It was stuck.
Smothering a shout of frustration and fear, acutely aware of the rush of water in the distance, Marina realized what she had to do. Frantically, in the closeness of the tunnel, she flipped and pulled and tugged until she freed Dennis Strand from his moorings on the stretcher.
She was going to endanger his injuries further by pulling him through, but she had to take the chance — or he wouldn’t have any chance at all.
And neither would she.
She inched them three more feet.
It was a little easier now that she didn’t have to contend with the board. She pulled and twisted, and felt him groan against her once, in pain, and she gritted her teeth and kept moving, feet first, belly-crawling; backward, backward, scooting, scooting, pulling, pulling ….She focused on the rhythm, because that was all she had.
The sound was loud now, she could feel the shift in the close air and her heart rammed in her throat. Her knees screamed in pain and her back ached.
How much further?
Too far. Much too far.
12
When Junie Peters finally dragged herself out of bed, it was still dark. Four-thirty in the a.m. She’d had a total of three hours of sleep since tumbling into the bed inside a church that had been reorganized as a base for the crew. It was a cot, really; but that was better than one of those inflatable mattresses on the ground, where she’d slept more than once during a clean-up.
She’d dreamt of oil slickening her hands and her body; smothering her as it did the loons that tried to clean it from their feathers, clogging her breathing as it did the whales that needed to swim in it, blinding and suffocating her as it did to the crabs and lobsters that lived near the oil-drenched shores. Twisting through her hair like evil black braids, liquid ones that closed around her neck and arms and into her nostrils.
It was always like this. She had the nightmares and dreams during the cleanup, and for months after, with decreasing frequency, until they finally went away … until she was called to the next one.
She’d worked on ten different spills over her career as a marine biologist, and each one seemed to affect her more deeply. The dreams and images hung in her consciousness longer each time, and her despair with the carelessness of a world so dependent upon oil worried deep in her stomach. She swore she was developing an ulcer.
Her jeans and waders were slung over a chair next to her cot, and she tried to be silent as she reached for them. The others were still sleeping, and if they were anything like her, they would need it. Too bad she couldn’t keep her eyes closed.
Once she dressed, Junie slipped into the church’s toilet to relieve herself and wash up. Trying to keep her Wellies from clumping too loudly, she made her way out of the building into the early morning.
Pulling her grey sweatshirt closer, she zipped it and yanked the hood up to cover her ears. Impossible thing about short hair — it provided no warmth, and it was always cold near the ocean at night. She beamed her torch around, but she’d made the trek to and from the workstation so many times in the last twenty hours that Junie knew she didn’t really need it.
The walk to the site of the beach where the clean-up crew had been stationed took only ten minutes. Junie moved quickly, as much to keep warm as to get to the area and get to work again. Saving the life of even one more salmon or trout, or using dishwashing detergent to clean the oil off the feathers of one more seabird would help to ease that tension gathering in the base of her spine.
A tier-three oil spill was the worst of its kind. It would be millions of euros in damage, and decades before the wildlife in the region would completely recover from the infestation of its habitat. A tragedy to this habitat; and yet the rest of the world went on.
She sniffed the air, drawing in a deep breath of salty sea tang. Junie had loved the ocean since she was a little girl, growing up on the coast of England, and she was fortunate that she’d found her life’s calling, studying something she loved.
She sniffed again. Fresh, cold, crisp. Familiar.
Then she realized she smelled only the ocean, the natural smell. The ooze of oil that usually tainted the air at one of the clean-ups wasn’t so strong.
She walked faster. She must not be as close to the beach as she’d thought.
The sun had begun to faintly light the sky, and Junie saw that, no, she was wrong — she was right at the beach.
Odd. The oil smell wasn’t strong; in fact, she couldn’t smell it at all.
Maybe her olfactory nerves were getting used to it, and so didn’t sense it any longer.
Junie strode down to the beach, where only hours ago, black oil had swept onto the sand or crashed onto the rocks, mingled with the foamy waves. It would splash onto the boulders or shore, then the water would pull back, leaving slimy black residue to seep into the sand.
Only, the sand wasn’t black.
And the water ….Junie stared, flashing her light around. It was dim, and grey in the early morning, but she could see well enough with her flash that the water was just water.
Junie dashed toward the wave crashing at her feet, and knelt in the sand in her rubber waders. Pulling off a glove, she reached for the water and sand, sifting it through her fingers. No oily residue. Nothing.
Was she dreaming?
Her head felt light all of a sudden, and she tilted to one side, her hand bracing herself in the damp sand.
Suddenly dizzy, Junie pulled to her feet, beaming her light along the shore. The shore where, only hours ago, had been thronged with workers and animals they’d pulled from the oiled water.
The oil was gone.
Miraculously disappeared ….and that was her last thought before the ground raced up to slam into her face.
13
The rush of water was coming closer, and Marina felt her adrenaline spike and a welcome wave of energy surge through her limbs.
Leveraging her toes, bent and aching inside her sturdy boots, she scooted backward. Knees, hipbones, elbows; shimmying, zigzagging, squirming through the narrow passageway, canting from side to side, half-rolling, grunting and groaning, she worked them back through the tunnel.
A fear that had never been with her before, a tense closeness from confinement, worked into her consciousness. Marina shook her head suddenly as if to throw it off, and her helmet banged against the side of the tunnel. She heard a pop! and everything went horribly black.
Not dark, not the darkness of the middle of the night, where, if you stared long enough, shadows began to form. No. This was true, ink-black nothingness.
No daylight, no illumination however faint, to allow her eyes to adjust to the light.
Just black. Like someone had wrapped her head to toe in black construction paper.
Cold swept over her. Pitch darkness, in a cave. Water rushing in.
She had to ignore the chill that came from the inside out. Marina took the chance and let go of one of Dennis’s hands. Gingerly, she pulled her own hand toward her body, barely able to bend her elbow in the narrow space to bring her arm back to her side where she needed to pull her extra light from her ride-side belt clip.
Maneuvering that move wasted precious seconds, and was nearly as difficult as bringing Strand through the tunnel. At last, she grasped the light, pulled it from her belt, and switched it on. With that in her hand, she could only hold onto one of Dennis’s hands now ….unless she continued to move in solid darkness.