The outline turned again. Evans saw, unmistakably, the shadow of a protrusion above the barrel, thicker than the barrel, that began above the pistol grip and ran no more than a quarter of the barrel’s length, where it flared out in a bell. A scope.
Only rifles had scopes. Shotguns didn’t even have ordinary sights.
The bootprints started walking in front of him. Evans followed them, walking upside down beneath the man, a pace behind him.
From the way the bootprints stopped, made half-turns to each side, and from the way the shadow of the rifle swept in an arc along Evans’s glowing ice, back and forth, Evans knew for certain this was a guard.
The bootprints kept on—Evans stalking the stalker, walking upside down beneath him. He found them moving in a curve toward some point. Every five steps the prints would stop, the long compound shadow of the rifle and scope would sweep along the ice like a shadow searchlight across a glowing sky, then the bootprints would continue. Evans gradually became sure.
So he knows. And he’s hunting me.
Evans followed the bootprints in their curve, certain they were heading for his second exit hole. They were waiting for him to come up.
Good God! And I think of myself as an intelligent person. He’d cut the hole in his idiosyncratic way. He had his own ways by now.
He had cut his exit hole near the ice-divers’ drying shed a quarter-mile away. He hoped they hadn’t found the shed, but they’d guess it wouldn’t be far from the hole. They’d know he would need to get inside shelter quickly once he came up. The water was never colder than twenty-eight degrees, but the wind above on the lake gave a chill-factor of sixty below zero on this ice. At that rate he would turn into an ice statue unless he dried off within a very few minutes of surfacing. How in God’s name could he get out of this? He had only the Anaconda .44 Magnum pistol and the speargun; they had a gun each, he presumed. He didn’t doubt there was another one. They’d know it wasn’t safe for only one of them to try to take him.
Evans trailed along beneath the guard’s bootprints and the gun’s searching shadow. This was what you wanted, wasn’t it? You against them? But not here, Evans thought.
Dinoflagellates twinkled above him. He walked shod in silver on the glowing pearl of the ice.
And marring his pearl: black bootprints, and the shadow of a gun.
They were at the exit hole. Waiting for him. And they knew goddamned well there was no other way for him to get out. He was screwed if he didn’t think of something soon. And if he did think of something, and if he did get out of this, the Limbus folks and he were going to have a little chat about pay grades….
*
Five days after Jennifer and the kids moved out, Blaine was served with divorce papers. It took exactly four months to completely dismantle the life and home they’d shared for twelve years, and Blaine Evans found himself, at age fifty-three, alone and living in a small apartment near the library, hoping the house would sell before the year was out. He could use the money. Jen wanted nothing from the sale of the house; thanks to her hefty salary from Limbus, she didn’t need it. And as if to rub his face in how wonderful her life and those of the children were going to be, she’d left ten thousand dollars of her signing bonus in the joint account. Okay, okay, he told himself, maybe she wasn’t trying to rub his face in it—she wasn’t a vindictive person. Maybe she just wanted to be civil, leave behind a peace offering to let him know it would be okay for them to stay in touch. He had no way of knowing. For months after the divorce he tried getting in touch with her but no one, including her parents, knew where she and the kids had moved to—or if they did, they weren’t about to tell him. He hired a private detective to track them down, but she’d come up with very little. By the end of the year (with the house still not having sold, despite his dropping the price), Blaine was as lonely and uncertain as he’d ever been, even more than when he was a kid and teenager. At least he didn’t have to fall asleep listening to his mother ramble on, stoned on sedatives, as Dad drank himself unconscious, both of them going on about their wonderful daughter who was no longer there and their disappointment of a son, the little shit who should have been looking out for his sister; at least he didn’t have to worry that he’d be awakened in the night by the sound of gunfire, only to go downstairs and find both his parents dead after Dad finally lost it; at least he wouldn’t find himself being continuously shuffled through the foster care system, going from family to family, some good, others too horrible for words who did even more horrible things to him; at least he’d managed to survive to see fifty-three, even if it was arguably a self-imposed isolated survival.
He began drinking in order to fight the insomnia that took hold of him since the divorce. It was nothing serious at first, just a couple Johnny Walker Blacks over ice, enough to make him groggy and ensure he wouldn’t be in noticeably bad shape for work the next morning, but after a while, a couple turned into three as his system built up a tolerance, and then three turned into five, and five into six, and instead of feeling groggy, he began to simply pass out on the sofa in front of the television that was usually showing one of the downer movies he’d put into the Blu-ray player.
After his third reprimand for coming in late and obviously hung-over, the library board suggested he take an unpaid leave to get himself and his life straightened out. He didn’t argue with them, only nodded his head and, without making eye contact, thanked them for not outright firing him. Maybe he was needed here after all.
The dreary routine of the following days were spent reading, taking walks to no place in particular, and finding new restaurants with food that did nothing to help reduce his waistline; nights were spent with Bailey’s Irish Crème (Johnny Walker had worn out his welcome) and watching as many bummer movies as he could make himself sit through before crashing out hard. Every so often he’d break up the routine by staying sober for the night and watching something with a happy ending; if Jennifer had been around, she would have shaken her head at the way he always cried himself to sleep after these joyous films. He was turning into a pathetic caricature of the recently-divorced, middle-aged, unemployed loser. And he hated it.
Which is how and why he found himself one evening walking to a nearby church that had advertised an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. He knew that his drinking was getting serious. Whether or not he was an outright, raging drunk like his dad had become was still in question, but he knew he had to do something. This was the first time in years he’d taken the initiative to shake up his life, and as anxious as he felt about it, he also felt a small sense of pride. Maybe he could get better. Maybe he could get past all the lousy stuff he carried inside that always reared its ugly head when he least expected it to. Maybe he could become the kind of man who’d be worthy of a woman like Jennifer. Maybe he could become the husband she deserved.
He was almost to the church when the car horn sounded behind him. He ignored it at first, figuring the person was honking at someone else, but when the car pulled up at the curb beside him and the door opened and someone called his name, Blaine turned around just in time to note three things: the Limbus, Inc. logo on the side of the car, the two men who were approaching him, and something small and sharp jabbing into the side of his neck. After that, it was dizziness, the sidewalk rushing up toward his face, and then darkness.
*
He’d sunk an Ikelight below the exit hole in the ice for safety. The clouds overhead were thick, perhaps they had noticed his light, even so deep? It was too strong, the Ikelight? No. They’d just been lucky. But if he survived this, he wouldn’t use the Ikelight any more if an assignment involved ice-diving. There’d be more chance of becoming lost beneath the ice, but it would be better than this: one single-shot speargun against the rifle.
Ahead he saw more shadows by his entrance hole and another pair of black bootprints.
The prints Evans was following reached the other set and they faced each other, conferring. Shadows now of two guns, two scopes.
&
nbsp; Two men with rifles waiting at his exit hole. Odds were they knew his single tank couldn’t carry much more than forty minutes’ worth of air.
I’m dead, Evans thought.
He could feel a tug when he tried to breathe and had a spasm of fear. Sucking at the air as the tank emptied was like trying to breathe through a pillow that was getting pressed tighter and tighter against his face.
That wasn’t his only problem. He had lost great quantities of body heat the whole time he was underwater. Not just from the exhaustion but the water, with a specific heat exactly one thousand times greater than air, had been conducting warmth away from his body twenty-five times as rapidly as would air at this temperature, Fahrenheit twenty-eight. The lake had been leeching heat from him—heat of energy, of strength and redemption, of life itself—while he was under.
He had very small reserve.
The shivering and the coldness he felt in his hands were signs his extremities had already fallen below thirty-six Celsius. His body’s thermoregulatory system had turned on its defense mechanisms and he’d begun to shiver.
Damn!
Heavy shivering increased the body’s basal heat production five to seven times. The vasoconstriction called gooseflesh meant his skin had begun sealing itself tighter to keep body heat in, stop blood flow to his periphery, where heat evaporated faster, and preserve it around his core organs. These were signs his body was chilling toward death, had gone through its heat and fallen onto its last reserve.
It was getting damn cold under here.
His blood temperature was dropping too fast.
Time was running out on him.
They knew it.
He knew it.
All God’s chillun knew it.
All they had to do was wait him out. Perhaps that was why they were both at the hole now, anticipating his return.
He couldn’t think of alternatives. He could walk to some spot of shallow ice by a tide island and break his way out easily enough—and freeze to death. More than air, he needed to get into that drying shed, which his heater had been warming since he began this assignment, where hot liquid was waiting in a thermos, where his cache of Just-In-Case weapons was sitting, and—most importantly—where his two-way radio waited, powered by a portable generator that had maybe thirty minutes’ worth of juice left.
If his core temperature—the deep tissue areas of his body, as opposed to his extremities—had fallen only two degrees Fahrenheit below normal, to ninety-seven degrees, or thirty-six Celsius, as he thought of it, then Evans had already begun to die of hypothermia; when his deep tissues reached thirty-four degrees Celsius, his brain would begin to go; and at thirty-two Celsius, his heart.
In the wind above, that could happen within minutes. Even if he could manage to kill them within two minutes of his exposure to the air, there was a chance there might be damage to his brain.
Evans stood upside down, opposite the guards standing above him. All they had to do was wound him badly and everything would go haywire—even if he killed them. In his current situation, even a mere scratch could prove instantaneously fatal.
He had to kill them; all they had to do was hit him. And he was wildly outgunned.
Evans, fumbling in the cold, removed his tri-cut point from his speargun and took a stempoint from his bandolier. He could take one shot, then had to reload. There were, after all, two of them.
He looked at his timer. Seven minutes of oxygen left. His cheeks inside the mask were collapsing as he sucked air like a baby straining at an empty bottle. It took precious effort not to panic.
A pair of bootprints stood near the hole. Evans’s heart beat intensely: Near enough?
He walked underneath the man and knelt, inverted directly below him. He studied the boot soles. Rubber. Really meant for mud. Not bad for ice, but Evans’s spikes would have the edge on traction.
Where there was an ice break like his exit hole, water usually bled around it for several feet. The weight of the ice pressing down on the entire lake kept forcing water slightly up, like a pressure valve giving. Helpers would spread sand by the hole if they were backing up an ice diver so that they wouldn’t slide in. But Evans had no backup crew; he hadn’t prepared the ice with the sand. Immediately next to the hole, then, he could hope for a slight slick on the surface, over and beyond the slipperiness of the ice.
Was the man close enough?
As Evans watched, the bootprints stepped closer, and the gun shadow swung in the arc he knew. The guard was scanning; his gaze was raised.
Evans dug his spikes into the ice, held his breath, remembered the pathetic creature that was the man he used to be, and reached out of the water.
*
Before he’d even fully opened his eyes, Blaine knew he was restrained; his shoulders were screaming from being pulled too tightly in toward his chest, he could barely feel his hands at all, and his chest…Christ, it felt like crisscrossing iron bands were cutting into him.
As his eyes adjusted—he had to look away from the large, round medical lights that seemed like they were only a few feet away from his face—he saw that he was lying on a hospital gurney, that his legs were restrained at the ankles by thick leather straps, and that he was in a straightjacket. Part of him—the part still recovering from whatever drug they’d shot into the side of his neck—almost laughed at the thought of being straightjacketed like this: how many time had he joked to Jennifer (who’d never found it funny) that he could well imagine himself spending his retirement years in just such a fashionable coat while relaxing in a room with rubber walls?
The amusement didn’t last long. Several figures in surgical scrubs milled around the operating room, making preparations for God only knew what. All of them wore filter masks so that the lower portions of their faces were obscured. Blaine rolled his head from side to side, trying to crack his neck bones and ease some of the tension in his muscles.
“He’s awake,” someone said.
Like vultures clustering over fresh carrion, the gurney was immediately surrounded by a circle of masked faces staring down at him. He blinked at the medical team as they shone a penlight into his eyes, turned his head from side to side, and conversed with another in that maddening medical-speak that might as well have been in Croatian for all that Blaine understood.
After a few more moments, a female voice outside of the circle said, “Stop crowding the man already!” The medical team pulled back and away, one of them readjusting the overhead lights so that none were shining directly into his face. Blinking away the mini supernovas exploding across his field of vision, Blaine was soon able to focus on the face looking down at him; it belonged to a young black woman of perhaps twenty, maybe less. She stared into his eyes for a moment and then smiled as one of her hands took a cool cloth and daubed at the sweat forming on his face. It felt wonderful.
“Hello, Mr. Evans,” said the young woman. “My name is Tasha Willing. I apologize for the somewhat…unconventional manner in which you were brought here, but you’ve been volunteered for a new program our company is the process of implementing—after, of course, we get a few bugs worked out.”
At her saying “bugs,” someone elsewhere in the room barked out a short but loud laugh.
Blaine had never seen this young woman before but recognized her name. It didn’t take long for him to place it.
“…ennifer,” he managed to croak. “…you hired Jennifer…”
Tasha nodded. “I did. And this program that she volunteered you for is her baby.”
“I’ll be doing something like social work for the company,” Jennifer had said, “except I’ll be overseeing the development and implementation of … I guess you’d call them ‘mental health’ programs …”
“Where am I?”
Tasha daubed at his face a little more. “You’re in one of our volunteer medical facilities. Please don’t worry. No one here intends to hurt you but—and I’m saying this so you’ll know that I am not in the habit of lying or euphe
mizing things—there is a good chance that some of this process is going to be kind of unpleasant for you. We’ll provide you with all the vitamins and nutrients your body will need, we’ll provide all the pain medication necessary, and our physical therapy department is hands-down the best on this world or any other. In short, Mr. Evans, your ex-wife has made certain that you are in the best possible hands.”
He glared at her. “So why am I in a fucking straightjacket?”
Tasha waved a finger in front of him like a scolding parent. “I don’t insist on many things, Mr. Evans, but I do ask that you not curse in my presence. It only makes things more tense than they need to be.”
He blinked. “Understood. Why am I in a straightjacket?”
Tasha smiled. “See? Was that so difficult? You’re restrained in this manner because you’ve been injected with a certain substance that has, in the past, given us some trouble. Violent outbursts, people unable to control their limbs, people harming themselves and others.”
Blaine was even more frightened than before. “What have you done to me?”
“I’m getting to that. Your medical history—including your ongoing trouble with alcohol—has resulted in your nervous system being in many ways severely compromised, but it’s been compromised in a way that—ironically enough—may very well allow us to not only heal but enhance it. In short, if you weren’t such a physical wreck, the injection would probably have destroyed you by now and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
“What did you put inside of me?”
Tasha stood, tossed aside the cool cloth, and turned toward someone unseen. “I think this where you come in, Ted.” She turned back to Blaine and smiled. “I’ll be seeing you again soon, Mr. Evans. In the meantime, you’ll be working with Ted—Dr. Copeland. He can speak with much more insight than I. Try not to worry, Mr. Evans—and please don’t bother trying to do something heroic like fight your way out of here. You’d never find the exit, believe me, and if through some series of skewed coincidence you did manage to find the exit, you’d never find a way off the island.”
Limbus, Inc. Book II Page 21