The Deep Zone

by James M. Tabor

  It was, she realized, one of the easiest places to die in the whole cave. When did you need to pee? Middle of the night. Where did you go? To the river. What shape are you in? Half asleep. Jesus Christ.

  “Let’s go see.” She pointed at his feet. “Be careful.”

  They walked toward the river, and it was like walking down a wet, steeply pitched slate roof. Closer to it, the rocks became smooth, almost glassy, scoured by the action of grit-carrying water over countless eons. And right down close to the foaming water itself, Hallie could see that the rocks had an eerie shine, covered with a greenish algal growth that was almost invisible. She stood where she was. They played their lights up and down the riverbank, over and over. The river down here was so powerful that they felt it as much as heard it, their bodies vibrating with the energy that came up from the rocks, through their feet, and into their legs.

  Flashing their lights, they walked back and forth both ways along the river, staying above the slippery algal sheen, for half an hour. Finally, she turned to Cahner and motioned for them to head back. There was no point in trying to make herself heard here.

  They returned to their camp area and Hallie struggled to steady her voice. “He’s gone. Don’t know how, but gone. Probably the river.”

  But her mind was filled with a simple, terrible question: How could he make such a mistake? He was tired, and exhaustion makes you careless, but still. How?

  For a second, Cahner’s face looked like a pane of glass, pushed out of shape by great wind, in the moment just before it shattered. Hallie could sense the struggle going on within him, the urge for self-preservation warring with his conscious desire to help. Sometimes people lost that struggle and went berserk. She put her hands on his shoulders and looked into his eyes. “Al. I can’t do this alone. I need you.”

  The words seemed to hit him like a slap. His head came up, his eyes clearing. He focused on her. She saw his jaw working, watched as the muscles of his face appeared to rearrange themselves, regaining tone and strength. He stood erect, swallowed, nodded. It was the first time she had ever seen him stand up really straight, and she realized that he was almost as tall as she. He took her hands from his shoulders and held them.

  “You have me.” His voice was firm and certain. “Whatever it takes, we will do this.” He looked at her for another moment, then released her hands and turned toward his pack.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  TWENTY-NINE

  SIX HOURS AFTER LEAVING DEMPSEY’S BODY, STIKES AND Kathan finally located the meadow and sighted the mouth of Cueva de Luz. The mission had never called for them to actually go into the cave. Rather, they would wait for whoever came out and deal with them on the surface. They made a camp fifty yards back from the tree line. Then they created a hide, just inside the tree line at the meadow’s edge, from which one of them could watch the cave mouth constantly. One man slept or rested, one kept watch. Four on, four off. If Dempsey had been alive it would have been four on, eight off. This two-man rotation was punishing, but Stikes had endured worse.

  He had just finished one of his fours and was rousing Kathan—carefully. It was unwise to startle a man like Kathan from sleep.

  “Kathan. Kathan,” Stikes whispered.

  The big man’s eyes snapped open. “My turn?”

  “Yeah.”

  Kathan sat up and rubbed his face. He gazed around the campsite with a puzzled look and for just a moment he seemed to Stikes like a huge child. But then Kathan focused and Stikes thought, No eyes like that in any child.

  “I was about to ask you where the hell Dempsey is,” Kathan said. He shook his head. “Jesus.”

  “It’s tough about Dempsey,” Stikes said. “I know you two went back a way.”

  “Yeah, we did.” Stikes waited for more, but then Kathan started assembling gear for his turn in the hide.

  “This place is crawling with bad actors,” Stikes said. “You can’t afford to get careless for a second.”

  “Dempsey never got careless. I served with the man a long time. Something else happened.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know what. But trust me—Dempsey was not the careless type.”

  Stikes saw no reason to argue the point. “I guess we’ll never know.”

  “The real question is, why didn’t they come for us? They must have been watching, waiting for an opening, like Dempsey moving off to take a crap.”

  “Two of us together, they probably figured too much for them,” Stikes said.

  “Yeah, probably so.” Kathan paused. “We lost a guy like that in Iraq.”

  “Like what?”

  “The hajis cut his head off,” Kathan said. “His name was Stanton. They put spikes through his eyes and hung his head from a road sign. There was so much blood, you could tell they put the spikes in before they killed him.”

  “A buddy?”

  “Closest kind,” Kathan said. “Him and me and Dempsey were on our third deployment together.”

  “Why’d you get out? You and Dempsey, I mean.”

  Kathan hawked, spat. “It wasn’t our choice, you want to know the truth. After we lost Stanton, we had some problems interrogating hajis near Fallujah.” Kathan’s eyes went vague, then refocused. “It wasn’t like we did a My Lai. Just three hard-core hajis. And we got good intel, too.” He took in a long breath, exhaled, gazed toward the cave mouth. “But then, look how it’s all turned out. We’re making five times the money, and the benefits definitely don’t suck.”

  “Plus which,” Stikes said, “as much as it pains me to say this, the benefits just got better.”

  Kathan nodded. “Yeah. We’ll split ol’ Demp’s share. It would have been the same if they’d got you or me.”

  “The way it works.”

  “Sure enough. And those other benefits, too.”

  “Other benefits?”

  “Come on, man. The tall blonde. Honest to God, Stikes, I can’t stop thinking about that one.” Kathan winked, grinned, but Stikes saw no trace of humor in the other man’s face. More like hunger. She’s gotten into his brain and there’s only one way to get her out.

  “No?” Stikes said.

  Kathan glanced at him. “Hey, don’t worry, man. There’s plenty for two there, count on it.”

  Stikes saw that Kathan had misunderstood. “She’s all yours.”

  “You don’t want some of that?”

  “It’s not my thing, Kathan.”

  “Not your thing? What’s that supposed to mean?” Kathan’s gaze suddenly hardened, turned suspicious. Stikes saw that he was going to have to talk this through.

  “It’s my last run. I’ve been doing this long enough. I’m getting out.”

  “Getting out?”

  “Give it another ten years or so, see how you feel then. Yeah, I’m getting out.”

  “Getting out.” Kathan repeated the words as though they were in some foreign tongue.

  “Come on. Don’t you ever think about it?”

  Kathan rubbed a hand over his eyes, looked out at the forest. “What the hell would I do?”

  Stikes shrugged. “Anything you wanted to.”

  “I don’t want to do anything else. I like this work. What are you thinking about doing?”

  “Starting a business. Boxing gym, or maybe a martial arts academy. For kids in the ’hoods.”

  “Jesus Christ.” Kathan studied him for a few moments, as though sensing that he was missing something. Then he grinned. “You have a woman back there, don’t you?”

  “Yeah. I do.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Keyana.”

  Kathan repeated the name slowly, enunciating each syllable. “Nice name, the sound of it.”

  “What about you? Who do you have back there?”

  “You mean, like wife or girlfriend?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Nah. I got the work, is all. And you know what? I like it, man. Don’t tell me you don’t get off on it.”


  “Sometimes, some part of it. But not like it was once.”

  “You really getting out?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Told Gray yet?”

  “I gave that some thought. I figured the best time is after we’re back and I have my money.”

  “Good call.” For just a moment Kathan’s eyes changed and he looked like he might say more, but then they hardened again. He finished collecting his gear and moved off toward the hide.

  THIRTY

  HALLIE, HOLDING UP HER HAND, WHISPERED, “AL… TURN YOUR light off.”

  “What’s the matter?” His voice, like hers, was thick with fatigue.

  “Turn off your light.” She had turned hers off already. Cahner did as he was told, and the darkness rushed over them like black water closing around two drowning people.

  “What are we hiding from?” He kept one hand in contact with her pack.

  “We’re not hiding. Look past my right shoulder.”

  He did. Gasped. “My God, Hallie.”

  “I know. Amazing, isn’t it?”

  A faint blue glow. Fifty yards ahead, the route turned right, and the glow was coming from beyond that turn.

  “That’s it, then? The moonmilk chamber?”

  “That’s it.”

  Five minutes later they stood in a roughly circular chamber fifty feet in diameter. The floor was gravel and sand, sloping gently downward toward an exit passage, the ceiling about thirty feet overhead. The chamber’s walls were vertically fluted yellow-and-white flowstone. Off to their left glowed the moonmilk colony. It was a microbial mat, five feet square, six inches thick. It looked like a big, glowing blue-green brain hanging from the cave wall.

  The glow was bright enough here that they could see without their lights. It felt like being under azure Caribbean water. It was not a steady glow but instead wavered and flowed like the northern lights.

  “How in God’s name does it survive down here?” Cahner was still whispering. It was like being in a cathedral, somehow. They had moved away from the watercourse, its sound now distant and faint. There was nothing but the softly pulsing blue light. The air in this chamber felt different, drier and slightly warmer.

  “We don’t know.” Hallie’s voice was reverent, tinged with awe. “But it does. Has for eons, apparently.”

  “I could stand here and look at it for hours.” Cahner sounded mesmerized. “It’s like staring into a fire.”

  “I know. There’s a feel to it, too, Al. Are you getting that?”

  “Yes, a little. It’s like warmth.”

  They dropped their packs. Still operating in the light given off by the moonmilk colony, Hallie retrieved an Envirotainer, an aluminum cylinder eighteen inches long and six inches in diameter. Inside were four test-tube-sized stainless steel containers. In the Envirotainer’s base was a battery-powered EMU—environment maintenance unit. Moonmilk, she had learned the hard way, had a very narrow range of survivability: plus or minus about four degrees in temperature, plus or minus 5 percent in humidity. It had zero tolerance for light, natural or artificial. Not that any of those things were surprising, given that it had evolved in an environment where the conditions were hyperstable and absolutely dark.

  “Now comes the hard part.” Hallie set the four containers on the cave floor beneath the moonmilk colony. As she did so, the biomass’s colors changed subtly, a hint of pink flowing in.

  “My God. Look at that.” Cahner stopped moving.

  “I know. Amazing, isn’t it?”

  “Changes colors. Like an octopus.”

  “Probably more like chameleons.” Hallie had investigated the color shifting. “Cephalopods use muscles to control their color changes. Moonmilk doesn’t have muscles, so it must be cell signaling, which is how chameleons do it. They can change color in response to temperature fluctuations. Mood. Stress. So this is probably chromatophores responding to hormone releases.”

  She put on a high-filtration, isolation surgical mask with a 0.1 micron barrier capability. She donned sterile, elbow-length surgical gloves and removed from sterile packaging a Bard-Parker No. 60 straight-blade scalpel and a stainless steel dissection scoop. She turned to Cahner.

  “Okay, here’s where it gets tricky. Once we separate a sample, we have about ten seconds to isolate it in the Envirotainer capsule before it loses viability. I need you to position the containers while I deposit samples. Put on a mask and gloves first.”

  Cahner did as he was told. Then he picked up one of the sample-collection cylinders, unscrewed the top, and held it for Hallie. With the scalpel, she made an incision in the biomass slightly smaller than the cylinder. Using the dissection scoop, she excavated beneath and behind the incisions and gently worked the sample free. For the first few seconds, it glowed and pulsed in consonance with the primary biomass. Then its luminescence began to dim and the color pulses slowed. It gave off a peculiar scent that reminded Hallie of crushed grapes.

  “Quick, now,” she whispered, more to herself than Cahner, who was standing there with the cylinder ready. She deposited the sample.

  “Secure it!”

  The words came out more sharply than she’d intended, but Cahner seemed not to notice. He put the cap in place, screwed it down tightly, inserted the cylinder into the Envirotainer. “Good job,” she said. “That one ought to be fine. Let’s do another.”

  They obtained two more samples and sealed them into the Envirotainer. They were working on the last one when the scalpel slipped in Hallie’s fingers. The stainless steel handle had a scored surface for better purchase, but it had been designed for use in the controlled conditions of a surgical theater, not the bottom of a supercave. The handle had become wet and slick with biomatter as Hallie worked. She was making a vertical incision in the body of the moonmilk, her left hand holding the mass steady as the blade passed through. Though visually it appeared to resemble brain matter, the moonmilk’s tissue was tougher. Cutting it, even with the surgical-grade scalpel, was more like cutting through the skin of a grapefruit, requiring considerable, steady pressure. Before she could stop it, the scalpel blade slipped and jumped sideways, slicing a deep gash that ran through the web between her thumb and forefinger and halfway across her palm.

  She screamed, dropped the scalpel, grabbed her left wrist. The pain hit instantly, like someone laying a red-hot blade on her palm, running all the way up her elbow into her shoulder and neck. She was off balance anyway, and the explosion of pain caused her to stumble, shoving her bleeding hand into the body of moonmilk. When she pulled her hand free it was smeared with blue-green matter, which mixed with the blood flowing heavily from her wound. The pain flared, as though someone had poured pure alcohol into the gash.

  Cahner was already tearing through the contents of his pack for the first aid kit. Hallie pulled the surgical gloves off, held her left hand up, and squeezed her left wrist fiercely with her right, compressing the ulnar and radial arteries—the deep ones that suicidal wrist slitters had to cut to be successful. Those both lay deep, however, and blood kept welling from the wound, running down her forearm, dripping and pooling on the cave floor at her feet.

  “Al!”

  “I’m looking, Hallie! Hang on!” He was buried in his pack up to the shoulders, digging its contents out, socks and toilet paper and MREs flying out behind him. Hallie was watching, and then suddenly she was sitting down, feeling dizzy, nauseous.

  “Got it!” Cahner ripped the paper wrapping from a sterile compress and hurried to kneel beside Hallie, dressing in one hand, poly bottle canteen in the other. “You hold your wrist, keep that pressure on, and I’ll flush this cut out.”

  She held on, gasping from the pain when Al sloshed water over the wound. It wasn’t sterile, but it might wash out fragments of rock and moonmilk. He emptied his canteen onto her hand, then put the compress on her palm and cinched its gauze straps tight.

  She yelped.

  “I’m sorry, Hallie!” He sounded horrified.

  “No worrie
s.” She forced herself to relax, breathe deeply. “It has to be tight.”

  When he was finished, Hallie sat, letting her head clear. Cahner knelt, one hand on her shoulder. “That is a nasty cut. What else should I do?”

  “I don’t think anything, right now. It’ll need stitches for sure when we get out, but the bandage should hold it together until we do.”

  “Climbing isn’t going to be fun with that.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Does it hurt like hell?”

  “It did. But not so much, now.”

  “Probably mild shock. You were looking wobbly there.”

  “Better now.” She started to stand up, but Cahner pushed her gently back down.

  “You just stay there for a few minutes. We’ll rest a bit and have something to drink and a bite to eat.”

  “We need to get more moonmilk,” she said.

  “What we need now is to get you fixed up.” Cahner took off his mask, and removed his rubber gloves. They ate energy bars, drank what remained of Hallie’s water, and napped for two hours on the cave floor. Then it was time to start the long trip out.

  THIRTY-ONE

  LENORA STILWELL WAS DREAMING OF A TIME AT A SMALL island in the Gulf, called Delfín. Spanish for “dolphin.” She and Doug and Danny were swimming out past the low, white curl of surf, slicing through blue ocean strewn with sun glitter, when a group of bottlenose dolphins came toward them, making silvery arcs in the air with their leaps. They stopped, treaded water, watched the dolphins on a feeding run, chasing schools of mackerel, which, herded to the surface, made it swirl and bubble like water boiling in a vast pot. Then she looked around and Doug and Danny were gone and someone was calling her name, someone she could hear but could not see, and she could not keep her head above the water.

  “How are you feeling, Major?” Stilwell opened her eyes. The nurse, a young woman in a blue Chemturion suit, had one gloved hand on the rail of her bed. Stilwell turned her head. “I’m sorry to bother you, ma’am,” the nurse said. “Just a vital check and I’m out of here.”