Reef of Death (The Zone Unknown)

by Paul Zindel

  “I can’t see,” Maruul yelled. PC turned up the intensity on Ratboy’s screen. He checked the deck plans. “This is a place that’s not supposed to exist.”

  Click. Click.

  “What’s that sound?” PC asked.

  “What sound?”

  It took PC a moment to figure out what it was.

  “Could you keep your hair quiet?” he told Maruul.

  “Sorry.” She held her beaded braids so they wouldn’t knock against each other.

  PC tripped, knocking over a pile of long, thin metal pipes. They crashed to the floor. “And you’re worried about my hair?” Maruul whispered in his ear.

  After the last pipe stopped rolling, they continued forward.

  “I’m getting a chill,” Maruul said, pulling her robe tighter around herself.

  “I’ve got goose bumps too,” PC said.

  There was an unidentifiable crackling and sounds of scurrying.

  PC tilted Ratboy’s screen so it lighted their feet. They were standing on a moving, living rug of twitching little claws. PC and Maruul screamed, jumped up and down, and lost their balance. They reached out to the walls, but their hands sank into more of the moving, brittle shag.

  Maruul shuddered. “What are they?”

  “Some kind of hairy land crabs,” PC said. “Dr. Ecenbarger’s a pretty lousy housekeeper.”

  The crabs pinched their fingers and began to leap onto their bare legs. Now, suddenly, a door opened at the end of the passageway. Silhouetted in the doorway was the figure of the shaman, towering in a horned headdress. Maruul shouted at him in her native language. “Why have you turned against your village? You’re killing our tribe. Killing it!”

  The shaman stayed silent and motionless, as though daring them to approach him. PC yanked Maruul behind him and ran through the gauntlet of crabs.

  They had almost reached the shaman when he turned and ran into another room. PC and Maruul followed him inside and were nearly blinded by floodlights that hung from the ceiling. It was another laboratory—a secret one, not on the ship’s blueprints. The shaman retreated to a doorway on the opposite side. When PC and Maruul were in the middle of the room, he stepped through the doorway and slammed the steel-and-glass door closed behind him. PC ran to the door and yanked on its handle. He tried to force it open, but it was sealed shut. Suddenly, across the room, the door they had entered from swung closed, too.

  PC turned to Maruul. “This is a trap!” he yelled.

  They raced from one door to the other, hitting and kicking at the latches, the glass. The doors didn’t budge; the glass was several inches thick. Finally, they stopped pounding and held their hands up to shield their eyes from the floodlights. A computer console was welded to the right wall. Chrome benches

  and a stainless-steel table were riveted to the floor.

  “What is this?” Maruul asked.

  “A decompression chamber,” PC said. “If a diver comes up too fast from a dive, the nitrogen starts to boil out of his blood. They call it the bends. It’s terribly painful, and it can kill you. This chamber builds up pressure to push the gas back into the blood. Then they lower the pressure slowly so the gases in the diver’s blood don’t come out too fast.”

  A stench floated toward them, making them choke. Slowly, they became aware of a strange sloshing sound coming from behind the steel table. Closer, the terrible odor became overwhelming. Maruul buried her nose and mouth in the skin of her arm. In front of them, shimmering under the stark whiteness of the lights, was a mass of maggots covering the form of a rotting animal.

  “What was it?” PC asked.

  “Some kind of a dog,” Maruul said. “The shaman’s old let’s-bite-a-dead-dog trick obviously works around here too!” The thousands of tiny white worms covered the carcass so thickly, it was a rippling, living mass.

  Suddenly, there was a hissing sound, like gas escaping. They looked up to a row of metal ducts on the ceiling. “What’s happening?” Maruul asked.

  “They’re sucking the air out of the chamber.”

  PC set Ratboy down and charged one of the doors, throwing all his weight behind a solid karate kick. His foot connected, but the glass held strong. He kicked again.

  And again.

  “I’m getting pains in my chest. I can’t swallow,” Maruul said.

  “We’ve got to do something fast, or the pressure’s going to drop so low that we’ll both explode,” PC yelled. He turned to the computer welded to the wall and typed in a STOP/CANCEL command on the keyboard. A message flashed on the screen: AUXILIARY IN USE. CANNOT OVERRIDE.

  There was a popping sound. Maruul thought it was her ears.

  Another pop.

  And another, as though someone was popping corn.

  “What’s that!” Maruul yelled.

  The sounds were coming faster now, especially from behind the steel table where the writhing, oozing carcass lay. In another moment, Maruul answered her own question.

  “THE MAGGOTS ARE EXPLODING!”

  “Quick, throw your robe over them,” PC ordered.

  Maruul pulled off her robe and flung it over the bursting carcass.

  PC felt drops of blood start falling from his nose. The air pressure was dropping fast. He kicked at the console and pressed his face against the glass window of the door. Another face—dark and startling—stared back in at him.

  “Wally!” PC cried out.

  “Help!”Maruul screamed. “Help us, Wally!”

  “There’s got to be a set of controls out there, Wally. Find it,” PC yelled through the glass. “Hurry!”

  “What?” Wally said, unable to hear.

  Shouting, PC repeated the command. Wally still couldn’t get it. PC grabbed Ratboy, threw open its lid, and typed: FIND THE CONTROLS OUT THERE. THERE HAS TO BE ANOTHER COMPUTER! He held the screen against the window.

  The pain in Maruul’s head was awful, her eardrums on the verge of bursting. She staggered to PC’s side and began to sink to the floor.

  “Wally, we’re going to die!” PC screamed. He knew the old man could see them, could see the blood coming from PC’s nose. See Maruul losing consciousness. Wally looked torn and helpless. He turned from the window and began to walk away.

  “Don’t go!” PC cried out.

  Wally Wallygong kept moving farther back into the darkness. PC’s lungs felt as if they were being ripped up through his throat. Maruul’s eyes closed. She laid her head down. PC thought her face would be the last thing he would ever see.

  There was one more image.

  A figure.

  The figure of an old dark man running.

  Wally coming back, racing toward the decompression chamber. He looked like a phantom, and when he hit the light spill from the chamber, PC saw the long, thin pipe he held high.

  Wally Wallygong came faster.

  Faster.

  Wally let the strange spear fly with a skill learned many years before.

  There was a tremendous implosion of glass and a rush of air into the chamber, as though a whirlwind had struck.

  8

  DEMONS

  “Coast Guard gone,” Wally Wallygong said. “They ask about you. Doctor tell Lt. Roessler not to worry, eh. She said she’ll get you to be with your uncle. She must have seen what happened to Cliff.”

  “Not if I can help it,” PC said, gasping.

  PC and Maruul took a series of deep, long breaths. They felt oxygen racing back into their blood and strength returning to their bodies. PC’s nose had finally stopped bleeding. There were sounds of guards running toward the shattered chamber. PC opened the ship’s program on Ratboy, checked the Anemone’s design plan again.

  “We’ve got to move it,” PC said. He pulled Maruul to her feet and led her and Wally out through the shattered door of the pressure chamber and down a curving metal stairwell.

  Maruul was confused. “Shouldn’t we be going up?”

  “No.”

  PC took them deeper inside the ship, far below
the waterline. They found a vast lighted room, an area that seemed to be part factory, part smelting plant. There were ingot molds and rinse tanks. Extrusion machines. Furnaces. An alcove of diving equipment. The freighter was turning out to be a Chinese puzzle, PC thought—box within box within box.

  Wally went straight to an aisle of open crates brimming with shiny metal. “Magnesium. Doctor mining magnesium. Still, not fortune, eh,” he said. Off to the side there was a receiving bin of wet, freshly mined metal spilled out from a sluice.

  “Why is Dr. Ecenbarger doing all this? Why would she want to kill us?” Maruul asked.

  “Greed,” PC said. “She’s sick, and can never have enough money or power. There aren’t any more countries in the world, you know. There are only corporations with two kinds of people: the ad guys and the Dr. Ecenbargers, the ones who call the shots on the whole scam. They’re the mutations—monsters who’d cut our noses off and try to kill us for a buck. There are Ecenbargers all over the place now!”

  PC headed for the circular pool beside the dive equipment. White piping with gauges and valve controls covered a wall. Although he’d seen only pictures of them in articles about high-tech nuclear submarines, he recognized the setup as an ocean interface—a tank that allows divers to launch themselves into the sea from inside a ship.

  Maruul turned in a slow circle, taking in the whole of the layout. “What is this place?”

  “Whatever it is, it’s state-of-the-art. This whole nasty freighter is a front for something else.” PC held up one of dozens of slick blue diving vests that had built-in breathing-exhalation bags, soda lime canisters, and nitrox tanks. “Rebreathers. They recycle the air. Divers can stay down for hours.”

  “My nephew sells rebreathers for plenty of dollars,” Wally said. He picked up a face mask with a built-in receiver. “He sells these, too. Now we talk better to each other underwater—like fish. Buddy phones. Got walkie-talkie chip. Five hundred bucks a pop.”

  Sounds of guards.

  Closer.

  PC noticed a surveillance camera mounted on the ceiling. It turned like radar. “They know we’re here. Suit up,” PC said. “Quick.”

  He finished first and made sure Ratboy was dry in the shoot bag. He helped Wally and Maruul buckle the loose ends of their gear. For a moment the three of them looked at each other. Maruul’s eyes were wide and alert. Wally set all three of their buddy phones to the same channel. They heard him whisper, “Stone, tree, stars, and human—all are one in our hearts.”

  We’re a team, PC thought, smiling as he launched himself down into blackness.

  Maruul and Wally followed. For twenty feet the interface tube remained as dark as a well. Then it became larger, transparent. They could see the hull of the Anemone and a blazing aura of sunlight crashing into the water surrounding it. A half dozen other tubes dropped from the freighter like so many glistening filaments dangling from a parasite.

  “Ecenbarger’s got her freighter rigged like a big leech,” PC said into the pencil mike of his buddy phone. “She has it drill and suck up anything she wants.”

  “Maybe suck up the meat for her cheap sandwiches, too, eh eh,” Wally said.

  Drills were visible in a few of the tubes: metal spirals turning slowly and carving into the sparkling magnesium lode beneath the Anemone. They saw that the magnesium lode extended along the top of a mound and up high into the chalk wall of the reef.

  “These drills aren’t making that high-pitched sound we heard,” Maruul said.

  “Right,” PC said. “She’s probably got some other kind of gizmo for that.”

  More than a hundred feet below the surface, the divers surfaced in the exit pool of the interface. PC stood, slid off his mask, and tested the air. “We’re in some kind of undersea cave,” he said.

  Wally and Maruul took off their masks. A moan drifted through the space like breath blown into a giant seashell. Strings of burning naked lightbulbs and pipe-and-board scaffolding covered the pitted rock walls.

  “What is this?” Maruul wanted to know.

  “It looks like a lava tube,” PC said. “There must have been volcanoes on the mainland that erupted a long time ago.”

  “Yes,” Wally said. “Giant fingers of hot lava reached out many years ago under the sea, eh. Have lots of spiders. Some tubes are filled with water. Others have air. Doctor fixed this one up with electric lights.”

  Maruul peered down the length of the long, strange tunnel. “All Aboriginal people are believed to have once sailed from another land. Maybe our Morga ancestors first landed near here and found the lava tubes. Tubes that stretch out like arms. It could be another reason why they painted little hands and fingers on the piece of bark. I feel spirits. The old Morga clan was here.”

  PC noticed a surveillance camera mounted high on a wall. It oscillated. “Dr. Ecenbarger’s got spy cameras all around. She and her goon squad probably saw us come down the interface tube and will be coming after us,” PC said. He started to climb the stairs of the scaffolding. The others grabbed their gear and hurried after him. Near the top PC led the way off the clattering boards and onto a crude pathway carved into the rock. They stripped off their wet suits. PC kept Ratboy but stowed the rest of their equipment behind a rock in the dark of a hollow.

  There were loud hammering, pounding sounds. Rough voices floated toward them as they turned a corner. The wind became musical, cellolike, as it moved through the passage.

  PC led them toward a bright light. He reached the end of the passageway first and hid in shadows near the edge of a precipice. Maruul and Wally caught up, flanked him, and froze, staring out at a startling domain. The ceiling of the underwater cave vaulted high, narrowing like the steeple of a cathedral. Jagged stalactites hung down, appearing to be the pipes of a colossal, ghostly organ. Far below, the main floor of the cavern bubbled out, where strands of once-liquid rock had cooled into buttresses and gnarled shapes from a nightmare. It reminded PC of those hollow sugar Easter eggs, the kind he used to peer into as a child and see miniature castles with tiny people, clouds—birds flying across a painted candy sky.

  Floodlights at the top of the cave shone down on several dozen workers hammering away at stone with chisels, pickaxes, even drills.

  “Are they Aboriginal men?” PC asked.

  “No,” Maruul said. “They look like they’re from Borneo or one of the other islands near the equator.”

  “What are those stones?”

  “Lava rock,” PC said.

  Wally scratched his head. “Not worth anything. Why they cut that?”

  PC pointed to a huge stitched canvas tarp on the far wall of the chamber. It hung, six or seven stories tall, like a shabby drape. He said, “The main event’s behind there. That’s your village’s fortune. Behind the canvas.”

  Wally nodded. Maruul stepped closer to the edge to get a better look.

  A large glass water tank at the edge of a grotto pool on the right began to glow. Just under the surface was what looked like a black steel chair with thick arm and leg straps. The men laid down their tools and turned toward the tank as though it were a holy altar. They appeared nervous and frightened as eerie, flutelike music began to fill the cavern. A vision of hideous beastly forms began to rise from a ridge beyond the tank.

  “Oh, my God,” Maruul said. She reached out and took PC’s hand as a procession of wild dog heads—dingoes with stiff ears and gaping, toothed mouths—marched toward the glass tank.

  “They’re men in dog skins. Your shaman’s really into dogs,” PC said.

  Two of the dingo men blew into enormous flutes made from slender hollowed trees. The last figure in the procession was the shaman, startling in a cape of dog skin, and wearing the largest, most ferocious of the dingo heads. His eyes, visible through holes in the dingo mask, shone like a demon’s.

  The flutes stopped. Suddenly, a series of screams came from a passageway on the right of the glass tank. Three men dragged out the muscled guard PC and Maruul had last seen swatting
at bats in the lab. His arms were tied behind his back. He was prodded by sharp, hooked sticks and driven toward the glowing tank of water.

  Quickly, a rebreather was forced into the prisoner’s mouth. Then he was lifted into the tank and strapped underwater into the metal chair. He struggled as a long, narrow cage was lowered over his head and belted.

  Dr. Ecenbarger, wearing her high spike heels, strode in from a separate dark passageway. She pulled her lab coat tight about her and stared into the tank. At the sight of her, the prisoner stopped his struggle.

  “What are they going to do to him?” Maruul whispered.

  “I don’t know.” PC stared down at the doctor, watched her head tilting, calculating. Wally was puzzled, too.

  The shaman shouted at the terrified workers. He told them the prisoner had failed the doctor. That because of him, there were enemies loose on the ship. Enemies who could hurt the doctor. Hurt everyone. Because of his bumbling, the prisoner had placed them all in danger, and he would have to be punished.

  Dr. Ecenbarger moved closer to the glass. She stared down the long cage that had been strapped to the prisoner’s face. The petrified eyes of the muscled guard looked back at her, his garbled pleading nothing more than senseless, noisy air bubbles. The doctor inspected the cage and made certain it was secure. Satisfied, she stepped up onto a platform, reached into the water, and lifted open a door on the top of the cage. Clutching a fish net, she signaled a guard holding a bucket to approach. With a single motion, she scooped out something large and black and dropped it into the far end of the cage.

  Maruul squeezed PC’s hand tighter. “It’s horrible,” she said. “What is it?”

  “Another freak from the reef, eh,” Wally said.

  The prisoner closed his eyes from the sting of salt water. After a moment, a series of tapping sounds made him open them again. He strained to see through the water, but there seemed to be nothing except a dark globe shape that was getting larger. It took him a moment longer to realize it was some sort of spider crab.