Authors: John Gilstrap

At All Costs (15 page)

BOOK: At All Costs

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Rest,
she thought.
I just need to rest here for a minute. Get my breath . . .

But then Jake’s hands were on her again, and she was on her feet, being dragged toward God knows where. Yanking herself free from his grasp, she punched the transmit button between her breasts.

“I can’t keep running,” she said. Her lungs burned from the effort, her head reeled. The inside of her suit had become a sauna—hotter than she’d ever been. “We’ve got to take a rest.” Jake wouldn’t answer her, so she tried it again, thumping the button and this time yelling, “Slow down, goddammit!”

“. . . slow down. Later.” Jake’s voice seemed distant in her earpiece, and she’d walked on his transmission, talking at the same time he was trying to talk.

She felt like she was still running, but the passing foliage had slowed down to the pace of a barely brisk walk. “I can’t hear you!” she shouted. Like yelling somehow made the signal stronger. Now he wasn’t answering her at all. Was he hurt? Jesus, he was shot in the face! Of course he was hurt. “Jake!”

C
HAPTER
T
WELVE

Jake couldn’t hear anything but himself.
Why won’t she answer me?

He could barely see through the spiderweb of broken Plexiglas in front of his face, but that didn’t slow him down a step. He’d never run this hard; never felt so frightened. Yet Carolyn kept slowing down. Then she wouldn’t answer up on the radio. He saw her hitting the transmit button once, but his earpiece remained silent.

His earpiece! That was it. It must have jarred itself loose as he was being tossed around. He considered stopping to correct the problem but dismissed the notion as crazy. He had a hole in his fucking suit! The bullshit lectures from Nick Thomas flooded back into his brain as he tried to remember the details.

Time, distance, and shielding.
He remembered that: the three factors that controlled exposure to toxic chemicals. Limit the time, increase the distance, and shield yourself from the hazard. Well, shit! He’d been standing in a damn smoke cloud for who knows how long with a hole in his goddamn suit.

The negative thoughts opened the door for terror, and the panic that it brought. What had Nick said during the last pep talk? Oh yeah.
A little dab’ll do ya.
Big laugh, lots of grab-ass. Now this stuff was going to kill him!

So he kept running, dragging Carolyn by whatever body part he could find. They’d be out of air soon, he knew. They had forty-five minutes’ working time under normal conditions. Certainly, the designers had never run numbers that assumed their customers would be blown up and shot at before running like deer through the woods. How much air was left? Thirty minutes? Less? How long had it been already? No telling. It felt like a week.

At least his air pack was still working; he was breathing clean air. That was his greatest concern. Out of nowhere, Nick’s voice popped into his head again and contradicted him.
Three routes of entry.
That’s what he said, wasn’t it? Inhalation was the worst, but that left absorption and ingestion.
Chemical agents are designed to be toxic by absorption through the skin.

And I’ve got a hole in my goddamn suit!

Jake’s worries about panic started to materialize as the real thing once he realized how light-headed he felt.
Oh, God, I’m going to pass out!
He fought with growing desperation for control of his mind, trying to remember the signs and symptoms of overexposure, but the details just weren’t there.

If it looks like a duck and it walks like a duck . . .

That was one of Nick’s favorite expressions. Sure, it was hot as hell out there, and he was more frightened than he’d ever been in his life, and he was probably dehydrated down to zero, but was that the reason he felt sick, or was it this big fucking hole in his suit?

Jake yelled—literally yelled—as the low-pressure warning vibrated his facepiece.

“Oh, shit! Oh, fuck! God
damn
it!” This was it. Five minutes to live—no, make that three, the way he was gulping lungfuls of air. He stopped dead in his tracks, unaware that he continued to hold a fistful of Carolyn’s suit, and he fought to clear his head. It was his nightmare come true: stranded inside a suit with no one to help.

He sat down heavily in the leaves—fell down, really—and snaked his arm out of his sleeve to find his ear mike, dangling against the sweat-soaked belly of his coveralls. His fingers did all the seeing for him, locating the mike, then winding its way up toward his ear. Over the din of his alarm and the heaving of his breath, he could hear the buzzing of Carolyn’s panicked cries.

“. . . wrong?”

Jake used his finger to trigger the transmit button. “I’m sick, Carolyn,” he gasped. “I’m fucked. Buzzer’s buzzing. I’m dead.”

“Bullshit.”

The tone of Carolyn’s reply surprised him. She sounded argumentative; not the least bit grieving. He felt her tugging on the sleeve of his suit, then saw a bundle of duct tape in her fist.

“What are you doing?” he asked. Then he saw. The atropine. “Wait!” he yelled. “Maybe it’s just the heat!”

Carolyn had never been a nurse; never wanted to be, as far as he knew, and it was a damn good thing. She jammed the needle into his leg like she was squashing a bug. He wondered if she lodged it in his thighbone. The pain changed from sharp to burning as she mashed the plunger, and then the head rush came. He fell backward for an instant; then it passed.

The shot of pain cleared his head. The buzzer was slowing now. Time was short. He had to get out of the suit. Now. Right now.

Body bag with a window.

The zipper was a little thing, nestled somewhere behind his head and sealed under a velcro flap; designed specifically not to be readily opened. That way, you couldn’t accidentally snag it on something and ruin your day. Jake fumbled for a minute looking for it.

“Use your knife,” Carolyn’s voice instructed, seemingly from inside his head. He looked up in time to see her give herself an injection, noting just how gentle she was with her own thigh.

The knife. Yes, of course, the knife. How was she staying so calm? It was a stretch snaking his hand down to his pocket, but the instant his latex-clad fingers found their mark, he was rewarded with the feel of locking-blade Buck. Opening a knife was a two-handed operation, though, requiring him to pull his other arm out of its sleeve as well.

Working strictly by feel, he wrestled the blade out of its slot, just as the buzzing of his facepiece stopped. He’d never drawn a tank down this far before, but popular theory stated that once the vibrator stopped, only thirty seconds of air remained.

Shit!

Gripping the blade in his fist, he thrust it through the suit just below his chin. The five plies fought him every inch of the way, but he worked like a madman, ripping the suit to the crotch, then changing his grip to take the cut down to his knee.

And his air tank died. In midbreath, the air just went away, as surely as if someone had pinched off his nose and mouth. His lungs screamed and his gut muscles tugged for air, but it just wasn’t there. In those seconds, he forgot all about his suit as panic seized him. He dropped the knife down his pant leg into his boot and clawed with both hands at his facepiece. His struggles had drawn the pressure in the mask down so far that it made a quiet burping sound as he pulled it away.

“Thank God,” he said aloud, bending at the waist and resting his hands on his knees. He could breathe again.

“Get out of your suit,” Carolyn commanded. “You’re dirty, Jake.”

The suit.
God, it was filthy, contaminated with whatever had burned up in there. Jake stopped breathing again—this time by choice—and shrugged and stepped his way free of the moon suit. He stumbled away from it in his stocking feet, quickly scrambling a good ten yards before stopping to look back.

He propped himself against a tree and he breathed. The hot August air felt cool by comparison, and the simple act of drawing breath in and out of his lungs seemed blissfully unregulated. And he was alive.

“How do you feel?” Carolyn asked. She was still in her suit, still talking to him over the radio, and in the background Jake could hear through his earpiece that her buzzer was sounding, too.

“You’re using me as a guinea pig!” he shouted, palming his transmit button. He laughed. “You shithead! You were waiting to see if the air was going to kill me!”

Like a bird emerging from some bizarre silver egg, Carolyn cut her way out. Clearly, she’d practiced this before, if only in her mind, and her motions seemed smoother than his; graceful, even, as if her knife were somehow sharper and the effort somehow easier. After emerging from the moon suit, she stepped free of the boots, then walked downrange a good distance before methodically removing the tank from her back, then the mask from her face. Last things off were her gloves, which she meticulously turned inside out as she snapped them off, thus preventing cross-contamination.

When she was done, she looked through the trees to Jake, who stared back at her for a long moment, before they started to move toward each other.

“We’re alive,” Carolyn said. Her tone carried none of the happiness that the words should bear.

Jake wanted to say something clever—something to lighten the moment—but a sudden rush of emotion staggered him. Shadowy, surreal memories of fires and explosions and friends’ bodies swirled in his head, and he found himself suddenly overcome. He still had Carolyn. That much made sense, even if nothing else did. And as she said, they were still alive. As they hugged each other in the silence of the woods, he had a nagging fear that the ordeal wasn’t over yet.

They walked for nearly four hours before stumbling upon the cabin along the river. It was a one-room affair, done in Early Hobo, with an old Army cot in one corner, a chemical toilet in the other, and a propane camp stove in the middle. The door hung from one hinge, and it appeared that no one had visited for weeks.

“Charming place,” Carolyn mumbled.

Jake smiled. “Yeah, a real fixer-upper. I don’t suppose you see a phone anywhere, do you?”

She put her hands on her hips and rolled her eyes. “Yeah, sure. I think it’s over there in the butler’s pantry.” She strolled toward a broken window.

He sighed. “We need to get to the cops.”

“Well, as soon as . . . Hey! They’ve got a boat!”

Jake hurried to peer through the window, over Carolyn’s shoulder. “Where?”

Carolyn led the way back out the front door and down toward a makeshift dock. About halfway, next to a disorganized stack of firewood, lay a well-abused aluminum canoe, turned upside down in the leaves. “Think it’ll float?” she asked.

“You can’t just go steal a guy’s canoe! Christ, they probably hang you for that out here.”

She made a face. “You have a better idea? I’m done walking barefoot through the woods, thank you very much, and I’m not inclined to stay here in this shack.”

Jake looked around, as if someone was watching. “Jeeze, Carolyn, I’ve never stolen anything before.”

“Oh, yeah, like I’m John Dillinger, right? It’s not like we have a lot of alternatives here.”

He took a deep breath and held it, scanning the horizon for inspiration. Finally, he shrugged. “Oh, what the hell. In for a dime, in for a dollar, right?”

He rolled the canoe onto its keel and dragged it down toward the dock, while Carolyn carried the paddle that had been stashed underneath. “Not overexerting, are you, dear?” Jake grunted, struggling not to smash his toes under the boat.

She smiled.

Once he got the boat past the firewood, it actually slid pretty easily across the sloping grass and into the water. Standing submerged up to his hips, Jake helped Carolyn down into the canoe before climbing in himself, taking the rear position.

They paddled for an hour, past endless stretches of forest. “Think we’ve gone five miles yet?” Jake asked, his first words in a long while.

“I think we’ve gone a thousand miles,” Carolyn said, groaning. She lay on her back on the bottom of the canoe, her arm slung over her eyes to block the sun. Jake’s question was really a test to see if she was awake. “Why do you ask?”

“Well, since the contingency plan calls for evacuation within a five-mile radius, I just wanted to make sure we’re safe.”

She lifted her arm a fraction of an inch to sneak a peek. “You’re so full of shit, Jake Donovan. You never read the contingency plan.”

He shrugged with a smile. “No, but you read it to me.”

“Next time I’ll show you the pictures,” she said, once again retreating under her arm.

The river narrowed considerably in the next twenty minutes, and as the banks grew closer together, so did the distance separating the homes that lined the riverbank. “I think we’re reentering civilization,” Jake announced, prompting Carolyn to sit up.

The houses on either side had lost their hunting-cabin feel, and while the yards continued to double as junk heaps—dumping grounds for old stoves, refrigerators, and the like—people obviously lived here. Set precariously close to the water’s edge, the houses looked dank and pitiful among the towering trees which cast them in perpetual darkness, sheltered from the invading rays of the blistering summer sun.

As Carolyn took it all in, she tried to imagine what it would be like to fight a perpetual battle against mildew. She shuddered at the thought of what these un-air-conditioned shanties must smell like.

“How can people live like this?” she asked, mostly to herself. Her mind conjured up images of filthy children playing in squalor as they awaited their next malnutritious meal.

Jake slipped his Budweiser T-shirt back over his head and shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said charitably.

She smirked lovingly at his never-ending optimism. “Nobility of the poor, right?”

BOOK: At All Costs

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