Suddenly the lamps flashed on for an instant, too brief for the light to even bounce off the walls, and went off again.
Then again, a tad longer, enough to carry a germ of false relief before they went out.
“Did anyone say, ‘Things could be worse’?” Nate polled.
The lights kept hiccuping on and off, Kerri and Andy reading in each other’s eyes the same revelation.
“Morse!”
“What’s he saying?”
“Uh…‘Andy’…” she deciphered. “Then E…Z…”
“Z?”
“No, X, shit, why am I so bad at this?! E…X…I…T…”
“Hurry up!” Nate begged, aiming the shotgun at the blinking drift. In the next burst of light, Peter was standing right in front of the double barrel.
PETER: Hey, Nate, I was just thinking about those pills you’re taking, ironically, to not see me—
NATE: Shut up!
PETER: (Closer.) Didn’t the label mention something about epileptic seizures?
NATE: Shut the fuck up!
PETER: (Closer, dribbling worms.) Didn’t it, Nate?
“N, W, 2!”
“There!” Kerri solved, pointing at an unlit tunnel. “Northwest, second opening; go! Tim, come!”
Tim ran toward Kerri and Andy grabbed Nate by the jacket, and during that split second before she pushed him into the tunnel she was able to see the enemy. It filled up the drift like boiling water up a geyser—a swarm of gray fiends crawling on all fours, or sixes, teeth snapping, claws slashing, stampeding, rolling on top of one another.
She scarpered away, snatching the canary cage on her way, and dove into the tunnel to Debo?n Isle.
—
“We’re almost there!” Kerri tried to shout, but barely puffed, holding a flashlight in one hand and the prints in the other, all while sprinting downhill through a roughly carved tunnel barely high enough to stand in. “After that turn, the gallery goes back up through something called ‘Debo?n stairs’!”
“Stairs?” Nate panted. “Please tell me it’s not another ladder!”
It wasn’t.
The down-sloping tunnel piped them for a quarter of a mile up to a natural cave split by a large crevice, some fifteen feet wide and unfathomably deep. As a reminder of the force of nature that had created it, magma glared red below. The far ledge was some twelve feet higher than the one they’d landed on. A rotten iron structure, corroded into every color iron is not supposed to be, bridged the gap. It consisted of two beams bolted into the rock on either side, with about twenty ascending steps laid across and a single handrail on the left. The right side handrail had probably taken a dip into the lava a century ago.
Before Kerri even had time to screech to a halt and swear at the view, Tim ran past her and climbed up the stairs, and only at the top did he remember to turn and peek down into the chasm.
“Ooh,” Nate judged, as he and Andy stopped two steps short of the fall. “Handrail and everything. Luxury!”
“It will hold,” Kerri vouched, placing a foot on the first step, keeping her weight on the support beams. She capered up as gracefully as she could, trying to make it quick for the sake of steps that complained more than living small mammals would, ignoring the searing red veins of the planet below. Safe on the other end, her suede boots almost kissed the dusty rock again.
“See? No problem,” she said, patting the handrail, which gave way after two taps. Andy and Nate and Tim joined in a perfectly synchronized heartbeatskip as Kerri regained her balance, then they watched the iron bar tumbling down the cliff, clanging painfully all the long way down.
“Okay,” Andy evaluated, shaking off Nate’s backpack, which she’d been carrying. “Throw the backpack first, then the bird, then you go,” she said, standing guard by the tunnel mouth.
Still panting from the previous run, or from the current vertigo, Nate leaned one foot on the first step, then the other foot on the second, took the backpack from Andy and flung it across the chasm. It landed on the tenth step, from which Kerri swiftly retrieved it.
Then Nate halted to check on the caged bird. It was hiding under its water tank as if to stop from bouncing around; Nate could see its little feathered chest heaving at terminal speed, its pea-sized heart about to explode. The whole cage couldn’t be more than ten pounds. He decided to spare the bird another jolt and carry it upstairs.
The penultimate step considered that a poor decision and penalized it by snapping under Nate’s foot.
He fell facefirst on the ground, half his body dangling off the cliff; the cage flew out of his hands and rolled straight into Tim’s care while Kerri dove to grab Nate’s arm.
Andy’s first gunshot reverberated all over the cavern. She abandoned her post and galloped up the stairs, skipping two of every three rotten plates, grabbing Nate and yanking him up on the way, then turning at the top to face the wheezing ovation.
A staggering swarm of misshapen silhouettes clogged up the mouth of the tunnel. Twisted necks and overelbowed arms bashed at one another before receding at the second gunshot, while Tim viciously dared the wheezers to cross. Nate crawled to his bag and grabbed a stick of dynamite and a lighter.
ANDY: Nate, shells!
NATE: Fuck that! (Throwing the lit dynamite across the cliff.)
KERRI: NO!
A rock-shattering explosion flashed the cavern for a split second, pounding at their eardrums, blowing up pieces of stone and broken bodies.
Then, after the eternity it took for the sound to fade, there was silence.
And then the ovation returned, twice as loud, twice as angry, from the smoking cave mouth.
KERRI: TNT explosions create enormous volumes of CO2.
NATE: Shit.
ANDY: Run.
NATE: I didn’t know that!
ANDY: RUN!
A tumult grew inside the cloud of smoke and a second wave of creatures emerged, almost in an orderly fashion, and leaped up the bridgeway while Andy beat her own record time for reloading. She butted the jaw off the first wheezer and fired at the second, blowing its ribcage open in midair, while a third one skipped the stairs and super-jumped across the chasm and grabbed the opposite ledge and managed to bore its two-inch claws into the rock. Its eyeless face lurked above the ledge just long enough to see Kerri slicing a knife through its arm, severing every connective thread within, and then it fell into the abyss.
“Go!” Andy cried, aiming for the exit tunnel. “Any way that leads up!”
The final sprint took place in almost pitch darkness, flashlight beams too nervous to linger anywhere, and when they found the roots of a spiral staircase, they climbed up at maximum speed, quelling any attempt of rebellion from their muscles, and as they did, their frantic heartbeats and burning lungs overshadowed everything else: the exhaustion, the fear, the blindness, the survival instinct. They did not even stop to assess how far the wheezers had fallen back when they reached a landing, and they kept running up a new, shorter set of stairs and burst through a hatch and into a room—an actual room, a basement—and then slammed the hatch closed behind them and Andy pulled down two bookcases to block it.