A Multi Leveled Planet

CHAPTER FOUR

THE MULTI LEVELED PLANET


CHAPTER FOUR



“My light is dimming,” April complained, breaking the long hours of silence.

“Yeah, mine too,” Jason admitted. “Let’s stop and rest, and see if there is anything left of our lunch. I'm hungry and we've been walking for hours.”

“I’m starved!” Kevin exclaimed before he pulled his backpack off his shoulders while looking around for a reasonably clean space to sit down. Though the wet floor seemed to be more composed of sand than mud, it still was a mess to sit in. Kevin grunted, then plopped down onto the wet stuff with a frown of complacency.

“Where are we going to sit?” April complained. “In the mud?”

“It’s not mud, April, its silt, fine sand mostly, and wet.” Shelby eased the weight off her her aching shoulders. Relaxing, she opened her backpack, searched inside and retrieved a zippered plastic sack that contained a pack of handiwipes. Something she never, she claimed, went without. “Need a wipe anyone?”

Between them the foursome found two drumsticks, one and a half tuna sandwiches, three hard boiled eggs, two oranges, and an apple. Shelby even produced a zipped bag of potato chips to share.

“Wait,” Jason stopped them before they took their first bite. “I think we’d better consider rationing what we have. How much water is left?”

Without a word, everyone produced their canisters of water. April shook hers, frowned, unscrewed it, and turned it upside down. Not a drip fell.

“Damn.” Her eyes grew wide as she realized what this meant. In the dull light, Jason could see her cheeks color. He wanted to erase her discomfort, but the reality of their position tightened his gut.

“Shelby?” he asked.

“Mine’s about half full.”
“I have a little more than half left,” Kevin frowned.

“Mine is just about three-quarters full.” Jason uncapped his canteen and took a sip. “I’ve noticed there’s been no pools where some of the water might have gathered. I wish… There’s no use wishing. What’s done is done.”

He turned to April. “Here, I’ll pour a little into your canteen but be careful with it, okay?”

“I’m sorry…” she mumbled.

“No,” He stopped her, laying his hand gently on her arm. “Don’t say that, April. None of us  dreamed with all that water at our feet, how water, or the lack of it would become a problem. “You haven’t done anything wrong.”

“Now what?” Shelby asked. “I’m not sure how much to eat.”

“Break the sandwich in two, which gives us three sandwiches, one meal.” He turned to Kevin. “I know it isn’t much but can you survive on one of those drumsticks? They're big drumsticks,” he chuckled a little, "Dad hit one of mom's prize Rhode Island Reds when he came tearing into the yard yesterday."

"They're as big as capons legs; I wonder how large one of the half-breasts would have been."

While they chewed what food they allowed themselves, Jason and Kevin kept glancing into the surrounding darkness. The cavern had turned into an uninteresting journey through muck. Other than the occasional noise of a zipper being opened or closed, or the rustle of clothing or equipment, the silence loomed thick and gloomy.

“Can I peel an orange and separate it into pieces for us?” April’s voice trembled in the dimness.

“Sure.” Jason swallowed the last of his half sandwich. “It will help clean our mouth and give us a little sugar energy.” Then, in an aside remarked, “We’d still better keep our trash in the packs. We’ve left enough tracks in case someone, sometime will follow us,” he swallowed before adding, “I hope.”

“Too bad this muck isn’t a bit drier; I could almost ignore it and go to sleep for a while.” Shelby tried to wipe her hands with the one handiwipe she allowed herself. He watched as she dug at the dirt from beneath her nails.

“I know, we’re getting tired and we’ve been walking for hours. I wonder if anyone has noticed the Bronco sitting alone on the side of the road. It’s dark out there by now. Hell.” He glanced at his watch. “It’s after midnight! Mom must be having kittens by now.”

“Midnight?” April groaned. “My folks are going to come positively unglued. I’ll bet they have half the police in the state looking for us by now.”

“Mine too,” Shelby wrung her grimy handiwipe and sighed as she glanced at her own watch. “At least my watch is still working, too.”

“How far does this room go?” April brushed a strand of silt-streaked hair away from her eyes. “I’ve trekked more than a dozen caves and I’ve never seen anything like this.”

“Yeah, and I’ll bet you’ve never seen artifacts in any of them, either.” Kevin zipped his backpack closed and pushed himself to his feet. “Or at least none not made by anyone other than an Indian.”

“Ouch…” Shelby, clambering to stand, shrugged her backpack’s straps over her shoulders. “My shoulders feel as though I have rubbed them with sandpaper. How come these packs get heavier even as we use our supplies?” She shrugged the weight higher.

Then, changing the subject, she asked, “Could this have been an underground complex or something, I wonder? You know, maybe some secret government complex? Maybe when the river started coming down they had to abandon it.”

“We entered through a hole in the top of a hillside,” Kevin reminded her.

“Yeah but, maybe there is another entrance, maybe a man-made one and we just have to reach the other side, find the stairs and climb out. Or… or maybe the remains of an old elevator rusted away at the bottom of the shaft. We could still get through it, maybe, or climb up it…”

“Quit thinking of ‘ifs’,” Jason stopped her. “We’ll find out when we get there, but can you imagine even the government building a complex this deep into the ground? What the expense of that would be?”

“Why should the expense stop them?” Kevin mused as they re-started their endless trek across the room. “The space programs all cost billions, the war against terrorism cost America trillions! And for that matter, how much did it cost to build that big defense base in Colorado? In the Rocky Mountains, no less. A lot of hard granite had to be carved out for that facility.”

“Hey I know,” Shelby added, “back in the early fifties everybody worried about planes dropping atom bombs on us, and in the sixties and seventies it was missiles. This may be their idea of the first hideout before Colorado.”

“If it wasn’t so far down…” Jason mused, as ideas raced though his head. “Back in the mid-twentieth century they didn’t have the technology to do this; at least I don’t think they did.”

“They walked on the moon!” April objected. “That wasn’t a primitive accomplishment, even now.”

“That wasn’t until the seventies, or late, late sixties,” Jason chuckled. “This is different. This is chiseling into rock, a long way down into rock. I don’t know, maybe you’re right, but… it just doesn’t feel right. I mean the idea that our government is responsible feels wrong, but someone had to do it.

“When we get topside again, they can come down and solve the mystery. Unless we finally run into a normal cave again, with stalagmites and stalactites, flow stone, and pools of water with real cave formations, I don’t want to come back.”

“Me neither,” Shelby agreed, fiddling with her shoulder straps.

“Hurting much?” Jason winced at her discomfort.

“They’re just aching. I think April’s are worse than mine.”

“I don’t know if mine are worse or not, but they are getting awful sore.” April tugged at her straps. Kevin didn’t say anything, but Jason noticed that he too seemed bothered by the straps. He learned long ago to pad his straps to avoid such problems, thanks to Dad.  So far his shoulders, though tired, didn’t hurt.

“Can you keep on for awhile? Maybe in a bit we’ll reach the far wall, or a higher and drier spot where we can stop and rest.” Jason glanced at his watch.

“Why do you keep watching the time?” Shelby asked.

“My watch has a compass on it.” Jason grinned in the dimming light. “See?” He held the back of his wrist for her to see. “I’m making sure we don’t walk in circles.”

“Smart!” Kevin laughed. “When we get out of here I’m going to get me one of those. May never need it, but I’ve been secretly worrying about going around in circles down here.”

“Yeah,” Shelby nodded. “I have too. It seems as if we've been going around and around in circles.”

“So we’re definitely going straight, right?”

“Right, Kev, we are.”

“How far have we walked, I wonder?” April sounded weary. Watching how each step took an effort, he feared for her. The wan light showed her drained features.

“I think we’ve walked for miles.” Jason tried to estimate the answer.

“So… if we’ve come several miles, and my feet feel like we’ve been hiking forever,” Shelby mused aloud as if she needed to chatter. “That would be another reason to doubt our government built this, right?”

“Right, that’s what I’ve been thinking. Still, who else could have afforded to do something like this? And since this has been the United States way before anything of modern technological was thought of…”

“Yeah,” Kevin stumbled for a second, before he continued. “But I…”

“You okay?”

“I think I’m getting a little tired. I know it wasn’t that long ago we grabbed a nap back there, but…”

“Not long? We’ve been in this cave for over twenty hours, and if you aren’t exhausted, I am.” Jason snorted, irritated with himself and with their circumstances. As the oldest you’d think…

“And there is still no dry place to stop,” April complained. “If we could just find a dry spot…”

“That’s it,” Shelby stopped suddenly. “I can’t see a thing. My battery is finished.” She looked at Jason; her voice trembled as it dropped to a whisper. “I’ve only got one left.”

“But you have your emergency candles, right? That’s one of our spelunker’s rules; always pack some candles just in case.”

“Well, yeah but… yeah!” Her voice rose excitedly, “I forgot, I have one of those little pumping flashlights. You know the kind...”

“I have one too,” Shelby laughed.

As it turned out, only the he and Kevin had not thought of making use of the little ‘fad’ flashlights everybody a few years ago had to have. Jason knew everyone felt the very real grab of fear in the pits of their stomachs. He’d held off changing his battery as long as possible, as had the others. Like Shelby, he slung his backpack off to search for his last battery.

“We might as well put the last batteries in, but let’s not use them just yet, except for one. That way we’ll have four times the amount of service from them, and you girls can use your little flashlights. I have to admit I wish I’d thought of throwing one in,  just in case… but I didn’t.”

“That makes sense, wish I’d of thought of it hours ago.” Kevin’s words hung in the still air, dripping with dismay.

A few moments later, with the new batteries installed, only Jason’s lit their way in a strong steady beam. The little ‘pump’ lights would need to be pumped every few minutes, never keeping their bright beams strong like the battery kind did. Still, they were light.

As they began their boring journey again, he noticed even his straps were beginning to chaff. He frowned, wondering how bad the others were. Concerned, he walked beside April and touched one of her straps. Like he feared, she jerked away in pain.

“That bad, huh?”

“I didn’t want to worry you.” She nodded. “I wish I’d thought of padding my straps like yours are.”

“I learned that back on my first trip to Carlsbad year’s ago, with my Dad. We took the long way through the caverns.” He chuckled in remembrance. “By the time we walked to the entrance, instead of riding the elevator, my straps literally rubbed the skin clean away. Dad wanted to take the elevator but I wanted to see everything there was to see. When we got back home, I sewed some pads onto my straps. I wasn’t about to go through that again. Anyway,” he finished with a sigh. “I never forgot the lesson.”

“That should be another one of our rules.” Kevin nodded to himself. “Never go into a cave without wearing padded shoulder straps.”

“My shoulders are only meat, now,” Shelby groaned, shifting her strap for the umpteenth time. Unseen in the dimness ,Shelby’s shirt was beginning to show stains.

“Hey everyone!” Kevin reached for Shelby’s arm, dragging her to a halt. “Look!”

“What is it?” April whispered.

“I think it’s the wall!” His sentence ended close to a shout close to joy, so great was his relief..

As one, all four of them found themselves jogging toward the end of the room. Sure enough, as they neared they could see in the light of the one headlamp, they were up against a wall, literally.

Cracks had traveled across the pitted remains, for that is what it seemed to be, the remains of a once perfect, man-made wall. But, Jason thought to himself, why a wall when limestone lay behind it? He ran his hand over the wall, feeling large brick-like objects obviously mortared together, no doubt the same as, or close to, what he would call ‘cement bricks’ for construction.

They chatted among themselves with renewed life. The floor wasn’t so smooth anymore; instead it was full of silt-covered humps, no doubt bits of wall. April with a whoop of hope, started jogging , the others after some protests, followed.

After nearly an hour of a deteriorating jog along the ruined rampart, they finally broke into an exhausted stagger. Without warning, April stumbled into Kevin and they both fell into a heap on the floor.

“I can’t move anymore,” she moaned.

“Where are you hurt?” Shelby, openly scared now, cried as she knelt beside them.

Jason, a little further along than the rest, realized something was wrong and he turned to glance back before skidding to a halt.

“What’s wrong?” His voice echoed across the muddy floor.

“They fell.” Shelby raised her voice in answer, “Kevin and…”
Before she could finish her explanation a familiar groan started up from deep beneath the earth. April screamed as Kevin threw his arms around her. Jason and Shelby ran to join them.

“Cover your heads!” Jason yelled at them, trying to keep his own arms above his skull. They should try to get away from the wall…
A terrible crash of broken debris sounded a good distance from them where they crouched.

“Come on,” Jason shouted, “let’s move back from the wall. It might break and come down on us…”

“No,” Kevin shouted back, “it’s the ceiling falling, not the wall. If we back away from its protection…”

“Okay,” Jason, understanding, agreed.

The floor buckled like a live thing beneath their feet. Then, as Jason poked his head up to try to see something in the dim, dust laden lamp light, he saw they had almost reached the corner of the room. Cracks in the far wall were opening even as he looked! Then he realized, he could see light between the cracks, which were widening with each second.

He ducked his head back down, covering it with his arms as more debris, some heavy by the sound of it, hit the floor and fell a bit too close to them for comfort. For long moments they were rained on by small chunks, and a lot of dirt and dust.

Even as the ground beneath began to stabilize, they found it hard to breathe. The dust from the fallen rock, or ceiling above them, was clogging off their air. Then, everything went from bad to worse, the wall crumbled with some of it landing on top of them.