by Susy Gage
To her right as she emerged from the building was a gate topped with barbed wire, and beyond it Visitors parking. To her left was the main lab, from which a long trail of LEPERs was filing towards the auditorium two by two. They looked cheap, hot, and uncomfortable in their suits, mostly black but with the rare female presence signaled by a speck of red, beige, or mauve. Lori got a couple of funny looks, but no one said anything as she slipped around the corner close to the gate and walked up the drainage ditch past the building.
Once out of sight of the march, she figured she was home free. There was no one behind the auditorium building—nothing, in fact, but a row of eucalyptus trees and some well-tended bushes of wild rosemary. She paused to consult her map, recalling again that the Drift lab was all the way to the north.
North here meant “up a very steep hill.” Lori jogged to get it over with, and she came over the crest only to encounter a yellow go-cart parked in the middle of the road.
The go-tard had clearly expected everyone to be at the talk, since his engine was off and it looked like he was finishing a burrito. He could probably be fired for that—or flogged. “Stop!” he cried, revving the thing into action with a cloud of blue smoke and a noise more horrible than a thousand leafblowers.
Lori did the only logical thing: she turned around and ran. The seams of her cheap suit stretched as she sprinted down the hill with a stride she wouldn’t have thought possible, thanking God she hadn’t tried to wear dress shoes. She instinctively followed the path that would have scared her the most on her rollerblades, the one with the narrowest, steepest hill and the sharpest right-hand turns, but the thing was right behind her, spewing gasoline and roaring over the feeble shouts of the LEPER driver.
At the base of the hill was a parking lot dotted with small trailers. It looked like a bad place to hide, so at the next right turn she leapt from the street into the bushes next to a tall cement building. The go-tard saw her, put on his brakes, turned the wheel to the right, and crashed.
Visions of federal prison dancing in her head, Lori breathed a sigh of relief as the guard extricated himself unharmed and kicked at his sputtering up-ended go-cart, probably swearing, but she couldn’t tell over the two-stroke engine noises. She sneaked all the way around the building in the bushes, came out on the road that led to the auditorium, and retraced her initial steps as fast as she could possibly run.
The air conditioning in the Drift lab hit her like a wave, and she hid under the stairwell for a minute, gasping for breath and feeling this morning’s eggs and salsa burn in her stomach. She heard footsteps somewhere in the hall, someone running, and when the door handle turned she wanted to scream—but it was Lou, apparently no more efficient at sneaking around the lab than she was.
For fun, she slipped up behind him and tapped him on the shoulder, but he didn’t flinch. He just said “Good” very seriously. “The cold room should be right down this hallway.” A note of amusement lifted his voice as he got a good look at her. “I like your ‘Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane’ approach. Did it help?”
Lori looked down at herself and realized that she had collected quite a few leaves, sprigs of rosemary, and cactus spines. “It’s not funny. I got chased by a go-tard.”
“Yeah,” he sympathized grimly. “They have their engines off. Come on, let’s get this over with.”
They each had two small coolers lined with fake ice, and managed to pack in quite a few of the ten-centimeter rounds. Before they left, Lori stuck her head into hallway and looked around, still unnerved by the footsteps she’d heard. She didn’t mention them to Lou, though, too distracted by what she saw as he latched the door. “That is an extremely dangerous handle to put on a cold room. They should be designed so you can’t get trapped inside.”
“Remember, Lori,” he replied solemnly, “the number one safety concern of the LEPERLab is killer deer. I can assure you that the latch is entirely hoof-proof.”
They went back to the car together, taking the highest road across the top of the lab and coming down as close to the gate as possible, hoping that the steep terrain would discourage go-tards. Lou enjoyed the downhill, but admitted he’d had a rough time the previous week identifying a path to the Drift lab that he could climb without falling over backwards. Although the descent was uneventful, neither could face a second run, and they and their samples took refuge in the immense bowels of the SUV. They sat in the rearmost passenger seat and sorted the cores into one of the coolers, trying to read the scribbled handwriting on the brown paper they were wrapped in.
They still ducked every time they heard a noise, but there was no sign of human (or cervine) life until the auditorium doors burst open and the zombie parade began in reverse.
“Hurry,” Lori urged, throwing in her last few cores without inspection. “He’ll be here any moment, and your cooler seems to be leaking.”
Lou covered his lap with his lunchbox. “Um, no, I think that’s just pee.”
Rose was not at all astonished to see the job done. He gave them the thumbs-up and got into the passenger seat while Lori walked, nearly upright, through the vehicle to the front. She started the engine before the Great Man had even had a chance to find his seatbelt.
Their adventure wasn’t quite over. They waved their IDs at the gate and were immediately surrounded by a throng of armed guards with baby-seal-clubbing gleams in their eyes. They made them all get out of the car and dragged out the coolers, and Lori heard “Anonymous tip” and “White SUV” whispered smugly more than once. If only they’d thrown some cans of soda in the coolers and pulled the paper off the ice cores, they would have looked like so many ice cubes. Now they were going to jail and it was her fault.
“These are the personal property of Benjamin Gerson,” she heard Rose say as they led her around to the passenger door where two guards were tossing every loose item they could find out of the SUV.
Inside the guard booth, behind glass, stood the person who was presumably commanding them. It was someone from the VIP list, a fat man with tiny eyes and ears and a look of twisted hatred on his face. He smirked with glee as an enormous guard towered over the ancient physicist, and Lori could see the struggle in both of their limbic systems between the joy that snapping the old man’s neck like a twig would bring versus the fear of retribution for abusing a Nobel laureate.
“So,” the behemoth asked dangerously, bending over to look into Rose’s weathered face, “you must have a personal property pass?”
“Of course I do!” Rose exclaimed confidently. “Dr. Barrow, Dr. Maupertuis, do you recall where you put that pass I gave you?”
Lori and Lou gaped at each other, betrayed. They weren’t on the no-clubbing list. Don’t hurt us! ran in a panicked refrain through Lori’s mind, but she made a show of opening her briefcase pocket, rustling through the papers until something occurred to her. She held up a yellow slip. “Is this it?”
“I think that’s it,” Rose replied.
The guards looked at each other, peered at the paper… and then they started loading everything back into the SUV. They even shook out and folded the blankets. Lori worked as fast as she could, picking up strewed items so as to have something in her hands, to not be left holding that piece of paper at which the fat man might ask to take a closer look. Already he was moving in their direction, but they were quicker; Lou got into the front seat so fast that she thought he might like going to the climbing gym.
Weaving out past the orange cones at last, she was shaking so badly that her foot slipped off the brake and she almost ran a traffic light. She could still see the fat man in the rear view mirror, and now that he was no longer scowling she recognized him as the guy with the cop voice who had interrogated her at the hospital.
“La voiture maudite,” Lou murmured, pulling off his jacket and inspecting a large tear in the lining, then casually using it to cover his crotch. “It’s all right, Lori, du calme.”
This time it helped to hear him speak French, since it reminded her
of that cold, innocent country so far away, and of Roger who always spoke Franglais when he was nervous. She told herself that if Lou could maneuver this thing after being shot, then surely a little abject terror was no excuse, and she gave him a weak smile. “Je m’excuse,” she muttered as she took a side street past the football stadium, automatically choosing the bike route even though now she was the overgrown fossil-fuel-guzzling enemy. “I don’t do well with authority.”
“What was it that you showed them back there?”
She tried to laugh but only a squeak came out. “My bill from the bookstore. It was obvious from the Big Men On Campus poster that they don’t read well, if at all, and I don’t know if it’s a coincidence, but the bill said Book, Goldstein. Ben Gerson?”
“Ten points to Pasteur House,” quavered Rose from the back seat. “I think I wet myself.”
Having distinguished herself as the only member of the expedition not to pee her pants, Lori spoiled the effect by pulling over the instant they were on campus and heaving her breakfast onto the base of a sixty-foot California Fan Palm.
Sol watched her hurl, then calmly rolled down the window and passed her the ice cores. “Go stick this in the freezer, and then I think we can all start our weekend a little bit early, don’t you?”
Lori wiped her mouth self-consciously, looking at each of them in turn. They made no move to get out of the car, so she slung the lunch boxes onto her shoulders and headed towards her new “ice lab” to put the cores away.
The door didn’t open when she punched in her code, making her go so far as to pull out a calculator to make sure she’d remembered the square root of the fine structure constant correctly. After three tries she realized that the code was not the problem—the door wasn’t even locked.
It was almost as if there was something behind it, blocking its swing. She stepped back and gave a tremendous push, and there was a sickening thud and a gap of no more than six inches opened up. She stuck her head in, turned on the lights, glanced down, and then pulled her head out and sank slowly to the floor.
“Lori?” came a distant voice, how many times she didn’t know. “Lori, what is it?”
She didn’t know how long she’d been sitting there, and it took her a long moment to recognize Bert van Gnubbern, bent over her with worried blue eyes swimming behind thick glasses. “Lori?” he repeated. “Are you OK?”
She finally roused herself when it looked as if van Gnubbern were going to try pushing on the door himself. “Stop!” she yelled. “Don’t touch that. Marybeth is in there. If she wasn’t dead before I bashed the door open, she is now.”
Eleven: A Very Canadian Way To Die
They spent the entire weekend being interrogated. The cops didn’t drag them downtown, only to the tiny campus police station, which was barely furnished and contained only one cell that they used to call the Bubo Tank. The walls were made of unpainted wood and usually it was really hot inside; this late September day was no exception. Despite what she might claim to scare people, Lori had only ever spent the night in jail once before, but there was nothing she hated more than the cops.
She knew it showed. She talked nervously, her hands shook, and she no doubt came across as the most hopeless liar on the planet. It was comforting to hear definitively that the clunk on the head from the door had not done Marybeth any further damage: she had been dead for hours of hypothermia. What was less comforting was that Lori was somehow entirely at fault for the grad student’s getting trapped inside the electron microscopy lab.
“What safety precautions were on the room?” they asked more than once. One of them, chubby and sitting, did most of the talking, while the skinny one stayed standing and held onto the documents and photos.
Lori thought fast. “A phone,” she said finally. “There was a phone right by the microscope. She could have called Campus Security.”
“A phone?” they repeated, as if Lori had said something completely outrageous. “What do you mean, a phone? You mean a landline?” They huffed with disdain as she nodded. “Do you know if this landline was operational?”
Of course she didn’t—the last time she’d used it had been back in the previous century. “But couldn’t Marybeth pound on the door and scream?” she wondered. “It was the middle of the day.”
They didn’t answer that question, just kept asking her if, and how, and why she’d let Marybeth work in the lab. She had to give all the details about how Marybeth wanted to be an experimentalist but carefully avoided using the words ice core or mentioning what the project was about. Marybeth had received no safety training, but then again, she wasn’t going to be working with biohazards or going into the BSL-3.
“Would the handle on the door have been visible to someone who was visually impaired?” asked the skinny one with the photos.
That was a dumb question, of course, because there were all sorts of visual impairment, from a myope’s bad resolution to central defects to colorblindness. Lori recalled with a sinking feeling her first meeting with Marybeth, though, and something about a restricted visual field. “Was she really partially sighted? I thought she was lying. I mean…”
So then they made her recite all of Marybeth’s lies. It made her sick even to contemplate what might have inspired them or whether they had a grain of truth. After a while, they decided to recognize that Lori was nervous and upset, and they asked her why she was shaking.
“Because I’m hungry,” she offered, so they left for a few minutes and came back with a small bottle of orange juice and a nasty muffin. The pair checked their notes as she ate, and when they started again, it was at a rapid-fire pace with no mention of Marybeth at all.
They asked why she’d gone to the LEPERLab. They asked what she’d been doing hiding in the rosemary. They showed her a picture and asked her to identify the man in it.
“Anthony Hopkins?”
They looked at each other and apparently decided she really didn’t know. “Ben Gerson. Did you have any grudge or resentment against Marybeth?”
She was starting to think that this whole thing was much bigger than herself, lab safety, or even the physics department. “I barely knew her.”
“What is your relationship with Louis Maupertuis?”
The way they pronounced his name made her wince. “We’re colleagues.”
“No more than that?” demanded the fat cop. “You didn’t know him in Chicago?”
“In Chicago?” Lori echoed, searching her mind desperately for a possible trap. Fang Li was at Chicago at the same time as Lou, she realized, but wasn’t about to share that information. “I’ve never even been there.”
They tapped the table impatiently, looking at their notes. Lori’s throat was dry, and the juice hadn’t helped; it contained some sort of fake flavoring that tasted metallic. “Your employee went into your space, was trapped four hours at below-freezing temperatures, and lost her life. This is an extremely serious incident,” said the skinny one harshly.
“My employee?” Lori exclaimed. “Marybeth was not my student.”
“Your supervisor informed us otherwise,” they gloated together, delighted to have caught her in a lie. “Dr. Kuznetsov affirms you were her official advisor as of your arrival.”
“That’s news to me.” Goddamn Kuzno, Lori thought. “I have no idea why Marybeth thought she should go in there, or how she got the passcode. I was the only one who was supposed to use that lab.”
“You could have been injured, too,” said the cops.
“I have plenty of warm clothes—” Lori began, then stopped herself as she realized they had something else in mind.
They smirked pityingly, Poor girl doesn’t know what almost hit her. “You had no business going into the abandoned lab. The falling door could have killed you.”
Having spent five years in Canada, Lori had felt her blood run cold on many occasions, but none quite so icy as this. She had not told a soul about the freezer door that had come too close to crushing her two weeks ago. �
�Who told you about that?” she gulped, sliding her chair back.
“Calm down, Dr. Barrow.” The fat cop moved to stand up, as if he were going to run to block her exit.
“I told no one about that—not Dr. van Gnubbern, not Lou, not Professor Rose.”
“And the incident report?” demanded the skinny one, holding up a sheet of paper with its back towards her.
“Who filed an incident report?” Lori demanded.
They wouldn’t tell her. They insisted she knew about it. When she protested otherwise, they claimed to have a written report showing that Kuzno had spoken to her about safety but she had been “unresponsive.”
A thought flashed through Lori’s mind: Would Kuzno murder Marybeth to stop me from doing experiments?
It was absurd—and yet a student was dead, and it was Lori’s fault.
She wouldn’t change her story, so after another long hour they had to let her go. Of course, it wasn’t without kicking her a few times first: she could have been arrested for stealing from the LEPERLab, she was not to leave town, and she could expect severe repercussions for what she allowed to happen to her student in her space.
“No one’s going to be using that lab again for a good, long time,” they added as a parting shot.
Lori was too dejected to dwell on the fact that that sounded like a phrase drummed into them by Kuzno.
Hot, sticky, starving, and utterly demoralized, she was in no mood to be slapped on the back by Hannibal Lecter as she left the room.
“Lori!” the stranger exclaimed as if they’d known each other forever. He had a crisp Midwestern accent, more Christian Slater than Anthony Hopkins, making her mind flash between I ate his liver and scenes from Heathers.
“You must be…” she began with false certainty.