by Nick Cutter
“Exactly, Dr. Nelson. Locks and keys.”
“And this particular key—you think it’s eight miles down?”
Felz closed the laptop. “That’s the hope. Perhaps there’s an abundance of it. Perhaps—and this is an admittedly out-there hypothesis—what we’ve found so far are shreds off a far larger organism. A mother-organism, if you will.”
A quaver passed down Luke’s spine. A mother-organism. Huge and amorphous and ageless, lying in darkness at the bottom of the sea. Jesus.
“Why wouldn’t Dr. Parks want to be part of this?”
Felz started. “I beg pardon?”
“Dr. Eva Parks. She discovered it. Why wouldn’t she want to be part of perhaps the greatest discovery in human history?”
Of course, Luke knew it had to be Clayton. His bullying ways. He was thinking about their childhood sandbox: how Clay had commandeered the toys for no other purpose than to deprive Luke of the satisfaction of playing with them.
“Dr. Nelson . . .” Felz licked his lips, smearing that ever-present dab of spit across them. “Dr. Parks committed suicide shortly after the sample arrived in our custody. She hanged herself in her apartment in Maine. In her closet, with a length of nautical rope.”
“Good God. Why would she do such a thing?”
“That I do not know. From all outward appearances she was happy. A good career. Engaged to another doctor she’d met at graduate school.” Felz glanced at the cooler and licked his lips again. “There is no sensible cause, but suicide is not a sensible act.”
A door banged open. Luke and Felz craned their necks toward the sound.
“The very man I’m looking for,” a new voice said.
13.
THE VOICE BELONGED to a woman in combat fatigues. Tall and incredibly broad across the shoulders, that broadness tapering toward her waist, which was cinched in a thick belt. She wore no insignia of rank. Those things didn’t mean as much now, the same way a policeman’s badge carried less heft. Ever since the ’Gets, people were measured by their abilities rather than by the pieces of tin pinned to their chests.
Her hair was clipped short and her jaw had a long angularity that gave her face a sharpness, an intensity that was of a piece with her piercing green eyes. She carried herself with a controlled bearing that seemed almost robotic, each movement calibrated to deliver maximum function with minimal exertion. A scar roped up the side of her neck and trailed behind her left ear—thick and ribbed and pink, the color of bubblegum.
“Dr. Nelson?”
“Yes.”
She offered her hand. “Alice Sykes. Lieutenant Commander, U.S. Navy. But feel free to call me Al. Paul Simon may come sniffing around for royalties, but I can deal with that hassle personally.”
Luke liked her immediately—yet he got a sense of forced jocularity off of her, too: her smile was screwed on too tight.
She turned to Felz. “I take it you’ve filled Dr. Nelson in on the magical goo in deep freeze?”
Dr. Felz stood up straight. “Yes, we’ve covered just about everything.”
“Fine. We gotta get this show on the road.” Alice’s expression darkened. “Have you spoken to him about what’s surfaced?”
Felz said, “No. I thought . . .”
“That’s okay. It’s not an easy matter. Let’s hop to it.”
A four-seat golf cart waited on the deck. Al sat up front, Felz and Luke behind.
“A hell of a thing, isn’t it?” Al said to Luke as they careened through the floating minicity. Each building was painted a reflective black; the sun knifed off every angle, painfully bright. Luke caught sight of the sea through a gap between the buildings—the horizon shimmered, the sky a searing blue against the plate-glass water. Everything looked new and modern, but so many of the structures seemed to be half built or unused. It reminded Luke of those model communities on the outskirts of Las Vegas, built in anticipation of a boom that never came. The Hesperus had that same ghost town feel—it was a place built for great things that had not quite come to pass.
Al craned her head around to see if Luke was taking it all in—Luke diverted his gaze. He’d been focused on the scar that went all the way around the back of Al’s neck, a pink band that petered out at her right earlobe. It looked as though someone had tried to slit her neck, starting at the back. If she noticed him looking, she was tactful enough not to mention it.
“Who paid for all this?” Luke said.
“Everyone who earns a paycheck,” Al said. “You, me, the butcher, the baker. Not just American greenbacks, either: Japanese yen, British pounds, Chinese yuan, German deutsche marks.”
“That would be euros,” said Felz, fussily. “They replaced the deutsche mark in 2002.”
“Thank you, Dr. Felz, for your scrupulous attention in regards to matters of international currency.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Anyway,” Alice went on, “what you see here is the whole world, holding hands. We got a lot of support from private enterprise, too. CEOs, CFOs, magnates, philanthropists. Everyone’s smashing their piggy banks. Everybody’s lost something to this by now, y’know? And what’s money worth if there’s no future to spend it in?”
“Why is it all Americans, then? I mean, down on the Trieste? Dr. Felz said the researchers are all from the U.S.”
“I guess because America always rides point,” Al said.
They stopped beside a compact submarine. Fifteen feet long with a porthole window at one end. It lay in a massive canvas hammock. It looked like a huge lozenge—a vitamin pill for Neptune.
“Challenger 5,” Al told Luke. “It’s being prepped for your descent.”
Luke said, “You’ve got to be kidding me. I have no idea how to operate this.”
“Yeah, that would take some serious training. Thankfully, you’ll be in the company of a skilled pilot.” Al thumped her chest. “Like I said, tight squeeze.”
She leaned over the seat, jammed her face close to Luke’s own.
“Breathe on me.”
“What?”
“I said, breathe on me. Come on, don’t be shy.”
Luke did as she asked, too startled to refuse. Al sniffed.
“Okay, good. Nothing worse than being cooped up for hours with a guy with bad breath.”
Luke exhaled, chuckling now. “I’ve got Tic Tacs in my bag.”
She winked. “Even better.”
If I have to journey eight miles beneath the water’s surface, Luke thought, this Alice Sykes seems as fine a companion as any.
“Dr. Westlake came up in Challenger 4,” Al said. “It’s still under quarantine.”
Luke said, “Dr. Westlake?”
“Dr. Felz hasn’t mentioned him yet?” Al darted a glance at Felz, a darkness settling into her eyes. “He was the third member of the team. Dr. Cooper Westlake. He was a—remind me what was his job again, Doctor?”
“Computational biologist,” Felz said as the cart got rolling again.
“I got to know Dr. Westlake pretty well,” Al said. The forced jocularity was gone. In its place was somber concern. “I liked him a hell of a lot. He seemed put together. But it’s incredibly hard down there. Not just the physical pressure; there’s the added pressure of what they’re trying to achieve. Dr. Westlake surfaced nine and a half hours ago, while you were in transit. Let me ask—has your brother ever mentioned him?”
Luke said: “I’ve never met Dr. Westlake. Never even heard his name.”
“I believe that’s the truth as you know it,” said Al.
The cart stopped before a building with a red cross on its exterior. Al rested her gaze gently upon Luke’s.
“What’s behind that door,” she said, “is Dr. Westlake. What surfaced of him. You don’t have to look . . . but maybe you’ll want to, seeing as you’ve agreed to go down.”
“What happened to him?” said Luke.
Alice showed him her palms, same as Felz had done. A helpless gesture.
“It’s still our world down there, Dr. N
elson,” she said, “but that’s like saying that the ice ten thousand feet beneath the arctic icepack is, too. Yeah, it is, but not anything we know. Our government has spent thirty trillion dollars on space exploration, and less than 1 percent of that to explore the world underneath us right now. But it’s just as unknown. You’ll be entering another world, really and truly.”
“It’s Luke,” he told her. “Call me Luke. And I’ll go. I’ll see.”
Al’s clipped nod made Luke think she wished he’d chosen otherwise.
14.
THE AIR WAS MEAT-LOCKER COLD on the other side of the door with the red cross. Luke’s arms instantly broke out in gooseflesh.
The room was uncluttered. Halogen lights buzzed down on a bank of steel vaults. Luke had visited morgues as a veterinarian, most recently to perform an autopsy on a police drug dog that’d died after ingesting a perforated balloon of heroin.
“Every vault is empty save one,” Al said. “We’ve been lucky lately with the ’Gets. A few in quarantine, but none dead and no new cases reported in a week. Must be the sea air.” A gravedigger’s smile. “Sorry. Poor taste.”
They walked with aching slowness toward the vaults.
“Dr. Westlake and the others had settled into their roles inside the Trieste. The station was holding up. Electrical function, oxygen purification, waste disposal—all systems operational, which on the technical side of things was the main concern.
“Mentally, the crew seemed sound. Your brother was the point man—he gave the majority of the updates, so our perceptions up here were filtered through him. But we watched the other two on the monitors. They were eating, sleeping, engaged in productive labor. You’d see them talking and laughing with one another.
“There was the odd sign of strain, but that could be chalked up to their situation. Add to that the sensory deprivation. No sun, no fresh air. But our psychs are versed in signs of trauma fatigue; they assured us the trio was holding up well. Then . . . well, Westlake went off the grid.”
Al gripped the handle of the centermost vault and cracked it open a few inches. A chemical tang puffed out, sliming Luke’s tongue and making him slightly nauseous.
“Westlake may’ve been getting squirrelly,” Al said. “He’d been isolated inside his lab for quite some time. No updates, no contact. The video camera in his lab was busted. We couldn’t see what he was doing . . . or what was being done to him.”
Done to him? Luke thought.
“We thought about going down. Maybe he’d cracked, right? But descents have been tricky the past few weeks. A lot of subsurface disturbances, the most serious being a current ring situated directly above the trench.”
“Current ring?”
“An underwater tornado, basically. An eddy sucking a billion-odd tons of water into itself, creating a funnel. We sent a supply drone down last week; the eddy caught it, spun it, and smashed it into the trench wall.”
“And you expect me to go down into that?”
“The ring cleared two days ago. The sea’s gone sleepy again. Anyway, we didn’t go down for two reasons.” She held up a finger. “One, because of the current ring”—she held up a second finger—“and two, because your brother, whose contact had become sporadic, assured us things were fine. Then today, in the early hours of morning, Challenger 4, which had been docked to the Trieste, began to rise. Westlake was inside. How he’d managed to get the sub working—he hadn’t been trained in its operation—is unknown.
“A few things happened during Westlake’s ascent, all of them bad. First, we lost contact with the Trieste altogether. The comm link went kerflooey, or else someone shut it off. Second, we lost most of the monitors. We’d already lost a few, but this was a whole whack of them, all at once. Could be a technical issue. A major circuit blowout. Or else someone down there wanted them off.”
Someone or something, Luke thought irrationally.
“Something else happened as Westlake came up. Happened to him. He could only have done it to himself.”
Al’s fingers were steady on the vault’s handle, but a fragile muscle fluttered next to her eye.
“You go ahead and open it,” Luke said.
Without another word, she did so.
15.
AT FIRST LUKE COULDN’T TELL what he was looking at. His eyes rejected it, as it didn’t fit any prior conceptions of the human form.
Dr. Westlake’s naked body was a swollen mass of scar tissue. His body was all scars. A ballooned, inflated parody of the human form.
It appeared as if Westlake had been wrapped in pink elastic bands. Some were thick as garter snakes, others thin as copper wires. Some fibrous as canvas rigging, others frail as onionskin. They lapped over in gruesome profusion, each one nurtured to a sickening, sensuous bulbousity. It seemed as if at any moment they might burst open and thin ribbons of flesh would spool forth, covering the old scars in layers that further obscured the body trapped inside.
Westlake’s frame was bent, each limb wrenched at an unnatural angle. The bends. Nitrogen bubbles had built up in the blood, snapping Westlake’s bones as they expanded.
Luke wanted to look away. Couldn’t.
Sweet Christ, his face. The scars were the worst there. Elsewhere they seemed to have been laid down haphazardly, but the ones on his face had a more considered appearance. They had been delivered with special care. His eyes were trapped inside swollen bulbs of flesh—if Luke were to touch them, he imagined they would feel like India rubber balls—each so huge that they projected from the wrecked tapestry of his face like plums. His lips had been sliced and had healed until the flesh knit together, upper lip wedded to bottom, fused into a thick band that curved upward in a grisly rictus. His nostrils had a feathered look, the flesh slit back in fragile petals that revealed candle-white sinus cavities.
“Shut it.” Luke’s voice was a frail whisper. “Please.”
Al did so. Luke jackknifed at the waist, hands braced on his knees.
“How . . . ?”
“I wish I had any idea,” Al said softly. “We found a scalpel in the sub. Its blade was gouged up, dull as a butter knife. We figure it’d been used to cut through flesh, tendon, cartilage. Eventually it went dull on the bone.”
“It’s not possible, Al. I mean, that kind of trauma . . . how long does it take to surface?”
“Eight or nine hours usually. Westlake came faster, which is why he got the bends. He decompressed too fast. Truth is, we were fully expecting that it wouldn’t be pretty. But no way could we have imagined this.”
“He did this to himself?”
“Who else? The submarine was empty.”
Totally empty? Luke wondered. What if Westlake had been carrying that goo?
“We didn’t find any ambrosia,” Al said before Luke could ask. “We tore the sub apart and found not a trace of the stuff. Just the scalpel, Westlake’s body, and one more thing.”
“What was that?”
“Luke,” Al said carefully, “Felz showed you the mouse video, right? You see what that stuff can do. A godsend? I can see that. But I can see other things, too.”
She didn’t need to finish. Luke had the same vision. Westlake rising up from Challenger Deep, hacking into himself—and every time he cut himself, he healed so fast that it was almost immediate. Luke pictured an endless zipper: Westlake’s flesh opening, only to close a few moments after the scalpel slit it, leaving very little blood and a ragged scar. Westlake could have sliced himself for hours, reducing himself in some exquisite way, laughing or shrieking or crying or who-knows-what, mindlessly—or mindfully?—layering scar over scar until . . . what? How did he die? Had the ambrosia deserted him? Evanesced, as Felz said?
Luke closed his eyes. The absolute worst of all was the expression frozen on Westlake’s face. Luke was quite certain he died smiling.
“What else, Al? What was inside the submersible?”
She set a hand on Luke’s shoulder. Luke didn’t realize how badly he’d been shaking. It had no
thing to do with how cold the room felt.
16.
DR. FELZ WASN’T THERE when they returned to the deck of the Hesperus. They got into the cart, both of them sitting on the rear seat.
“Go,” Al told the driver.
Luke couldn’t inhale enough air to inflate his lungs. He couldn’t unsee Dr. Westlake’s horrible, twisted body. For the first time, doubt seeped into Luke’s mind. Why did he have to go down, anyway? He wasn’t saying he wouldn’t, but why him? He hadn’t asked this most elementary question when the phone had woken him two days ago. He’d flown to Guam unquestioningly, as many people might when their government made the request. He paid his taxes and renewed his license and never caught more fish than his limit, too. He wanted to help, to do something good, just as Leo Bathgate did. Governments approved of citizens like Luke Nelson.
Plus there was no one on the other side of his bed to tell Luke not to go. And the room down the hall that his son had once slept in was empty, too.
“Why me?” he said. “Clayton’s my brother, but we aren’t close. I don’t have any specific skills that might help you out down there.”
“We’ll make a motley pair then, won’t we?” said Al. “What you’re asking, I take it, is why don’t we send down a crew of Special Forces badasses and put things right? We considered it. Dismissed it. First, that current ring made it dangerous to get down until recently. Second, the two men still down there—your brother and Dr. Toy—wield the whip hand now. They’re inside, we’re outside. I’ll give you a full debriefing later, but suffice it to say, the Trieste is fragile. All it takes is one screwdriver—pierce any wall just a fraction and it’s pancake city. So if we head down cocked and locked, well, what do we stand to lose if things go sideways? Everything. Absolutely everything.”
“That’s a cheerful thought. Jesus.”
They passed down a row of low, black, flat-sided buildings connected by linked walkways; they made Luke feel like he was touring a medium-security prison.
“But why you?” Al said. “Good question. You’re as green at deep dives as I am at neutering spaniels, right? The main reason, Luke, is that your brother asked for you.”