The Deep Zone

“There is danger in the cave,” said Cahner. “Danger’s not good or evil. It’s just danger. In the mountains we talk about objective dangers, things like weather and avalanches over which we have no control. Same in a cave. Isn’t that right, Hallie?”

Arguello spoke before Hallie could. “I am thinking about the two men who were lost in here, during your other expedition. What happened to them? Why did they not return?”

“As I said, we never found out.”

“That is a great pity.” She waited for Arguello to go on, but he said nothing more.

“We all need some rest.” Bowman, more gently than Hallie would have expected, was telling them it was bedtime. “We haven’t gone as far as I’d planned, but given the circumstances, I think it would be dangerous to keep moving. Let’s plan to sleep for four hours, and then head out again.”

“You will have no argument from me,” said Arguello. “I can surely use the rest.”

“Sleeping in caves is such fun,” Cahner sighed.

Bowman waved an arm. “Welcome to the Cueva de Luz Hilton, my friends. I hope you find the accommodations to your liking.”

Hallie’s spot was a hundred feet from where they had eaten. Back there, she took from her pack an airtight red capsule about the size of a flashlight. She unscrewed the container’s top and removed its contents, a super- compressed, waterproof sleeping bag with an integral bottom pad. On contact with air it began to expand like a dry sponge absorbing water. Unlike a sponge, it kept on growing as though it were being inflated, which, in fact, was exactly what was happening as the nanopolymer filling’s affinity for nitrogen molecules drew them in. In less than two minutes, the thing had grown to resemble a conventional, puffy mummy bag.

She took off her boots and set them just to the left of her bag. She stripped off her filthy caving suit, folded it, and put it on top of the boots. Wearing her damp but clean red polypro long underwear, she slipped into her bag. But for a long time she lay awake, staring at false light images. It never failed. The times when she needed to sleep most were inevitably the times when she could not sleep at all. She lay there, watching the fireworks that the dark tricked her eyes into producing, feeling more impatient as the seconds passed—which, of course, made it even harder to fall asleep. Before long, she heard snoring from the direction of Cahner’s sleeping spot. Then Arguello, whose snoring was slower and more deeply pitched than Cahner’s. She waited, expecting to hear Bowman next, but did not.

One reason she could not sleep was that her mind kept returning to Haight’s death, seeing the young man’s body, which lay, unburied, under the green plastic groundsheet. By now, she knew, it would be stiffened by rigor mortis. Tomorrow decomposition would set in, if it had not already. Another thing holding sleep at bay was her own body’s soreness. She knew from experience that no matter how good her conditioning was when she came into a cave like this, it would still take several days to get acclimated.

But there was a third reason why she could not sleep. She waited half an hour, listening to Cahner and Arguello snoring, waiting for them to work their way down into REMs. Finally, she slipped out of her bag and, navigating from her mental snapshot, started moving.

Hallie moved through the dark softly, smoothly, going by sense of touch and memory, looking not so much like a blind person groping through unfamiliar rooms as a dancer in slow motion. After two minutes she caught a trace of scent, a minute later picked up the sound of soft breathing. She kept moving forward, working her way between boulders, until, without warning, a hand clamped her ankle.

“Hallie.” Bowman’s voice, whispering.

“You heard me coming. But how’d you know it was me?”

“Scent. You’re quiet, though. I’ll give you that.”

“Don’t you ever sleep?”

“Not much. You?” He released her ankle.

“Now and then. But I wasn’t having any luck.”

“Cahner and Arguello don’t seem to be having trouble.”

“Exhausted, both of them.”

“Yes. Long, hard day.”

Neither of them spoke for a while, Bowman lying down, Hallie standing over him, both listening to the cave talking: water flowing, wind soughing, every once in a while the sharper, cracking sound of rock breaking from the ceiling of some distant chamber. There would be silences of varying lengths and then another sound, explosive, as rock hit the cave floor. Some impacts were so distant that they sounded like small bags being popped, but others, closer, were louder and made the floor shake. It was a process that never stopped, like a human body continually sloughing off dead skin cells. And where the rocks landed was purely the luck of the draw. Hallie knew that a rock, pebble sized or big as a house, could hit any of them at any time.

Cahner had been right about objective dangers in the mountains. Caves had plenty of those as well. Rockfall was one, roughly analogous to avalanches. Up top, you could at least see and avoid avalanche-prone terrain. Down here, the only thing you could do was not dwell on the danger. If you were in the wrong place at the wrong time, well, you had to hope it would be big enough to kill you quickly.

“Are you just going to stand there?” She could hear the smile in Bowman’s voice.

“I don’t know. Is there room down there?”

“Plenty. Come on down and stay awhile, why don’t you?”

Hallie eased down to her knees, felt for the cave floor, and sat down beside Bowman. Or tried to. There wasn’t enough room between his body and the rock wall for her to sit. She squeezed down beside him on the cave floor. She couldn’t even lie on her back, but had to turn onto one side, facing Bowman.

“See? Tons of room.”

Hallie could tell he was still smiling. “For you, maybe,” she said.

“For us.”

“Oh, roomy as hell.”

She was lying on her left side and he on his right, their faces separated by a foot of darkness. She could feel the warmth of his body and smell the scent that had led her here, a salty, leathery smell with traces of something like burnt honey. Not a bad smell at all, she had to admit. Wonder what I smell like? But she quickly scratched that thought.

Hallie’s critical distance—the minimum space between her and another person before she began to feel uncomfortable—was greater than most people’s. But here, squeezed together with Bowman like two sardines in a tin, she felt safe and relaxed. She wasn’t making herself relax, it simply was what it was.

“I’m curious about you,” she said.

“I can understand that.”

“What is Wil short for?”

“Might not be short for anything. You’ve heard of Will Rogers? He was just Will.”

“Are you just Wil?”

“No. It’s short for Willem.”

“Sounds Scandinavian.”

“Middle English, actually.”

“How do you know?”

“My twenty-sixth great-grandfather was a soldier in the English army at Agincourt. An archer. Bowmen, they were called then.”

“So that’s where the name came from. Bowman.”

“Yep.”

“You’re serious about all this?”

“Very. My mother was obsessive about family history.”

“She got back that far?”

“Just a bit further. But the records start to fade beyond the eleventh century.”

“Where are you from?”

“Colorado. A little town called Arago. How about you?”

“Near Charlottesville, Virginia. But that’s not what I meant.