“Help me,” Sophie whispered. She closed her eyes and tried with all her strength to envision not Tom, not Lacie, not even Silas or Patrice, but only her father.
And there he was. Poorly shaven, after he had broken his right hand on a hunting trip he had never quite trusted that hand with the razor any longer, and not even his wife could touch his throat with any trusted blade. He was like that. Silver-scruffed and poorly shaven, strong and red-jowled and smiling down at his second-favorite daughter of two.
“Now remember, love,” he was saying. “All you need, fire inside you and any hollow man he’ll burn up just from the fire inside you oh heart of a lioness oh there you are, remember. Remember you see anyone up there, you grab the sides of that ladder and you slide all the way down. Get your back to the vault door, be ready to shoot at anyone fool enough to show himself. Counting on you now.” One of his bushy eyebrows arched, a loving patriarchal mixture of favor and disfavor. “Counting on you,” he said to her. “Stay strong for me when I’m gone. Keep your sister safe.”
Oh, how that had been. Safe, oh Patrice…
“Now open your eyes,” he said. “Goodbye.”
She did so. There was nobody up there. She reached about, felt the aluminum-gridded handhold up over the shaft’s edge, and hauled herself upward while her father’s image melted away inside of her.
She peered over the edge as she rose. Her breath misted out and pulsed against her faceplate. Reflections of mist played on the faceplate’s farther side, puffs of shifting air and dewdrops caught in the endless wave of humidity pouring in from the waterfall. Strange crimson reflections shifted over the walls above her, turning the black stone to ever-shifting patterns that writhed like images of flesh.
She could not feel whether her surroundings were hot or cold, but there were unsettling clots of moist ash dolloped all about her and across the cave floor, smashed dough-balls of congealed dust and burnt matter bound up by some greasy substance. The mud-balls had been sculpted into piles where they had been scuffed aside by booted feet, and smeared footprints showed in hardened craters all along the floor.
They came in. They died. The last one left. There’s no one here.
A catch in Sophie’s breathing told her otherwise.
Feeling all at once how precarious her position was, she heaved off from the rungs, got a knee over the rim and belly-crawled away from the shaft. Mud greased her suit and spattered her fingers. Her left foot kicked off of the last rung with a sickly tilt, and a surge of vertigo swept through her as she twisted along the cave floor and spun onto her back. The gun jumbled up under her gut, still hinged to her utility belt, and nearly got stuck beneath her.
Careful, now. Someone is out there.
She raised herself up into a spidery crouch and swept the flashlight’s beam further into the darkness. The beam’s frayed edges caught the glitter of some broad metallic surface out in the farther cave. Was that the H4 at the edge of sight?
She spared a look to the ceiling. There. At the angle she had assumed, it was actually quite easy to tilt the beam of light and to beckon forth the shadows, forcing them to reveal the hidden outline of the painted crane socket indented above the shaft. Tom had cored away some of the ceiling stone so that the crane-hinge was actually flush within its hole up there, flat with the planed and carved-out surface of the ceiling. Looking more closely, Sophie noticed for the first time that all of the stone in the narrow had been spray-painted the same dull hue, almost certainly for the sole purpose of concealing the crane from unwanted eyes.
Right, then.
She stood fully, glancing over her shoulder to look behind her. A foolish gesture, for without pivoting at the waist she only caught a better glimpse of her own suit’s interior and her breath’s humidity streaking down the insides. If anyone wanted to ambush her, seize her, this was the perfect time for them to do it.
She stood up on tiptoe, reached, and just barely caught the tip of the crane’s hidden hook with two fingers. Her glove slipped easily off the steely surface, but a squeak of the crane’s joist told her that the assembly was ready to move.
One thing working perfectly, she mused. At last.
Solo-operating the crane, from what she had read, would be exhausting after awhile but fairly easy. By fully snapping down the two levers and snap-locking the aluminum joint in place, by swiveling the hook-and-pulley over the shaft’s center, she would be able to drape plastic cording or even a chain over the pulley wheel and begin the work. She could winch up the flats of supplies in a matter of a couple hours or even less.
Satisfied that her position was not hopeless, Sophie held her breath and turned away from the crane assembly once again. It was time to search the cave.
She knew all at once then, chilled by a trickle of certainty: if no one had yet attacked her, there would be many more dead bodies. There would be horrible things she would need to see. But she had to keep moving. She had no choice.
She cinched her flashlight between her left elbow and hip as she repositioned, unclipping her gun. She crept out of the tunnel and into the wider cave, following the fractured glo-lites, the dancing crimson radiance of the outside world spun into whorls by the endless cascading of the waterfall. The world went a little brighter, running with a glow too much like blood.
And oh, Sophie, what beautiful wonders will we see?
A giggling inside her, icy echoes all around her.
She kept moving. She went through rote actions, machine actions, shifting her load and readying herself as best she could. The knife was pulled a half-inch from its boot sheath, and then left there at the ready. The flashlight was poised in her left hand, the gun with its safety off held firmly in her right. If forced to fire, she would need to make a split-second decision to either drop the flashlight to control the gun, or fire one-handed and likely get spun by the power of the recoil. But if there was more than one enemy, more than one man she needed to kill, she might not have a choice.
Silas can’t protect you here, Sophie told herself. Your protector is dependent on you until you can get him out of here. He can’t do anything to defend you until you get him moving. You are the strong one now, you are the only.
The only.
She compelled herself to walk toward the glittering metallic surface, slowly sweeping her light from side to side. Her eye was first drawn to the greasy and looming bulk of the H4. The Hummer was shunted off at an angle she did not remember. The windshield was starred and cracked where rubble had fallen down and pelted it, but the safety glass hadn’t shattered. The chrome bumper and the tubing of the grille were all badly crunched where the SUV had rebounded off the cave wall, when Sophie had first sped into the cave and crashed to a halt. She could see that one of the four headlights was cracked, another entirely shattered. But at least two, possibly three, of the lights might work. There were still jagged rocks, some bigger than cinderblocks, resting in ugly divots in the hood.
The driver’s door was open.
Sophie put the flashlight down on the hood and advanced with a gliding sideways gait, pointing the way with the HK submachine gun held in both gloved hands. She circled and looked down at a halo of shattered glass. There surrounded by crystalline splinters was lain the body of a boy, badly rotted, crumpled on the muddy ground.
He must have been about sixteen. He was almost in the fetal position, and horribly — or perhaps mercifully, her buzzing mind could scarcely process what she was seeing and could not weigh the determination — the boy had managed to bury his face in both of his pustule-covered hands. She could not see the death agony etched across his features, but she could feel it. It was all that remained of him.