The Deep (3 page)

Luke said: “Is that
squid jerky
?”

“Wild, huh?” said Bathgate. “This tub was brought down from the Land of the Rising Sun, right? We’re loaded for bear with Japanese delights.”

“Anything you’d recommend?”

Bathgate said, “The shrimp chips aren’t half bad. Kinda of like Cheetos except, y’know,
fishy
.”

Luke tore open a pack of squid jerky.

“Pretty good,” he said, chewing thoughtfully.

Bathgate said, “I found this, too.” He held up a bottle of Japanese whiskey. “I had a warm beer the other night,” he continued, “but there’s something about drinking hard liquor alone on a boat. But now you’re here, want me to crack it open?”

Luke bit into another rawhide squid, chased it with a handful of wasabi peas, and snorted as the burn hit his nostrils.

“You only live once, Leo.”

Leo poured a stiff belt of whiskey into two glasses and cocked his head at Luke.

“Want a splash of Coke? Some’d say it’s sacrilege, sugaring up good hooch. But hell, I’m a low-class man with animal tastes.”

“Oh, I doubt a low-class man would have a yachting license, would he?” Luke told Leo with a grin.

Leo tipped a wink. “No, but a low-class man
would
have a trawling license. A trawler and a yacht are pretty much the same thing. Just one’s a helluva lot nicer than another. Like upgrading to a Ferrari when you’re used to driving a Kia. Now you, however, a
doctor
 . . .”

“My brother’s the brainiac,” Luke said. “I’m just a veterinarian.”

“
Just?
I’d say that’s a damn noble living.”

“Sure, and I love what I do,” said Luke. “Just, y’know . . . had to get there on my own. My folks couldn’t afford to send me or my brother to school. Now for Clay, there were scholarships and grants and bursaries. Me? Shoveling shit out of dog cages at the ASPCA, midnight-to-8-a.m. shift, to pay for school.” Luke smiled. “So believe me, I’m no top-shelf liquor drinker.”

Leo tipped Coke into Luke’s glass. They gave their drinks a quick stir around with their index fingers, thumbing their noses at propriety, and clinked glasses.

“Cheers, Doc.”

“Cheers to you, Leo.”

Smoky, with a burned aftertaste. Whiskey had never been his tipple. Guilt crashed over Luke. Here he was drinking another man’s property—a
dead man’s
property in all likelihood—and he had no appreciation for it.

7.

LEO USHERED LUKE
to the helm. The instrument panel was lit in ghostly greens and blues. A monitor charted the present depth of the sea: 2,300 feet.

“I’ve been on the ocean since I was a kid,” said Leo. “My pops owned a lobster boat. I was out on it soon as I could walk. By seven, I was holding the wheel while he dragged the pots. Dad had me stand on an old telephone book.”

He laughed at the memory, his gaze returning to the water.

“I love the sea, and I understand it—much as you can understand something like this. But I haven’t spent time
under
it, y’know? In my line of work, if you find yourself there, well, you’ve screwed the pooch.”

The points of isolated stars reflected off the water. Luke and Clay used to stare at the stars from their bedroom’s skylight.

The light we’re looking at right now,
Clay had told Luke,
took billions of years to reach our eyes. Light travels at 299,792,458 meters per second. And still, it takes a billion years to get here. That’s how big the universe is. It’s 99.99999999 percent darkness. And did you know that the stars we’re looking at right now could be dead already? Burned up, nothing but a black hole. We’re just seeing their ghosts. Ghosts that traveled a quintillion miles just to say
Boo
!

If they’re ghosts,
Luke had asked,
then how come we’re not scared of them?

Clay just looked at him as if he’d fallen off the turnip truck—which, apart from an expression of mute dispassion, was the most frequent look he used on Luke in those days.

On the main instrument panel, the ocean floor dropped beneath the yacht: 2,309 feet, 2,316, 2,325, a brief rise to 2,319, followed by a dip to
2,389. A different world existed down there—an inverse of the one human beings existed on. After a hundred feet, it was permanent midnight.

“Didn’t mean to put your feet to the flames earlier,” Leo said. “Asking about your brother and all.”

It didn’t really matter to Luke. He hadn’t spoken to his brother in years. Clayton had never cared about maintaining their connection, anyway. A day, a week, a year, a decade. Time was immaterial to him—and people were even more forgettable.

“
Hope
,” Leo said. “That’s the hardest part. Maintaining hope after what happens, happens. Because it already happened to my wife.”

Leo’s eyes met Luke’s—Luke caught that wretched
need
to tell him what had happened. And Luke would let him. That was part of the pact in this new version of the world. Listen to people’s stories, tell your own. It was the only way to cope sometimes.

“I met her in middle school,” Leo said. “Mona Leftowski. The skinniest, gangliest, most remarkable girl. We lived on the same block, and I made every excuse to spend time with her. That didn’t mean I was stuck doing girly things. Mona had a slingshot; we’d peg cans down at the town dump. One time I suggested pegging one of the dump critters—the big rats, maybe a raven—and she slugged me so hard that my shoulder was purple the next day. God, she was so
mad
. She said that ugly creatures got a right to exist same as you or me.”

Leo chuckled, the skin at the edges of his eyes crinkling. He gave Luke a knowing shrug that said:
You’ve heard this story before, haven’t you
?

Luke had. Just about everyone left had heard it, or lived it, or both.

“I proposed to her on her nineteenth birthday. Down on one knee in Doyer’s Burger Barn, of all places. When she said yes, my heart just about floated out of my chest and bobbed in the rafters like a balloon on a string. I took over my father’s business. Mona taught at the local elementary school. We had great years together, twenty-one of them in a row. The last two were harder, sure . . . but hell. That’s life, right?”

Leo refilled his glass and drained half at a go, his Adam’s apple jogging.

“Happened first was, Mona forgot our anniversary. It wasn’t such a big deal, except she had a mind for dates. But what the heck, Mona forgets our anniversary. No big deal.”

He finished his drink and poured another belt. He didn’t drink it; he just cupped the glass in his hands as if to draw warmth from it.

“It happened so gradually you could half convince yourself it wasn’t anything to worry about. You could say: Well, hell, Mona
is
past fifty; a little memory loss is par for the course. But it got worse. She forgot to flick the turn signal when she was driving. No big whoop—our town was small, traffic’s light. But then she forgot that a red light means ‘stop’ and blew right through an intersection; our Toyota got T-boned by a Lincoln. She was okay, thank God, but after that we decided it was best that I hold on to the car keys.”

Leo beheld Luke miserably over the rim of the glass.

“Mona brought it up after the accident—was it
Alzheimer’s
? Early onset? That made the most sense. Heck, at first that’s what all the wonks thought it was, too—a hyper-aggressive strain of Alzheimer’s. But as we figured out, the ’Gets is something else entirely. She started writing notes to herself. When it was getting bad, I mean, when she was breaking out in those god-awful scabs. She’d fill notebooks with dates and times and little fragments of info. She had a stack of them, all filled with her neat schoolteacher’s handwriting.”

Luke set a hand on his shoulder. “Listen, you don’t have to—”

Leo waved Luke’s suggestion off with impatience. “What, am I dropping your mood, Doc?”

Luke thought:
The story I could tell you, my friend, would sour your mood far worse. So don’t you worry about it one bit.

“Go on, Leo.”

“I watched it,” Leo continued. “God. I
watched
her forget. Then one day, she’s staring at me across the kitchen table. And her mouth falls open and out comes a half-chewed dinner roll. She hadn’t spoken for days at that point. I don’t even know how much of her was left anymore. We sat that way for a few hours. Mona slumped there, mouth open. I tried to close it for her, but it’d just fall right open again.

“That night, I carried her upstairs and undressed her. I took off her . . . Doc, she was wearing diapers. Those were hard to lay your hands on by then. Pharmacies all sold out. It busted me up to pull those god-awful things on and off my wife—but if you love someone, you love them in all their states, don’t you? Sickness and health.

“I put her nightgown on and put her in bed and lay down beside her. I was crying, yeah, but I tried to be real soft about it. I don’t imagine it troubled her. Sometime that night, she . . .
stopped
, I guess? It happened quickly, which was a relief. She forgot how to live, or . . . damn it all, I don’t know how this disease finishes us. It didn’t seem real.”

It didn’t seem real
. Luke understood that. He’d felt the exact same way the day his son had gone missing.

“I’m so sorry, Leo.”

Leo sawed his palm across his nose. “It’s all percentages, Doc.
Life
is percentages. When Mona came down with it, hardly anyone had
gotten
the ’Gets. Less than 1 percent of the population. But that’s the thing about percentages—no matter how small, they’ve got to affect someone, right? After Mona passed I sold the house, packed up, and caught on as a commercial boat captain. When the ’Gets started spreading, a few guys at my company started ferrying supplies to the
Hesperus
.”

Luke said: “Is that what I am, then? Supplies?”

Leo smiled. “The work keeps my head straight. I like to think I’m doing a bit of good here. When your brother went down . . . I’m not a religious man, but I prayed he’d find answers. Not for me. The one it could’ve helped is gone from my life. But I harbor that hope all the same.”

The marine band radio squawked.

“What’s your ETA, Bathgate?”
someone asked.

Leo consulted his monitors and then keyed the mike. “This is Bathgate. Thirteen hours, twenty-two minutes. Over.”

“Bump it up
.” A prolonged silence.
“Something has surfaced from the
Trieste
. It’s . . . Is Dr. Nelson with you now?”

“He’s right beside me. Over.”

“What’s surfaced is . . . You better get here as soon as you can manage
.”

A knot—something as hard and sticky as clay—twisted in Luke’s stomach.

“I’ll go full bore, then. Bathgate out.”

Leo adjusted his controls. The turbines churned. The yacht surged.

“Home again, home again,” Leo sang. “Jiggedy jig.”

8.

THE
HESPERUS
HOVERED
against the horizon, holding its position against the rising sun.

God of the Evening Star—Venus. That’s what
Hesperus
meant in Greek, Luke had been told. But it was frequently mistranslated in Latin as
Phosphorus
. Namely, Lucifer. Of all the names in creation, why risk that invocation?

There wasn’t anything especially demonic about the
Hesperus
. The research station looked a lot like an offshore oil rig. It sat atop the Mariana Trench, the deepest point in any ocean. The trench went down six miles—the same distance to reach the top of Mount Everest. And Luke’s brother was two miles below that, in the heart of a narrower fissure called Challenger Deep.

The
Hesperus
floated on huge nitrogen-filled bladders.
Each one can shoulder ten tons,
Leo had told Luke earlier.
The
Hesperus
floats on thousands of those things.

Its sheer enormity was staggering. Though squat—most of its structures were only a single story—the station sprawled across the water like a raucous frontier town. Ten thousand metric tons of low-slung architecture, salt-whitened scaffolding, and waterproof storage canisters. Dozens of ships were moored around it like moons ringing a planet.

Leo said: “Impressive, huh? That’s what happens when a bunch of first-world countries toss their moolah in a big pot.”

“It is amazing,” Luke said.

“Not half as amazing as what’s happening down below.”

A shiver cat-walked up Luke’s spine. They were now floating above the
Trieste
—above Clayton. And Luke would be down with his brother soon enough.

Something has surfaced . . . get here as soon as you can manage
.

Leo nosed the yacht alongside the
Hesperus
and docked neat as a pin. By the time Luke had gathered his belongings and returned topside, stationed soldiers in camouflage fatigues had swung a gangplank into position.

Who the hell wears camouflage on the ocean?
Luke wondered.

“Should we go?” he asked Leo.

“Not me, Doc. All this”—Leo nodded at the soldiers—“is above my pay grade.”

How long had Luke known Leo? No more than a few hours. Seemed much longer. He wanted Leo to come with him, pay grades be damned. But he could only shake his hand. “Pleasure meeting you. Thanks for the lift. And the squid.”

“Anytime, Doc. I’m so glad you’re here. Like I said, I’m hopeful.”

Luke headed down the gangplank and slid into the backseat of a golf cart. An adenoidal soldier drove them down a walkway strung with windowless structures. People passed in and out of doors, some in fatigues and others in lab coats. The
Hesperus
reminded Luke of a MASH unit: the stumpy outbuildings, the hum of generators, the calls going out over a loudspeaker system:
L-Team to SQR, Code Orange . . . L-Team to SQR, Code Orange . . .