“I’ll have to inspect you, too,” he said.
She smiled. “Of course.”
He peeled off his shirt. Beyza started with her pants. Both of them half-naked, Cortez went to her, stroked her hair, and untied the mask from the back of her head. Beyza reached up to stop him, but then he kissed her and more of the tension left her shoulders and neck. She wanted to forget her fears and to help Cortez forget his own.
“Elio,” she said when his hands began to explore.
Something moved behind the curtain, out in the hallway.
Beyza jumped, both of them turning to stare at the dark cloth over the doorway.
“Hello?” she called.
A figure shifted, just beyond the curtain, a darker silhouette.
“Professor Solak?” the figure said. “It’s Sergeant Dunlap. Dr. Durand is gathering anyone who’s been in the Pandora Room. She’d like you to join us in the worship chamber.”
Cheeks burning, Beyza covered her mouth with both hands to stifle a cry of embarrassment or a peal of laughter, she wasn’t sure which. Cortez was halfway bent over, wearing an enormous grin.
“I’m changing,” Beyza said. “I’ll be along as quickly as I can, Sergeant. Thank you.”
Dunlap returned her thanks, and then the silhouette vanished from the hallway. They both stared at the curtain for twenty or so seconds before Cortez exhaled.
“Okay,” he said, grabbing his shirt. “I guess I’ll just wait here.”
Beyza ripped the shirt from his hand and tossed it on the floor. “Yes, you will. You’re officially quarantined to this room.” She slipped her hands into the waistband of his pants and tugged them down. “But I haven’t finished examining you yet.”
Sophie could wait a few minutes. After all, none of them were going anywhere.
As it turned out, though Beyza had not been feeling well, Cortez proved himself to be feeling very fine indeed.
* * *
Sophie wondered how long her pulse could race so quickly without giving her a heart attack. She felt like an animal backed into a corner, a wolf trapped in its den while the hunter waits outside. At least a half hour had passed since the last loud explosion aboveground, but in the quiet of the worship chamber, she could still hear the staccato punch of gunfire ripping up the night. The sound drifted down the ventilation shafts so quietly that she could almost have imagined it, but then it would grow louder, or fall silent, and it could not be denied.
She watched as they entered, one by one—all those who had spent time in the Pandora Room. Sophie had asked Sergeant Dunlap to gather them in the worship chamber for a private meeting. Dr. Tang, Walker, Beyza, Kim, and Dunlap himself came in, found stone seats or leaned against the wall. There were a total of twelve filtration masks, and they were all accounted for. Sophie ticked them off as she glanced around the room—counting herself, there were six in the room. The sentries each had one, and that made ten. There was the grad student, Zehra, who’d volunteered and received a mask in order to be posted to watch over their makeshift morgue.
Dr. Tang had been wearing a hazmat suit but had removed it and opted for her own filtration mask again. The suits were not meant for long-term wear, but Sophie had made certain Dr. Tang kept her suit and the others close by, worried they might still be needed. The rest of the staff were confined to their quarters, so there was little chance they would be spied upon.
Someone was missing.
A shudder went through Sophie as she glanced at Beyza. “Where’s Martin?”
An exhausted Beyza looked up. “I don’t know.” Perched on the edge of a stone bench, she glanced around the room as if to confirm he wasn’t there.
“I looked for him,” Dunlap said. “But I didn’t have time to search everywhere.”
Sophie felt a tremor in her chest. Her throat still hurt, but that seemed the least of their troubles now. The sight of what had happened to Marissa and Sean and the others had shaken her deeply. As the others waited on her to speak, all she could do was imagine herself locked inside a plague ward.
“Okay,” she said, glancing around. “Let’s make this quick, and when we’re done here, someone needs to find Martin and make sure he’s all right.”
“I’ll go,” Beyza said.
“I’ll cover your back,” Dunlap replied.
Sophie nodded her thanks, then turned to Dr. Tang. “Doc, go ahead.”
Dr. Tang sat unusually still. “Some of the staff are suffering from an ugly rash, along with raised lymph nodes, dark-colored lesions, and other symptoms.”
“Shit,” Dunlap whispered.
“Have any of you noticed a rash or sores?” Dr. Tang went on.
Sophie exhaled slowly as a chorus of negative replies went around the circle.
“We’re being honest here, right?” Dunlap said.
“We have to be,” Walker replied.
“My throat’s killing me.” The sergeant shrugged. “That’s really it, other than a headache, but I’m so tired I hoped that was the reason.”
“It might be,” Sophie said, “but my throat is also very sore.”
The others began to chime in with symptoms from headaches to minor coughs to dizziness.
“But no rash?” Sophie asked. “Nothing like that?”
“Under my jaw. There’s some pain,” Walker said hesitantly.
Dr. Tang went to him and used a penlight to examine him, careful not to disturb his filtration mask.
“I don’t see anything, but the glands may be swollen,” she said.
A quiet descended on them all as she moved from person to person, shining that light beneath their chins and into their eyes.
“So the crack in the jar released something,” Walker said.
“I guess there are other ways to explain this,” Dunlap replied, “but I can’t think of any logical ones.”
“I was sick before the jar cracked,” Sophie told them.
“Lamar had the rash,” Dr. Tang said. “Badly. He had other symptoms, too, including eyes so bloodshot they’d gone totally red by the time he was shot, or maybe while he was dying.”
Sophie winced, but Dr. Tang didn’t seem to notice her grief. The woman didn’t mean to be callous, she knew, but the thought of Lamar cut her deeply.
Beyza spoke up. “Lamar spent three times as much time in the Pandora Room as any of us. Even when he was just working on translating, he’d sit in there. He said he’d rather look at the original than the photos while he was trying to puzzle it all out. Maybe we were all exposed to something in there, even before the crack, but Lamar just had more of it.”
“What about the others? The rash?” Walker asked. “None of them were in the Pandora Room.”
Kim crossed her arms. “Let’s go through the steps. Lamar stashes the jar in his camera bag, wrapped in his sweatshirt. When he was shot, he fell on top of it. Assuming that impact cracked the seal, it’s possible the first bit of whatever came out of the jar got into his system then, in the moments when he was dying.”
Sophie frowned. “Unless the crack happened earlier, in the Pandora Room. It’s hard for me to imagine him attacking the sentries and those techs, but he did. He … Lamar killed those people. Maybe in the middle of that, the jar was knocked over, and the seal cracked then. He wraps it up in the sweatshirt, stashes it in the camera case, and whatever microbes are released are trapped there until…”
She buried her face in her hands, mask and all. “Fuck,” she said. And then shouted. “Fuck!”
“Until we took it out of the case,” Dr. Tang said, “and packed it into the contagion box.”
“We all started wearing masks before that,” Walker reminded them. “We thought we’d been exposed, but—”
“I’m lost,” Sergeant Dunlap said. “We’re talking before and after the crack, right? Two different effects?”
Sophie nodded slowly. “At least two. Remember the legend? ‘All the curses of humanity.’”
“Or all the blessings,” Beyza said.
>
Dr. Tang whipped her head around. “I think we can rule out the blessings at this point. But I’d like to point out that Dmitri was very close to Martin when he carried the camera case through the atrium. Giving him a hard time. There were several others there, but you’ll have to identify them. If we’re trying to establish a contagion model and we begin with the jar—”
“Cortez,” Beyza said, burying her face in her hands.
“What’s that?” Sophie said.
Beyza glanced up. “Cortez was there. He grabbed Dmitri or something.”
“We need to have a look at him,” Dr. Tang said.
“I … I just did,” Beyza said, glancing sheepishly around the room. “About ten minutes ago.”
“What do you mean?” Dr. Tang asked. “He’s supposed to be confined to his quarters.”
Sophie stared at Beyza, surprised she would share that bit of information. Beyza was both very private and very married.
“You and Cortez?” Kim asked.
The worship chamber went very quiet. Even the gunfire seemed to have paused.
Dr. Tang leaned toward Beyza. “You took your mask off?”
Kim gave a nervous laugh. “Of course she had her mask off, Erika. Let’s move on, shall we?”
Dr. Tang flashed an irritated look at the entire group. “Don’t do that again. Any of you. Whatever this is, it is moving very quickly. If Cortez is in Professor Solak’s quarters, he should remain there until I can examine him. We’ll need to track this from person to person.”
Walker stood, pacing, staring at the floor as he walked as if he could see through to the center of the world. “I’m still not sure how this works, with the jar causing some effects before and some after.”
“Maybe the mortar used for the seal is porous,” Dunlap offered.
Walker nodded and pointed at him. “Okay, yeah. It wasn’t meant to be, but thousands of years pass and it dries out enough that some kind of contagion gets through, enough to have … some effect on everyone who spends any length of time in that room.”
“But when Lamar steals it, he cracks the seal,” Dunlap added. “Now something else is coming out.”
“I didn’t believe in the danger,” Beyza said. “It’s a myth.”
Kim glanced at her. “Walker and I have met myths before.”
Dr. Tang cocked her head. “What does that mean?”
“There’s something more going on here,” Kim replied. “There’s natural science, and then there is what I cannot help thinking of as unnatural science.”
“Kim—” Walker began.
But Kim would not be halted. She leaned back against the wall and crossed her arms as though to give herself warmth. Above her mask, her eyes were wide, pupils fully dilated in search of brighter light.
“I’m talking about evil,” she said. “All the curses of humanity.”
Sergeant Dunlap scoffed, smiled as if he thought she must have been kidding. Sophie could see from her expression that she wasn’t.
“That’s ridiculous,” Beyza said, studying her as if she’d appeared out of thin air.
Dr. Tang coughed lightly. “Well, perhaps not.” She glanced around as they all turned to stare at her. “Dmitri and Rachel said they’d seen ghosts. I’ve seen them as well, and I’m willing to bet some of you have, too.”
Sophie stared at her. She didn’t seem like the kind of woman to joke about this—or anything else, for that matter. Dr. Tang looked around the circle, trying to get a glimpse of their expressions despite the masks eclipsing the lower halves of their faces.
“Or maybe it’s just me,” Dr. Tang said, cocking her head in her quirky fashion.
“I might’ve seen something,” Walker said. “Just a glimpse. Corner of my eye. I thought someone was there.”
“That’s happened to me in my apartment,” Dunlap replied.
“It happens more here,” Beyza said quietly.
Sophie stared at her. “Something you want to say, Professor?”
Beyza narrowed her eyes as if she’d been wounded, and she looked up at Sophie. “You really haven’t seen anything?”
Sophie sighed. “Like Walker. Maybe a glimpse. I chalked it up to exhaustion. I still think that’s what it was.”
“Not me,” Beyza said. “What I saw was … it was awful.”
She went no further, and it seemed clear she would not say more, so Sophie decided not to push her. Instead, she turned to Dr. Tang.
“Ghosts,” she said aloud, just to taste the word on her tongue. The flavor was ridiculous. “I’m sorry, but I have trouble with that. What’s happening here is some kind of virus. Contagion. Like we said, maybe more than one kind, but—”
Dr. Tang pointed at her. “You just said it. Maybe more than one kind. These hallucinations are manifesting in specific ways, but with apologies to Kim, I’m not willing to assume there’s anything supernatural about them. I will admit they scared the hell out of me.”
“You may be right, Doctor,” Kim said, her tone crisp and cold. “But if you had been on Mount Ararat with Walker and me, you would know there are things in the world science cannot yet explain.”
“Or doesn’t want to explain,” Walker added.
Sophie glanced back and forth between them and made the connection she ought to have made before. “Mount Ararat,” she said. “You were part of the Ark Project.”
Kim nodded slowly. Her eyes closed, and she muttered something too quietly, the words lost behind her mask.
Sergeant Dunlap threw up his hands. “What’s ‘the Ark Project’?”
Beyza turned to him. “A couple of years ago? They thought they’d found Noah’s Ark?”
Dunlap shrugged. “I’ve been in Iraq a long time.”
Sophie kept her gaze on Kim and Walker, shifting from one to the other. “A lot of people died, including nearly all the archaeologists involved.”
“Suddenly, I don’t feel as comforted by the impending reinforcements,” Beyza said.
It was an offhand comment, but Walker shot her a withering glance.
“We did all we could,” he said. “It’s a miracle we got off the mountain.”
Kim shuddered again. She took a series of deep breaths, her whole body shifting with each lungful of air. “You don’t understand.”
“There was a storm,” Sophie said, recalling the news reports. “And someone on the team lost it, started killing people.”
“That’s the story the media told,” Walker said, his eyes turning cold. “They found more than timber in that cave. Ark or not, there was something else inside it.”
The sorrow in his voice was unmistakable, but Sophie heard more than sorrow. This time, she heard fear.
“You understand how hard it is to believe, don’t you?” she asked.
“Of course we do,” Kim said. “It wasn’t easy for us, either. Maybe Dr. Tang is right. What she saw, what the others saw, might have some other explanation. I’m just saying don’t assume. Don’t…”
Walker put a hand on her back. “You okay?”
Her voice cracked when she spoke again, fighting tears. “I’ve been struggling with the trauma of that since we came down off the mountain. Some days I can almost forget. But now here we are, in another cave, and I’d do anything to get out of here. I’m the one who had to order the quarantine. Trust me, the irony is not lost on me.”
“We’re all claustrophobic after a while. You’ve been fine till now,” Walker began, trying to soothe her.
Kim rounded on him, eyes flaring. “I haven’t been fine! I’ve been crawling out of my skin since we got here. That’s the whole reason I wanted you with me!”
Silence enveloped the worship chamber. The others stared at Walker and Kim, but then as if at some unspoken cue, they all looked away. Walker said something too softly for the rest to hear, and when Sophie glanced up, he was shifting to be nearer to Kim, taking her hand. In that moment, Sophie hated the Pandora Room and everything about the work they’d done.
S
he wanted to go home.
“Evil exists,” Kim said with a hitching breath. “Trust us. Whatever’s here with us, I feel it. I can practically taste it, whatever it is.”
The words sank in. The people in the worship chamber grew uneasy, glancing at shadows, and it became clear the conversation had ended. They had only conjecture now. What they needed was sleep—and sunrise.
Walker glanced at Sophie. “You don’t have to believe in evil, but you have to believe there are things science doesn’t understand. And that those things can kill us.”
Dr. Tang stood up. “I’d like to hear the story of what happened on Mount Ararat sometime, when we’re out of this. When we can all breathe easier.”
It surprised Sophie to hear such hopeful talk coming from the ever-serious Dr. Tang, but it lifted her spirits a little nevertheless. Under their present circumstances, a little was all she could ask for.
Sophie stood and glanced around at the others. “We’re all a wreck. I don’t know if any of you will be able to sleep knowing the fighting is still going on above us—”
“I’d like to try,” Dunlap said.
“Fair enough,” Sophie replied. “But it might be a smart idea to take turns so whoever is awake can rouse an alarm if something goes wrong. If the USAMRIID team hasn’t arrived by sunup, Dr. Tang will examine everyone showing symptoms—”
“I’m going to check on them tonight and then again at dawn,” the doctor interrupted.
“Fair enough,” Sophie said. “The rest of us are going to get some rest. If we’re showing no further symptoms ourselves in the morning, that’ll be a good sign. We’ll have learned something, anyway. If anybody has any ghost stories in the morning, we’ll talk about that then, too.”
Beyza glanced at Dunlap. “The sergeant and I are going to try to locate Martin first. He had his mask on, but he was the one who carried the camera case back down to the Pandora Room. I’m worried about him.”
Sophie felt badly. She had forgotten all about Martin for a few minutes. “Thank you. But don’t stay up all night. Give it half an hour and then turn in. Sergeant, tell the sentries we need them to stay up. Tomorrow we’ll find a way to let them rest, even if we need to guard the Pandora Room and the cadavers ourselves. I’m sure the fighting upstairs will be over by morning.”
The Pandora Room: A Novel Page 18
