Sinkhole

by Deborah Jackson

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Kat dashed along the perimeter of the cavern, stumbling over some rocks but managing to keep her balance. Breccia crunched and crackled behind her, telling her that Pete was in close pursuit. She didn’t pause when she heard another sharp blast of the whistle, but bit down on her lip at the implications.

  Megan and Ray were in trouble. They had their masks; it couldn’t be a venting unless they’d been caught unawares. But anything could happen in a cave—a sudden collapse of rock, a slip into a fast-flowing sump or, as had already happened to her, an imprisonment in a tight squeeze. The flashlight beamed off a column, passed over a jagged archway in the rock—my God, an exit—and found two figures, one sprawled on the ground and the other hunched over him, biting down on her whistle.

  “Megan!” Kat shouted, propelling herself even more quickly to the spot. “What is it? What happened?”

  Megan spat out the whistle and beckoned them frantically.

  “Oh, Kat. I’m so glad you came. Ray is sick—he’s burning with fever. The organism . . . where he brushed his neck . . .”

  Kat approached Ray’s quivering body, her breath locked in her chest. She knelt down beside him and tried to comprehend the picture in front of her.

  Ray was flushed, hyperventilating, his body sheathed in sweat, his teeth chattering uncontrollably. She bent over his neck, gasped, and brought a hand to her mouth. It was swollen, had turned an angry red color, and was weeping bloody drainage. The moles on Ray’s neck had disappeared, leaving behind raw flesh.

  “No,” said Kat. “Not like this.”

  “What is it?” asked Pete in the most casual tone. “Something like Streptococcus pyogenes?”

  “This isn’t flesh-eating disease,” snapped Kat. “It’s something different. The organism obviously secretes a toxin.”

  “A potent one, at that,” said Pete.

  “I put antibiotic cream on it,” said Megan, snuffling. “But it had no effect. What can we do?”

  Kat shook her head, shut her eyes. What could they do?

  “We have to get him to the surface, somehow. There’s an exit . . .” She blinked and refocused on the gap in the wall.

  “No,” said Megan. “We can’t go that way.”

  “Why?” asked Pete. He strolled over to the gap. “It looks passable.”

  “Because,” said Megan. She switched off her light, then reached over to Kat’s and did the same. “It’s swarming.”

  Kat looked over at the pulsating luminescence within the tunnel, trying to come to terms with this new barrier. Just when escape seemed within their grasp it was snatched away again. If just one brief brush with this microbe could cause such a violent reaction in Ray, imagine if they were covered in it. They’d be dead long before they reached the surface. But they couldn’t just leave Ray like this. They had to do something.

  “We’ll bring him back to the Mayan tomb in the middle of the cavern and set up a base camp. At least it will be farther from the source of this organism. Then I’ll try to figure something out.” She was, after all, a microbiologist. If she couldn’t discover what this organism was, and what mechanism might halt its invasion, certainly no one else on the team could. But she wasn’t exactly stocked with antibiotics or other combatant organisms to fight it.

  She motioned for Pete and Megan to help her lift Ray’s twitching body from the ground. “Be careful you don’t come in contact with the wound,” she cautioned. “We don’t know how transmittable this microbe is.”

  They didn’t need to be told. Pete had already withdrawn the foil space blanket from his pack and draped it around the infected lesion. They hoisted Ray, who was moaning and chattering deliriously—“Are we going somewhere? Kind of cold down here, isn’t it? Hey, my neck hurts.”—and slung his arms around their shoulders. Kat considered slinking in beside them to help, but she hardly had the strength to support her own weight lately, let alone to carry a 170-pound man. They staggered back toward the center of the chamber, through the Mayan graveyard again, and into the anteroom to the burial chamber—if one could call it that—where Mayan artifacts littered the ground. Kat found a relatively clear space and motioned for the others to lay him down.

  Ray continued to tremble and mutter incoherently. Kat knelt beside him and peeled the foil from his neck. She almost exploded into tears as she looked at the corroded tissue. But she had to look at this clinically in order to find a solution. She had to clear her mind of all emotional baggage. A deep breath and her brain should function again.

  It was unusual how the skin and subcutaneous tissue underneath the moles had eroded in perfectly matching circles. The toxins must have been released at first contact with the moles. Moles that she had thought might be cancerous. Perhaps a specific protein in the cancerous cells, unique to aberrant cells, was what the nanobacteria had first attached to. All pathogens work by adhering to the host tissue in some fashion. Perhaps it had bound to the moles for a reason. Then, once the toxins were released, it continued to break down tissue and rupture red blood cells. Whatever it was doing, it was working rapidly, even faster than S. pyogenes, causing massive tissue and blood vessel damage. Hemolytic toxins, perhaps? If she didn’t stop this organism, it would probably lead to septic shock in a matter of days, if not hours. Ray would be dead long before she was.

  “Pete, I’m going to try to take a look at the organism.” She met his skeptical eyes and felt the gravity of their situation punch her in the stomach. “I don’t know how much I’ll be able to see without the FESEM, but it’s worth a try.”

  She shot open the zipper of her pack and thrust aside the food stocks and climbing equipment inside to get to the carefully cushioned packet at the bottom. There rested the microbiologist’s staple equipment: a microscope. It was a basic construction, a Van Leeuwenhoek special, capable of discerning nothing smaller than 0.2 microns in size. Scientists had originally proclaimed that bacteria could not exist at smaller sizes, only because it was the smallest size a standard light microscope at maximum magnification could distinguish. Now everyone knew better; rods and spheres as small as fifty-six nanometers in diameter had been discovered—not only in caves, but in the thermal vents deep in the Pacific Ocean, even in dental plaque, and now on Mars.

  Kat withdrew her microscope from the watertight pouch. She was amazed it had survived the battering in the sump, but she’d packed it quite securely, buffering it from bumps with the one-meter square polyurethane foam she used as a mattress. Laying the scope gently on the ground, she opened one of the sample jars she’d collected from the phosphorescent source and gingerly extracted a sliver of jelly from the dish with a swab. In a second she had it smeared on a slide and whipped under the lens. Adjusting the focus, she could distinguish four or five blobs, but nothing that resembled a rod or filament of bacteria. Increasing the magnification didn’t improve the image.

  “What do you see?” asked Pete.

  “Nothing much,” said Kat, sitting back and shaking her head. “Biofilm, definitely, but I can’t make out a shape. It’s just too small.”

  “What is biofilm?” asked Megan.

  “Basically, it’s what many mineral-dwelling bacteria release into their environment. It’s how microbial mats are woven together, like the snottites up above, or the substance by the cave rafts at the cavern’s entrance.” Kat rubbed her forehead. There was something tapping at her brain, but she was so tired and frustrated that she couldn’t latch on. She looked over at Ray and felt a jolt of fear. His skin was swelling like rising dough and his eyes had glazed over. The stridor of his breathing echoed in the chamber.

  “If we had something to neutralize the toxin. But we don’t have anything other than the cream in the med kit.”

  Ray mumbled something. She leaned toward him and stroked his cheek. “It’ll be okay, Ray. I’m not going to leave you.”

  His teeth clicked. He shook his fist. “P- pack,” he said explosively.

  “What do you need?” she asked. “Wa
ter?” She found a Nalgene bottle and brought it to his lips.

  Ray knocked the bottle from her hands. “P- pack. It’s in . . . my pack.”

  “What is?” she asked, hardly daring to hope.

  “Peni-ci-cillin.”

  Kat felt all the tightness in her muscles melt away. She wanted to whoop and holler. “You brought penicillin?”

  “I know, doesn’t work all the time, but . . . Didn’t want to take a chance with all your microbes, although I . . . guess . . . not very good at sterile . . . technique.”

  “It’s really isolation technique,” said Kat, “and for someone who was pretty stupid, you can be brilliant sometimes.” She jumped over Ray and dove into his pack. Sure enough, jammed in with his toiletries was a bottle of penicillin.

  She held it up to the light like it was a gift from the Mayan gods.

  Pete looked at it with a tilt of his head. “It probably won’t work fast enough if it’s ingested.”

  “Right,” said Kat, tilting the bottle and spilling tablets onto her palm. She quickly laid a plastic sheet over a solid slab of stone, rechecked the dosage, and counted the pills in her hand. After returning some to the bottle, she folded the plastic over to sandwich the remaining tablets, picked up a carved statuette and raised it above her head.

  “What are you doing?” Megan screamed.

  “I need to crush the pills, Megan. Have you got a mortar and pestle?”

  When Megan shook her head, Kat slammed the statue down on the penicillin. Dusting the crushed pills into her hand, she took a small vial of saline solution that she kept in her med kit for flushing eyes and dumped the granules into it.

  “You’re going to inject him?” asked Pete, amazed. “But the chance of infection . . . Well, I suppose it doesn’t matter.”

  Kat rolled her eyes and pulled out the syringe she kept in her sampling kit for dropping solutions onto the microscope slides. It was hardly sterile but, as Pete had already realized, Ray was too far gone to worry about other bacteria. She drew up the penicillin solution and tapped the air bubbles out of it. Pete rolled up Ray’s sleeve and wrapped a short piece of nylon rope around his arm for a tourniquet. Ray moaned again and started to shudder, but Pete clamped down on his arm to hold it steady. Kat swabbed the vein with alcohol—probably a useless effort—and slid the needle into it.

  Ray yelped. “Dammit, Kat, you’re a lousy nurse,” he said, as coherent as the day they’d met. Then he passed out.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  The retraction on the rope as it met the end of its tether stalled Mark in his plunge down the sump. The lash of the harness around his waist and chest ripped through his body, as if he’d been slammed in a head-on collision and only held back from certain death by the strap of a seatbelt. He gasped and choked back a yelp, swallowing the pain, then realized the rope was holding as the current surged around him. He wasn’t going to be bashed into the wall or sucked into the center of the earth.

  As he sputtered and caught his breath, a gentle tug on the rope revealed that energy was being expended at the other end to retrieve him. Once again, Jorge would not let the cave consume another victim. No longer at the mercy of the river, Mark grabbed the rope and strove to fight his way back against the current. Hand over hand he pulled, water chafing his arms and legs and pounding against his head, the rope trickling backward as he worked. The battle with the current was torturous and endless. His shoulders screaming with pain, he thought he might have to let go again, when an arc of light that mirrored his own appeared in the tunnel ahead and he knew he was approaching the guide.

  Mark struggled the final meter as Jorge reeled him in, reaching out of the water and grasping a slick cone of rock. He prepared to hoist himself out, but Jorge was faster, clutching his belt and hauling him over the bank. Mark flopped down, spread-eagled and exhausted, heaving and panting. Only his eyes followed Jorge’s movements.

  Jorge looked as spent as Mark felt. Sweat streaked his face; his breath rasped in his throat. His knees suddenly buckled and he collapsed on the ground, shaking his head at his own weakness.

  “Oh, doctor,” he finally managed to say. “You will be the death of me yet.”

  “Why, Jorge?” Mark croaked between pants. “Why all this trouble . . . for a couple of scientists? Why bring me, when you . . . know I’m not up to the task?”

  Jorge shook his head. “I . . . thought I could kill two birds . . . with one stone. I thought you . . . might be able to solve the . . . mystery of the curse, come up with some . . . scientific explanation, and I could use . . . I mean I could rescue your wife at the same time. Mistake, on my part. Not . . . sure we can make it.”

  Mark was silent. He’d caught Jorge’s quick correction. Use what, and how? How would a Mayan guerrilla use scientific knowledge? But maybe he’d just misinterpreted the little blunder. Besides, his final statement had more significance at the moment. They had to make it.

  “Well.” He slouched into a sitting position and flung the rebreather from his shoulders, windmilling his arms to shake the stiffness from them and stretch his aching back. His strained tendons and throbbing muscles groaned as he forced them to move again. “We’d better get going.”

  Jorge sat up and squinted rather dazedly at him. “You want to continue, no matter that you nearly died again? No matter that you look as spent as a shell casing after the bullet is fired? You would drag that soft body down to the blistering core of the planet for this woman! I don’t understand it.”

  “Neither do I,” said Mark. “Either I’m madly in love or I’m just mad. I’ve made mistakes—grave mistakes that might have cost me my marriage—but I can’t let her go.” He lowered his voice. “Even though she may be dying anyway.” He paused, then whispered, “She has cancer.”

  Jorge stared, his forehead deeply creased. “Perhaps, doctor, you’ve finally earned my respect. You believe as profoundly in your marriage as I believe in my cause. You may have lived a different life—a sheltered, pampered life. But you have commitment, you have compassion and faith, things that I have all but lost. And somehow, you have incredible stamina. We will get past the final sump and find your wife, assuming they got that far.”

  Mark nodded. Then a light bulb snapped on in his head. “The final sump? Do you mean to tell me there’s another one of these?”

  Jorge’s eyes were sunken and tired, but an impulse to goad still gleamed in them. “Oh yes. There are two more, actually. But the current in the third one is the most powerful. I’ve told you before, no one has returned.”

  “Then why do you think we can?”

  “Just a guess. We might be able to find another way out. Somehow the ancient Maya made their way down there. Otherwise, we’ll have to battle against the current again. Either way, it is possible that someone will escape. Maybe all of us. Even you, doctor.”

  Mark met the challenge with a curt nod.

  Jorge smiled, but it was a frosty smile that didn’t quite touch his eyes. Mark wondered if he believed his own words. Jorge turned his back on Mark and sifted through his pack, removing a couple of chocolate bars. With a wink he tossed one over, and Mark caught it before it could fall into the sump. He ripped open the wrapper and tore a chunk out of the bar like a ravenous wolf, relishing the sugary burst of energy it supplied, short-lived though it would be.

  “How much farther to this last sump?” he asked between bites.

  “Another seven hundred meters. We have fifteen more rappels, a few more belly crawls. Two more days, at least.”

  Mark stuffed the last morsel into his mouth. “Okay,” he mumbled, licking his fingers. “Let’s do it.”

  Jorge carefully secured the wrappers in his pack and hefted it onto his back. Mark wondered why the man was so fastidious about keeping the cave clean when his people were starving. Perhaps it was a trait of the Mayan people. Those he’d seen had been beautifully clothed in pure and vibrant colors.

  Jorge walked through an open tunnel fully erect, for a change. His fo
ot faltered the odd time, but he wasn’t staggering like Mark. It was surprising how optimistic he now seemed after voicing his doubts. Mark wondered if this would be his best chance of discovering Jorge’s plans, maybe even of changing them, before the final leg of the journey: the sump of no return.

  “Jorge,” he began, his voice a hoarse croak that did little to increase his confidence. “I don’t know much about your people, but I find a striking similarity between their situation and that of the Canadian first peoples. They too have been repressed for ages, nearly stomped out of existence, but now they are reclaiming their rights. It makes for noisy confusion, wars with the government and police, standoffs that I’ve always thought were unnecessary. I felt they should change with the times—relinquish the past and join the modern world of enterprise and competition. But I didn’t realize that maybe they couldn’t. Maybe prejudice stood in the way. I think, on some issues, they might be wiser than we are. Their cultural traditions were more friendly to this earth than our expanding technology.”

  “Progress is often regression,” said Jorge, bending now at a particularly low dip in the passage.

  “Perhaps in some things, although in the field of medicine I maintain that it’s essential.”

  “Essential for whom, doctor? For the few who benefit from it?”

  Mark sighed. He’d thought that maybe he could get through to Jorge, maybe alter the path he’d chosen, but he still couldn’t argue with him. “You’re right. My specialized research isn’t going help your family survive. If the device I’m working on—it’s a miniature submarine to help cardiac and cancer patients,” he explained—“Well, if it ever gets past the testing stage it will probably be used in the U.S., Canada, maybe Europe, but I don’t see it ever making its way to a surgical unit in Chiapas.”