Shifting

Twenty-Three

It was nearly noon by the time we found the cave mouth. During the trip, I kept noticing the Captain’s eyes crawling over Monika. It was more than just a few appreciative glances-I would have expected that from any guy. I recalled a bearded vagrant I’d seen on a subway in Chicago, his eyes had worked over every woman on the train. They’d been hungry eyes, and he’d ridden the subway for hours, like he lived on it. The Captain’s eyes were like that.

His stubble had been coming in further every day, few of us bothered to shave anymore, and there was plenty of white in his beard. I bet it had been a long time since he had been with a young sweet girl like Monika. Maybe he never had, not in his whole life. I bet he’d been frequenting backstreet whores for years up in Bloomington or down in Louisville on the weekends. That was more his speed.

I shook my head, trying to clear away such thoughts. I reminded myself that he’d killed the thing that had killed my dad and half the town along with him, and then there had been the matter of removing a thirty-foot tree-monster’s arm just yesterday. I owed him for that, we all did. But he did give off a strange feeling to us more homey types. I imagined vague suspicion had always been the reward others gave to real warriors, real killers. Everyone needed them when the chips were down, but we had a hard time trusting them completely. Especially the spooky ones like the Captain.

“Okay, I guess we split up here,” I said.

The Captain glanced at me, and then his eyes swung back to latch onto Monika. He stood there staring, leering really. I guessed he was waiting for us to enter the cave. I almost turned my back on him, but I had a dark thought, just then. He had that rifle. What if he just blew me away, had his way with Monika, and then headed back after dark with some story about us turning into werewolves? Maybe he figured we were crazy and doomed by going down there anyway. Maybe in his thoughts he was figuring he might as well finish us now, instead of waiting for us to come back and stalk him in the woods after we had changed. Who would ever know the difference? What policeman would come out and dig up the truth? There weren’t any police anymore. We were our own law.

For an awkward moment I stood there, all of us watching each other, and I didn’t know how to move things forward. Monika had big eyes. I wondered if she knew what I was thinking. She was pretty perceptive. If she was tracking my thoughts, she was playing it cool. Her hands were in her coat pockets, and I knew she had her pistol there. Maybe she had her hand on it with a white-knuckled grip, or maybe she didn’t. I didn’t think an American girl could have kept quiet at a moment like that, if she was having those thoughts. But this girl was different, more serious.

I opened my mouth, and then closed it again. I thought hard for one more second, and then I had it.

“Hey, I wanted to thank you.”

He startled and looked vaguely surprised.

“For yesterday, and for back when you got that meter man, the one that got my dad.” I said, speaking honestly. “I’ve always wanted to thank you for that. I owe you one, James.”

He looked at me for a moment, and I saw a change come over his face. “You’re welcome,” he said evenly.

I nodded and we parted ways. Monika and I went into the cave, while the Captain took his overland path. I wasn’t sure if had any reason to be, but I felt relieved to get into that cool, dark cave mouth.

When Monika and I were down in the dark hole I lifted the lantern and turned it up. She looked up into my face seriously. I opened her pocket and gently pulled her hand out of her coat. It was wrapped around the pistol grip, just as I had suspected.

“You were worried?” I asked in a whisper.

She nodded. Her lower lip quivered, and I thought for a second she might break down, but she didn’t.

“I had strange thoughts from him,” she said. I had noticed that her English became a little worse in stressful moments.

“He often gives people that feeling. He’s not a completely normal man. He fought in many wars. Bad wars.”

She looked at me in sudden understanding and nodded. I wondered what kind of soldiers she might have met in Eastern Europe. Russian veterans of Chechnya, perhaps?

“I think he is okay, he just worries people, especially now that the world is so different.”

“Okay,” she said, I could see her pulling herself together. “Let’s find the way out.”

“Do you like caves?” I asked.

“I don’t know. This is my first cave.”

I grunted as I got down on my hands and knees. “It opens up further down. There are some big rooms below us.”

She followed me as we wormed our way down into the earth. The cave had all the familiar smells I recalled from my teen years when I’d spent quite a bit of time in them. It smelled like fresh dirt and a dozen hinted-at flavors of old dung. The air was very cool and still. I’d only been in this cave a few times, but I remembered it had several exits. To get to them you had to work your way down a few twisting shafts, one that was steep, like a chimney, and then you would be in the big rooms. There were water pools down there and big rock formations, one of which looked like a petrified pipe organ.

Getting down the chimney was the hardest part. It seemed smaller than it had years ago, and I had a lantern instead of a strap-on headlight this time. The lantern clanked and scraped on the walls as I toted it down. I wondered what the hell I would do if I broke it down here. We’d brought flashlights, but of course they didn’t work. They were just dead weights in our pockets now, relics from a forgotten era.

“I wonder how long it will be before we forget about flashlights,” I mused aloud, straining as I lowered Monika down to the floor of the first big chamber.

“What do you mean?”

“If they never work again, years from now people might even forget their original purpose. They might think things like that were some kind of bizarre religious icon.”

Monika looked up at me when she had her feet planted firmly. She wore an expression of bewilderment mixed with a touch of fear. I worked at getting myself out of the chimney and down to the floor of the cave.

I shook my head, “Never mind, a silly thought.”

“No, no,” said a strange voice in the darkness of the cave. It wasn’t Monika, it wasn’t anyone we knew. In fact, the voice wasn’t even human. “Pray thee continue, it is a good question, a deep question, one the earth can answer.”

The voice was high-pitched and querulous, and upon hearing it, my mind conjured an image of a shirtless, skinny old man with every one of his stacked ribs showing between his sunken belly and knobby shoulders.

I fell out of the chimney and almost broke the lantern.