Deep Down (Sam Stone Book 1) (5 page)

Laramy Gray felt itchy and jumpy. His skin felt as if it were breaking out in hives under his clothing, but when he pulled up his shirt and looked for the telltale red bumps, there was nothing there.  His skin was smooth and white, just as it always was.  

Every little sound in the dining cavern seemed amplified and too loud to Laramy’s ears.  He wasn’t usually so sensitive to sound.  At home, he frequently had his stereo blaring out his favorite tunes so loudly that his mother had to ask him to turn it down.  But now the noise seemed so intense that it was beginning to make his head ache.

Laramy tried to pay attention to the dinner theater actors, but his throat had also begun to feel tight and he was finding it hard to breathe past the strange constriction in his airway.  

Darn allergy pill I took must not have worked too well,
he thought.

He took several large gulps of his water to tamp down the urge to cough so that he wouldn’t interrupt the actors.  He was in enough trouble already without being disruptive.   His mother had been very upset with him when the security guard had escorted him back to the table and explained that Laramy had been ‘tampering’ with a museum exhibit, conveniently leaving out the fact that he’d drawn a gun on Laramy.

Laramy had tried to explain that he had not
tampered
with anything, but neither his mother nor the guard had listened to his explanation.  He
hadn’t
been tampering.  He’d simply gone in for a closer look.   Besides, what was the harm?  The case was obviously just a prop.  He knew from Science class that bacteria were only single-celled organisms, so it wasn’t as if he’d have been able to see “Ed” with his naked eye anyway.  Still, the slide had looked clean when he’d checked it out up close.   Shouldn’t there have been a smear of
something
on the slide if a living bacteria were on it?  Didn’t bacteria need to eat too?

Laramy’s throat constricted suddenly with a stronger urge to cough, taking his mind off of the earlier scene with the security guard, but he held back the cough with effort and gulped down more water. 

Man, I’m going to have to tell mom that I need different allergy pills as soon as she’s not so mad at me.  The ones I’ve been taking aren’t doing a thing for me tonight.

Irritated at the failure of the pills, his urge to cough, and the whole darn situation, he gave up trying not to scratch, and vigorously dug his fingernails into the skin of his upper arm, scratching at the bone-deep itch that prickled invisibly just under the skin.  The whole evening had been a waste, as far as he was concerned.  He knew that his mom had wanted him to come and have a good time because she was always saying that they didn’t spend enough time together anymore, but, c’mon, a murder mystery Christmas-themed dinner theater? 
Lame!

He’d have rather stayed at home and played Oblivion with his online friends.  Not that the actor wasn’t funny – the guy was hilarious – but Laramy preferred online gaming to in-person performances.  And, besides, he’d almost beat level eight in the game, and sitting here with his mom wasn’t going to get him to level nine now was it?

As he watched the actor pirouette around the room in a ridiculous looking tutu while continuing his parody of the Sugarplum Fairy, Laramy suddenly had the strangest urge to scream.  Not just figuratively, like people often said, but a real, out-loud, yell-at-the-top-of-his-lungs scream. He held back the urge that welled up in is throat and scratched at his itching skin hard enough to draw blood. 

He felt that he either needed to scratch or scream, and since his mom was already mad at him for disturbing “Ed” and would be even angrier at him if he started screaming now, he continued to scratch, ignoring the blood.

Stone tottered unsteadily ahead of her as they walked back to the table, and Jenny could tell that he was still weak from the strange coughing attack that had overcome him.  This telltale sign of his weakness frightened Jenny.  Stone was
never
weak.  Ever. It was one of the first things that she had admired about him.

  Stone was built like a bull, all thickly muscled chest and bulging biceps.  And they’d been dating long enough that Jenny knew the man had a constitution that matched the strength of his substantial muscles.  He could eat as much as he wanted and never gain weight.  He could venture into a sick room, yet never get sick.  He had no allergies or sensitivities to anything at all.  His eyesight was perfect.  His blood pressure was perfect.  He health was always
perfect
.

When they’d first begun dating, this healthy perfection comforted her.   Jenny’s father had recently had to deal with a spate of heart problems, so Stone’s extreme health made her feel safe.   It was safe to love him as deeply as she did, because, with his extremely healthy constitution, there was no danger of him dying and leaving her alone and bereft without him.

Now, as she saw the way he wove dizzily back to his seat, she felt a pang of fear worse than any she’d ever suffered.   The illusion that Stone was invincible burst like a thin bubble in her mind’s eye, and she suddenly felt unreasonably terrified that she’d lose him.  She had to get him to a doctor – had to get him out of the museum – before whatever it was that had affected him this way caused any more damage.

She’d thought it was the air, but the dining cavern, filled with over one hundred visitors, was fairly quiet at the moment.  She heard no violent coughing as she and Stone took their seats.  Those who had been coughing earlier had quieted. 

Perhaps it had been the food?  But if it was the food, why did it seem that no one else was experiencing any symptoms?

Jenny sat close to Stone, reaching over to take his wrist in her hand so she could place two fingers upon his pulse and count his heartbeats.   As she counted, she peered at Debbie’s eyes closely.  The woman’s pupils were normal. 

Jenny stared hard at Gilbert, ignoring his questioning expression when he caught her gaze on him.  Gilbert’s pupils were normal too.  So were Alice’s.  As were the pupils in both Paul’s and Cheryl’s eyes.  None of them had pinpoint pupils. And they’d eaten the same food and were breathing the same air.

Alice leaned forward, her manner secretive, and Jenny noticed now the anxiety sketched across her lovely face.   Alice’s perfectly arched brows were wrinkled into a frown.

“The tour guide was here while you were all in the tunnel,” she whispered.  “The guide said that there has been some sort of malfunction with the lift, and that we may be down here a bit longer than they’d originally planned.  She said that they’d used the radios to call in a specialist to fix it, but they have no idea when he’ll arrive. Until then, nobody leaves.”

Jenny felt a jolt of horror shoot along her spine.  Without a working lift, they were well and truly trapped underground in the mines.  As were the hundred or so other people.  And Stone still needed medical care.  Jenny shuddered.  She could almost feel the millions of tons of heavy earth pressing down upon them.

Under her finger, Stone’s pulse leapt.  To her surprise, the broken lift seemed to bother him as well. 

Stone was not easily bothered by such things. 

“If that’s the case, then why didn’t the security guard just tell us that?” Stone asked.

Jenny felt her heart’s tempo increase even more.  She now shared Stone’s suspicion. Yes, why hadn’t the guard told them that?

Now that Alice had shared the tour guide’s instructions, Jenny realized why the room had been so silent when they’d entered.  The other patrons in the room were all equally upset.  They were no longer having a good time. They weren’t talking in animated and cheerful streams of conversation. 

The actor’s performance had been stopped and the silence was stretching thin now.  It hung unnaturally in the heavy, oddly scented, pumped-in air.  In a room of over a hundred people, who had gathered together for a night of food and fun, there should be jovial conversation and at least a little laughter.  There was none.

Several minutes passed, and the small group at Jenny’s table shared in the silence, looking at each other with apprehension.   Jenny had stopped counting Stone’s heartbeats, and now clutched his wrist in fear.

Jenny began to feel a pressure in her chest again, and almost broke the silence by groaning aloud.  Not again.  She could
not
have another asthma attack  - or whatever it had been.  Not now.  Not when she knew that there was no way to leave if she needed medical attention.   Panic skated across her thoughts.  What if she and Stone both had attacks again?  What if the inhaler didn’t work this time?

She took a shallow breath to calm herself, closed her eyes and counted to ten.  When she opened them, she felt a bit calmer, although that could have been due to the fact that Stone’s breathing was now back to normal and one hundred percent wheeze-free.  Or maybe it was because he’d taken her hand in his while her eyes were closed and was now squeezing her fingers reassuringly.

Inside the calmness, she realized that this pressure in her lungs was different.  It was not an asthmatic reaction, it was simply that the air felt heavier.  Thicker.  Denser somehow. 

“Do you feel that?” she whispered, looking at Debbie for an answer.

Debbie nodded slowly. 
Yes.

Alice’s eyes had grown even larger in her pale face. “The air feels strange,” she whispered.

Jenny was looking at Alice when the girl’s pupils constricted quickly, the black center growing so small as to be barely visible.  Alice began to cough.

For a moment, Jenny just stared.  Then she leapt from her chair and moved to Alice’s side.  The girl, who was sitting right beside Stone, progressed quickly into gasps for air.  It only took a moment for Jenny to wrench the inhaler from her pocket, remove the cap and shake it, but in that short time, Alice’s face had gone chalk white and her lips had begun to loose natural color.  The girl’s eyes looked odd, almost alien with their nearly absent pupil, as they stared up at Jenny.   She tipped Alice’s head back and administered a shot of the inhaler, hoping that the girl could inhale the atomized medication into her own lungs and would not need assistance as Stone had.

Alice gasped and wheezed, straining with effort, and Jenny leaned the girl back in her chair so that she didn’t fall to the floor.  Beside her, Stone put a large hand upon Alice’s shoulder to keep her from sliding out of the chair.

After several tense moments, with Alice wheezing and gurgling and gasping loudly, she was able to gulp in a breath of air.  Seconds later, her pupils expanded back to a more normal size.

Jenny shared a meaningful look with Stone, knowing that he’d seen the effect too.

As Alice drew in another deep breath, a man several tables away stood up hastily, knocking his chair back so that it screeched upon the floor. 

“What in the
hell
is going on here? Three people at that table have had coughing fits in the last few minutes.  Is there an illness that we should all…“

The man was interrupted by an eardrum-piercing scream.

The shout broke off suddenly and then the skinny kid who’d been playing with the bacteria’s protective case earlier stood up from his place several tables over and screamed again.  The boy screamed loud and long this time, his voice undulating and breaking several times with the force of his shout.  Even from her position behind Alice’s chair, Jenny could see the boy’s throat straining as he screamed and screamed.

Goosebumps blossomed along Jenny’s arms and scrambled over the sensitive skin at her nape as the unnatural sound of the boy’s scream went on and on and on.  The noise echoed through the cavern and out into the tunnels, reverberating back in undulating waves of sound that crashed together, creating a conglomeration of shouts, all reverberating wildly around the enclosed space.

Jenny felt the hair at the back of her neck stand to attention.  Something was very, very wrong.  The boy seemed to be screaming for no reason at all.  There had been no trigger to his outburst, no inciting incident, yet Jenny knew that no one screamed with such ferocity without a reason.  Did they?

Seconds later, as the boy still screamed, Gilbert, Debbie, Cheryl and Paul all began to cough violently.  

Jenny still had the inhaler held in hand, so she quickly moved from person to person around their table, administering a shot from the inhaler to each, trying to ignore the chaos that had erupted across the room around the screaming boy.

The chaos was hard to ignore.  People were leaping to their feet, chairs screeching noisily across the saltcrete, the high-pitched sound blending with the sounds of the boy’s seemingly endless scream.  Men and women were shouting.  

Jenny focused her attention on Stone’s friends.  She had to help them.  For the moment, someone closer to the boy would have to deal with that situation.

She knew that it was unsanitary, but she had no choice.  Administering the inhaler into so many mouths, one right after another, would not be a considered a best practice under any circumstances, but it was the only thing that she could do to help Stone’s friends. Not only was it unhealthy, it was also dangerous, because the medication it contained was not prescribed for those at the table.  She had no idea if there would be drug interaction problems with their current medications, complications or side effects, but faced with the violent breath-stealing coughing fits, she didn’t know what else there was to do.   Based on Stone’s loss of consciousness and lack of ability to breathe on his own, Jenny was certain that Stone’s friends would die if she didn’t use the inhaler to help them breathe.

Cheryl was the last to receive the inhaler, and by that time, the cartridge of Albuterol inside was running low.  When Jenny shook the inhaler after giving a dose to the older woman, the inhaler was light and empty feeling.  There might be enough left in the inhaler for one last dose, but Jenny couldn’t be sure.  The cartridge was almost spent.

This knowledge made her feel edgy.  The inhaler was her safety net.  Her defense against the infirmity of asthma.  Without it, what would happen if she had another attack?  That was the whole reason she always carried the inhaler, though she rarely used it.  The thing was her emergency backup. One that she feared that she might need badly in the very near future.

Still, she could not have just stood by and let Stone’s friends die, not even if she was risking her own life by using up all of the medication that the inhaler contained.

Stone was on his feet beside her now, and seeing the concern upon her face, he took the inhaler from her hand and shook it himself. 

“Do you have another cartridge?” he asked, raising his voice to be heard over the still-screaming teenager.

Jenny just shook her head, staring at him.  They both knew what the empty cartridge meant to her.   It meant that she would most likely die if she had another asthma attack.

Stone’s lips compressed into a grim line as he pocketed the inhaler himself.  “We’re getting you out of here, one way or another.”

“How?” she asked.

“This is still a working mine near the other end of the tunnels.  There’s got to be another lift there.  It may not be as fancy as the one here for museum visitors, but it will work to get us out of here.”

“There’s a map…” Gilbert gasped, wheezing loudly as he struggled to talk.  “In the museum.  Map of the mines.”

“There are trams too,” Alice said, her voice was rough, but her breathing was now smooth and almost normal. “I saw the trams near an exhibit.  They’re supposed to use them to take us back to the lift after the dinner theater tonight.”

Stone smiled, “Then that’s our ticket out of here.”

“We’ll have to wait until they’re breathing normally again, Stone,” Jenny said, gesturing to his still incapacitated friends. “I don’t think we will get very far with them like this,”

He nodded.  “Sit down and try to look normal. We’ll wait.  I’ll go check on the kid.”

Jenny had reached her chair and was just sitting down when the gun went off. 

The sound of the shot was like a small explosion in the cavern, and she clapped her hands over her ears a second too late to block out the reverberation of the echo. 

Her eardrums ached, but as the whine of the reverberation filled her ears with remembered sound, she suddenly realized that there was also an absence of sound under the echo. 

The boy had stopped screaming. 

Seconds later, a woman’s anguished cry filled the void.

“You shot him!  You shot my son!” the woman wailed, and Jenny turned to see the guard from earlier, the one who had threatened the kid, still holding his drawn weapon.

The guard’s expression was shocked, as if he could not believe that he’d just shot the boy. 

He looked at the screaming woman, then at the kid lying on the floor, a slow ooze of blood running from the boy’s shoulder, and then the security guard brought the gun up towards his own head.

As the barrel pressed against the man’s temple, several people at the surrounding tables next to the guard surged to their feet.  Chairs were knocked over, clattering to the floor and filling the awful silence with a jangle of sound.

“Don’t do it,” the blonde tour guide screamed from across the room.  “Sam, please don’t!”

Jenny shot to her own feet, but she was too far way from the man to stop him if he truly intended to shoot himself. Beside her, Stone had apparently realized the same thing, because he’d taken two steps toward the man and then stopped.  He was now standing absolutely still, watching the guard silently, as if calculating the odds that he’d make it to the man’s side before the guard could pull the trigger.

Jenny wanted to close her eyes, so she wouldn’t be a witness to the horror that was about to happen, but she couldn’t.  Her eyes felt locked upon the security guard. A millisecond passed, but it seemed to Jenny as if time itself had slowed.  There was an ominous hush through out the cavern as everyone held their breath and waited for what came next. 

Only the boy’s mother showed no reaction to the guard’s predicament.  The woman was down on the floor, sobbing in big choking gasps, her son’s head cradled in her lap as tears streamed down her face.

Jenny saw the security guard squeeze his eyes closed as if bracing for the bullet’s impact. She wanted to squeeze her own eyes shut too, but instead, she watched the horrifying scene as it unfolded.

At the crucial second, instead of pulling the trigger, the man burst into a sudden fit of coughing.  The gun swung away from his temple as he convulsed with ferocity of the coughing attack, but his finger was still on the trigger and as his chest spasmed violently, the gun went off again.

Beside her, Stone shoved her to the saltcrete floor, not bothering to be gentle about it in his haste. 

“Down!” he roared as he pushed at her shoulders, following her down to the floor to crouch beside her.

The bullet hit the wall and ricocheted several times, pinging off of the hardened salt walls with a whining sound like the buzz of a very angry hornet.  The echo of sound caged within the enclosed space made it impossible to determine where the bullet was inside the cavern, and Jenny expected to feel the burn of the bullet as it entered her flesh at any second.   Worse, she feared that she might hear the sound of the bullet hitting Stone.

She knew the pain that a bullet brought.  She’d experienced it herself once before.  It wasn’t something that she could bear to see Stone go through.  The mere thought of him writhing in pain as he bled out was almost more than she could endure.  She clenched her teeth tightly together and pushed the gruesome imagery away.

Mere seconds passed as the bullet whizzed around the dining cavern, but it seemed like years to Jenny.

Stone’s large hand was upon her back, holding her flat against the saltcrete floor as he crouched low next to her, sheltering her with his own body.

Jenny felt salty dust coat her throat with every inhalation, but she dared not move, not that she’d have been able to with half of Stone’s weight pressing her to the floor.

“You get down too,” she hissed at him, awkwardly twisting her arm behind her back, reaching up to tug at his shirt.

Stone didn’t listen.

When the bullet stopped pinging about the room, Stone stood quickly and crossed the room to the choking guard, his hand fumbling in the pocket of his jeans.

He grabbed the guard by the collar of his shirt and picked the man up from the floor with one hand, and then stuck the inhaler into the man’s mouth in one smooth motion.  After administering a blast of the inhaler, he lay the man back down upon the floor, none too gently.

“That was the last dose,” he announced to the people surrounding him.  “And we don’t have another.  Does anyone else have an inhaler?”

No one answered, so Stone shrugged and stepped over to where the kid lay upon the floor.

Jenny climbed to her feet, dusting salt and dirt from her shirt and jeans as she quickly crossed the room.  She joined Stone at the boy’s side, laying her hands upon the shoulders of the sobbing woman, yet knowing that there was nothing that she could do to help or comfort the shocked mother.  Though the bullet had hit high up on the boy’s right shoulder, missing any vital internal organs, it appeared as though the boy had stopped breathing.

Stone crouched down beside the woman, placing two fingers upon the boy’s neck.  Absolute silence reigned in the cavern as Stone sought a pulse. He fingered the boy’s neck lightly, his strong hands gentle against the boy’s rapidly paling skin. 

After several long seconds, Stone looked up at Jenny and gave a small, negative shake of his head, then gently moved his fingers to close the boy’s staring eyes for the final time.  The boy’s mother let out a keening cry of grief as he finished the motion.  The wail was full of anguish and horror of such depth that it brought tears to Jenny’s eyes, as if she could feel the woman’s loss as her own.

Jenny’s heart trembled within her chest as she stood there uselessly, unable to do anything to help the boy or his mother. There was nothing that she could do to ease the pain a mother experienced after witnessing the violent death of her own child.    Jenny knew that she could not bring the boy back, but still, her mind sought a solution, clutching desperately at useless scenarios that began with ‘maybe’ and ‘what if’ and ended with ‘if only’. 
If only
things had gone differently.
If only
…  Jenny knew that this activity was useless, but for a moment, her mind pursued this course anyway, desperate to find
some
way to save the boy, until reason once again returned and logic dominated her thoughts once more.  There simply
was
no way to cheat death. 

Long seconds passed.  The woman continued to cry harshly, her grief manifesting itself in ragged sobs and gasps and horrified groans.  And no one else in the room uttered a single word, as if they were all caught up together in a funereal tableau that could not be disrupted.

The awful moment was broken suddenly when several men pushed their way noisily through the people gathered about the exit to the cavern.   They shoved in through the milling group, rudely breaking the silence and even more rudely clearing a path for themselves. 

Dressed in protective suits, covered head to toe in white plastic-like drapings that were burdened down with oxygen tanks and large, enclosing hoods, the three men looked like something out of a sci-fi movie.  Jenny had never met anyone wearing a suit like that.  Events that would require that kind of gear just didn’t happen in Hawkington, Kansas.  But everyone, including Jenny, had seen that type of suit on TV at one time or anther. They were quarantine suits, used to protect the wearer from severe environmental or biological hazards.  At the sight of these suits, Jenny’s heart stuttered with fear.

What need was there for quarantine gear down in the tunnels?

Jenny felt again the ghost of remembered pain from the severe coughing attack that she’s suffered and the agony in her lung after the inhaler had been administered, and she
knew
.  Gooseflesh prickled along her arms at the realization that they’d all been exposed to something deadly.  Something so lethal that it required hiding the truth and preventing the exit of the infected until a quarantine unit could arrive.

The men drew nearer, the lead guy pushing his way through the gathering crowd around the dead boy to stand over the crying woman.

“Back up, I’m a doctor,” he told Stone.

Stone rose to his feet and said, “There’s nothing you can do for him.  The boy is dead.”

“I still need to take a look,” the man replied.  Then he looked around at the milling people as if recognizing the fact that he was greatly outnumbered.  “Please take your seats.  The guide has another announcement to make.”

Stone tossed Jenny a look, and she knew instantly what he was thinking. She was thinking the same thing.  
More lies to come.

As one, they both turned to follow the doctor’s instruction, heading back to their table. As they passed the still-wheezing guard on the way back to their table, Stone bent to place two fingers against the man’s neck, as if solicitously checking the man’s pulse.  Quickly, keeping his hand hidden between his body and the guard’s, Stone used his other hand to feel around under the guy’s jacket.  No one, other than Jenny, seemed to notice when Stone retrieved the man’s gun.

Jenny saw him quickly stuff the weapon into the front waistband of his jeans, then jerk his shirt down to cover it as he removed his fingers from the man’s neck and stood in a supple, fluid motion.  She followed behind him as he led the way back to their table while two of the other security guards came to lift Sam from the floor and drag him over to a seat near the exit.