Chapter 39
I can do this, Allie told herself. I’ve lasted this long.
I can survive this, too.
Forty feet up, she saw light.
Faint at first, but it slowly grew into a blue-white glare. Shadows swirled across stalactites as the light source crept closer
to the Chimney’s edge, just out of view. Then soft noises echoed from above: a pack unzipping, rope uncoiling, the click of
descender bars. Allie listened to the rustle of gear and waited for her former best friend to say something before she began
her descent, to justify her actions or even apologize, and it took a few heart-sinking moments to accept that Tess had nothing
to say to her at all.
This fight would be different—and so much harder—than the clownish and sadistic man she’d shot in the throat. While her enemy
prepared above, Allie would prepare below.
I can do this.
First, she needed a weapon. The male killer’s .45 was slide-locked empty. Her survival knife was long gone. She searched loose
cobble to find a rock the size of a baseball—light enough to swing, heavy enough to crack bone. It would have to do.
I can do this.
She kicked off her boots, waterlogged and heavy. She would move faster on bare feet. She peeled off her harness and slathered her arms with handfuls of cold mud. It would camouflage her, make her slippery in a hand-to-hand grapple.
I can do this.
Surprise was her best advantage. She tossed her glowstick into the pool—it would only give away her position—and concealed
herself behind an overhang of dripstone. She nestled into its contours comfortably, until blackness shrouded her.
The glowstick projected watery ripples across the chamber, a dizzying aurora of green light. She steadied her breaths and
closed her eyes, letting them adjust to the dark. She listened to Tess rappel from the ledge above using the same single-rope
technique they’d practiced as teenagers and swallowed a solid mass of emotions—shock and betrayal and heartbreak and rage—all
at once. She didn’t know what to feel first, so she strangely felt nothing at all.
Those familiar sounds crept closer: the soft jingle of a carabiner, rope feeding through stainless steel bars, wet boots wall-walking
down rock.
And halfway down: a jarring metallic gunshot.
Allie heard a heavy splash and the slap of limp rope. She already knew Tess’s fall was nonfatal, broken by the pool, but all
the same, she felt a jolt of adrenaline: the last anchor bolt up in Razor Alley had finally broken. Its corroded, century-old
hook had shattered under the strain like she’d known it would, and whatever happened next, Tess and Allie were now trapped
inside the lower chamber together.
Both were fully committed.
All right, sesame seed.
I have a few things I need to get off my chest.
First, you, my little friend, must be the unluckiest clump of cells in the entire universe. And I’m not just referring to
our current situation.
You had the extreme misfortune of coalescing into existence inside me, Alma Lynne Merritt.
Me, of nearly two billion fertile women on Earth.
Whatever maternal instinct is, I don’t have it.
I’m not nurturing. I’m not patient. I have zero interest in wiping crap out of an infant’s butt crack or building a toddler bed or waking up early in the morning to pack a school lunch.
I’ve never, ever wanted to make a family, and to be brutally honest, I’ve wanted to punch most of the children I’ve met.
Let’s face it, little guy or gal, you and I were never going to work.
Second, I just want to make this perfectly clear, so you don’t get your hopes up. Whatever happens in the next few minutes,
if I survive this fight, if I somehow make it to the surface—I’m still killing you on Monday.
I already made the appointment.
Sorry, sesame seed.
Nothing personal.
Allie flattened her body against cold rock.
Her enemy’s LED flashlight scanned the walls of runny dripstone, much closer and brighter now, but it still couldn’t see everything.
It would need to search every blind corner and check every shadowed space. And in one of them, a crouched and mud-slathered
Allie waited with a rock clenched in her fist, ready to swing.
As the light crept closer, she felt a tickle atop her bare shoulder: finely haired legs creeping one step at a time.
They climbed her throat.
Her chin.
Brushing the spider away would risk making a sound, so Allie relaxed her muscles and let it crawl up her cheek, tickling her
eyelashes, and then onto the wall behind her.
This was her world, not Tess’s. Since she was nine years old, she’d spent cumulative weeks of her life underground, and she was such a natural part of this landscape that its blind denizens didn’t even notice her.
The cave spider didn’t even realize it was walking over a human face.
A dead man’s voice echoed in her mind, a droning loop.
The man downstairs, he waits and he waits.
This time, the lyrics emboldened her. Allie had the element of surprise now, and she only needed to wait for her moment to
strike.
As the LED light crept closer, it illuminated the glistening floor, almost touching Allie’s bare toes. She tucked them in
and pressed herself lower, her body aching and tense. Rock textures lit up around her—mineral grays, egg-yolk yellows, rust
reds, glistening streams of calcium carbonate poured like molten slag. Eye-wateringly bright now, the light infiltrated every
crack and crevice, and Allie’s hiding place shrank to a sliver of darkness.
No noises now. She held her breath.
The light stopped a few feet away, hovering just barely out of view. She knew Tess was standing just around the formation’s
edge, almost close enough to touch. She could hear the woman’s breaths, the flex of her harness, the water dripping off her
drenched clothes. One more step and they’d be eye to eye—and Allie would swing her rock.
It was almost over.
Almost.
With her lungs in her throat, Allie waited for that final step.
Instead, the LED light snapped away. The woman’s footsteps retreated. The light source raced back to the base of the Chimney,
leaving Allie alone in the dark. She struggled to process this. Something had just suddenly changed, but what?
Then under her own heartbeat she heard it, too. A faraway echo off wet limestone, so faint and muffled that she’d mistaken it for another layer of the cave’s ambience. It could have been there unnoticed for minutes, a low and throaty rumble, like a predator’s growl.
Every cave has a Minotaur, Ethan used to joke, but she knew this was something worse.