Immortal

70

Jeb Oppenheimer cackled to himself as he clambered awkwardly over endless jagged rocks in the darkness, his way lit only by the solid-gold lighter he held like a lantern in front of him, a white handkerchief wrapped around it to protect his fingers from the heat. The interior of the cave was low, forcing him to stoop in order to move forward. But he could smell a breeze that drifted into his face from somewhere ahead in the impenetrable blackness, cool air touched with the scent of damp but also of something else, an almost clinical smell that he could not identify but which seemed somehow familiar.

The noise of fighting behind him had faded, the complex turns and twists in the cave deadening all sound. Drops of water plopped in fat drips into puddles on the ground, seeping through the bedrock from hilltops hundreds of feet above his head. The thought of millions of tons of solid rock bearing down upon the chamber from above sent a wriggle of fear twisting through his gullet but he pushed on, driven by the knowledge of what resided somewhere deep within these prehistoric caves.

Ahead, the weakly flickering flame of his lighter reflected off something embedded in the rocks that glittered like pearls. Oppenheimer slowed as the low ceiling of the tunnel rose and he squeezed through a narrow vertical cleft in the rocks into a chamber filled with a shimmering pool of crystalline water so clear that the light of his flame illuminated the floor perhaps twenty feet beneath the surface.

But that was not what drew his eyes and caught the breath in his throat.

Above his head, immense crystals like giant geometric tree trunks were lodged at angles to span the width of the chamber above the shimmering water. Like giant causeways made of translucent glass, they criss-crossed above the water and sparkled in the weak light of the flame as though encrusted with jewels.

‘Gypsum,’ Oppenheimer gasped, recognizing the immaculate nature of what was otherwise a nondescript mineral.

But here it possessed a purity the likes of which he’d never seen. He began easing his way into the cave, staring in awe at the crystals and the flickering water. The strange scent he’d detected earlier tainted the air around him, and he recognized it as ammonia. A flickering motion on the cavernous ceiling caught his eye, and he looked up to see bats roosting in their thousands above him, their wings fluttering as they clung to their rocky domain. As they did so, he saw an occasional droplet of fluid fall from the heights, dropping into the water with a tiny splash and ripple, the cause of the endless shimmering of the surface.

Slowly, placing his feet near the edge of the pool, Oppenheimer peered over the edge. There, deep below the surface, he watched the tiny droplets fall through the beautifully clear water to join a bizarrely colored deposit deep beneath the surface, a kaleidoscopic multitude of fungi and mosses. Oppenheimer guessed that the droppings in the water must clear overnight when the bats were out hunting, settling on the bottom of the pool. In the reflection from the surface of the water that illuminated his wrinkled face, Oppenheimer saw his own smile beaming back at him like a shimmering ghost as a disembodied voice echoed through the cave around him.

‘It’s guano.’

He whirled to see Lillian Cruz watching him from the entrance to the chamber. Oppenheimer regarded her for a moment and then decided that she was no threat to him as he turned back to the water.

‘The guano has ammonia in it,’ he said, almost to himself.

Lillian stepped into the chamber, gesturing to the water. ‘It also has high levels of phosphorus and nitrogen,’ she said. ‘Along with ammonia it contains uric, oxalic, phosphoric and carbonic acids, various earth salts and nitrates.’

Jeb Oppenheimer’s mind was working overtime as he nodded to himself, gesturing to the giant gypsum crystals soaring above the chamber.

‘The gypsum and sulfur crystals mean speleogenesis: cave forming by sulfuric acid dissolution,’ Oppenheimer said. ‘The limestone cavern would have formed from the bottom up, in contrast to the normal top-down carbonic acid dissolution mechanism of cave formation. Sulfuric acid, derived from hydrogen sulfide, would have migrated from nearby oil deposits.’

‘The cave then floods over time with water draining through fissures from the ground above, creating these pools,’ Lillian added.

Oppenheimer nodded eagerly, gesturing up at the crystals with his cane. ‘The water falls,’ he said, ‘hitting the crystals and sometimes taking with it bacteria that were encased within the crystals when they formed millions of years ago, bacteria like Bacillus permians.’

Lillian nodded.

‘The bacteria fall into the water and mix with the guano at the bottom. Phosphorus in guano is an essential plant macronutrient,’ she said, ‘that’s why it’s used so heavily in fertilizers. The guano, laden with the bacteria, are kept in solution by the water in the pool. The bacteria, provided with a nutrient source by the guano, are reanimated and come into contact with all manner of mosses, fungi and bottom-feeding invertebrates.’

Oppenheimer’s laugh rattled out in the chamber, echoing back and forth around them as he spoke.

‘Some insect and invertebrate species are semi-aquatic, and others live on the surface. They consume the bacteria-laden guano, and are likewise consumed by the bats that hunt them!’ Slowly he turned to face Lillian, his wrinkled features alive now as finally, after so many years, he realized that he had found something that had existed in folklore for millennia. ‘The bats carry the bacteria, giving them their unusually long lifespans. They also process the bacteria through their gut and excrete many of them back into the water, or spill blood through injury into the pool.’

Lillian nodded, and despite the fact that he knew she hated him, she smiled.

‘Which over time ladens the water with the very fluids the bats have ingested, alive with a form of Bacillus permians that has evolved within these caves to live symbiotically within mammals.’

‘But what was the fuel?’ Oppenheimer struggled to understand. ‘What metabolism was required to sustain them for such long periods inside human beings?’

Lillian no longer held the truth back from Oppenheimer. In fact, she appeared to enjoy revealing to him what she had learned. ‘Iron, from the hemoglobin in blood,’ she replied. ‘Anyone who carries the infection will suffer from anemia if iron supplements are not provided in their diet.’

Oppenheimer looked at her pleadingly, like a child who has misbehaved yet yearns desperately for one last chance.

‘But how could it have made the transition to humans through a single encounter?’

Lillian regarded the old man for a long moment before replying.

‘Cross-species communication is possible in bacteria through something known as quorom sensing. The bacteria use it to coordinate gene expression via the density of their population. If there’s enough of them present in a biological species, the genes are activated and any infection shows symptoms.’

‘My God,’ Oppenheimer exclaimed. ‘Like the bioluminescent luciferase in fish that glow underwater, produced by Virbio fischeri. The gene cannot be expressed by a single cell, only when the population is large enough does the production of luciferase begin.’

‘The bacteria’s ability to express the gene is only activated when enough are consumed by the host species,’ Lillian confirmed.

Oppenheimer gasped, touching his head with one hand.

‘The only people who have ever been down here long enough to consume enough of the bacteria to activate them were those Civil War soldiers. Which means that they must have got their infection from…’

Oppenheimer stared at the beautiful waters at his feet as Lillian took a few paces forward to join him. Her voice, soft as it was, carried throughout the cavern and into Oppenheimer’s ears with the words he had once believed he would never hear.

‘This is the water,’ she said quietly. ‘This is the elixir, the real fountain of youth. Ellison Thorne and his men drank the water here while they waited for the Confederate army to pass them by in 1862. They did not age from that day onward.’

Oppenheimer, his eyes alight with joy, let his cane fall onto the rocks beside him as he got down on his knees, tears dripping from his face to ripple into the water.

‘And this is our ticket out of here,’ he whispered to his own reflection. ‘They dare not shoot us, if we’re uninjured and already carrying the infection.’

Slowly, he lowered his lips and they finally touched the surface. It was icy cold, clear, finer than the most expensive wine he had ever tasted. It surged through him as though he were forcing ice cubes down his throat, filled him with a tingling sensation as though his very nerve endings were sparking electricity onto the charged air in the chamber.

Finally, Oppenheimer stopped drinking and turned as he knelt beside the water, looking up at Lillian Cruz. He smiled broadly, just in time to see Lillian’s features melt into an expression of pure hatred as she lunged down and grabbed the back of his head and plunged it beneath the surface. As the freezing water swallowed his head, Oppenheimer heard Lillian’s voice shouting at him above the bubbles and splashes as he fought for his life.

‘You wanted to be here so much? Now you can damned well stay here!’

Oppenheimer’s ruined lungs ached, his aged heart thumped in his emaciated chest and his eyes bulged as he fought the urge to breathe. The clear view of the bottom of the pool swirled and starred as his vision faded. He was losing consciousness when he saw Lillian’s hand plunge into the water beside his head, holding a small plastic container that held what looked like a ball of iron surrounded by flesh. Water from the pool filled the container, and then it vanished again as a black cloud descended over his vision. He heard a faint voice from somewhere on the periphery of his consciousness.

‘Get off of him!’

Suddenly the immovable weight of Lillian’s body vanished, and Oppenheimer lurched upright and out of the water. He sucked a huge volume of air into his lungs. His vision returned as he sagged backwards onto the damp rocks just in time to see Saffron hurl Lillian Cruz to one side.

Ethan burst into the chamber just in time to see Lillian Cruz staggering to her feet, water pouring from her arms. Oppenheimer sat in a drenched huddle beside the pool, Saffron standing protectively over him.

‘We’ve got to get out of here!’ Ethan yelled, grabbing Lillian and propelling her out of the chamber. ‘Get to the surface!!’

Lillian glared at Jeb Oppenheimer and Saffron, but she obeyed and dashed out of the chamber. Ethan turned to Saffron.

‘It’s time to go,’ he said.

‘I’m not leaving him here,’ Saffron shot back.

‘Fine!’ Ethan shouted, losing patience. ‘Let’s just get out of here!’

Jeb Oppenheimer struggled to his feet.

‘I’m not leaving without samples,’ he insisted, gesturing at the huge crystals with his cane. ‘Help me get them before we leave.’

Ethan almost laughed.

‘Like hell,’ he said, and grabbed Saffron’s arm. ‘Come on, let’s go.’

Ethan had almost turned his back when he heard the sound of a gun’s mechanism being cocked. He turned to see the old man holding a small, snub-nosed pistol in his right hand. Ethan froze as Oppenheimer smiled grimly.

‘I never leave home without one,’ he said. ‘Now, get up there and get me some of those crystals or I’ll put a bullet in you.’

Ethan stared in disbelief as Oppenheimer walked away from the pool and positioned himself between the chamber exit and Ethan and Saffron.

‘Are you really that insane?’ Ethan demanded. ‘We could be buried alive in here at any moment.’

‘Best hurry then!’ Oppenheimer cackled, gesturing with the pistol. ‘Move!’

Ethan shook his head.

‘No. You’ll never be able to climb up there on your own, so without me you’re screwed.’

Oppenheimer’s face wrinkled up on itself in furious defiance.

‘Not quite.’

Oppenheimer shifted his aim and before Ethan could even register what he was about to do, he fired a single shot that rang out deafeningly loud in the chamber. Saffron cried out as the bullet thumped into her belly and out through her side, ricocheting off nearby rocks and zipping away into the chamber.