James Tabor: The Deep Zone

She dropped off, came back. “Know wha’?” She was starting to mumble, heard herself, but the best she could do.

“What?”

“I like the way you smell.”

He laughed. “I’m glad you do. It’d be a hell of a thing if you didn’t.”

“Do you like the way I smell?” She giggled, the sleep pulling her.

“That and a whole lot more.”

“Like what?”

“I’ll tell you all of them, every single one, and that will take a long time. But you need to sleep now.”

He leaned down and kissed her softly on the unbruised cheek, then on her forehead, careful, tender, then on the lips, his touch soft as light. He straightened up, still holding her hand, and the last thing she remembered before dropping off was him standing there, towering over her, looking down from what appeared to be a great height, the air around him seeming to glow, and her feeling not only safe, but saved.

SPENDING SO LONG IN THE CAVE HAD DISRUPTED HALLIE’S biorhythms, which would take days to restabilize. She slept for twelve hours after Bowman left and awoke in the middle of the night. The floor was dark. Somewhere down the hall a patient was snoring softly, but that was the only sound.

She tossed and turned and tried to go back to sleep, but her body was still in midday mode. At three A.M. she was still awake, trying to make her mind stop revisiting the things that had happened, when a nurse padded in silently with a stethoscope, digital thermometer, and sphygmomanometer.

“Hey. I’m awake. You don’t need to tiptoe. But if you could leave the light off, I’d appreciate it. Still hurts my eyes.”

“Of course. The night-light is plenty. I’m really sorry to disturb you, Dr. Leland.” The nurse was a short, plump woman in her thirties wearing white pants and a floral-patterned hospital top. Her name tag said, “Placida Dominguez, RN.”

“I can get you something to help you sleep if you like.” She had a slight Latin accent and a velvet-soft voice. Hallie wanted no more befuddling pain meds.

“Thanks. I’ll count sheep or something.”

“Warm milk? That really does work. Tryptophan, you know.”

“No, but I appreciate your concern.”

Hallie sat up and had to be quiet for ten seconds while the nurse took her temperature with the digital thermometer, read it, and said, “Ninety-eight point four.” She took Hallie’s blood pressure, listened to her lungs.

“It’s quiet here tonight,” Hallie said.

“Here, yes. Not so much in other wards, though.”

“No?”

“No. They have activated the Biosecurity Isolation Area. Down in Sublevel Two. We have not been told what is there.” She paused, frowned. “People are thinking maybe smallpox. It’s all soldiers from Afghanistan. You know, germ warfare maybe.”

It’s ACE , Hallie thought. They don’t know yet . “Have they confirmed smallpox?”

The nurse shrugged. “No. It’s just what people are saying. Nobody knows, really.”

Hallie nodded, but did not add anything.

“Your vitals are looking very good, Dr. Leland,” the nurse said. “I think they will discharge you tomorrow.”

“That will be nice. To sleep in my own bed. Yum.”

“Good night, Doctor. Please use your call button for anything at all. Even if you should only want to talk. I am just at the nurses’ station.”

Hallie eased down, then turned onto one side because her bruised back hurt. They had raised the safety bars on her bed, and now she lay there staring through them. She was not thinking about her expedition into the cave. She was thinking, instead, of the footage of the soldier Don Barnard had shown her in his office, back before this all started. The things she’d seen were like the afterimages caused by staring into a bright light, but these would not fade. She closed her eyes, tried to think about other things, to squeeze the horror out of her mind. Then she stopped doing that. Turning away struck her as cowardice. Turning away from the people themselves struck her as worse. Especially from one person. What would she tell Mary, knowing that her sister was right here in the same hospital, and that she could have seen her, and did not? She dropped the safety bars and swung her legs over the side of the bed.

Because it was so late, the halls were deserted. It was not hard for Hallie to find a supply closet and exchange her hospital johnny for green doctor’s scrubs. She pulled white Tyvek covers over the running shoes Don Barnard had brought and put a hair cover on, just for good measure.

“I’m Dr. Leland,” she said as she approached the desk by the elevator. She had expected that access to the elevators and stairways would be restricted. The young corporal looked at her, then looked again, transfixed by her damaged face. “Car accident,” she said. “The stupid Beltway. You know how it is. I need to get down to the iso unit to see a patient.”

He examined a clipboard on the desk, running his index finger down a printout with a list of names, the finger stopping beneath each one. His lips moved while he read the names silently. Finally he looked up.

“Uh, I’m sorry, ma’am…”

“Doctor.”

He blushed. “Yes, ma’am, I mean, Doctor, but I don’t got your name here.” He held up the clipboard.

She grabbed it, laid it on the table, picked up one of his pens, and wrote her name between two others. Eyes flashing, she pushed the clipboard toward him.

“Now you do. Open that elevator, soldier.”

After passing into the iso unit’s air lock system, Hallie performed all the BSL-4 procedures, donned a Chemturion suit, and finally walked through an inner air lock into the unit itself, as quiet and dim as the area she had left. Ultraviolet germicidal lights on the ceiling and walls glowed an eerie, radioactive-looking blue, and even with the Chemturion’s filtration system running the air smelled of a chlorine-based aerosol disinfectant.

The nurses’ station was deserted—no surprise with a ward full of critical cases. She turned right and started down the long hall. Most of the rooms had their doors open, privacy curtains drawn around the beds inside. When she was halfway to the corridor’s end, she passed a room where the curtain was not drawn and she could see the person lying in bed. She was sleeping or, more likely, knocked out on meds, on her back. Some of the flesh on the right side of her head had been eaten away, exposing white patches of skull. There was a plum-sized hole in her left cheek, through which Hallie could see jawbone and teeth. There was no eye on this side, just a suppurating empty socket.

Hallie’s stomach churned. It was one thing to look at pictures of this horror, another to actually see—and smell—it. She started down the white corridor again. At its end, she turned left and kept walking. She passed five rooms and then stopped at the door to one. The rectangular metal frame on the wall beside the door held a paper name label: STILWELL, L. MAJ. FLNG.

It was a private room, just the one bed, a perk of rank. Night-lights at the baseboards and wall switches illuminated the room softly. Hallie could see a woman with short brown hair lying in the bed. She had met Lenora only once, at Mary’s parents’ home in Louisiana. Now an oxygen-supplying cannula was inserted into Stilwell’s nostrils. A sheet was pulled up to her chin. Her arms rested on top of the sheet. Both hands were bandaged. And then, as Hallie watched, one came up and waved her in. She walked to the bedside.

“Hey.” Stilwell’s voice was a raw whisper, roughened by pain and throat inflammation. “What’s up, Doc?”

My kind of gal . “Lenora?” she said very softly. Then, remembering the suit, she repeated her question more loudly.