Nevada Barr - A Superior Death

Switching on her light, she followed Patience into the interior of the Kamloops .

Claustrophobia met her just inside the portal. The engine room was low-ceilinged and the passages were narrow. Bulkheads showed gray in the beam of her light. To the right the passage opened into a space filled with machinery separated by walkways just wide enough to accommodate a man. Ahead, the corridor branched into several narrower passages fanning out amid the once working organs of the dead ship.

In the clear, still waters at one hundred and ninety-five feet, the wrecks were amazingly clean, as if they’d settled just weeks before. Still, over everything was a softening shroud of silt so fine it scarcely dulled the outlines of the machinery. Each flick of her feet stirred up eddies in the fine-grained mud and Anna swam with great delicacy.

Keeping her light trained on the floor so it wouldn’t alert Patience to her presence, Anna trailed down the passage. Knowing somewhere five corpses kept vigil, she had a sense of being watched, a prickling feeling down her back that at any second a half-fleshed hand would clutch at her.

The circle of light that Patience’s lamp produced continued to flicker on the bulkhead at the end of the passage. Tricky, unnatural, the light flitted here and there, always on bulkhead or machinery, always in sight, as if Patience shined it constantly behind her looking for pursuers. Like a will-o‘-the-wisp, it vanished as Anna reached the corner. Like a will-o’-the-wisp it led her down another, smaller walkway.

Like a will-o‘-the-wisp, Anna thought and suddenly knew, like other unwary travelers, she was intentionally being led astray. Patience must have seen her light as she descended from the Belle Isle , and had lured her into the ship.

Anna stopped. The feeling of clutching hands grew till she could feel her heart pounding in her ears and wondered if the sound carried through water. Slowly, warily, keeping an eye on the light beckoning her still deeper into the wreck, she swam back the way she had come. Corpses no longer seemed of any consequence. Compared to the living, they were benevolent.

Something was wrong with Patience’s lamp.

The light, once a clear stabbing white, began to fade, then diffuse in a strange fog. Silt. Patience was silting out the engine room. An impenetrable fog was boiling down the corridor. Panic rising, Anna fled.

Patience had circled round, found her way through the twisting passageways until she was between Anna and the door. The brownish-gray wall swept down, blotting out everything. In seconds, Anna’s light was rendered useless. The water was thick with silt. Bulkhead, deck, engine parts half a foot away, were hidden behind liquid mud.

The world dwindled, closed in. Lake and ship and now the very space she moved through crushed down. There was no way out, no choices left to make. A scream built in Anna’s chest, pressing hard against her sternum until the pain brought tears to her eyes. Fear flushed through her bowels and she was weak with it. Air gulped through her mouthpiece burned her throat with icy slush and her head spun. The need to run like a wild thing blindsided her and Anna kicked hard, swam madly through the opaque waters.

A racking pain took her in the left shoulder. Kicking free, she hit her knees on an unyielding surface. Wildly, she scrabbled her hands over it. The deck. She had swum hard into the floor of the passage. Equilibrium was gone, sight was gone, hearing, everything. Nothing was left to tell her if she swam deeper into the ship, up toward the ceiling, or sideways into the maze of machine parts that cut the engine room into winding passages. With blunt, gloved fingers, Anna clawed at the metal of the decking, or was it the bulkhead? The ceiling?

The insanity of the act caught her mind, held it still long enough so she could think. Forcing herself to stillness, she retreated back to basics, to Ralph’s remembered instructions: Breathe. Concentrating on the mechanics of her diaphragm drawing down, her rib cage lifting and expanding, air pulling through the rubber hose filling the vacuum, Anna breathed in, breathed out. Her lips had lost feeling, her mouth felt like a snow cone. In. Out. Rational thought, not opposable thumbs, is what makes us more dangerous than the apes, she thought.

Rational thought. First she must discover, microscopically, where she was in the ship. She stopped even the gentle movement of her flippered feet and waited, feeling time, the essence she had less of than air, slipping away. Slowly, in her stillness, the weight she wore to counteract her buoyancy sought its natural state and she began to settle. Her knees, then her hands struck the deck.

You’re no longer lost, she told herself, mostly because she needed the reassurance of banal conversation. You are on the deck of the Kamloops‘ engine room. Not the ceiling. Not the bulkhead. Good.

Closing her eyes to shut away the brown haze that seemed the physical manifestation of pure confusion, Anna mentally retraced the path she had taken following Patience. Into the ship, then down a corridor walled on the left, open on the right where machinery was housed, past one doorway on the left, then a left turn, another passage, narrower, left again at an open door.

Careful not to lose contact with the deck, she spread-eagled herself. Her left hand hit the bulkhead, her right, nothing. Changing the light over to her right hand and keeping her belly pressed to the deck, she pushed her left hand into the angle where bulkhead met deck, and began to work her way back down the short hallway. At least she hoped she headed back and had not turned herself around in her frenzy and was now swimming deeper into the ship. Her hand lost contact and she felt a spark of hope. It would be the right place for the door she had seen as she turned up the last passage in pursuit of Patience. Inching to the right, she felt along the deck till her lamp collided with the bulkhead on that side. Again she switched the useless light to her free hand. Fingers trailing, she made the first turn, then a second.

If her mind map was accurate she would come to another doorway. A break in the wall: she began to believe she might escape and swam on with more confidence. Another twenty-five feet or so and she should swim free into the lake.

Keeping her hand firmly in the angle of the bulkhead and deck, she swam. No change in the silt miasma heralded open water. No slightly lighter square in the hopeless darkness relieved her eyes.

The bulkhead ended in another. No open door, no freedom, another wall made a ninety-degree angle to the left.

Panic, held at bay by hope and action, flooded back. Anna couldn’t breathe. The mechanism of her tanks had malfunctioned. Air wasn’t coming through the mouthpiece. She fought down the urge to rip her mask off, to get some space around her.

“Breathe,” Ralph said clearly.

Her mouth was completely numb with cold inside and out. She grabbed her lips with gloved fingers and pressed them down, molding them around a regulator she could no longer feel. Sitting with her back to the wall, Anna breathed. There was air. She took it in; let it go. I will die calmly, she thought. And preferably not today.

The map she’d drawn in her head was shattered. Exploring the unexpected bulkhead with her hands, she felt for something that would jog her memory, give her a place to begin drawing a new map. One that would take her out of this hell and back to the world of the living.

A seam ran up vertically eight inches out from the corner. Anna pursued it with fingers grown clumsy with cold and fear. The seam made a right angle, then another. A door: her mental map had not failed her. Patience had closed the door to the engine room. A lever, slanting down at a forty-five-degree angle, was located to the left and center. Anna’s hand closed on the metal. For a second or two she hesitated. If the door didn’t open, she would die.