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hypnoticwinter · 3 years

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Down the Rabbit Hole part 23

“Erica,” I ask her, “what the fuck are you doing?”

“Shut up,” she tells me, glancing behind her. I hear movement and then Marcus comes into view. He has a slim pistol gripped in his hand and casts a wary glance around the interior of the Cord before his eyes fall on the Sergeant’s prone form, laying just ahead of us.

“Is he dead?” he asks.

Erica prods at him with her foot gently. The Sergeant doesn’t move. I glance over at Elena; she is staring at his dead body with an unmistakable look of horror. I’ve never seen her look scared before.

Erica’s gun is still trained loosely on us but without it pointing directly at me I begin to relax a little. Her hand, I notice, is shaking a little.

My heart is still pounding and there is a heavy, queasy sensation whenever I look at the Sergeant’s body, but I shut it out, don’t even begin to process it. I can see the golden gleam of the other bullets in the revolver’s cylinder, pointed at me, blunt and shark-nosed. I can feel myself trembling lightly, adrenaline and exhaustion and grief all welling up inside of me.

“You aren’t going to get away with this,” Elena says, and Erica rolls her eyes.

“Can we have a little less from the peanut gallery?” she asks. “Hand over the crystal and nobody else is going to get hurt.”

There is a moment of frozen silence before Elena and I both blurt out our responses to this ludicrous request at the same time. “The crystal?” I ask. “You know about the crystal?”

“Nobody else?” Elena asks. I can feel her fists clench next to me and I have to resist the urge to reach over and hold her back. “Nobody else?” she repeats. “You didn’t have to fucking shoot him!”

“I’m not here to get in a goddam argument,” Erica growls, prodding the barrel of the revolver into Elena’s chest. I eye Marcus warily; our eyes meet for a moment and he looks away, glancing over at Erica, but his pistol remains trained on me.

I can see Elena thinking about it, as she looks down at the pistol. Erica has committed one of the cardinal sins of holding someone at gunpoint – you never actually touch them with the gun. Or touch them at all, really, if you can help it. Every point of contact between them and you is a conduit for information – they’ll be able to tell the way you’re moving, how distracted you are, might even be able to guess how willing you are to actually pull that trigger if you try something.

And it can be a point of attack. During my Karate years in Oklahoma we did a section on realistic encounters – what to do if someone pulls a knife on you, pulls a gun on you, and so on. If they’re holding it close to you and you are very, very quick, you can snap your hands down from where you’re holding them up and empty-palmed and jerk the gun away, maybe even get it into your hands. I don’t know what hand-to-hand training in the Coast Guard or in the park ranger service was like, but if even I know the technique Elena probably knows something similar.

And she will also know that it isn’t something you can ever realistically pull off. The person with the gun has to be distracted, or possibly just disabled, not to be able to react in time. There’s a reason Ali always told us in class, very seriously, that if someone was holding us up to mug us, to just give them what they wanted. “You are not,” he said, “going to be faster than someone’s index finger moving a couple of centimeters. You will die, unless you are very lucky. If they want something, give it to them. If they’re going to kill you, though,” he said, waggling his finger at us, flashing that brilliant smile, “it’ll be better than nothing.” Then we practiced headlocks and sleeper chokes.

So even though I can see Elena’s hands flexing with an unconscious urge to rip and choke and get us out of this situation, she doesn’t move a muscle. I see her glance over at me, just a flicker, like checking a pulse, making sure I’m still here, I’m not panicking.

“Hand it over,” Erica repeats, glancing between us. I am very curious to find out how she expects us to just give her a crystal that’s roughly the weight and shape of a refrigerator, but maybe she doesn’t know how big it is. How the hell does she even know about it to begin with?

Makado. Somehow I know it must have been through Makado, one way or another. If she was willing to tell me, she’d potentially be willing to tell someone else, someone even more of a security risk than I am.

I remember Peter telling me, what feels like ages ago now, that the cult was harmless. Just a bunch of broken people trying to get by.

“We don’t have it,” I tell Erica. “It was a mess down there, an ambush. If you want it, go get it.”

Erica’s eyes are very cold. I can practically see the gears working as she measures what I’ve said. Elena edges slightly closer to me and the feeling of her there at my side is a comfort, but I am just praying that Erica isn’t cold-blooded enough to just shoot the two of us right now that she knows we don’t have the crystal.

Erica finally tells Marcus to search us, and he does so, tossing all of our various tools and gear into a small pile on the floor. I hear the lens of my camera shatter when he drops it and I can’t help but wince. He doesn’t pat us down very proficiently besides searching our pockets and our bags, which makes me reassess my initial assumptions – maybe this isn’t something that had a lot of planning put into it? Or at least she definitely couldn’t have been expecting to run into us here.

I look Erica over, head to toe. She’s dressed in hiking gear, but loosely – long shirt, long pants, but fairly thin. Without a climate controlled suit the humidity would be the real danger. Marcus is dressed similarly; I can’t tell for sure but I think he must have changed clothes at some point after he got into the Pit, changed into something more suitable for a long stay. And there must have been – well, what would he have eaten? Just – carved out bits from the walls? No way. Even if you were a certified card-carrying badass on a mission you’d have brought your own food. And Marcus does not strike me as the disgruntled ex-Army-Ranger type. Even just the way his hands traced over me with extreme delicacy and hesitation when he’d searched me made me think that taking captives must be an entirely new experience for him, and not one he’s comfortable with.

No, Erica is improvising. Which makes her more dangerous, especially if she gets desperate.

So let’s not make her get desperate.

“We’ll take you back down to get it,” I suggest. Erica looks over from her huddle with Marcus. Well, half a huddle, both still turned towards us, watching cautiously, guns still aimed at us but fingers off the triggers now. Elena nudges me and looks at me like I’m crazy but I shoot her a look that I hope says ‘trust me.’

“I thought you said it was an ambush?” Erica asks. “Down in the barrows?”

“Well, yes, but –“

“What, do you want us to go down there just to get eaten by copepods?”

“Do you want the crystal or not?” I shrug. “Doesn’t bother me none.”

She looks at Marcus. His face is tight and unreadable. “We’ll go down and check,” she says, nodding. “We’ve come all this way, it’d be stupid not to.”

“What about them?” he asks.

“Look,” Elena says urgently, “the Sergeant had a tracker PDA in his bag. It’ll show you exactly where the crystal is. Just take it and follow it and we’ll leave and pretend we never saw you.”

I resist the urge to bury my face in my hands. Elena’s got plenty of strengths but negotiation isn’t one of them.

Erica laughs at that suggestion and informs us that she has a better idea.

“Why don’t I,” she asks, rummaging through the pile of gear and coming up with a short length of rope, “tie you two up, and then you’ll lead us down to get the crystal? Or,” she says, brightening, “how about I get rid of one of you first –“

Elena stiffens next to me, but all I can feel is a cold hard knife-edged anger slicing at me. I look at Erica, really look at her, force her to look at me, cram all of the casual hate I can into my gaze and throw it at her. “You’ll have to kill both of us, then,” I tell her. “Because if you kill her, I’m going to do the best I can to lead all of us straight into a copepod’s mouth. And if you kill me –“

Elena picks up where I left off, a little more bloody-minded: “and if you kill her,” she finishes, glancing over at me, “I’m going to do whatever I have to do to tear your throat out with my teeth before you put me down too.”

I have to stop myself from smiling when I hear her say that; I content myself with nudging a little closer to her as well so that our hips touch. That will have to be enough for now.

Erica has faltered a little. Even though she’s still got the gun, hell, she’s got two guns on her side, she isn’t certain. You can see it in her eyes. She draws back, then tries to save face. Predictable. “I was just – I wasn’t going to actually do it,” she says.

There is something very strange going on here. This is too disorganized to be a real attempt to – to what, steal the crystal from us on the way back up? No way. Even if she’d brought the material and equipment needed to actually transport it without the use of Joker, she’d still have to contend with what should have been a full squad of combat-trained rangers, plus two useless hangers-on (me and Euler). She’d have had to have brought enough people to outgun us, and even then it’d be dicey in tight quarters like these, especially if the people she brought weren’t familiar with the Pit.

This – her and Marcus – can’t be it. It simply can’t. Even if she thinks that the crystal could fit in her pocket she would still have to take it from us. This is something opportunistic, something important to her for some reason, important enough to throw her entire life away for a shot at, for a crazy shot at, for a Hail Mary at the buzzer.

I turn and look down the Cord, at the sparking depths of it, at the rows and rows of spiral-staircase encasing it. I wonder where Fumi is, what Fumi’s doing, whether he’s okay. Maybe it was cowardly for him to run but I’m glad that he did, I’m glad that at least he got out of this okay. For the moment anyway.

She’s going to make us go back down. There’s no way around it. I can feel myself sagging at the thought of it, at the thought of going back down there and seeing with fresh eyes all the death that’s waiting down there. I had kept it together admirably well up until now but I can feel myself clenching, I can feel myself freezing up, shying away from even thinking about it like if I don’t it won’t be able to touch me. I want to close my eyes and cry, for Euler, for the Sergeant, for Ellis, for Slate and Crookshank and all the others that are down there even still, I want to just heave out sobs until I can’t any more and I’ll be empty. Being empty sounds good right now but I’m not and I can’t be.

I wonder for a brief moment whether this is what PTSD is, whether I’ve been damaged somehow, and then my lip curls without any conscious effort and I can feel myself tighten, drag myself back upwards like chains ratcheting along my spine.

“Fuck it,” I say. Everyone looks round at me and I realize that I’ve said it a little louder than I meant to. Ordinarily I’d shrink and get embarrassed but I have gone through so much shit lately that I feel an uncharacteristic willingness to take up space, to be violent. I am tired.

I look at Erica again. “If this crystal is so fucking important we’ll go back down and you can look at it and admit that it was a stupid idea to go down there and then we can come back up. Alright? But don’t you ever point that fucking gun at her,” I say, pointing to Elena. “No, fucking look at me, I’m serious. I don’t give a shit. You don’t know this terrain, you don’t know this area, and even if you’ve been here before you don’t know the lay of the land right now. You need us, both of us, so give us a little fucking respect. We’ll fucking guide you down there but treat us like fucking human beings, you bitch.”

Erica’s eyes are very wide, and it is very, very quiet as my voice fades into the dull, thick air. Then her eyes go slatey and hard and she strikes me across the face. I see it coming and could have blocked it but I stopped myself, which is a little harder than it sounds, because the instinct when you can see a blow like that is to either dodge it or put your hands up, but she’s still got the gun.

I can feel the butt of the revolver smack into my cheekbone and there’s a starburst of pain there. I stagger back a little, bumping into Elena, and then she is holding me. I can hear her growling at Erica, calling her a bitch, but Marcus points his gun at her and she quiets a little. Then Erica hauls me to my feet. Her nails are digging into my shoulder painfully and I cry out softly. She digs the barrel of the gun into my gut and the feeling of it is like icewater. My hands are shaking and no matter how hard I try I can’t stop them.

I begin to realize that I may have made a mistake.

“No,” Erica snarls, “you listen to me, you little shit. You are in no position to make any fucking demands. You’re going to lead us down there and thank us profusely if we decide not to end your miserable lives once we’ve got the damn crystal. You understand?”

Her hand tightens further around my throat – when did she start choking me? – and I croak something out, but I am too busy panicking to realize whether or not I actually meant to form words or if I just let out a mindless squeak of fear.

One thing karate in a dojo will not teach you is how to handle imminent mortality. Nobody who learns karate expects to ever actually need to use it. Karate isn’t even a real way of fighting – it’s more of a sport, something for lazy dojo tigers to pad around showing off, sparring for points. The grabs and chokes and defenses I know are more MMA than anything else. What’ll karate, pure karate, do to help in a real fight? Are you going to throw a spin kick at somebody? Please.

I can’t breathe. I bat ineffectually at Erica’s face and her shoulders but she doesn’t even bother to stop me. Finally, after what seems like forever, she lets go and I fall to the ground in a huddle, coughing and gasping. Elena is there, curled over me protectively, glaring daggers at Erica, and even Marcus is eyeing her a little warily.

“You could have fucking killed her!” Elena spits, and a little of that uncertainty returns to Erica’s eyes, or at least I think it does – mine are still a little bleary. When I can blink the tears from them and look at her again she seems utterly unruffled.

“Tie their hands,” she says to Marcus, and after only a moment of hesitation he does so, and then we are making our slow, awkward, armless way down the Cord, back towards the barrows.

* * *

“We need a break,” Elena points out again, and again Erica does nothing but click her tongue and urge us onward, gesturing with the barrel of the revolver. Not only has Marcus bound our hands but he’s also tied us together, making it so that Elena and I are linked by only a couple feet of paracord. It’s been biting roughly into my wrists for the last couple of hours and if this keeps up I’m going to have ugly welts because of it. Erica and Marcus have both relaxed a little, especially since they’ve gotten rid of all of our gear. She got Elena to show her how to work the Sergeant’s tracker, and I almost cried when they had to flip him over in order to take it from his bag. The look of stunned surprise frozen on his face was so gentle and unlike him that it almost made him look like a different person entirely.

I don’t even know why I was crying – he was an asshole, for sure, but there was something, I don’t know, something meaningful to him that made me think that there were reasons. And of course there are always reasons that people end up acting like that but sometimes people end up being so crabbed and gnarled and nasty that you don’t want to find reasons to unpeel them from themselves and look at the kind of person they are really. The Sergeant I would have liked to have sat down and had a drink with and gotten to know, just for pure raw opportunistic curiosity.

I didn’t even have the luxury of closing his eyes for him, because as soon as Erica had retrieved the PDA and browbeat Elena into showing her how to work it – oh, how my blood boiled as she called Elena a bitch and a cunt and worst of all fucking stupid just because she kept fumbling with the login screen and getting her account on the PDA to track the crystal as well – we were off and marching, leaving the Sergeant sprawled there, staring up dead and empty at the cold metal-capped ceiling.

I don’t have it in me to feel angry, I don’t have it in me to hate. That will come later. Right now I’m too tired. I am too damn sour at myself for reading Erica wrong. I thought I could cow her, I thought that even though she had the gun she’d back down. At the very least we wouldn’t be tied up, even if we were marching all the way back down to the barrows on a pointless errand that might get us killed.

Once we’re down at our stop on the Cord and out and walking down the long, damp path down to the barrows, Elena turns around, fixes Erica with a glare. I can still see a cold light of hatred burning somewhere deep down inside of her cool grey eyes and for a moment I feel frightened for her, I feel momentarily terrified that she’s going to try something and get herself shot and I – I –

“What’s this crystal to you?” she asks Erica, and I swallow hard and glance back at Erica as well, waiting to see what she’ll say, if she’ll even give us a straight answer. I look at her and those dark eyes stare back at us. She is – I will give her this, she’s determined. She has set her mind to doing this, whatever the hell this is, and she’s going to be willing to throw us all away if she has to. You can see it in the set of her jaw, in the way her eyes rake us like an eagle’s claws. “What’s the point of all this?” Elena continues. Erica’s nose wrinkles lightly. I wonder if she’ll even bother trying to win us over, whether she’ll figure that her having shot the Sergeant will have turned us against her permanently.

Erica nods to Marcus and he unties us and we all huddle there for a while against the side of the corridor, sit down in the sopping squelch of it, too tired to care. Erica leans against the ribbed wall of the vent and looks down along its depths towards the barrows. She’s still holding the revolver but at least it isn’t pointed at us.

Elena leans in to me and rests her head on my shoulder and I kiss the top of her head, and I feel her smile faintly, but it vanishes fast. This isn’t going how I wanted at all. I want to say something to her, I want to kiss her and tell her it’s going to be okay. She’s so tough but she’s so scared, I can tell she’s scared, and I want to show her that I can be tough too. That I am more than an anchor. But doing that in front of Erica and Marcus would feel – dirty, somehow. Uncomfortable. I itch at the thought of it. So instead I sit there very still and let her rest her head on me and let that be enough.

“My husband was there four years ago,” Erica says, and we both look up at her. Marcus doesn’t look interested, clearly he knows this story, he’s heard it before. “At the disaster,” Erica clarifies.

She waits for a moment, maybe to see whether or not we’ve got any response. Elena and I stay quiet, no ‘oh really’ or ‘no way.’ If she wants us to be buddy-buddy with her she’s straight out of luck.

“You know what that crystal is, don’t you?” she asks, and Elena snorts. I would as well but the welt on my cheek from where she got me with the butt of the revolver hurts too much whenever I move my nose.

“I do,” Elena says. “Do you?”

Erica laughs. There isn’t much humor in it. “I don’t think you do. I think I know much better than you do.”

“Explain it to us, then,” Elena tells her, and I nod in agreement. The longer we can keep her talking, hopefully, the longer we’ll be able to rest.

“My husband Burt,” Erica says, “was a ranger here at the park. And he was here in 2007. But he wasn’t the ordinary type of ranger, he worked at the one place in this park that required a security clearance.”

Elena frowns. “I don’t know what –“

“You see,” Erica continues, “when they found the Pit back in the 70s, they found ritual grounds too. Old places, places that the indigenous tribes had been using for centuries to commune with the Pit. This place,” Erica gestures widely, “is alive. It feels and reacts. It thinks.”

Elena snorts again, a little softer this time. “In the ritual grounds there were crystals exactly like the one you were sent down to find, only carved and shaped so that if someone who knew what they were doing hit them with a strike in just the right way, they’d resonate. And that resonance could influence the Pit. Make it calm down if it were starting to wake up, make it wake if it were sleeping. Calm the wildlife, make it possible to live down here without any danger. Or send them into a frenzy.”

“Sounds like magic,” I murmur, but without much conviction. Makado, in that hurried briefing after Slate had died, had said something a little similar. I look at Erica, meet her eyes. “Did your husband work on the – the contingency plan?”

That catches Erica up for a moment, but she nods, glancing over at me. Her eyes, I notice, linger for a moment on the swollen mark on my cheek. “Yes,” she says finally. “Yes, he did. And he was there when they broke the crystals. See, I figure someone, Veret probably, told you about the crystal and why they want it. But nobody would have told you about what exactly the crystal did when it was broken.”

“Well, it – it put the Pit to sleep.”

“Yes,” Erica nods. “Yes, it did. But did they tell you what it did to the people there? Some of them, at least.”

Elena frowns. She starts to say something but I nod. “Peter told me,” I say. Elena is giving me a very confused look. “Not all of it,” I add, “but enough to piece together the parts. I hadn’t known it was breaking the crystal that had done it, but I could guess.”

“What - ?” Elena starts.

“It’s a – when they shattered the crystals it caused something like a contagious psychic plague,” I tell her, glancing at Erica. “From what Peter told me it sounded like it would gradually erode your self-control and make you want to come to the Pit, to come down into the Pit and, well, I don’t know what happened to them once they got in. I don’t think Peter did either. And if you weren’t able to get to the Pit you’d get to a point where you’d be spreading it to everybody you were near just – just mentally, I guess. I know it sounds like bullshit but it’s true, I swear it’s true.”

“But if that’s true why was Peter smuggling people in? It must have been people with that – with that disease,” Elena says. “Why didn’t he try to help them? I mean, Christ, people without any preparation, sick people, down here in the Pit, they wouldn’t last a fucking day. That’s –“

“Because the cure,” I tell her, “has a good chance of completely wiping out your personality,” I tell her, and she quiets. She believes me, I think, she has to believe me. Or if she doesn’t believe me she trusts me, at least. I don’t give myself time to feel warm and fuzzy about it. “That’s what Peter told me, anyway. He was one of the lucky ones.”

“He had this disease?” she asks, glancing over at me.

“Yes,” Erica says. “He did. Roan’s pretty much right about the details. Peter was lucky.”

“So he and Makado decided it would be better to just smuggle people in? Let them go down there to die?”

I can tell by the look on her face that Elena thinks this would be just as bad. I shrug. I can feel the exhaustion in the weight of my shoulders. “Peter told me that there’s a point where it becomes contagious, right before you die of it. But if you’re in the Pit, that doesn’t happen, there’s no contagiousness. That’s why they were letting them in.”

“That seems awfully convenient,” Elena remarks, and I shrug.

“I don’t know if it’s true,” I say, “that’s just what Peter told me.”

“Surely there would have been a better way -“

“Peace,” Erica says quietly. “All that’s over now, now that Peter’s – well, is he dead?”

I think about it. “I didn’t see him die,” I tell her. “But he must have. I don’t know how anybody else could have lived down there. It was awful.”

“It was stupid,” she says, “going down to the barrows to try and get it.”

“Makado was desperate,” Elena says. “She was afraid that the Pit was going to wake up sometime soon and without another crystal to break to send it back to sleep, they wouldn’t be able to contain it.”

“Well,” Erica says, running a hand through her hair, “you can see the logic in it, can’t you? But I think she’s being played. And in turn she’s playing you, all the rangers in the team that went down. How many were there?”

“Eight,” I say. “Plus me and one other.”

Erica nods. “See, the problem with breaking the crystals is that, yeah, it’s an immediate solution. But did you ever think why they found those thousand-year-old crystals carved and perfect and intact? Not cracked to pieces?”

“Why?” Elena asks. She still has an ugly sullen undertone to her voice but she’s listening, she’s evaluating. I don’t think Erica is necessarily going to lie to us but I think whatever information she’s operating off of must be flawed if she’s come down here herself.

“Because,” Erica says, giving us a little mirthless smile, “cracking one of those crystals is like knocking the Pit out, rather than easing it into a natural sleep like you supposedly can do if you strike it the right way. It’ll wake up sooner and angrier and hungrier than it would otherwise. I don’t think they meant to crack it but I don’t think they’ve done their research, they haven’t even tried to reach out to some of the native communities around here that might still have had a little knowledge about how these things work. They fucked everything up in the 70s, made a lot of people very mad at them. I don’t think they know how bad they’ve made things. If they get their hands on that crystal and end up cracking it again, it’ll –“

“Alright,” Elena says. “I get the picture.”

“What happened to Burt?” I ask, and Erica sighs.

“Well,” she says, “they told me he was dead. Wasn’t true for a couple months after, though. They shipped him off to a lab somewhere, I have no idea where, and used him and a bunch of other people from the park who were suffering the worst to try and develop some kind of treatment. I only found out because he was able to sneak out and call me from a pay phone someplace outside wherever they were keeping him. He told me everything and ever since then –“

She can’t go on, her voice cuts off in a sudden choke.

“I’m sorry,” I tell her, and Elena looks at me sharply. I meet her gaze evenly, then turn back to Erica. “I’m sorry that that happened, because you nor him deserved it. But coming down here, killing the Sergeant, with no plan, not even the –“

“If I don’t at least try to do something to stop everything from happening all over again,” Erica tells me, “I’d never forgive myself.” She pauses for a moment, starts to say something, then thinks better of it. Her voice is like broken glass. “Maybe I’m making a mistake but I’m going to do the right thing.”

There is a brief, brief silence that passes between us. Elena reaches over and hugs me, but while her lips are pressed close to my ear, she hisses to me that this isn’t our fucking fight and to follow her lead when she makes us get moving again, and as she says it I feel a looming terror break over me like a riptide and I look at her as she pulls away and want so terribly to tell her not to, whatever she’s thinking about doing to just not, don’t do anything stupid, if I lost her I – I –

And then Erica is gesturing at us with the gun to get up, saying that it’s time to get a move on, and as Marcus comes over, his slim little automatic clutched loosely in his hand, aimed at us but from the hip, and offers Elena a hand, she takes it wordlessly and pulls herself up, her hand leaving mine with only a tight, brief squeeze. Then once she’s up she shoves Marcus off-balance and before he can even think to do anything other than reach out reflexively to catch himself she’s got both hands on the gun and is struggling with him for it. “Elena!” I croak, starting to rise, just as Erica screams at her to stop, legs spread wide in a shooter’s stance, trying to get a clear shot at her. Marcus’s gun is pointing straight at me and I scream and throw myself to the side just a moment before it goes off and a bullet shrieks past and buries itself in the fleshy wall of the corridor behind me, just where I had been standing. While I try to scramble to my feet amid the dirt and muck on the floor I hear another gunshot, and then a body falls next to me face-down and starts writhing, and when I see Marcus staggering to his feet and realize who has fallen heavily, a string of curses bubbling from her blood-flecked lips, I scream Elena’s name over and over again, pressing my hands over the streaming hole in her side with desperation born of utter futility.

Continue with Part 24

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#mystery flesh pit #writing #writeblr #fiction #Novel #mystery #Michael Crichton #horror #caving #disaster

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