The Deep Sea Diver's Syndrome Read Online Free

approaching wakefulness, he was afraid that at the first turn he’d tear the steering wheel right off the column with his increased density.
    Nadia turned the key and pulled away just as the red lights showed up down the avenue. “Five-O,” she said in a flat voice. David shriveled into the seat, not daring to move for fear of tearing through the vehicle. Luckily, the car held together, and the metal hadn’t yet taken on the gelatinous look that signaled imminent waking.
    “They’re in hot pursuit,” Nadia said, swinging the muscle car into an alley. The tires screeched at every turn, and the smell of burning rubber filled the car.
    “Gonna be tight,” the redhead muttered. “You took too long. Lost focus. Scared me. I should’ve come with you.”
    “You can’t, you know that,” David said softly, putting a hand on her arm. “That’s now how it works. No changes to the ritual. I always have to go alone.”
    “That’s why it keeps getting harder and harder. Your guilt’s getting stronger. Somewhere deep down, you want to fail and come back empty-handed.”
    “No! That’s not true!”
    “C’mon!”
    They were being shot at. Short bursts hammered the bodywork like a hail of ball bearings.
    “We’ll be OK,” said Nadia, letting out a breath. “How deep are we?”
    “Six hundred fifty feet,” said David. “Waking any minute now.”
    “You take care of yourself up there, OK?” she whispered. “In the real world, I mean. Down here you always make it through, but up there … I’m scared whenever you go away. When will you come back down?”
    “I don’t know. In a week, if I can.”
    “That’s a long time. When you’re not here, I can’t stop thinking about all the dangers waiting for you up there: diseases, accidents, hit and runs … what a terrible world.”
    “Terrible,” David agreed, as the back windshield burst into pieces from the bullets. Nadia popped the glove box with one hand, grabbed a grenade, yanked the pin out with her teeth, and tossed it through the missing windshield.
    “Diseases scare me the most,” she said. “There’s the—what do you call it again? The flu?”
    The grenade exploded, tossing a police cruiser into the air. It landed heavily, blocking the street, belching out curls of smoke and flame.
    “The flu’s not that bad,” said David. “Except if you’re old. Don’t worry about the flu.”
    He looked over his shoulder. Some cops were struggling to get clear of the twisted chassis. Others ran through the night frantically waving their arms, human torches, their screaming mouths the only dark spots on their bodies.
    “You could die even if you never left the house,” Nadia was saying. “You could slip on a bar of soap in the shower and crack your skull on the edge of the tub. Promise you won’t shower too much? It doesn’t matter if you’re filthy. There are no smells in dreams.”
    No one was chasing them now. Nadia was still going pedalto the metal to the edge of town. “We made it,” she said, turning toward David with her eternally pained smile.
    “It wasn’t an easy job,” he said sadly. “I have to do better next time. We can’t keep going on like this.”
    “Don’t let those people up there get to you,” Nadia objected almost immediately. “You gotta be in tip-top shape to go lower than three thousand feet. No point tempting fate. If I hadn’t been there tonight—”
    The car was now rolling through a landscape of empty lots cluttered with unrecognizable shadows that stood out against the horizon like the plywood flats of a set. Nadia slowed down. The race was over now.
    “Jorgo’s coming for me,” she murmured. “The cops can’t trace this back to us, even if they find the car. I stole it this morning.”
    David opened the door and got out. The sun seemed too soft, jellyish. Nadia ran to his arms and pressed her lips to his. Her lips were always too hot, possessed of an unhealthy heat, a kind of chronic fever that alarmed