rockfall. The doctor might have his work cut out for him. Anna could see the lack of confidence in the uncomforta
ble shift of his blue eyes and the uncertain, almost childish, crimp of his mouth. McCarty wasn't an ER doctor or a television hero. He was a gynecologist on holiday. Chances were good he had less experience with emergency medicine than Anna, Oscar, or Holden. But he had the M.D. after his name, and in the eyes of the world, that made him responsible.

  He and Oscar had rappelled down using two short lines Oscar had been carrying to rig the ascent at the end of the Pigtail. They anchored to a formation that grew out of the wall above like a petrified rhinoceros horn. Anna watched as they strapped on their ascenders for the climb back up. Her gear resided with her other two light sources under Zeddie's care. If Zeddie still lived.

  Peter worked in grim silence. Understanding Anna's need for information, an imposition of order—or maybe just needing to talk—Oscar told her everything he'd seen, heard, or surmised.

  "Peter and I were right above you and Frieda," he said. "We heard that . . . that noise . . . and looked up. Something let loose in the pile of rock up by the Distributor Cap. I heard it more than saw it. Kind of a weird shift in the shadows, but I could tell it was coming down. I think it started off small. Then a ton of rock hit the boulder we'd anchored you guys into. It must have shifted."

  That would have been the first short drop.

  "I thought that was it, but something big got torn out," Oscar went on.

  The second grinding.

  "The anchor boulder hopped. I mean hopped," he said. "Like it had come to life. It staggered, rocked backward, then hopped, hit the bridge, and went down."

  Anna's leviathan.

  "After that the dust got so bad I had to turn away, put my arm over my face. Didn't see much for a while."

  "Holden?" Anna asked. He'd been on the stone bridge directing the operation.

  "Don't know," Oscar said, his voice suddenly hard. "He's fast. He may have got clear."