Way behind her, she heard Nino breathing hard, a man’s voice curse, and someone else complaining. But she was in her element. This was what she trained for and what she excelled at, the hand over hand, toe hold to the next, always scaling upwards while trying not to outpace those behind.
Emma paused again to scan around a slight bend in the shaft. The rocks were good, old, but dense and looked like they were ancient igneous rock, more than likely granite, which was hard as iron, and less likely to drop stones back down on lower climbers.
She looked back down; Nino already struggled, and she saw that Ben had let him slip past so he could push up on the man’s foot, basically lifting him as he climbed. She grinned as she watched him; she couldn’t help it. She liked him. She’d liked him at school, and she now liked what he’d grown into even more.
Truth be told, she wasn’t just here to find some lost plateau; she was here for Ben. He was her ideal man — tall, handsome, rugged, and from a good family. Any one of those attributes would have put him close to the top, but all of them together… well, let’s just say, she’d already decided that big guy wasn’t going to get away so easily this time.
She chuckled in the darkness.
“All right up there?” she heard him call to her.
“All good, so far.” She directed the powerful beam of the mag-light lashed to her wrist up into the chimney — there was no end in sight, and by her estimates, they had come about 400 hundred feet, but had maybe three times that distance to go.
She called down: “How’s everyone doing back down there? Everyone still with us?”
Ben stopped, getting her drift. “Sound off, people,” he called.
One after the other, with the voices getting fainter, the group let them know they were all safe. Even the loathsome Barlow and his band of apes joined in. She didn’t trust any of them for a second, and she still couldn’t work out why Ben had agreed to let them come. No choice, she guessed.
She turned back to the chute, quickly rubbed her hands on her pants, and then continued up. For her, the climb was easy, and there were no areas that required ropes or pitons, and just as well, as she only had about 100 feet of rope in her kit and no other climbing aides. She had originally assumed she would have to scale the sheer wall of the plateau by herself, but the pipe was an unexpected gift.
About 800 feet up, she paused to suck in some air. A slight breeze still rushed past her, bringing with it all the sounds of the lower climbers — the grunts, groans, and heavy breathing.
Emma took off her forehead light and used an arm to wipe her brow — even though the cave was cooler than outside, the humidity was stifling, and she wedged herself in the chute for a moment to tug out her canteen and take a sip.
The air stopped moving.
Emma sipped again, waiting. But the air remained stagnant. She frowned, looking up, and saw it was impenetrable darkness above her. She remembered she’d removed her forehead light and quickly slipped it on, looking up again. She’d felt this sort of event type before — it occurred when something blocked a chute, and it usually meant bad news — a rock fall or something was laid over their access path.
Ben caught up to her and tapped her shoe, making her yip with fright.
“Jesus, Ben.” She looked down at his dust-streaked face.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“I think…” She looked back up just as the air suddenly began to rush past her again — whatever the blockage was, it was now gone. She licked flaking lips. “Nothing.” She continued to stare upwards.
Ben squeezed her foot. “Let’s go, beautiful.”
“Yeah, yeah.” She smiled and nodded. “Just… just tell that fat-ass Barlow to stop blocking the pipe.” That had to be it, she thought.
She continued on, still feeling good, light, strong, and then what she thought was dust began to grow thicker. Emma held a hand up in front of her face and let her light beam play over it — she expected to see floating dust motes, but instead, there was nothing except a distinctive cloudiness.
“Ha. Mist,” she said and felt an odd tingling in her belly.
Oddly, it seemed to defy the breeze blowing past them to remain suspended in the chute.
She shone her flashlight upwards. The chimney continued on until it exhausted the strength of her beam, but now there was a definite haze. She laid a hand against the stone — cool. She knew that mist and fog could form when cool air passed over warmer water or land. But the stone was cooler here.
Ben caught up again.
“Look. We’ve entered a mist layer.”
He added his light to hers. “Humidity’s pretty high. Cave wall’s still dry though; that’s a good thing.”
“Yep,” she said. She placed a hand on her belly. “You feel okay? Any tingling?”
He scoffed quietly. “Yeah, a little. Just thought it was fatigue or vertigo, or something.”
“No, not that.” She wiped her nose. “Weird; maybe that magnetic effect Dan mentioned.”
“Maybe,” Ben said half-heartedly.
“Are we there yet?” Nino had caught up and gasped up at them with a red, sweat-slicked face.
She smiled back. “No, but nearly.”
She started up again. Higher and higher, even her trained muscles were starting to feel the ache and strain of dragging your own bodyweight upwards. Her fingertips were abraded and nails ground down, and it was only after another hour that she thought her eyes were playing tricks as it seemed that the fog was thickening. There was also a change in air density that she recognized.
She increased her speed, moving like a spider as excitement gave her muscles new energy. She quickly left Ben and Nino, as the smaller Venezuelan man unfortunately beginning to act as a plug to the other climbers. He was just lucky he had Ben with him who continued to push him skyward, as he would surely have been left far behind.
Emma’s grin widened as she detected something else, and she reached up to flick off her headlamp.
Yes, she whispered, and turned once again. “We got light, people.” She started to scamper higher, leaping now.
“Slow down,” she heard Ben yell, but his voice was already far behind now. The chimney narrowed a little but caused her no problem. However, she knew that someone the size of Barlow would struggle. Good, she thought, hope he loses skin.
In another hundred feet, she smelled damp earth, exotic odors, and many sweet scents that could have been pollens or flowers in bloom. Her wristwatch told her it was 7am, and sun up, but the light was still muted. She sniffed again; there was also something odd, faintly acidic, almost like cat-piss ammonia.
Emma put her hand up onto a ledge with a roof above it. The chimney had ended in a horizontal cave, flat at about two feet high, but broad and disappearing off into the darkness for both ways.
She eased off her backpack, scrambled on her belly over some sort of gravel to the end, and stopped.
“Oh my God.”
Her mouth stayed open
It felt, as well as heard, the animals in the cave. The vibrations in the stone that had been transported to her body told of blundering creatures, several of them, and all inside the cave. Her cave.
It tasted the air but didn’t pick up any scent; they were still far away. It eased itself from its hiding place, prepared to defend its territory. But something else flared inside it, hunger, always the ache of hunger.
It also hadn’t eaten in days, and nothing would be wasted.
Like the rest of them, Ben had to dump his pack to crawl forward. He put a hand on Emma’s shoulder. She had her chin resting on the back of her hands, and she turned to smile.