Anna Pigeon - Blind Descent Part 7

"The New York Times." She spit out the words. "They're onto this story. Like they can know anything." She flopped down, glaring at Anna as if waiting for her to take up the cause and fume with her.

Anna was too tired. "You'll have the first-person I-was-there angle," she said consolingly.

"Who'll care? By the time we get out of this h.e.l.lhole it'll be old news."

"I guess." Anna concentrated on unwrapping a Jolly Rancher Holden had given her at the last rest stop. She wished Sondra would go away. Petty concerns in the face of disaster irritated her. She remembered a self-important tour guide from one of the many buses that plagued Mesa Verde during the tourist season. An elderly man in her group had collapsed on the porch of the museum, dead of a ma.s.sive coronary. They'd practically had to pry the guide's grasping fingers from the corpse's wrist so they could shock him in an attempt to restart his heart. The woman was livid, spouting New Age bulls.h.i.+t about how she needed to say good-bye to his spirit. Later, when Anna was tying up the loose ends, it turned out the guide didn't even know the man's name. She'd traveled with the group for three days and had never been interested enough to remember it.

That was about as close as Anna had ever come to taking her baton to a visitor who wasn't actually breaking any laws.

"I told Holden I'd talk to the Times," Sondra said. "He said they declined. Those sons of b.i.t.c.hes have no interest if you're female. Screw the truth. White male only wants to talk to white male. Big surprise."

Holden Tillman's race would be pretty hard to discern over the phone, but Anna didn't say anything. Maybe the newspaper business was as s.e.xist as Sondra believed. It wasn't a circle Anna had ever moved in, or ever wanted to.

"Anna," Dr. McCarty called, and she looked over to where he sat with Frieda. "Frieda's going to do her phone interview now. Want to come keep her company?"

Grasping at any excuse to leave, Anna pushed herself to her feet. As she stoop-walked toward the back of this cave-within-a-cave, she could hear Sondra grumbling, "Anna. Of course. Anna. Now I suppose there's only one lady-in-waiting..."

"It's Katie Couric," Peter called.

Sondra gasped. Or hissed. Anna couldn't tell with her back turned. In spite of herself, she laughed. She didn't much care if Sondra heard or not. The woman was beyond help.

Frieda did splendidly. Dr. McCarty's central nervous system exam had freed her from the cervical collar, and she was in excellent spirits. Whether she liked it or not, she was both a good sport and a trooper.

She was charming and gracious and brave and funny, lots of good stuff to quote on the six o'clock news. Or the ten o'clock news. Anna no longer had any sense of time. The little numbers the hands of her watch pointed at, then pa.s.sed, had ceased to have meaning.

Phone calls finally at an end, Holden delivered the good news. At least it was good to everyone but Anna and possibly the doctor's wife. For the past five minutes he had closeted himself in a cranny near the keyhole with Peter McCarty. When the two men emerged it was to tell the rescue party that their h.e.l.lish pace could be relaxed. Frieda was stable and alert. The break in her tibia was in no way life-threatening. With this fortuitous development they could afford to move more slowly, take greater care not to harm any of the natural resources of the cave.

Like a good citizen, Anna joined in the cheer, but her heart was creating a bizarre sensation in her chest by racing and sinking simultaneously. Thirty hours had seemed an eternity. Forty-eight rang in her ears like a death sentence. Get a grip, she told herself coldly. Pretend you are in a movie theater, a mall. The strategy was transparent; movie theaters and malls had doors.

Holden went on to tell them anyone feeling the need to could rotate out. A cave rescue made special demands. Those unaccustomed to it, not in perfect health, or "off their feed" for any reason were to go and G.o.dspeed. They'd already given several lifetimes' worth.

"That's me," Sondra said, and her husband pretended not to hear.

Anna wanted to go. Like a drowning woman wants air, she wanted s.p.a.ce and sunlight. In an act of mind-bending courage, she put temptation from her and said nothing.

Holden's rigging through the high slit above the aragonite forest of Razor Blade was a work of artistry. He edged through, a line tied into a carabiner at the back of his belt. A rig and tag line were pulled through using that first line as a tow. Pulleys were anch.o.r.ed at either end by running webbing around a boulder on the Lounge side and a formidable stalagmite on the far end. As he had promised, Frieda went through as neatly as silken thread through a needle's eye.

It took considerably longer for the rescuers, now nineteen in number, to creep and contort through the lower, decorated pa.s.sage. They went on the buddy system, two at a time, with orders to take it slow, warn each other of endangered formations, and never, under any circ.u.mstances, stray from the existing trail. In Holden, Lechuguilla had a staunch protector.

Razor Blade opened on Lake Rapunzel, so named, Oscar said, because the only way to the lake was across fifty-five feet of flowstone, a stunning formation created by eons of trickles leaking down the side of the basin to leave behind golden locks that cascaded as enticingly as the imaginary damsel's tresses.

Traveling in, they had pa.s.sed through the chamber, but Anna had seen it only fleetingly via sc.r.a.ps of light that served more to irritate her exhausted retinae than to illuminate the room. Now, as it turned out, her lucent fantasy of earlier in the day had come true.

Along with the rigging team working from Rapunzel to the cave's entrance came two newspaper photographers, sent by the Times and allowed in by George Laymon and Carlsbad's superintendent, to record the rescue. They had brought powerful floodlights. When Anna corkscrewed out of the aragonite embrace of Razor Blade, the room and lake were bathed in light. She laughed and clapped her hands like a delighted child. For that instant she was no longer tired, no longer afraid.

The chamber was made of magic. From where she stood on the lip of the run, liquid gold poured down to a lake as crystalline and blue as a summer sky. Beneath the water's surface floated great clouds of white stone, appearing as ethereal as any she'd watched forming over the mountains of southern Colorado. This jewel was in a setting befitting its splendor. Flowing draperies ringed the water in a delicate golden tracery. It staggered the imagination to know this was all made of solid rock. That it had remained hidden from human eyes for the short eternity of its existence lent it a mystical aura. Anna was transfixed.

In short order, bustling humanity compromised the beauty. Zeddie hovered at the drop, checking anchors as the teams began rigging the descent to the water from Razor Blade Run and the shorter climb up a second golden fall to a bleak section of the cave dubbed Katie's Pigtail.

Sublime became surreal as a giant alligator flopped into the diamond waters.

"What in the heck . . ." Anna heard Oscar whispering beside her.

"It's Frieda's ride."

Anna turned to see Holden looking particularly delighted at the gray-green amphibian. "It's Andrew's favorite. The boy has a deeply generous heart."

Andrew, Anna recalled, was Tillman's four-year-old son.

Oscar shook his head. Fatigue robbed him of his sense of humor.

"Somehow I think the Park Service could have come up with a few inner tubes that would have done the job."

"Oscar, Oscar, Oscar," Holden said sadly, a man lamenting the failure of a promising protege. "Inner tubes are unclean. Andrew's 'gator is clean, lightweight, easily packed, and designed to float supine bathers."

Even in whimsy, Tillman had a plan. The alligator was ideal. Anna was sorry when he commanded a moratorium on photographs of the actual crossing. It would have made a picture worth having, but Holden wanted his people to keep their minds on their work and not on how their naked hind ends were going to look on the front page of the Sunday paper.

Every caver to cross Lake Rapunzel stripped down to helmets and rubber water socks, then sponged off with water brought up from the lake in plastic pitchers. Their clothes and packs would be ferried over on the alligator as soon as Frieda no longer needed it. Once they had climbed the opposite wall to the entrance of the Pigtail, they would dress and put their boots back on.

Frieda was the only one to remain clothed. The Stokes was wrapped in plastic and a second float put on top of Andrew's alligator to keep her out of the water.

Again Anna was hooked into the spider on the Stokes. This time she was joined by Oscar and Peter. Her job was to watch Frieda, theirs to keep the litter away from the flowstone so the formation would not be scarred. Naked people of all shapes and sizes dangling from ropes over a pint-sized paradise; the picture so tickled Anna she had to think dark thoughts to keep from giggling.

Katie's Pigtail was a miniature version of the North Rift. A jagged crack bordered by breakdown, it cut upward for close to thirty yards, ending in a choked crawl that led into the Distributor Cap-the Swiss cheese room where Anna had waited on the way in while Oscar and Holden negotiated the Wormhole.

The Pigtail wasn't as impressive as the Rift. At its deepest it was forty-two feet, and at no place was it more than ten or twelve feet across. As at the Rift, a litter could not be carried along the breakdown on either side of the drop.

A team from the outer world worked from the far end stringing a traverse so the litter could travel in a more or less straight line. Because of the emergency situation, a power drill and pitons had been okayed by the superintendent, saving the rescuers the time required to find natural anchors: jug handles, arches, stalagmites, k.n.o.bs, boulders.

Near the end of the Pigtail a pile of breakdown created a wall that continued down to clog the end of the slot. It was this mountain of rock and scree they would climb to reach the exit. Forming the base of this sliding heap of earth was a wedge-shaped boulder fifteen feet across at the top and six feet at the foot. It was la.s.soed with webbing secured with locking carabiners. The traverse rope was attached to the webbing and so to the boulder.

Faces, arms, and legs burnished bronze by sweat and dirt, cavers crawled everywhere. Cracks were crammed with bodies wrapped in various colored ropes. Ledges held packs, water carriers, and those with no immediate task. Shadows scurried over surfaces to be swallowed by the canyon below and the crevice above. Instructions, questions, and remarks hollered by workers caromed off the walls till conversation was broken down into meaningless words.

In the cacophony of sight and sound, no one was easily recognizable. Like ants, they all looked the same. Sitting at the mouth of the Pigtail with Frieda, Anna had to close her ears and shut her mind to escape the suffocating congestion.

Within two hours the rigging was complete. All personnel not needed for the traverse went on ahead. Noise abated. Once the Pigtail was behind them, the team would break up, most of them leaving for the surface. The core group would remain to set up camp in the Distributor Cap.

Since escape was beyond the realm of possibility as far as Anna was concerned, she found herself looking forward to the departure of the others. As welcome as they had been hours earlier, they were coming to seem an absolute crush of humanity, a veritable horde of interlopers. And she wasn't dreading camp as much as she thought she would. Movement toward the surface was a balm to her soul that allowed her to go on with some show of equanimity, but fatigue was overriding paranoia. Every cell in her body cried out for rest. Regardless of personal demons, she had little doubt that she would sleep like a log.

When all was in readiness, Holden came back to the ledge where Anna and the Stokes roosted.

He'd had less sleep than she. No one had worked harder; no one had taken fewer rests, yet aside from a miner's tan of filth, he looked none the worse for wear.

"How do you do it?" Anna asked in admiration.

"Coffee breaks," Holden said simply.

Coffee. Anna would have given a year of her life for a good hot cup of coffee. "Where?" she almost wailed.

Holden tapped the pocket on the front of his tee-s.h.i.+rt. "Next to my heart." He pulled out a small foil envelope of Taster's Choice instant, ripped off a corner, and tapped the contents expertly into his bottom lip like a farmer taking chaw. "Good to the last crystal."

Frieda was as tired as any of them. Without the concealing mask of dirt, her face showed it. Her skin was drawn and pale and her eyes were staring, too much of the whites showing. For the hauls, Holden needed her awake and moderately alert so she could tell them if she was in any distress and needed to stop. There was a limit to the amount of pain medication Dr. McCarty could give her and still leave her with enough brain power to work on her own behalf. Though no one but Anna was permitted to hear a word of complaint from her lips, Frieda was not the best of patients. Anna suspected she hurt a good deal more than she would admit and took less pain medicine than she needed, as if by suffering she was somehow paying her way.

"Ready for a last push?" Tillman asked Frieda.

"Ready whenever you are. I'm the one's been napping all day."

"This is rigged like a dream," he promised. "You'll be in camp in no time. I got a special room in the Swiss cheese earmarked. You two can have it all to yourselves to do lady things."

When this was over Anna wanted to meet Holden's wife and his little boy. A man as fine as Tillman didn't just spring into being all of a piece like Venus on the half sh.e.l.l. Somewhere along the line he had been shaped. Anna had the feeling she would be right at home with those sculpting influences.

Anna and Frieda were tied into the web of ropes. Two pulleys, anodized in red, white, and blue, were set to roll down the main traverse, a thick lavender rope. The Stokes was tied into the system with webbing, two lines through each of the four carabiners locked onto the frame of the litter and running up to locking 'biners connected to the bottom of the rollers. A gray line attached at the same point. This would be used to pull the Stokes and Anna along the creva.s.se. A second, purple rope, lighter than the traverse line, was connected as well, but with its own carabiners, a tag line so the Stokes and its dependants could be retrieved in the event of a malfunction. Each system had a backup, and each connection had been checked by Holden, then rechecked by Oscar and, apparently on her own agenda, by Zeddie as well. Neither Anna nor Frieda had any compunction about trusting their lives to the cat's cradle of ropes.

Nothing in Lechuguilla was designed for the easy access of humans. Katie's Pigtail was no exception. The crack was irregular; the sides of jutting rock looked as if they had only recently been torn from the opposing wall. The stones were white overlaid with dirt that sifted from above. Below, all was darkness, a band of unrelenting night cutting raggedly away from the farthest reach of the lamps. The right side of the Pigtail was concave, gaping holes where chunks of rock had fallen away. On the left was a fractured ledge, a footpath for mountain goats. It was here the remaining rescuers would make their way. Three-quarters of the way to the exit, the creva.s.se was crossed by breakdown, immense slabs forming a natural bridge. Five yards beyond was the landing where they would start the climb to camp.

Katie's Pigtail couldn't be rigged in the neat in-line haul that Holden had managed above Razor Blade. For most of the way the rigging was tucked up close to the left-hand wall. The ledge was too fragmented to hand-carry the Stokes. It would be suspended over the drop and moved along by pulleys and haul lines.

Anna hooked into the spider, she and Frieda were lowered over the edge of the drop. Anna's feet were flat against the wall, her f.a.n.n.y over thin air. The Stokes was held several inches above her airborne lap. By using the strength of the muscles in her thighs, she would be able to "walk" the Stokes over the rough patches along the edge. The haul line did the work of moving the litter forward. Wherever on the goat track cavers could find perches, they waited to help her manipulate the litter around obstacles.

Knowing this was the last work of the day gave strength to Anna's flagging spirits as she began the long crab-walk to the exit with Frieda. Ropes slid, pulleys rolled. Muscles in her thighs and b.u.t.t burned, but the Stokes slipped and b.u.mped along without mishap. At Holden's order, no one talked. His voice, light and clear as he supervised from the false floor of stone bridging the canyon, issued commands and encouragement. Foot by foot they pa.s.sed through the maw of the Pigtail. Anna could see her own exhaustion and elation mirrored in the faces of the others; a dance, a symphony, a poem of human effort and mind.

The first hint that something had gone wrong was the call "Rock!" carried down the black canyon on a gust of fear.

7.

Like a flick of foam on the crest of a tidal wave, the shout was borne down on a thunderous roar. In the insulated chamber, sworn to long silence by the earth itself, the noise consumed everything in its path. The stone beneath Anna's boot soles quaked. The Stokes chattered against the limestone. Anna could feel the frame ratcheting in her hands. The feeble clacking of metal was lost in the greater chaos. Helmet lights slashed at the darkness, cutting across each other in the void, vainly seeking the source of the racket. In a second Anna saw those beams turn from gold to brown. In another instant they were smothered completely.

Silt-out, she thought inanely, her mind grasping at a diving incident years before. Dust: the earth was reclaiming the canyon they crept through. Curling down over Frieda, Anna grabbed both sides of the Stokes and hung on. Her hard hat was pressed against the Plexiglas protecting Frieda's face. Anna thought she heard Frieda screaming, but it might have been her own voice.

Ropes slipped, and there was a sickening skid downward. Then something broke loose, and they fell as one falls in a nightmare. Sudden weightlessness, a sense of utter helplessness, as all that was once real, once stable, is sucked away. Without sight, there were no walls streaking by, no floor rus.h.i.+ng up. There were just the wind and the breathless drop.

Without warning the ropes caught, and Anna was jerked above the litter, the webbing slas.h.i.+ng at the soft skin of her groin. Upended, she snapped back against the canyon wall, elbow cracking into an unforgiving surface. The litter was still between her hands, the weight of it threatening to drag her arms from their sockets. Maybe lines still held it, maybe they didn't. Anna wasn't going to let go and find out. As long as the spider held, she could hold, she told herself.

She lied. The leather of her gloves began to slip, a slow rotation that would pry her fingers from the metal. Squeezing with every muscle in her body, Anna willed her bones to weld to the aluminum. "I got you, Frieda," she said over and over, as if by repeating it it would continue to be the truth.

By the light of her lamp she could see Frieda's face below her. Through the gauze of swirling dust she looked no more than twelve years old. "Grab me, Frieda. Grab my wrists." In what appeared to be slow motion, Frieda reached up. Anna could see the articulation of her fingers, opening like petals of a flower in time-lapse photography.

Grinding as of enormous gears out of sync clogged her ears and squeezed the gray matter in her skull. Dust boiled down in an opaque swirl, burning her eyes and lungs. Frieda vanished in a noxious cloud. "Grab hold," Anna cried. Dust forced her eyes closed, stopped her breath. None of her senses would function. She felt a terror so primal she could no longer even speak. Fingers closed around her wrists. Good girl, Frieda, she thought, and clenched eyes and teeth and hands against the onslaught.

Gradually the noise abated. The invisible freight train roaring down their canyon turned away, the rumble following it. Pressure lifted with the relative quiet. The sound of rocks skittering touched lightly on the ear like the burble of a mountain stream. Anna remembered to breathe and was rewarded by a hacking cough expelling dust-saturated air. She opened her eyes. In the brown glow of her headlamp she could see her left arm and Frieda's face. Through the Plexiglas Frieda looked up at her, and Anna saw her own fear mirrored.

Stillness reigned. Anna craned her neck, peering over her shoulder. The lines held. The traverse rope was at a drunken angle, but it was taut, and the spider looked solid, a testament to Oscar and Holden's rigging expertise.

"Whoa," she said. "They've still got us. We can let go. Easy." Frieda loosed her hold on Anna's wrists, leaving a burn where she'd gripped bare skin. "Me now. Sheesh. My hands are stuck in the 'on' position." Anna laughed shakily, and Frieda managed a smile. Before Anna could pry her fingers from the metal, another sound a.s.saulted them, a screech like tires on pavement. "Jesus f.u.c.king 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 Rosencrantz and Guildenstem Are Dead, a play her husband, Zach, had starred in Off-Broadway, reverberated in a voice she'd thought lost to her, something to the effect that life in a box was better than no life at all.

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 disa.s.sociation. 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 s.h.i.+eld. 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 sh.e.l.l 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 s.h.i.+eld 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 b.u.t.ts 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 vanis.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+eld 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.