Blind Descent

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 uncomfortable 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.'

'Anybody else hurt?' Anna pressed.

'Like I said, I don't know,' he snapped. Strain came across as irritation. After a moment he went on, his unspoken apology accepted. 'Most of the others went ahead. They must have gotten clear. The Distributor Cap is solid. I'm betting this was a local slide.'

Peter McCarty was locking his ascenders onto the rope. He had said scarcely a word since he'd pronounced Frieda dead.

'Will you be okay with… You know, here?' Oscar asked almost as an afterthought. 'As soon as I'm up I can send down my climbing gear.'

'Thanks,' Anna said. 'I'll be here.'

They left her a flashlight, and for that she was grateful. Watching them walk back up the wall of the chasm, she hugged it to her chest as if it were a magic wand.

Alone again, she crawled over to where Frieda lay. There was nothing with which to cover her face. By the light of the flashlight, Anna closed her friend's eyes and folded her hands on her chest. They wouldn't stay put, and she had to hook the elbows against the frame of the Stokes to keep them in place. Why it was important, she wasn't sure, but it was. Death required ritual, even ritual that wasn't completely understood. Anna found herself wishing she knew the words of the last rites. All that came to mind from a distant and spotty religious training were the first lines of the Twenty-third Psalm. 'Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil.' The sentiment was apt, so she spoke the words aloud. They were all she could remember. The rest of the psalm was inextricably tangled up with the Charge of the Light Brigade.

'Sorry,' Anna whispered. 'It's the best I can do.' Clicking off the light she sat cross-legged near the Stokes, one hand resting on Frieda's shoulder, and listened to what was going on above.

Remembering the drop, then watching the men climb, she estimated they'd fallen close to thirty feet. Dust was thick in the air but had ceased to boil and twist like a live thing. In increments almost too small to note, the lamps were growing brighter. Sound, human notes, were discernible, but just barely. They seemed far off and impossibly lonely.

'I'm scared, Frieda,' Anna admitted. 'I wish you were here.' Tears came again but quietly this time, a steady stream of sorrow cutting channels through the dirt on her face.

One of the lines used to descend began to snake up the wall. The slithering frightened Anna till she shined her light on it and knew it for what it was. Half a minute later came the call 'Heads up.' She used her light to follow a burgundy sidepack, streaked with mud, down the rock face. It came to rest a few feet from the foot of the Stokes. She made no move to retrieve it.

'Got it?' came a call.

'Got it,' she shouted, and continued to sit and stare as if it were an alien object for which she could not fathom any practical use.

Now that the time had come to reenter the fray, take up those burdens she had righteously eschewed