”You know why he ain’t fighting you? ‘Cause the rush is worth the pain.“
Cyrus grins, then pushes the plug into the socket.
There’s no flame, not even a flash, but that side of the testing lab moves to this side without visibly traveling the space between. My plan was to shelter under my sleeping bag, but everything happened too fast. Now Blue’s elephantine body lies across my head and torso, and it’s not moving. Someone is screaming, but it’s not Blue. I touch my mouth to see if it’s me.
It’s not.
With colossal effort, I roll Blue off me and look to my right.
Cyrus is writhing on the floor, screaming gibberish and clawing at his eyes. His entire body is peppered with bloody wounds.
That’s what killed Blue. The top of his head is gone, as though someone put it partway into a guillotine. When I glance at his lower body, I see that my own legs are bleeding from several wounds. I retch, but there’s nothing in my stomach.
The shrill ring of a fire alarm sounds over Cyrus’s shrieks. There’s no fire that I can see, but the explosion obviously triggered something. The custodian in the guardhouse is bound to investigate. Unsure of my legs, I flatten my palms on the floor and struggle to my feet. My legs are shaking badly, but they seem able to support my weight.
The lab door is standing open, but it may not be the only one between me and freedom. I try not to look at Cyrus’s face as I bend and take his keys from the ring on his belt loop. His jerking torso is almost too much to take. The acid blown out of the batteries has vaporized the cotton of his T-shirt and is now eating into his skin. Cyrus claws at my wrist as I lift the keys, but I yank my hand away and hurry to the door.
His screams follow me down the tiled corridor outside. I’m not familiar with this part of the plant. I have no idea where to go. Pausing by the door at the far end of the corridor, I try to recall anything I can.
”Hey!“ someone yells. ”Cyrus? Blue? What happened in there?“
Wavering on my feet, I move to the side of the door and flatten my back against the wall. The door bursts open, and a black man in a blue uniform runs through it, making for the lab. As he enters it, I leave by the door he just came through.
Now I’m in a much larger room; the ceiling is thirty feet over my head.
When I clear the door, new sirens cut through the shrill scream of the fire alarm. I fall to my knees, but I keep moving. I have to get clear of the factory. The custodian could shoot me just to cover his ass, then blame my death on Cyrus.
I smell the river now-it’s only five hundred yards to the west-and kudzu, too, the greenest smell in the world. As I crawl forward, red light flashes crazily on the walls of the buildings around me. I force myself to my feet and hold my hands high in the air. A fire truck careens around a huge building on my left and bears down on me. I wave my arms frantically, but I don’t have the energy to maintain my balance, and I fall.
I hear a door slam, then nothing.
Chapter 37
Four hours after the fire department rescued me-maybe twenty hours after Blue last injected me-I was lying in a bed in an intensive care unit, cold sweat bursting from my pores. By the twenty-four-hour mark, my skeletal muscles were cramping, twisting me into a fetal position. After thirty hours, every cell in my body was screaming for heroin. My father had to send a nurse to Jackson for methadone; there was none available in Natchez. An addiction expert he consulted by phone attributed my severe withdrawal after such a short experience with heroin to the likelihood that I’d received a steady flow of extremely pure product for six and a half days.
But it wasn’t completely pure.
When I arrived in the ER, Dad immediately diagnosed me with a dangerous vascular condition called hypersensitivity vasculitis. My guess had been right. Whatever had been used to cut the heroin had triggered my immune system to attack my own body, particularly my veins. My bone marrow had begun churning out proteins called immune complexes, which immediately began clogging my smallest veins-the venules. This silting process started in my extremities and steadily moved toward my core organs. A blood-pressure reading taken on my arm in the ER was 140/95, but a reading taken from a cuff on my finger was 145/180. I had an irregular heartbeat, and tiny patches of skin on my toes and penis had died. I assumed that stopping the injections of contaminated heroin would short-circuit this immune reaction, but Dad soberly informed me that as long as the adulterant remained in my system-and he feared that some of it was embedded in the walls of my veins-the potentially deadly immune reaction would continue. He was considering a treatment called chelation, but after he described it to me, I felt more inclined to wait it out and hope for the best.
My legs had been peppered with shrapnel from the exploding batteries. The wounds themselves weren’t severe-my bones had escaped damage-but since the shrapnel was mostly lead fragments from the battery plates, poisoning was a serious concern. A surgeon spent two hours under a fluoroscope digging every fragment out of my body.
Before Dad admitted any visitors into my glass-walled cubicle in the ICU, he drew the curtains and stood close beside my bed. The white hair and beard gave him the look of a doctor who had seen everything, but I could tell that he’d never dreamed of seeing his son like this.
”Annie’s had a tough time these past few days,“ he said. ”We all have, but she had it the worst. She thought you were dead. And nothing we said to her would change her mind. I guess losing her mother so young proved to her that the worst nightmares
”You can count on it. How’s Mom?“
Dad shook his head. ”She’s a tough old girl, but this just about did her in. She sat by the telephone day and night, waiting for word. I don’t believe she slept more than three consecutive hours the whole time you were gone. She was afraid they were going to find you in a ditch somewhere.“
”I’m sorry. I’m sorry I got myself into this mess.“
A small smile touched my father’s lips. ”That’s your nature, son. I understand it. But you’ve got a family to think about.“
I nodded.
Dad looked through a crack in the curtains at the nurse’s station. ”When they brought you into the ER, they put you on the same treatment table they put Kate Townsend on two weeks ago. I saw Jenny Townsend that night. And I felt just like her when I saw you.“ Dad’s jaw muscles flexed with the effort of holding in his emotion. ”I’m not burying my son,“ he said in a shaky voice. ”I won’t do it.“
I reached up and gripped his wrist, squeezing as hard as I could.
”I couldn’t just sit and wait,“ he said. ”I knew if there was a way to stay alive, you’d manage it. After meeting with Sheriff Byrd and Chief Logan, I called your old assistant and got the names of every FBI agent you’d ever worked with. I called them all, and they lit a fire under the task force here. I still wasn’t convinced that was enough, so I called Dan Kelly’s security company in Houston.“
Daniel Kelly is the former Delta operator I considered bringing in to protect Annie. My father got to know him well during the Del Payton case.
”Kelly was still in Afghanistan, but twelve hours later, he returned my call. When he heard you were missing, he promised to get back to the U.S. by hook or by crook. It took three days for a replacement to arrive in Kabul, but forty-eight hours ago Kelly arrived in Natchez and started searching for you. He even brought a buddy with him to protect Annie. You may not believe it, but Kelly was planning to search the Triton Battery plant the day after you escaped. I saw it in his daybook.“
