Loose ends

28.

The deeper she descended, the colder it got. Liz knew from her goose bumps and trembling arms that she must be several hundred feet beneath the surface. She was lost as well, not at all certain that she could ever find her way back uptop, even if she wasn't being hunted by a crazed, gun-wielding killer.

She could hear Morton rampaging down the sloping passages behind her, perhaps following her oozing footprints through the bewildering network of tunnels. She had hoped that her trick with the bats would have discouraged him for good, but instead it only seemed to have made him even more insanely driven to kill her and regain his merchandise. "Run, you alien slut! Run while you can!" he bellowed, completely out of his mind. "You can't get away!"The beam of his flashlight nipped at her heels, and Liz constantly had to shift directions to avoid giving him a clear line of fire. She darted left, right, then left again, taking any turn offered by this never-ending limestone labyrinth. I really have become a mouse in a maze, she realized, remembering what she had written in her journal many hours ago. According to her watch, it was almost five p.m., which meant that Morton had been chasing her through the uncharted caverns for at least an hour and forty-five minutes. How much longer can I keep this up? she thought, exhausted and scared. Or do I have to keep on running through these endless catacombs forever? Max's palm print blazed upon her bare stomach, its phosphorescent radiance warning her right before she ran over the edge of a dangerous subterranean cliff. Yikes, Liz thought. That was close. No helpful guardrails protected travelers from the sudden drop-off, whose ultimate depth Iiz couldn't even begin to guess. The yawning abyss stretched before her farther than her meager light could penetrate. Looking both left and right, Iiz was dismayed to discover that the only way remaining to her appeared to be a narrow ledge running along the length of the chasm, at the base of a towering wall of petrified limestone draperies. The ledge was maybe a foot wide at best, making it extremely risky to venture out onto.

She looked back quickly over her shoulder, hoping she could still backtrack to a more promising escape route. In horror, she saw instead the darting beam of Morton's flashlight. He was only minutes behind her! There was no time to look for another path, nowhere else to go. Swallowing hard, her back pressed tightly against the overlapping limestone drapes, Liz eased onto the ledge, trying with all her might not to look down. The darkness concealing the height of the chasm was a blessing, sparing her from vertigo, as, facing the abyss, she inched along the ledge, the tips of her sneakers actually extending an inch past the brink of the precipice. She felt like some silent-movie comedian climbing around outside the top windows of a twenty-story skyscraper, except that there was nothing at all humorous about her dire situation. Don't look down, she warned herself. Short, fearful breaths misted before her lips in the chilly subterranean atmosphere. Even if you can't see anything, don't look down! Mortons cowboy boots pounded the floor of an adjacent tunnel. "I'm getting closer!" he threatened loudly. He sounded practically just around the corner. "I can smell your fear, you glowing freak!"Liz looked down at her luminous belly, wondering if she dared cover her only available source of light. I guess it's too much to hope for, she thought bleakly, that Morton will accidently fall over the edge of the cliff. Alas, the batteries in his flashlight still seemed to have plenty of juice in them.

Creeping sideways along the narrow sftelf, with Morton closing in and no place else to go, she experienced a brief surge of hope as the ledge eventually widened beneath her feet, so that she could actually face forward witnout toppling over the brink, thus allowing her to flee faster and less gingerly. Her relief was short-lived, however, when she abruptly ran into a dead end straight ahead.

"Oh my God," she whispered. Her precarious trek along the ledge had led her only to a couch-sized limestone balcony overlooking the bottomless crevasse. Walls of solid rock blocked her path on her left and to the front, while the deadly precipice dropped away on her right. She was trapped, with no way out except the way she came. What do I do now? she despaired. I've run out ojcavel "Liz!"The unmapped caverns were a labyrinthine network of detours and false trails. In theory, it should have been impossible to track a missing person through all these convoluted tunnels, yet Max intuitively sensed that he was on the right course. He could feel Liz's presence in the dank catacombs, the very molecules of the air seemed to vibrate with the lingering reverberations of her recent passage. He knew that she had tread the exact same path he was taking now, and not very long ago.

He also knew that she was in terrible danger. The silver nimbus around his left hand, the same hand that had once brought Liz back from the verge of death, flared brighter than it ever had before, as if urging him onward to ever greater speed. Through some sort of subliminal psychic link, he felt her raw terror and hopeless desperation as though they were his own. At least she's still alive, he thought emphatically, hanging onto that conviction as he descended deeper and deeper into the underworld. But for how long? A bullet hole defacing the wall of one limestone corridor proved that he was following in his quarry's footsteps, as well as confirming that Joe Morton was indeed armed and dangerous. Max gulped apprehensively, but did not slow his pursuit of the vicious killer and his captive. Squeezing through an unnervingly tight fissure in the Earth, he entered a sizable grotto that reeked like an animal's lair. His lambent hand illuminated an empty chamber whose floor was literally carpeted in excrement. This must be where all those bats came from, he realized. Glancing up, he saw that a handful of winged mammals, perhaps less excitable than their fellows, still hung upside-down from the ceiling. As before, he couldn't help wondering-and worrying-what had frightened all those other bats.

Morton's gunshots? Hurrying across the grotto, he found disturbing evidence of recent violence. Fresh bloodstains mingled with the accumulated bat dung, leading across the sludgy floor to a darkly opaque exit at the bottom of a slippery slope. Did the crimson stains come from Liz, he wondered, or from Morton? The sight of small, muddy footprints, proceeding rapidly away from the bat cave gave him renewed hope that Liz was still unharmed. Even better, the trail of bloodstains seemed to accompany Mortons larger bootprints more than they did Liz's much more petite tracks. Had Liz somehow managed to injure Morton? Good for you, Max thought.

The spilled blood, along with the dual sets of footprints, left no doubt as to which way to go. With his incandescent hand held aloft, he followed the clues that Morton and Liz had inadvertently left for him, which led farther downward, deep into die bowels of a planet he didn't even belong on.

He could no longer hear Michael and the rest behind him. Lacking his special connection to Liz, they must have been slowed or stymied by the cavern's many twists and turns. Fine, he decided. He would deal with Morton alone, one way or another.

"Liz!" he shouted again, throwing caution to the wind. He knew he was sacrificing the element of surprise, but that couldn't be helped; he had to let Liz know that she wasn't alone in this hellish underworld. "Hang on, Liz!" he cried, his feet racing over the trail of drying blood and muck. "Don't give up! I'm almost there!" The light from his hand was almost blinding.

Cornered! Unable to run any farther, backed against the wall, with solid rock on one side of her and a gaping chasm on the other, Liz held her breath as she heard Joe Morton's relentless footsteps drawing nearer. Now she cowered in total blackness, having done what she could to hide the shining fingers emblazoned on her flesh. In her heart, however^ she knew that the darkness alone wouldn't be enough.

Indeed, only minutes later, a shaft of light pierced the absolute blackness, advancing to the very brink of the precipice-and beyond. "Whoa!" Morton exclaimed, taken aback by the sight of the yawning crevasse. "That step's a doozy!" He stomped up to the edge of the underground cliff, then swept the surrounding area with his flashlight.

It took him less than a moment to locate Liz, crouched upon the limestone balcony at the other side of the rocky ledge. The merciless spotlight showed him an exhausted young woman with nowhere to flee. Realizing diat the moment of truth could no longer be avoided, she rose to her feet unsteadily, resolved to face her persecutor, the assailant who had haunted her traumatized psyche, once and for all. "That's right," she said as defiantly as she could, wishing she could manage as withering a remark or glance as Maria or Isabel surely could in her place. "You've found me. Now what?"What now? You want to know what now?" His voice, already hoarse from filling the caverns with his barbaric shouting, was so clotted with murderous hatred that it barely sounded human. "Look what you did to me, you witch! Look!"He turned the flash on himself, revealing a face shredded by dozens of bloody bites and scratches. His thinning hair was askew like a madman's, while loose flaps of reddened skin hung off his torn and ravaged scalp. Crimson stains splattered his collar and shirt, making him look like a homicidal psycho straight out of one of those gory slasher movies Kyle was always renting. "Thought you were pretty cute with that bat trick, didnt you," he snarled, "Take a good look, you outer-space freak! Look what you did to me!"His bulging, bloodshot eyes glared at her with more pure malice than she had ever seen from a human being, or even a Skin, before. This wasn't about the "merchandise" anymore, she realized with a chill. It wasn't even about whether or not she was really an alien. This was about making her pay in blood for the bats and everything else.

"What about what you did to Lieutenant Ramirez?" she challenged him. "What about Okada, and that biker my friend saw you kill in that alley?" She hurled two years of suppressed trauma back at his mutilated face. "What about what you did to me that day in the Crashdown Cafe! You almost killed me, you slimy bastard!"Morton spat contemptuously into the chasm. Blood or tobacco, Liz couldn't tell. "So?" he said callously. The recitation of his victims, even the one she could not possibly have known about, did nothing to dim the predatory bloodlust in his eyes. "Hell, you're not even a person, Tess."My name is Liz," she said. "Liz Parker. And a lot more people care about me than anyone ever will about you."Whatever," Morton muttered, unimpressed. He raised his semi-automatic and aimed it straight at Liz. "Time to finish what I started at that stupid diner."The gun fired, the boom resounding in Liz's ears, and she felt the bullet strike her below the ribs, just like it had two years ago. This time, however, the lethal projectile bounced off the flexible silver foil that she had wrapped around her midsection, underneath her blouse. (In his pain and fury, Morton had never noticed that the glowing handprint was no longer visible.) Unable to pierce the miracle metal, the bullet ricocheted back at Morton, winging him in the right shoulder. "Arrgh!" he shouted, his handgun flying from his fingers into the chasm beside him, falling for several seconds before Liz heard it strike the bottom hundreds of feet below. "What-?" he grunted, clutching his wounded shoulder. "How did you-?"Thanks for the merchandise," she said, flashing open her blouse to give him a glimpse of the silver foil girdling her waist. The shocked look on his face was almost worth all that she had endured since bumping into Morton in another cavern the day before. "This stuff really is worth everything you paid for it."You-!" He staggered toward the ledge, his good arm reaching out for her, his bloody fingers clutching spasti-cally, as though they couldn't wait to choke the life out of her. Liz backed against the cool limestone wall behind her, suddenly afraid that the injured gunman still possessed the strength and the ferocity to kill her with his bare hands. "That belongs to me!" he howled, saliva dripping from the corner of his mouth. Heedless of the fatal drop awaiting him if he slipped, Morton dragged himself onto the ledge and began inching inexorably toward Liz. "I'll take my merchandise from your cold, lifeless body if have to," he vowed, "or even if I don't!"Liz saw her end approaching. It was ironic; in the end, a crimson handprint around her throat would trump the silver handprint that had saved her once before. Good-bye, Max, she thought. I always loved you.

"Liz!"Max's voice rang out in the cavern as he came racing out a tunnel, holding up a glowing hand. His unexpected appearance startled Morton, who pivoted in surprise, losing his balance on the narrow ledge. "Who the hell are you?" he blurted, then toppled over the brink.

His falling scream terminated in a final, bone-crushing thud, many long seconds later. Then silence.

"Liz!" As quickly as he could, Max crossed the ledge and took her in his arms. She could feel his body shaking with emotion. "Oh my God, Liz, are you all right?"Yes," she said truthfully. She had stared her worst nightmare in the face, and come out of it alive and well and exorcised, finally, of a lingering demon. Beneath the lifesaving silver foil, her stomach tingled for an instant, and she knew intuitively what had occurred. Pulling away from Max's comforting embrace, just long enough to confirm what she had already guessed, she peeled away the silver wrap, revealing smooth, unblemished flesh underneath.

The glowing handprint was gone, this time for good.