“How do I look?” he said.
“Like a Lego,” said Zoe.
She put on her own jumpsuit, which had been crushed in a ball at the bottom of her duffle. It was off-white, and so stained with mud that it looked like an abstract painting. Her helmet came next. Her dad had given it to her when she turned 15. It was dark blue, and scarred from low ceilings and falling rock. It was slightly too big and poorly padded. Whenever she nodded, it did a dance on her head.
For ten minutes, Dallas and Zoe geared up. Everything Dallas owned seemed to have been scientifically engineered—even his gloves looked like something you’d use to repair a space station. Zoe’s stuff was all shabby crap from the land of misfit clothes. But Dallas didn’t judge her, and she didn’t embarrass easily, anyway. She pulled on her yellow dish-washing gloves like they were made of silk.
Zoe and Dallas double-checked their headlamps, their batteries, their backup batteries, their drill. Dallas got pissed when he realized that he’d forgotten to bring walkie-talkies. Fortunately, Zoe had thought to pack a pair. She dug them out of her duffel, and handed him one.
“Please come prepared next time,” she said.
Dallas locked up the 4Runner—cheep! cheep!—and they hiked back down the road, trudging along stiffly under all the layers of clothes. After a few minutes, they came around a bend and saw some deer in the snow up ahead. The deer’s eyes were wet and nervous. Their coats, thin and red in summer, had turned coarse and gray to survive the cold—and hunting season. They stared at Dallas and Zoe, then darted away, jumping high like horses on a carousel.
In the silence, Zoe’s anxiety began to seep back in. She tried to clear her mind, but couldn’t. A story her dad had told her when she was 10 or 11 came back to her and the minute she remembered it, she couldn’t shake it. The story was about British cavers in the ’60s who got caught underground when a freak thunderstorm flooded their cave.
She’d never forgotten the details: Rescuers came running from their pubs. They built a dam, but it kept collapsing so they had to hold it together with their bodies. They worked through the night to pump out the water. Finally, they wriggled into a small tunnel to search for survivors. Deep in the cave, the lead rescuer found the bodies of two dead cavers blocking the way. He had to crawl over them to find the others. They were just corpses now, too. The last of them had squeezed into a tight fissure in a desperate hunt for air. The lead rescuer began his retreat, knowing all was lost. The volunteers behind him were crying and throwing up in the passageway. He said to the first one he saw, “Go back, Jim. They’re dead.”
Dallas noticed that Zoe wasn’t talking.
“What are you thinking about?” he said.
“The British cavers,” she said.
“The dead guys in the tunnel—those British cavers?” he said. There wasn’t a caving legend that Dallas didn’t know. “That’s a horrible thing to think about, dawg. Hit Delete right now. Seriously.”
Zoe shoved the story into the Do Not Open box. It didn’t want to go in—it wrestled with her—but eventually it did. She imagined herself sitting on the box to keep the thing trapped.
But still she felt unsettled as they trudged through the wilderness. Between the silence and the snow and the burned-out forests sliding past, Zoe felt like she and Dallas were characters in some postapocalyptic movie—survivors of a deadly virus that only they were immune to.
Dallas didn’t seem remotely nervous. He never did. He seemed stoked, giddy almost, oblivious. They were within arm’s reach of each other, but still miles apart.
“It’s this way,” said Dallas, who’d been staring down at his GPS. He thrust a fist in the air: “Woot!”
He led her to the side of the road, and down the steep embankment. If there had ever been a trail, it was buried now. The slope was piled with fallen trees, which plows had shoved off the road. Their trunks were charred and blistered.
Zoe struggled to climb over the logs. The weight of her pack kept pulling her off balance.
Getting to the cave was supposed to be the easy part.
Dallas was just ahead of her. She tried to step exactly where he stepped. She started to sweat under her clothes. She was near the bottom of the embankment when her snowshoe landed on a rotten log.
She had a sick feeling, like the ground was disappearing.
It was.
She pitched forward, her arms churning helplessly.
Dallas was still babbling. He had no idea. Zoe fell toward his back, arms outstretched and grabbing at the air. A branch shot past her face. It missed her eye by an inch.
She crashed against Dallas.
He gave a grunt of surprise, then fell forward, too. The whole thing took only an instant. Less than an instant.