Chapter 14

Dim LED lanterns lit the entryway and common areas of the dormitory. Linda spotted Mike the moment he walked through the darkened front door with Natalie Morris cradled in his arms, and he fully expected her to blow up at him. The fact that she didn’t, along with her distressed and frazzled expression, told him more about the dire situation unfolding at Overton House than any other thing possibly could.

“Bring her back here!” Linda shouted, waving him over with a flashlight to the common room as if nothing had happened between them.

When he got there, he understood the reason. As he feared, the number of sick students had climbed while he was away, from less than twenty to over thirty. Many had severe burns on their faces and bodies, much like Natalie did, but some were like Kali. Sick but unburned. He filed that bit of information away as Linda directed him to an open area on the floor for Natalie to lie.

“Is it true?” she asked him after he set down the delirious girl. “Are we really at war?”

She must have been talking to Renata. Linda was normally calm and assured, which made the fear on her face and in her voice all the more unsettling.

“I don’t know,” Mike answered truthfully. “Where’s Renata?”

“In the nurse’s office, crying. Were you able to get them to a doctor?”

“No. We’re on our own.”

Through the front door marched Sgt. Chapman and Cpl. Ibarra, still in their protective gear, carrying Taylor and Sydney inside from the car. The four other members of their unit dragged themselves behind, and Kali brought up the rear, shuffling through the door with an armload of medication.

“Who is that?” Linda asked with alarm, shining her flashlight on the imposing image of six heavily armed soldiers in bulky protective gear invading her campus.

“National Guard,” Mike said, then waved and shouted, “Over here!”

It wasn’t until the four sick guardsmen collapsed onto an empty spot on the floor and leaned against the wall that Linda began to grasp their reason for being there.

“What’s wrong with them?” she asked.

“The same thing that’s wrong with the girls. Radiation sickness. I told them we could help.”

Linda grabbed him by the arm and pulled him aside, out of earshot. “Why did you tell them that? This is a school! We’re not equipped to handle this kind of thing!”

“I didn’t have a choice. They had nowhere else to go.”

“How can that be?” she asked, glancing back at them, her voice distraught. “They’re the Army. Don’t they have medics for this kind of thing? In fact, we should be taking these girls to them, not the other way around.”

“Do you think they’d be here if they did?” Mike asked, borrowing Sgt. Chapman’s line.

“We don’t have the resources to handle this, Mike. We don’t even have enough Tylenol and bandages for the girls. Renata can barely keep it together. She keeps falling apart every five minutes, and four ... no, seven more patients will send her right over the edge!”

“Where should I take these?” Kali asked when she located Mike in the darkened room.

“Back there,” he said, pointing to the hallway leading to the nurse’s office.

“Who the hell are you?” Linda asked, shocked to see yet another strange face in the dorm. “And what’s all that?”

“I’m Kaliyanei Sayavong,” she replied in a tired voice, pushing back her eyeglasses, “and these are drugs, and who the fuck are you?”

Mike pushed on her back to hurry her along. “Just go look for Renata, please. She’s in the nurse’s office. Find out what she needs so we can start treating all these people.”

Kali gave Linda a dirty look and then wandered off in the direction Mike indicated, muttering “bitch” as she walked away.

“Kali’s a pharmacist,” Mike explained. “She pretty much emptied out her entire pharmacy to help us.”

Linda’s scowl disappeared, replaced by shocked relief, and she all but forgot about the surly Asian woman’s rude behavior. “She did? Where? Show me!”

Rounding up Rachel, Marcus, and Theresa, and several garbage bags, the five faculty members emptied the trove from Mike’s car and carried the sacks of medication back to Renata’s office on the far end of Overton House. Mike heard shouting from down the hall and ran to find out what was happening.

Kali stood in Renata’s face, barking at her with a strong, commanding voice he hadn’t heard from her before. Up until that moment, she’d been sick and lethargic, if not a bit acerbic, but barely able to raise her voice above a whisper most of the time.

“Have you even triaged them yet?” Kali asked, appalled. “Have you done one goddamned thing to help any of them at all?”

“Don’t talk to me like that,” Renata cried through tears of frustration and hopelessness. “You don’t know what I’ve been dealing with here!”

Kali slapped her across the face, then grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her.

“Get a hold of yourself! There’ll be plenty of time for crying later, but right now you’ve got a fucking job to do! You’re a nurse, goddammit, and there’s a roomful of sick people in there that need our help, and I’m not going to let you fall apart on me now! Pull yourself together, grab the shit I told you to get, and do exactly as I say!” When Renata hesitated, Kali screamed in her face. “What the fuck are you waiting for? Move it!”

Whether because of sheer terror, or a sense of obligation, it was enough to kick Renata into gear. Kali gathered up a clipboard and an armful of medication and stormed out of the office with Renata a half-step behind, equally ladened. As they marched past Mike, Kali jerked her chin.

“Just put everything in there. I’ll organize it later.”

When the two women disappeared, everyone looked at Mike.

“Who’s that?” Rachel asked, a touch of awe in her voice.

“I’m ... not sure,” Mike said, shaking his head.

“Well, whoever she is, I like her style.”

After getting Renata oriented and tasked with triaging the “wounded” as she called them, Kali pressed the rest of the faculty and both healthy guardsmen into service as orderlies; fetching blankets, boiling water, gathering supplies, and moving and cleaning the patients.

Once he was assured that his men were being looked after, Sgt. Chapman approached Kali about stealing Mike away to work on the Humvee, but the assertive pharmacist gave him a loud and very embarrassing dressing down, then commanded him to get the fuck back to work. Only after every single patient had been attended to did she finally assent to his request, dismissing Mike, Chapman and Ibarra as if they were her subordinates. Sgt. Chapman thanked her profusely, but she shooed him away.

“Holy shit, man. Where the fuck did you find that chick?” Ibarra wondered as Mike worked to remove the Humvee’s ignition control module under the light of the guardsmen’s torches. The high mobility, multipurpose, wheeled vehicle sat parked in front of the open rollup door, just outside of Mike’s lab. Both men had finally removed their gas masks when their dosimeter badges failed to show any indication of radiological contamination, but kept their suits on just in case.

Mike was struck by how young the two men were. Sgt. Chapman couldn’t have been a day over thirty, and Cpl. Ibarra was even younger than that. Although both men conducted themselves with the utmost professionalism, they hadn’t lost the boyish exuberance and playfulness that complemented their youthful appearance.

“Doc Murphy’s Soda Fountain, if you can believe that,” Mike said with a grunt as he yanked the module loose.

Ibarra laughed. “You’re shitting me.”

“I’m not. It was literally an ice cream shop. Here’s the culprit,” he said, holding up the beefy control module. “Let’s take it inside so I can figure out what’s wrong with it.”

While Mike dissected the module under the torch light, and watchful eye, of Sgt. Chapman, Ibarra explored the pitch black basement.

“You sleep down here?” Ibarra asked from the storage room where the girls of the Robotics Club had waylaid Mike earlier that afternoon.

“No. Not usually,” Mike said.

“Hey, nice lathe. CNC?”

“Yup.”

“My uncle’s got a fab shop down in Charlotte. You do much machining down here?”

“Nope. Not yet.”

“Yeah, Uncle Jorge makes all kinds of stuff for high-end homes. These big ass sliding gates, giant steel doors that you can open with one finger, ornate railings. Even outdoor furniture. It’s crazy what people will pay for that shit.”

“Ibarra,” Sgt. Chapman said, sensing Mike’s frustration at being constantly distracted. “You mind zipping it while the Professor here is working?”

“Sure thing, Sarge.”

“Don’t mind him,” Sgt. Chapman said to Mike. “Jarheads never know when to shut the fuck up.”

“I heard that,” Ibarra said as he crossed to the other storage room, then carried on as if Sgt. Chapman had said nothing to him at all. “Anyway, all I’m saying is that you’ve got a pretty sweet setup down here. Look at all this stuff. Woah! Holy shit, check this thing out!” he shouted, sticking his head out into the workshop.

“What is it?” Sgt. Chapman asked with alarm, his torch now on the Corporal instead of the control module in front of Mike.

“Yo, dude’s got a big ass robot in here!” Ibarra said with a giggle. “Holy shit, man, this thing is bad ass! I mean, totally nasty!”

“You mind,” Mike said under his breath, trying not to sound as annoyed as he felt.

“Ibarra!” Sgt. Chapman yelled, returning the light to the assembly table. “Get your ass out of there!”

“Alright, Sarge. Relax.” Ibarra wandered around in the main workshop, perusing the bins of robot parts and hardware. “Hey, cool drone,” he said, flicking the rotor blade. “You ever get to fly it around and shit?”

“Ibarra!” Sgt. Chapman and Mike yelled at the same time.

“Fuck man, alright! It’s cool. Do your thing, homie.”

Mike worked in relative silence for a while as the two guardsmen took turns keeping a light on him while the other fetched tools or parts from one of the hundreds of bins lining the walls, or simply served as a third hand.

“Can I ask you a question, Sergeant?” Mike asked while he desoldered a couple of surface mounted capacitors from the control module’s printed circuit board.

“You can, but the answer is no. Corporal Ibarra does not know when to shut the fuck up.”

Mike smiled at that and said, “That’s not what I was going to ask, but good to know.” Then he grew more serious. “What’s going on out there? Are we really under attack?”

From the corner of his eye, Mike observed Sgt. Chapman and Cpl. Ibarra exchanged a look. After a long pause, Sgt. Chapman answered.

“I’m not at liberty to say, Mike.” After a moment, he added, “Don’t take that the wrong way. It’s not that I don’t trust you or anything. The fact of the matter is, we don’t know for sure.”

Mike nodded, almost imperceptibly, without taking his eyes from his work. “Fair enough. What do you think happened?”

“I don’t know. When it’s not a drill weekend, we’re pretty minimally staffed at the armory. There were only a few of us there. The NCO in charge said it might have been a high-altitude burst, designed to blind us.”