The Deep Zone

Stilwell was in an isolation ward with four beds. There was another woman, an ACE sufferer, drugged to sleep. There would come a time, Stilwell knew, when morphine would not be enough, when nothing would be enough, and then it would be truly bad. The other woman’s case was not as advanced, but in her, asymptomatically, ACE had emerged through the tissues of her face first, rather than eating its way out of the body cavity. There were so many nerves in the face, so much pain there just waiting to be set free. She needed morphine, and a lot of it.

It won’t be long for you, girl, Stilwell thought. You’re steady at level seven now. Yesterday was level five. So a couple of days at most. You can probably handle up to eight without the morphine. She had often asked patients to rank their pain on a scale of one to ten, one being pain-free and ten being unendurable agony. Now, for the first time ever, she was giving herself the same quiz.

She didn’t want meds yet. For one thing, they made her constipated. They also muddled her thinking. The pain did that, too, of course, but she found that she could take “vacations” from the pain, going to other places and times in her mind. And when she came back from vacation to the hospital room, she could think clearly for a while. She was thinking about ACE, reviewing all she knew about it, trying to create a virtual laboratory in her mind to work out some protocol to counter it. Having contracted it herself put her at a disadvantage. But looked at another way, it gave her the advantage of being a physician and scientist who could analyze the symptoms and progression firsthand.

Just now, though, the pain interrupted her thoughts. The spots on her leg, abdomen, and arm were red and raw, leaking blood and pungent fluids, the products of putrefaction. The spots felt like someone had poured gasoline on her body there and set it afire. Bad. Very bad. But so far the spots were a relatively small part of her body’s entire surface, and none of them were in a nerve-dense zone. So she could manage, at least for periods of time. Now, though, she knew it was time to go on vacation.

She closed her eyes, breathed deeply and slowly, and thought back to the day she had graduated from Vanderbilt University’s School of Medicine. She went there, felt the green-edged black cap with gold tassel on her head, the weight of the black gown on her shoulders, saw the black toes of her low-heeled pumps peeking out. Felt the graduates in front of her and behind shuffling forward.

Smelled the aftershave and perfume and sweat on that hot Tennessee day. Felt her heart beating more quickly as she approached the steps to the outdoor stage—

“Major?”

It was the young nurse. Stilwell pulled herself back to the world of pain.

“Hi.”

“Major, ma’am, you have a visitor.” The young woman grimaced, blew air through her nose in an indignant snort. “I told him you shouldn’t be disturbed, but… he’s an officer.”

That brought her awake. “Really? Who?”

“Um, I didn’t catch his name, ma’am. Can’t see the name tag through his suit. He’s an officer, though, made sure I knew that. You feel up to it?”

This was a surprise. She had not had any visitors, save routine calls from the doctors and the nurses’ regular checks. “Yes, I can do it. Tell him to come in.”

“All right, ma’am.”

“Wait… I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.”

“Artwell, ma’am. Sergeant Artwell.”

“Your first name.”

“Oh. Yes, ma’am. It’s Regina. People call me Reggie.”

“Thanks. Reggie, would you please raise the bed so I can sit up?”

“Sure enough, ma’am.” She did that and left, and presently a short, stout man in a Chemturion shuffled in. His face was obscured behind the suit’s scratched, wrinkled plastic faceplate. In one black-gloved hand he held a bulging yellow envelope with the word CONFIDENTIAL stamped on it in fat red letters.

“You don’t look so good, Major.” She recognized the stuffy voice. Ribbesh the fobbit. What the hell is he doing here? “Sorry to see that. Anything I can get you?” Some kind of adenoidal hypertrophy, probably, his voice.

“I’m all good, Colonel.”

“Hm. Is it… very painful?”

“Not so bad.” No way she would admit hurting to this fobbit.

“I’m glad to hear that.” He came around the foot of her bed, took a cautious step closer. She could see his face more clearly. Some people had facial features that made them look piggish—round, pink cheeks, upturned nose, tiny eyes, plump chin. Colonel Ribbesh was one. Overweight, he was perspiring heavily inside the suit.

“I’m sorry about that little business with the suit, Colonel,” she said. “I was under a lot of stress.”

“No doubt. It’s regrettable. But I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that if you’d obeyed my order, you wouldn’t be here like this.”

“And young soldiers would have suffered a hell of a lot more. Not a good trade-off, Colonel. May I ask why you’re here?”

“Of course. As a matter of fact, it’s about that… incident.” His eyes flicked around the room. He touched the side of his hood, cleared his throat. “You see, I had you on speakerphone to hear you through the suit. So our conversation was witnessed by a number of other personnel. A major who is my adjutant and quite a few enlisted people. That created a problem.”

“What kind of problem?”

“If it had been a direct, unobserved communication just between you and me, it could perhaps have been resolved differently. But the presence of other personnel made it… unavoidable.”

“Made what unavoidable?”

“I had no choice but to report your action to higher authority. I’m sure you’re familiar with the military Code of Conduct. Any failure to report a violation of the code is a violation in itself.” He reached up as though to wipe the sweat from his forehead, remembered, let his hand drop. “Hot in these things, isn’t it? You’d think they’d air- condition them or something.”

“Go on, Colonel, please.”

“Yes. Well, I had no choice, don’t you see? I would have risked my career by turning a blind eye to that exchange. It wasn’t something I really wanted to do, I can assure you.”

I bet not, fobbit, she thought. Ribbesh was not only a fobbit, he was a purveyor of chickenshit, which had a very special definition in the Army. She knew officers like Ribbesh, miserable people with small minds and great buzzing swarms of resentments. They lived to dole out chickenshit—unnecessary punishment for trivial infractions, the punishment bearing no appropriate relationship to the offense, the purpose being nothing more than making life worse for someone of lower rank. She also knew that the Army, which welcomed all and fired none, bore an inordinate number of chicken-shitters.

“Shouldn’t I have been notified? Served with a paper or something?”

“That’s what I’m doing now, Major.”

“Oh. Took you a while, then, didn’t it?”

His pink face got pinker. “It was necessary for the document to move through proper channels.”

“Of course,” she said. So there’ll be a letter in my Guard file. Big deal.

As if he had read her mind, he said, “I had a need to review your personnel file. Unfortunately, this was not the first occurrence of insubordination.”

“That’s true. Sometimes orders and good medicine don’t mix. From where I sit, medicine always trumps.”

“Yes, that was clear from your responses to the previous charges. Frankly, I was surprised. No ordinary officer could have gotten off so lightly. But then, you’re a doctor. Obviously exceptions were made.”

“Colonel, is there anything else? I’m tired and—”

“If you’ll allow me, I will complete this conference and leave. Because this was a subsequent incident, rather than an initial occurrence, the severity escalated. In addition to disciplinary action, it appears that there will be DOB as well.”

Denial of benefits. Her tired heart wrenched. “What are you saying?”