Just lay me on the water. This story was published on January 18, 2024.
“Fuck.”
Hayden tore off his goggles. The wind clawed at his eyes.
“Pull off,” he shouted over the engine.
“What?”
Samuel had the accelerator pressed flat. Hayden jerked his arm and pointed.
Samuel looked up, then he braked hard and let them skid off into the grass. The engine idled like a sick animal.
“What?”
Samuel pulled his goggles down to his neck. The skin was clean and moist around his eyes. Dirt and wind had colored the rest of him red.
Hayden unbuckled his harness and twisted around to squint at the hills behind them. His blonde curls were stiff.
“We need to get around another way,” he shouted.
“What?”
Hayden turned and pointed.
“Get up to that ridge and pull us around on the right.”
“That’ll take us out east.”
“We can cut across the side of the utility easement. It backs up to the race.”
Samuel killed the engine. The air was quiet except for the mosquito whine of third place winding through the hills behind them.
“The track stops at I-54,” said Samuel.
“There’s a line through.”
“Man, what are you talking about?”
“Let’s just go. I can drive.”
“Fuck that.”
Samuel turned the key and downshifted while he slammed the gas, so their back wheels whipped around and they fishtailed out of the grass, the engine roaring revenge. Hayden grabbed onto the canopy.
They tore across the edge of the red desert at an angle. On this side of the hills, the spiney weeds were blue and gloomy and moaned for rain. Their hard edges plinked against the exhaust pipe.
“Come across the side,” Hayden shouted.
Samuel brought them around in a wide arc to clear the ridge and turned north, facing down miles of clear desert. El Paso’s khaki skyline pulled into view.
“We shouldn’t be this close,” Samuel shouted.
“What?”
“The race isn’t this close to the city.”
Hayden ignored him.
“We’re out-of-bounds,” Samuel shouted.
“Just stay on the easement.” Hayden pointed toward a telephone line that drooped across the desert toward the city. Samuel straightened out and cut toward it. Chunks of limestone popped and skidded under their wheels. Hayden pulled up his goggles.
Hayden woke up coughing. Hot blood was dripping over his lip. He spat, then moaned. He lifted his head and felt a spine pull out of his cheek with an elastic pop. He stretched his arms and bicycled his legs. His jeans were shredded along the side of his calf and pasted over with blood and dirt and sloughs of scraped skin. But it wasn’t running; no deep cuts. He rolled onto his hands and knees.
“Sam?” he shouted.
He stood up, shaking. There was no reply except the low breeze skating through the hills. Hayden limped and skidded toward their hobbled four-wheeler where it lay on its side. It was crushed against a shelf of limestone, its wheels bent out like broken knees.
“Sam,”
He looked in the seats; nothing. Samuel’s goggles were hanging on the plexiglass windshield where it had popped out of the frame. Hayden shouted again and started jogging awkwardly in his flapping pantleg. He made a circle around the four-wheeler. The land was empty. Cold panic grabbed at his gut.
Hayden ran back to the four-wheeler and reached under the upended driver’s seat to unclip the cellular phone from its dock. He pulled out the antenna as far as it would stretch and held it toward the city like a wand, punched a code into the keypad, then set the phone down on the rock shelf beside the four-wheeler.
Tears were stinging at his eyes. Hayden bit down hard on his cheek and tried to take a steady look at the landscape. He paused, then dropped to the ground and laid out prone to look below the limestone. It was black underneath.
“Sam?”
Hayden pushed himself under the rock. The dirt under his elbows sloughed with moisture.
“Sam, are you under here?” he shouted.
Hayden’s voice echoed. Fear split across the back of his neck, then he crawled, trying to keep his eyes alert to rodents or snakes coiled under the rock. A few feet ahead, his reaching hand slipped over the dirt and fell forward into empty air. He jerked it back and waited for a hiss or a rattle. Instead, he heard a soft whisper like air moving through grass, and he smelled water. Hayden shouted again, and his voice traveled beyond him, disappearing into the darkness. He held his hand out and felt the lip where the ground dropped away, then pulled himself forward and looked over.
There was a cavern. Cracks in the rock ceiling lit the chamber moonish gray, and its basin was filled with black water. The water’s surface was breaking gently against a strip of sand under the ledge. And there lay Samuel.
“Sam,” Hayden shouted.
Samuel was still. A dark stain was seeping out from under his legs, soaking through the sand. The air moved again, whispering.
Hayden shuffled backward clumsily, scraping his wrists on the dirt. When he pushed out from under the rock the sun stunned him, striking him blind while he tripped up to a stand. He fell forward against the four-wheeler and started tearing through the equipment piled between the seats. He pulled out a coil of nylon rope, tied one end around the canopy frame, tested the knot. Then he grabbed the first-aid bag from the emergency kit and got back on his belly, shuffling under the rock with the bag and the rope clenched tight in his hands.
At the edge of the cavern, he pushed the bag over the ledge and pulled the rope down after it in long armfuls, scraping his knuckles. Finally he took the rope in his hands and kicked his legs over the edge, hugging the lip with his elbows, and let himself slide down. He landed on the sand and almost fell backward into the water, then ran across the beach.
Samuel’s face was scraped raw on one side, exposing the edge of his orbital bone. His shoes were missing, and patches of his clothes were shredded open. His leg was bent across his body like an insect’s, and dark red blood poured rhythmically from a wound deep in his thigh.
Hayden started unbuttoning his shirt, then he dropped his hands and ran to the first-aid bag where it lay under the ledge. He pulled out a pair of shears, cut a long length from the rope, then fell over Samuel and wrapped a tourniquet around his leg, knotting the ends tight with his back. The blood pulsing from Samuel’s pantleg withdrew to a drip. Hayden went back to the first-aid bag and dumped it out on the sand. On his knees, he shook his hands through blister packs and useless ointments, looking for anything else to do. But there was nothing else. He was scared even to touch Samuel again, in case he disturbed some hidden nerve or broken vessel. Hayden fell back onto the sand. He tried to breathe.
The cavern stretched out before him. The black water that filled the basin wandered gently from one side to the other, the ripples on its surface emerging and disappearing in the rock depths under the cavern walls.
Hayden stared blankly. It was some kind of aquifer, or a cenote, but—he let his head roll back onto his shoulders. He looked at the rough ceiling, then drew his eyes down over the wall. He pushed himself to a stand and walked across the beach. The cavern wall was black and sheer, like polished marble. Hayden turned to look as far as he could see into the chamber. All the sides of the cavern were the same plates of obsidian rock, fixed in the limestone overhead and hung just over the water. Hayden turned to face the wall beside him; his reflection shone back dimly. He put out his hand and laid it on the rock, expecting glassy smoothness; but the surface was harsh. It clawed and stuck to his skin. He pulled his fingers back, then leaned in closer toward his reflection, straining his eyes in the gray light. The polished surface of the rock was etched with dense scratches, fine and complex as spiderwebs. Hayden dragged his fingers across it. He felt the lines in his skin catch and slide over the grooves in the rock.
A helicopter rumbled overhead; its muffled chop hammered into the cavern. Before Hayden could think, he was shouting.
“In here!”
His hands were raised up over his head, like he would signal the pilot from underground.
“In—”
His voice was drowned by the sound of air rushing over the water. The noise rose until it filled the chamber and hushed across Hayden’s ears. His breath caught in his throat, and he looked behind him over the lake. Its surface rolled and wandered, uninterrupted by any wind. And he hadn’t felt anything.
Hayden shivered. He looked down at Samuel, and then shouted toward the ledge.
“Is anyone up there?”
His voice echoed, there was silence, and then the sound like moving air rose again, like a breeze skating over the water. Faintly, almost too weakly for Hayden to hear, the whisper opened and hissed hollowly, and then closed, tapered, faded.
Hayden shivered again. He walked to the ledge and stood by the dangling rope, pointing his chin toward where he imagined the four-wheeler lay in the sunlight outside.
“Is anyone—is anyone there?”
The sound like moving air rose. It whispered, opened, hissed, hollowed, closed, tapered, faded. Hayden turned around, slowly. The sound was a word.
No.
Hayden ran to Samuel. He fell onto his knees and put his hand on Samuel’s face. He slapped him lightly, then harder.
“Wake up,” he said. Then he was shouting.
“Sam, wake up.”
Dread settled across Hayden’s back. He felt the whisper before he heard it, rushing over the water. Its hissing contour rose and fell, shaping itself in the echoes of the cavern.
He can’t hear.
Hayden stood and turned toward the water.
“Who’s there?” he shouted.
The whisper rose.
I am here.
As the words hissed, the obsidian walls of the chamber shimmered and fogged, then clarified. Hayden looked over to the wall beside him.
“Who’s there?” he shouted, loud enough to shake the cavern.
Hayden watched while limestone sand, white and fine as dust, fell from the cavern’s ceiling and tumbled down over the obsidian plate, catching and sifting in its intricate grooves until the sand poured in hairline falls into the water. Hayden turned to look into the chamber. Sand was pouring over each of the black plates. The dust’s trillion whispered splashes rose and moved and hissed, forming the words, again:
I am here.
Hayden stared into the black shadow where the water disappeared.
“What are you?” he said.
Dust danced over the walls. The whisper rose, changed, fell, but too quietly.
“What are you?” Hayden shouted, louder. His voice boomed in the rock chamber.
Sheets of the fine sand shook from the ceiling, and the walls fogged and shimmered. The whisper roared up from the water. The answer came:
Memory.
Hayden stood silent.
He heard a slapping sound like wet skin. He turned to see Samuel convulsing, kicking, thrashing his head back into the sand. His chin was pushed forward, and his teeth creaked, grinding into each other.
“Sam,”
Hayden fell over Samuel and tried to hold his shoulders down. Samuel threw his head up, cracking into Hayden’s nose and knocking him over. Hayden felt blood pour over his lips. He rolled onto his knees and crawled over to the first-aid bag, looked in the sand for the bottles he’d thrown out before.
Samuel doubled into himself, then heaved a terrible, gurgling moan. It echoed into the cavern and shook the rock. The water’s whisper rose.
Sit.
Hayden froze where he knelt. For a moment there was silence, except for the horrible thrashing of Samuel’s feet in the sand. Hayden shouted.
“What?”
The whisper rose and changed, faded.
Make him sit.
Hayden looked at the water. Then he stood and ran to Samuel, bent down and hooked his arms under Samuel’s shoulders. Hayden spat a ribbon of bloody mucus, then heaved Samuel back, pulling him to the side of the ledge. He laid Samuel’s shoulders against the rock, then pushed his hips back to force him upright. Samuel’s head rolled forward, his chin fell onto his chest. His kicking feet twisted, reached, then fell still. His breathing slowed.
Hayden sat down on the sand and coughed. The blood was thick around his mouth. He looked across the black water and watched it roll delicately under the rock, coming and going, disappearing under shadows.
Minutes passed. Another helicopter flew overhead, and an engine whined somewhere nearby. Hayden stood up. Soon there were men shouting outside. Their voices were anxious and muffled, and then they rang into the cavern from under the limestone shelf.
“In here, in here,” Hayden shouted.
The men’s voices mixed and echoed. Hayden heard them crawling under the rock; a flashlight lanced across the cavern’s ceiling.
“In here,” Hayden shouted again. “We’re in here.”
The water whispered.
Soon men’s hands were reaching over the ledge, then their faces, shouting. They were pushing over a stretcher, scraping it on the rock, fumbling it down to the sand on long canvas straps.
Hayden glanced at the water, its ripples coming, going.
Hayden shouted back to the men. He went to Samuel where he sat against the rock, heaved him away, began dragging him across the sand.
The water’s whisper rose, changed, fell.
No.
Hayden stopped. The men were shouting above.
“Why?” he shouted into the cavern.
He will fall.
Hayden laid Samuel down. There were black smears on the sand behind him. Blood was pouring from under Samuel’s tourniquet, soaking his clothes, painting him. His knees twisted; he seized again, weakly.
“I have to get him out,” Hayden shouted. The men were hanging their arms over the ledge, pulling at the straps, trying to balance the stretcher between them.
The whisper rose, hissed, changed.
He will bleed.
“He needs help,” Hayden shouted.
Bring him to me.
Hayden watched the black water. Its ripples wandered across the surface endlessly, from the rock, into the rock, forever. He squatted, hooked his arms under Samuel, heaved, dragged him down the sand, fighting Samuel’s kicking legs. He laid him down and turned him, so that Samuel’s leg and side and shredded face were covered in the warm water. Its surface lapped sweetly on the blood, quieting the wounds. Samuel’s breathing slowed.
The men were shouting. Hayden looked behind him, then turned.
“What n—”
A boiling gurgle; flashes of white, scaly flesh, red eyes, fins, teeth; and the cavefish ripped Samuel’s body apart, pulling it under.
The end.