James Tabor - The Deep Zone

“Do it,” he said.

“No.”

Kathan sighed. He set his rifle on the ground. With his right hand, he pulled the combat knife from its belt scabbard and held it poised over her head. His left hand wrapped around her neck. He lowered the point of his knife onto her scalp, letting her see how it felt. He wasn’t even pressing, but just the weight of the knife itself made her gasp, and a small rivulet of blood ran down her forehead. She flicked her eyes sideways at the other man, who stood as he had before, hip cocked, rifle propped, watching. For a split second their eyes met and she thought she saw a flicker of something human, but then he blinked and looked away. Hallie thought of lunging at the rifle where it lay on the ground, but as if he had read her mind, her tormentor applied pressure and the knife point dug deeper and she grunted, her vision blurring into a red mist.

“I’m hoping we can all be nice about this, blondie,” he said.

“Kathan, goddamnit, we—” the other one said.

“Hey, bro? You need to shut the fuck up now, hear?”

Kathan dug the knife point in so hard she almost fainted. Then he eased the pressure off and lifted it a centimeter above her scalp. He put his other hand behind Hallie’s head and pulled her toward his crotch.

In her peripheral vision, Hallie saw the other man take a step sideways. He said, “Hey, bro .”

His aiming laser’s red dot appeared in the center of the big man’s throat, just above the top of his body armor. “Throw the knife in the water. Let her go.”

The grip on Hallie’s neck did not loosen, but the big one turned his head toward the other. “You really do not want to do this, Stikes,” he said.

Kathan and Stikes , she thought. Do not forget those names .

Stikes sighed. Hallie heard the sharp double click as he thumbed his M4’s safety lever from “safe” past “semi” to “burst.” He said, “It won’t take two of us to get that stuff home, and I can really use another share. You know what else? This world could use one less racist psycho cracker.”

“Wait, Stikes—” Kathan said.

Stikes braced the rifle’s stock against his side, locking it in tight with his right elbow. Turning her head an inch, Hallie saw the tip of his index finger starting to pale as he applied pressure to the trigger.

A small hole appeared just in front of Stikes’s right ear and a dark red fountain blossomed out the other side of his skull. Hallie heard the sharp report of a rifle, the sound coming a millisecond after the bullet. Stikes stood upright for a second. Then he jerked, collapsed to his knees, and flopped onto his face.

More rifle fire, short, full-auto bursts. Bullets spattered the rocks around them, threw up geysers of water and spurts of soil. The giant named Kathan dropped the knife and snatched his rifle off the ground. Hallie jumped to her feet, readying for a sprint into the protective forest. With his rifle in one hand, Kathan lunged and grabbed her upper right arm with the other.

Reaching for her like that put him off balance, so that he was leaning sharply toward the cenote. Her mind did the necessary calculations in a microsecond. Whoever had fired the shot might be as bad as the man named Kathan. Or they might be help. It was at least possible. With Kathan, there was only one possibility.

Hallie spun behind Kathan and wrapped both arms around him in a bear hug, pinning his own arms momentarily to his sides. She pulled back and Kathan began to tilt like a great column, slowly at first, then more quickly, accelerating toward the water. As they landed, she wound both legs around his waist and just before going under she sucked in a huge breath.

Kathan let go of his rifle as soon as they hit the water, but with all the weight of metal and body armor he was wearing, they sank like an anchor. Hallie kept her arms and legs tight around him. She could not risk having him get free to drop the rest of his gear and make it back to the surface. She locked her ankles, one over the other, heels in his crotch. She grasped her left wrist with her right hand and her right wrist with her left. The double grip gave her twice the holding power. Twined together front to back like lovers, turning slowly, they plunged deeper, and the deeper they went, as pressure squeezed buoyancy from the man’s gear and their bodies, the faster they sank.

In two seconds they were twenty feet down. Kathan struggled frantically, kicking his legs, working his arms free to pull Hallie’s wrists and hands. Then panic took over and he began flailing in the water, trying to claw his way back to the surface.

At thirty feet he reached back and grabbed a handful of Hallie’s hair, but it was short and very fine, wet and greasy, and it was like trying to hold on to oiled monofilament. Then he went after her face, clawing for her eyes, but she kept them pressed tightly against the soft place where his neck and shoulder joined. At forty feet, his eardrums burst. Hallie actually heard the two sharp pops and knew that it felt like ice picks had just been driven deep into both sides of his skull. He opened his mouth in a silent scream and his head whipped back and forth with a will of its own, trying to throw out the agony.

At fifty feet he began to jerk and dance with the involuntary spasms of near drowning as his immense body went to war with itself. His diaphragm and breathing muscles struggled to suck in air as the levels of carbon dioxide in his blood rose. His mouth and throat, controlled by the voluntary nervous system—which understood that to inhale meant death—fought those efforts.

A few seconds later his blood’s carbon dioxide level won the battle, tripping that irresistible switch in his brain, and the reflex designed by evolution to save his life took it instead. His body arched in one violent spasm. His head stretched back and his mouth opened wide, water flooded his lungs, and Hallie knew it would feel like someone had poured acid into his chest.

Her own vision was starting to dim. She pushed him away and he rolled over, turning his front to her. The cenote water was so clear that there was still light even at this depth. Without a mask everything underwater had a blurred, ghostly look, but for an instant their faces were so close that she could see his eyes. There was a second of life in them yet, agony and horror, the look of one in a nightmare from which there was no waking. Then he rolled over again and sank out of sight.

Hallie looked up. The small silver circle far above shone like a full moon in a dark sky. Her arms and legs felt as light and useless as featherless wings. There was no pain, and some dim remnant of consciousness knew that was bad. Then clouds began to tarnish the silver moon and the sky grew darker. When she was a child in Virginia, on summer nights Hallie had stood in the pasture among their grazing horses, touching stars with the tips of her fingers. Now she saw the stars beginning to come out, more and more tiny white sparks flickering against the black, and she stretched her fingertips up and up, trying to touch those stars one last time.

EVVIE FLEMMER AWOKE FROM A DREAM THAT LEFT HER WITH clenched fists. She sat up in bed, breathing very carefully, and waited for the nausea. Mal de mer , the yacht’s steward had called it with a sympathetic tongue clucking. She knew it as seasickness, but whatever you called it, the puking horror had made every minute of the first days of her new life miserable. She had never spent time on the ocean before, and no one had warned her that seasickness might be a problem even on a boat the size of this superyacht with the peculiar name, Lebens Leben . To make things worse, they had put out from Cape May at night—no steadying horizon to stare at—and she had started throwing up within an hour. The steward had given her some blue pills that did nothing for the nausea but made her so drowsy she could barely talk, so she’d quit taking them. Flemmer had been told that this oceangoing yacht carried a chef lured away from La Tour d’Argent, the most famous restaurant in all of France, but she had been able to keep down nothing more substantial than weak tea and chicken broth.