“Energy conservation. Just enough light for safety. Motion sensors turn them on and off as you move along.”
“I was being ironic,” Hallie said.
“Gathered that. I’ve read the story. Faulkner, right?”
Hallie’s nose kept her from setting Bacon straight about contemporary American fiction. “What is that reek?”
“Eau de Pole,” Bacon chuckled. “Diesel fumes, disinfectant, burned grease, and unwashed bodies. You’re here just for five days?”
“Why is the floor vibrating?”
“So you’re one of those.”
“What kind of those?”
“Who answer questions with questions. It’s irritating.”
“Is it?” Hallie could keep the grin off her face, but not out of her eyes.
“Fungees.” Bacon scowled.
“What’s a fungee?”
“Fucking new guy. Or girl.”
Bacon’s cough had sounded bad outside. It was worse inside, without the face mask and the covering noise of wind. She was flushed, her eyes were bloodshot, and her nose ran.
“Picornavirus heaven,” Hallie said. “Everybody sealed in like lab mice, passing germs back and forth.”
“You a doctor?”
“Microbiologist. Where’s the cafeteria? I need water and coffee.”
——
The U.S. Navy dug the first South Pole station out of solid virgin ice in 1957. Buried thirty feet deep now, that original facility, called “Old Pole,” still survived. So did some vestiges of naval tradition. Thus the current station’s cafeteria was a galley. By any name, it was like the dining hall in a big high school or penitentiary, one open rectangle redolent of fresh floor wax and old grease, crammed with scarred green tables and chairs, and buzzing at lunchtime. The kitchen and serving line were in back. In a fit of festivity, somebody had once strung multicolored Christmas lights from the ceiling. Most were burned out now, and their wires hung like thick green cobwebs.
“How’s South Pole food?” Hallie was in line with Bacon.
“Ever been in prison?”
Before Hallie could say, “Not yet,” a red-haired woman in a lab coat stood up too quickly, knocking her chair over backward. She was clamping a wad of paper napkins to her face, trying to stanch a bad nosebleed. Blood quickly soaked the makeshift compress, ran down the skin of her hands and pale wrists, and dropped in radish-sized spots onto her white lab coat.
For a few moments, nothing more happened. Then the woman’s eyes bulged and her chest convulsed. She coughed out a thick, red stream. Took a step, stumbled, mouth thrown open, blood spewing. She staggered, knocking over chairs. Grabbed for a table. Blood kept pouring out, splashing the front of her lab coat, splattering tabletops, the floor. People scrambled away.
She fell over backward. Her head hit the floor with a sharp crack. A PA system boomed:
“Code blue in the galley. Code blue in the galley. EMTs to the galley. Repeat, code blue in the galley.”
“Somebody called comms,” Bacon said.
A heavy man in black coveralls knelt beside the woman. He put his face close to feel for breath, shook his head, and began performing chest compressions. Another man knelt by her head with a mask-style ventilator, but there was too much blood flowing to use it.
Two EMTs in blue jumpsuits burst into the galley. They suctioned the woman’s airway, then went to work with a ventilator bag and defibrillator. After ten minutes and four sets of shocks, the instrument’s computerized voice droned, “Victim not responding.”
The EMTs rocked back on their heels. “She’s gone,” one said.
Hallie had seen victims on mountains and in caves badly hurt, drowned, and, several times, killed and disarticulated by long falls, but she had never seen so much blood. The woman lay completely surrounded by an oval, dark red pool. The two men and the EMTs looked like battle casualties.
The big room had been absolutely silent while the EMTs worked. Now it became even louder than before. When she’d entered, Hallie had seen dozens of faces, each one distinct. Now they all looked very much alike, reshaped by horror. Someone—she couldn’t tell whether man or woman—was sobbing softly off to one side.
“What the hell happened here?” Hallie turned to see a tall man dressed in pressed khakis. She was struck by the pallor of his skin and how his clothes hung off his knobby frame. His voice was raspy. Heavy smoker or bad sore throat, she thought. Maybe both.
“I was sitting close.” A woman in the onlooking circle, red-faced, close to tears. One hand was clasping a table edge, the other at the base of her throat. “Harriet stood up all of a sudden. I thought it was Polarrhea. But then she started vomiting blood. I never saw so much blood. Look at it.”