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
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
