by RJ Blain
Before I could gather my wits to do something about getting smacked with my own door—and figure out which end was up—Chief Quinn gave another command. I really wished the man would shut up for once in his life. My door smacked into me so hard it cleaned my clock and shunted me aside. Double ouch.
Why couldn’t he follow simple instructions? ‘Seal the door’ did not mean ‘batter the damned thing down.’
A white shoe and leg stepped over me, and it took me a moment to comprehend someone wearing a hazmat suit had invaded my apartment. Oh. Hazmat suit. That’d work, too. I blinked and tried to piece together how I had ended up on the floor, but I couldn’t remember.
The person in the hazmat suit was either a part of the police containment team or a member of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Either way, I was screwed. Plastic crinkled, and I heard the gentle hiss of the oxygen tank ensuring complete protection from any potential gorgon dust lingering in my apartment.
A gloved hand pressed something gold to my throat. I guessed it was a stethoscope of some sort. It could be a gun, too, something they’d whip out if I started petrifying people.
“Sluggish pulse, semi-conscious, sir. Looks like she collapsed in front of the door.”
Damn. I recognized the man’s voice, although it took me a few moments to force my uncooperative memory into dishing out its secrets. Forensics. He was someone from Forensics. No, that wasn’t right. He wasn’t in Forensics, he just knew everything. Quinn’s… expert guy. The ‘weird shit just happened’ guy. I was fairly certain he had a name.
Bert? No, that wasn’t right. Perky? No. Wait, yes. Perky Perkins. He hated when I called him Perky. Maybe if I stopped giving strangers names they didn’t like, I’d have more friends. “Hey, Perky. There’s gorgon dust in here, and I don’t know if I neutralized it all.” My words slurred. Yippee. I sounded like a drunk.
“That’s why I’m wearing a hazmat suit, Gardener. On the surface scan, you’re showing as clean, but let’s not take any chances.” Perky removed the metal sensor from my throat, took hold of my chin, and tilted my head so I faced him. Behind his clear face shield, he frowned. “Your face took one hell of a beating. What happened?”
My body really didn’t approve of my attempts to move, but I pointed at the trashed cell phone anyway. “Boom.”
“Jesus Christ. Cell phone bomb, Chief. She even bagged it for us.”
“Bathed it in neutralizer first, too.” With Perky’s help, I managed to sit up. “Sprayed down the whole apartment, too, but…”
“Better safe than sorry and having an outbreak. Sprayer,” he ordered, standing and turning to the door. “Nail the hallway while I take care of the interior.”
The other residents of my building were just going to love the mess. It’d get into everything, invade the ventilation system, and coat everything in a pink, glittery residue requiring a great deal of elbow grease to clean up. Someone in a hazmat suit passed Perky a green extinguisher. Pulling out the pin, he took aim and fired, covering everything in my apartment with a pale pink powder. Maybe I was immune to some of the nastiest magical substances known to man, but the purest form of neutralizer could stop the most virulent of plagues dead in its tracks. I tingled everywhere it touched, including my mouth, nose, throat, and lungs when I breathed. It worked its way into my clothes, and within several seconds, I tingled in places I had no business tingling.
It took less than a minute for the itching to kick in. I spat curses at Perky for exposing me to hell. “I thought you said I’m clean!”
“Better safe than sorry, Gardener. Don’t be a baby. It only stings and itches for a little while. Look at it this way: if you were sick with anything, you aren’t anymore. This is the good stuff. It’ll even reverse petrification in a few minutes.”
Even my eyes itched, which didn’t help me look at anything on the bright side. Scratching wouldn’t help; I’d end up spreading the neutralizer into my bloodstream even faster. Within two minutes, I’d be a living itch. “Yippee. I got the good stuff.”
Perky abandoned me to scan my apartment for gorgon dust, the meter in his hand beeping away. It squealed like a stuck pig the instant he approached the destroyed phone. “What ratio of solution did you use on this, Bailey?”
“One part neutralizer, three parts water.”
“Was the batch stale?”
Was he trying to insult me? While I had expired neutralizer lying around, I kept it separated from the active compounds. I only squirreled it away in case of an utter emergency. The state of my apartment counted, but I hadn’t run out of the unexpired formula. “No, it wasn’t stale.”
Asshole.
Perky sighed. “A man can dream, can’t he? Chief, I’m going to need a box. Got a live sample, and it’s strong—I’m getting a reading right through the plastic, and it’s airtight.” Turning to me, the man frowned. “Any symptoms, Gardener?”
A shiver ran through me, and I fought the urge to scratch. The full-body itch could mean nothing. It could mean everything, too. Even with treatment, in a day or two, I might start petrifying people. The human body was filled with inert diseases and bacteria, and the neutralizer killed them all, but it couldn’t reverse the gorgon virus. Nothing could.
To add to my misery, if I stayed exposed to the powder for too long, the neutralizer would fry my immune system, ensuring I’d need a new dose of vaccinations on top of everything else. For the next month, I’d catch every little illness known to man.
But I wouldn’t spread the gorgon contagion, and that was the important thing.
Why the hell would anyone toy around with gorgon dust? I sure as hell didn’t; I knew what would happen if I took a dunk in bile: nothing. But gorgon dust? I’d never breathed in a lungful of it before. Would my immunity hold up? I’d find out soon enough.
I sighed. “No symptoms, but the bomb detonated right in my face. I breathed it in.”
With my words, I condemned myself to quarantine, and I knew it. Judging from the way Perky blanched, he knew it, too. “We’re going to need the mask and the glass coffin, Chief.”
The police chief cursed from his post in the hallway but issued the order. Screaming at the thought of forced hibernation and containment wouldn’t change anything. Like it or not, I’d spend a few days in a coma while the CDC evaluated and monitored my health. Begging and pleading wouldn’t get me out of it, either.
If I got lucky, they’d reverse sedation, wake me up, and life would go on. If I didn’t, one of two things would happen. Depending on my rating as a gorgon, I’d either be tossed to the wolves or packed out for a trip to the mountains where I couldn’t harm anyone. If they determined I was a carrier potentially capable of transforming others into gorgons, too, I’d probably be euthanized as too much of a risk to humanity.
Not even other gorgons wanted a carrier among them. Carriers could produce the dust, the dust made more gorgons, and the dust could petrify gorgons, too. I wish I had paid more attention to the gorgon biology courses during my certification rather than yawning my way through most of them.
Immunity gave me an auto-pass for everything relating to gorgons, and their non-typical methods of reproduction hadn’t interested me. Their typical reproduction didn’t, either, but I knew enough about the basics I wanted nothing to do with the whole twisted thing.
I got to my feet to enjoy the last few minutes of freedom, took a single step, and found a marble with my foot. The impact with my floor cut my squeal off and drove the air out of my lungs. “That hurt,” I wheezed.
When Perky hurried to my side, he discovered my marbles the hard way. Unlike me, he stayed on his feet. Bending over, he picked up one of the shiny bright blue spheres. “Lose something, Gardener?”
I hated Perky so, so much sometimes.
The man grinned at me, crouched at my side, and touched the marble to my nose. “Don’t worry. I’ll pick them all up for you. This explains so much. Hey, Chief? I figured out Gardener’s problem. She’s gone and lost he
r marbles.”
“Screw you, Perky.”
He laughed.
Chapter Three
As part of the certification process, I’d done several stints in a glass coffin. The devices prevented outbreaks due to mundane and magical sources, and those on the front lines were most likely to be exposed to contagions. My only job was to keep calm. The mask, the part I hated almost as much as the idea of being trapped in a see-through contraption, delivered the initial sedative and doses of the neutralizer. Once I lost consciousness, Perky and anyone else in a hazmat suit would dispose of my clothes, load me in, and flood the box with more neutralizer. If all went well, the mask would keep me breathing.
The neutralizer had no more than seven days to eliminate any hints of contagion. After that, I’d die from dehydration.
Once a glass coffin was activated, nothing entered or left it, and if I didn’t survive the process, they’d bury me in it. If I got a viewing, they’d cover my coffin with black velvet to preserve my dignity.
I tried not to think too hard about the whole being stripped part of things. It’d been bad enough with strangers doing it, but I knew at least half the men and women quarantining my apartment. Sighing, I shook my head and waited, my nervousness intensifying with each passing minute.
Had I been inexperienced with hibernation, neutralization treatment, and the glass coffin, someone would’ve knocked me out with the mask instead of letting me observe their preparations so I could confirm they did the job right. Magic supplied the oxygen, and if something went wrong, I’d suffocate unless they had someone on hand able to penetrate the glass barrier with magic.
Few could.
“You’re really going to make me get into the box, aren’t you?” A hint of my dismay manifested as a quiver in my voice.
Perky paused in his work and grinned at me. “If you ask me really nice and fetch your nicest lingerie, I’ll decontaminate it for you so you can go in partially clothed.”
“She will do no such thing,” Chief Quinn snarled, stepping into my apartment. Unlike the others, his hazmat suit was yellow with a blue armband marking him as a member of law enforcement with kill authority in the case of a critical contagion.
Yippee. The man who hated me for ruining his marriage could issue the kill order if he determined I was a risk to public health. “Chief Quinn, shouldn’t you be somewhere safer, like in the hallway? Back at the station would be even better.”
“What she said.” Perky snorted and returned to his work setting up the glass coffin for my habitation.
Chief Quinn crossed his arms over his chest. “And miss the chance to strip search you, Gardener?”
My entire body flushed at the thought of his hands on me. Instead of begging for it like every cell of my body demanded, I glared at him. At least his hazmat suit hid his perfection, which helped me control my desire to rub up against him while pleading for him to search me as thoroughly as he wanted. “Yes, please miss my stripping session.”
It wasn’t until someone laughed in the hallway I realized my words hadn’t come out quite right. My face burned. Fortunately, with so much pink powder covering me, no one would spot my blush.
“I’m afraid I’m going to have to disregard your request.”
I liked the sound of that a lot, but I made myself scowl. “That’s stupid. Go back to where it’s safe, Chief Quinn.”
“I’m afraid I can’t. I’m the only one here qualified to operate the mask and seal the glass coffin. You’ll just have to accept me, like it or not.”
Could sedation be faked? I really wanted to fake the sedation. If I ended up dying, I wanted my last memory to be of Samuel Quinn patting me down. That’d be one hell of a way to go. “That’s not at all fair.”
“You’re going in the box, Gardener. Get used to the idea.” Chief Quinn already had the mask in hand; I glowered at the plastic device designed to fit snugly over my mouth and nose. I had no doubt he just wanted to do his job and contain a potential outbreak, but I willfully deluded myself into believing he cared what happened to me. A girl could dream, right? My dreams just happened to involve dead ends, impossibilities, and ditching my virginity in a wild night with Manhattan’s Most Wanted Bachelor. “Damn it. Fine. I’ll get in the stupid box.”
“Good. Status, Perkins?”
“It’s ready, sir.”
Shit. I’d hoped for a little more time. I needed to tell Chief Quinn about Magnus McGee and his involvement with the cell phone bomb before he put me under. “What about—”
Chief Quinn slapped the mask over my mouth, and a puff of hot air filled my lungs. “Nighty night, Gardener. Sleep tight and have sweet dreams. We’ll see you in the morning.”
It didn’t take long for the sedative to pull me under.
Later, when I wasn’t alternating between seizures and full-body spasms, I’d remember surviving revival after hibernation was a good thing. Until the worst passed, I’d remain stuck in the glass coffin with several doctors and nurses hovering in case I required an intervention. I trembled from weakness, which warned me I’d spent several days in an induced coma. It tasted like something had died and rotted in my mouth, and I really didn’t look forward to stage two of revival, which involved expelling everything in my body the neutralizer had killed off.
For whatever reason that one of the doctors could probably explain if I bothered to ask, most of it ended up in my stomach.
I bet magic had something to do with it. Magic always found a way to rain on my parade.
I questioned whether survival was really worth the misery of revival. “Please kill me now.”
One of the doctors chuckled, and after a few moments of thought, I recognized him as one of the CDC’s instructors. “It’s your favorite, Bailey. Aren’t you excited to go through a live run of top-level containment? You only whined once about it, too. It’s a miracle. I’ll even give you a gold star this time for your exemplary behavior.”
“Oh, look. It’s Professor Yale. Did they bring you out of retirement just so you could torture me?” At least Yale understood me. He’d let me crawl out of the coffin on my own and stew in my own vomit if I couldn’t swallow my pride and ask for help. While I struggled, he’d laugh. In the end, spurred by his mockery, I’d recover in half the time it took most others.
Everything came at a price, and I’d rather bite off my tongue than ask my cranky ex-professor for help.
I set the bar of victory low: all I wanted was to hit the floor before stage two began. How hard could it be?
“Yes, Bailey. I came out of retirement just so I could torture you. When they called and asked me if I’d deal with our favorite pain in the ass, they actually begged—and offered to pay me for the work. How could I say no? Torture’s usually illegal.”
God, I had missed the old man’s smart mouth. He was a ray of sunshine among a bunch of cantankerous sticks in the mud. With a groan, I rolled onto my back. If stage two hit before I managed to sit up, no one would be happy. Without fail, I’d cry, and then Professor Yale would have to intervene so I wouldn’t choke to death. “Yay. I’m so happy. How nice of them. So, how’d I do this time, doc?”
Distractions from the growing discomfort in my stomach would help. No matter what, I couldn’t crack, not yet. If I made it to the floor, I’d consider it a win.
“You lived. That’s good enough for me. You get a passing grade. I even vacuumed the residue so you wouldn’t have to roll in it. Aren’t I nice?”
“You’re just swell.” Clacking my teeth together, I braced for the worst and lurched upright. It went better than I expected, and with a little help from the glass coffin’s sides, I got to my knees. With one good shove, I’d topple over the ledge and flop to the floor.
Maybe I’d set the bar a little higher and make it to the trash can before stage two hit. Surely they had one nearby just for my use. Then I could really give the old geezer a hard time when I proved it could be done. Victory was measured in effort, and I’d show him I hadn’t been a
waste of his time.
I hauled myself over the glass coffin’s side and smacked to the tile floor, grunting from the impact. Just because I could, I gave the wretched thing a solid kick. “Stupid box.”
It didn’t even budge. I’d have to work on my acts of defiance later to make them more effective.
Professor Yale sighed and pointed across the room. “Bathroom’s over there.”
Game on. I loved the old man so much. Who else would let me make a total fool of myself and only sigh about it? I clenched my teeth and swallowed to hold my nausea at bay. I wasn’t able to walk, but I had no issues with crawling my way to victory. Maybe I’d go for gold and take care of all the unpleasantries of stage two revival on my own. That’d teach the professor never to underestimate me again.
Inch by miserable inch, I clawed my way towards the bathroom and made it with seconds to spare. Score. I’d make him eat his words later, after he confirmed I still had guts left after throwing them up.
Victory tasted disgusting.
I got to wear one of the hospital’s fancy paper gowns while Professor Yale tried to educate a bunch of bright-eyed students about the glamorous reality of surviving a round in a glass coffin. Next time I’d remember to insist on a nurse inserting the catheter. While setting up an IV was an important skill for CDC qualified nurses and first responders, my arms did not appreciate the kid’s fumbling efforts. He got it in on the eighth try, and I suspected Professor Yale had picked him on purpose to make me suffer.
The catheter hurt like hell going in, but it didn’t compare to the misery caused by a bunch of young men and women eager to show they could handle injections to a professor renowned for demanding perfection. By the time they finished with me, I’d turned into a living pincushion. How the hell could anyone screw up a vaccination injection?
One girl had managed to stab through my arm twice before she got her three syringes emptied into me.