The Deep Zone: A Novel (34 page)

Cahner was already tearing through the contents of his pack for the first aid kit. Hallie pulled the surgical gloves off, held her left hand up, and squeezed her left wrist fiercely with her right, compressing the ulnar and radial arteries—the deep ones that suicidal wrist slitters had to cut to be successful. Those both lay deep, however,
and blood kept welling from the wound, running down her forearm, dripping and pooling on the cave floor at her feet.

“Al!”

“I’m looking, Hallie! Hang on!” He was buried in his pack up to the shoulders, digging its contents out, socks and toilet paper and MREs flying out behind him. Hallie was watching, and then suddenly she was sitting down, feeling dizzy, nauseous.

“Got it!” Cahner ripped the paper wrapping from a sterile compress and hurried to kneel beside Hallie, dressing in one hand, poly bottle canteen in the other. “You hold your wrist, keep that pressure on, and I’ll flush this cut out.”

She held on, gasping from the pain when Al sloshed water over the wound. It wasn’t sterile, but it might wash out fragments of rock and moonmilk. He emptied his canteen onto her hand, then put the compress on her palm and cinched its gauze straps tight.

She yelped.

“I’m
sorry
, Hallie!” He sounded horrified.

“No worries.” She forced herself to relax, breathe deeply. “It has to be tight.”

When he was finished, Hallie sat, letting her head clear. Cahner knelt, one hand on her shoulder. “That is a nasty cut. What else should I do?”

“I don’t think anything, right now. It’ll need stitches for sure when we get out, but the bandage should hold it together until we do.”

“Climbing isn’t going to be fun with that.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Does it hurt like hell?”

“It did. But not so much, now.”

“Probably mild shock. You were looking wobbly there.”

“Better now.” She started to stand up, but Cahner pushed her gently back down.

“You just stay there for a few minutes. We’ll rest a bit and have something to drink and a bite to eat.”

“We need to get more moonmilk,” she said.

“What we need now is to get
you
fixed up.” Cahner took off his mask, and removed his rubber gloves. They ate energy bars, drank what remained of Hallie’s water, and napped for two hours on the cave floor. Then it was time to start the long trip out.

LENORA STILWELL WAS DREAMING OF A TIME AT A SMALL
island in the Gulf, called Delfín. Spanish for “dolphin.” She and Doug and Danny were swimming out past the low, white curl of surf, slicing through blue ocean strewn with sun glitter, when a group of bottlenose dolphins came toward them, making silvery arcs in the air with their leaps. They stopped, treaded water, watched the dolphins on a feeding run, chasing schools of mackerel, which, herded to the surface, made it swirl and bubble like water boiling in a vast pot. Then she looked around and Doug and Danny were gone and someone was calling her name, someone she could hear but could not see, and she could not keep her head above the water.

“How are you feeling, Major?” Stilwell opened her eyes. The nurse, a young woman in a blue Chemturion suit, had one gloved hand on the rail of her bed. Stilwell turned her head. “I’m sorry to
bother you, ma’am,” the nurse said. “Just a vital check and I’m out of here.”

“No problem. Doing your job.” The clear plastic cannula, inserted into her nostrils, made her sound like she had a bad cold, but they were delivering four liters per hour of 100 percent oxygen.

“How you doing, ma’am?”

“All things considered, not so bad.”

The nurse smiled, nodded, but, to Lenora’s amazement, she saw the other woman’s eyes well up with tears. A lot of people seemed very concerned about her here at CENMEDFAC. She knew it was because word had gotten around about her work with the troopers back at COP Terok. They were calling her a hero, Major Angel, things like that. She had no patience for such things. The heroes were those boys fighting every day.

“I
hate
this. Excuse me, Major.”

She smiled back. Could still do that. Only had three lesions so far: right thigh, abdomen, left arm.

“Ma’am, why don’t you let us give you a little something to make you more comfortable?”

“I may just do that in a bit. Right now, I’m good. But I appreciate your concern.” She reached out and gave the nurse’s gloved hand a squeeze, managed a wink.

“All right, ma’am. You know I’m close as that button there.” A large woman, she nodded at the call button safety-pinned to Stilwell’s sheet, and her forehead bumped against the blurry plastic of the suit’s helmet. She squeezed Stilwell’s hand back and headed off to the nurses’ station.

Stilwell was in an isolation ward with four beds. There was another woman, an ACE sufferer, drugged to sleep. There would come a time, Stilwell knew, when morphine would not be enough, when nothing would be enough, and then it would be truly bad. The other woman’s case was not as advanced, but in her, asymptomatically, ACE had emerged through the tissues of her face first,
rather than eating its way out of the body cavity. There were so many nerves in the face, so much pain there just waiting to be set free. She needed morphine, and a lot of it.

It won’t be long for you, girl
, Stilwell thought.
You’re steady at level seven now. Yesterday was level five. So a couple of days at most. You can probably handle up to eight without the morphine
. She had often asked patients to rank their pain on a scale of one to ten, one being pain-free and ten being unendurable agony. Now, for the first time ever, she was giving herself the same quiz.

She didn’t want meds yet. For one thing, they made her constipated. They also muddled her thinking. The pain did that, too, of course, but she found that she could take “vacations” from the pain, going to other places and times in her mind. And when she came back from vacation to the hospital room, she could think clearly for a while. She was thinking about ACE, reviewing all she knew about it, trying to create a virtual laboratory in her mind to work out some protocol to counter it. Having contracted it herself put her at a disadvantage. But looked at another way, it gave her the advantage of being a physician and scientist who could analyze the symptoms and progression firsthand.

Just now, though, the pain interrupted her thoughts. The spots on her leg, abdomen, and arm were red and raw, leaking blood and pungent fluids, the products of putrefaction. The spots felt like someone had poured gasoline on her body there and set it afire. Bad. Very bad. But so far the spots were a relatively small part of her body’s entire surface, and none of them were in a nerve-dense zone. So she could manage, at least for periods of time. Now, though, she knew it was time to go on vacation.

She closed her eyes, breathed deeply and slowly, and thought back to the day she had graduated from Vanderbilt University’s School of Medicine. She went there, felt the green-edged black cap with gold tassel on her head, the weight of the black gown on her shoulders, saw the black toes of her low-heeled pumps peeking out. Felt the graduates in front of her and behind shuffling forward.

Smelled the aftershave and perfume and sweat on that hot Tennessee day. Felt her heart beating more quickly as she approached the steps to the outdoor stage—

“Major?”

It was the young nurse. Stilwell pulled herself back to the world of pain.

“Hi.”

“Major, ma’am, you have a visitor.” The young woman grimaced, blew air through her nose in an indignant snort. “I told him you shouldn’t be disturbed, but … he’s an officer.”

That brought her awake. “Really? Who?”

“Um, I didn’t catch his name, ma’am. Can’t see the name tag through his suit. He’s an officer, though, made sure I knew that. You feel up to it?”

This was a surprise. She had not had any visitors, save routine calls from the doctors and the nurses’ regular checks. “Yes, I can do it. Tell him to come in.”

“All right, ma’am.”

“Wait … I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.”

“Artwell, ma’am. Sergeant Artwell.”

“Your first name.”

“Oh. Yes, ma’am. It’s Regina. People call me Reggie.”

“Thanks. Reggie, would you please raise the bed so I can sit up?”

“Sure enough, ma’am.” She did that and left, and presently a short, stout man in a Chemturion shuffled in. His face was obscured behind the suit’s scratched, wrinkled plastic faceplate. In one black-gloved hand he held a bulging yellow envelope with the word
CONFIDENTIAL
stamped on it in fat red letters.

“You don’t look so good, Major.” She recognized the stuffy voice. Ribbesh the fobbit.
What the hell is he doing here?
“Sorry to see that. Anything I can get you?” Some kind of adenoidal hypertrophy, probably, his voice.

“I’m all good, Colonel.”

“Hm. Is it … very painful?”

“Not so bad.” No way she would admit hurting to this fobbit.

“I’m glad to hear that.” He came around the foot of her bed, took a cautious step closer. She could see his face more clearly. Some people had facial features that made them look piggish—round, pink cheeks, upturned nose, tiny eyes, plump chin. Colonel Ribbesh was one. Overweight, he was perspiring heavily inside the suit.

“I’m sorry about that little business with the suit, Colonel,” she said. “I was under a lot of stress.”

“No doubt. It’s regrettable. But I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that if you’d obeyed my order, you wouldn’t be here like this.”

“And young soldiers would have suffered a hell of a lot more. Not a good trade-off, Colonel. May I ask why you’re here?”

“Of course. As a matter of fact, it’s about that … incident.” His eyes flicked around the room. He touched the side of his hood, cleared his throat. “You see, I had you on speakerphone to hear you through the suit. So our conversation was witnessed by a number of other personnel. A major who is my adjutant and quite a few enlisted people. That created a problem.”

“What kind of problem?”

“If it had been a direct, unobserved communication just between you and me, it could perhaps have been resolved differently. But the presence of other personnel made it … unavoidable.”

“Made what unavoidable?”

“I had no choice but to report your action to higher authority. I’m sure you’re familiar with the military Code of Conduct. Any failure to report a violation of the code is a violation in itself.” He reached up as though to wipe the sweat from his forehead, remembered, let his hand drop. “Hot in these things, isn’t it? You’d think they’d air-condition them or something.”

“Go on, Colonel, please.”

“Yes. Well, I had no choice, don’t you see? I would have risked my career by turning a blind eye to that exchange. It wasn’t something I really wanted to do, I can assure you.”

I bet not, fobbit
, she thought. Ribbesh was not only a fobbit, he was a purveyor of chickenshit, which had a very special definition in the Army. She knew officers like Ribbesh, miserable people with small minds and great buzzing swarms of resentments. They lived to dole out chickenshit—unnecessary punishment for trivial infractions, the punishment bearing no appropriate relationship to the offense, the purpose being nothing more than making life worse for someone of lower rank. She also knew that the Army, which welcomed all and fired none, bore an inordinate number of chicken-shitters.

“Shouldn’t I have been notified? Served with a paper or something?”

“That’s what I’m doing now, Major.”

“Oh. Took you a while, then, didn’t it?”

His pink face got pinker. “It was necessary for the document to move through proper channels.”

“Of course,” she said.
So there’ll be a letter in my Guard file. Big deal
.

As if he had read her mind, he said, “I had a need to review your personnel file. Unfortunately, this was not the first occurrence of insubordination.”

“That’s true. Sometimes orders and good medicine don’t mix. From where I sit, medicine always trumps.”

“Yes, that was clear from your responses to the previous charges. Frankly, I was surprised. No ordinary officer could have gotten off so lightly. But then, you’re a
doctor
. Obviously exceptions were made.”

“Colonel, is there anything else? I’m tired and—”

“If you’ll allow me, I will complete this conference and leave. Because this was a subsequent incident, rather than an initial occurrence, the severity escalated. In addition to disciplinary action, it appears that there will be DOB as well.”

Denial of benefits
. Her tired heart wrenched. “What are you saying?”

“From the Army’s point of view, Major, it is no different than
shooting your toe off to escape combat. Your intention might have been noble, but, to paraphrase your words, orders always trump intention. In essence, you inflicted this infection on yourself.”

“So you’re saying that I will bear the expenses for all of my medical care.”

“That is correct, I’m afraid.”

“Stateside as well as here?”

“Yes.”

She experienced a new dread so intense it made her dizzy and even more nauseous. Her civilian, private health insurance provided zero coverage when she was on active duty. That was when the military Tricare program kicked in, and, as a physician, she knew the regulation verbatim: “When on military duty, members are covered for any injury, illness or disease incurred or aggravated in the line of duty.”