A hazmat suit landed loudly at his feet.

* * *

Fully suited up, the team made their way into the chasm, steadying themselves on guide ropes that had been set up for the rescue operations. Their flashlights did little to dispel the darkness as they entered a cavern descending steeply into the earth. The sound of his own breathing echoed hollowly inside Serizawa’s protective hood, which felt heavy and unwieldy. The weight of the suit, and his limited visibility, did not make the downward trek any easier.

Keeping one hand on the guide rope, he held the radiation sensor out before him. The clacking was nonstop now, the needle pegging the dial. Serizawa couldn’t help wondering about the quality and integrity of his hazmat gear. He suspected that Graham and the others were, too. None of them wanted to end up like those wretched souls in the triage center.

While Serizawa monitored the radiation levels, Graham documented the expedition with her digital camera. Periodic flashes lit up the cavern’s murky interior, exposing fractured stone walls and twisted metal debris. She gasped as a flash revealed a lifeless human hand extending from the rubble. Flashlight beams swung toward the hand, which belonged to a bloated corpse sprawled upon the rocks. A contorted face was frozen in an agonized rictus. Cloudy eyes gazed sightlessly into oblivion.

“They sent another fifty men down here to search for survivors,” Boyd explained, his voice muffled by his protective breathing apparatus. “Half the rescuers never made it back up, they were too weak.”

Serizawa did the calculations. That was over sixty-five fatalities so far, not including the doomed and dying men they had just left behind in the triage center. The death count was mounting by the moment and they hadn’t even confirmed the cause yet. He feared, however, that this was indeed far more than just a tragic mining accident.

Graham’s camera flashed again and again, finding additional bodies scattered in heaps through the cavern. Still more valiant rescue workers, Serizawa realized, who had perished before making it back to the surface. He admired their courage even as he mourned their sacrifice.

Squinting in the shadows, he looked away from the plentiful dead and studied his surroundings. Each flash from Graham’s camera offered a glimpse of roughly textured cavern walls and oddly curved calcite formations all around them. It was like exploring the interior of some alien moon or world fresh from the dawn of its creation. The rich, green splendor of the Philippine rain forest seemed very far away.

A work crew from the mine, drafted into service by Boyd, set up globe lights around the spacious interior of the cavern. Serizawa and Graham both gasped out loud as the first of the lights flared to life, giving them a better look at the scene in whole. Thick bands of a porous, calcite-like material ribbed the grotto.