The Deep Zone: A Novel (29 page)

“Major? Are you okay?” One of the nurses, concerned, watching.

She straightened up. “All good here. Good to go.” She walked out into the hall, followed by the nurses, who closed the morgue
door behind them. Out here, Stilwell was once again struck by the smell. She had been a physician for two decades and had smelled just about every awful stench sickness and death could produce. But even all that experience had not included anything like the smell produced by ACE eating the flesh of living bodies. It was a sharp, nauseating stink, with elements of blood and decaying meat and fecal matter, as the bacterium ate through intestinal walls and abdominal muscles. That
would
be one advantage to a biosuit, with its rebreather filters, she thought.

Her life had settled into a rhythm of sorts. She worked until the numbers on the charts and instruments started to blur, excused herself and slept for an hour or two, got up, poured more coffee into an already sour stomach, gobbled junk food, went back to work.

No new cases were being admitted, of course, but more than a dozen remained from the time when wounded were still being brought in before they understood that ACE was rampant in the hospital unit. She was experimenting with adding other antibiotics to the colistin, creating “cocktails” of various combinations, hoping that one might be more effective than the colistin by itself. So far, none had been. The last regimen was purely palliative, trying to alleviate pain as the ACE infections moved into their advanced stages.

Miraculously, she had not been infected. By this time it amazed even Stilwell herself, given how beat-up her immune system must have been from all the stress and fatigue. But she knew there really was something to the idea that doctors developed immunities over career-long periods of exposure to bacteria and viruses, and it was a proven fact that the female immune system was more powerful. Maybe those advantages would carry her through after all.

In her tiny, cluttered office she sat down, opened her laptop computer, and wrote an email to her husband:

She read over the note and clicked on the Close button on her email program.

Do you want to save changes to this message?

She clicked on the Save button.

This message has been saved in your Drafts folder
.

That folder contained many messages by now. They had shut down the outgoing comm again. She had been writing emails and saving them anyway. It made her feel a little better. And if she didn’t make it, they would at least give Doug and Danny a sense of what she had been doing.

A Chemturion-clad soldier leaned into the doorway to her office. “Major, we need you on Ward B, please.”

“Is it urgent?”

“No, ma’am. Private Cheney died a few minutes ago, is all. You need to pronounce.”

“Give me a moment.” She nodded at the door to her tiny washroom. “I’ll be right with you.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She went into the lavatory, lowered the lid on the toilet, and sat on it. She took a digital thermometer out of her camo shirt’s chest pocket and put it under her tongue. Ten seconds passed and the thermometer beeped. She removed it from her mouth and looked at the readout: 100.2.

She sanitized the thermometer with an alcohol wipe, put it back into her pocket, and headed for the ward. Before she had gone five steps past her office, another Chemturion-suited nurse stopped her.

“Major, we need you on Ward A.”

She halted, trying to remember where she had been going in the first place. Oh yeah: Private Cheney. She needed to pronounce his death to make it official.

“What is it there?”

“Sergeant Clintock just died, ma’am. We need you to pronounce.”

She nodded. How many did that leave? Eleven? Ten? At this
rate, they would all be gone by the end of the week. And then what? Can’t worry about that now.
Then what
would take care of itself.

“Is Captain Franch available? Could he help you on Ward A?”

The nurse looked shocked. “Oh God. I’m sorry, ma’am. Didn’t someone tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“Captain Franch overheated in his suit and collapsed. Dehydration and hyperthermia. They took him outside. His temperature was a hundred and six and spiking. They think he might have suffered some neurological damage.”

That left her and one physician’s assistant, plus the nurses.

“Thank you. I’ll be with you in A as soon as I can. B called me first.”

“I understand, ma’am. Thank you.”

THEY CAME TO A SLOPING, OPEN SPACE BETWEEN GIANT
boulders where the three could all stand together. There was not enough room to sit.

“We need to talk about what’s next,” said Hallie, watching the others.

“What’ve we got?” Bowman actually looked tired. Cahner was panting, bent over.

“It’s a siphon. A narrow slot about two hundred yards long. Widest at the bottom, two feet or so, but narrowing at the top to less than shoulder width, so we have to pass through sideways in places.”

“Why couldn’t we just crawl along the bottom, where it’s wider?” Fatigue made Cahner’s voice faint, as though he were speaking to them from a distance.

“Part of the cave’s main watercourse diverts into this passageway, which siphons it off from the primary flow. Thus the name.”

“You said it’s filled with water. How full?” Bowman, curious.

“It all depends on the year’s surface rainfall.”

“So let’s just put on our rebreathers,” said Cahner.

“I don’t think we should.” Bowman shook his head, his light beam slicing the darkness sideways. “We still have that long sump to recross on the way out. And the Acid Bath before that. We’ve breathed them down too much already, because of that acid lake.”

“So how do we do it, then?”

“We can’t wear our packs because they’re too big to fit through the siphon’s narrow top,” Hallie said. “We can’t push them ahead because the floor of the siphon is submerged. So we drag them along behind us.”

She led them down for another few hundred yards to a waist-deep stream that flowed into a vertical, wedge-shaped opening in the cave wall. They paused long enough to tie haul ropes fashioned from parachute cord to their packs. Bowman said, “I’ll lead off. Al, you take the middle. Hallie can be our sweep.”

Cahner spoke with unusual firmness. “I don’t think that’s the best way to do this. If something should happen to me, I could block her passage. From Hallie’s description, it sounds like a hellish place to have to drag a body out of. So I’d best go last.”

Hallie and Bowman looked at each other, then at Cahner.

“Are you sure?” Bowman asked.

“I’m sure.”

“All right, then.” Bowman turned and walked down an easy sand slope to the stream bank. Hallie waited several minutes, then pulled her pack into the water behind her and started off. At first it was easy passage. The water was chest-deep, cold but not painful, and the siphon had the rich, bright smell of pure water tumbling over clean rocks, just like a brook in sunlight on the surface. The haul rope was snug around her waist and buoyancy reduced her pack’s weight, so pulling it along the sandy bottom was not that hard. She
sloshed forward, her helmet light illuminating the passage’s walls: red from iron deposits, blue and green from veins of copper.

As she waded farther the water gradually deepened, rising to the middle of her neck, which meant that the floor was sloping down. Now that she had been in it for a while, she began to feel the water’s chill. Sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit didn’t sound all that cold, but it was thirty-three degrees below normal body temperature. With that differential, you lost heat very quickly, and water sucked it away seven times faster than air.

There was no perceptible current here. The walls were less than shoulder width apart. The siphon’s ceiling started sloping downward, so that after a while she had to stoop slightly to clear the top of her helmet. Hunching down dropped her chin to the water’s surface. Occasionally an off-balance step dipped her mouth and nose under, but she was prepared for that. The greater problem was having to move sideways in a modified duck waddle, knees bent, unable to stand fully erect. That, and dragging the pack along, was tiring her more quickly than she had anticipated.

About halfway through she stopped to rest. By then the ceiling had dropped more, forcing her to remove her helmet and carry it. While resting, she unclipped one of the helmet’s lights and held it above the water with her left hand, hanging on to the helmet with her right. Now there was about four inches of space between the water’s surface and the passage’s ceiling. She could breathe only by tilting her head back to keep her nose and mouth out of the water.

Stooped, knees bent, head thrown back, she started off again.
If this thing keeps dropping, I’ll be breathing good old H
₂
O before long
. Presently the ceiling did exactly that, dropping another three inches, leaving a space about the width of three fingers between water and rock.

Easy now. You’ve done it before, this is no different, just breathe easy and go slow
.

She had forgotten how awful it was negotiating this kind of passage. It was worse than diving, worse than dropping down vertical
walls, worse even than acid lakes. It required the utmost control to keep moving along like that, nose and lips scraping the siphon’s rough ceiling, rock fragments falling into her eyes, water lapping into her mouth every so often, and the passage so narrow that she could move forward only by turning her body and edging along sideways.

She inched along—
step … breathe … step … breathe
—and only when she was stationary and could straighten her knees ever so slightly was she able to bring her nose and mouth out of the water. Then the ceiling dropped more and only her two nostrils were clear of the water’s surface. There was perhaps an inch of space between the water and the rock, no more, so that she was moving with both mouth and eyes underwater. It was hellish. Try as she might, she could not avoid inhaling water, which made her throat constrict. But she could not afford to gasp or cough, because that would have sucked more water into her breathing passages, and it would take only a few teaspoonfuls to trigger involuntary spasms, and those would drown her.

She had passed a point of no return. If she got into trouble here, even with her tremendous breath-hold capacity, she would not make it back to clear space before drowning.

Her right boot toe caught on a rock. She stumbled forward, smacked her forehead against the siphon’s spiky wall, dropped both her hand light and helmet. The impact set off red flashes in her vision and for just a second she was off somewhere else. She came back quickly, on her knees underwater, left hand on one cave wall, right hand on the floor.

She thought she should be able to spot the lights and pick them up, but there was nothing. Either the lights had been damaged or the visibility was so bad that she could not see them. That, she realized, was entirely possible, given how much silt she would have just stirred up.

She would look for the helmet later. And the other light. Right now she needed to breathe. Gently she pushed herself upright,
going up inch by inch, feeling along the wall with her left hand, careful to keep her feet in place and steady. Finally she felt the top of her head touch the cave ceiling. She tilted her face upward to get her nose above water and take a breath, but she ended up kissing the rock ceiling. There was no space between it and the rock. The siphon was completely flooded, floor to ceiling. She had fallen away from the air space. When she’d gone down and struck her head, she had lost her orientation, and now, submerged in black water with no perceptible flow, she wasn’t certain which way to go.

Then she remembered her pack. She was tethered to it, and all she had to do was follow the short rope back to the pack, stand up, and find the air space that she knew would be there. She put her hands on her waist, feeling for the rope, but her fingers found nothing.

Must have slipped into a fold in the fabric
. She used her fingertips to explore with more pressure. Nothing. She reached behind her, groping for the section of rope that led back to the pack, but it was gone. Her knife, worn on a belt clip when diving, was now in her pack.

She began to feel the first burning in her chest, oxygen depleting, carbon dioxide building.

The pack can’t be more than six or eight feet away. Which way? Don’t know. Go one way. If you don’t find it, go the other. Where the pack is you can stand and breathe
.

She felt for clear space, found it, took a step that way—and fell, thrashing, onto the bottom of the siphon. The rope had somehow dropped down from her waist and become wrapped around her ankles. When she tried to move, it tripped her.

The burning in her chest was worse, bigger, hotter. Underwater, she felt for the rope, found it, tried to push it down over her boots, but it would not pass their tops. Tangled or knotted. She found the snag, explored it with her fingers. Not soft and loose. A hard little lump. The force of her stumble had cinched it tight. If it had been big, eleven-mil rope, such a knot would have been easier to loosen.
But this was three-millimeter parachute cord. Picking tight knots out of that was hard enough on the surface, in good light.