Okay, we're changing gears from emotion and romance to the action that's pretty much required by putting "Tomb Raider" at the top.

"DREAM CATCHER"

by

Eric R. Umali

“Taking the Plunge”

With a slight kick-up of dust, the Jeep slid to a halt.  Lara and John climbed out, and while he headed back to unpack the equipment, she took a moment to take in the view.

They’d arrived on top of a massive butte sitting incongruously by itself in the middle of the Arizona desert.  A reddish-brown pillar almost five hundred feet in diameter, it reached up about the same distance from the desert floor.  A path, spiraled around the butte’s sides, had been cut into the rock by hundreds of years of feet, hooves and wheels.

On the top was little of interest besides dust, sand and scrub except the cave.  Its mouth was little more than a bulge in the butte’s upper surface with a four foot-wide hole in it.  It was this decidedly unattractive feature that Lara Croft was staring at, rather than the magnificent Arizona vista stretching out into forever all around them.

Unfortunately, her mind was on neither.  She returned to the Jeep to find John nearly finished unloading.

“Ready to take the plunge?” he asked, smiling.

“What?” Lara replied, shaken from her thoughts.  “I’m sorry, what was that?”

“Are you ready to go?” he repeated slowly.

“Of course,” she answered, maybe a little too sharply.

He held out his pack.  “Check mine.  I’ll check yours.”

Lara took the pack, and, careful not to disturb the carefully packed contents too much, she inspected it.  “Looks fine, John.”

“Same here.”  They hiked the packs on.  Lara hauled another satchel from under her seat and unzipped it.  She extracted her gunbelt and strapped it on.  Reaching back into the bag, she produced her guns– a newly acquired pair of Walther P99s.  She holstered the pistols and placed the spare magazines into their places on the belt.

John stood nearby, making a show of impatience.  Lara glanced over once, then ignored him.  A moment later, her sawed-off Remington 12-gauge was clipped to her pack.

“A shotgun?” John quipped.  “That’s not overkill?”

“You won’t say that the next time you run into a bear or a wolf,” she replied, then added under her breath, “or a velociraptor.”

“Excuse me?  Did you say, ‘velociraptor,’ Lara?”  He snorted.  “Don’t tell me you’ve encountered a species that’s been extinct for sixty-five million years.”

“You’d be surprised,” she answered.  “And I do believe that set of H&K USPs and some ancient-looking double-barreled Winchester in the back belong to you.”

John laughed, and repeated the slow, deliberate process of arming himself.

Lara raised an eyebrow as he slipped the double-barreled shotgun into a loop on his pack.  “Twelve gauge?”

“Twenty gauge, actually, with a magnum load.  Useful for the big cats… and the occasional, um, harpy.”

“Harpies?  Well, at least mine actually _did_ exist at some point.”  She started walking away, towards the cave entrance.

“They looked just like my fourth-grade teacher, too,” he muttered before following her.

**********

After thirty minutes of uneventful spelunking, John and Lara stood on the edge of a massive pit.  It had been this endless-seeming drop that Lara had climbed down alone, precipitating her need for John’s rescue.  This time, there were two people readying the descent, using John’s decidedly more expensive, but well-tested equipment.

It took them just five minute to assemble the metal framework that would keep their descent ropes from abrading against the rocks and repeating the accident.  John began attaching the first length of ropes to their anchors.

“Do you want to take the sonic reading?” he asked.

Lara nodded, and aimed the machine into the darkness.  As she waited for the gadget to do its work, she looked it over, then looked towards John.  “So where did you get all these wonderful toys?”

He smiled.  “I have a deal with a fellow who retired from the CIA’s armory division.  He invents stuff, and I field test it.”

“Sounds convenient.  And how do you fund this cozy little business endeavor?”

Even in the cave’s darkness, Lara could see a shadow pass over his face.  “I haven’t told you?”

“No,” she answered, concerned.

“Mother and Father died six years ago.”

“Oh, God, John, I’m sorry.  I didn’t know.”

John shrugged.  “How could you have?”

“How did it happen?”

“You know, this almost makes it funny that you compared me to James Bond yesterday.”

Lara didn’t understand.  “What do you mean, ‘funny’?”

“There was an accident while they were skiing in Switzerland.  Just like Bond’s parents.”  He bent again to his work.

Lara’s reply, whatever it was going to be, was preempted by a tone from the rangefinder.  The invisible sound waves had done their work, and she was presented with a rough color-coded representation of the hole’s topography.  “I’m only getting shapes to a depth of fifty meters.”

“It can be set to scan deeper, but we’d lose the detail on the sides.  We can take it in shorter hops.”

She shook her head and stowed the device.  “It figures that the only way into the underground caves we’re interested in is more than a hundred fifty meters _above_ the ground!”

Taking the end of one cable from John, she proceeded to tie it to her climbing harness and loop it through her customized rappelling rig.  Out of the corner of her eye, she could see John doing the same.

“There’s a good plateau about thirty meters down towards my side.  We should aim for that,” said Lara.  John nodded, and they both slowly lowered themselves into the opening, gingerly putting their weight to the anchor assembly.  By the time their heads had disappeared beneath the opening, they were surrounded in almost complete darkness.

Both stopped a moment to switch on the lights mounted on their pack straps.  The wide, bright beams pushed back only small wedges of the dark, but were enough to find the rock plateau Lara had found.  They reached it in just five minutes.

The next hundred twenty or so meters passed just as uneventfully.  They were both quiet, speaking only when the climb required it.  John seemed absorbed in his thoughts, and Lara, understanding, kept silent in respect.  An hour and a half had passed before they reached their first major marker.

John started planting another anchor.  “We’re finally at ground level,” he said.

“It’s about time,” Lara replied.  She brought out the rangefinder once more, and trained it on the wide opening below them, measuring almost fifty feet in diameter, where the hole at the top had been less than twenty.  Even the halogen beams of their lights barely pierced the black.  The only spaces large enough for them to land were located on opposite sides of the opening.

Turning away, John braced his foot against the bottom of the rock wall and began hammering the anchor in.  After a few seconds, he looked down.  His foot seemed to have crept up the wall an inch or two.  He put his foot back and went to work.  He looked down again.  It had happened again.  His eyes went wide with the realization.  The rock platforms they were standing on were slowly retracting back into the walls.

“Lara!” he shouted.  “The platforms!”

She looked down, wondering, then felt a jerk that nearly pulled her feet out from under her.  “I see what you mean,” she mused.  “There’s no time to sink an anchor!”  Less than eighteen inches remained to stand on.

“Can you jump the gap?”

“No!”  Twelve inches left.  Then it came to her.  “I won’t need to!”

Planting her feet firmly on the last eight inches of rock and crouching, Lara sprung out, her long legs propelling her out into the void.

John cursed and did the same, flying forward.  As he sailed towards her, some vague part of John’s mind tried to remember the name of the patron saint of spelunkers.

Just as they approached, momentum faded and gravity took over.  Both of them stretched out, trying to will themselves together.

Their fingertips brushed, and they started falling.

TO BE CONTINUED…