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Grinding as of enormous gears out of sync clogged her ears and squeezed the gray matter in her skull. Dust boiled down in an opaque swirl, burning her eyes and lungs. Frieda vanished in a noxious cloud. "Grab hold," A
Gradually the noise abated. The invisible freight train roaring down their canyon turned away, the rumble following it. Pressure lifted with the relative quiet. The sound of rocks skittering touched lightly on the ear like the burble of a mountain stream. A
Stillness reigned. A
"Whoa," she said. "They've still got us. We can let go. Easy." Frieda loosed her hold on A
Grinding began again, pulverizing A
A
Black on black, she struck with a violence that knocked thought aside, hammered her knee into her chest. She folded. Her helmet struck something with such force she could feel her brain skid in its pan. Her left shoulder slammed against the rocks. A faint pop reverberated up through tissues to her ear-a break or a dislocation. No pain, not yet. Air gusted from her chest, the wind knocked out of her. She'd not felt that paralyzing inability to inhale since she was a little girl and had fallen off the horizontal ladder on the playground of Johnstonville Elementary.
Through the panic of asphyxiation came a piercing realization: her earlier prayer for death was bogus. Regardless of where she'd landed, she wanted to stay alive. A line from Rosencrantz and Guildenstem Are Dead, a play her husband, Zach, had starred in Off-Broadway, reverberated in a voice she'd thought lost to her, something to the effect that life in a box was better than no life at all.
Air returned in a trickle, and A
Frieda's lamp had been extinguished as well. A
For half a minute A
A
Lamps began appearing, brown muted smudges that came and went in the haze like will-o'-the-wisps. Shouts and cries accompanied them, but none reached to where A
"Light," she shouted. "Get me some light down here."
"Hang on." Oscar Iverson's voice cut through the fog, and she was comforted. She could hear the scramble of feet and lines. A fine rain of dirt pattered down on her helmet.
"Frieda?" she ventured. There was no reply. Keeping her right hand clasped tightly on a projection of stone above her shoulder and moving carefully so as not to dislodge them should their perch be as precarious as she feared, A
Between her knees was the cool Plexiglas of Frieda's face shield. A
"Frieda?" A
"Frieda?" A
"Almost there." Looking up she could see the boots and butts of two cavers descending in a halo of murky light. When she looked down again the illumination had spread. In diffused sepia tones, like those of an old photograph, she could make out the barest outline of where they had come to rest. Katie's Pigtail bottomed out a foot or two below the wide shelf where the litter had landed. The Stokes was at an angle, propped in the ell where wall met floor. Lines tangled around it, some vanishing into the dark like snakes fleeing the scene. A