“Out!” she yelled, kicking him into the bottleneck. “Run! Get the fuck out now!”
They crawled up a two-feet-tall gap between miles of vertical rock to find the antechamber leaking. Trickles of water were pouring from once-dry fissures. And new fissures were opening, slithering from under Nate’s palms as he toddled up.
Peter sat on the ledge where they had left their bags, swinging gracefully along with the bedrock.
“Nice going, Nate.”
“Shut up!”
“It’s okay. We all kinda expected it’d be one of your mistakes that would kill the club off.”
The next second Nate was flying above the sitting hallucination, ass-kicked forth by Andy as she grabbed both their bags.
“Go! Climb up, go go go!”
A new angry clash of tectonic plates made her lose her balance. She didn’t mind; she’d need to climb on all fours anyway.
“Kerri!” she shouted ahead above the castrophony. “Go up! As high as you can!”
She wasn’t sure they were within shouting distance of Kerri, especially with the world collapsing around them, but at her speed they would be in a matter of seconds. Nate felt that if they had been tumbling down the hole like Alice and the white rabbit, they wouldn’t have fallen as fast as they were climbing up. That was mostly thanks to Andy, who was practically dragging him by the hand, making him feel like his part should be extremely easy. And yet, once they had risen back to the level where supporting beams and carved steps were common sights, his arms and legs were whimpering in exhaustion. An ankle-deep river of water was now cascading down the passage.
At the first bundle of abandoned equipment they came across, Andy stopped to grab a pickax and swung it at a boarded wall that was sputtering water at them.
“What the fuck are you doing?!”
Andy kept striking the wall, twice, thrice, until the hole vomited a loud gush of water and earth, followed by a boulder the size of Utah that slid into the opposite wall with a titanic boom, inches from her face.
She turned to Nate, visage slashed by dark hair, spitting mud between her teeth: “Now it’s sealed!”
She pushed Nate forward, and he had to tell his limbs to stop whining and move again. On what seemed like his next breath, they came nose to nose with Tim and Kerri, peeking down into the tunnel.
“What just happened?!” Kerri asked, pulling Nate up. “What was that?!”
“Up!” Andy ordered as she crawled out the mouth of E-6. “Back to the surface, AFSAP!”
She was in the middle of the sentence when she noticed there was no need to shout.
She removed her mask. The quake had ceased. She didn’t know how long ago. They’d been running too fast to notice when the earth had stopped moving.
“What did you see?” Kerri said. She was as frantic as they were. “Was that a cave-in?”
“Some of it,” Andy said. “Put on your mask again. You’re about to do the climb of your life; you can use the oxygen.”
—
They had already started back up the Allen shaft ladder before Andy could notice they had skipped a few safety measures in their haste. They had forgotten to tether themselves together. They had freed Tim from his respirator, but they had not padded him tightly enough into Andy’s backpack; she could feel him dangling every time she hoisted their combined weight up a new metal vertebra inside the long vertical tract. Nate was leading the way again, though he could have done a better job at securing the flashlight to his belt. If he lost his grip and fell, he’d drop on Kerri, and both would land on Andy. Andy ground her teeth and made sure to grab each and every rung as tight as the steel could bear.
All she could hear were her muscles plotting their painful revenge on her the next morning. Which was okay by Andy. She was eager to live to the morning.
Her fingers were meeting Kerri’s heels more and more often.
“You okay there, Kay?”
“I think I’m gonna puke.”
“Okay,” Andy acknowledged calmly. “Please lean over to your right.”
“I can see the lights,” Nate announced from above.
Andy puffed out. She had expected those lights to be visible long ago.
“How’s Tim?” Kerri asked.
Tim shuffled inside his papoose and barked loudly, happy to be remembered.
“Good boy.”
Static cracked.
“Shit.” Andy stopped, her arm curled around a rung, and picked up the radio. “Al, can you hear me, over?”
White noise was the only response.
“Al, we can’t hear you, but we’re on our way up. I repeat, we’re fine and on our way up. Over and out.”
She hooked the transmitter back on her belt, ignoring the static that followed.
“Go on, Kay. Just a little more.”
“We’re close,” Nate shouted, farther ahead of them than she expected. “Like five or six floors.”
“See, we’re almost there,” Andy said. “We’re starting to pick up Al’s signal; that’s good.”
“Why is it cutting in and out like that?” Kerri wondered.
“It’s not me; it’s Al. We’ll see him in no time.”
“No, I mean, why doesn’t he just keep the speak button pressed?”
Andy frowned, then gave the matter ten seconds’ worth of thought. For five of them, the transmitter on her hip buzzed continuously. For another five, it crackled in short bursts.
“Morse code,” she said.
“What?”
“He’s speaking to us with the power button. That’s S…A…F…E.” The signal flatlined to a continuous buzz again. She picked up the radio. “Al, come again, over.”
“He just said it’s safe,” Kerri reasoned.
“He wouldn’t need to tell us it’s safe. I think he was saying ‘unsafe.’?”
The static broke down to sparkles of dots and dashes again.
“I’m almost there!” Nate’s voice came from up above.
“Nate, wait!” Kerri called.
“I’m nearly at the platform, it’s fine! I can hear the bird.”
“Nate, wait for…” Kerri stopped, glanced down at the darkness where she guessed Andy would be. “Did he say the bird?”
Andy was un-spelling the Morse code. Most of the message had been lost to real interference, but she was now sure that the word preceding “safe” had been “not.”
“Nate, the bird’s not supposed to sing unless we’re fucked!” Kerri yelled.
“Up!” Andy ordered, replacing the radio with the pistol and pushing Kerri; she could almost make her silhouette out against the feverish glow of the lights above. “Sprint up, up, up!”
Kerri sunk her teeth into her lip and ruthlessly squeezed the last out of her muscles, ordering them not to give up.
And they didn’t.
A rung did. The rock cracked and gave way just a couple of inches, enough for Kerri to lose balance and fall.
Andy was too close to see her come, but not too slow to try to grab her when she landed on her; in that split second she lost her grip on the pistol, releasing it to gravity. And then Kerri followed.