Perdue watched as he got the same image they had on the fifty-inch monitor inside the station on the dashboard unit. He zoomed to the flashing light by using his fingers on the touch-screen.
“Don’t look now,” Purnell interjected, “but there aren’t any roads between here and there. Not even a damn deer track. Guess Bruno wasn’t kidding about keeping it off the map.”
“Trust me, that’s the least of our problems.”
“How so?” Purnell knew he was better off not asking, but couldn’t help himself.
Perdue pressed a button. As they rolled forward, the tires “grew” a tank-track shell around them. The front of the truck sprouted some impressive grill work, as did the windshield. Perdue proceeded to mow over trees in his path as if the SWAT truck were indeed a tank. “Widget’s latest accommodations.”
Purnell just stared ahead at the path opening before them.
“What, no pithy comeback?” Perdue offered him a stick of gum.
He took it, blew bubbles.
As the last one popped, Perdue laughed. Reading Purnell’s expression, he said, “There goes another great idea. Tell me about it. The loud pops help snap you out of your defeatism, though, don’t they?”
“Speak for yourself.”
Perdue smirked. “Cheer up. Dying’s easy. It’s living that’s hard.”
***
Johnny swam toward the light, kept his fingers crossed that the undertow was somehow pushing them out into open water. As fate would have it, his luck was even better; the light was the lamp on Phoenicia’s forehead.
One impossible dream had replaced another as he swam toward the light for a while, and realized he wasn’t getting any closer, until he felt his way into an even faster riptide, just inches below the one carrying him along. Now as he approached the light, the aperture grew smaller and smaller, suggesting it wasn’t a portal to another world, just a gateway to his heart, which these days, beat inside Phoenicia’s chest. He had justified changing strategies, and resisting the tide which held him, on the premise that Phoenicia’s body, filled with water, would have sunk into the faster liquid equivalent of a jet stream.
He grabbed hold of her body and swam with it, looking for an opening in the cave where there might be a pocket of air and a dry landing, a place where he could beach her body and attempt CPR.
When no such pocket was forthcoming, he reminded himself that brain death would not set in at six minutes in these frigid waters; she would have longer than that. How much longer, he couldn’t say. Just like he couldn’t say how much further it’d be to that much-needed landing.
***
“What are you doing?”
“Relax. It’s on auto pilot.” Perdue walked away from his driver’s seat and examined their diving equipment. “You might want to get back here and familiarize yourself with this stuff from now. Hard to learn at sub-zero temperatures. The mind tends to forget what it’s doing.”
Purnell sniggered. “We can only hope.” Then, torn between trusting his fate to their auto pilot, and trusting his fate to Diver’s Cemetery absent a dry run on the equipment, he decided a head-on collision with a tree the truck couldn’t handle—which could be avoided with him at the wheel—was the lesser concern.
He planted his backside on the bench opposite Perdue, and pored over the equipment.
“The damn thing has a heating system. Nifty.” Perdue thumbed the fabric.
Purnell found a gauge he couldn’t explain. “What does this do?”
Perdue examined the equivalent on his suit, turned the dial, listened by pressing the gauge and the suit up against his ear. “Kill the lights for a minute.”
“Yeah. Good idea. Let’s get so we can handle this stuff in the dark. Not likely to be much light where we’re going.” Purnell killed the lights. His mouth went wide at the glowing suit in Perdue’s hands, lighting up the back of the SWAT truck better than a handful of glow-sticks.
“You blink and the state of the art changes,” Perdue said. “God, I love the twenty-first century.”
Purnell’s expression soured. “May you live in interesting times: It’s a Chinese curse.”
“Yeah, well, you can’t trust a people who feast largely on white rice.”
Purnell snorted, shook his head.
***
Johnny turned Phoenicia onto her side and applied the Heimlich maneuver in hopes of driving out the water in her lungs. He didn’t know if it’d work, but breathing into a lungful of water through her mouth wasn’t getting him anywhere.
As the water flowed out her mouth, his whole demeanor changed. It was as if he’d breathed life into himself.
With renewed hope and energy, he applied his Red Cross CPR training. Five chest compressions. One breath. Five chest compressions. One breath.
Five minutes of that, and it was starting to feel like a countdown to a rocket launch that just wasn’t going to happen. It was time for another of his bright ideas, or a return to hopelessness; take his pick.
She’d damaged one of her battery packs in the fall. If it wasn’t any good to her while she was alive, maybe it could at least bring her back from the dead. He could divert the last remaining charge in it to her heart. It was a stupid idea. Unlike shock paddles, he couldn’t control the amount of charge hitting her; could just as easily cook her heart as trigger a heartbeat. But he pressed on.
He used his diving knife to cut a slice down the center of her chest, making sure to separate the seams of the suit without damaging the electrical heating coils. He slipped the wires from the battery under the suit to get past its insulating properties. Then he stepped away from Phoenicia. Her body would serve as the ground, not his.
Here goes nothing.
He threw the improvised switch on the battery.
Her body arced off the ground with the bolt of electricity. Well, now he knew how they got four hours out of one of these things. Must be new battery technology. All the same, he didn’t know how many more times he could hit her without exhausting the battery’s reserves, or without overloading her body.
By the third try he found out. The battery was dead. Phoenicia, no more alive.
He flopped down on the landing beside her, and sobbed. Their “island in the stream” was a slab of ice carved out of the cave which had won its battle against the algae which kept the rest of the water from freezing. He doubted he’d fare as well against the ice as the algae.
In the middle of feeling sorry for himself, it occurred to him that he’d spared his own battery by switching off his headlamp. He would need enough remaining charge to maintain his own body heat, which Phoenicia would need him to share with her, and his bioluminescence, lest he make it all but impossible for a rescue team to find them. But with all that, maybe he still had enough to give her a stronger hit than her damaged battery could give her. His hands were already scrambling to put his idea into action.
He got her hooked up and fired away. Again. And again. Phoenicia coughed. And then she gasped. He hugged her, and reprised his sobbing.
Her gasping for air improved about the time her shivering worsened. She managed a stuttering, “Sta-sta-status report?”
He laughed. He noticed his bioluminescence had already diminished, as had his body temperature, confirmed by the reading off the body-scanning watch. “You woke up in time to die. Batteries low. Temperature dropping. No end of this cave in sight. Tide is too strong to swim back the way we came.”
“This is no time to start telling me the truth.”
He laughed and cried and squeezed her tightly. “The good news is we’ll likely go out making love. Only way to stay warm. How bad can that be?”
“To tell you the truth, the sex was getting tired.”
***
“Fuck me. Took some brass balls to descend down this hole.” Purnell felt an urgent need to pee just looking down. He stood there thinking he could stand to evacuate his bowels, also, before the actual descent compelled his reflexes to get the better of him.
“You wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Perdue tested the ropes for rappelling down the sheer wall of the cave’s entrance. “The kids did their homework before coming out here. Let’s hope it’s kept them alive.”
“You save those prayers for us.”
Perdue took the lead on the ropes. Purnell right beside him. Fighting to keep up. Per usual.
***
“Force the issue, Purnell. Push him over the edge before he takes you over a cliff with him.”
Purnell didn’t appreciate the voice in his head. He appreciated it even less when he noticed it was coming from a few feet in front of him. A woman’s ghostly figure hovered before his eyes. “Who are you?” he said. Purnell kept the conversation in his head for now, not wanting to alert Perdue that the guy he depended on was decompensating right beside him. That could put a definite crick in their professional relationship.
“Someone you can trust when I say you’re headed down a dead end road together. Not only will you end up dead, you won’t be the least bit wiser for it. Trigger the insights now, before it’s too late—for both of you.”
He must have been hyperventilating.
“Steady your breathing,” Perdue said.
“You ever stop to consider what separates you from these kids? A little better technique? A little more luck? What drives you, Perdue? The last thing you need is to find yourself trapped in a place like this.”
Perdue shook his head, reached for his diving knife, and held it to Purnell’s line. “This should shut you up,” he said.
He cut the line.
Before Purnell could grab on to him he was falling. So much for trusting in his guardian angel.
She trailed him down for a while, smiling. “That’s the ticket.” And then she disappeared.
The water was bitter cold, the heating elements lining his suit the only thing keeping him from instant shock. And it was so black it took him a while to realize the hand in front of his face he thought he was looking at was just an optical illusion.
He heard a splash beside him. Then he saw the light. Perdue’s light.
“Activate your bioluminescence.”
Purnell did as instructed.
“You of a mind to get philosophical,” Perdue said, “ask yourself what you gonna do the day you don’t have me to do your thinking for you.”
“You want me to think for myself? Fine. Show me how to turn off the audio so I don’t have to take any more brow beating. The voices in my head every time I try to follow you anywhere are enough.”
Perdue’s face plate didn’t hide his smirk. He pointed in the direction of the riptide. “Don’t fight it. Doubtful they could have for long.”
Purnell watched the undertow snatch Perdue away from him, and panicked. Seconds later it caught him up in its mighty arms and whisked him away as well. He was never so happy to be taken under by such a fast moving current.
***
Perdue waited for Purnell to pop his head above the surface. Just in case Purnell wasn’t thinking straight, Perdue kept one of his feet in the water, so his bioluminescence could cue him.
The young couple was in bad shape. They were both in superb physical condition, judging from their physiques and the fact that the cold and dank had failed thus far to kill them. But there was still the question of if he could revive them enough to save them. There was only one way out of this cave, and that was to continue to follow the riptide.
He barely had room to work. Even seated, crouched over the bodies, the small cavity pressed up against him from all sides. Maybe that was all the prompt he needed. Perhaps Purnell’s earlier words had primed the pump, but he suddenly flashed back to his childhood, when his father had left him locked in a similar coffin-sized box to ensure he was home when daddy returned. When that failed to discipline him enough, dear old dad threw in bags of dry ice and then closed the lid on him with the fateful words, “I’ll be back.” Was Purnell right? Was that what drove him? A need to re-experience the terror, only nothing quite matched the early-childhood demons for sheer intensity, so he had to keep pushing?
When Purnell stuck his head above water, he was gasping. “You all right?”
Perdue was pissed at himself for pulling focus. He wasn’t the one who needed rescuing here. He got his breathing under control and tended to business, reaching for the needle full of adrenaline in a pouch in his backpack.
In the ice next to the satchel, a shadowy female face stared back at him. It was the same woman who had manifested at the religious compound. “Heed your own warnings, Perdue, before it’s too late,” she said.
He slid the satchel over the face. The play of light and shadow was all it had taken to turn a smudge into a Rorschach test. That, and God knew what gases were trapped down here.
They needed to get a move on.
He pierced the needle into the teen’s heart, waited for him to revive.
A few seconds later he bolted upright, gasping. Perdue had to settle him down. To his oxygen deprived brain, they must have come across like demons attacking him in his dreams, considering their face masks and body suits and tanks.
Perdue pressed a button and released his face plate to clear a path to the kid’s ears. “We need to go. I revived you, but we’ll keep the girl under for now. Unconscious, she’ll require less oxygen. She might need all the help she can get where we’re going, and I’m guessing saving her is a priority. With the head gash, moreover, if we revive her; her heart’ll pump faster, exacerbate the blood loss.”
“Consider yourself lucky, kid,” Purnell interjected. “That’s more explanation than I’ve ever gotten from him about the harsh facts of life.”
The kid nodded.
“You hold on to her like your life depended on it.” After ushering the edict, Perdue slipped into the water ahead of the kid. “Whatever you do, don’t lose me.”
“You don’t have to tell me twice,” the kid said. He grabbed hold of the girl.
“Me, either,” Purnell added.
***
Robin came around to find herself at her bedroom balcony window at night overlooking the Harding estate, Drew beside her, drink in hand.
“You and your poor man’s safaris,” he said. “Ever occur to you there are Renaissance types all around you, if only you had the eyes to see?”
“I’m the optimist, remember. You should stick to cynicism; it suits you better.”
She turned her back on him.
“To appreciate my cynicism, you first have to appreciate my sarcasm.”
Robin ignored the dig, focused for now on Perdue and Purnell, wondering if she’d gotten through to either of them with her thought projections.
THIRTY-NINE
Lady Harding set down the wine glass, and just missed the bedside table. She watched the blood-red seep into the rug, before making her way to the window.
She retreated nearly as much as she moved forward; the window she was intent to look out did not seem to be getting much closer. “Oh, hell, you may as well put it to music.” She dropped the needle on the phonograph, not sure if the tune that played on the antique Victrola was a waltz or not. Her drunken stagger alternated between a fox trot, a meringue, a salsa, a tango, and some break dancing, as she kept falling to the floor in unsightly fashions.
She pulled herself up by the bedpost after her latest crash landing. “You need a bracer is what you need.”
She felt her way to the liquor cabinet, indulged herself with a quick shot of whiskey. She tried her hand at her floor routine again, and noticed her gait had gained a jitterbug wildness with the sudden flinging of arms and legs to regain equilibrium against the even steeper sways. “Well, your technique’s improving, if that’s any consolation.”
The quickest way to get back to the liquor cabinet in her current state, she decided, was to attempt a daring forward roll. When she lande
d on her back, she determined the smartest thing to do was to use her feet to open the doors to the liquor cabinet. She attacked the bottle on the bottom shelf. After gripping it between her ankles, she hoisted it out of the cabinet, threw the bottle up in the air, caught it between her shins, then tossed it again, and caught it between her knees. In this fashion, by the third toss, she got it to land comfortably on her belly, where she reached quite comfortably for the merlot. “Let’s see what this does for your footwork.”
She swilled the second-rate vintage, then pressed her way to vertical using arms and legs and palms and elbows, chin and forehead, in no particular order. By the time she was upright again, she found she could walk perfectly. “I see the genie’s out of the bottle at last.”
She lifted the arm off the record on the Victrola, turned to see the vacuous floor space filled with a ghostly impression of a shady character stealing through The Crystal Palace, site of the 1851 World Expo. Assassin or saboteur? Only a closer investigation would reveal the truth.
She ran to her walk-in closet, ripped the door open to reveal her collection of steam-punk weapons. She changed into period-appropriate wear, attached implements of destruction to her of various scales, layer by layer.
Then she bolted towards the garage.
***
Raya Stark found Toby at the wheel. “Step on it, Toby.” When she got no response, she realized he was asleep.
She took the pistol out of her belt, adjusted the setting on the ray gun, and hit him with a bolt of electricity. His eyes popped open. Still unable to focus, he turned to the passenger behind him. “Lady Harding?”
“That simpering fool?”
Toby’s senses sharpening, he realized by the changed appearance, body language, and pitch of her voice, that this was no longer Lady Harding, but her alter. “Sorry, Ms. Stark.”
Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5) Page 151