The Deep Zone

So we are reduced to this, she thought, crawling around in the dark and trying to kill each other with rocks. Cahner might not need a rock if he had the Taser. But if he had it, he would almost certainly have used it already. So why hadn’t he? The only possible reason was that he did not have it in his possession. That meant either he had lost it or, more likely, had stowed it in his pack. Did he carry a knife? She could not remember seeing one on his belt, but that did not rule out a pocketknife. He wouldn’t need either one of those to kill her, though. A rock would do that just as well. He could even break off a sharp stalagmite and use it like a spear. Suddenly she heard a grunt, a half second of silence, and a rock smashed against the cave wall off to her left, not even close to where she lay. But she understood that Cahner was trying to frighten her into revealing her position. Another rock struck a few feet closer. He was working his way around the clearing like the sweep hand of a clock, hoping either to hit her at random or to frighten her into making noise. Moving very slowly, she began searching the cave floor with her right hand, looking for a rock to use as a weapon. She moved her hand and arm through a full arc, from shoulder to waist, but felt only soft sand. She repeated the motion with her left arm, but again found nothing.

Another rock hit the cave wall directly behind her. Whatever his location, Cahner’s throws were surprisingly precise, the rock impacts moving from left to right with about five feet between them. Without knowing where he stood, she could do nothing but wait for him to find and attack her. Furious with herself for not having planned her own assault more carefully, she could only lie in the sand and stare into the darkness.

Then she began to see, not with her eyes but with her mind, the snapshot that her brain, out of long habit, had taken when Cahner’s helmet had gone spinning away into the darkness. She closed her eyes and began to perceive images, outlines, shadows. Judging from the sounds he had made while throwing the rocks, Cahner was sidling from her left to her right, picking up rocks as he went, pausing to throw and hoping to hit her without really knowing where she was. That was all helpful, but still did not tell her where Cahner was at that moment, which was the one thing she needed to know.

Then Cahner told her himself. Not with his voice, but she heard him pick up a rock. It was just the slightest scraping noise, like one fingernail brushing a desktop, but it was enough. She did not hesitate, because she knew that it would take only a second or two for him to throw the rock and move again. She came up out of the sand and launched herself toward the sound Cahner had made, thinking to run into him with her shoulder and knock him down.

Her snapshot was not detailed enough to show every feature of the cave where they were, and so halfway to Cahner, her right foot twisted in a small hole in the floor and she went down, falling hard on her chest. Cahner was on her in an instant, straddling her back, grabbing her forehead with both hands and pulling up, trying to break her neck, but she was slick with water and sweat and his hands slipped off. She flipped onto her back, clawed at his groin, squeezed with strong rock climber’s hands.

He screamed in pain, twisted out of her grasp. She heard him stumbling to his feet and jumped up herself, remaining in a crouch, hands up defensively.

“Goddamn you!” Cahner rushed toward her in the dark. She jumped to one side, felt him brush past, shoved him that way, turned to face the direction in which he had gone, fully expecting him to spin around and come for her again.

Instead, there was a gasp and then sudden silence. Terrified, she crouched down in the dark, felt around her for a rock, found one, clutched it. She knelt there like a Neanderthal, defenseless except for her rock and muscles and brain, her face twisted into a snarl, waiting for the attack of whatever horror might come at her out of the dark.

Nothing came. She knelt and waited, listening, trying to feel the dark for motion, but there was nothing.

After a while she said, “Cahner?”

No answer.

“Al?”

Still no answer.

She tossed the rock ten feet to her left, waited for him to throw one of his own at the sound. Nothing happened.

“Cahner.”

He did not answer.

She decided to search for the helmets and their lights. Dividing the chamber into quadrants in her mind, she moved back and forth on her hands and knees as if she were mowing a lawn. By sheer luck she found her helmet in less than a minute. The impact on the cave’s floor could have broken its lights. Holding her breath, Hallie turned one on. Blue-white light flared from the LED bulbs.

“Thank you,” she said softly. “Thank you, Chi Con Gui-Jao.” She put the helmet on and stood up cautiously, scanning for danger.

And then she screamed.

Cahner was lying facedown, legs splayed and arms thrown out like those of a skydiver, held several inches above the cave floor by the base of the waist-high stalagmite onto which he had fallen. The impact of his body had broken off the stalagmite’s slender tip, but the thicker shaft at its base had pierced his body and he lay now, impaled, the bloody stone spear protruding from his back.

Unbelievably, he was still alive. She saw that the shaft must have missed his heart by inches. One of his feet was twitching. Blood dripped from his nose and mouth, gathering in a dark red pool on the cave floor inches beneath his face. He turned his head slowly toward her, and she saw in his face the agony of hell, so horrible she had to look away. He tried to speak but made only a guttural, animal groan. His blood gave off a ferrous, rusty smell, the iron in it reacting with oxygen molecules.

Her stomach clenched at the sight of him like that. She felt not hate but horror. She watched, transfixed, as Cahner managed to bring both hands together under his chest, wild-eyed and shrieking with agony as he did so. He grasped the bottom of the stalagmite where it joined the cave floor. She saw his knuckles go white as he squeezed with all his strength. Then his whole body tensed, legs jerking out straight, as he tried to push up and off the spike. He managed to lift himself a few inches, screaming, bloody froth foaming from his mouth and nose. He stopped, unable to do more. She heard him moan something that might have been “air” or “Eric,” but it was a guttural, animal sound and she could not understand. Then a gout of blood erupted from his mouth and his hands fell free. He dropped back down, quivered, and was dead.

She took a few steps closer. Hallie had seen the results of violent death before: climbers who had fallen, divers who had drowned, cavers who had been crushed by rockfall. She had not actually watched people die from their tragedies. She felt inexpressible relief that Cahner would no longer be trying to kill her. And, in another realm of her heart, some grief. Despite everything that had happened, everything he had told her about his treachery, during their years of working together she had come to like Cahner. Those feelings had been genuine then, and she recognized them within her now.

She looked around for a place to sit, and the only place was Cahner’s pack, so she walked unsteadily to it and dropped down. Sure that he had killed her, Cahner had not bothered to dispose of Hallie’s pack back at the river camp. After she’d climbed out of the pit, an hour’s careful searching had brought her back to the sleeping spot and her pack, right where she’d left it. Before attempting to subdue Cahner, she had taken it off and cached it near this clearing, and she would retrieve it shortly. For now, she just wanted to rest. Her hands and knees were bloody, and the eye where Cahner had caught her with a punch was swelling. She was sore from shoulders to butt from the hard landing on the microbial mat in the pit, and the hand she had sliced throbbed painfully. Worst of all, she was alone. Then she thought of Bowman, and her skin tingled and her chest tightened.

You will not cry. There is still too much to be done.

But she did cry then, long and hard. For the soldiers, and Haight, and Arguello, and Bowman. And then, finally, for herself and everything she had lost along the way to this place.

Hallie awoke and realized that she had curled up in the sand and gone to sleep, but had no memory of doing so. She had not turned her light off first, and its glow was now noticeably dimmer. Hurrying, she found her pack and brought it back to the camp. She was carrying only the bare minimum now: a rebreather unit for the dive through Satan’s Anus, the Gecko Gear, a poly bottle of water, the few remaining PowerBars, her sleeping bag, her helmet with its lights, and her last backup light. Even if the headlight batteries failed, the one hand light with fresh batteries might be enough to get her out of the cave, though she did not relish the thought of diving through Satan’s