Anna came up beside him, cramped under his arm by a pinch of stone.
'The tape is gone. Somebody took it.'
The monomania of sustained movement cleared from her mind. The orange plastic surveyor's tape marking both sides of the trade routes through Lechuguilla was missing. Without it as a guide, the cave became a treacherous maze, each junction in the sinuous underground indistinguishable from the last. The way was not linear. Jagged rips in the limestone, some big enough to drive a truck through, others providing only wiggle room, were above, below, all around. Only one led out. A hundred such junctions, each with its myriad possibilities, rendered the odds of consistently making the right decision virtually nil.
'Why would Sondra take up the tape?' Curt asked.
Anna remembered when, during the carry-out, they'd finally reached the field phone: Frieda talking to her folks, Oscar Iverson and Brent Roxbury on the phone, Sondra sitting too close, taking notes.
'She didn't,' Anna said with certainty. 'She was eavesdropping. Something Oscar or Brent said must have struck her as that big news story she was so hungry for. She went back to find it. Somebody must have followed, pulled the tape, and left her.'
'Gad, but that's cold.'
'Or desperate.'
Curt dug through his pack for a roll of tape. Anna carried some as well, part of the rudimentary kit for cavers in new environments. Following footprints and scuff marks, they moved on but much more slowly, leaving orange ribbon to mark the way back.
On a natural balcony overlooking Lake Rapunzel, they cried Sondra's name but could not scare up the ghost of the cave a third time. Urgency was growing in Anna, a need to find the woman, to reach Tinker's Hell, to get out of the realm of the dead before she started seeing three-headed dogs and smelling sulphur. Had Curt not insisted on a rest, she would have pushed on.
They sat; they drank. They did not speculate. It took too much energy, and even Curt was beginning to flag. Anna shined her light down glistening red-gold flowstone and ignited the perfect topaz of Rapunzel. That serene and liquid jewel, cradled in its basket of burnished limestone, made her doubly glad for the invention of the buddy system. Without Curt to curb her baser instincts, she knew, with what would have been shame had she not been too tired to care, she might have plunged in, clothes and all, introducing a cloud of grime into the pristine waters. Tracing her light up the far side of the sunken lake to Razor Blade Run, she remembered the glassine forest of aragonite crystals yet to be threaded through. She hoped she'd never be so brain-dead she would bull her way through that china shop. She liked to think that even without witnesses there was a limit to her fatigue-induced evil.
They moved without incident through the descents and ascents of Rapunzel and the dry pit of encrusted pillars called the Cocktail Lounge. The two rooms and their connecting passages were simple by Lechuguilla's standards. Few openings existed that hinted at further trails. At the mouth of each they called and listened lest Sondra had wandered in and become disoriented.
In the long and crushing passage that linked the Cocktail Lounge with Tinker's Hell, their shouting at last elicited a response. Standing upright in the chamber where Sondra and Peter had argued, they froze, willing the sound to come again. Just beyond was the belly-crawl where Anna had lain newtlike and eavesdropped. Anna's muscles twitched and her psyche trembled. Holding the reincarnated claustrophobia at bay took energy, akin to carrying a pit viper in a cotton pillowcase, ever vigilant, ever careful not to let it get too close.
'Sondra!' Curt shouted.
Moaning from hearts of stone dripped into their ears.
The chamber where they stood was not so much a room as an irregular void left behind by the shifting of immense blocks imperfectly mortared with lime. Walls were not smooth, not unbroken. The floor was not flat. The ceiling was dizzy-making with fractured planes. Cracks gaped from every angle. More were hidden by shadows. The one, true, going lead, the exit that would take a traveler to the Lounge and on, was one of these. Anna had recently crawled through it. She stood with her back to the bib of stone camouflaging it, yet she couldn't say with absolute certainty she'd find it again without the orange flagging.
No wonder Sondra hadn't made it out. Without tape she was lost. Without light she was doomed. Her batteries wouldn't have lasted four days. The miracle was that they had heard her through the rooms and passages between this forsaken rent in the earth and Katie's Pigtail. Either there was a crack somewhere high in the rock that carried sound, or Frieda had indeed been whispering, trying to summon help.
Whimpering oozed from all directions. Curt pointed with his light to a triangular opening five feet up and slanting away to the right. 'I'm guessing that one. What do you think?'
'We've got to start somewhere.'
Ten minutes in, the lead dead-ended. No room to turn, the two of them backed out. Curt gathered up the tape as they retreated. Sweat ran from Anna's hairline in blinding streams. Her shirt hinted at a life of wet tee-shirt contests and mud wrestling. Humidity and exertion were as deadly as the dehydrating sun of the Trans-Pecos. Every time she thought of it, she drank. Every time Curt told her to, she drank. Fortunately, with Lake Rapunzel and several other designated watering holes, getting enough liquid wasn't a problem.
Despite renewed shouting, the whimpering came no more.
Curt marked the failed lead, and methodically the two of them began following the others, moving counterclockwise around the room. To save time, they split up, each leaving a trail of tape. On Anna's third solo crawl she found Sondra McCarty.
Before she'd squirmed twenty feet, the smell met her, a vile odor of excrement and human despair, the odor of prisons, hospitals, and madhouses. A smell that can be masked but never completely expunged. Fighting nausea, Anna pulled the neck of her shirt over her nose and mouth, Joe Bazooka style, and crawled on. Sweat soaked through the rip-stop covers on her elbow and knee pads. Mud formed, creating minuscule dams that broke and reformed as she moved.
Trailing a lifeline of surveyor's tape, she heaved herself over a fall of flowstone. Stench hit her in full force. Her light shone into a room more spacious than any they'd found since leaving the Lounge. Twelve to fifteen feet high and twice that long, it stretched into the darkness. Blocks of limestone broke it into a maze. Piles of human waste dotted the flat areas. Paper and foam cartons were scattered around. A sidepack and helmet, cast off as in anger, hung precariously on an abutment halfway down the room.
At the far end, a wall glistened with water. Seepage formed a pool at its base. The body of a woman was beside it, curled into a fetal position so tight her head was hidden. All Anna could see were arms, legs, and butt. Having lowered her feet into the room, she slid down till she stood on the floor.
'Sondra?'
The fetus began to unwind with painful slowness, limbs like sticks, stiff as a puppet's, unfolding. Matted hair was pushed back by skeletal fingers to reveal eyes as devoid of humanity as any Anna had ever seen. They closed against the unbearable brightness of her lamp. No spark of recognition had registered, no gleam of incipient sanity.
Hunkered down on her heels so she would present a less alarming figure, Anna said, 'Sondra, it's me, Anna. One of the cavers who came down to help carry Frieda out. Do you remember?' She kept her light just off Sondra's face. No intelligence was burgeoning. The vague, soulless stare continued. 'You've been lost down here for four days.' She spoke softly, easing Sondra back into the world of the living. 'I see you found a water source. I'm impressed. You've kept yourself alive. That took courage. We're here now. We're going to take you home. Can you get up? Can you do that for me? Are you hurt?'
With a suddenness that caught Anna off guard, Sondra uncoiled, rose to feet and hands, and charged. Guttural cries rumbled behind bared teeth. Anna tried to stand, to jump clear, but legs too long without rest had cramped in the crouching position. She fell, rolling helplessly onto her back.
In an instant, Sondra was upon her, hands clawing, the growl becoming a staccato bleat.
Though moderately painful, the assault turned out to be friendly in nature. The tall, once haughty young woman held on, trying to burrow into Anna's arms, crawl into her pockets, hide in the warm safety of her.
Anna held her and muttered a slightly profane version of 'there, there' till Sondra's hysterical flailing ceased. Bit by bit the grunts began to form into words, an ongoing litany of 'Oh, God. You're real. So long. God. Don't let go.'
