Pressure Read Free Page B

upcoming events. For a country that was facing the mounting possibility of a forced, mandatory evacuation, the people of Mauritius didn’t seem to care. Or perhaps this was just their way of dealing with it. Maybe they chose to face it by pretending that life was still going on, as normal.
    Carrie thought that she could almost like it here. Smiling, she inhaled deeply through her nose, trying to get rid of the smell of the hospital, which still seemed to linger about her. She smelled flowers and food. Her stomach grumbled.
    Then she thought of Peter, and her mood soured again. She shivered, despite the tropical heat.
    The events of the last three days were still a jumbled blur, but she decided to focus on them, so as not to think about Peter. Not yet. She would have to, at some point, because there were things she needed to do, but first, she needed time to consider her next moves carefully. She had experienced something during this last dive—she wasn’t sure what. A hallucination, perhaps? She was no stranger to the sense of euphoria that came with free diving. Being that far down, with no scuba gear, was very much like what being in outer space must feel like. But this had been different. She hadn’t been free diving, for one thing. She’d had the protection of state-of-the-art diving gear. And when the sensation had overcome her, it wasn’t euphoria she had felt. It was …
    No. She wasn’t ready to go there yet. She needed to plan first.
    And she also needed a drink. Or more likely, several of them.
    She remembered the equipment malfunctioning. Of course it had. That had been the one constant on this expedition—everything that could go wrong, had gone wrong, especially when it came to electronic gear. Such mechanical failures had been the reason she and Peter had attempted such a dangerous dive in the first place. Her memories were more confused in the moments after that—just snatches, really. A jumbled mess of images and impressions and sounds. She remembered freeing herself from her tank and gear, and making for the surface, managing to save her own life with her ascension-breathing techniques, but because she experienced compression so suddenly, she’d gotten quite a case of the bends. She didn’t remember blacking out, but it must have happened after she’d surfaced. She had snatches of memories in the moments after that—the severe itching she’d felt all over her skin, being brought out of the water and placed in the hyperbaric chamber, (which, thankfully, was one piece of equipment that had not malfunctioned), the dim awareness that she’d soiled herself, concerned faces of colleagues whose names she couldn’t remember as she drifted in and out of consciousness, the numbness in her arms, legs, and tongue, and a brutal pain in her lower back—all symptoms of decompression sickness.
    The next thing she remembered was waking up in the hospital, alive, thanks to her skills as a free diver, and her ability to hold her breath until resurfacing. And, she supposed, the doctors and the EMTs.
    Peter wasn’t a free diver and the monitors had lost track of him as he descended deeper into the trench.
    She’d learned yesterday that he was missing and presumed dead.
    Carrie thought that was a safe assumption.
    After walking a few more blocks, she found a quiet bar nestled between two apartment buildings. It was dimly lit, even in the daylight, and didn’t echo of music or laughter or fighting. Deciding to try her luck, Carrie stepped inside and paused for a moment, letting her eyes adjust. When they did, she saw that the establishment was nearly empty, save for a drowsy-looking bartender with a thick, graying mustache, and an even sleepier-looking patron nursing a drink at the end of the bar.
    The customer seemed lost in his own morose thoughts, and didn’t look up as she wove her way around a series of rickety, beer-stained tables and