This Green Hell

SIX

Aimee sat quietly in the shade of the stretched canvas sheet that was doing little to block out the pervasive humidity. Her eyes followed the activity of the men as each worked smoothly, but noisily: changing pipe segments, calibrating penetration force or drill speed, or simply yelling out data to Alfraedo on the other side of the platform.

Her stomach roiled from the impatience she felt over the time it was taking to break through into the deep cavern, and also from the images of the ruined bodies just past the jungle’s edge. She thought she could still smell a hint of the ripped and torn flesh as it sat slowly baking in the sun and heat, and a tiny shot of bile hit the back of her throat; wishing she could have another sip of Francisco’s whisky, she swallowed hard.

Aimee grimaced when the acidic taste refused to leave her mouth, and began searching for the small doctor just as the background noise of the drill thumped, making her start, before taking on a smoother sound for a second or two, then stopping as its rotational brakes were applied.

A shout went up from the rig foreman — they had broken through into the gas chamber.

Aimee got to her feet, her stomach still threatened more discomfort, but she was thankful for some action at last. She strode a few feet closer, but had been cautioned to keep her distance from the heavy machinery while it was being operated, and settled for hovering just behind the workers and their furious exertions.

The drill head had to be carefully extracted and the toothed bit drawn back up inside the drill shaft. It was a tense procedure: the pipe remained sealed, but with trillions of cubic feet of gas under thousands of pounds of pressure, any mistake could be disastrous — causing either an explosion that would crush hundreds of feet of expensive pipe, or destabilisation and fissuring around the penetration site resulting in gas leakage over a huge area.

Aimee paced back and forth while the last few hundred feet of pipe were withdrawn from the well. Finally, the end hissed free in a white cloud of raw gas and micro-fragments scraped from the walls of the shaft. She held her breath — primitive gas contained sulfur, methane and a number of other revolting-smelling compounds that always made her imagine dinosaurs farting.

Ignoring the warning that she should stay well clear of the drill zone, she pushed forward. She had to get the encrusted drill tip before surface bacteria contaminated it. What she sought came from an environment so different from their own that it might as well have been from another planet — so fragile that it could be destroyed on contact with the air. Assuming there was even anything there in the first place …

Ramón used a twenty-pound wrench to unscrew the drill bit, then let it drop gently onto a padded sheet so the soil and rock caught in its teeth wouldn’t shake free.

He stood and rolled his shoulders — his whole body was sore and he had a headache. He hadn’t slept properly since his trip into the jungle, and he was tired — deathly so. Nightmares continued to boil away his sleep at night, and his cousin, Hector hadn’t returned. Still Ramón refused to take seriously the dark images that filled his dreams; to accept them as real memories, rather than some sort of drug-induced hallucination — to do that, would surely lead to madness.

The tall American woman stood behind him, watching his every move. She was attractive enough, but not his type; like most foreign women, she was too tall and much too aggressive.

The encrusted drill head glistened darkly in the sunlight, like the feathers of a water bird fouled by an oil slick. Ramón lifted it in his thick rigging gloves and held it out to the woman. She looked pleased, but refused to take it in her hands. Instead, she asked him to return it to the sheet and make a kind of carrying sack by lifting the fabric’s edges, so it could be moved to her tent office.

After Ramón had placed the sheet and its contents on the small folding table, the woman said something to Doctor Herrera, who then turned to Ramón.

‘Please get some new gloves, Ramón,’ he said. ‘There could be contaminants on that pair now.’

Ramón nodded and walked away, pulling off first one glove, then using his bare hand to remove the other. Black, oily sludge now stained his fingers.

Aimee scraped a tiny speck of the glistening debris onto a glass slide before placing the drill tip in a clear isolation box. With experienced hands, she added a few drops of demineralised water to the sample and placed it under the lens of a high-power microscope, then she unwound a small length of cable and inserted one end into a free port on her computer; the other end fitted neatly into the back of the microscope. Aimee clicked an icon that informed her the scope was successfully connected, and immediately her screen expanded to show a seething grey ocean of microbial life. She grinned and punched the air — success! It was exactly what she had been hoping for: living bacteria from a primordial gas chamber deep beneath the earth.

In among the whirling, flicking and spinning life, flecks of silver shimmered. Aimee recognised the material immediately: iridium. Must be where the K-T layer extended in this region, she thought. She had come across the mineral many times in her work. The rare substance was in abundance in two places that she knew of: the first place was a thin sedimentary layer that dated back over 65 million years and separated the Cretaceous and Mesozoic eras; a global skin that separated humans from the dinosaurs. The theory was that iridium was the pulverised remains of a massive meteor strike — which was where the second common form was found: in meteors, meteorites and astral bodies that made Earth landfall.

Aimee moved on from the mineral to the microscopic animals that crowded the screen. She clicked her mouse to create a square border around them, then enlarged and rotated the captured images. Many she was able to identify as well-known, simple anaerobic life forms, but others … they refused to fit into any recognisable categories. She was sure she’d seen something like them before — long spherical bacteria in chains — but not from miles below the ground.

She suspended another image on the screen and scrolled down to the description box, her cursor blinking at her as she sat thinking for a moment. She remembered Alfred’s words about the bacteria being a potential key, then smiled and typed: Clavicula occultus; Latin for ‘hidden key’. And hopefully that’s what you might be, she thought as she added a standard taxonomic descriptor for spherical bacterium.

She flipped back to the live images and was surprised to see that some of the chains had increased slightly in size. Hmm, hungry little fellows, aren’t you?

She continued to examine the bacterial life forms for a while, their shape nagging at her memory. Finally, she saved the images and shut down her computer. She’d know more after she ran some tests back at the camp.

She smiled again, her earlier black memories and fears swept away by the realisation that she may have hit upon an inexpensive, and limitless, source of fuel for the world. Today is a good day for mankind, she thought.

Ramón was having the strangest dream of his life. He was in a black pit full of twinkling stars — pinpoints of light that landed on him like angel dust and tickled his skin. His hands were the most thickly covered, and they wouldn’t work. He felt as light as a feather, but just as weak.

He came awake slowly, as though rising through water to break the surface on a gloomy landscape. His nose was running into his mouth and the taste was strange, like dirt and tar. He tried to sit up in the dark tent, moving quietly so his three companions would not waken — all were bigger than Ramón and would not take kindly to being roused unnecessarily after a long day’s work and an early start the following morning. But he couldn’t move his arms to place them on the ground. The darkness was velvet black and made it impossible to see even outlines. Still, he knew something was terribly wrong: his arms didn’t just feel numb, they felt … gone.

The tingling sensation turned to pinpricks of fire and he knew he was going to have to wake his co-workers. He would risk their harsh words or blows; he just needed to ensure he was okay.

‘José, lo siento,’ he called softly into the dark, beginning to sob as he felt the prickling move to start in his shoulders. He called again, a little louder. ‘José.’

This time he was answered by a grunt in the dark, then a deep and sleepy voice beside him. ‘Qué quieres, Ramón?’

Ramón sobbed out his request for light.

The larger man swore softly under his breath and reached for the mud-caked flashlight they kept near the door of the tent. A small click and the beam lit Ramón up like a ghastly performer on a stage.

Jose’s scream was high and piercing and immediately wrenched the other two men from their sleep. On seeing Ramón, all three pressed themselves to the back of the tent.

Ramón’s body was coated in a black oily mucus that ran from every orifice in his body, even from the very pores of his skin. The most shocking aspect was his upper limbs — or lack of them. At his shoulders were dripping stumps. The wounds weren’t bloody and ragged, as would be expected if the arms had been hacked off by a knife. Instead, the limbs were frayed, as though something had dissolved them into a tattered mess. As the men watched, a piece of grey-black flesh fell away from Ramón’s shoulder and plopped into the pool beside him, melting away like butter in a hot pan.

Ramón’s vision was clouding, but he could see the horror on the men’s faces and knew it must be bad. He tried one last time to sit up, but all he managed was to rock forward a few inches and then flop back down, splashing into the pool of viscous liquid that surrounded him. It splattered the other men and they cried out in disgust, holding damp sheeting or clothing over their lower faces.

Ramón sobbed and turned his face to the canvas roof to pray, his voice now a wet, guttural sound. He coughed, and a plume of dark spray flew from his throat and swirled around inside the tent.

His three colleagues had seen enough. They fell over each other as they scrambled outside, screaming for the medico as if the devil himself had appeared to them.

By the time Francisco called Aimee, all that remained of Ramón was a blackened head and neck, a pair of glistening feet, and a mound of jelly-like substance steaming in between.

‘Oh my God, what the hell did this?’ Aimee asked. ‘Some sort of industrial solvent?’ She pulled the front of her shirt up over her nose. ‘Smells like boiled vegetables and … something like tar.’

Francisco shrugged and shook his head. His eyes were locked on the remains and his normally light brown complexion looked sallow and waxen. He raised a handkerchief to cover his nose and spoke through the incongruously spotless cotton. ‘There are no chemicals used on this project that could cause that type of damage to the human body. Do you think it could be a disease? There are recorded virus types that exist in jungles that can cause extreme cellular disintegration — like Ebola or Marburg?’

Aimee narrowed her eyes at the mess on the sleeping mat and spoke through her shirt. ‘Yes, you’re right, but I don’t believe there’s been any recorded incident on the South American continent. Anyway, they don’t cause total disintegration, just cell-wall destruction leading to organ failure and bleed-out. No, this is something different — and very weird.’

She kneeled for a closer look, still keeping her distance from the corpse. ‘It’s still active — it’s breaking down rapidly. Let’s get some photos of the remains before there’s nothing left. I’ll take some samples too.’ She paused. ‘This tent should be off limits to everyone.’

‘Yes, I agree. I also think the men who were with this poor soul should be disinfected and kept in isolation until we know what it is we are dealing with.’ Francisco pulled the handkerchief away from his face for a moment, and tilted his head. ‘It seems the more we erode the jungle, the more it fights back. There have been extreme contaminations in Latin America, Dr Weir. Two hundred people were infected with hantavirus in the Boquerón region. Many recovered, but our government takes any outbreaks very seriously now.’ He looked at Aimee, his face still very pale. ‘I will have to report this to the Paraguayan Communicable Diseases Unit in Asunción.’

Aimee nodded and followed him out of the tent. She regretted entering the enclosed space without a mask. If the contaminant was a microorganism, and was airborne, she was also now at risk.