"A mountain, a mountain. How did we even end up in a mountain? This is a hiking trip meant to go through the valley. We were never even supposed to enter Mount Salvo aside from a depot at the very top made for tourists to look at rocks. Unbelievable. Honestly. I guess it might have been useful if I were paying a little more attention during the club's outings and 'debates on rocks,' but come on, who has time for all that? Rocks and sediment are great and all but can you blame me for being a little more interested in what happens above ground?"
Scott had been on this one-man diatribe for well over three hours. Anna knew the exact amount of time because every few minutes she would check her watch. A few times she wondered if the seconds had somehow slipped backward and rolled back into previous minutes. Her only assurance this wasn't the case was despite Scott's constant yammering he never managed to repeat himself. If there was a silver lining to ever be found in her pile of shit life, it was at least that. She supposed that she had somewhat gotten dulled to the outspoken barrage of a person's consciouses due to living so close to Kitty. The difference was, at least Kitty talked about something that was interesting.
"Rocks, stones, minerals - what is even the difference? I guess the difference is minerals can be found in spring water and we need a certain amount of minerals in our diet. Then there is iron. It can't be the same kind of iron that's pulled out of the ground that we need to eat, right? It's a different type of iron."
At least Kitty talked about anything interesting. On the other hand, the constant talking filled the void in their otherwise utterly dark, utterly freezing existence. Over the past hour though, she was really starting to feel the dullness scraping away at her few remaining pockets of willpower. She was becoming more aware of how her legs felt like chunks of concrete somehow attached at the knee by broken glass, and the muscles in her neck and shoulders were now tightly wound piano wire under the weight of her pack. It took all she had to keep walking forward, one step in front of the next. She wasn't about to let her body fail her before Scott's did his. She noticed the limp in his left leg, the longer breaths he was starting to take between sentences and the occasional slight trips on the uneven floor. He was in just as bad a shape as her, despite his monologuing.
Though the trek had been long and just as unforgiving as the hike outside, it wasn't any worse either - which surprised Anna. When she first met up with the King of all Butt-Munchers, the chamber they found themselves in had outcroppings in all sorts of strange directions. Some snaked down and looked only accessible by crawling on your stomach, and others were so high you had to be a bat to get anywhere near them. Still, there were many man-size corridors like the ones they were in now. Mostly level, their corridor snaked around and branched off at regular intervals. None of it felt natural, but none of it looked new either. Every so often her wrist-mounted flashlight would uncover strange markings on walls that almost looked like pictures. Wispy stick-looking things were depicted and something she thought was a normal 'S' she now was beginning to think was a snake. She found figures drawn with what were clearly spears, then jagged diagonal lines she figured were mountains. It was all so haunting and yet strangely beautiful at the same time. The thought that, where she walked, were people like her thousands of years ago painting, cleaning a recent kill, or maybe little kids playing with little toys. She felt questions like, 'Who really were these people?' and 'Did they live long and happy lives living in a cave?' float across her mind. In her history books, it was all just dates and big boring important white guys, but then there was the little cave kid drawing a moose-looking thing on the wall in front of her. She couldn't help but wonder what that kid's life was like back in their time.
"Anna, are you listening?"
She blinked, her eyelids sticking to the balls of her eyes while she did. "What part? It was all just so goddamn fascinating, Scott." He grabbed her shoulder and it sent a shock through her system that was near enough to knock her over. "Wha-"
He pointed at something behind her. "Shine the light there."
Her body struggling with the new movement, Anna turned and planted her beam on a wall. "Cool. Another one of those. Can we go now?"
"Are you looking? It's made of wood."
Anna blinked again, and sure enough, she found he was right. Her mind was either too tired or reflexes too dull to initially realize it, but for the first time since falling down that hell-mouth, she was face to face with something other than rock. She walked up to it and touched it with her bare hand. Like everything else in the cave, the wood felt wet. "It's weirdly spongy."
"There is a puddle at its base."
Anna showed the light up at the cave ceiling and found large rocks looming over head whose soul support looked to be the wooden wall. "I… don't think we should hang out here."
"Agreed. That's a good sign though. Maybe-"
"Hey!" Anna peered through the gaps in the planks. "There is stuff beyond this wall. I can't see exactly, but it kinda looks like mining equipment."
"This rock though. I don't like it."
"Some miners probably put the wall there to support their mining shaft. We will probably find some other way around if we go along the right wall this time. Think you can manage that Mr Wall-hugger?"
"I think we can deviate just this one time."
"How kind of you." Anna turned back around to continue the way they were headed when her wrist light blinked. She brought the screen to her face. "5% battery left."
"You serious?"
"No, Scott. I love pulling your leg about my battery levels." She looked at him. "The hell is wrong with your watch anyway? Why are we just using mine?"
"It got busted up in my fall." He showed her his wrist and she saw his watch's screen was completely caved in. Still, the hole where the screen wasn't completely black, but was instead pulsing red with its few remaining LEDs.
"What's it doing?"
"I've been broadcasting an SOS to Xavier the whole time we've been down here. It's the only thing it's been good for."
"Doubt any signal is getting out from under a mountain of rock. Didn't even get a signal from my phone on the way out here."
"These work a little differently. It broadcasts to Cerebro and other watches. It pings where you are."
"Well," Anna waved her watch back and forth. "Like I said, I got jack squat, so it ain't working."
"Maybe it needs to bounce off a satellite or something. I'm not sure how it works exactly."
"Well, either way, we are going to need to find a replacement for my watch light soon or we are going to need to befriend some bats or something."
"Phone light?"
She dug in her backpack and produced her phone. "Not much better, 23%"
"23%? That's it? Didn't you charge the thing before we went on this trip?"
"Alright, take it easy. I charge it when the phone tells me to."
"Well, do you have a lighter or something?"
"I don't smoke."
Scott clutched his fists to the sides of his head. "Anna! You can use lighters for stuff other than cigarettes while camping. For stuff like fire and light, maybe?"
"Suck my left one, 'Survivor Man.' No one told me to pack a lighter, or rope, or TNT, or whatever else you need for this outdoor shit, alright? I packed a tent and clothes and some essentials."
"Yeah, essentials for camping I would hope! What 'essentials' did you deem worthy of your pack, exactly?"
"Shit like tampons, Scott. Is that what you want to hear? You want to hear that I'm bleeding like a stuffed pig while shitting in nature with you and a bunch of fucking rock nerds? Huh?"
Scott's cheeks colored. "Oh. Right. Sorry -"
"No, please - you wanted to ask. You wanna know my brand since you're dying of curiosity about every little detail of my pack?"
"No - no, that's -"
"Tampax."
"I'm walking away now."
"Uh-huh," Anna pulled out her phone, exchanged light sources between her wrist and the phone, then followed after Scott.
Following the length of the right wall, it didn't take long for the pair to uncover an extensive encampment encircled by roughly hewed wooden struts like the ones they had discovered only moments before. Though similar in shape and apparent purpose, these wooden supports seemed to have weathered time better than the first one they found. Within the camp's winding perimeter, they spotted several wooden benches covered in tools lacquered with dust and cobwebs, metal lockers and shelves, pick-axes, folded metal chairs, rolled canvas leaned against walls, and the list went on. Much of what lay before them looked like set-dressing for some long-abandoned Indiana Jones film.
"Jack-pot," Scott rushed to the site, his feet kicking up clouds of dusk. "Bring the light over!" Anna covered her mouth with her shirt and followed after him. She shined the light on the hardy wooden struts and the glistening segments of the cave wall between them. "Throughout the years, cavers and miners have visited these caverns looking for anything valuable," He pushed upturned chairs and misplaced fallen tools aside with the brunt of his foot. "If this is a mine shaft, that must mean there is a mine entrance, which means a way out"
Anna blinked her soggy eyes against the black clouds of muck Scott was kicking up as he went along. She must have been treading over a wooden floor from the creaking and snapping she felt underfoot. Just beyond the looming haze, she could see two long wooden pillars with thick cross struts keeping them together. Built within one of the pillars, she saw a little housing for a light bulb that was now missing. Scott approached the two pillars and put his hand on the mountain of rubble between them.
"I think this was once an elevator." He looked left and right, then knelt down. "Look at this, splinters."
Anna joined his side and found it a little easier to breathe closer to the ground. Sure enough, at the foot of the wooden pillars were not only a million splinters but twisted metal and several dozen rusty bolts and screws. "This thing got annihilated by those rocks."
Scott looked up and pounded his fist on one of the pillars. "The supports don't feel weak. They don't even feel wet like half the stuff in this cave does."
"Maybe the rocks came from someplace the pillars didn't support?"
"Maybe," Scott felt one of the splinters between his fingers. "The wood fragments don't feel wet either. The break looks fresher than anything down here too."
"Well, I have to imagine the cave-in happened after the mine shaft was abandoned."
"Of course, but the break seems almost new. Then there is all this loose dust in the air."
"That's because you were kicking it around!"
Scott looked around the cave, and around the shaft. "Do you smell that?"
Anna sniffed, "gunpowder?"
"Gunpowder."
Anna glanced back at the rubble. "Think whoever is screwing with us caved in this elevator shaft?"
"Probably aren't done playing with us and don't want the rats to leave the maze just yet."
"God… creepy." She curled her free hand and stuffed it under her armpit while she played her phone's light over their surroundings. She spotted little spiders resting in long wispy webs between wooden table legs and many multi-legged little 'things' crawling about the wooden floor behind them. "Whoever is behind this, they must be watching us too. How else would they have known to cave in the mine shaft?"
"I'm sure, but we can't waste time worrying about that now." He looked at her. "I'm about to drop dead tired and I'm sure you're feeling even worse after carrying the weight of that bag."
Anna sighed, her lungs stung as they filled with air. "We should stop for the night. But we still need to find some water. The canteen is almost dry. There is food too."
"Let me worry about that. Find a safe dry spot and set up that tent of yours. I'll scavenge around here and see if these miners left anything good behind."
"Don't you need a flashlight?"
"Yeah, give me your phone and use the juice you have left in your watch to set up camp."
Anna was too tired to argue. Instead, she handed over her phone, flipped the light back on her wrist, then struggled back to her feet. She said nothing as she drug her backpack behind her and kept walking till she stopped hearing the clattering of Scott pushing around boxes and opening chests behind her. She stopped at a spot at random, looked around for a few seconds, then opened her bag and pull out a heavy squat rectangular sack. She laid it on the ground and pulled the heavy-duty cord that secured the bag around its contents. The cord went loose and a myriad of loose black metal ribs and nylon canvas split out the newly appeared hole.
Had hunger not been pulling at her attention, she would have been surprised at the speed she was able to assemble the Tinker Toy puzzle from hell that was constructing a tent. It required the sort of focused mind only chess players in their prime or people about to pass from utter exhaustion could accomplish. Leaning solidly on the latter, Anna sat at the foot of her recent construct staring ahead, her surroundings and body completely smothered in darkness after she shut off her light to its conserve power.
She felt a strange sort of peace about the cave once she stopped moving. It was quiet but not overly so. There were little pitter-patters from water dripping into some puddle. She heard distant screeches from bats, that once spooked her, but now had become a strange sort of friend. It was one of the rare times when not a single thought crossed the threshold of her mind. She shut her eyes and found her breath. She followed it, feeling her chest rise and fall, and her battered muscles slowly unravel. Ororo would have been proud.
She didn't know why, she didn't know how, but at that moment she knew something had shifted in her environment. Her body, seemingly moving under its own power, rose and ignited the light on her wrist. She walked only a few steps from the camp when she saw it. On the cave floor before her was a pistol.
Her eyes dulled at the edges and blunt at the point, she knelt down and picked it up without a second thought. Keeping her finger off the trigger, like Logan taught her, she looked the gun over. She could tell even before she picked it up that it was a 9-millimeter handgun, but once it was in her hand she could tell it was something someone loved. It was easy to hold and had a satisfying weight to it. The grip was custom, it had semi-luminescent sights that were venom green and the whole thing smelt like gun oil. She checked the safety and then ejected the clip. Inside the magazine were bullets, but the bullet heads looked weirdly square and strange. Not like anything she had ever seen at least. She jammed the clip back into place and looked down the sights. Her finger desperately wanted to pull the trigger to feel the gun fire.
Her better senses returned to her, then she held the gun as far away from her as she could and looked at it like an alien. "Where the hell did something like this come from? We came from this way, I would have seen it. I would have -" She looked back in the direction of camp when she thought she heard Scott's voice. When only her own echo answer her, she clutched the gun close to her chest and bit her lip. She dared another look at the gun. The thing was strangely mesmerizing. She found her bare fingers running down the black chrome-plated shaft, then immediately pulled them away. She stood, rushed back to camp, and stuffed the thing away in her pack just in time to hear -
"Here? Really?"
Zipping the pistol tight in a pouch, she looked back out the mouth of the tent. "What?"
"What? Look at this place -" Scott gestured around, his arms loaded down with what appeared to be garbage. "There is hardly any room, there are passageways in front and behind us -"
"You wanna move?"
He sighed. "It's fine," then sat down on the ground cross-legged, and dropped his bounty. "The people here, they weren't miners, they were archaeologists." He rolled out a few rusted picks and funny-looking ropes along with a wrinkled leather-bound binder. "I'm not sure what all this is, but I know enough from the club that these are the sorts of excavation tools archaeologists use." He folded open the binder. "Then there is this. It looks like some sort of general field guide on the Mohawk and Mahican people that once lived in the valley a few thousand years ago. A lot of the text is faded and water damaged, but I thought it was interesting."
She looked from the book and then up to him. "Food - water?"
"That's something else you won't believe." Under all the rusted garbage, Scott produced three slick brown bags. "MREs"
"MREs? Like food army people eat in the field?"
"Yep. Not only that, look at the bag." He tossed her one and she near fumbled it.
"This looks brand new." She read the label. "Spaghetti"
"Guess our deranged babysitter doesn't want us to starve." He pulled out two canteens identical to Anna's from the pile. "Or go out from dehydration."
Anna stared at the canteens.
"Hey," Scott rested the MREs on the floor next to him. "You said you didn't have a lighter. You do still have those tampons right?"
"Yeah. Why do you wanna know, perv?"
"Tampons are made out of cotton, right?"
"That or something like it. Yeah, why?"
"If that's the case, it might be good tinder." He got on his knees, "do you have any batteries?"
"In my Game-Boy, but they're dead."
Scott pursed his lips. "How about your laser gun? Did you bring that?"
"Of course."
"Take that out and a couple of tampons, I have an idea on how to start a fire."
She did as instructed, uncovering a couple of tampons and her laser gun from her pack. By the time she handed them over he had produced a small pile of dry wood between them. He exposed the absorbent material of the tampon with her help, set it on the wood pile, then looked her gun over.
"What do you need that for? Don't you make your own lasers with your eyes?"
"Yeah, but they aren't heat related. They're more of a concussive blast than laser beams. It's more or less the same how your laser works. Besides, that's not the part I'm interested in." He grabbed her gun cleverly concealed as a 50s pool toy by the barrel, then smashed the handle on a rock till the plastic shattered into a million little pieces.
"What the fuck are you doing!"
He pried apart the exposed seam and pulled free a tiny black box with a couple of exposed wires. "The battery."
"At the cost of my laser gun, you fucking asshole! You could have at the very least asked before you completely destroyed my only means of defending myself!"
"You don't need to worry about that, Anna. I'm sure there are others at the mansion, and this battery is critical. Besides, you got me to watch your back and my eyes hit way harder than this thing ever could."
"Fuck you, Scott! You are such a self-absorbed tool! How fucking dare you break someone else's property and tell them 'not to worry about it.'"
"I think you'll have a hard time calling me a tool when you're warming your feet a fire." He got close to the cotton tinder, crossed the wires and a dazzling spark immediately ignited the tinder. He got close, blew into the fire, and stoked it with wood. Within a few minutes the fire was consuming the wood and Anna's body was presented with a warmth she hadn't felt since feeling the sun outside the cave.
She looked over the fire at him. "You're still an absolute tool."
"Whatever you say." He leaned over and grabbed the remaining two MREs "Chili Mac or Chili with beans. So many choices."
Anna stared at him. She could feel her scowl imprinting on her face. At that moment, the only thing she could think about was the comforting weight of that new pistol in her hand.