P. Deutermann - The Last Man

He did the dive calculations as he went down, his ears cracking. A hundred-plus feet. He didn’t intend to stay down there, but if someone had come into the bat cave and thrown everything there into the cistern, there might be some of those steel staging poles. He swam straight down, or as straight as he could with no visual cues, feeling the pressure squeeze his body. Going deep in a third dive in one day violated the nitrogen safety rules, but he had to know. Besides, he would be “surfacing” into air pressurized at thirty-five feet of water, which would act like a decompression stop. Sort of, anyway. He hoped it wouldn’t be a permanent one.

As he neared the bottom his headlamp illuminated a light cloud of silt. The bottom had been stirred up, probably by the avalanche of stuff thrown down from the bat cave. He slowed, hovering vertical now, his arms extended, until he felt his fingers pressing into soft mud. Moving slowly so as not to stir up any more silt, he felt around for anything on the bottom. Nothing. Then he had an idea. He switched off his headlamp. Sure enough, the reference light was glowing about fifty feet away. He swam over there, grabbed it, fastened it onto his arm, and encountered some cans of food, but no pipes. He expanded his search area and finally felt rather than saw a single staging pipe. Then a second one. He tried to lift them both but realized he would need help getting two of them to the cave entrance. He put the pipe back down near the second one and strapped the reference light onto one of the poles, pointing up. Then he swam back up toward the western wall of the cistern, shutting off his headlamp again as he passed through fifty feet, watching for Judith’s light. It appeared to his right, barely visible. He had gone way off course coming back up. He stopped and looked down. The reference light was just visible in the murky water, but it was visible.

He got to Judith and signaled that she needed to come down with him. He showed her the depth and pointed to her ears. She gave him the thumbs-up okay sign. He reached over and took off her headlamp and jammed it into a crevice near the entrance to the cave. Then he turned to swim back down, making sure she was following. Two minutes later they were on top of the pipes and the reference light. He explained with gestures that he wanted to take the two pipes back to the cave. She nodded. He tied the reference light’s rubber cord to one of the pipes in case they dropped one or both going up, then got the end of one pole in each hand. Judith lifted the other ends. Then they began to ascend, facing each other with the twelve-foot-long pipes between them like a stretcher.

At one point, near sixty feet, she stopped and shook her head, as if she were having problems clearing her ears. He stopped and watched her face grimacing in the mask. Then she nodded, and they started up again. Ten feet higher she stopped again and then suddenly grabbed her right ear, releasing her grip on one pipe. He tried to hold on to the pipe, but it slipped right out of his glove and disappeared down into the gloom, the reference light going with it. Not a total disaster, he thought. I can find it again with that light.

Judith was shaking her head and pointing down. She wanted to go back down to adjust the pressure on her ear. He nodded, holding on tight to the remaining pipe, and they maneuvered back down to sixty feet again. He watched her carefully as she went through more facial contortions behind her mask to clear her ear passage. Finally she signaled okay and they started up again. By the time he realized she was going up a whole lot faster than he was, the pipe was extended out to the full length of his arm and he couldn’t hold it. He almost yelled, but it was too late. He lost his grip on the pipe, which put its entire weight on her arm, and she dropped it immediately. They stopped ascending and watched it disappear into the depth below.

He swore mentally at their bad luck and then closed with her. He tried to read panic in her eyes behind the faceplate of her mask, but there was only embarrassment. He indicated they had to go back. To get one pipe this time, he signaled. She understood. Not that they had any choice, he thought. Only one pipe had a light on it. The other one was lost forever in all that silt. Plus, they couldn’t safely keep going back down to that depth.

He held her hand for a moment and turned off his headlamp. He looked up and could see a faint glow off to their left. Her headlamp was still there. Good. He looked down. There was a glow, but it was so diffused now in the silt as to be almost useless. He pointed down, and they began their descent. He left his light off. At a hundred feet they encountered the bottom. The glow was more distinct now, but it was way off to the southeastern side of the cistern. They swam that way, undoubtedly churning up silt clouds behind them, but David was focused on finding that light. It looked to be fifty feet away. Forty feet. They slowed to keep the silt disturbance minimized.

Thirty feet.

Twenty feet.

The light was visible now as a small purple glimmer. It’s probably buried in the silt, he thought; we’re lucky we could see it at all. They slowed even more, and then they were ten feet away. He looked for the pipe but couldn’t see it. It must be truly buried in all the silt, which was now boiling away from them along the bottom.

Away? Was there a current down here? He couldn’t imagine how that could be, but there was. Then he saw that they were almost up against the southeast wall of the cistern. He checked depth: one hundred twelve feet. They couldn’t stay here. But there, right in front of them, at a height of about six feet off the bottom, was a four-inch-diameter pipe protruding a foot out of the rock wall. A modern steel pipe, with a concrete-collared flange. What the hell was this, he wondered. He switched his head light on to examine it, but then something grabbed his forearm with a grip so strong he almost lost his mask whipping his head around.

It was Judith. She was pointing to something to the right of the pipe, something black, with glints of metal and what looked like glass. Oh, shit, he thought. That’s a wet suit… and a mask… and the white object behind the mask was a skull. The wet suit was striped with wide yellow and dark red bands. There were white bone fragments where the feet and hands had been.

Then Judith made a screaming noise in her mask, releasing a huge cloud of bubbles, and shot up out of sight like a rocket.

His immediate instinct was to follow her, but he remembered the staging pipe. He couldn’t come down here again. Taking a last look at the skeleton in the wet suit, he doused the light again and homed in on the partially buried reference light. He felt around for the pipe and grabbed it, but it was stuck under something. The silt was obscuring everything, turning his lamplight brown in the water.

He felt along the pipe until he encountered what felt like a huge timber. He swept away the silt cloud, trying to clear the water, trying to see what it was. Then he saw the glint of metal. Bright metal, like stainless steel. The silt returned, obscuring everything. He knew his time at this depth was going to kill him if he didn’t get upstairs in a hurry. He felt along the object. It was cylindrical, maybe two feet in diameter. He couldn’t tell how long it was. There was another one, and another one. At least three. Now he was stretched out, holding onto the staging pipe, and couldn’t move to his right anymore. He felt the stirrings of euphoria.

Gotta go, gotta go!

He went back to the pipe, wrestled with it, got it loose, and started up, hoping like hell Judith hadn’t gone all the way up to the ceiling at that speed. Hoping she’d remembered to blow air out of her lungs.

It was a struggle going up with the heavy pipe, but then he remembered his BCD. He adjusted the inflation slightly, and it was much easier going. He cursed himself for not thinking of that a whole lot earlier. His mind wasn’t working at top form just now. Nitrogen does that, a nasty little voice told him.