I wondered how many bodies I would later find should mine not be among them.
"Over there," my escort ordered.
Joel Hand was on his back on the floor, covered by a curtain someone had ripped from a window. He was very pale and still wet from the pool where he had swallowed water that would kill him, no matter what I tried to do. I recognized his fair, full-lipped face from when I had seen him in court, only he looked puffier and older.
"How long has he been like this?" I spoke to the man who had brought me in.
"Maybe an hour and a half."
He was smoking and pacing. He would not meet my eyes, one hand nervously resting on the barrel of his gun, which was aimed at my head as I set down the medical chest. I turned around and stared at him.
"Don't point that at me," I said.
"You shut up." He stopped pacing and looked as if he would crack my skull.
"I'm here because you invited me, and I'm trying to help." I met his glassy gaze and my voice meant business, too. "If you don't want me to help, then go ahead and shoot me or let me leave. Neither one is going to help him. I'm trying to save his life and don't need to be distracted by your goddamn gun."
He did not know what to say as he leaned against a console with enough controls to fly us to the moon. Video displays on walls showed that both reactors were shut down, and areas in a grid lighted up red warned of problems I could not comprehend.
"Hey, Wooten, take it easy." One of his peers lit a cigarette.
"Let's open the bags of ice now," I said. "I wish we had a tub, but we don't. I see some books on those countertops, and it looks like there's a lot of stacks of paper over there by that fax machine. Bring anything like that you can for a border."
Men brought to me all sorts of thick manuals, reams of papers and briefcases that I assumed belonged to the employees they had captured. I formed a rectangular border around Hand as if I were in my backyard making a flower bed. Then I covered him with fifty pounds of ice, leaving only his face and an arm exposed.
"What will that do?" The man called Wooten had moved closer, and he sounded as if he were from out west somewhere. d to radiation," I said. "His "He's been acutely expose system is being destroyed and the only way to put a stop to it is to slow everything down."
I opened the medical chest and got out a needle, which I inserted into their dying leader's arm and secured with tape. I connected an IV line leading to a bag on a stand that contained nothing but saline, a harmless salty solution that would do nothing one way or another. It dripped as he got cooler beneath inches of ice.
Hand was barely alive, and my heart was thudding as I looked around at these sweating men who believed that this man I pretended to save was God. One had taken his sweater off, and his undershirt was almost gray, the sleeves drawn up from years of washing. Several of them had beards, while others had not shaved in days. I wondered where their women and children were, and I thought of the barge in the river and what must be going on in other parts of the plant. voice barely said, and at least
"Excuse me," a quavering one of the hostages was a woman. "I need to go to the bathroom." obody shitting
"Mullen, you take her. We don't want n in here."
"Excuse me, but I have to go, too," said another hostage, who was a man.
"So do I." he was young
"All right, one at a time," said Mullen, w and huge.
I knew at least one thing the FBI did not. The New Zionists had never intended to let anyone else go. Terrorists place hoods over their hostages because it is easier to kill people who have no faces. I got out a vial of saline and injected fifty milliliters into Hand's IV line, as if I were giving him some other magic dose.
"How's he doing?" one of the men loudly asked as another hostage was led off to the bathroom.
"I've got him stabilized at the moment," I lied.
"When's he going to come around?" asked another.
I took their leader's pulse again, and it was so faint I almost could not find it. Suddenly, the man dropped down beside me and felt Hand's neck. Digging his fingers in the ice, he pressed them over the heart, and when he looked up at me, he was frightened and furious.
"I don't feel nothing!" he yelled, his face red.
"You're not supposed to feel anything. It's critical to keep him in a hypothermic state so we can arrest the rate of irradiation damage to blood vessels and organs," I told him. "He's on massive doses of diethylene triamine pentaacetic acid, and he is quite alive."
He stood, his eyes wild as he stepped closer to me, finger on the trigger of his Tec-9. "How do we know you aren't just bullshitting or making him worse."
"You don't know." I showed no emotion because I had accepted this was the day I would die, and I was not afraid of it. "You have no choice but to trust that I know what I'm doing. I've profoundly slowed down his metabolism.
And he's not going to come to any time soon. I'm simply trying to keep him alive."
He averted his gaze.
"Hey, Bear, take it easy."
"Leave the lady alone."
I continued kneeling by Hand as his IV dripped and melting ice began to seep through the barricade, spreading over the floor. I took his vital signs many times and made notes, so it seemed that I was very busy in my attendance of him.
I could not help but glance out windows whenever I could, and wonder about my comrades. At not quite three P.m., his organs failed him like followers that suddenly aren't interested anymore. Joel Hand died without a gesture or sound as cold water ran in small rivers across the room.
"I need ice and I need more drugs," I looked up and said.
"Then what?" Bear came closer.
"Then at some point you need to get him to a hospital."
No one responded.
"If you don't give me these things I've requested, I can do nothing more for him," I flatly stated.
Bear went over to a desk and got on the hostage phone.
He said we needed ice and more drugs. I knew Lucy and her team had better act now or I probably would be shot.
I moved away from Hand's spreading puddle, and as I looked at his face it was hard for me to believe that he had so much power over others. But every man in this room and those in the reactor and on the barge would kill for him. In fact, they already had.
"The robot's bringing the shit. I'm going out to get it," said Bear as he looked out the window. "It's on its way now.
"You go out there you're probably going to get your ass shot off."
"Not with her in here," Bear's eyes were hostile and crazed.
"The robot can bring it to you," I surprised them by saying.
Bear laughed. "You remember all those stairs'? You think that tin-ass piece of shit's going to get up those?"
"It's perfectly capable," I said, and I hoped this was true.
"Hey, make it bring the stuff in so no one has to go out," another man said.
Bear got Wesley on the hostage phone again. "Make the robot bring the supplies to the control room. We're not coming out." He slammed the receiver down, not realizing what he had just done.
I thought of my niece and said a prayer for her because I knew this would be her hardest challenge. I jumped as I suddenly felt the barrel of a gun against the back of my neck.
"You let him die, you're dead, too. You got that, bitch?"
I did not move.