“Is the one we follow.”
Andy drew her flashlight across the station, tracking down a crimson scar that snaked vertically across the north wall. Three tunnels, labeled N-3, N-4, and N-5, opened on that same wall. All three were marked with rusted signs and wired, even though the lights were not working.
She then turned east: the gallery seemed to expand casually in that direction, carved by natural forces rather than industry, sloping downward into pitch dark.
“There,” she concluded bitterly. “The unpopular tunnel.”
—
From the mining equipment buried in that station like implausible goodies found inside pyramids and hellgates for the use of video game characters, Andy picked up a few items she deemed useful. Two kerosene lamps seemed to be in good order; she lit both and left one by the elevator. The packing of a few sticks of dynamite sparked a new controversy: Nate argued that, if they found the entry to the wheezers’ hideout, they would require explosives to seal it; Kerri opposed the idea of detonating dynamite underground without any notion of safety. Andy became the tiebreaker once again, Tim having lost any interest in the discussion once it had been stated that he wasn’t allowed to carry the sticks in his mouth. In the end, she settled the argument by allowing Nate to pack the dynamite and forbidding him to carry the lamp at the same time. Then, regretting yet another lost chance to align with Kerri, she marched the party toward E-6.
The kerosene lamp proved somewhat better than flashlights; though it did not shine nearly as bright, the halo was wider, allowing them to see both where they trod and where they headed. It also granted Tim more freedom of movement to scout ahead. There were no rails; the galleries seemed freshly dug, or not dug at all, like natural, conveniently sized caverns. Except for some passages densely flanked with pillars and boarded-up walls, marks of human craftsmanship were dwindling; warning signs had gone extinct; derelict mining gear was infrequent. And that was long before the gallery funneled into a lower, narrower tunnel that sloped steeply downward, a brief inscription crudely chalked on the rock above reading E-6.
Nate scowled at the unceremonious sign. Miner slang for “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”
Steps had been roughly carved or occurred naturally, too tall and irregular to let travelers forgo the use of their hands. The detectives had to sit and slip in single file down onto the next ledge, each one narrower than the preceding one. At some point Andy stood up and noticed that the ceiling was remarkably close.
Kerri noticed the ceiling too, but she had already decided she would not complain before Tim did. And he didn’t. The brave motherfucker kept hopping down from landing to landing without a whimper.
About the depth line of 5,200 feet, as chalked on an exposed slate of basalt, the weight of the ten thousand tons of rock above finally sank in. Kerri glanced behind and could not make out anything six feet back. The light they had left by the elevator was a distant memory. Sunshine was a dream. She tried to stretch her arms: both her hands met walls she knew to be miles thick. She realized that their kerosene lamp was the first thing to have lit that nook of the planet in fifty years, a single bubble of light and air in a one-mile radius of three-dimensional solid matter. And the darkness kept pouring in.
“What is that sound?” Nate asked.
“Running water, maybe,” Andy said.
“Maybe?”
“I’m guessing. We may be close to a subterranean river.”
“Andy, I can’t breathe,” Kerri said.
Andy raised the lamp at her. She barely made out some distressed orange hair. “Yeah, you can.”
“No, I’m telling you, I can’t go on.”
“You’re just anxious. Look, we all are—”
“This cave isn’t safe; there’s water on the other side of this wall! It could collapse on us.”
“It won’t, Kerri; it’s held this long.”
“We could be buried alive. We are buried alive!”
“No, we’re not—we came that way, we’ll leave that way!”
“There is no way!”
“Kerri!”
“What’s happening to the light?” Nate pointed out mellowly.
The girls stared straight into the kerosene flame. They could. It burned bluish and shy, its halo receding, crawling back from Andy’s face.
And then it went out.
Blackness—a million tons of heavy, stone-hard, Neptune-cold blackness took over.
Life, light in the universe, ceased to exist.
—
Nate switched on his flashlight, a hysterical white beam drawing the image of primordial panic in the new Age of Light. Andy searched her pockets for a box of matches, tried to scratch one and dropped it. She gritted her teeth, commanding her hands to pull themselves together, and tried another one.
Kerri saw the phosphorus flash with a short-lived burst of glee before the flame quickly ebbed down to a helium-voiced, meek, lukewarm drop of blue.
And then it died.
KERRI: Masks! Put on your masks now! There’s no oxygen!
They immediately dropped their bags to the floor, frantically scattering most of the contents as they searched for the aviator masks and oxygen bottles. Kerri had hardly taken the first puff of O2 before fitting the dog mask around Tim’s head.
“How did you know?” Andy asked while assisting Nate with the valves, her voice muffled behind the mouthpiece. “Is this firedamp, like in coal mines?”
“No, firedamp would have exploded on contact with the flame,” Kerri said. She could notice strength coming back to her arms and legs, the oppression receding. “The most likely gas to displace oxygen without us noticing or Tim smelling it would be…” Her mind cogs stopped to an audible click. “CO2. Carbon dioxide.” She drove a hand to her chest. “How’s your heart rate?”
Andy queried her wrist. “High.”
“You sweating?”
“Yeah.”
“Vision?”
“Better than a minute ago.”
“And your hands were trembling just now. They’re all symptoms of hypercapnia—CO2 poisoning. Your body doesn’t react because CO2 is always in the air; it’s what you breathe out. But in very high concentrations it can make you lose consciousness before you notice it.”
“That’s what I felt yesterday,” Andy contributed. “At the lake, when we faced the creature in the fog. My legs were failing; I couldn’t focus. Same thing was happening just now.”
“It must come from fissures in the walls,” Kerri said, the dull rockscape suddenly interesting. “After all, we’re on volcanic…I mean, we’re inside volcanic rock; this is what…”
She sank for a second in the ellipsis, then reemerged.
“Fuck me,” she said, running out of expletives. “That’s it. They breathe CO2. The wheezers do. It makes sense! I mean, it doesn’t make sense; no known animal inhales CO2, but…that’s how they live underground, that’s how they’re able to come up. The Walla Walla myth says so: the fog carried the first dwellers. It’s not fog; it’s CO2 leaking from underground that allows them to emerge.”