Watermind (5 page)

And there under the light stood CJ. Slim and straight, pale as fresh milk, defenseless in the harsh motel light, she looked more like a budding child than the world-weary adult she tried to impersonate. A hank of her auburn hair had come loose from her ponytail and fanned across her cheek. She stared off in the distance, chewing her thumbnail, oblivious to her surroundings, lost in her usual interior tide.

“The moon's down,” he said. “We can go. But I don' like it.”

Neither did CJ like it. Alsen's story incensed her. As she stumbled through her motel room getting ready, she fumed and kicked furniture. She crushed her Quimicron pay stub in her fist. She despised the chemical industry. Unlocking the secrets of molecules, forcing artificial unions, synthesizing compounds with effects no one could foresee. “To make a killing,” that's how Harry put it. To make a quick buck.

Yes, Harry had sided with the corporations. When he wasn't lecturing at MIT, he was off consulting with CEOs to “maximize shareholder value.” She accused Harry and
his corporations of playing creator, only without omniscience or compassion. But Harry never listened. When she raged about eco-disasters, he answered with his trademark sarcasm: “
Carolyn, don't be naïve
.”

CJ pulled her shoelace so hard, it broke in her hand. “
We are not the end!
” Harry used to rant when she accused him of soaking their planet in poison. She pictured him crouching at his desk, a tweedy graying scholar, slicing the air with his hands. His mad eyes seemed to glow.

“Poisons are our medicines. They grow our food. They kill the germs and weeds and vermin we don't want to live with,” he stormed. “And yes, they're killing us, too. But life doesn't end because we die.”

“What'll survive us?” CJ had shouted. “Black mold? Viruses? That's hideous.”

“Human judgment does not apply!” he wailed. “Carolyn, you're a bleeding heart. Like your mother.”

CJ remembered knocking over a wineglass. “And you're already dead.”

How viciously they had fought. On the last night she saw her father alive, they had raged.

From her balcony at the Roach, she hurled her coverall and hip boots down the concrete stairs to the parking lot. Max noticed her mood and kept quiet. He loaded her gear in the Rover, along with the portable magnetic field finder he had “borrowed” from the company shop at her request. She took her usual place in the driver's seat, and when she slammed the Rover's door, he said, “Settle down, child.”

“You settle down,” she snapped.

Max opened his window and leaned out. Ceegie's tone pained him. Sometimes her voice went so sharp and thin, it hurt his ears. He whistled softly through his teeth. This night was starting off badly, and more than once, he'd considered walking away. But he couldn't let her go alone into Devil's Swamp. It wasn't in him to abandon her. So he leaned out the window and let the night air cool his face.

Later, as they lurched onto a rutted back road, CJ
touched his hand. He was slouching against the passenger door, hanging his elbow out the window. Neither of them had noticed the red Toyota following with its headlights turned off.

“Max, I've been a total bitch. How can you stand me?” she said.

He squeezed her knee and hummed a line of melody, not the song from that morning but something older and more languid, a bolero. The glowing dashboard lit his features, and CJ felt a sudden rush of fondness.

For an instant, she wanted to throw on the brakes, nuzzle into his arms, and make love right there on the leather seat. The thought of traipsing through Devil's Swamp in the dark terrified her. Especially after reading the EPA report. But if she hesitated, Max would try to talk her out of going—and he might succeed. She was already second-guessing the whole venture.

After all, the ice didn't belong to her. Quimicron employed dozens of scientists—real ones, not college dropouts. Probably, they'd already analyzed the ice and filed for a patent on the chemical reaction. That's what she hated most, that they would keep the process a secret and claim they'd invented it.

“Sell it for money,” she muttered.

Her fingernails sank into the leather steering wheel. If the ice could transform poisonous swill into safe drinking water, that could benefit millions of people around the world. Quimicron didn't have a right to profit from that. She shoved hair out of her eyes. But who was she to stop them? The whole system was bogus. She had half a mind to turn her car around and get on a plane to Mexico.

A raccoon scurried through her high beams, and she swerved and splashed through a pothole to miss it. Somewhere in the darkness ahead lay the pond. She could almost see the blue-green light again, ranging just beyond her periphery. What chemical effect could produce luminous ice that pulsed in time to music? Deep in her brain, nerve endings prickled with curiosity. She kept driving.

 

Wednesday, March 9

11:33
PM

 

A cold front moved through the swamp, and the warm sloughs respired a malodorous fog. CJ coasted the last hundred yards and parked against a barricade of palmettos. Max opened his door, and cold mist wetted their faces. When they climbed out, the ground felt spongy underfoot. CJ shimmied into her coverall, and Max shouldered the heavy bag of tools. They trudged through dew-drenched grass up the sloping ring levee.

From the top, they could see Quimicron's mercury floodlights gleaming across the canal water, and far in the distance, boat traffic winked along the river. But the two hundred-acre swamp lay in cold darkness. Max and CJ slid down the levee bank into the pitch-black undergrowth, covering their flashlights with their fingers to damp the light. Not far away, they heard the voices of the guards.

“Ouch!” CJ tripped and fell. Something sharp prodded through her glove. It was a piece of rusting concertina wire. When she tried to pull away, it tangled around her arm.

“Ceegie, you hurt?” Max helped her work loose from the coiling wire, but its razor barbs tore holes in her glove and grazed her palm.

“We should both think about tetanus shots,” she said.

After that, she moved more cautiously, creeping on bent knees, holding her muffled light near the ground and vividly recalling the symptoms of tetanus: muscle spasms in the jaw escalating to full body convulsions powerful enough to break bones.

Under the moonless sky, her flashlight caught the glowing red eyes of a baby alligator. Bullfrogs bayed rumbling choruses, and tree frogs crooned. Grasses rustled with movement. An owl screamed. Sawbriars chewed at her
boots, and heavy dew soaked her gloves. Max stayed close. Even with his compass, it took them an hour to find the northern end of the canal.

Across the water, mercury lamps brightened Quimicron's dock like a surreal apparition in the black landscape, and loading cranes hovered like giant insectile arms. Three barges bobbed in the ebony water, moored by heavy cables. The chain-link fence glittered with moisture, and behind the fogged upper windows of Building No. 2, people were working late.

They skirted along the canal. Mosquitoes swarmed thicker near the water, but at least the rippling reflections helped them see their way. “It's through here.” Max pointed into the dark swamp, then rechecked his compass. “I'm pretty sure.”

CJ studied her electromagnetic field finder. Nothing yet. An impulse of affection made her squeeze Max's hand. “Lead on, Ranger Joe.”

As he angled through the rasping dewy palmettos, she realized how confidently she trusted him to find the path. She wouldn't have dared this escapade without him. Max didn't want to do this. Yet here he was, loyally guiding her through the dark. She followed close and touched his back for comfort.

Technically, they were breaking the law, but CJ wasn't worried. No one would ever know. Besides, they were employees, weren't they? And she was good at talking her way out of complex situations. She played her flashlight over Max's square shoulders. With another impulse of guilty fondness, she hugged him and made him stumble.

“
Lamie
child, you afraid of the boogie man?”

“Hell, yes.” She found his mouth and kissed him. Max was a kind, good man. Life would be so peaceful if she could only decide to love him.

“Who's there?” A white beam spotlighted them, and they froze. “Stop, or I'll shoot,” said a gruff male voice.

Branches snapped as the man approached, then something yanked her arm. It was Max. He switched off her
flashlight, and they sprinted blindly through the swamp. They blundered over sodden grass clumps, slipped in mire and splashed through puddles of unknown liquid. Lights shafted around them.

“Stop!” the guard yelled. Gunshots exploded.

Max caught CJ's waist and pulled her down hard. They crouched in a foot of cold soupy muck, surrounded by tall dripping grass, and CJ feared her breath was roaring louder than a hurricane. Surely, the guards would hear and fire their guns again. Guns! Of all the scary things in the swamp, she'd never imagined guns.

When her breathing calmed down, she whispered, “Which way is the pond?”

“Ceegie, we gotta lay still.”

Behind them, boots trod through sucking mud, and flashlight beams wavered in the glistening grass stems to their left. CJ caught the faint shape of tupelo trees just ahead. She gripped Max's shoulder. “It's that way, isn't it? Behind the trees?”

He touched her lips to make her be quiet.

“Max, we're this close. I have to get that sample.”

She heard him inhale. The lights and footsteps were circling farther away to the left. “Wait a little,” he said.

After ten minutes, they crept toward the trees, half-squatting so the grasses would screen them. They moved deliberately, trying not to make noise. The frogs and birds had fallen silent, and every time CJ broke a stem or heard the mud belch under her foot, she froze in midstride, expecting an explosion of bullets. When they reached the grove, her muscles ached with cramps. The air felt wintry. And there was no mistaking the silver crescent of frost that glimmered through the tree trunks. They felt their way through slick wet roots to the edge of the pond.

Cupping her flashlight behind her hand, CJ took a quick peek at her field finder. Condensation fogged the screen, so she wiped it with her glove. Yes! A highly energetic field radiated from the pond. It was EM—electromagnetic. Her
instrument showed a frequency slightly higher than FM radio. She wanted to laugh out loud. “Look, Max!”

“Shhh.” He switched off her light again. “You watch for the guards. I get your sample.”

From his tool bag, he brought out an ice pick, a cordless drill, a chisel, and a mallet. CJ lined up three sterile plastic sample jars in the mud and twisted off their lids. Then she crawled up the clammy bank and lay prone at the base of a tupelo sapling. Flashlights twinkled through mist on both sides of the pond. Half a dozen guards were searching in a grid pattern. She lay in the waterlogged brush, wondering about the source of that EM field. The sudden chatter from Max's cordless drill on the ice rang like a Klaxon.

“Over there!” the guards shouted.

Lights converged toward CJ. She half-crawled, half-rolled down the bank to the pond. “They're coming.”

Max dropped the drill and got up to run. But CJ seized the first tool she could find, the mallet, and started banging away at the ice. She no longer cared about noise. After coming this far, she didn't intend to leave empty-handed.

Max gripped her wrist. “We gotta
parti vite.
”

“One more minute!” She held the chisel against the ice and tried to drive it into the pond with the mallet. But her hand slipped, the mallet banged her fingers, and the chisel skittered across the pond out of reach.

“Please, child.” Max's voice broke. “They gonna shoot us.”

“Go then. I'm staying.” With aching fingers, she searched in the dark for the chisel. Close to panic, she leaned out over the freezing cold ice and felt blindly along its surface. She didn't want to leave the bank. That ice had swallowed her. As she slid forward a few inches, she remembered the throes of suffocation.

Max's long arm circled her waist. He was kneeling beside her on the ice, holding on to her for safety. “I won' let you go,
lam.
”

At last, her fingers closed on the chisel. Then she felt it
sink. Under her warm hand, a small circle of ice softened to slush. She held fast to the chisel, but the cold numbing slush closed around her forearm.

“It's happening,” she whispered through a throat constricted with terror. For some reason, only a small circle of ice had thawed to slush, and it was not refreezing as quickly as before. She held her arm rigid, afraid to move. “Max, turn on your flashlight.”

Max fumbled in his pocket, and when the light came on, they saw the chisel eighteen inches down and CJ's arm sunk above the elbow in a column of slushy ice. The slush measured only six inches across, but instead of refreezing, it was very slowly widening.

“There they are,” shouted one of the guards.

Max clicked off the flashlight. “Can you lift your arm outta that mess?”

“I'm fine. Get my sample jars,” she whispered.

“I'm not leaving you, girl.”

“Do it!”

Too late, she realized how accurately she had reproduced Harry's caustic tone, the tone she hated—but it worked. Max slid over the ice on his knees and returned with one of the jars. Flashlight beams flickered through the trees, then closed in, drenching the two of them in a pool of light. “Stop whatever you're doing,” said the hoarse voice.

“Dip as much as you can. I'm all right,” she whispered, trying to hide her stampeding fear. Sunk to the armpit, her skin burned with cold. To the guard, she said, “We're not doing anything wrong. Give us a break.”