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Caught in a terror she could neither run from nor outsmart, she waited, mind curiously blank, muscles knotted as her body readied for an impossible battle.
The bellowing rush sustained, not growing closer, not receding. Through it, she heard gasping: Laymon prying himself out of the belly crawl. With a start, she realized the roaring that had sounded like part of the earth itself was the beating of her own heart. She'd been told of the phenomenon, but didn't grasp how alien and frightening it would be. Hands clamped over her mouth, she fervently hoped the machinations of Laymon's own heart would mask the jungle-drumbeat of hers.
Furtive sounds penetrated the steady hum of blood in her ears. Whether he climbed toward her, moved on, or adjusted his pack, she couldn't tell. Inquisitive as a live thing, light streaked up the rock beyond her feet and across where the lead made a hard left creating the shelf on which she hid. The round of gold probed closer, Tinkerbell's evil twin. Cringing, she resisted an impulse to swat it away.
If the light sensed her presence, it had the good taste not to inform its master. Flickering, the gold slithered back down the rocky chute and was gone.
"A
Her name, shouted so close, startled her. Too tired for perfect discipline, muscles twitched. Gravel skittered down the rock.
Maybe Laymon heard it. Maybe he didn't.
Maybe he knew she'd caused it. Maybe he blamed the resonance of his own voice.
She waited for the noises that would set her again to ru
The evil Tinkerbell light never came back. Laymon's scritching and scraping grew fainter. A
Paralyzed by the idea, she stayed where she was. Utter darkness and exhaustion conspired against her. Morpheus wanted her. Minutes crept by, and she became less able to tell the difference between unconsciousness and sensory deprivation. Bodily aches and pains were apparently shared by both the waking and the sleeping states. She could not afford to fall asleep. The mental picture of waking alone padlocked in Lechuguilla spurred her to movement.
Switching on her light she waited a moment to see if it brought any response. It didn't. Two choices: go up, attempt to retrace Brent's trail, and emerge high on the wall above Tinker's Hell, or go back and take the more familiar trail Frieda had blazed. The first carried the risk of becoming lost, the second of stumbling into an ambush.
A
No Laymon.
No tape.
A
Sticking her head up into Tinker's required courage. Feeling slightly foolish, she reverted to the old cowboy trick of a hat on a stick. Lechuguilla having nothing in the way of vegetation, her arm took the place of the stick. She pushed her hard hat, lamp on, above floor level and rotated it as one would turn one's head. No shots were fired or stones thrown. She repeated the exercise with her head in the helmet. Near as the brownish orb could tell her, Laymon did not lie in wait, at least not in the immediate vicinity.
Several yards away, over more or less flat terrain, was a big friendly rock. A
She could wait Laymon out. If the falling pebble had tipped him off to the fact she was behind him, and he'd stopped short of the far wall, he could no more negotiate the remaining distance without giving himself away than she could. But if he'd made the exit, and, though A
Already she was missing her pack. Thirst was nagging. Each time she moved, the lacerations on her feet made themselves felt. Suffocating darkness seeped into the crevices in her brain. If this was a waiting game, Laymon won; A
The hat trick was the only one left in her depleted bag. She put it to use one more time. Having unbuckled her helmet, she turned on the lamp and held it away from her. Aimed at the light, Laymon's first shot should go wide. On some level she craved gunfire. It would let her know she wasn't alone.
The shot didn't come. She crossed Tinker's, drawing on reserves of strength she didn't know she had, climbing over an endless parade of table-sized boulders. Sweat no longer poured from her. Thirst was constant, and she chose not to think about it. From the way her feet hurt, she suspected she left bloody footprints. She didn't dwell too long on that either.
Reaching the far side, she rested, her lamp extinguished. There was no sound other than that of the life coursing through her body. Twice she turned on the lamp and waved her hard hat, fishing for Laymon. Nothing. Once she hollered his name but got only echoes in reply.
The conviction grew that he had heard the pebble, had known she was behind him; that he never intended to waste time lying in wait. He didn't need to. He only needed to leave her behind. The cave would do the rest. Numbing fear washed over her. She forced herself up on trembling legs. Caution was gone. Pushing as hard as her worn muscles would allow, she entered the twisting nest of passages that led from Tinker's to the relatively simple and open spaces beyond.
Her guess had been right. Laymon had already passed this way. The surveyor's tape she'd laid to mark the route was taken up. Not so the paranoid flags hidden at the junctions. As batteries dimmed and eyes fogged with weariness the flags became harder to find, but knowing they existed kept her from giving up. The last of these scraps was laid at the entrance to the area where she and Curt had stopped to seek the source of the crying.
Laymon couldn't have known it, but this was the one room in Lechuguilla with which A