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I set my satchel down on the ground. And then, one by one, I began to remove the bags of blood.

Asher

I despised caves.

Try wedging your body down half a mile of the blackest, putridest, most kinked-up asshole of a crawlspace you can imagine.

Of course the anomaly had to be down here.

Of course.

It couldn’t have been in a meadow or on a beach or ontopof a mountain.

No. It had to be half a mile under it.

Arms pinned beneath me, I crawled deeper into the cave, toiling under the weight of my gear. The tiny space amplified the clinking of my clips, my raspy breath, the scuff of my gear on rock. Deep breath. Focus on the breath.In... out... in...

Silty mud splashed into my mouth and I coughed at the acrid tang. As I did so, my helmet banged the ceiling, reminding me I had zero wiggle room.

“Fuck you, cave.” I muscled another foot, teeth gritted against a wave of sickening claustrophobia.

Caving alone.

Not a good idea. But I trustedno onewith what I was about to uncover.

The cave walls shrank around me until they cut into my shoulders, halting my progress.

Wedged in like a cork.

The light from my headlamp illuminated a small, jagged opening to pitch blackness, out of which whistled cold, dank air. Breathing heavily, I computed just what inhuman contortion I would need to adopt to fit, and I didn’t like it.

At least I liked the cold.

Topside, the West Virginia backcountry around White Sulfur Springs would be dripping with the muggy late-summer heat.

I unclipped my pack, so I could pull it through after me, and angled my shoulders sideways to squeeze through the chokepoint. It smelled different on the other side. Colder, more cavernous, a hint of ash lurking under the wet tang of corroded minerals. Instinctively, my nose wrinkled.

The echo of my breath changed too, perking my inner ear. The sound of wide open space.

Getting closer.

I couldn’t crane my neck far enough for my headlamp to illuminate the other side, so I squeezed my flashlight through and panned it forward.

A glassy pool of water gaped below me, its banks overgrown with lumpy stalagmites. They glittered in the light, their ghostly shadows dancing around the walls of a large cavern.

This was the spot.

I could feel it. The way the hairs stood up on my forearms.

Sliding the rest of the way through, I lowered myself down among the stalagmites, now careful to stay quiet. Drips echoed in the darkness, but nothing else sounded, save for the quiet moan of air rising from deep in the earth, like the cave itself was breathing.

Place gave me the creeps.

With the flashlight off, I flipped the thermal imaging scope down over one eye, and my palm went to the Glock at my hip.

I surveyed the cavern through the lens, my surroundings cast in dim shades of blue.

Nothing else living down here.