by Dan Rabarts
The explosion wakes her, sending her scrambling from the couch and dashing into the aisle where Beaker emerges like an astronaut from a cloud of green smoke.
Penny scrubs at her eyes. “Beak! What the hell?”
“It’s OK. I’m OK.” Beaker shoves his safety goggles up on top of his head, blinks a couple of times, then promptly pulls them back on as the murk engulfs them.
Penny’s bench partner may be alive, but clearly things are not OK. The air in the lab is putrid. Sickly and sulphurous, it’s the stench of the dead, their bodies washed up on the beach to bake and bloat and burst in the sun. Malodorous gases prick at Penny’s eyes and make her throat burn. Her mind guns into overdrive. Some kind of chemical bomb? In her lab? Why would anyone want to bomb her lab? That can’t be right. And yet the far end of the lab is billowing with noxious fumes. Who would do this? Could it be something to do with this new case? But who even knew she was working on it? Only Cordell…
“Beak—” she croaks.
“I know, I know. No flames, but these fumes could be toxic. We need to get into the corridor where it’s safe.” Taking his phone from his pocket Beaker bustles Penny towards the exit. “Come on. Let’s get out of here. I’ll get on to the chemical spill squad.”
Mention of the Tox Team stops Penny in her tracks.
Over my dead body.
Whirling, she swats at the phone, batting it out of Beaker’s hand and onto the bench. Beaker lets out a little cry of alarm as it skitters across the surface and spins to a stop.
“And get us a citation for contaminated premises? Beaker, what makes you think they’ll treat us any different to a dirty meth lab? You call them, and we may as well shut up shop now.”
While Beaker stands flat-footed and confused, Penny plunges her hand into a cardboard box of disposable respirator masks, yanking one over her head and face, tugging frantically at the elastic when it snags in her pony tail. “For Christ’s sake, don’t stand there, Beak, get the fume hoods on,” she grunts through the mask.
“Riiight,” Beaker says, his loyalty to Penny finally winning out over his need to adhere to standard spill procedure. He turns a full 360 degrees, trying to get his bearings, and for a second Penny wonders if he wasn’t injured in the blast and is only just feeling the effects now.
“Fume hoods, Beaker,” she says again, slower this time. “Turn them on—full tit—then get out.”
“Fume hoods. Full tit.” Penny imagines him colouring at the word tit, but the billows of smoke are forcing her to screw up her eyes, so there’s no way of knowing.
“Right.”
“Wait.” Penny shoves the box along the bench at him. “Put a mask on first.” They might be flimsy and cheap-looking, but these little filters are capable of protecting a wearer from sub-micron particles—99.8%—and biological contaminants—99.1%—as well as non-volatile liquid mists.
Except there was an explosion. Which means whatever they’re huffing is definitely volatile. Shit. Penny’s got to get some air in here before they both pass out.
Holding her breath, she doesn’t waste time casting around for her safety googles, rushing instead to the window, throwing it open, then moving on to the next, going down the length of the lab towards the corridor like pencil traced from point to point along a number line. But even in her haste, Penny notes that there are no broken panes.
She’s just flung open the last window when the lab ventilators crank into action, slowly gathering speed like a couple of old freight trains. Her eyes full of tears, Penny dashes out into the corridor.
Pulling the mask down around her neck, Penny bends over, her hands on her knees, and breathes in large desperate gulps of air that taste of polish with undertones of decades old linoleum.
“Penny? You OK?”
“Uh-huh.” She stands upright, sucks in another breath. “You?”
“A bit dizzy and my ears are still ringing, but I’ll live…”
Penny yawns, then slaps her hand over her mouth. “Whoops. That just slipped out.”
But Beaker only shrugs. “No offence taken. You’re in shock. Waking up to an explosion is just the kind of stimuli to set off a person’s fight and flee mechanism. Or maybe it was the C02 saturation. That’ll cause yawns. I’m pretty sure you were holding your breath when you ran out of the lab.”
You’ve gotta love an employee who provides scientific hypotheses as excuses for your rudeness, but this isn’t the time. Penny places a hand on Beaker’s shoulder. “Beak, what the hell just happened?”
Beaker slides down the wall until he’s sitting on the marbled lino, his hands resting on knees not covered by his lab coat. Penny lets her hand fall away as she drops to the floor opposite him.
“I don’t know,” Beaker says. “When I got in this morning you were asleep on the couch. Matiu said you’d stayed up late to run some assays? You must’ve come in late because I didn’t switch off the lights until close to nine.” Sitting cross-legged, her back against the wall, Penny wipes her face with her hands. So Beaker did stay on. Penny hopes he didn’t mention that to Matiu or she’ll be down the price of Mum’s Christmas present and a week’s worth of ribbing from him. In fact, she’ll be lucky if it’s only a week. “Anyway, Matiu said not to wake you because you’d not long ago nodded off. He said I better keep the clinking to a minimum because if you woke up you’d be, you’d be…” he stammers, searching for the right word.
“Grumpy?”
Beaker’s eyes drift left. “Um, yes. Something like that.”
Just wait ‘til she gets hold of Matiu.
“Anyway, your brother said he needed to take his dog out for a bit, run a couple of errands, and I was just to carry on…”
“How long ago did Matiu leave? Do you think someone could have slipped their foot in the door before it closed?”
“What for?”
“To give them time to roll the Molotov cocktail into the lab.”
“Molotov cocktail?”
“Well, maybe it wasn’t strictly a Molotov cocktail. I don’t think it was petrol. Did it smell like petrol to you? It might have been some other flammable solvent. I thought it smelled like sulphur. Not carbon disulphide, thank God. Any contact with air and that stuff turns into a fireball…”
Beaker is completely dazed. Maybe Penny should get him checked out at the hospital after all. He might have a slight concussion.
She tries again. “Beaker, I’m talking about the explosion. The one that caused all the smoke? The reason we’re sitting on the floor out here in the corridor?”
At that, Beaker raises his index finger in his own version of a Eureka moment. His face lights up in understanding. “And you thought someone was trying to sabotage the lab?”
“That’s not what happened?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
Beaker shakes his head like a disappointed school marm. “Really Penny, you should know better than to jump to conclusions. It was the Breadmaker. I’d set up one of the biological samples from the crime scene and then left it to run. I must have done something wrong. Maybe I accidentally substituted the wrong reagent. I don’t know. I’ll need to check. But something definitely happened. I’d left it—I was looking at the results from the assays you ran last night—when the machine started moaning and sighing. It was like something was alive in there trying to get the hell out. As soon as I heard it, I knew something was wrong. I was on my way to turn the machine off when the thing blew. I had to steady myself against the fridge. At least the lid was down: I think it contained the blast.”
“I’m very glad it did. Otherwise, you could’ve been seriously hurt,” Penny says, hoping to make up for her earlier yawning gaff. Inside though, her hopes are lower than a pimp’s morals. She needs to be kind to Beaker right now. If the Breadmaker™ is irrevocably damaged then their
chances of completing the DNA analyses and seeing out this case are a big fat zero. Penny’s liability insurance won’t run to replacing the machine. Not without a huge hike in premiums which she can’t afford. She’ll be out of business almost before she’s started, and poor Beaker will be filling out forms at Work and Income. She pats him reassuringly on the knee. “We’ll give it a few minutes for the gas to dissipate and then we’ll sample the air using Teflon impingers, and titrate the samples through barium chloride-thorin substrates—just to eliminate any risk. It’s what the Tox Team would do, right? Only we’ll be quicker and there’ll be no need to close the lab down. We’ll check there’s nothing too noxious lingering about, and after that we’ll see what’s what. You’re right. It was premature of me to jump to conclusions. We can’t make a call about the cause of the explosion until we have more information.”
Beaker looks glum. “It was probably my fault.”
“Beaker, honestly, I’m just glad we’ve established it wasn’t a bomb. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. Mistakes happen. Anyway, the machine’s new, so maybe something was off with the factory calibration before it was sent out. In that case, it should be under warranty. Let’s just wait and see, shall we?”
Penny and Beaker are still in the corridor when Officer Clark and Matiu turn up, Cerberus bounding along the corridor behind Matiu.
Clark crinkles his nose. “What’s that god-awful smell?”
“That? It’s nothing.” The dog thrusts his nose playfully into Penny’s crotch as she pushes herself to her feet. “My colleague Beaker here thought he’d have his breakfast in the lab,” she says, hoping she sounds nonchalant. She nudges Cerberus away with the flat of her hand, then stoops to scratch him behind his ear, teasing a grass seed out of his fur. “But he forgot to set the timer and managed to burn his toast and eggs.” Smiling, she pushes the door open and gestures for Clark to enter. “It was a bit pongy so we came out, but we can go in now.”
Beaker hurries around them. “I’ll just get rid of that…toast,” he says. He disappears into the back of the lab.
Remembering that Fletcher’s computer is still out on the bench where Matiu had been dissecting it last night, Penny steps sideways, hoping to block it from Clark’s view, but the officer doesn’t appear to have noticed. In fact, Clark is staring past her at Cerberus.
“Dr Yee, I don’t think your dog is too happy.”
Penny turns to look. Cerberus is backing up towards Matiu, his hackles raised and his eyes rolling back, the whites showing stark and panicked. A low growl rumbles in his throat, his lips curling upwards over his canines, snarling softly as if his master had returned, plank in hand, to flay the skin off his bones.
And when Penny looks at Matiu, her brother’s expression tells the same story.
- Matiu -
It washes over Matiu, a cold dread whisper, a rasping of sand across barren places, a swaying of his senses, broken blades of sound stabbing through him from somewhere beyond the veil. His coffee cup suddenly burns his palm, the fried rewa-bread with cheese he bought from the street vendor around the corner catching, clumping, choking in his throat.
“The fuck—?” he manages to gasp, as he reaches out to steady himself against the wall. It’s the hand he’d been holding the coffee in, and the paper cup hits the floor with a hiss, rolling in long wet arcs towards the door. Matiu can’t hear anything over the menacing chuckle beside his ear.
“Don’t get weak on me now, bro. Not now. when things are starting to get interesting.”
Makere is at his shoulder, darker somehow, larger than Matiu remembers, or maybe that’s because Matiu is sliding down the wall. He fights to find his balance, goes down hard on one knee. The pain brings him focus, and then there are hands on him, under his arms, lifting him back to his feet.
“Matiu! Are you OK?”
Matiu pushes Penny away, perhaps more roughly than she deserves. Clark, on the other hand, is harder to brush off. The cop is giving him a hard look, the kind that cops bring out for Persons of Interest. Matiu’s winning grin slams into place like an iron mask. “I’m all good, just spilt my coffee then slipped in it. They should put a warning on the cup, eh? Who’d’ve thought you could find a hot cup of coffee in this part of town, anyway?” He doesn’t try to seal the deal with a laugh. That’d just sound wrong.
Penny chimes in, predictably, with her watery tinkle. It sounds wrong too, only Matiu doesn’t know why. She’s hiding something, and Matiu has to hope Clark isn’t the sort of copper who can smell that from a distance.
Clark looks from Penny back to Matiu, then unhands him, straightening up his ruffled jacket. “You should get a mop, clean that up before someone gets hurt. Safety first.”
Matiu bobs his head. Was a time he would’ve chafed at being talked to like that, but the last thing he needs right now is to wind up the five-oh. It’s bad enough that he’s got an illegally cracked laptop, which also happens to be evidence in a missing persons case, sitting on Penny’s workbench, but for the cop to turn up at what looks and smells literally like a bombsite? With smoke pouring out the door? Matiu shakes his head. It’s Penny’s lab, not his. Her record is shiny clean, so they won’t suspect her of anything. In fact, as Clark turns back to Penny and starts asking about the results of the crime scene analyses she’s been working on, Matiu realises that it’s merely his own guilty conscience working against him. The cops have simply come to collect what they’re paying for, and given how pressed they are for leads and resources, maybe a smoking shambles that can deliver results is better than no lab results at all. Not the best look, for sure, but as long as Penny can string them along, they should be fine.
But the feeling of dread has eased and Makere, too, has vanished like a rat scuttling back into a sewer, after poking his teeth out just long enough to bite, to remind Matiu he’s there, and that he isn’t going away. Leaving Penny to deal with the inconvenience of the copper on the doorstep, he slips away to find the broom cupboard. Cerberus, still growling low in his throat, follows when Matiu slaps his hand to his thigh.
The smell gets worse as he moves through the lab, but he can hear fans blowing, so Beaker must be on it. As he clatters about in the broom cupboard, dragging out the mop and bucket, he ponders the feeling that washed over him as he stepped into the lab. The sudden, empty cold, like he was laid out beneath the glittering stars with nothing below him but frigid, shifting sand and there, in the back of his mind, the sound that had twisted his guts into sudden, unspeakable terror.
The baying of dogs at the moon. It was a raw and hungry sound, the more so for the desolate ages it echoed across to reach him.
CHAPTER 8
- Pandora -
When Clark had left to run their DNA results against police databases, Penny insisted that Matiu drive her back to her apartment for a late breakfast and a shower. Nothing could be achieved until the lab had been thoroughly decontaminated, and Beaker insisted on doing that—probably out of a misplaced sense of guilt, since he’d been the one who’d loaded the sample into the Breadmaker™. Well, Penny wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth, not when she hadn’t had a change of clothes since being called out to the crime scene at the warehouse yesterday. Yesterday! She must smell totally rank with the filth of a day and a night of murder investigation on her. And now, with the stench of sulphur clinging to her hair and seeping into her pores, she could have crawled out of a sewer. Even Cerberus is giving her a wide berth, and let’s face it, dogs will eat their own shit…
Dropping her satchel, she makes her way down the hall. For once, Matiu hadn’t argued with her. He’d been rattled when he arrived back at the lab this morning. Rattled enough to collapse. Clark may have bought his ‘oopsey-I-slipped-in-my-coffee’ routine, but not Penny. She knows her baby brother better than that. And he can’t tell her it was the fumes either. He’d only been in there a few minutes, and by tha
t point the pea-green clouds had pretty much dissipated. A lingering waft or two is all, so it definitely wasn’t that, individual variances in susceptibility notwithstanding. Perhaps it had something to do with the information he’d discovered on Fletcher’s computer? He’d mentioned last night there was something on there that they should probably check out. But enigmatic as ever, he hadn’t specified exactly what and Penny, up to her elbows in lab work, had been too engrossed to ask. Is that what he’d been doing this morning while she was asleep? Following up a lead on the case without her? Penny frowns. He better not have. Unfortunately, in the short drive to her apartment there hadn’t been time enough to go into it, and once here Matiu hadn’t hung around, mumbling about needing to check in with his probation officer. No matter. It’ll keep. For the moment, she’s going to stand under the shower and let the water wash over her until she feels human again.
In the ensuite she turns on the tap, giving the water time to run hot while she returns to the bedroom to search out some clean clothes. Naughty of her. Clean water is a finite resource. Still, she’ll be quick. Bottom drawer for a pair of jeans. Second drawer for T-shirts. She shuts the drawer and opens another. Rummages about. Aha, here it is: a soft cup bra, because the blasted underwire on this one has been driving her crazy, digging into her all night. Laying the clean clothes out on the bed, she strips off, stuffing the dirty ones into the hamper, then steps into the shower. Tiny needles of hot water thwack at her shoulders and back. Standing still, she closes her eyes. Breathes deeply.
Oh God, that’s good. Best thing by far all day. Although learning that the Breadmaker™ was intact had been a huge relief. It remains to be seen if the assays are still accurate, if the results are still dependable, but just looking at it, Penny had been encouraged. Standing in the corridor with Beaker, she’d been convinced her lab career was going out the window with the fumes. But amazingly, apart from being slightly blackened, the Breadmaker™ didn’t appear to be seriously damaged. A few failed LEDs, but nothing much else. Lucky for her, the manufacturer had installed an automatic cut-out in case of operator error—they must have had an inkling about Beaker. Anyway, whatever it was that caused the blast had imploded inside the reinforced machine casing, forcing the lid open and spewing lovely green fumes throughout the lab, but happily containing any major damage. There was nothing left of the sample to analyse, but there wasn’t much they could do about that. Overall, things could have been a lot worse.