by RJ Corgan
“Now, that’s true. That’s certainly true.” Shona swirled her drink thoughtfully. “She came down here to start the Outpost and learn from yours truly.” She motioned to herself and Jacob. “And then, barely a few months later, the pandemic hit. Poor thing didn’t know anyone here, but those students took her in, invited her out, looked after her. It was a good thing too. Jeanine Davis spent too much time by herself and it did not end well. No, it did not.”
Carter thought back to Maria’s conspiracy post and Kea’s question about Emilio’s rope. “And if she thought someone were trying to hurt one of her ‘family?’”
“I wouldn’t want to be in their boots.” Jacob chuckled.
Shona silenced him with a dark look.
“No,” Carter agreed. He had met Kea on a resort in the dry Makgadikgadi Pan in Africa, where they had been stalked by a murderer. It hadn’t ended well for the killer. “Neither would I.”
KEA’S WORLD consisted only of agony. Blinking at the shadows that shifted inside the shelter, a flicker at the mouth of the passageway drew her attention. It was Ling, keeping a safe distance. No doubt afraid of coming too close, of getting infected.
“Perhaps today isn’t such a bad day after all.” Kea succumbed to a spate of coughing, then wiped a foul wad of goo from her lips.
“That’s an odd way of looking at things,” Dominic observed.
Kea shifted so that she could see him better. Or rather, so that she could stare at his boots. The downside of being mostly horizontal, she thought. A quick twist of her stomach told her brain that her body was not ready to commit to sitting up yet. “Saving my life again?”
He gave her a wan smile. “We’re taking turns making sure you’re still breathing, if that’s what you mean.”
“I hurt, therefore I am.” Kea rolled over onto her back. The clouds of gas had momentarily thinned, so she took off her mask and gulped for air.
“Carlos sent one of the climbers back to Gamma to give them an update of who survived and who didn’t.” Dominic pointed at the top of the rockfall. “If it helps, we’ve gotten word that several members of the press team on Alpha are also sick with whatever you have. Simon thinks you’ll recover in a bit.”
Although it was a relief to know that her condition wasn’t fatal, it still took every ounce of her remaining energy to pull herself from one moment into the next. Even the possibility that her symptoms might continue for a few more hours seemed excruciating. “How are the others?”
Dominic shrugged. “Josine’s broken collar bone is a problem. They’re getting a stretcher ready, but they haven’t finished rigging the lines to get her out. Probably will need to do the same for Daniela.”
“How’s your hand?”
He held up the bandaged limb. The pulverized flesh was thankfully hidden by white bandages that glowed in Masaya’s demonic light. “They won’t give me proper pain meds, so you can imagine I’m not in the best of moods. I’m also waiting to see if I start … ya know.” He waved at the splatter marks that decorated the ledge.
Kea remembered handing him her flask; the odds of passing an infection were high. “Yeah, well, I’m not a fan of me right now either.”
“I thought I was dead,” Dominic whispered. “One of the rocks about to fall right on top of me.” He nodded at one of the house-sized boulders. “But the base of the boulder just sorta twisted out from under it, and it veered into the chasm, saving me.”
Must have been the hydrothermally altered layer beneath it sliding away, Kea thought, or perhaps the rest of the ledge gave out.
“We weren’t even supposed to be here. We could have been out a half hour earlier. We only kept working ‘cause Emilio wanted to take more footage.” He fixed her with a sad, steady gaze. “None of this had to happen.”
Kea nodded to the others. “How are they holding up?”
“Francisco and Blanca seem fine, although Emilio’s death ...”
“Yeah,” Kea nodded. “I’m still processing that myself. Ya’ know, the sad thing is, I bet wherever Emilio is up there, he’s probably thrilled that his viewing figures went up.” As she spoke, the darkness around the edges of her vision swelled. Her head suddenly felt enormously heavy.
“That sounds more like the Kea I remember.”
“That Kea probably didn’t stink of goo and poo and was likely also a lighter shade of Death.” She nestled her face into the soft recesses of her pack. “If you see that Kea, tell her …”
Sleep claimed her once more.
IT WAS the dead of night, although stationed near the opening of the plaza, Ling’s body clock had no idea what time it was. Her vision was completely disorientated by the cauldron’s blazing orange and yellow lights that stuttered across Delta. By resting her head and arms on her knees, she was able to get snatches of sleep, but her hip bones pressed sharply against the rock beneath, forcing her to shift every half hour. When she woke, her parched throat demanded water, so she drank. Sleep, drink, repeat.
As the others continued their own fitful slumber, the rescue team’s lead climbers worked late into the night, erecting new lines to extract the wounded personnel. Ling had made an initial attempt to supervise their efforts, if only to show that she was being supportive, invested. However, they made it clear that her assistance was unwanted. Indeed, they seemed to pretend that she wasn’t there.
The rest of the team had responded to her in a similar manner, each in their own ways. Some switched to private comms frequently, while others averted their gaze, or simply broadcast their disapproval via turned shoulders and long sighs.
Ling took note of each action on her little tablet, filing the information away in case she should require documentation for future disciplinary action. She was unable to bother to generate an emotional response to their behavior – these people had been working closely for years under extremely hazardous conditions and the intrusion of any outsider would naturally rankle those relationships. She didn’t take it personally. To her, this was just another project, one of many she was currently involved in. Indeed, everything, including the team’s rate of descent, Kea’s reaction to her appearance, even their collective disdain, was proceeding as Ling had anticipated.
Even Kea’s illness was not, from a project management perspective, beyond the imagination of a capable planner. Nearly every non-native team member in this region was at risk of similar ailments, and Ling naturally factored in a three-day buffer into any project. Kea’s timing was terrible, of course, but Ling certainly had come to expect nothing less of the woman. If anything, unpredictability was one of Kea’s defining characteristics.
In between naps, Ling propped her chin on her knee and surveyed the plaza, trying to identify what was bothering her. In her mind, she walked through the events of the expedition once more, from the start of the descent from Beta to their arrival on Delta. The team had performed capably on the descent, putting safety above the natural inclination to affect a hasty rescue. Discovering the surviving team members had naturally led to a pulse of elation that reinvigorated the rescue team’s energy. Something lurked beneath the team’s dynamics, however, some fundamental shift that eluded Ling.
She pictured each member of the team in her head, trying to match what she knew of their backgrounds to the people she had encountered so far. The behavior of injured parties, Daniela, Josine, Dominic, and, of course, Kea, were clouded by pain, or medication and therefore unreliable. Francisco seemed to be the fool of the group, although perhaps that was misleading. Carlos’ nervousness could just be down to the stress of the rescue mission, which was certainly not something he had signed up for. However, why was Carlos the only member of the team to make it back to Beta? Why had he left Delta level early? She made a mental note to check the project files.
A flickering at the edge of the plaza drew Ling’s eye. Cloaked in a silver proximity suit, a figure skirted the crater wall. The long, loping strides were unfamiliar, but judging by its height, she guessed that it was a man. She drew
her legs beside her to allow him passage into the shelter’s opening. When he removed his visor, she recognized the silver hair and widow’s peak above the gas mask as belonging to Luis, the engineering professor.
“I didn’t see you leave,” Ling remarked.
“I didn’t want to wake you,” Luis said, removing his bulky gloves. “But I needed to see if there was any way to salvage the equipment on the other side of the rockfall.”
Ling nodded, remembering the location where the Canadian acoustical survey team had been positioned. “Any luck?”
He shook his head. “It’s like the entire landscape completely changed.”
She had not forgotten that Luis was one of the few members uninjured by the rockfall. She tried to meet his gaze and asked, “What were you hoping to find?”
Luis, who had been pulling off the silver garments froze. Despite being partially shrouded in gear, Ling could tell that she had inadvertently caught the man off-guard.
“With the acoustical equipment, I mean.” Having read the project files, she already knew the answer, but she was less interested in his response and more interested in how he said it.
He blew out a breath. “We were trying to map several cavities that extended below Delta and might connect to a larger network of lava tubes.”
Ling cursed the cumbersome gas mask that concealed the man’s facial expressions. Judging by the tone of his voice, however, he seemed to have relaxed slightly. “Did they find anything? Before the rockfall?”
Luis shrugged. “Hopefully, their data was uploaded to the cloud before the systems went down, but we won’t know until we get it up and running again. He finished removing his suit, then excused himself and headed deeper into the shelter.
Watching his retreating form, something clicked in Ling’s mind.
Ever since they’d reached the Delta team, aside from the initial moment of elation, they hadn’t relaxed. If anything, a pervasive sense of unease hung in the air.
Which didn’t make any sense at all.
Chapter 12
CARTER AWOKE beneath a thick, multicolored quilt. He lay staring at the ceiling, not eager to make the journey across the cold tile floor to the bathroom.
The guest bedroom had been recently occupied. The clothes in the drawers were too small for Shona, but they were about the right size for a certain five-foot, three-inch woman. The ginger hairs in the brush on the dresser were also telling.
He had left his rucksack on a side chair. The rest of his belongings had gone up in flames in his hotel in Bluefields, but he had a change of clothes and some toiletries. Provided he could summon the energy to get out of bed.
The enticing scent of coffee wafted throughout the house and the sound of the news on the television in the kitchen bubbled into his little room. Everyone else, it seemed, was starting their day, but Carter found it difficult to do much more than roll over. He stuffed his face into his pillow, shielding his eyes from the glare of the rising sun.
Before he had falling asleep last night, he had connected to Shona’s Wi-Fi and delayed his flight another day, adding the change fee to Kea’s bill. He stretched out his hand and groped for his laptop on the bedside table. Logging in, his flight status read ‘On Time.’
He could be out of Nicaragua by tomorrow afternoon. He had planned on meeting his partner Leo for a relaxing week in Jamaica before heading on to Madagascar to explore the Forest of Knives.
In theory.
Shona had sent them all to bed with the promise of continuing her gravimetric survey the next day. While Carter found her ten-minute lecture on gravity measurements interesting, and didn’t mind the thought of hiking from station to station across the flanks of the volcano, it wasn’t directly helping the trapped team members.
It certainly wasn’t why he had come to Masaya.
Part of his agreement with Kea had been that he would deliver a file to her, but she had stressed that he wouldn’t receive full payment until they completed the final task together.
He scanned the news headlines, scanning the pages for updates on the rescue party, but saw nothing helpful. He checked his messages. Still nothing.
Carter was growing concerned that Kea may never have a chance to see the file they had worked so hard to acquire. Even if she got reconnected to the internet on Delta level, if there really was a killer stalking her party, she might never make it out of the volcano alive.
With a sigh, he opened a connection to his virtual storage and created a shareable link, for Kea only, and sent the file to her. She might need some good news, he reasoned. Also, it might help motivate her to get out of there faster and pay up. “She better, ‘cause I sure don’t want to do this alone.”
“The best thing about the pandemic was the masks,” Shona said from the doorway. “I could talk to myself till the cows came home and no one would know. Without ‘em, ya’ just look crazy.”
“This was Kea’s room during the pandemic, wasn’t it?” Carter asked.
“She split her time between here and Alisha’s.” Shona leant on the doorway and folded her arms across her chest. “She came here when she wanted some peace and quiet, especially after the riots.”
Carter nodded. He’d seen the protests on the news. “I find it hard to believe Emilio was central to resolving that. I always assumed someone else had a hand.”
“Kea?” Shona laughed. “Dear Lord, no. She can’t stand politics, not a drop of it. No, that really was all Emilio, or at least his father’s money that swayed that compromise. Emilio was just looking after his friends, but of course by then it was too late.”
“Too late for what?”
Shona crossed over to the dresser and opened one of the drawers. She pulled away some of the blouses and pulled out a couple of framed photos. She sat down on the bed beside Carter. One of the pictures was of the same party he’d seen a photograph of the night before, but with a smaller group of women and men. Kea stood on the side, awkwardly apart, but still glowing with happiness.
“There’s Emilio, Blanca, and Francisco.” Shona pointed to the tallest of three. “Inseparable, God help them.”
Carter watched in confusion as Shona made the sign of the cross on her chest.
“Now here’s Kea, with Daniela and Luis.” Shona pointed to a gray-haired man in the photo. “Far too good looking to be a professor, nothing but trouble. Poor Alisha.” She moved her finger to the other girls in the photograph, “She and Josine were devoted to each other. Dominic was with Alisha, back then anyway, before ...” Shona repeated the sign of the cross. “They were all barricaded in the university with the other students when the Policía Nacional came down on them. When they tried to escape a few days later, they got captured. Somehow, the police found out about their plan. Someone had narc’d on them, never discovered who. Those taken in for questioning, well, not all came back. Like Alisha. We never heard from her again. Josine was devastated.” Shona put the photograph on her lap and stared up at the ceiling, reigning in her emotions. “We all were, naturally. Especially horrible for the family during that time, of course, never knowing if she’s still out there somewhere, or languishing in some cell. And now Emilio.”
Carter, still going through the groggy stages of waking up, tried to process Shona’s ramblings. “Maria seemed to think that Emilio was killed, but why? By the government because he supported the students?” He frowned. That didn’t make sense.
“Goodness no.” Shona shook her head. “He’s the public face of compromise between the elite old guard and today’s youth. He’s invaluable to them. Was invaluable, I mean.”
Carter tried to follow the pivot. “Then why did Maria post that?” he paused. “Does someone think Emilio was the narc?”
Shona paused, as if considering. “I suppose that could be. There were over thirty students in that compound, could have been any of them, or their families for that matter. We may never really know.” She waved impatiently. “That’s all in the past. Sometimes a rockfall is just a rock
fall. Come grab some food, we’re headed out soon.”
By the time Carter showered and sat down at the kitchen table, Jacob and Maria were already loading up the truck with equipment. The television screen showed multiple news channels in quadrants. One was a live stream of activity in the crater; if Carter had to guess, Shona probably had a feed from the Outpost.
“Where is that?” He pointed to a group of protestors at the edge of a lake.
“San Miguelito.” Shona finished wiping down the counter and joined him at the small table. “They’re finishing work on the final lock connecting Lake Cocibolca to the Atlantic. Once it’s finished, they’ll open the Rivas channel to the Pacific and the canal system will be complete.”
She took a long drink from her coffee. “The Panama Canal won’t be the only game in town. The ecology of the lake will be ruined but Freedom Unlimited will get very, very, rich.”
“I’m surprised the people are allowed to protest.”
Shona shrugged. “There have been appeals, but at this stage it hardly matters. The thing is virtually complete. They’d be crazy not to open it. Besides, the country’s so far into debt to China, it’s not like it’s their decision anymore.”
Carter finished off his plantains and started making some sandwiches out of rolls and jam for lunch. “I understand why Freedom Unlimited is involved in the canal, but why do they care about Masaya?”
“They own nearly everything now, all the new bridges, the utility lines, you name it. But it’s the volcano project that gets all the international press. They were sniffing around all the Central American Outposts ages ago, back when I was in charge.” She handed him a cloth bag to carry his lunch. “Back then, before the collapse, we could stave off the vultures, but now? I’m not surprised Amirah sold this Outpost. Funding is so scarce these days.”
“If you don’t mind me saying, handing off everything in the middle of a crisis is a little insane,” Carter finished for her.
Shona nodded. “Or a perfect opportunity to prove how shoddy the previous management was. Besides, El Presidente isn’t the only one who was watching Emilio, or our little Maria.”