Chapter 15: One Left

One Left

Two hundred and eleven steps. I made that count once on my belly, with the lamp in my teeth, and I made it again on my feet, because counting was the one thing I could do that did not make any noise.

On our feet it took longer. Two hundred and eleven of my steps is a hundred and fifty yards, and we had walked a hundred and fifty yards a thousand times in the last two days. A man walking under something that is asleep walks with his whole body, though, and the body is what gives out first.

Voss came behind me with the lamp and kept the flat of her hand over the front of it, so the four of us moved along inside a ball of orange about the size of a doorway. Chuy had two fingers hooked through my belt and rode my hip to keep the weight off the foot. Tank brought up the rear, which was where I wanted him and where the grenades were.

The red was still up there.

I am not going to dress it up. It was a low ceiling of faint red points, and in places it hung close enough that I could have reached up and put my hand into it, and it did not move and it did not make any sound. We knew they could be killed, because we had killed some. We knew that when they woke they burned blue. That was the whole of it.

The trees were stone. Standing stone, in the place they grew, the grain still on them where the lamp crossed it, some of them as thick through the base as a man’s chest. You put your hand out and touched one and got nothing back at all. Not cold. Nothing, the way a quarry wall is nothing.

We went between them in single file, and every boot we set down we set down like a bowl we could not replace. Nobody knocked a stone. Nobody put a hand on a trunk any harder than a hand had to be put, and nobody touched the ones carrying the most of them, which were the ones at shoulder height, which is where our hands wanted to go.

Chuy had one word for the crossing, and he had already given it on the way in.

“Quiet.”

So we were quiet.

Twice, something crossed the ceiling over us and a long band of the red went along with it, all together, and stopped where it was. There was nothing down there to move air. We stood still sixty seconds each time and went on.

Then the wood was behind us and the ground sloped, and I stopped counting.

The water was ahead of us and off to the right. I had been listening to it for two days. Up close it was not a drip and it was not a trickle. It was weight moving under the floor, going north and west, and it had been going that way a long time before there were men down here to hear it.

Then I put my next step down, and the floor gave.

Not a hole. A hole you feel in the ankle; that hurts, and that is all it does. This was a yard of cold, wet give under my boot, and under the give, something. Then the something moved.

Voss brought the lamp around my shoulder.

I have read accounts by men who go into caves, and they always have the right feeling at the right moment. What I had first was nothing at all, and then it was my scalp.

It was pale. It was the color of the inside of a potato, wet all over, and longer than a man lying down, and the front of it was almost all mouth — wide, flat, running side to side across it, no expression in it, and no eyes anywhere in the head. Four legs set out to the corners like a lizard’s legs. A long flat tail of it going back into the dark past my boot.

It did not do anything. That is what I have to report about it. It was as long as I am, and it had a mouth you could have set a plate in, and it lay on the wet rock and it did not come at me and it did not run, because it could not see me, and nothing had ever come at it in its life.

Tank fired.

Three rounds and a stop, from behind me and to the right. The sound did not leave that place. It got into the walls and it stayed in them, and my ears went to a high whistle and they have never entirely come off it.

The animal came off the floor about a boot’s height and lay back down, and its tail kept working for a while after the rest of it had quit.

Voss went past me with the lamp and stood over it longer than people stand over a dead dog.

“No eyes,” she said. Then: “It could not have found you. It could not have come at you in here.”

“I know,” I said.

The shot did it. Nobody had to explain that to me; I was two steps from the animal when he fired, and I watched the whole thing happen. It was the same luck we had been having since the first morning, only louder. Two days under the ground, and the one thing we had managed to do was wake the place up.

Then the color changed.

For two seconds, nothing. Then a patch of the ceiling fifteen feet across went from red to blue, quietly, and then it ran — out along the ceiling, quick as fire in dry grass, and no sound in it at all — and by the time I had my head back down, the whole roof of that place was blue, in front of us and behind us, over the wood and over the water, and the stone trees were blue, because the light was coming up out of every one of those things that was stuck to them.

Thousands is a number I can write down. I did not count them. I stood in more light than I have ever stood in, and my shadow was on the wall in four places, and the lamp in Voss’s hand was a yellow rag of nothing.

And there was no heat. None.

I have stopped trying to get people to believe this part. The light came up like a furnace door opening and the air got colder. It came cold on my face, then on my hands, then it was in my teeth, and my shoulders were shaking like a man coming up out of water in October. Whatever those things were burning, it did not give anything back.

Then they came off the wood. Not all at once. A few hundred lifted off the trunks together, like dust off a rug when somebody beats it, and hung there, and then more, and then the ones over the water moved down and the ones behind us under the wood moved up, and they did not rush us and they did not scatter. They made a loose thing out of themselves in the air, all down the only way out we had, and it moved a little, like a rope held at both ends, and it got colder every time another one of them came up.

Behind me, under the trees we had just walked, the whole length of it was blue. Whatever we had come through asleep, we were not going back through it awake.

Tank had both grenades off his belt. One in each hand, and he was working the pin out of the right one with his thumb while he looked at the water, or at what was standing between him and the water.

“Both,” he said. “Right now. Both.”

I put a hand on his wrist.

“One.”

“One won’t —“

“Throw one.” I said it into his ear, because the whistle in my head had not let up. “Give me the other.”

He stopped. There was enough light coming off those things to see his face by, which I would rather not have had.

“For what,” he said.

I did not answer him, and there was no need to. One grenade left, and four of us, and behind us the whole length of the wood gone blue — a man who walks back into that awake does not get to choose how it ends. Arithmetic nobody needs said out loud, in the dark, in front of the other two. He got there. It took him about as long as it takes to shut a door. Then he let go of the left one and put it in my hand and shut my fingers over it, which is a thing I have thought about since.

“North and west,” I said. “Along the wall, the line I crawled. Same as we said.”

He threw it flat and low into the mouth of the cut, into the low part of the blue where the water sound was coming from, and it was still in the air when he started moving.

Then I am running.

I run into the place where I have just put a grenade, which is a thing no man should do twice, with the last one in my left hand and my thumb on the lever and my fingers shut around it, north and west, thirty feet of wet floor and then the shelf and then the cut, into the water sound, with Chuy’s hand in my belt and Chuy’s blood come through the bandage and down my back where his arm is, and Voss behind me carrying the lamp out in front of her like a full bowl of soup, and Tank behind her, and the blue over the water and over the wood and over all four of us.

And it has not gone out. Not one foot of it.

It is all still up there. Still cold. Still burning. And I still do not know what it was.