corner of the magazine. This time the explosion had a physical dimension. He felt the heat pulse pick him up and deposit him butt-first into a stack of shelving, which quickly collapsed under his weight. In the brilliance of the flash, he saw Carolyn’s silver outline against the roiling billows of smoke as she was deposited within feet of him.
“Carolyn! Are you okay?”
His only answer came from somewhere in the back of the magazine, well beyond the thick black veil of smoke. An ungodly shriek rose from those depths; a howl, really, whose volume increased geometrically until it finally drowned out all other sound. Then it fell silent.
“Carolyn!” he screamed. “Carolyn, where are you?” He could barely hear himself, and he wondered if he’d been deafened.
Out of nowhere, a pair of hands landed heavily on his shoulders, and he felt his suit pull tight at the crotch as someone dragged him across the floor. He struggled first to his knees and then to his feet, cheering aloud as he caught a glimpse of the big “3” on the silver suit in front of him. Carolyn was alive!
Still disoriented, Jake stumbled after her, on the assumption that she knew where she was going. The fire behind grew larger by the instant, made bigger still by secondary explosions, as munitions cooked off. Suddenly he wasn’t stumbling anymore. He was running, and pushing Carolyn along in the process.
Flames and smoke billowed through the door frame as they dove face-first onto the grass-stubbled roadbed. Slapping his hand against his transmit button, Jake yelled, “Run! Run! Run!” But he still couldn’t hear himself.
Together, they scrambled to their feet and dashed for the decon line, but Carolyn stopped short, causing Jake to stumble one more time. This time he caught himself before he fell. Then he saw it. Carnage. Bodies everywhere, in twisted heaps on the ground.
What the…
Carolyn heard the shots, then saw the shooter: a faceless monster, blended perfectly with the trees but for the muzzle flashes and the bucking of the rifle at the end of his arm. He seemed so close. She wondered how they could still be alive, and in the instant the thought flashed into her head, she saw a spray of Plexiglas explode from the facepiece of Jake’s suit. She screamed and caught him before he could fall to the ground.
“Oh, God! Oh, my God, Jake!”
But Jake didn’t fall. Instead, he grabbed her by the arm and scrambled for cover on the far side of the magazine. He climbed the steep mound first, then practically threw her the rest of the way.
Then they ran. And ran. The woods crashed by in random flashes of green and yellow and white as they charged through the forest, away from the monster with the rifle, away from the looming smoke cloud, toward nothing in particular. They needed distance, and they needed it right now.
With each step, the heavy air tank on Carolyn’s back shifted wildly between her shoulder blades, wearing away her skin under the fabric of her coveralls. Suddenly, her feet felt unsure, clumsy. A loop of vine reached up from the forest floor and snagged her by the ankle, pulling her down heavily into a pile of leaves at the base of a fallen tree.
Rest, she thought. I just need to rest here for a minute. Get my breath…
But then Jake’s hands were on her again, and she was on her feet, being dragged toward God knows where. Yanking herself free from his grasp, she punched the transmit button between her breasts.
“I can’t keep running,” she said. Her lungs burned from the effort, her head reeled. The inside of her suit had become a sauna-hotter than she’d ever been. “We’ve got to take a rest.” Jake wouldn’t answer her, so she tried it again, thumping the button and this time yelling, “Slow down, goddammit!”
“… slow down. Later.” Jake’s voice seemed distant in her earpiece, and she’d walked on his transmission, talking at the same time he was trying to talk.
She felt like she was still running, but the passing foliage had slowed down to the pace of a barely brisk walk. “I can’t hear you!” she shouted. Like yelling somehow made the signal stronger. Now he wasn’t answering her at all. Was he hurt? Jesus, he was shot in the face! Of course he was hurt. “Jake!”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Jake couldn’t hear anything but himself. Why won’t she answer me?
He could barely see through the spiderweb of broken Plexiglas in front of his face, but that didn’t slow him down a step. He’d never run this hard; never felt so frightened. Yet Carolyn kept slowing down. Then she wouldn’t answer up on the radio. He saw her hitting the transmit button once, but his earpiece remained silent.
His earpiece! That was it. It must have jarred itself loose as he was being tossed around. He considered stopping to correct the problem but dismissed the notion as crazy. He had a hole in his fucking suit! The bullshit lectures from Nick Thomas flooded back into his brain as he tried to remember the details.
Time, distance, and shielding. He remembered that: the three factors that controlled exposure to toxic chemicals. Limit the time, increase the distance, and shield yourself from the hazard. Well, shit! He’d been standing in a damn smoke cloud for who knows how long with a hole in his goddamn suit.
The negative thoughts opened the door for terror, and the panic that it brought. What had Nick said during the last pep talk? Oh yeah. A little dab’ll do ya. Big laugh, lots of grab-ass. Now this stuff was going to kill him!
So he kept running, dragging Carolyn by whatever body part he could find. They’d be out of air soon, he knew. They had forty-five minutes’ working time under normal conditions. Certainly, the designers had never run numbers that assumed their customers would be blown up and shot at before running like deer through the woods. How much air was left? Thirty minutes? Less? How long had it been already? No telling. It felt like a week.
At least his air pack was still working; he was breathing clean air. That was his greatest concern. Out of nowhere, Nick’s voice popped into his head again and contradicted him. Three routes of entry. That’s what he said, wasn’t it? Inhalation was the worst, but that left absorption and ingestion. Chemical agents are designed to be toxic by absorption through the skin.
And I’ve got a hole in my goddamn suit!
Jake’s worries about panic started to materialize as the real thing once he realized how light-headed he felt. Oh, God, I’m going to pass out! He fought with growing desperation for control of his mind, trying to remember the signs and symptoms of overexposure, but the details just weren’t there.
If it looks like a duck and it walks like a duck…
That was one of Nick’s favorite expressions. Sure, it was hot as hell out there, and he was more frightened than he’d ever been in his life, and he was probably dehydrated down to zero, but was that the reason he felt sick, or was it this big fucking hole in his suit?
Jake yelled-literally yelled-as the low-pressure warning vibrated his facepiece.
“Oh, shit! Oh, fuck! God damn it!” This was it. Five minutes to live-no, make that three, the way he was gulping lungfuls of air. He stopped dead in his tracks, unaware that he continued to hold a fistful of Carolyn’s suit, and he fought to clear his head. It was his nightmare come true: stranded inside a suit with no one to help.
He sat down heavily in the leaves-fell down, really-and snaked his arm out of his sleeve to find his ear mike, dangling against the sweat-soaked belly of his coveralls. His fingers did all the seeing for him, locating the mike, then winding its way up toward his ear. Over the din of his alarm and the heaving of his breath, he could hear the buzzing of Carolyn’s panicked cries.
“… wrong?”
Jake used his finger to trigger the transmit button. “I’m sick, Carolyn,” he gasped. “I’m fucked. Buzzer’s buzzing. I’m dead.”
“Bullshit.”
The tone of Carolyn’s reply surprised him. She sounded argumentative; not the least bit grieving. He felt her tugging on the sleeve of his suit, then saw a bundle of duct tape in her fist.
“What are you doing?” he asked. Then he saw. The atropine. “Wait!” he yelled. “Maybe it’s just the heat!”
Carolyn had never been a nurse; never wanted to be, as far as he knew, and it was a damn good thing. She jammed the needle into his leg like she was squashing a bug. He wondered if she lodged it in his thighbone. The pain changed from sharp to burning as she mashed the plunger, and then the head rush came. He fell backward for an instant; then it passed.
