action Winchester—one bullet each in the back of the head.
As ten streamlets of blood ran out and converged to fill a swag in the rocky floor, several people had gone and knelt at the edge of the pool, gleaming like black lacquer in the firelight, and lapped up the warm blood.
Some hours later, Jessup had extended the offer again, got twenty takers the second time. Gloria would have been one of them had she possessed the strength to lift her hand or to voice her desire.
Jessup himself had barely been able stand or even cock the Winchester’s lever, and he’d given everyone ample warning that this was their last opportunity to make use of him.
When he’d seen to his customers, she’d watched him position the barrel of the carbine under his own chin.
Gloria knew that Jessup and his final act of kindness had not been an illusion of her disintegrating mind, because she would occasionally glance over at the thirty bodies slumped together on the floor, raging with envy that she was not among them.
She tried to escape into sleep again, kept telling herself that one of these times she wouldn’t wake up.
This wasn’t hell.
It couldn’t go on forever.
EIGHTY
J
oss heard the roar in the distance and smelled the water. Melted candle drippings oozed onto her left hand, but she didn’t flinch, her fingers already coated with hardened white wax. She smiled because she recognized the sound of the cascade pouring into the subterranean lake where she and Lana had taken those first gorgeous gulps of water after leaving the main cavern. She might actually find her way back from here.
The flame quivered as she entered the waterfall room, and it would have extinguished in the draft, but she had it cupped with her right hand.
Joss climbed down the wet rock and knelt at the lake’s edge, figured it had been at least a full day since her last drink. She held the candle in her left hand and bent over and dipped her face into the water, letting it siphon into her mouth. As she drank, several icy drops splashed on the back of her head, probably runoff from an overhanging stalactite, but, too engrossed in sating her thirst, Joss didn’t distinguish the sudden hiss from the overwhelming crush of the waterfall.
When she lifted her head from the lake, she first noticed the odor of smoke, and then the black. Black beyond dreamless sleep or how she imagined death might be, like something had come along and snatched her eyes right out of their sockets.
She looked at her left hand, felt the candle in her fingers, saw only the faintest impression of the wick, fading from orange into amber.
“Calm the fuck down, Jocelyn. You got one match left.”
She reached under her serape into the lapel pocket of her cotton dress shirt, felt her fingers graze the sliver of sulfur-tipped wood.
She took it out, held it in front of her face.
“You’re holdin your life in that little splinter.”
She’d performed this trick any number of times, even derived a measure of pride from it, to the point that six years ago she’d thrown out the piece of flint she kept in the prayer book with her papers and tobacco.
The move was simple—lift her serape and shirt, strike the match against the middle of three buttons that fastened her canvas trousers.
She set the candle beside her on the rock and lifted her shirt, reaching down in the dark, fingering the trio of metal buttons.
She held the match in her right hand and closed her eyes. Instead of being in a cave, she imagined herself chained up behind the bar in that beautiful saloon of hers, chewing the dog with Bart or Oatha, flirting with Zeke, glaring at that porch-percher Al, nooning by the stove. She conjured the aroma of whiskey, the cold rancid sweat of hardworking men. No big deal. No great importance attached to this match. Just time for a cigarette.
In the darkness, her hand moved, the match gliding toward her crotch. She was trying not to overthink it, but she noted she couldn’t remember the last time she’d snapped a punk—this thought interrupted as she felt the match head graze the surface of the button.
Acrid bite of sulfur, then the match flared and the lake lighted up, firelight reflected in the water and the crystals, and she could have cried as she reached for the candle.
Her hand slid across wet rock—nothing there.
“The fuck?”
Already, the heat of the flame was descending toward her thumb and fore-finger.
She leaned onto her right buttock, thinking maybe she’d sat on it, but no. Now, carefully, bringing the flame over to the rock, searching the contours, the crystalline veins—still nothing—edging her fingers farther down the match as the flame pursued, desperation setting in, and the heat building, nowhere for her fingers to go now, the fire blackening her thumbnail, her teeth gritted, her skin beginning to bubble, and the last thing she saw before the flame smothered was the candle, three feet from the bank, floating in the lake.
Again, the black, and, as if her brain sensed she’d seen her last light, disorientation flooded in.
“You ain’t dead yet,” she said, rising to her feet. She still had her bearings. She couldn’t see it, but she knew that on the other side of this lake stood the opening to a flat tunnel she’d have to crawl through. From there, she’d take it one room at a time. No rush. No panic. She’d scream. Listen. She’d find them, or they’d find her.
Joss took baby steps along the rocky bank, arms outstretched. She came to a wall she couldn’t feel the top of, but there were handholds, so she climbed, the waterfall getting louder, as though she stood above it now. And still
