James Tabor - The Deep Zone

But Stikes couldn’t quite let it go. He said to Kathan, “Hey, man.”

“What?”

“You got good waypoints? Feels to me like we might have lost the track.”

“You think I started doing this yesterday? Course the waypoints are good. Gray’s intel is always A-grade, man.”

LENORA STILWELL STOOD TO ONE SIDE, HER UNIFORM SPOTTED with dried blood, shivering in the chill. Two biosuited nurses slid the long, stainless steel platform bearing Sergeant Marshell Dillon’s body into a refrigerated locker and closed the door. Dillon had died several hours earlier, but they had not autopsied the body; the cause of death had been all too obvious. Dillon had died like all the others: a mass of oozing red tissue, his face a bloody horror, screaming in pain that, near the end, massive doses of morphine did nothing to blunt.

Stilwell said a silent prayer for the young soldier, then turned to walk back to the wards. In the morgue’s doorway she had to stop and steady herself, placing one hand on the wall.

“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:

Hi majormom here how things w u? I’m swmped here. How Danny? ? tackles did he mk lst gm? Hv 2 go doc work nevr dun. I love you and miss you. Give my love to Danny. Talk soon. Lenny.

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.”