Our Hearts. Chapter Eleven. The Shaft

The timid, pastel halftones of dawn in Kato-Tombe were interrupted every day by the crude, inevitable intrusion of the generator.

The guttural, deep rumble of the diesel rose from behind the hill at exactly five-thirty, the way the chest of a sleeping giant rises with a whistle and a wheeze after a long, anxious pause. The air was immediately saturated with the bluish, oily smell of burnt diesel fuel and dust that had not yet dried after the night.

The camp woke up very quickly, without drawn-out transitions from sleep to wakefulness: with a dry electrical crackle, the deathly-white fluorescent light flashed in the residential modules, bolts clanked at the posts—a sharp, metallic sound that instinctively made one’s jaw clench—and large, sharp gravel crunched beneath the heavy boots of the patrols. There was an almost religious discipline in this merciless mechanical rhythm—the way Benedictine monks rise for the first prayer, submitting not to the will of the merciful sun, but to a blind, inexorable rule.

Leo was not sleeping. He lay on the narrow cot, which smelled of someone else’s sweat and disinfectant, with his hands behind his head, listening to how his own anatomy was inevitably turning into an alien, unmapped archipelago.

His internal clock had irrevocably shattered. His first heart—his own, familiar, trained by long years of study and stress—beat out an even, almost doomed rhythm: sixty-four beats per minute. But nearby, behind his sternum, in the stifling darkness of his body, a second one had awakened. It beat deeper, stronger, with a frightening, cavernous insatiability, responding to approximately every third beat of the first. This was nothing like simple extrasystoles or neurotic arrhythmia. Leo, as a doctor, felt with chilling clarity how the alien, primal muscular pump was physically displacing the tissues of the mediastinum, how it roughly compressed his left lung, forcing the lower lobe to painfully collapse with every breath, and dully pressed against his diaphragm. Something was pulsating in his chest—it seemed that two autonomous, thinking organs were crowded there, desperately contesting each other for the meager free space among his aching ribs.

“Am I infected? Where?” the thought ricocheted erratically, in time with the alien pulse. “In the stifling tent? In the sterile laboratory when my hand flinched? Or…”

A knock at the door—short, firm, double.

Diana Pătrașcu stood on the threshold, her body blocking the timid morning draft. She wore a dark blue cotton shirt with a stiff collar, tucked into gray cargo pants, and sturdy hiking boots covered with a thin layer of rusty-red dust. In her left hand, she held a lightweight leather case, its handle gleaming from the frequent touch of fingers, and in her right—two scratched construction helmets, one yellow and one white, with frayed chin straps.

Behind her back, exactly two steps away, stood two guards. One was a lanky Congolese in faded camouflage with an Israeli Emtan on a shoulder sling; he smelled of cheap tobacco and gun oil. The second was white, stocky, with a poorly shaved skull and round, watery eyes that reflected the gray morning sky. His gaze held neither hostility, nor interest, nor even a shadow of humanity—only a biomechanical fixation on its target, frighteningly reminiscent of a blind optical sensor at work.

“Good morning, Gonzales. Put on your boots. I will show you where Brunet worked.”

Dialogues with her always resembled the exchange of encrypted messages—minimum intonation, maximum functionality.

They walked toward the far edge of the camp. The walk took about twenty minutes of viscous, silent pacing. At first, the wooden decking laid between the headquarters and the equipment hangars resonated dully, with a springy give beneath their feet, but as they approached the northern side of the camp, the wood gave way to packed red clay, slippery from the morning dew, then to jagged gravel that scratched at their soles, and finally to scorched earth covered in deep, wrinkled cracks. Here, the PMC camp reached the very edge of an old, exhausted quarry, yawning like a wound on the body of the savanna.

The perimeter in this sector looked different. Instead of a high steel fence with a concrete base, there was only a double row of barbed wire, carelessly stretched over darkened wooden posts that were slimy with dampness. The old razor wire sagged in rusty, toothless loops. On the lopsided gate hung a peeling iron sign with a faded yellow-and-black radiation hazard trefoil. The paint had blistered over the inscription:

DANGER

NE PAS ENTRER

NSAMBU TE

Beyond the wire, literally five meters from the edge of a dizzying, crumbling precipice, a shack clung right up against a gentle hill that disappeared into thick undergrowth. Single-story, built of earthy, porous, colonial-era brick and roofed with sheets of corrugated iron hopelessly rusted brown from corrosion. One small window was boarded up tight with swollen plywood. From the outside, no thick power cables or water pipes stretched to the shack. More than anything, it resembled a shed forgotten by God and men, used for storing pickaxes and deteriorated explosives—an echo of the cruel times of the Belgian Congo.

“You will stay here,” Diana commanded the guards.

The soldiers silently took up positions on either side of the gate. The bald one didn’t even twitch a muscle on his face—he continued to scan the wasteland behind them with a glassy stare, as if expecting a threat from the red earth itself, rather than from people.

Diana unlocked a massive padlock with a key from a small ring; the metal clanked dryly, and she pushed the metal door inward.

Inside the shack, there were no windows or air conditioners, and the space immediately pressed down on their shoulders with its full mass. The air here was suffocating, unbearably damp and stale, settling in the mouth with a rancid taste. It smelled of the heated roof and a characteristic bouquet that ate into the pores, which Leo recognized instantly, with a nose-stinging sharpness: formalin, caustic preservative solutions, phenol, and a barely perceptible, acidic, throat-scratching hint of lysing agents. It was the concentrated smell of a field biological laboratory, multiplied by the spirit of an old crypt.

The room was dimly lit by a few fluorescent lamps powered by a humming battery pack in the corner. On steel tables that chilled the skin, microscopes, a portable centrifuge, containers with alarming biohazard markings, and a laptop connected to an uninterruptible power supply stood in neat, pedantic rows. On the shelves along the walls, like a hideous cabinet of curiosities, glass jars lined up, containing samples of whitish tissues floating in a cloudy, yellowish solution.

“Maurice preferred to work here,” Diana said, setting her case on the edge of the table. Her voice sounded muffled. “Far from Girard’s bunker with its sterile bureaucracy. It’s quiet here. And it was here that he discovered the primary vector. The bats weren’t found in the main cave system, but right here.”

She took out a portable, palm-sized Geiger counter in a rubberized casing, slipped it into her pocket, and walked over to the far wall of the shack. There, between two lopsided shelving units, hung a thick canvas tarp—dirty green, dusty, securely fastened to rusty iron hooks. Diana grabbed the rough edge and pulled it aside with a sharp, eardrum-scratching rustle.

Behind the canopy, a maw opened up.

It was neither a door nor a neatly prepared technological passage. A rough, semicircular adit went straight into the primordial darkness of the hill. The walls were carelessly reinforced with sparse, rotten wooden supports, blackened by time and covered with a whitish, fuzzy layer of toxic mold. A completely different air exhaled from the depths—icy, damp, cellar-like. Mixed within it was the sharp, ammoniacal taste of guano and an undertone of something that had fermented long ago, something sweet and putrid. And for some reason—Leo swallowed viscous saliva—cutting through this stench clearly and illogically was the faintly perceptible aroma of church incense and intoxicating, blooming gardenia.

“Take this,” Diana handed him a helmet and a headlamp. The plastic was unpleasantly cold. “And watch your step.”

Leo put on the helmet— the stiff strap dug into his chin—and adjusted the lamp. The narrow, deathly-white LED beam sliced through the thick gloom, illuminating the uneven, moisture-seeping vault of the tunnel.

“Did the Americans dig this? In the forties?” he asked. His own voice seemed alien to him amidst this rough stonework and the jagged marks on the stone.

“No,” Diana clicked her headlamp on. “The Americans used drilling rigs and reinforced their shafts with concrete. This is a manual excavation. The marks of chisels, pickaxes, and manual drilling tools. Copper ores were mined here long before the Belgians arrived. This excavation was made decades earlier. Or perhaps, centuries.”

She stepped over the slippery threshold of the adit and slowly turned around: “And one more thing, Gonzales… Be careful. If they are in there right now, don’t frighten them.”

Leo looked at her questioningly, feeling a sticky chill crawl down his spine.

“The bats,” Diana explained dispassionately. “Sometimes they appear in this part of the shaft. The colony is unstable. Let’s go.”

Leo stepped over the rotted wooden timber of the threshold—and in that very second, his body responded to the step with a monstrous, destructive physiological rebellion.

It didn’t start in his chest. His right hand, where the old copper bracelet lay tightly, suddenly flared with an icy burn. The metal on his wrist didn’t just turn cold—it began to vibrate, emitting a physically barely perceptible tremor, biting into his skin; it seemed as if it had entered a damaging resonance with an invisible, ancient frequency coming from the very bowels of the earth.

Then, a tight wave struck his chest.

Leo staggered and, to keep from falling, pressed his bare palm against the slimy wall seeping with icy mucus. His own heart stumbled, pitifully froze for a long, terrifying pause, while that second one, formed inside, pushed with such bestial force that it took his breath away. It wasn’t a normal pulse—it was an oppressive, inescapable hydraulic blow. Leo clearly, with a nauseating tangibility, felt how under his skin, along his ribs and on his neck, small, hard nodules, like lead shot, were rapidly emerging. The subdermal rash swelled instantly, pulling the skin tight, turning the subcutaneous tissue into a hot, lumpy surface. A roar filled his ears, as if a massive dam had collapsed nearby, and a persistent, astringent, nauseating taste of oxidized copper and rusty iron spread in his mouth.

His internal organs crumpled, submissively making room for the growing impulse. It was pure horror, paralyzing in its primitivism—the horror of flesh colliding with the triumph of an alien neoplasm that heartlessly used his own circulatory system as a perfect nutrient broth.

“Stop, Gonzales. Look…”

Diana’s voice sounded hollow, but it tore through the growing hum in his ears. The beam of her headlamp lowered to the floor.

Leo forced himself to straighten up, tearing his palm away from the stone. He breathed heavily, raggedly, drawing the icy air in through his mouth. On the uneven stone floor of the shaft, in a small natural depression between two outcroppings of rock, pooled a liquid.

Thick. Oily. Crimson. Opaque. It lazily seeped from a barely noticeable hairline crack deep in the wall, flowing down in small, sticky drops. In the cold light of the LED lamps, this substance shone brightly, with a deep, almost hypnotic hue that was impossible to confuse with anything else.

“Is that blood?” Leo said, barely above a whisper. His voice sounded hoarse, as if he were speaking from under several meters of water.

“No,” Diana crouched down, her face in the light of the headlamp looking as if carved from marble. She stopped her hand an inch from the puddle, without touching it. “When we first saw it, we thought the same. But it is not a biological fluid. It is an aqueous solution with an extremely high concentration of mercury sulfide and iron oxides. In essence—a suspension of liquid cinnabar. But with an anomalous, impossible chemical structure.”

She pulled the dosimeter from her side pocket and extended a thin metal probe. As soon as the tip approached within a couple of centimeters of the shining, amalgam surface, the device erupted in a rapid, hysterical crackle that merged into a single piercing whistle.

On the digital display, red numbers raced with lightning speed, madly.

“Radioactive,” Diana said evenly, as if reading a routine laboratory report, her voice cutting through the crackle of the device. “A consistent spectrum. Uranium-238, thorium, traces of radium isotopes. Almost the exact same profile we invariably find in the tissues of the affected specimens.”

Leo stared silently at the crimson puddle, feeling cold drops of sweat rolling down his face. The mineral blood of the earth. Radioactive cinnabar, flowing out of the Precambrian monolith like from a severed artery. In his chest, the second heart gave another unhurried, elastic thud, as if entering into an intelligent dialogue with the panicked crackle of the Geiger counter.

And then, from the endless depths of the shaft, came a sound.

It wasn’t the scraping of crumbling stone or the rustle of sliding earth. It was a breath in.

Low, drawn-out, unbearably deep, with a quiet, guttural suction of frigid air, as if somewhere in there, far beyond the bend, in the absolute, untouched darkness, the giant, multi-meter lungs of a living continent were leisurely expanding.

Inhale… a long, tense, frozen pause, during which time seemed to stand still in all of Katanga… and an exhale. The exhale sounded shorter, with a slight whistling wheeze, frighteningly reminiscent of the movement of stale air through a narrow organic valve.

“What is that?” Leo whispered, physically feeling the hairs on his forearms stand on end.

Diana didn’t flinch and didn’t turn her headlamp toward the depths of the tunnel. She kept the beam on the shining floor.

“We don’t know,” she replied in a quiet, matter-of-fact tone. “Barometric fluctuations in vast karst voids. Deep ground shifts. The movement of subterranean gases. The displacement of groundwater. The sound appears periodically. Sometimes it repeats with the precision of a metronome every five minutes; sometimes the shaft lies muted for weeks. Girard ran a spectral analysis—they are low-frequency acoustic waves, but their source is definitely located far beyond the cave-in.”

And right then, following the fading exhale, movement came from the darkness.

At first—a light rustle, barely perceptible to the ear, of a dry leather fan being stretched. Then the merciless beam of the headlamp snatched dark, swift shadows from beneath the high, moisture-seeping vault.

They didn’t fly the way ordinary small bats fly, darting around in a panic with chaotic, ragged fluttering. They glided. They were large hammer-headed fruit bats. The wingspan of their dark, velvety-leathery wings exceeded a meter. Hideous, absurdly elongated muzzles with corpse-gray, flared nostrils flashed for a fraction of a second in the beam of light. Their eyes reflected the diode lamps as two pairs of bright, ruby, almost sentient points. Without a single squeak, without the slightest sound except the dry rustle of the musty air being sliced, the three enormous specimens described a perfectly smooth arc right under the ceiling of the shaft and silently vanished back into the thick, incense-smelling darkness.

It seemed to Leo that for one unbearable second, the rhythm of their massive wings perfectly matched the rhythm of his awakened second heart: beat – flap – beat – flap.

“It’s time to go,” Diana touched his elbow. Her strong fingers squeezed his sleeve coldly and adamantly. “We shouldn’t disturb them. They come and they go.”

They returned to the shack. Diana lowered the rough, dust-smelling canvas tarp and carefully secured it on the iron hooks, cutting off the gloom. The outside world with its suffocating, sterile smell of formalin and the businesslike noise of the diesel behind the thin wall seemed almost illusory to Leo, a cardboard set piece. He sank powerlessly onto a hard wooden stool by the table and stared at his lowered hands. His fingers were trembling finely, treacherously.

Diana walked over to the portable refrigerator humming in the corner, clicked the latches, and took out a rack holding several glass test tubes. Inside splashed a cloudy solution, slightly opalescent in the light.

“We keep these samples here,” she said, slowly turning the test tube so the light refracted in the liquid. “Maurice secretly transferred them from the main bunker. In the central lab, Girard works under sterile conditions with a stable, preserved strain. But the virus that is isolated here… it behaves differently. It is constantly, feverishly mutating. It is incredibly aggressive and frighteningly unstable.”

“Is it… is it reacting to what’s happening in the shaft?” Leo asked, wiping sticky, salty sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. The second heartbeat in his chest was gradually slowing down, reluctantly quieting, but leaving behind a sensation of deep, draining muscular fatigue.

“To the environment,” Diana corrected dryly. “To the background radiation, to the invisible mercury vapors, to the very composition of that dark-red liquid. The shaft is completely caved in about thirty meters from here. There’s a solid, compacted collapse of rock. Two years ago, when we first arrived at this site, we decided to clear a passage. We brought in four local workers from the mine. Experienced, tough guys, used to working with this kind of soil in the dark.”

Diana leaned against the cold edge of the metal table, crossing her arms over her chest. The dim light of the lamp reflected in her eyes.

“They dug for several days, without straightening their backs, until they punched a small, narrow breach in the cave-in. And from there, this liquid gushed out. The very same crimson one. It flowed right under their feet, flooding their boots, dripping onto their helmets. And right behind it, like spilling from a torn sack, a swarm of those fruit bats flew out of the breach.”

“And the workers?”

“You should have seen their faces, Gonzales. There was nothing human left in them. They dropped their tools into that radioactive mud. The eldest of them, Nkembo, I think his name was, broke into a scream, as if he had seen hell yawning wide open before him. They ran from the shack, stumbling, crushing each other in the narrow doorway in blind panic. In their dialect, they wailed the exact same phrase, over and over. Our translator later turned pale and told us it meant: ‘It is a curse! The earth is bleeding! He must not be disturbed!’”

“Did you try to bring them back?”

“They quit that same evening,” her voice did not waver. “They didn’t take their final pay, didn’t drop by the cramped dorms for their personal belongings. They simply picked up and walked away on foot through the night jungle toward Nzinga. We never saw them again.”

“And the cave-in was left untouched?”

“Yes. We didn’t proceed. The liquid appears and disappears according to its own schedule, incomprehensible to us. We found no reservoir, we found no logical source. The geologists talk smartly about hydrothermal discharge from deep horizons, but it seems this chemical composition has no parallel on the planet. And the main thing is—the sequence is always, rigorously maintained: first the bloody water appears, and only after that, as if on command, the bats arrive.”

“Do they drink it?” Leo asked quietly. Diana looked at him with a long gaze, tinged with noticeable respect.

“Maurice concluded that this is exactly what happens. He sometimes spent the night here, on this folding cot. He maniacally watched them through an infrared camera for hours. But they don’t just drink this liquid, Gonzales. He believed it is integrated into their very biology. Their light bones, their blood, their tissue enzymes have been reconfigured for uranium and heavy mercury. They are a living, flying reservoir for this virus. And Maurice firmly believed that beyond the cave-in, there is a massive natural grotto. The primary nidus. The place where all this originates.”

“And did he find a way through to it?”

“All we know is that he got infected and died an agonizing death, Leo. But if he did manage to find a way past the collapse or penetrate deeper—he took that secret with him.”

Leo slowly, overcoming a nervous cramp in his legs, rose from the stool. He walked over to the canvas tarp and touched the dry, dusty fabric that scratched at his fingers. Behind it, hiding its secrets, the ancient mountain stood silent, while deep within it, something breathed—faintly, but stubbornly and heavily. Here, in this isolated, forgotten shack on the very edge of the crumbling precipice, there were no all-seeing cameras belonging to Girard. There was no reassuring sterile control. There was only the dry, cruel, tangible reality of a mutating pathogen and radiating traces of uranium… in an absolute blind spot.

“Can I work here?” Leo turned back to Diana, his voice gaining strength. “I need full access to these unstable samples and to your biologist’s personal materials.”

Diana was silent for several long seconds, carefully examining his face—unnaturally pale, covered in beads of cold sweat, with deep shadows settled beneath his eye sockets.

“Alright,” she finally said with a barely noticeable exhale. “The tools, the microscope optics, and all the samples are at your full disposal. I will leave orders for duplicates of Brunet’s handwritten work logs to be brought here for you.”

“And it would be preferable to have a fan brought in, or, if you have one, a portable air conditioner.”

“We’ll do that. There’s enough electricity here.”

She walked to the exit and grabbed the cold iron handle.

“Don’t hold it against me, Leo,” Diana gave a slight smile—restrained, subtle, with a barely perceptible, bitter shadow of irony. “Outside the fence, by the creaky gate, our security will always be stationed. And this is not a distrust of your professional intentions. It is the only guarantee that you won’t go past the cave-in alone, yielding to the call of the search. Maurice also believed that he was fully, completely in control of the situation.”

The door of the shack opened with a drawn-out creak. The scorching, blinding morning light of Katanga struck Leo’s face with full force, bringing with it the stifling heat of the savanna. And at that very moment, he felt with crystal clarity how the two hearts in his chest—his own, vulnerable, human one, and the second, uninvited, commanding one, formed in the depths of aching tissues—finally fell into a single, confident, perfect synchronous beat.

Beat. Pause. Beat. Like inescapable footsteps. Like the dull strikes of a subterranean hammer on an anvil. Like a resonant pulse deep within the collapsed shaft. Like Imani’s hot, moist, vibrating whisper, burning his ear in the living, pulsating darkness.

Chapter Twelve. The Exodus →
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