Blue Bloods

Katrina slid her hand under Damien’s shirt, and the world chose that moment to go insane. Something smashed through the theater screen, leaving fire and smoke in its wake. The screams from the film mixed with screams from the crowd as whatever it was careened through the back wall of the theater as well.

Damien threw himself on top of her, wrenching her hand back painfully. His weight bore both of them to the sticky, sugar scented floor of the theater. The moment they hit the ground the theater collapsed inward. She was struck with a sudden unquenchable need to see what was about to happen to her. Damien tried to cover her face, to protect her head, but she had to see, had to get free.

The first thing she saw was a support beam from the roof tearing free, falling toward them. The sight ripped a scream from her throat, a scream that rang through the rumble of the collapsing theater and echoed within the confined space. She couldn’t help it, her panic overwhelmed her, and the scream kept pouring out, long after she thought she’d run out of breath. The beam fell, struck a ripple in the air above her, and bounced. Shocked, she stopped screaming and sucked in a breath. The moment she did, the bar ground into motion again, the sounds of complicated collapse echoing through the building.

She screamed again. The bar hit another ripple in the air, bare inches above Damien’s back. The world narrowed to her echoing scream and tons of torn steel waiting to crush her. Despite the overwhelming cacophony of the building's demise, despite the sound of her own scream, deep inside her head she heard Damien’s soft New England accent, sharpened by his deep concern.

“What’s wrong? Are you hurt?”

She couldn’t stop screaming, or the beam would crush them. She knew that made no sense, but she’d seen the collapse stop twice now. She shook his shoulder and pointed at the bar above them. He tried to stand and bounced off the ripple in the air, collapsing onto her, driving the breath out of her. The huge steel beam crumpled again, grinding down through the dissipating ripple. Damien crawled to his hands and knees, only to have the beam slam into his back. He strained, pushed, gasped, and she heard his voice deep inside her head once more.

“Ow.”

She had no idea how he’d done that. She stared into his eyes, seeing nothing but concern for her. Her panic faded, replaced by a love she never thought would overwhelm her quite this way. She hoped he could hear her voice, sense her thoughts, feel her unconditional love for him over the rumbling death falling on them.

“No matter what, I’m here with you. If this is how it ends, I am content to be with you.”

She snuggled into his chest, contentment filling her. She felt him relax as his arms went around her. He relaxed into her. She felt his comfort, his strength, his need to protect her and make her feel safe. She heard a sound like a mountain shrugging, followed closely by a wall of noise that dwarfed everything that had gone before.

Brilliant white light and the warmth of Damien’s arms became her world.

***

One moment Jack dozed in the radiation therapy room. The pain hurt bad, but the quiet room coupled with his ever present fatigue to help him sleep. The next moment a ten-inch cannonball bounced around the inside of the room, trailing a streamer of dust behind it. Jack wasn’t strong enough to even cover his mouth to avoid breathing it in.

He thought he was a goner when the thing ricocheted from the ceiling at the far end of the room and headed toward his face. Instincts from a life he’d tried to forget for a decade surged to the fore, but his arms were wasted and palsied. He closed his eyes. Rest would be good.

He opened his eyes when the cannon ball smacked into his palms like God’s own medicine ball. He slid backward off the therapy bed, rolling as he hit the floor. A horrible crunch sounded when he hit, and he froze while he waited for the pain of the break to hit him. He kept waiting, the heat of the ball warming his hands, replacing the tingling warmth of radiation.

An errant thought about the first time he’d been exposed to radiation made him grin. Standing watch in subzero temperatures at a listening station in Alaska one of the old hands told him a trick; stand in front of the dish. It was always warmer there. Of course, he realized now that he and the other soldiers had slowly microwaved themselves. He still didn’t know if it was better to be slowly cooked or slowly frozen.

As he considered that event from the long distant past, he realized that he felt no pain from the break. That was bad. If he couldn’t feel his limbs, his nerves had degenerated the way his muscles had done. He climbed to his feet, accompanied by crackling and crunching. For the first time in a long time, everything seemed to be working. Adrenaline; one hell of a drug.

The floor shifted, and he looked down. The floor around his feet had shattered, its tiles deformed and torn, the concrete below fractured like someone had taken an impact hammer to it. He looked at the ball in his hand; it was damaged from its trip around the room, with a big chunk taken off one side, but it was too big and rounded to have caused some of the finger-sized holes in the concrete.

Jack looked at his hands with dawning comprehension and horror. His fingernails had grey dust under the nails, like he’d been planting radishes in cement. His hands were otherwise unharmed. He looked at the back of his left hand, where the doctors always attached his intravenous line. The line was gone, the cut bleeding sluggishly, the blood clotting the way it had when he was twenty.

He was healing. He was strong. He jumped for joy, pumping his fist, long habit dampening the sound of his shout of joy. When he landed, the reinforced floor of the radiation room shifted under his feet. He was healing, he was strong, and he was very, very heavy.

He heard someone in the other room. Moving carefully, testing each step before he put weight on it, he carried the still smoldering cannon ball into the antechamber, into a future he suddenly felt he would live to see.

***

Drew looked down through the hole the meteorite had punched in the roof. For a moment what she saw confused her. A woman lay on the bed below, utterly oblivious to the water drenching her, completely unconcerned by someone looking down from above. At first Drew thought she’d died, hit by the falling projectile. Then her chest moved. She drew a breath, exhaled, and went still once more. Drew looked around and quickly realized she might not be able to find the room from the floor below. Shrugging, she wriggled through the hole headfirst, grabbed at the last support beam before she fell on the poor woman below, and flipped herself to one side of the bed. She absorbed the landing with her knees, coming to rest in a crouch beside the bed.

Lying next to her on the floor was an odd, curved section of mattress. A quick glance showed her it was situated directly beneath the catatonic woman’s dangling hand. A scan of the room showed a jagged hole through one wall, sparks still flaring from a severed electrical wire. She saw no obvious threats in the room but heard shouts of alarm coming from the hallway outside. Cautiously she stood, glanced at the woman in the bed and glanced at her chart.

The woman’s face reminded her of someone. She wasn’t sure who. A check of the charts showed her name as Jane Doe. The name Jane tickled Drew’s memory as well, which was even weirder than her face being familiar. Setting the chart back, she nodded in the direction of the staring woman.

“Be back in a bit, Jane.”

She moved into the hallway with her head held high, her shoulders thrown back. If she wanted to calm people down, she had to project confidence. Two orderlies ran toward her as fast as their legs would carry them. She stepped in their way.

“Stop!”

Both men’s gazes snapped to Drew, and both of them nearly took a header stumbling to a stop. When they managed to get themselves stationary and upright, they just stared at her. One of them opened his mouth, but before he could say anything she cut him off.

“What’s going on here?”

Her voice shocked one of the orderlies into instant obedience. “Radiation problem, ma’am.”

That was serious. She looked at the one who was speaking, and his eyes lit up with the attention. Completely weird. “What kind of leak?”

The orderly scrambled to clarify his statement. “No leak, ma’am. The radioactive materials are gone.”

That wasn’t just serious; it was a potential nightmare of terrorism and bomb scares. Something in her gaze made the orderly wince. She tried to calm him with a smile. Heck, I’m supposed to try to be nicer, right?

His reaction was unexpected, to say the least. The orderly blushed, stammered, and did everything but explain further. She turned to the other orderly, frowning. “Stolen?”

The orderly quaked. She’d never seen someone shiver from fear before. Weird. The fact that it seemed like she’d caused it with a frown? Just bizarre. She stopped frowning and he started talking a mile a minute.

“I’m not sure. The container was still there, so if they took it, they carried it out in their bare hands. They might have brought a container, though. If they did, someone would have noticed. We had a lot of the stuff. Not just the radiation therapy stuff, but everything is gone.” He ran down, mouth still moving as if he were looking for something else to say.

Careful to keep her expression neutral, Drew thought about what he said. “What do you mean, everything?”

The orderly began babbling again. “Everything even a little radioactive is just gone: the radio tracing enema fluid, the radio tracing potables…”

The other orderly cut in, “There’s a difference?”

Drew frowned again, and both orderlies fell silent. “First of all, ew. Second, was anyone using any of the radioactive material when you noticed it missing?”

The orderlies stared at one another for a moment. The talkative one shrugged, “Not me or anyone I took it to.”

The other orderly’s face lit up with inspiration. “Hey, old Jack is getting rad therapy today. He’s not real mobile, but he doesn’t miss a thing. If somebody stole it from the rad therapy chamber, he’d have noticed.”

Drew scowled, and both men looked away. “If he noticed something, and they had weapons, he’s a dead man. Show me.”

The orderlies scrambled to lead her to the radiation therapy room. In an antechamber outside silvery-blue rad suits hung from a rack. One of the men checked the Geiger counter in the corner of the antechamber. Without pausing to speak, he ran for the suits and scrambled into one. The other orderly didn’t even check. He ran directly for the suits and started gearing up.

Drew stalked over to the Geiger counter and peered down at the dial. She cudgeled her brain and tried to remember how the thing worked. She’d been trained on one during her hazmat course but couldn’t remember too many details. High was bad, low was good. Like most gauges, if the needle swung too much, it meant something was funky. It swung about wildly right now. She picked it up and walked to the door. At the door, it flatlined. She walked back toward the radiation room. It picked up but wobbled something awful.

One of the orderlies walked over to her with a suit. She stepped back to the doorway and pointed at the Geiger counter. He looked down, a puzzled expression lifting his eyebrows. She tapped on the Plexiglas of his face shield and spoke loudly and clearly, so there would be no misunderstanding.

“Go into the radiation therapy room. See if Mr. Maliss is still in there. If he has been injured, one of you see if you can give some aid, the other come back to me. If there is anyone else in the room, get back behind me, fast. If he’s gone, see if you can find the source of the radiation. Got all that?”

The suited orderly just nodded and took the Geiger counter. Her hands free, Drew reached simultaneously for the gun on her right hip and the badge strung around her neck. Neither was in its accustomed place, and she cursed vehemently. At least she was wearing… She cursed again when she realized she wasn’t wearing her POLICE emblazoned hooded sweatshirt. That was back in the break room, hiding in Jesse’s bag. She reached into her back pocket for her wallet; if she flashed the interior of that at someone they flinched sometimes, not even looking for a badge. Her back pocket was smooth, flat fabric covering the curve of her butt. As the lead orderly opened the radiation therapy room door, she screamed her frustration to the uncaring, Murphy cursed world.

The man standing just inside the door didn’t flinch at her scream, but he did drop into a practiced combat crouch. In the sudden silence in the room as both orderlies froze and the combat vet went uncannily still, she listened for the ticking of the Geiger counter. It had gone utterly silent, not even the normal background clicks. She spoke into the silence, dealing with the biggest threat first.

“You! In the radiation therapy room! Lie down on the floor, put your hands on your head, and let the patient come out to me.”

The patient’s voice was gravelly, like he’d spent far too long smoking and shouting. Despite that, his words were clear.

“Sorry, ma’am, I’m afraid I can’t do both.”

Drew dropped into a crouch, turned sideways, and slid toward the man in the door. He raised his hands, palms outward, but Drew had been taken in one too many times by fake surrenders.

“I said lie on the ground!”

The orderlies tried to get her attention, but she dared not lose focus. By the way he moved, this guy was combat trained. If she looked away, he could grab one of them as a hostage, or even kill one of them if he were so inclined. He shrugged, smiled, and dropped to the floor in a single smooth, practiced move. Without taking her eyes off him, Drew shouted at the orderlies.

“You two! Get out into the hallway. Check the counter to see if it’s still working!”

The two orderlies scrambled, one pulling his hood off the moment he made it to the hallway. The Geiger counter clicked slowly, faintly, the way it would with normal background radiation. The orderly cleared his throat. Drew still didn’t look away from the guy on the floor. If he went down that fast, he could get up faster.

“Yeah, what is it?”

“Ma’am, I don’t know how, but that’s Jack Maliss.”