by Leslie Lutz
I floated at the railing, stunned. What could do this? Whatever it was, I didn’t want the machine to turn on when we were down here. The image of me in a blender came to mind.
Cup of coffee number six, injected directly into my veins.
Without warning, the Sense rose up from nowhere and blindsided me. Images flashed in front of my eyes, a montage of light and shape and memory. Graham and me rising with bags full of food. Graham and me tangled in the filaments of a something we couldn’t see. Metal falling on us, trapping us, until we ran out of air. A string of flashes. In some memories we lived. In some we died.
Lost in the show in my head, I sucked down air like a new diver. I held my breath and made myself ration it. And without explanation, the Sense left me, descended back into the deep.
Graham had finally shaken off the last of his fear, or swallowed it, and his dive light danced over the metal curves and angles like a bright little fish. The beam stilled on an opening to our right, two floors down. He pushed off the railing and swam toward it, and I followed.
Under a catwalk that dangled drunkenly off a few metal bolts stood a door, yawning open on one hinge. Graham slipped halfway through before I grabbed his ankle. He turned, and I held up my coil of bright orange line.
Keep it in sight, I was telling him. Don’t go anywhere that you can’t see this.
I secured my line to a bolt on the outside and led the way, unspooling our lifeline as we swam into the yawning opening of the cored-out lab. Machine. Whatever it was.
Beyond the doorway was a flooded hallway, the kind you’d see in a hospital, with white, institutional walls. Six doors down the hallway stopped and became a T junction. I ran my light over the walls, stopping on a sign.
In Japanese.
My heart thudded as I realized what that meant.
I then puzzled at the lettering through my bubbles.
A tap on my ankle made me jump. Graham pointed down the hall and then at his stomach and his wrist.
Let’s get going.
Another sweep revealed three doors on the left, two on the right. And a body at the T junction, lying on its side. I knew I’d encounter one eventually. Thankfully, it faced away from me. I didn’t want to see the empty stare.
Graham glided past me, kicking up a cloud of silt. I grabbed his ankle again. When he turned, I pointed at the silt cloud, which now completely obscured the hallway behind us.
He looked at the cloud, and then at me. I pulled out my slate and wrote a message with my golf pencil—Fins off floor—and shoved it in his face.
He blew out a cloud of bubbles and held his hands out as if to say, “Ladies first.”
That’s all I needed—underwater sarcasm.
We continued on with me in the lead, two floating lights in the dark hallway. I checked my watch. Five minutes had elapsed. Fifteen minutes left.
Graham stopped swimming and shined his light at an open doorway on his right. When he turned to me, he made a few garbled hand gestures that I interpreted as Stay here.
I shook my head.
He made the sign again. I poked my light inside and found it to be the size of a walk-in closet. No way he could get lost in there.
I nodded and he slipped through the doorway, soon returning with a small white case marked with US Navy on the front. He pointed to it, then his leg. My heart swelled with relief. Medical supplies. Antibiotic, in a sealed case. Thank God. I punched Graham on the shoulder and he nodded, blowing out a cloud of bubbles. We gave ourselves a few seconds to celebrate before I stuffed the case inside my BC and tightened my straps.
Graham led the way and I unspooled our orange line, foot by foot. Left turn. Right turn. Past another body, this one wearing a white lab coat, who I gave a wide berth. Halfway down a corridor, where we had to skirt a pile of debris where the ceiling had caved in, Graham pointed his light at a doorway that led to an empty room. We swam inside and he passed by me to grab the handle of a door I hadn’t noticed. With a yank and a cloud of silt, it swung open. Another dark room. I dragged my light over the walls and . . .
Sweet mother of God.
Cans.
Stacked in neat rows five high. Potatoes, beans, pudding—pudding!—peanut butter, fruit cocktail, and—oh yes—mandarin oranges. My mouth watered, and my regulator mouthpiece slicked. Spam. Tea. Canned biscuits. More Spam.
Five shelves on each side of the room. Each one with at least a hundred cans and tins, some in Japanese, some in English.
A bubbling, gurgling sound came from Graham. He was laughing.
I floated there in the darkness, scanning the shelves. Green beans, apples, meat and vegetable stew. My body shook with need. I slung an arm over Graham’s shoulder and squeezed, laughing into the water with him.
I filled my bag with food, on the most glorious shopping trip in history. Graham worked on the other side of the room, his fins splayed on the floor. Stuffing his sack like a thief who’d just set off the house alarm.
Graham finished when I did. The excess weight of cans in the bag over his shoulder dragged him down, and every kick created an enormous, blinding silt cloud that would soon fill the room. I grabbed his vest and yanked him until he stilled. Pulsed a shot of air into his BC and secured the food on his back. But it was hard to be mad at him. He had forty things to remember, and he just couldn’t process it all. I’d give him lessons on the beach, and he’d be more controlled next time we came down here for supplies. And we’d both operate better with full bellies.
Once I’d cut the orange line and tied it to a shelf so we could find this place again, we slipped through the doorway and into the hall to make our way out of the maze. My light hit the silt cloud and bounced back to me. The muck Graham had kicked up was so thick that if I extended my arm, my hand disappeared.
I tapped Graham and flashed the signal in front of his mask, two index fingers together.
Stay close.
He nodded.
I wasn’t worried then. We had the line and eight minutes to spare. Mom and me, we’d done this kind of dive a dozen times in the Spiegel Grove and the Duane. Mom and I did the hallways of the Vandenberg for my seventeenth birthday. Piece of seaweed cake. As long as the thing hunting the coastline wasn’t waiting for us in the sinkhole, we were home free.
We started our exit, swimming through silt soup, my finger hooked around the line. I pushed thoughts of the green glow out of my mind and imagined the luau we would have on the beach. Laughed into the water again. My heart thumped and my whole body celebrated.
At the first turn, the silt thickened. I couldn’t read my gauges unless I held them a few inches from my eyes. Mom’s training had prepared me for this too, and my heart was all kinds of calm. No green glow. No problem. I loosely hooked my finger around the line, linked my arm through Graham’s, and kept moving.
And then the line went slack.
Ten cups of coffee in my bloodstream now. All at once.
I stopped, bringing Graham to a halt. Picked up the line and pointed to it. No reaction. He couldn’t see me. I reached for my slate to write him a message, to tell him the horrible truth. Then I let my hand fall to my side.
He didn’t need to know. Not yet. Trapped underwater. Lost in a maze. The truth would only make him burn through his air faster.
I finned my way through the soup, careful not to pull the line. Maybe it would still lead us out into the clear water of the sinkhole. The knots you taught me were perfect, so it hadn’t slipped free of the bolt. Which meant the bolt came off the wall. And the bolt would weigh down the end and lead us out. I rationalized my panic away, telling myself we were fine. Piece of seaweed cake . . .
Halfway down the hall, the end of the line appeared out of the murk, right in front of me, floating like sea grass. I grabbed it to get a better look, the thunder of breath in my ears speeding up, mocking me. The knot had come loose from the bolt.
My knot had failed.
I couldn’t hide the truth anymore, so I tapped Graham and hel
d the frayed end a few inches from his mask. A startled gurgle came back to me.
I had the sudden urge to stop and write Felix a note on my slate, to tell him I was sorry. That I loved him. But what was the point? Ben and Steph could never come down to find what was left of us and bring our bodies home. So I kept us moving, straight ahead, into the brown haze.
Halfway down the hall, something brushed by my leg. Startled, I flashed my light on it. A hand, floating there, attached to an arm. Which was attached to a body that faded into the cloud of silt.
The fingers twitched.
I pushed it away, a scream caught behind my regulator. Oh God. I couldn’t see, and I didn’t know where I was, and maybe those things were everywhere.
After a few more kicks and me barely controlling a hyperventilation attack, we reached the T junction. I directed the beam of my light left. Then right. My adrenaline flush had gone to low tide, and my body remembered hunger. My head swam, a hazy confusion filled my mind. I grabbed Graham’s arm and squeezed twice, pointed one direction, then the other, and pointed at him.
Which way?
He floated for a few breaths, searching both directions with his light, his beam bouncing back at us like the high beams of a car in a fog bank. He didn’t remember either.
Flipping a mental coin, I dragged him to the left, my arm a clamp on his. I wasn’t letting go, not for anything. If I let go, it would be too easy to lose him in this mess, like I’d lost Marshall.
We swam side by side, my breath a constant Darth Vader in my head. My body weightless and trembling with cold and adrenaline. I counted my kicks to estimate the distance.
Five. Ten. Fifteen.
And then we crossed some kind of threshold I couldn’t see. My mind stretched, popped like a rubber band. My body pulled apart and came back together, my stomach took a journey on a tightrope between two buildings. A muffled, watery cry next to me said Graham felt the same thing. And miraculously, the silt disappeared.
I floated to a stop, staring all along my light beam at perfectly clear water. How had the cloud disappeared so quickly? Had we hit a strong crosscurrent? But that feeling, my mind flipping over like a fish on a deck, just like that first day I swam too far away from the island . . .
A sweep with my dive light revealed gray walls lined with bolts. A long room. A large wooden crate dominated the end. Metal barrels stacked two high. The door on the opposite wall had a wheel on it, the kind you’d find in a . . .
I stopped breathing.
We weren’t in the lab anymore.
I scanned the walls. A glint of glass drew me, and I swam to it, past the barrels, past the wooden crate that towered above us. I reached the porthole and pressed my mask against it with an audible thunk. More water on the other side. A lot of it. And faint light.
Sunlight.
Open ocean.
Something brushed my waist and I startled, turning. Graham grabbed my slate and wrote something. I yanked it from his hand and shone my light across the message. But it couldn’t be. He’d written one word.
Andrews.
ENTRY 27
I SHOOK MY HEAD. Graham went into a complex pantomime that involved pointing at the barrels, then pointing at his mask, and a lot of nodding and gurgling and pointing out the porthole. The gist of it—he’d been here before. He recognized the room.
Andrews.
The USS Andrews, where he’d served before a torpedo sent the ship to the bottom of the ocean. Which means that Graham and I were now somehow two hundred yards off shore, ninety-five feet down, in the bowels of a shipwreck. We’d entered a sinkhole in the middle of the island and been magically transported a mile away.
My mind was still reeling from the weird rubber band effect, that stretching and popping that happened as we crossed the boundary that brought us here. The ceiling, the floor, they spun once, then righted themselves.
Coffee cup number twelve. Even for me, it was too much.
A flash of something out the porthole. A dim phosphorescent glow. There and then gone. I choked on my regulator. Of course that thing was here. Where it belonged. Where it was born. Senseless thoughts, bubbling up and stirring me into a panic.
I pointed the way we came, hoping it wasn’t a one-way trip. He nodded, we secured our stores of food securely on our backs, linked arms, and swam, praying that thing wouldn’t smell us down here and follow us back to the other side.
As I hit the invisible boundary, my stomach turned inside out. My legs stretched, my arms twisted, my brain smoothed flat as if by a steamroller. I dry heaved into my regulator. A rush of bubbles came from beside me, but I barely registered the sound.
We were in a brown world again. I kicked and pulled Graham tight against my side, but he weighed me down like a dead body. I stopped swimming and almost dropped my light.
I slid the beam over his face and saw his half-slitted eyes, his fins kicking weakly. A flush of relief flooded over me. Graham was alive.
Somewhere amidst the detritus floating in my mind I remembered the turn we’d made, the wrong way. Now we were heading the right way, toward the sinkhole, a straight shot down the hall.
Swimming, swimming, just keep swimming, I told myself. That dippy cartoon fish singing in my head. The Sense returned, rising up from the deep, full of splinters and teeth. Us, lying against the lab wall, choking on the last bits of oxygen. Us, knocking over a barrel in the Andrews, and the blast pulling us apart. Us, dragged over the edge of the catwalk and into the dark. And I kept swimming, swimming, just kept swimming, the images breaking and shattering and replicating in a hundred different variations.
A dim glow penetrated the darkness. A hazy rectangle. Five more kicks, and it became a doorway. The world opened up, and we were in the sinkhole again.
I closed my eyes and floated a moment, so relieved that my body felt light, my blood felt new.
When I checked on Graham, my relief disappeared. He pushed his fins so weakly through the water I thought he’d passed out. I pulled him to the catwalk and set his hand on the railing. He grabbed it and floated there, trying to put the pieces of himself together.
I checked my gauge: 300 PSI. I calculated the air I had left, checked my dive watch, and my breath stuttered. Twenty-nine minutes had passed. Too long filling bags. Too long swimming in the wrong direction.
Nine minutes past our safe point.
We needed to get to fifteen feet, then stay there for at least fifteen minutes if we wanted to, as you used to say, live past Sunday. If I breathed shallow, maybe I’d make the full fifteen before the air ran out.
I passed my light over Graham, who floated motionless, the only sign of life his death grip on the railing. One look at his gauge and the blood drained from my arms. He was redlining. And I felt so stupid. He was a guy, which meant he ran through his air faster than I did. More body. Bigger lungs. Of course he was out.
Only a few minutes left. We’d have to share.
I ran the numbers again. There wouldn’t be enough for both of us, not if we stopped to decompress for fifteen minutes. And if we didn’t make it, neither would the food.
My hands shook, but I managed to connect the lift bag to the cans. I firmly stuffed the medical kit in, filled the bag with air, and sent the whole thing flying up to the surface.
As I watched it disappear, I thought about what you would do, what you wouldn’t do. I considered going with the food. Graham was so out of it he wouldn’t realize I was gone. And even if he did, he wouldn’t find me in the dark. Wouldn’t panic and grab the regulator from me and take my air. No, I would go to the surface and leave him behind. I would be there for Felix. A necessary sacrifice. Felix needed me.
All of that scheming made its way through my brain in a breath. Two more seconds, and the shock of what I’d just considered ran through me like an electrical current.
I started to take Graham’s bag, and he pushed me away, yanking the rope from my hands and threading the end through the loop on the lift bag. His mind was
back, the rubber band pop of his brain a memory, and these final bits of him wanted to show me how good he was at tying knots. Could I? Could I leave him there in the dark?
I took my regulator out of my mouth and filled the second lift bag with some of my precious air instead of using the little he had. A decision. Now I didn’t have enough either.
Together we watched the mesh bag of cans slowly rise. We both kept our eyes on it until it disappeared into the darkness above us.
I turned him to face me, put my mask against his. It felt right to do this. Because we’re all in this together, and we don’t leave anyone behind.
The two of us at the bottom of the world, just out of the blender, floating together. Ben had his antibiotics. Felix had more food than he could eat in a month. And Steph, well, I guess she’d be along for the ride.
We started our ascent, and Graham jerked in the water. I shined my light on his mask. His eyes were wide. He tried to talk and got out a burble. He’d forgotten the signal for out of air, but his panic said everything.
I handed him my regulator and counted to five while he breathed. Then I gave his shoulder a quick squeeze and took it back. We swam up slowly, sharing air as we rose to the surface.
Time clicked through my head. Seconds, minutes, hours, years. Backward, forward. Somewhere in the kaleidoscope in my head, I laughed into my regulator, like I had when we’d found the food. But this time I was laughing at myself. I had miscalculated so many things—tied a bad knot, turned the wrong way. And what killed me in the end was forgetting an itty-bitty detail—I’d left no tank hanging at fifteen feet in case something went wrong. After over a thousand dives, I had forgotten to rig a safety stop. I laughed again as the flash of possible futures coalesced into one. We were about to die.
Graham had no idea. He probably thought we were in the home stretch. When we got to the surface, I wouldn’t have time to explain what was happening to him, but Ben would. He was kind, and he would lay him down on the edge of the sinkhole and tell him why he couldn’t breathe, why blood was bubbling out of his lungs. And I would have just enough energy to say goodbye to Felix before the nitrogen bubbles in my brain and heart shut the light out forever.