The Deep Zone

didn’t want people risking their lives to bring them out. And, so I heard, the state thought it would help prevent repeats.”

“Law of unintended consequences kicked in, though, am I right?”

“What do you mean?”

“The place is famous now. Like the Doria. Everybody wants to dive here, go see the skeletons.”

He had that much right. They ran through predive routines, made giant-stride entries, hovered at ten feet to perform bubble checks and S-drills. She vented gas from her own Halcyon and settled to thirty feet, the water sweetly cool after the heat above. The cave mouth was a dark hole in a pale underwater wall. Inside, beyond the entrance, she shone her light on the white guideline on the cave floor. Brewster pointed at his eyes, gave the circled thumb and forefinger: Okay.

Hallie tied off line from her main reel to the permanent guideline. She pointed in the direction of their intended travel, watched him acknowledge by repeating the gesture, then took them down toward the Boneyard, spooling out line as she went.

The first quarter mile was like the intestinal tract of a giant worm, ten feet in diameter, bending and twisting, striated limestone walls flaring green and white and black in their dive lights. The bottom was tan silt, fine as flour; the particles would remain suspended in the water for an hour if disturbed. The only sounds were the hissing and burbling of their regulators.

Hallie loved being down here. She had been in her first cave at six, just a touristic operation, nothing special, Luray Caverns in Virginia. But that day something went click deep inside, and she had loved going into caves ever since. Sometimes she thought of herself as a troglodyte, one of those creatures, perfectly adapted to the cave environment, that died if brought out into the light. She wouldn’t die and she loved light, but in caves a certain ancient calm took her over. Very different on the surface, where type A genetics drove her like wind behind a sail.

They each had two lights on their yellow helmets and bigger primary lights affixed to the backs of their right hands with surgical tube straps. Every twenty feet, Hallie looked back between her thighs at Brewster. He was moving well but breathing hard, blowing out a steady stream of bubbles.

Four hundred yards in and forty-five feet deep, they came to the restriction. The ceiling dropped and the walls closed in, leaving an opening the size of a refrigerator door. It was called the Jaws of Death, something Hallie had neglected to mention to Brewster. She slipped through and hovered, waiting. His head and shoulders made it, but his big chest and double tanks did not. Instead of relaxing and emptying his lungs, Brewster started throwing his hips and legs around and yanking on rocks with his hands—bad mistake. Before he silted them out, she grabbed both his wrists, gave them a hard jerk, made eye contact, held up an index finger: Stop.

He did.

She signaled again, pushing down slowly with both hands: Relax.

He nodded, backed off, tried again, and worked his way through. They reached the Boneyard Chamber in ten minutes. The main cave passage continued to the left, and the short feeder passage to the chamber dropped steeply fifteen feet down to their right. Hallie went in first. The chamber was shaped like a bell, thirty feet in diameter at the bottom, no bigger in diameter at the top than an oil barrel.

Brewster came in and settled down toward the skeletons, whose bones flashed white in his bright dive lights. They were on their backs, where the weight of their tanks had pulled them. As their flesh had decayed, their mask straps had loosened and the masks had fallen away. The eye sockets gaped, black holes in the white faces.

Brewster videotaped ten feet from the skeletons for thirty seconds. He sank lower until he hung a foot above them, the sharp light making the skulls shine like silver. Then he jerked and spun, dropping his Nikonos. Inside the mask his eyes looked wide and wild.

Hallie had seen it before. The skeletons had spoken: We died in here. You can, too. He had begun to imagine their deaths, the panicked breathing, thickening silt, the flailing search for the exit in zero visibility. Thrashing and gasping, tangling bodies, panic feeding panic, air coming harder as tanks emptied, frantic last gasps, thoughts flickering out, and then… nothing.

She knew that Brewster’s deep, reptilian urge for self-preservation would be screaming, Out! He charged, tried to shove her out of the way. Hallie grabbed his harness and spun him around and smacked him hard on the side of the head, just beneath his helmet, with the steel handle of her primary light. Not many things could cut through panic, but good old-fashioned pain was one. She gave him a shake, held up one finger: Stop! For a moment she wasn’t sure, but then he got control of himself. She looked at his pressure gauge: 1,300 pounds. They had started with 3,000. He should have signaled for the turnaround long ago.

We’re going back, she signaled with a twirling forefinger. Now.

He nodded.

She went first, frog-kicking and pulling herself along with handholds to get more speed. She had dropped her primary reel in the Boneyard. No time to be rewinding line now. Brewster was breathing so hard it looked like his regulator was free-flowing. At the Jaws of Death she slipped through. Brewster got stuck again, flailing and scrabbling. Hallie hung back, knowing that panicked divers not infrequently took their buddies with them. Two minutes passed before he finally muscled through.

And then, suddenly, his bubbles stopped. He grabbed his secondary regulator. No bubbles. She could not believe he had breathed both tanks dry that fast, but here they were. She gave him her primary regulator on its seven-foot hose. His eyes were bulging as though someone were pumping air into his skull.

Breathing from her own secondary, which she carried on a shock-cord necklace, she started out again, careful not to pull the regulator away from him. Fifty yards from the cave mouth, it began to feel as though she were sucking air through thick cotton. She took several long, deep breaths, locked the last down in her chest. Brewster spit his reg out and tried to grab her. He breathed in water, convulsed, went limp. She grabbed his harness and began swimming backward, towing him on her chest.

Hallie was a national-class free diver who could remain motionless at forty feet for almost five minutes. But hauling Brewster, who weighed more than two hundred pounds, and whose double-steel tanks weighed another hundred, she was burning through oxygen. No choice. She swam on toward the circle of light. It was small and too far away and she knew they were not going to make it. Hypoxia hit, burning in her chest, her peripheral vision contracting, thoughts slowing. She felt sluggish and numb. Very soon her blood CO₂ level would trip an autonomic breathing reflex, and that would drown her.

Nothing to do about that.

Swim.

She kept kicking hard, pulling on rocks with her free hand, her vision darkening to points of light like the last two shimmering stars in a black sky. Beyond thought, beyond feeling, her body kept working, hauling, pulling. Then she was falling away from the dimming stars, away, and then she was gone.

She did not remember bringing herself and Brewster through the cave entrance. When she came to, she was swimming toward the platform, Brewster in tow.

“Need help here!”

People ran down from the picnic area, hauled Brewster onto the platform.

Gasping, she puked into the water. “Put him on his left side!” Hallie said. She dumped her own gear in five seconds, climbed onto the platform. Brewster’s face was gray, lips and fingernails blue. She cleared his airway, rolled him onto his back, performed fifteen chest compressions, started CPR. Sour fluid came out of him. She breathed, pumped, breathed, pumped. She heard someone calling 911.

“I thank he’s a goner.” A woman in the crowd, nearly hysterical.

This was country; EMTs would take time. Hallie began to feel light-headed, her arms burning. She kept at it, breaths and compressions, over and over and over. It could have been ten minutes or an hour, she wasn’t sure. Was that a siren? She couldn’t be sure about that, either. Foul liquid kept leaking out of Brewster’s throat and nose, but she ignored it. A child in the crowd was screaming. A man bent over her, red-faced, fearful.