The Deep Zone: A Novel

by James M. Tabor

“How?”

  “In the sump I waited around that sharp turn. When Haight came along, I smashed his faceplate with a rock. Arguello was easier. I pretended to be frozen with fear on that ledge above the acid lake. I reached out a hand and asked for help, and he responded like the good man he was. I just gave a little yank and off he went.”

  “My God.”

  “And as for your big friend …”

  “Bowman?”

  “I knew that when the two of you had finished … doing what you were doing … he would go to the river. He was far too proper a man to piss right there at the sleeping spots. There was so much noise from the river it was easy to follow him. I went right down to where he was. He said, ‘You too, eh?’ And I said, ‘Yes, me, too,’ and moved off as though finding a little privacy. One quick shove from behind was all it took.”

  Hallie’s mind shuddered. For a moment, she could form no response. Then, her voice steady: “I’m alive, Al.”

  He remained silent for a while, then said, “Do those ropes still hurt?”

  “A lot.”

  “Stand up and I’ll take them off. But please do remember the Taser.”

  “I’ll never forget that thing.”

  “All right. Stand up and don’t move.”

  She struggled to her feet, saw him holding the Taser in his right hand. He came very close to her then, so close that she could feel his breath on her face.

  “You understand that I could do anything I want with you now, don’t you?”

  He stared into her eyes and she held his gaze, saying nothing. The moment stretched.

  “You’re not that kind of man,” Hallie said.

  Cahner inhaled, let out a long breath. “No,” he said. “I’m not.”

  Then, in one swift motion, he bent over, wrapped his arms around Hallie’s thighs, and picked her up in a fireman’s carry. With her draped over his shoulder like a sack of grain, he walked forward. Bent over his back, she could not see where they were going. She managed to sink her teeth into his flesh and bite hard enough to make him yell in pain. He swung an elbow around and hit her in the face.

  She was about to bite him again when he stopped.

  He pitched her over the edge of the bottomless pit.

  “I loved you, Hallie” were the last words she heard, and she could not tell if he was laughing or crying.

  KATHAN AND STIKES WERE SITTING IN THE DARK. KATHAN had just come back from the hide. It was Stikes’s turn, but he had a question first.

  “Hey. I been thinking. If all of them come out, what do we do with five bodies?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that, too. What if we weighed them down with rocks and put them right here in this lake?” Kathan scratched the side of his face. Something, Stikes saw, some vicious bug or plant, was giving him a bad rash.

  “They’re going to bloat and float sooner or later, though,” Stikes said. “Unless we do a lot of cutting. You know how messy that gets.”

  “Okay. But I think burning is out of the question, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Yeah. Slow, messy, leaves identifiable residue. Plus which, we don’t want to be advertising our presence here with a big barbecue.”

  “I don’t like dismemberment much, either,” Kathan said. “Animals will take care of the meat, but there’ll be bones and that’s too many loose ends.” He frowned, considering. The details were always messy. People like Gray never worried about the details.

  “Agree again. We could blow them up with grenades.”

  “We have six, with the two we took off Dempsey. But way too much noise.”

  “Yeah. What about dropping them into a pit somewhere?” Stikes so far had escaped the facial rash, but his groin had become a playground for bugs that were no less vicious for being invisible.

  “Probably the easiest,” Kathan said. “But not if we have to haul them far. That big one’s gonna be heavy. Another thing: you know how long it takes a body to decompose. Really decompose.”

  “For the bones, you’re talking years.”

  “Centuries. Especially when you don’t have the usual insects and bacteria and such. Hey, maybe we could make them eat each other.”

  It was hard to tell from the tone of his voice whether Kathan was making a joke. But they were having a serious discussion, so Stikes gave a serious answer. “Do you know how long that would take?”

  “I’m just tossing out options here.”

  “You should eat something.” Stikes had been growing concerned.

  “Not really hungry.” Kathan showed an eerie little smile.

  “You go too long on that stuff without eating, it’ll drop you right in your tracks.”

  Kathan snorted. “Not me, it won’t.”

  “Suit yourself.” Stikes knew that Kathan had been taking micro-doses of the blue meth to keep his edge. Stikes stayed away from the stuff. He was eating his second chocolate and peanut butter bar, washing it down with the coca-laced water. They were sitting side by side with their backs against the rock face.

  “I guess I’m leaning toward putting them in the lake here after all.” Kathan sounded resigned.

  “It does seem like the best option, all things considered. Lot of cutting, though. Can’t have them floating back up.”

  “Concur.”

  “Suppose they find another way out of the cave?” Stikes asked.

  “Then we’re screwed. But they won’t.”

  “How can you say that for sure?”

  “We were told there was only one way into this cave. That means there’s only one way out. Gray’s intel has never been bad before.”

  “Yeah, but how would he really know? And what about those GPS coordinates?”

  “There is that, you’re right. But it doesn’t change anything. What else can we do?”

  “We could go in after them.”

  “Knock yourself out, Stikes. You ever been in a cave? Like this, I mean.”

  “No. You?”

  “One time and one time only. Caves are very weird places, man. There’s no way I’m going in that thing.”

  Stikes thought, If it was bad enough to make a man like Kathan afraid … It was hard for him to imagine anything that could frighten Kathan. But clearly a cave had. “Okay, I hear you,” he said.

  Kathan, obviously wanting to change the subject, said, “Where do you think we should start first? With the blonde, I mean.” It was as though he had forgotten their earlier conversation about Hallie’s fate and Stikes’s plans to get out. Keyana’s image came to Stikes, as if conjured by Kathan’s words. She seemed to be frowning. Don’t you worry, girl, Stikes thought. Your man doesn’t do those things. “I hadn’t really thought about it,” he said indifferently.

  “I been thinking about it. But I worry about teeth, man. There was a girl in Kabul, if I hadn’t shot her, she’d have bit it off.”

  Stikes forced a grin. “That must have been something to see.”

  “She was clamped on me like a snapping turtle. I hurt for a month.”

  “You’re lucky you didn’t shoot your own self.”

  “Wasn’t like it was a tough shot. The range was pretty close.” That seemed to strike Kathan as hilarious, and he began to laugh so hard tears ran down his cheeks.

  The meth, Stikes thought.

  Kathan clamped both skillet-sized hands over his mouth. He sat there rocking back and forth, holding the laughter in, until finally the fit subsided. Gasping for air and wiping his cheeks dry, Kathan said, “That one won’t be doing any more biting. But I don’t think I want to risk it again. What do you like?”

  Keyana was still there, glaring at Stikes in his mind. He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter what I like, Kathan. I’m not into that. I told you.”

  Kathan went on talking about Hallie as if he had not heard. It seemed to Stikes that the other man might be slowly detaching from their reality, the forest and campsite and hide, and slipping into another one that only he could see. “She’s no simple country puss, that’s
for sure. One good looker.”

  “Except for that nose.”

  “Yeah, except for that. Someone must have laid one on her.”

  “Probably a pissed-off boyfriend,” Stikes said. “Or maybe a girlfriend. Always a possibility these days.”

  “I don’t know about you, but I think that’s sexy as hell,” Kathan said.

  “What, girls on girls?”

  “Oh, yeah. Gets me really hot.” Kathan made an ecstasy face, stuck out his tongue. “You know what I always wonder, though?”

  “What?”

  “Why do each other when you could be doing the real thing? You know what I’m saying? It just doesn’t make sense.” Kathan scowled.

  “Lot of stuff in this world doesn’t make any sense.”

  “You got that right. Like us hanging around in this bean-eater Pancho Villa sad excuse for a country waiting for those fools to come out and get dead.”

  “Roger that.”

  Kathan seemed to have run out of words. Stikes geared up and made his way to the hide at the tree line. The rock face two hundred yards away reflected enough starlight to glow softly green in his NVDs. The cave mouth was a black oblong at the face’s bottom. Stikes settled down, sitting cross-legged, to watch that dark space and wait for the moment when luminous shapes would appear to float from it.

  To pass the time, Stikes disassembled his Beretta and then started putting it back together. He could do it easily blindfolded and now he did it in the dark, keeping his eyes trained on the cave mouth. His hands took on lives of their own, moving over the pieces like a piano player’s lightly touching keys. Then he imagined touching Keyana, and while Stikes’s hands worked, his mind played with her astonishing body.

  Eventually, though, his thoughts were pulled back to Kathan. There was something wrong with the man. Objectively, Stikes knew you had to be a little off to do this kind of work. But Kathan was way off. Stikes had met such men before, and he felt that Kathan’s mind, like the others’, must have been dismantled by some horror and never properly reassembled. Earlier, during the daylight, Stikes had returned from the hide to find Kathan playing with some of the orange, white-spotted lizards that were about the size of a cigar and slow enough to be caught bare-handed. Kathan had made a small track framed with rocks to contain the lizards and was staging races.

  “Need to do a little handicapping,” Kathan said. As Stikes watched, he pulled a hind leg off the next two contestants. He looked up to see Stikes staring at him. “I got bored.” Grinning. “I used to do stuff like this when I was a kid.”

  “With lizards?”

  “Cats, mostly. My old man’s metal shears worked great. But they bled out too quick. Big veins in their legs.”

  “So what’d you do?”

  “Well. You make them run around without eyes, now that was a hoot, take my word for it, bro.”

  “How in the hell did you do that?”

  “Welder’s gloves.” Kathan chuckled. “Like steel mesh. You can’t drive a nail through them. And they come up to your elbows.”

  “You are one sick bastard,” Stikes said, flat-voiced, but Kathan laughed, appearing to take it as a huge compliment.

  STILWELL’S BERTH IN THE MEDICAL BAY OF THE C-5A GALAXY transport was surprisingly comfortable. The self-leveling bed was affixed to a set of stainless steel pillars with oil-filled shock absorbers. Instead of a mattress, she was cradled in a red elastopolymeric cocoon that molded to her body, insulating her from turbulence and the aircraft’s vibrations. She was receiving oxygen through a nasal cannula. A baby-blue, IMED Genie-R1 intravenous pump, hung from a stanchion beside Stilwell’s berth, kept a steady ketamine drip flowing into her right arm. Every sixty seconds, it beeped softly.

  Stilwell was one of six ACE patients being transported back to the United States for admission to Walter Reed Army Medical Center. The doctors and nurses on board were all garbed in full Chemturions with self-contained ventilation units. There were three doctors and twelve nurses for the twelve-hour flight. When they rotated off-shift, they went to eat, rest, and sleep in a secure, biosafe section of the plane.

  When it came time for her next half-hour check, a nurse trundled over in the ungainly suit and stood beside the bed.

  “Hey there,” Stilwell whispered. “Don’t you people ever sit down?” One of ACE’s many gifts, she was learning, was a sore throat that made strep seem mild.

  “When the aircraft lands and we roll you off, then we sit, ma’am,” the nurse said. This one, the shift supervisor, was a female lieutenant named Gauthier, a young woman with short-cropped blond hair.

  “Where are you from, Lieutenant?”

  “Vermont, ma’am. Northern part of the state.”

  “Vermont. I’ve never been there. What’s it like?”

  “Quiet. My parents run a dairy farm. They milk three hundred cows.” Stilwell could see the pride in her eyes, but then she added, “I couldn’t wait to get out of Vermont. All the kids are like that.”

  “Did you?”

  “Oh yes. I wanted to go to a city where it was warm. Those were the only two criteria. Well, and a good nursing school.”

  “Where?”

  “Rice, ma’am. In Houston.”

  “Great school. Expensive, though.”

  “Yes, ma’am. But my uncle paid for it.”

  “Lucky you. He’s not a dairy farmer, I’d guess.”

  “Uncle Sam, ma’am.”

  “Ah. Did you like Houston?” She could talk for a while, until her throat hurt too much. It took her mind off things.

  “At first it was incredible. So many places to go and things to do—restaurants, clubs, malls. Wow. But you know what? By my junior year, I couldn’t wait to come home. You don’t know what you’ve got till you lose it,” Lieutenant Gauthier said. “Houston was great for a while, but there was dirt, and crime, and people were rude, always in a hurry. Nothing like Vermont.”

  “How long till you get out?” Stilwell assumed that the woman would do “five and fly,” as they called it. The Army paid for college educations, but got five years of service in exchange. Most recipients, especially medical professionals, put in their time and jumped back into civilian life.

  “I’m thinking of staying in, ma’am,” she said.

  “Really?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I kind of like the Army.”

  “Army can use people like you.” Stilwell’s voice was a raw croak, her throat beginning to hurt too much.

  As if sensing it, Lieutenant Gauthier said, “I’ll let you rest now, ma’am. But you know how close I am.”

  “Two things before you go, Lieutenant.”

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “Please turn off that IV pump beeper.”

  The nurse tapped a red touch-pad button on the pump’s front panel. “What else, ma’am?”

  “What mode is the ketamine pump in?”

  “Auto, ma’am.”

  “Reset it to PC mode, please.” Patient control.

  The nurse hesitated for just an instant. “The doctors like to keep them on auto mode, ma’am, when they’re dispensing pain meds.”

  “I am a doctor, Lieutenant,” Stilwell said, locking eyes with the younger woman.

  “Yes, ma’am, you sure are.” The nurse tapped an orange touch pad on the pump twice. “There you are. All set, ma’am.”

  “Lieutenant?”

  “Ma’am?”

  “This stays with you and me. Clear?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Clear.”

  “Thank you. I think I’ll sleep a little now.”

  It had felt good talking to the young lieutenant, had taken her mind to the green beauty of Vermont. Maybe she would go the Guard route, as Stilwell herself had. Or maybe she really would stay in. God knew the Army could use kids with degrees from places like Rice.

  The phrase came back into her mind, as she had known it would. You don’t know what you’ve got till you lose it. But she had no guilt on that account. She had always known how pre
cious Doug and Danny were, how infinitely lucky she was to have met such a man and had such a child. She knew that she had never taken either of them for granted, not for one second. Maybe it was because, as a doctor, she saw so much loss, but for whatever reason, having Doug and Danny had never become dull and ordinary, the way some things do after you’ve had them for a long time and grown accustomed to them.

  As Stilwell lay there in the C-5A’s dim bay, tears began streaming down her face. It should have made her feel better, thinking of them, but now it did not. She thought of Ribbesh. Why are there such people? She had asked herself that question a hundred times. People who live to cause other people pain? She wrestled with the question through the ketamine fog, striving for some answer that made sense. Stilwell wasn’t a religious woman in the conventional sense, didn’t go to church every Sunday, didn’t take the Bible literally, couldn’t understand the minds of people who thought the world had been created—snap!—six thousand years ago, or whatever it was they believed. But she was spiritual, did believe in some kind of ordering higher power, and that faith in something larger than herself had been very valuable to a physician who often dealt with seriously damaged people.

  Every once in a while, however, she ran up against something she could not reconcile with a loving higher power, and people like Ribbesh were the most troubling. He had actually seemed to take pleasure in making her suffering worse. She didn’t want to die, of course, but was fairly certain that she was going to. Before, at least there had been the comfort of knowing that Doug and Danny would be taken care of. Now she didn’t even have that.

  Stilwell turned her head to look at the IMED Genie-R1. Just beneath the green LED screens showing dose level and drip frequency were two yellow touch pads, one with an arrow pointing up, the other with one pointing down. It would be so easy. She could just tap the up arrow over and over and the Genie would send her into a sleep from which she would never wake.

  PAIN.

  Terrible, blessed pain.

  You don’t feel pain when you’re dead.

  That thought blinked in Hallie’s brain like a firefly on a moonless night. Then it flicked out again and she was gone.