35

As Joe got about halfway through the opening he’d created in what he hoped was the final blockage, the cave tunnel rumbled, and the rubble shifted enough to pin him where he was, but not crush him.
He struggled, wriggling every way he could to find some space, but there was nothing. Merideth yelled at him in the darkness from behind. Lucky for Joe, she had already thrown her Rolling Pin of Death through the hole, and with the flashlight in his hand—the only part of him still mobile—he looked at it lying on the ground in front of him. If she’d still had it, his legs would have been mincemeat by now.
Joe thanked whomever or whatever that he hadn’t been crushed and wasn’t being beaten right now, but he was immobilized from his shoulders to his thighs. He wasn’t uncomfortable and thought it conceivable to take a nap. Joe was pretty beat. If he was lucky, the pile would shift again and kill him in his sleep.
But Merideth pinched his calves, hard, and he was persuaded to squirm a little more, if only to escape her boney, long-nailed fingers. As he did, he could hear the distinct sound of his phone dialing someone, and then after a moment, he heard:
“911. What’s your emergency?”
Joe had accidentally butt-dialed 911 a number of years ago—it was while he and his mother made meth in another trailer, in another mobile home park. That didn’t go so well. This, though, could go better. He hoped.
“Joe, what the fuck was that?”
Joe didn’t move, said nothing.
“Joe?”
“Nothing, mom.”
“Hello? This is 911 dispatch. What is your emergency?”
“Goddamn it, Joe!”
Joe wished the rest of the cave would collapse altogether and crush them both.
36
Rupert stumbled half-blind over the giant tentacle and through the hole; the tentacle withdrew behind him. Jesus stood there—not having ventured too far in—with his cell phone out for light, looking stunned.
The chamber they’d entered was preposterously large. Rupert pulled a flashlight from his cross-body bag, though his mind grew hazy, and investigated. A few pairs of massive stalagmites and stalactites almost reached each other from top to bottom around the perimeter, but the center of the ceiling looked like packed earth. There couldn’t have been much earth between the ceiling of the cavern and the ground surface above—and the nearly-sheer walls made it unreachable. There was no way out.
In the very center of the cavern floor, dwarfed by the space around it, was a huge pile of what looked to be Native American remains—and quite a few of them, broken and mixed up with various relics. Rupert pointed the flashlight up to the earthen ceiling above the pile, and though the beam just barely reached—a few roots hung down, bones and artifacts jumbled among them.
The lab hadn’t been located under Leenda’s mound—this cavern was—and Native Americans had been depositing their dead here for centuries, not knowing they had fallen down into this chamber. Or maybe they did know. He had no idea.
Some of the stalactites that had formed here over thousands of years had been knocked to the floor and lay in massive, broken heaps. Rupert imagined the power of those falls and of them breaking apart—his thoughts jumped immediately to Leenda. This was how he’d felt when he’d heard her last message—a seismic heartbreak of geologic proportion.
The comparative light coloring where the breaks occurred made the events look rather recent.
The earthquake. Rupert looked to the Plant with No Name, whom he could now see the enormous scale of—it took up most of the cavern floor—and it seemed to shrug. Oops.
Leenda. He wanted to look at his watch, but felt lightheaded and his thoughts scattered. He looked all around and found artifacts everywhere, all over the floor of the cavern and presumably under the gigantic aloe. He wondered how they’d have gotten all over the place as they should, in theory, all be concentrated in and around the pile, when a crash came from the neighboring lab chamber they’d just vacated.
“Jesus,” Rupert said, somewhat drunkenly. “Bill looked pretty unstable in there.” As he said this, the crashing continued and became louder and more consistent—Bill was destroying the lab and screaming something about Derek Peterson and MeeMaw, and demanding to know what had happened to his Whackin’ Dick.
“I don’t know if we can go back that way,” Rupert finished, his thoughts boomeranging more erratically than his lagging mouth could keep up with.
As Jesus looked about to respond, he was cut off by Efunibi’s Tonto voice, echoing through the chamber, soaring over the background of Bill’s destruction.
“Kemo Sabe!”
Rupert ran the beam of his flashlight around and then up in the direction of the voice. It was, indeed, Efunibi, and worse, he had Leenda, gagged and terrified. Rupert’s heart leapt around inside his chest, panicking. But also . . .
She came! She actually showed up!
They stood on a small ledge not much wider or longer than an average bookshelf. Efunibi had deteriorated—he was pallid, but still wrinkled, like bleached leather. Most of his hair had fallen out, except for one ratty braid with a few equally ratty feathers that stuck out in all directions. His jacket had lost much of its fringe. All of his teeth appeared to be missing.
Desperate, Rupert looked around but there was nothing that could be of any use, and he grew foggier, his thoughts less coherent, from whatever the Plant with No Name had doused him with. Again. He saw nothing with which to fight Efunibi and no way to get to them anyway. And Efunibi rambled on about something, which made it difficult for Rupert to think.
“Efunibi come,” he went on, “heap big long time ago. Don’t even know how heap. Efunibi eternal. But him heap tired and want to go home. Holy Nagai Nagayoshi betray Efunibi. Efunibi have no purpose.”
Rupert was quickly losing his ability to rationalize anything, but he turned to the Plant with No Name, meaning to ask it what to do, could it help him get to Leenda? But the oversized aloe plant pulsated slower and slower—it seemed weakened and unable to do much. It might have been dying.
Rupert glimpsed Jesus in his peripheral running to some far area of the chamber. His friend picked something up, examined it for a second, and then yelled to Rupert:
“Hey, ese! Catch!”
Jesus threw something and despite feeling sloth-like, Rupert’s reflexes were quicker than he’d expected and he caught the object. It was an ancient Native American pipe, an exact match to the one from the PBS documentary so long ago from his childhood. The anxiety that memory had always produced welled inside Rupert—he waited for his lungs to shut down, his throat to constrict, for the pistachio and crème to flood his brain, the foul smell of a cheese fondu to fill his nostrils. The plaid.
But nothing came. The feeling simply dissipated, and as it did, everything around him went quiet. Everything but the whimpering pleas of Leenda against the gag and her struggle against Efunibi.
Rupert took a deep breath and reached into his shorts pocket for a lighter. He didn’t have one. He never carried one and he didn’t know why he checked.
“Hey!” Jesus yelled from near the Plant with No Name. He tossed Rupert a lighter, who, again, caught it with surprising agility. He brought the pipe to his mouth, feeling natural despite never having smoked anything in his life, and lit up, inhaling deep whatever was packed inside—some sort of magical plant, hundreds of years old, maybe meant for a marriage ceremony, or for war, or for a funeral—any of these purposes were appropriate here.
He exhaled more smoke than he thought a pair of human lungs could have taken in, and in a few seconds, the chamber brightened and the flashlight became superfluous.
Rupert saw one of the aloe tentacles move slowly, feebly, toward the side of the chamber, beneath the tiny ledge that held aloft Leenda and Efunibi, who was still lamenting something of which no one had any idea. Now, though, he attempted one of his ritualistic dances, still hanging on to Leenda’s arm. Her eyes grew wide with fear as she was pulled this way and that, her center of gravity shifting back and forth, afraid she wouldn’t be able to keep up, or that it would finally be too much for the ledge, and they would both plunge to their gruesome, splattery deaths.
When Rupert saw Leenda’s eyes, the strength of a thousand men surged through him, and not only that, a thousand men his size. He followed the path the tentacle indicated and found in the mystery illumination that a number of shallow and precariously-placed ledges ran all over up the walls of the chamber.
Rupert began to climb.
At first, Efunibi didn’t see, he was so wrapped up in his dance. But as Rupert closed the distance between them, Efunibi noticed, stopped dancing, and pulled Leenda closer to him.
Rupert felt around above him for other areas of purchase, scarcely able to keep his own large form on the ledge he’d landed on. There was nothing—nothing else to climb to, to get him closer to Leenda. He looked down, which one should never do, and realized he had entered what one pioneering rocket scientist of the 1920s referred to as “extreme altitudes.” He also saw that Bill had apparently finished demolishing the lab, had made it through the hole—undeterred by the attendance of a mammoth, sentient aloe plant—and was presently attacking Jesus with the broken dildo.
Jesus didn’t seem too troubled by it, which was reassuring.
Rupert looked up again, trying to maintain his balance, and studied the ledge the two stood on. It appeared to be too small for two people, but Leenda was closest to the wall—a lucky break. Efunibi glared down at him. Rupert braced himself for some sort of reaction, which arrived in the form of a ludicrous screech—like an inadequate, but enthusiastic imitation of an eagle—which even caused Leenda to pause her distress mode to glance at him like, what the fuck was that?
Without thinking, Rupert sprung into action, shrugging his cross-body bag from his neck and shoulder and adjusting its strap to its longest capacity. He then swung the cross-body bag up, and Leenda looked down at him, petrified, but with the same look of, what the fuck? Except it now referred to his idiotic strategy, of which he was also dubious. But there was no time.
Rupert tried several times, swinging his cross-body bag up over his head, and when it finally hooked over a crag in the ledge, he braced himself against the wall as best he could and pulled with everything he had—the strength of a thousand six-foot-ten-inch, 235-pound men—two-hundred thirty-five thousand pounds of power, or so he imagined with an equal amount of force. Bucket’s voice sounded in his head: It is all created by electrical impulses running through your nervous system. Which are, of course, generated by your mind. Your thoughts. In a fraction of a second, Rupert visualized the entire scene, start to finish, ending with Leenda safe in his arms—he willed the success of this stupid, reckless endeavor, honing his thoughts with laser-like accuracy.
“Bucket! Don’t fail me, you nasty, twisted bastard!”
A great crack echoed throughout the chamber and the ledge gave way, plummeting both Efunibi and Leenda toward the rocky, artifact-strewn floor below.
Rupert let go of the strap and reached out in time to catch Leenda by the wrist, which he then grabbed with both hands. This dislocated her shoulder and she screamed through the gag. The ledge wasn’t big enough for the two of them—and Rupert already counted as two people—so he pulled her close and held her tight. She moaned in pain, feet dangling.
As he watched his mentor-turned-nemesis fall, shitty-eagle screeching all the way, Efunibi began to glow—not pink, like the Whackin’ Dick, but a warm golden glow and grew brighter as he neared the floor. Seconds from impact, Efunibi’s now-radiant form made a lightning-fast U-turn upward and, turning into a white-hot bright spherical light, shot up through the center of the ceiling, through the burial mound, laughing, and without displacing a grain of soil.
He was gone.
It was quiet now, and the mysterious illumination of the chamber has disappeared. It was pitch black once more.
Then, a light.
A flashlight. Jesus pointed it up at them, confirming they were still there, and then around himself to show that he’d incapacitated Bill and now sat on him. Bill looked to be unconscious. Then the beam went back up to Rupert and Leenda.
“Holy shit, did you see that?” Jesus shouted up to them.
Rupert could barely hold the two of them in place, Leenda’s feet hung over the edge of the ledge. He was afraid it wouldn’t take their weight much longer.
“Um . . . Jesus,” Rupert called down. “I . . . I can’t get us down.”
As the words came from his mouth, Rupert saw a huge green and black aloe tentacle emerging from below, out of the darkness. It slowly, gingerly wrapped itself around both Leenda and Rupert, squeezed enough to hold them, then gently brought them to ground level.
The tentacle released them and Leenda sank to the ground, her knees too weak from the whole experience to stand, and from the pain in her shoulder. Jesus ran over to her.
Before she could decide whether to not she should trust this complete stranger after what had just happened, with expert torque, he snapped her humerus back into its socket. She screamed one last time, and then Jesus advised: “You’ll want to ice that later.”
Rupert had sat down next to her, but at least a foot away. If she was angry with him before, she must hate him now. In the dark, he focused his eyes on the dirt floor beneath his feet and said nothing. No one said anything for a few minutes. In the eerie silence, they recovered to the greatest extent that one could from such a bizarre, harrowing encounter in such a short period of time.
Then, the darkness of the chamber began to retreat again. Rupert looked behind him at the Plant with No Name. It glowed a faint green light, which became stronger with each pulse of the plant. Soon, as it grew brighter and brighter, its tentacles began to writhe, slowly at first, but gaining strength and a certain wildness. They all got up and moved away, Jesus dragging Bill’s limp body with him.
Now the plant began to shrink, smaller and smaller, but as it did, its glow grew stronger and stronger. The chamber lit up once again, like green daylight, and the plant worked to resume its normal size. As it did, Rupert looked around the cavern and thought something had changed, but before he could place it, the Plant with No Name grew so small, it winked into a little ball and shot up through the bottom of the burial mound, exactly as Efunibi had.
Again, it was dark and quiet.
“Well.” Jesus said after a moment. “That was some crazy-ass shit.”
Rupert flicked the flashlight on again and walked around the chamber a little, looking all over it, trying to place the change he thought he’d seen. Then it was obvious.
There were no Native American artifacts. No relics. No bones, nor sharks’ teeth. Rupert stood surrounded by the largest, filthiest collection of drug paraphernalia anyone’s ever seen in the lives. This place was a drug den for Junkies, and looked like it had been for a very long time. Jumbled up with Florida Fried Gator bags and other myriad take-away cartons, empty drink cups and plastic utensils, were needles, foil, empty lighters, broken pipes, and bent, blackened spoons. There were enough pipe fragments to have sent Rupert into a coma-inducing seizure—but he felt nothing. He felt calm and was amazed by it. He celebrated in his head for a moment, until he whipped around and caught Jesus in the light’s beam.
“What the hell did I smoke?”
Jesus shrugged and smiled.
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