Cave Game

V - Stomach

Steve felt an eternity pass as he held his breath with all his might, praying that it couldn't hear or see him in the blanket of inky cold. His face was affixed in a deep contortion, each and every muscle dedicated to keeping any sound from escaping. The other thing in the room had no such reservations. It let out an anguished, high-pitched cry and floundered on the stony floor like a fish out of water. A suck of air through clenched teeth was followed by a painful dislodging jerk, a clatter of a wooden shaft, and the yowl of a tortured zoo animal whose agonizing torment had finally broken them. 

A single sob gasped out, carried by a woman's voice. After a long silence, a weep crescendoed back in, thin and elongated. He listened, unsure of what to do next. While frantically searching for an optimal next course of action, Steve felt his lips miming words, repeating them over and over, attempting to summon a sound from his petrified larynx. His voice box looked up to his brain through his windpipe like a confused mechanic-- they weren't expecting to have to turn back on his voice so soon. His brain looked back down the windpipe: They weren't sure why they were trying to speak in the first place. To the confusion of all of the parts of his body, the sound grew out of him like the rising chuffs of a steam engine departing from a station. Each attempt formed thicker syllables and grew more audible, until finally:

"Hello?" A coarse whisper slipped out from him.

The weeping ceased, and he blindly felt her freeze through the air.

"Hello?" he exhaled with no more confidence than before.

A rough, feeble, soggy voice repeated back. 

"Hello?" she coughed, clearing her throat with the words.

Steve swallowed a bubble rising through his esophagus. "Are you-" he choked as the bubble popped mid-transport. "-are you dying?"

"It sure feels like it." A weak smile carried on her sentence.

Steve reached out, crawling his fingertips out across the smooth floor like a search-and-rescue party raking through the damage of a cyclone. His first responders made contact with a curled knuckle. A puff of air shot out of her nose. With his minuscule touch, he felt her hand stiffen and then retract across the stony ground with a scrape. 

It was silent.

 After a while, he felt fingertips graze his fingernails, making their own wary and tentative expedition. They slowly hovered their way up to his wrist, raising the hair on the back of his hand as they passed. Starting at the fingertips and easing in, first with the thenar, followed by the rest of the palm, and finally each segment of each individual finger sliding down, her hand came to lightly rest on top of his. Their touch was partitioned by a thin layer of gritty dirt and particulate matter, caked to both sides of the ordeal, but it hardly stopped Steve from feeling it-- A hand, a real human hand. A beating heart slowed its tempo, easing the strikes on an instrument that very easily could've broken had they kept pace and vigor. With the first steady exhale in recent history, composure army-crawled back in the doorway to avoid any stray projectiles. Logical thought straightened its tie and cracked on with business.

"Oh shit, are you okay?" Steve pulled himself to a sitting position, drawing his hand back to his person, secretly feeling the warm spot where her hand laid upon the bend of his wrist. He didn't know what else to ask.

Another cough echoed, laced with the splatter of blood on stone. "Y-yeah, I'm doing good. Right as rain." She laughed at the sentence, each hoarse chuckle shaking against broken ribs and sore muscles.

"We need to find something," He said, ignoring her sarcastic response and frantically sorting through all the belongings he could shake loose from his exhausted mind. "Something- anything to help us. Can you sit up?"