The girl didn’t move or speak and when Pieter called to her, she seemed to glide a little closer. Maybe she came from the airplane crash and had been wandering around lost all this time. But how did she get down so deep by herself—and in the dark? Pieter stood up and called to her again, in the few words of English he knew. “Hello, who are you please, you identify, yes?”

The girl shape leaped forward and crashed into Pieter with a wet smacking sound. The pain was excruciating as several dagger-like tusks pierced his flesh. He could not push himself away from the girl as she seemed covered in foul-smelling glue and now even his face was stuck to hers.

Panic set in as he was pulled by an unbelievable strength towards the edge of the rift. His last vision through his night scope was of being hoisted over the cliff edge and drawn down into the blackness where something large and liquid-sounding waited hungrily in the depths below.

Sixteen

Alex distributed the useful items and food among the remaining non-military team members. The long rifles he left behind; though he would have liked the extra firepower, he decided instead to travel light and fast. He also managed to recover one of the handguns which he gave to Aimee. Silex protested, but there was no way Alex would put a loaded firearm into that man’s hands. He figured that even though the guns fired hard impact rounds as opposed to the HAWCs’ safer compressed air armaments, the danger from the creature far outweighed the danger from ricochets.

Alex checked his watch; it was only twelve hours until the chopper arrived to evacuate them. He knew the pilot wouldn’t be expecting to hear from them until they were at or near the surface, and when they weren’t there he would wait several hours and then call it in. That meant they probably had around fifteen hours to make it back to the surface—a walk in the park, if there were no more cave-ins, and if they didn’t stop from fatigue or hit a dead-end or were attacked.

The team marched in silence through the dark for several hours until their cave abruptly ended in a jumble of fallen rocks.

Monica put her hands on her hips and looked over the pile of broken stone, nodding to herself as though she’d been expecting it. “It’s a boulder choke. In simple terms it means the passage has been filled by rocks in some ancient collapse.”

“And she’s the expert? Great choice—four hours walking for nothing. Now I guess we walk all the way back and take door number two.” Monica ignored Silex and clambered over the fallen boulders until she found what she was looking for at the very base of the pile.