Killing Hour - Lisa Gardner [53]
He stood and the world went black.
What? Where? He needed to . . . He must . . .
He was standing in an old sawmill. He had a girl with him. He was outside his van.
The world spun again, black void threatening as he wobbled a little on his feet and clutched frantically at his temples. What? Where? He needed to . . . He must . . .
He was standing in an old sawmill. That’s right. He had a girl with him . . . He rubbed his temples harder, trying to hold it together through a fresh burst of pain. Concentrate, man, focus. He was outside his van; he was wearing blue coveralls. He had his survival pack. The body board was already loaded with water; the girl was strapped on. Everything was all set.
Except that confused him even more. Why couldn’t he remember getting it all set? What had happened?
The black holes, he realized faintly. They came more and more frequently these days. The future and the past, both slipping through his fingers with frightening speed. He was an educated man. Someone who prided himself on intelligence, strength, and control. But he, too, was part of nature’s web. And nothing lived forever. Everything of beauty died.
Lately, he’d been dreaming so often of the flames.
The man reached down, attached his line to the body board, swung the rope over his shoulder and started to pull.
Seventeen minutes later, he had arrived at the opening of a small hole in the ground. Not many people would notice it, just another sinkhole in a state whose limestone foundation was more hole-riddled than Swiss cheese. This opening was special, though. The man had known it since his youth, and understood even back then its full potential.
First he had to fasten his rope around the thick trunk of a nearby tree, forming a rough belay. He stationed his feet for balance, then used the rope to carefully lower the body board down through the hole deep into the bowels of the earth. Ten minutes later, he heard the small splash of the board landing. He tied off one end of the rope around the tree, and rappelled down the other, also disappearing into the foul-smelling earth. He landed standing upright in knee-deep water. Fading light forty feet above. Endless darkness all around.
Most people never looked past the sawmill above. They didn’t understand that in Virginia, there was often a whole other ecosystem far below.
He turned on his headlight, identified the cavern’s narrow passageway to his right, and got on his hands and knees to crawl. The girl floated after him, the board’s rope tied once more to the belt at his waist.
Within minutes the passageway shrank. He extended his narrow frame, body flattening carefully into the oily stream of rancid water. He was protected in synthetic shrink-wrap; he still swore he could feel the water lapping away at his skin, sluicing off his cells, eroding him down to his very bones. Soon the water would get into his brain, and then he would have no hope left. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.
The smells were richer now. The stifling decay of layers and layers of bat guano, now melted into an oozing morass that squished around his hands and knees. The sharp, pungent odor of sewage and waste. The deeper, more menacing smell of death.
He moved slowly, feeling his way even with the light. Bats startled easily and you didn’t need a panicked, rabid creature flying at your face. Ditto the raccoons, though he’d be surprised if any of them could survive this passageway anymore. Most of what had once lived here had probably died years ago.
Now there was just this rancid water, corroding away the last of the limestone walls and spreading its slow, insidious death.
The body board bobbed along behind him, bumping him from time to time in the rear. And then, just when the ceiling was shrinking dangerously low, forcing his face closer and closer to that putrid water, the tunnel ended. The room opened up, and he and the girl spilled out into a vast, expansive cavern.
The man shot