I nodded and agreed.
We embraced and kissed in a way that promised interesting things after her appointment. I turned away and walked down the stairs, grinning like an idiot.
B2 was bustling with activity. Jim and Darcy were sharing their recent experiment in home-fermented beverages, much to the delight of Nate and his friends. It was good to see Fitzgerald, Ramos, Kim and Jackson hanging out with everyone else.
They tended to keep to themselves, and I wondered how hard White’s death had hit them, but between one thing and another I’d never actually asked. Then again, I really didn’t see much of them when we weren’t under attack from one corner or another.
I sat down with them, and Ramos passed me a glass of Smith Special.
“Have you ever had anything like this, man?”
I sniffed the glass, filling my nose with the smell of autumn, alcohol and apples.
“Oh yes, Ramos. I have, indeed.” I looked over at Jim, who was grinning from ear to ear. “You figured out a version of English farmhouse apple brandy, didn’t you?”
“I told you I would,” he answered me in that freaky, melodious, radio announcer voice of his, “eventually. We’re going to do a spiced version for Christmas and serve it warm.”
“Oh yes,” Darcy chimed in, “it has to be served warm. Yolanda, Kathleen and I have already started to plan a holiday party! I love having a huge kitchen to work in, and real supplies, too.”
“Um, Darcy,” Kim interrupted, “aren’t Barry and Kathleen Klein Jewish?”
“Yes. They haven’t been able to keep kosher for quite a while, so they do the best they can.”
“I meant the Christmas thing, actually.”
“The way we handle it is non-denominational,” Nate explained. “They bring the Menorah and matzoh, and we do our best not to mix meat and dairy. Last year’s party was a hoot. Remember, Frank?”
“Oh yeah.” How could I forget? It was full of good, homemade food, adult beverages, singing, and a whole bunch of people I love. “You never told me Barbara has a voice like that. It surprised the hell out of everyone.”
“That’s my honey and her four-octave range!”
Ramos whistled.
“The only thing I want for Christmas is to get some single female recruits in the next batch. I’m a lonely, lonely man.”
“I am going to keep my mouth shut in polite, mixed company,” Boyle said, nodding at Darcy. “Just know that I have a scathing comment for you when we get back to the house.”
“Boyle, she’s married. You can put the suave attitude away,” Ramos said, ostentatiously flexing his muscles. “Besides, suave only gets you so far. Girls like muscles.”
The table dissolved into laughter. Even Darcy laughed, and she’s the local prude. I guess, having Jim as her husband, she might have arrived pre-brandied and relaxed. Some things I didn’t inquire too closely about.
I decided to try the apple brandy for myself. The aroma was enough to make me crave pumpkin pie and piles of orange leaves to jump on. Just like every other Smith creation, it was an insane success. It actually tasted BETTER than it smelled.
“God, Jim... this stuff is amazing,” I whispered, smacking my lips like a hairless orangutan. “We need to start keeping bees. You could do amazing things with mead.”
“Funny you should mention that!” Jim paused between sips of apple brandy. “I’ve always wanted to try making Tej. That’s Ethiopian honey wine. Amazing.” Sip. “Amazing stuff!”
The conversation went on like that until Omura arrived. We waved him over and foisted a glass of the amazing beverage on him. Being a convivial soul, he took a huge drink. The rest of us winced.
“This,” he said, coughing slightly, “is like easy-to-drink fire.”
I patted him on the back. Apparently, he’d never encountered apple brandy before.
“The only thing from the British Isles that will blind-side you faster is Potcheen,” I explained. “That is more like moonshine with an herbal kick.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” He took a smaller sip of the brandy, exhaled slowly, and smiled. “This is much, much better when you sip it.”
“So, what’s new with you?”
“I thought I’d track you down and invite you over for tea,” he said to me.
“Sounds like a grand, quiet night at the Omura-Buttons residence.” I’d been drinking the brandy steadily since I’d taken my first sip, and the little alcohol molecules had begun to dance in my bloodstream. “I think I’d like to take you up on that. If I stick around here I’ll keep drinking this, and discover I can no longer stand upright.”
The assembled product testing team booed and made awful comments about my lack of fortitude and gonads. Darcy kicked my shin! Unheard of!
Omura shook his head at my plight, put the glass down and bid everyone good night. I followed him out of B2 and we crossed the empty street to the house he’d appropriated a little over a month before.
The clock in my head told me it was 8:44pm.
Before he opened the door to the house, we heard alarms and weapons fire.
“That is the alarm on the nanotech starter container!” Bajali’s voice appeared in my head freezing me to the spot. It was pretty clear Omura heard it, too. “Jeff’s team, Bravo Euro, is raiding the lab!”
We turned, pulled our sidearms, and started to circle around his house, which backs up on Building One. Forty seconds later, the stealth helicopter lifted off from the helipad on the roof of that building.
I don’t know why Omura tackled me, but I do know that at 8:45pm, everything went to hell.
Chapter 24
I’ve been blown up before, or at least tagged by the last bits of a hand grenade explosion. This was on an entirely different level.
The blast knocked me off my feet and threw me, on fire, for what felt like a burning eternity. I landed underneath Omura with my left arm under me–my right arm stretched out–and the left side of my face pressed against the ground. I registered his weight on top of me before something really large landed on us.
When I came to the pain was so overwhelming I couldn’t do anything but scream. I know I was loud, but my voice sounded dull and far away. I could feel Omura’s body on my back, but it registered somewhere in the back of my head, just like I noticed I couldn’t see out of my right eye or hear out of my right ear. The front of my mind was completely occupied by agony–the searing, raw nerve pain of third-degree burns or worse.
They say that if you’re in pain, you know you’re alive. I want a time machine so I can meet whoever it was that started that mindset. I’ll shake his hand and promptly kick him in the nuts. I’m not like other people. Pain HURTS me.
There is a certain eternal quality about blinding pain. It goes on and on until it stops.
I don’t know who found me, but I became aware of them when something huge was lifted away, and Omura’s weight shifted. They say that you can feel every little movement of your body in your back, and I can tell you how true it is. The change in pressure on my body made every scorched nerve sing a chorus at High C over E. My lungs couldn’t match the notes, so I wailed the chorus.
During the eternity of screaming my throat raw, hands slid under my prone body. They put me on a board and started moving very, very fast. On a different occasion I probably would have been more grateful. I kept screaming my head off–searing torment knows no gratitude.
I still couldn’t hear much of anything, but I did catch a glimpse of my right arm as they picked me up. All I saw was from the middle of my forearm down to my fingers–it was partially de-fleshed and burned so badly it looked like barbequed bacon.
That is when I started to be truly afraid. Something was incredibly wrong, cosmically wrong, because I wasn’t healing... No interesting neurotransmitters were flooding me, dissociating me from the pain. I was feeling every bit of the experience like a normal person.
Abject terror drove up in a U-Haul and announced he was planning to move in.
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Thankfully, being moved and jostled overwhelmed me. I lost consciousness. Terror would have to come back when I woke up, or leave a really nasty message on my voicemail.
I remember waking up on my side with a bright light shining in my left eye. My brain was working at one-quarter speed, so I knew they’d drugged me to the gills. The drugs didn’t kill the pain, just moved it slightly sideways where I could be aware of it, but pretend it belonged to someone else.
“Dr. Sharma! Stewart is conscious!” The light-bearer yelled out, and I was muzzily grateful to hear it and know that Jayashri was okay.
I saw Jayashri kneel down in front of me. Her lab coat was a Jackson Pollock painting in red. She changed rubber gloves before she touched me. I couldn’t see anything north of the bridge of my nose, so she kept coming into and going out of view.
“Frank, if you can hear me, blink once. Do not try to talk.”
I blinked.
“Charlie? Where is Charlie?”
“Do not talk! Your throat is burned. Just blink for me.”
“Tell me where she is!” I don’t listen when I’m terrified.
“Stop, Frank. Listen to me. She is being cared for and there is nothing you can do right now.” Jaya was shouting in my face from behind her little paper mask. “You are badly injured and the nanotechnology is offline. The explosion set off an electromagnetic pulse. I have to treat you like a normal patient until we have another solution. Do you understand? Blink–do not talk! Blink once.”
I blinked again. This was bad.
“You have burns over 40% of your body. Some of them are very, very bad. I am going to put you under and take you to surgery. You will need reconstructive work later. Right now, we are going to do our best to keep you alive. Do you understand?”
I blinked again.
“Good. I will see you when you regain consciousness. I will not let you go without a fight. You will fight for me, Frank! Do you hear me?”
I blinked. I had to fight for Charlie first, but Jayashri was a close second.
No one even gave me the opportunity to count backwards from 100. I didn’t even get the chance to be disappointed about it. Darkness swallowed me, and for a time, there was no pain–or anything else.
Waking up after an operation feels a little bit like suffering from really bad dehydration. Everything feels dry and you’re disoriented as hell. It feels like it takes hours to pull your brain back together.
I shook my head back and forth, struggling against the grip of anesthesia.
A nurse came up to me and put her hand on my forehead to settle me back down. I was able to focus on her eyes for a second–long enough to realize it was Chunhua wearing a mask and scrubs.
“Chu...” I rasped at her, becoming aware that the pain was not as far away as I wished.
“Shhh, Frank. Don’t talk. There are a lot of injured people, and I can only stay for a minute. I just want you to know everybody sends their love, and we’ll see you soon.”
“Cha...”
“Shhh. I’ll tell her. Don’t talk. Rest. A nurse will be in just a minute. Things are stretched pretty thin with all the injuries. We’re getting some help in about 6 hours, but we have to cover it until then.” Her voice changed. It was Biggie the Alien this time: “I have something for you, but you are not well enough for it. Be patient and recover. We will speak again. Chunhua will not remember this interaction.”
She looked down at me, and I saw her eyes were wet.
“Not good shape, am I?” My voice came out as a rasping croak.
“Yes, sweetie, you’re in bad shape. Just rest. I’ll get the nurse.”
She rushed out of the room. I knew I was in a bad way, but I must have looked pretty horrible to merit tears.
I wasn’t in a hurry to know how bad off I was. My loved ones and friends concerned me more than finding out about myself. (God’s honest truth, I didn’t want to know how bad off I was.) I assumed that if Chunhua was up and moving, Shawn must be as well. Someone had told me that Charlie was being cared for, or was okay, and I managed to take a little peace in that.
I was wrong, but I wouldn’t find out until later.
True to her word, Chu sent a nurse in. I don’t remember ever having been introduced to her, but I remember her face from the original Health Troopers. She checked my vital signs, and the IV that snaked from somewhere into my left forearm.
“Can you understand me, Mr. Stewart? Just nod or blink.”
“Yes,” I croaked. I was feeling defiant.
“Really, don’t talk.” She walked away and came back. “I’m going to wheel you into another room in just a minute. We aren’t prepared for casualties like this, so we’re using as many rooms as we can. You’re going into the physical therapy room. Okay? Just nod or blink.”
I nodded.
“Great. There are one or two other people in there now, so you won’t be alone. Let’s go.”
She wheeled me down the hallway on the table, and I heard a lot of bad noises. Screaming. Crying. Several voices were yelling, too. There were a lot of people hurt by whatever happened, and that made me vaguely angry. My thought processes were thick and slow.
When we got to the PT room, she parked my table beside one of the examination tables along the wall. Barbara Banks, Nate’s wife, was sitting on the next table. Her head was bandaged, and her right leg was in a cast.
She saw me on the table, and covered her mouth with her hand. I might’ve waved at her, but the IVs made things a little difficult. My right arm wasn’t working at all. Shiny, just shiny.
“Okay, Mr. Stewart,” my nurse said, “I’m going to help you move over to the new table on your tummy. Scoot over just a little bit and I’ll pull you over the rest of the way. You’re going to be much more comfortable that way, and we’ll be able to change your dressings a little easier. Here we go.”
What else could I do? I scooted, slowly and carefully.
“Nurse Scott,” Barbara spoke up, “is there anything I can do to help?”
“You could keep an eye Mr. Stewart and make sure he doesn’t talk too much. Don’t push yourself: you need to rest, too.”
Nurse Scott draped a sheet across my legs very gently, and turned my head so my left eye could see a little bit. She also put a bolster pillow under my left shoulder and arranged things so my left ear was free. I already knew I was deaf on the right side, and I had the sinking suspicion that I’d lost my right eye, but it didn’t bother me a whole lot.
Drugs are good!
Then again, what drugs were they pumping into me, anyway?
“Mrs. Banks, please call out if you need help. I’m going to put a guard on your door. He’ll act as a runner until we get some communication equipment that works in about 3 hours.”
“Yes, Nurse Scott.”
“Honey, call me Noel. We’re all in this together.”
Noel patted Barbara on the arm before she left. Then it was just the two of us.
“Barb... what?”
“Frank, please don’t talk baby. Okay? I’ll tell you what I know if you keep quiet.”
I tried to nod, but the pillows wouldn’t let me do much.
“Bravo Euro stole some of the nanotech, and flew out with our helicopter. Right after that, Omura’s house exploded. There were other explosions around the neighborhood, too, but the house was the worst. Nate says there was an EMP device and it shut down our nanotechnology.” She turned away, but not before I saw the worry etched on her face.
I heard her take in a big breath before she continued.
“I was in B2 when the explosion happened. It took out the front wall of the cafeteria and the classroom. I was in the classroom with some of the older kids, watching one of the ‘Twilight’ movies on blu-ray when it happened. Nancy was close to the wall, and got burned by the fireball. Julia, Ezra, Matt Smith and Rebekah were injured, too, but not as bad as Nancy.”
Knowing I shouldn’t speak, I tried to exhale loudly enough to get her to tell me more. I w
as awake enough that I needed to know what I had missed.
“You’re not going to rest until I tell you as much as I know, are you?”
I tried to glare at her with my eye. I guess it worked.
“They found you and Omura under pieces of his house in the backyard. He was on top of you when the explosion happened. He was dead when they pulled you both out. I’m so sorry, Frank.”
Shoei was dead. Our nano-critters were fried, so he was really dead... no recovering. He’d saved my life. My heart sunk.
“Buttons is missing,” Barb continued. “No one has found a body, so we’ve got to assume he flew the coop. Ramos, Fitzgerald and Boyle were killed when the cafeteria wall exploded. Nate was thrown into the kitchen by the blast, and he’s pretty banged up. Darcy and Jim were in the kitchen, so they didn’t get much more than scrapes and bruises. Yolanda was in the freezer, so she’s fine. Nate tells me the walk-in freezer acted like a big Farraday Cage, and Yolanda’s nanotech is still online.”
“Me?” I had to ask, even if it meant going against doctor’s orders.
“Baby, I don’t know what to say. Do you really want to know?”
“Honest,” I rasped.
“You’re bandaged like a mummy. Your back is burned and so is the backside of your right leg. They,” she took a huge breath, so I knew the next bit would be rough, “couldn’t save your right arm, or eye. Your face is covered in gauze and burn dressings, so I can’t tell you any more than that. I’m so sorry Frank.”
“Oh.” I really didn’t have much more to say.
My head understood I’d be making the transition from superhuman to disabled, but my heart retreated from it. I worried what Charlie would say when she saw me. I couldn’t imagine our baby growing up with a father who looked like an extra in a bad horror movie. Would I even be able to keep my own family safe like this?
I wondered if it was possible to will yourself to die, and closed my eye.
“I’m so sorry, Frank.” She said it a second time, but I heard the catch in her throat, telling me tears were on the way.
I did my best to nod. She didn’t deserve to not get a response when she’d done as I’d asked her to and was a compassionate about it as anyone could have been.
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