Frozen Solid A Novel

39




IN THE UNDERGROUND’S MAIN CORRIDOR, SHE TRIED EDGING ALONG flat against one ice wall, hoping she might avoid triggering the lights, but they came on anyway. Nothing she could do about it, so she moved as quickly as she could to get away from the entrance.

This would have to be done fast, and not only to avoid detection. She had not wanted to risk going all the way to the ECW room at the station’s other end. Stepping from fifty-four degrees in the station to sixty below in the Underground almost took her breath away, but now she knew enough not to gasp.

Dive knife in hand, she slipped down the main corridor, praying that she could remember the route Graeter had taken when he’d escorted her around down here. The first right turn was easy, then down a secondary corridor about twenty yards, not worrying about lights now, past one corridor on the left and into the second. A long way along that one, then down a narrower passage, then around the heavy black curtain.

Once in, she switched on her headlamp and unzipped a body bag. Harriet Lanahan still had on the clothes she’d died in. Blood had frozen into a thick, red carapace on her chest. Her face looked like white wax. There was no frost on her—the humidity was too low for that. Hallie was thankful that someone had closed her eyes.

She had never feared dead bodies, even badly damaged ones. But these bodies were different. They evoked a childhood terror from some very deep place, unspeakable, nearly irresistible—a fear that these bodies might rise and take her back to their own realm. It was hard not to jump and run.

She put on the surgical mask and gloves she had taken from the lab, removed from her pockets plastic bags and oronasal swabs. She inserted one swab deep into Lanahan’s right nostril, past the turbinates and up into the ethmoid sinuses, until she felt hard resistance. She rotated the swab shaft between shaking fingers, then carefully withdrew and bagged it. She repeated the process in Lanahan’s left nostril, then took samples from Montalban and Bacon. The nasal blood was frozen, but she was hoping that the bodies had not been here long enough for the cold to have killed all of the pathogens present. Looking down at the three dead women, she said, “I’m sorry I had to do that. But I think you would have wanted me to. Thank you all.”

She closed up the bags and left the morgue, felt her fear slipping away. By then she was shivering so hard she had to clamp her jaw shut. How ironic it would be, she thought, to survive the cryopeg only to freeze here.

On the way in, she had used the dive knife to scratch a small arrow at every corner where she’d needed to turn. In less than five minutes she was standing in front of the air-lock doors.

The lab where Emily and Fida had worked was on Level 1, Pod A, behind the air-lock door with the warning sign. It was kept locked, but Merritt had given her a key when they first met. Hallie had seen dozens of microbiology labs just like it, except most were bigger. Rows of white wall cabinets, two stainless steel sinks, a workbench with a ventilator hood. On a central bench rested an autoclave, a centrifuge, microscopes, racks of test tubes, Bunsen burners, dessicators, incubator cabinets.

In the time it had taken her to reach the lab, her body heat had begun to soften the tiny red ice clusters on the swabs. She set out six petri dishes with red agar growth medium and used a sterile wire inoculating loop to transfer matter from the cotton-tipped sticks, swiping them back and forth in three separate sections on the surface of each dish. “Making a lawn,” it was called.

Since she wasn’t sure what she was trying to grow, she didn’t know the optimal incubation temperature. Many pathogenic bacteria liked eighty-six degrees Fahrenheit, so she set the lab incubator for that and waited for it to warm up.

Nothing would happen right away. Bacteria typically took from twenty-four to seventy-two hours to colonize growth media. Hopefully any pathogen in the blood samples would be a fast grower. She walked down to the far end of the lab to examine the Vishnu sample she had retrieved. It rested in a thirty-gallon tank full of cryopeg water that Guillotte had collected while she was diving. The tank itself resided in a chest freezer, the only way to keep the water as cold as it had been in the cryopeg. Nothing about the organism had changed, which she took as a good sign.

At the door, with her hand on the light switch, she paused, then decided to double-check the incubator temperature setting. As tired and brain-weak as she was, it would have been easy to get it wrong.

She peered through the glass window.

“Damn!” She actually jumped back a step.

Stripes like bright yellow pencil lines had appeared on the red agar in all the dishes.

By the time she finished in the lab, it was okay for her to be seen walking around. Hallie came to the place where the corridors diverged. One led to Merritt’s office, the other to Graeter’s. Merritt or Graeter? She stopped, leaned against a wall, waited out a dizzy spell. Merritt had been right: it was getting worse. On top of everything else, her throat was sore, and not just from the first day’s frostbite; the discomfort felt deeper and more painful, like the onset of a strep infection.

Where had she been going? It took her several seconds to remember. She looked both ways down the intersecting corridor. Left would take her toward Merritt’s office. Right to Graeter’s.