Subterrestrial by McBride Michael

Author:McBride, Michael [McBride, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-12-28T18:30:00+00:00

SEVEN

I

Below Speranza Station

Bering Sea

Ten Miles Northwest of Wales, Alaska

65°47′ N, 169°01′ W

The ground shook Calder back to consciousness. She opened her eyes and immediately closed them again when she saw rocks streaking down from the earthen roof and striking all around her.

Mitchell covered her body with his. A dull thud and a groan. She wanted to ask if he was all right, but she couldn’t seem to coordinate her thoughts with the movement of her mouth. She tasted blood and wondered how it got there. Her head throbbed and she couldn’t seem to make the ground stop trembling.

Mitchell pushed himself up from on top of her and warily shined his handheld light through a haze of dust toward the ceiling, where entire chunks had fallen off to expose the brighter limestone underneath.

Her stomach clenched. She barely had time to turn her face before a bellyful of water burst from her lips and spattered the bare stone. She coughed so hard she couldn’t seem to catch her breath. She rolled away from Mitchell and vomited again.

“That was attractive,” he said.

Calder wasn’t prepared with a retort. She’d aspirated too much water and seemingly no amount of coughing would purge it from her lungs.

Mitchell’s light made the blood on his face shimmer.

“You’re hurt,” she whispered, and reached for his cheek.

“Just a scratch,” he said. “I’ll be fine. Or at least I will be if we can find our way out of this maze.”

They were in a small cavern, roughly the size of her bedroom back home. A stream vanished under the limestone ledge to her left. The water was so cold that she didn’t immediately recognize the fact that her numb lower legs and feet were still immersed. She dragged herself away from the water and fully onto dry land. The assault of pins and needles in her toes was instantaneous and brutal.

The fall.

The memory struck her with another bout of coughing, which barely brought up enough fluid to dampen her tongue. She remembered running away from something. A dark shape running low to the ground and with frightening speed. She remembered the waterfall. Mitchell’s hand slipping from hers. Grabbing for it only to find her feet rising above her head. A sensation of tumbling through vast space, both weightless and impossibly heavy. Impact with the water. Darkness. And the cold. The bitter cold that whisked her silently into oblivion, in which she was neither aware nor unaware, as though for several moments she had simply ceased to exist.

Mitchell crawled beside her.

“Your legs. The wetsuit ripped.”

He shined his beam onto her legs. The Thermoprene curled outward from lacerations weeping rich red blood. He opened his backpack and removed the medical kit. There was barely enough gauze to clean the wounds and stanch the flow of blood. The wounds weren’t as deep as she initially feared, but the stinging was ferocious.

“The rocks down there were sharp,” Mitchell said. “This stream can’t have been running through here for very long or it would have smoothed them.

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