He settled himself in a chair next to my bed, and that put our eyes level. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the very perceptive aura I was reading off of the guy—he was just plain human, but he was nobody to underestimate, clearly. They wouldn’t have put him in charge of what had to be a major terrorist target if he hadn’t been utterly capable.
“Wait,” I said, and gestured urgently to a nurse. She handed me a kidney-shaped bowl, and I retched up what little I still had in my stomach. It wasn’t theater, it was truly that bad, and after I was done I fell back against the pillows, feeling shaky and still in sharp, cutting pain. “So just to be clear, you think I got myself snakebit as part of a clever plot?”
“Maybe,” he said, unmoved by my clearly unhappy condition. “I’m not taking any chances with you in my facility. You do have security clearances sufficient to gain entry under normal circumstances, so I’ll let you stay until Dr. Reid says you can be moved, but the second that happens, you are out of here. With my best wishes, of course.”
“Of course,” I said, and swallowed hard. “Water?”
He was kind enough to fetch the cup and sippy straw, and I drained it in a rush.
“I know what’s happening out there,” he said, once I was done. He refilled the glass, which was a considerate thing to do, and set it within easy reach. “I know how bad it is. And I can’t think it’s any accident somebody like you just happens to show up on our doorstep, snakebite or not. You want to level with me, Joanne?”
“Well, I’d like to, but I don’t think your security clearance is high enough,” I said. “And I’m not in a share-y mood right now, what with all the venom and throwing up and you being a giant prick.”
He laughed. It was a real laugh, genuinely amused. Nice to know I was entertaining, even now. “Now that’s the Joanne Baldwin people told me about. You’d be a smart-ass to Death himself, wouldn’t you?”
I had been before. But that probably wasn’t something to share except on a need-to-know basis. “If you want to know what’s going on, stick your head outside,” I said. “Humanity’s sitting on a bomb, and the timer’s clicking down. That’s what’s happening. Forget global climate change; we won’t be around to see the last of the polar bears drown. That’s why I’m here, Roland. I’m on bailing duty on the Titanic.”
He didn’t like that answer, not at all, and it didn’t spark any kind of laughter this time. He was a smart man; he could identify truth when he heard it. “And why come here?” he asked.
“I didn’t! I was dumped out by the idiot who picked me up. I think he could have been running drugs.” In this part of the country, that was an extremely plausible scenario. Carloads of Mexican Brown were caught all the time, zipping their way up through the Southwest. They weren’t fighting a major drug war in Mexico for nothing.
That was my first real lie; only it was actually speculation. I hadn’t stated it as a fact, only a perception. I waited, and watched Roland Miles’s aura up on the aetheric. It was tougher to read regular people than Wardens, but there was no mistaking the troubled colors that surrounded him. The man was under a lot of stress, and he was wary. I didn’t blame him. He certainly had every right.
Wary he remained, but I didn’t get the sense that he detected any hint of a lie in what I’d said. That was good. It wasn’t that I couldn’t tackle the defenses he could probably bring to bear, but it would be very, very messy. Lives would be lost, and there was a decent chance that I’d end up having to do what I’d planned without evacuating the plant first. I didn’t want that on my conscience. Especially as the last act of my life.
Dr. Reid buzzed in the infirmary door, trailed by another nurse, this one carrying a tray full of the antivenin bottles. He nodded pleasantly to Director Miles, who stood up and moved his chair away from the bed to make room as Reid bent over me, taking my pulse, probing the badly swollen arm, and generally being a nuisance before he nodded. “Second round,” he said, and began loading the antivenin into the IV drip. “I didn’t figure that one dose would do you. That was a nasty bite. How’s the pain?”
“Intense,” I said.
“On a scale of—”
“Ten.” And I wasn’t kidding, it really was. As an Earth Warden I was all too aware of the damage the venom was wreaking on my tissues, and it scared me. There was definitely going to be scarring from this, if I survived the day. In a weird way, it was comforting to think that I didn’t have much of a chance of that, anyway.
Six vials of antivenin later, Dr. Reid gave me some kind of additional shot. I didn’t see him do it in time to countermand, but I knew I was in trouble the second the warm, weighty feeling of pain relief began to spread through my body. Oh crap. I couldn’t fall asleep. That would ruin everything.
“No!” I gasped. He’d only emptied about half a syringe into the central line, and now he looked up, frowning. “No narcotics, please.”
“You’re in pain.”
“I don’t want it.”
He shook his head, but it was, after all, a patient’s right to refuse medication. So I got enough to dull the raging, chewing pain, but not enough to get rid of it, or to lull me into dreamland.
Best of both worlds, really.
Miles tried to ask me something else, but Reid cut him off. I closed my eyes and went up into the aetheric—a struggle, considering my physical condition—and watched Miles leave the room. Lucky thing about the plant—the buildings had always been built for pure industrial use, and there weren’t a lot of emotions soaked into the place. Where they existed, they were centered mostly on the area where I was currently resting—injured and scared people had been brought here over the years, and that lingered. But outside, the aetheric shape of the place was orderly, almost sterile. This was an administration building; as I expanded my view I saw activity in several other locations, in some areas going down deep into the ground.
That was where I needed to focus my efforts. Deep in the ground. But not yet, not until I was capable of moving on my own.
It took another forty minutes, but the swelling began to go down, to the pleased murmurs of the medical staff. The venom slowed its progress, and the antivenin began to break it down into harmless chemical strings that were swept away in my body’s efficient housecleaning system. I didn’t feel good, but I felt better. Clearer. I drank a lot of water, and one of the nurses, on Dr. Reid’s approval, provided me with some kind of high-protein bar. I was able to keep it down, which was great.
By the time the second sixty minutes had passed, my arm was only a little swollen and red. Reid bandaged up the wound, after antibiotic shots, and gave me detailed instructions on what to tell the doctor at the hospital when I arrived.
“Dr. Reid,” I said. He stopped his medical lecture and looked at me, frowning. “I need you to listen to me.”
“I’m listening.”
“I can’t leave,” I said. “I need to be here. And you need to help me get everybody out of this compound before it’s too late.”
“Too late for what?”
“I’m going to do something to help us survive what’s happening outside, but it’s going to be very messy. I don’t want your deaths on my hands when I do it. So I need you all to leave the compound, do you understand me?” I held his gaze, and I put all of my Earth Warden powers of persuasion into it. “Isn’t there some medical protocol for evacuation?”
“In the event of a major radiation leak,” he said. “Yes. But—”
“Trust me, there’ll be one by the time you call the alert. How long to get everyone out of here?”
He looked around, blinked, and said, “We’re on skeleton crew, so probably no more than fifteen minutes once the alarm sounds. That’s to load everyone into the vehicles and evacuate to the secondary rally point.”