[Original Novel] Pressure 3: Beautiful Corpse, Part 12

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“Then get the fuck out of there. This module is the only one we managed to seal when the flooding started. It’s dry all the way down to level 17. It should still be able to surface.” Olivia obliged her, running across the room to the hatch in the far wall. But the last part of her comment was baffling.

“Surface?” The woman, whose jumpsuit bore a nametag reading “Helen”, with “engineering” in small font below it. ‘Helen’ grunted as she swung the hatch shut and engaged the locks. “Oh yeah, I helped design the escape system on this tub. Four of these modules can detach from the central sphere and one another by explosive bolts. They’re a couple tons positively buoyant so they shoot right up to the surface after that. Only way to evacuate the whole crew in a hurry if there was ever a need to. And holy hell is there a need to.”

Olivia couldn’t argue with that. The fragile cooperation of countless machines and structural integrity of the station’s various connected hulls were all that held the full weight of the ocean at bay. One point of failure was all it took to set into motion a Rube Goldberg machine of sequentially larger, more severe failures until most of the station was flooded, collapsed or both.

“The terminals still work, somehow. Keeps spamming maintenance notices. I did a diagnostic, it says there’s big window down on the meat processing deck. It was gonna be an observatory at one point, before the increase in crew made sourcing food locally a necessity. That deck was reinforced as shit, had its own nested pressure vessel. Only reason why it didn’t implode the whole module. If it eventually does, the shockwave will weaken neighboring modules enough that they too will collapse minutes or hours after that. Then the ones next to those and so on, like falling dominos.”

“What can be done?” Olivia pleaded. The woman shrugged. “We’re doing it now. The air pressure out there is gonna be high enough soon for oxygen toxicity to kick in. If we can’t seal off this module before then, we’re all dead.” The ‘we’ she referred to turned out to be a dozen survivors, all conventionally human so far as Olivia could tell, who had against the odds made it to this safe haven as the rest of the Belusarius went pear shaped around them.

“So what’s in the box?” Olivia stiffened. “Oh….this?” The woman stared expectantly. “Yeah, you’ve got a death grip on it. Must be important.” Olivia searched for reasons and came up with very little that sounded convincing to her, finally settling on “Sentimental stuff. Family heirlooms. Couldn’t leave it behind. Don’t open it, I don’t want any of it to get wet, there’s some delicate stuff in there”

“Oh, Got it. Well there’s plenty of room in here. Sadly, not a whole lot of us made it in time. As the water level rose I heard pounding on the hatches, on one floor, then the floor above it, and so on. Until the pounding grew very rapid, then stopped altogether. Some kind of blockage must’ve prevented him from reaching the top. God rest his soul, whoever he was.”

Olivia’s mind was elsewhere. Helen’s mention of the box returned her thoughts to the precious cargo inside. What could be done? Even if she brought it with her to the surface, what then? Bring it to a surgeon? He wouldn’t know what to make of it. There was just one thing to do, wasn’t there? Find it a body.

“So...Helen. How do we detach the module? When the time comes, I mean.” She looked surprised, apparently not used to anyone taking an interest in her work. “Well the terminal on the floor below us is one of four capable of doing that. There’s a thumbprint and iris scanner keyed into my biometric info. After that a prompt will come up asking whether you want immediate or delayed release. That’s really all there is to it.”

Perfect. “Have you got clean clothes or food somewhere?” Helen gestured for Olivia to follow. When she turned Olivia spotted a heavy wrench hooked to her belt. Carefully as she could, she slipped it off the belt and raised it over her head. “Hey, did you just..?” Olivia brought it down on her head with a skull shattering crack. Helen collapsed in a heap.

Searching the room, she found a variety of tools, none of which were useful for surgery. Until she opened a drawer to discover a small circular saw. She recognized it as similar to the one the ‘good doctor’ used on her, except intended for something mundane like trimming insulation.

Alongside it was a battery operated reciprocating saw with a pistol grip. On a whim she took that too, along with two spare batteries. Returning to Helen, now bleeding profusely from her head wound, she set about cutting open her skull. Her hands shook as she dwelled on the disastrous results of prior attempts to mend, but this time it was sink or swim, with Violet’s life on the line.

Delicately she worked her fingers in around the quivering pink mass and lifted it out. Remembering Vivian’s admonition to leave behind the stem to take care of autonomic functions, she severed it there and dumped the rest of it to one side. It was a trick to open the case with slippery, blood coated fingers but she managed.

Violet’s brain was ice cold and showed no signs of life. But then, it wouldn’t. Olivia cut a small exit notch for the umbilical, then seated Violet’s brain carefully in Helen’s gaping hollow skull. Double checking the fit, Olivia then re-seated the top half of Helen’s skull, wiped away the blood and began mending it shut.

She’d lost a lot of blood, there was no getting around that. Olivia desperately hoped it wasn’t too much. The body lay motionless. She began to lose hope, but remembered the brain was cold and might need time to warm up. Then it occurred to her to listen to the heartbeat. It was so faint as to be almost inaudible.

What could be done? Olivia did an inventory of her options. Then she disposed of the brain matter in a nearby bin, and screamed. “Someone come quick! Helen’s fallen and hurt herself!” Within a minute she was surrounded by other refugees, most wearing jumpsuits identical to Helen’s. The remaining four were two sub pilots, an officer, and a doctor.

“The diving clinic is experimental. Only recently did it become possible to adapt the human body to the pressure at this depth without the brain basically shorting out. Marine biologists found this cnidarian species which secretes an enzyme that diminishes the effect of breathing highly pressurized gas on the firing threshold of neurons. Extended the range of saturation divers from around 2,300 feet down to a mile or so.”

Insufferable small talk. But Olivia bit her tongue. The doctor directed the jumpsuit clad men to wheel Helen’s gurney into something resembling an immense metal drum. “Hyperbaric chamber. Like the kind divers use to decompress. Only we’ll be using this one to do the opposite. High pressure therapy, accelerates healing by a factor of three. Cousteau’s Conshelf 2 team was the first to discover the phenomenon.”

Trivia which sailed right through Olivia as her eyes remained locked on the woman whom, to the other survivors, was Helen. But who Olivia knew to be the sickly little girl she’d poured her heart into, and pinned all of her hopes on.

The chamber door shut. The doctor spun a small wheel valve to seal it, then twisted a number of knobs on the side. Gentle hissing resulted. The thin red needle in the pressure gauge began rising. Olivia peered inside through a porthole about a foot in diameter and several inches thick. Violet’s breathing looked more regular. She thought she saw the eyelids twitch.

“An hour or two of that, and we’ll know if she’ll make it. How did this happen?” Olivia was quicker on the draw this time. “I was trying to outrun the rising water level when I heard her call for me to join her in this module. I came through, she sealed it and we were on our way up here when she slipped in a puddle and hit her head on the edge of the table.”

They seemed to buy it. “So what’s your story?” one of the engineers asked. Olivia blushed. “Me? Just the station’s psychiatrist. I imagine you all could do with one after what you’ve been through.” Projection maybe, but they responded well.

“Don’t you know it, lady. I was workin’ on a subfighter when I hear this loud bang. Next thing I know there’s this wall of water, waist high, plowin’ right through the maintenance bay. Up to my fuckin’ neck before I got out of there. I work subsea alot but I never swam so much in my life before now.”

It got a few smiles. Olivia followed suit, to fit in. “Computer says somethin’ collided with the big window on level 20. Whale maybe?” One of the sub pilots cut in. “Ain’t no whales this deep. Had to be a sub. Like to get my hands on the fucker what did it.” The rest nodded in agreement. “Coulda been sabotage too. Maybe the same guy what’s been installing all that rusted to shit piping everywhere, faster than we could remove it.”

“My vote goes to whale” one of the engineers offered. “Whatever it was got sucked in through the imploding window. The huge pressure differential just ripped it to pieces. On may way here I ran into floating chunks of it. Whiter than snow, leaking black shit that looks like oil.”

“Uh, Rick?” one of the engineers interjected. “We’ve got movement on the lowest floors.” A tall well built man, apparently Rick, made his way over to examine the tablet in the other fellow’s hands. “New girl. Thought you said you was alone.” Olivia waved her hands in front of her dismissively. “I did come alone. I saw Helen shut the hatch before she took a spill.”

“Well, that poses a problem” Rick continued. “How did anyone else get in if the hatches are sealed? The air pressure woulda gone up, but it’s holding steady at about four atmospheres. Helen sealed the last hatch just in time, much more increase and the oxygen toxicity would be droppin’ us as we speak.”

His cohort butted in. “But that don’t explain how there can be...Shit, there’s more now. Where are they coming from?” Olivia pried the tablet away and studied it. A 3D schematic of the tower they were in depicted a slowly increasing number of glowing blips appearing on the bottom few floors and making their way up the stairwell.

“Everyone listen closely. I don’t know what any of you witnessed on your way here but if you’re not in the loop, the rest of the station is overrun by...a sort of contagion.” Reactions varied from wide eyes to looks of amusement. The doctor spoke up. “You mean Dietrich’s zombies. You’re with him, then?”

She vigorously shook her head. “No, he’s as fucked in the head as you think. But even a blind squirrel sometimes finds a nut. Some time ago I spoke with a doctor George Bizen. Do you know him?” He grew silent. “I’ll take that as a yes. He was studying exotic conditions in which organic matter refuses to decompose.”

“So you mean to tell us he lost control of whatever he was working on and now we’re dealing with…..what? The undead?” More of them began to sneer. “Not exactly. You can shoot ‘em in the head all you want, they won’t go down. Just get clumsy, confused and pissed off.” A mechanic chimed in to defend her. “I saw that. Bunch of soldiers unloaded on a guy but he got right back up. They had to shred him to giblets before he’d stop advancing on ‘em.”

Excellent, a much needed witness. Now that he’d come forward, others volunteered their own stories. “I didn’t really know what to make of it at the time. Kept it to myself until now because I thought maybe the fear made me hallucinate. I was with other survivors in hydroponics. One of Dietrich’s men wouldn’t stop ranting about turning up the lights so someone finally did it. The woman who’d been trying to talk him out of it just kind of withered away in front of me. Like a time lapse movie of a decaying body. Shriveled up and fell to pieces, she screamed nonstop right to the end.”

There were no more sneers. “I can’t believe any of this. It contravenes everything known about biology, physics, and-” Olivia didn’t feel like letting the doctor finish. “I’m not asking you to believe anything you don’t want to. Just look at the tablet. See those dots on their way up to us? Tell yourself they’re just violent lunatics if you prefer. But if we don’t prepare to defend this floor before they reach it, you will quickly discover that there are more things in Heaven and Earth than dreamt of in your philosophy, many of which are immeasurably worse than death.”

The doctor cooperated with the others to set up barricades, although he grumbled throughout. Olivia tallied the available weapons. “Put the guns away, they’re worse than useless. This bucket’s our only ride out of here, can’t risk puncturing the hull.” Some still seemed mildly dubious that the mass of green dots now just five floors away could really be bulletproof.

“What do you expect us to do? kill them with kindness?” Olivia tossed one of the engineers a portable circular saw. “Cut them apart. Once they’re immobilized, gouge out the belly button. That will put ‘em down for good.” He gave her a quizzical look. “The bellybutton? Not the brain?” She improvised. “Look, I don’t know either but I’ve seen it work. Cut off the patch of their stomach where the bellybutton is and they fall to pieces.”

“That reminds me”, said one of the sub pilots. “didn’t one of you say bright light kills ‘em?” Rick dismissed it. “Not enough power. We’re down to the dedicated backup batteries for this tower. The rising water already shorted the ones on levels 18 and 19. That’s why the lights are out on level 15 and below.”

Olivia stopped cold in her tracks. “Did you say the lights are out on the lower levels?” The pilot affirmed it. “Yeah, pitch black down there. Colder than shit too, only enough power left to run the heaters on this floor.” Olivia smacked her forehead. The shadows. They’d come straight from the Foundry.

“The rest of you guard the deco chamber. Rick, you said we’re at four atmos, right? That means we’re all saturated with nitrogen. There’s no surviving the ascent unless that chamber’s intact.” The doctor reached out to stop her. “What, you’re gonna stop them by yourself?” Olivia brushed his hand away. “Just guard the chamber. They...uh...come after the injured and sickly. They’ll try to get...Helen any way they can.”

She left the small crowd looking mystified, reciprocating saw in tow. Third level down, she spotted one. It had just emerged from the stairwell. The two froze, staring at one another. Olivia realized it recognized her as a fabricant. The element of surprise.

Because the saw was electric there was no noise to warn the hapless creature that it was turned on and ready to use until it was tearing through his flesh. He thrashed and tried in vain to land a blow but was split diagonally from his neck down through his torso to the side of his waist before he could act. Kneeling down, she handily severed the umbilical and watched as the halves disintegrated in a matter of seconds.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 13!}