The Deep Zone: A Novel (32 page)

“Okay,” said Hallie. “And let us know if you need to pee, for God’s sake.”

They headed on down.

Seven hours later they were all beginning to stumble from exhaustion. Cahner had fallen once, fortunately suffering nothing worse than skinned knees and cut palms. Hallie’s own knees were screaming from the constant pounding of descent. Her thighs were on fire as well, and her back felt like someone had been smacking it with a hammer. They agreed to keep going until they found a place where they could camp. It took another two hours.

“I think this is as good as it’s going to get!” Hallie yelled. She was only a few feet from Bowman and Cahner, but the watercourse here was a full-fledged river, booming and boiling and frothing, so powerful that the cave floor throbbed under their feet. “There is no other place to camp between here and the moonmilk chamber. It’s another ten hours, at least.”

They had passed nothing remotely suitable for a camp during their last hours of descent. It had been one vertical drop after another, interspersed with short, steep connecting passages. They could have hung portaledges, like climbers use, from the cave walls if they had brought any, but the weight of those things was prohibitive, which left them with no choice; they had descended until they simply could go no farther.

“It will have to do,” said Bowman, shrugging.

Once again, there was no one open area big enough for all three
of them to camp together. But after hunting for half an hour, each managed to find an adequate sleeping spot. Bowman’s was between the other two, about a hundred feet from Cahner’s and half that distance from Hallie’s.

Alone in the dark, Hallie switched off her light and removed her boots and filthy caving suit. She repeated her ritual placement of suit and boots by her shoulder, so that even if all light failed she could still find them. Then she lay down on top of her bag.

Caves make luxuries of the simplest things. One cup of tea, better than champagne. One damp bag, better than a Plaza suite. What else do you need, girl? Well, okay, that would be nice, too. Been a while for you. But it’s not going to happen here. After, maybe. I really could see us doing something together if we get out of this cave. That kind of thing doesn’t do much for mission focus, like he said. But it’s fun to think about, just for a minute
.

Her sore muscles began to relax, inducing a sense of cozy security. She knew it wasn’t real, knew that the camp couldn’t protect her from any of the cave’s dangers—flooding, falling rock, bad air. She knew that there were still hazards between them and the moonmilk and that every one would have to be faced all over again on the way out. But just for a few minutes she surrendered to the luxury, false though it might have been, of allowing herself to feel safe.

Hallie thought of the farm down near Charlottesville, the best and safest place she had ever known. She saw green pasture washed by light, the breeze stirring summer hay in great slow waves, black horses grazing, their necks stretched down, muzzles working in the smooth green grass, tails flicking the air. She thought of all that, and especially of the sun, felt its warmth on her face and arms and neck. She fell asleep.

She dreamed of Bowman. Of his scent, that salty, citric tang with a hint of warm honey. She dreamed, as well, of the touch of his hand when it had brushed her face, the palm and fingers rough but the touch somehow light. And how it felt to kiss him. He would be a man who knew how to touch horses, and that said a great deal,
because horses could tell in an instant what kind of person was laying hands on them, even if it was just fingertips. She dreamed of his voice, too. It was soft, softer than most of the men’s voices she had ever heard, but it made your attention snap to.

“Hallie.”

Her eyes opened and she realized it was no dream. Here was Bowman, his face inches from hers in the dark, close enough for her to feel his breath on her forehead and smell that lovely scent. One of his hands was touching her shoulder. “Wil.” Her voice was rough with sleep.

“I thought you might be lonesome.” His lips brushed her ear. “No, that’s not true. I wanted to see you.”

An honest man
, she thought.
Truly rare in this day and age
.

“Well …” She yawned, despite herself.
Now, what message does that send?
she thought.
Stupid girl
.

“Do you want me to go?”

“No.”

Then she knew he would kiss her, but he did not. Instead, he pulled her closer to him, wrapped one long arm around her, and settled her head against his shoulder. She put her arm across his chest. Their legs touched all along their length. He kissed her ear. She kissed his neck. Together like that, wrapped around each other, they fell asleep.

Later, half dreaming and half awake, she thought she felt Bowman moving beside her, rising to an elbow, saying, “I’m just going to the river, Hallie. I won’t be long,” and she nodded and said, “Take a light,” and he said, “No need. I’ve got it pictured,” and she said, “Too far.
Take
it,” shoving her backup light into his hand, squeezing his fist around it, saying,
“Take it,”
and he finally did. Then she felt him standing up, she thought she felt that, anyway, or maybe she dreamed it, and listened to him moving off, all sound torn away by the crashing river, and then she dropped back down into the darkness of her own sleep.

• • •

When Hallie woke, she was alone. She looked at her glowing watch dial. She had slept almost four hours. She lay there in the dark, breathing, feeling her heartbeat, coming back to herself. She listened hard for the hiss of a stove, but there was nothing to hear but the river, nothing to see but red and silver bursts of false-light images swarming before her eyes.

She stood up, dressed, turned on her light, and headed toward Bowman’s spot. His gigantic red pack was there, leaning against a rock. His green sleeping bag was there, too, spread out flat on the cave floor, but it looked neat and smooth, like it had just been deployed. His one-piece red suit had been rolled into a compact tube and placed at the head of the sleeping bag. His boots and socks sat beside his pack.

A touch on the back of her shoulder made her cry out and spin around.

“
Al!
You scared the hell out of me.”

“Sorry! Where’s Bowman?”

“I don’t know.”

She used her light to slash the darkness up and down, again and again, the signal divers used to alert each other, but saw no flashing in return. She began to feel the first nibble of fear in her belly. She stopped moving, took several deep breaths, let them out slowly.

She turned toward Cahner. He held his hands out, palms up, eyebrows raised. He looked afraid. Hoping to calm him, she put her hand on his forearm.

“We need to search.”

“How?”

“Cardinal directions first. You go north. Three hundred steps. I go south. We meet back here. Primary light and backups.”

They retrieved all the lights from their packs and started out from camp, walking away from each other’s backs as if they were duelists. It took her almost ten minutes to complete the three hundred
steps, the terrain was that rugged and broken. As she went, Hallie searched on both sides slowly and carefully with her light, yelling Bowman’s name all the while.
We are using way too much light
, she thought,
but there’s nothing else do to. We have to find Bowman
.

Hallie reached the end of her search line and came back to their starting point. She was surprised to find that Cahner had beaten her there.

“Hallie, you’ve got to come see something.”

Her heart jumped. “Did you find him?”

“No. Maybe. I don’t know. Come on.”

Cahner headed back in the direction of his search route and she followed close behind, so anxious it was hard not to step on his heels. She expected them to walk for a long time, but they didn’t. Thirty feet at most.

“Stop!” Cahner’s voice was a bark, unusually sharp. She looked past his shoulder. There was a hole in the cave floor about twenty feet in diameter. “It’s deep, Hallie. Very deep.”

“How do you know?”

He stooped, picked up a baseball-sized rock, and tossed it into the hole. They waited. And waited. Nothing. But there was always the river’s roar covering everything else, so she picked up a larger rock herself and tossed it in and listened. Again, nothing.

“How deep would it have to be for us not to hear those rocks hitting bottom?” Cahner asked.

“A thousand feet, at least. Probably more.”

“Is that possible?”

“Anything’s possible in a cave like this.”

“If he fell in here …”

If he fell in here, he’s gone
, Hallie thought. “I don’t think he fell in here.”

“Why not?”

“Why would he come over this way? Even if he did, Bowman was too experienced to just fall in. Not possible.”

“You just said anything is possible down here.”

She opened her mouth, shut it again. He was right about both. She had said that. And anything
was
possible. Motioning for him to stay where he was, she inched closer to the edge of the pit. The perimeters of shafts like this were often rotten and unstable, like big cornices on mountains. Stopping five feet from the lip, she played her light down into the darkness. The walls were dead vertical. Twenty feet down, a layer of thick mist ate her light. She glanced back at Cahner. “Too much fog. Can’t see.”

Standing there with her light on his chest, Hallie could see that Cahner looked used up. His eyes were bloodshot, the circles beneath them were almost black, the flesh of his face sagged, his body curved beneath unseen weight, even without the pack. He seemed to be having trouble holding his head up. Fatigue? Neck injury?
He’s keeping it together with sheer willpower. Have to admire that
.

Then a thought struck her:
Do I look like that?
She knew the answer, but there was nothing to do about it other than keep going. She pulled up the image she had seen in Don Barnard’s office, that soldier who had died so horribly, and it gave her strength.

“Now we do east and west. You go east.”

They started off again. Hallie headed west and made her three hundred steps more quickly this time, the route presenting fewer obstructions. She got back to their starting point first. Cahner returned five minutes later, held up his hands. They stared at each other.

Hallie shook her head, slumped against a boulder.
You will not cry. You cannot afford that luxury here
. Cahner came closer and patted her shoulder. Thoughts began to fly around in her mind like bats, darting, uncontrolled. A second later, she slapped herself hard, startling Cahner.
Get yourself together. You have to find Bowman
, she thought.

They could keep going out, following more points of the compass, northeast and southwest, northwest and southeast. But she was beginning to think the unthinkable, that they just might
not
find Bowman. She recalled the two scientists who had simply vanished when she had last been in this cave.

How had the cave done that? Those men were experienced cavers, and there were two of them. One, you could imagine dying by a fluke fall or getting hit by breakdown. But two? That stretched the limits of the imagination. And now Bowman. Not just anybody, but
Bowman
. The least likely man she had ever met to come to grief in a cave. Or anywhere, for that matter. And yet it was appearing more probable with each passing minute that that was exactly what had happened.

Cahner pointed toward the river. “I think we need to look down there. Maybe he went to pee, fell, and hurt himself. Maybe he can’t move.”

“That
is
where he went!” Hallie suddenly remembered. She regretted revealing the knowledge to Cahner because of what it would tell him, but the hell with it. She had been half asleep when Bowman had told her he was going to the river. She had given him her light. But Bowman being Bowman, he might not have turned it on, relying instead on his snapshot. Or he might have turned it on and still gotten too close to the rushing water and slipped.

It was, she realized, one of the easiest places to die in the whole cave.
When did you need to pee? Middle of the night. Where did you go? To the river. What shape are you in? Half asleep. Jesus Christ
.

“Let’s go see.” She pointed at his feet. “Be careful.”

They walked toward the river, and it was like walking down a wet, steeply pitched slate roof. Closer to it, the rocks became smooth, almost glassy, scoured by the action of grit-carrying water over countless eons. And right down close to the foaming water itself, Hallie could see that the rocks had an eerie shine, covered with a greenish algal growth that was almost invisible. She stood where she was. They played their lights up and down the riverbank, over and over. The river down here was so powerful that they felt it as much as heard it, their bodies vibrating with the energy that came up from the rocks, through their feet, and into their legs.

Flashing their lights, they walked back and forth both ways along the river, staying above the slippery algal sheen, for half an
hour. Finally, she turned to Cahner and motioned for them to head back. There was no point in trying to make herself heard here.

They returned to their camp area and Hallie struggled to steady her voice. “He’s gone. Don’t know how, but gone. Probably the river.”

But her mind was filled with a simple, terrible question:
How could he make such a mistake? He was tired, and exhaustion makes you careless, but still. How?

For a second, Cahner’s face looked like a pane of glass, pushed out of shape by great wind, in the moment just before it shattered. Hallie could sense the struggle going on within him, the urge for self-preservation warring with his conscious desire to help. Sometimes people lost that struggle and went berserk. She put her hands on his shoulders and looked into his eyes. “Al. I can’t do this alone.
I need you
.”

The words seemed to hit him like a slap. His head came up, his eyes clearing. He focused on her. She saw his jaw working, watched as the muscles of his face appeared to rearrange themselves, regaining tone and strength. He stood erect, swallowed, nodded. It was the first time she had ever seen him stand up really straight, and she realized that he was almost as tall as she. He took her hands from his shoulders and held them.