She locked up the office and cut through the chem lab to collect her day pack, cape, and mug. Those, along with whatever was in her car, were now her net worth. Nightfall had darkened the chem lab almost completely. Smell-induced memories and emotions harried her as she shuffled through the rubble like a sight-impaired arthritic.
A memorial felt necessary, but wouldn’t it be awkward after everything came out? “Oh wait, the administration’s not going to let it come out, so no worries.” Maci’s blurt was answered by the scrape of a stool on the prep lab floor.
No, no, no, no, nooo!
Moves she had honed through a decade of sibling wargames kicked in. Maci grabbed a handful of debris and tossed it to patter against the office door while she ducked under a lab bench.
Two dark figures crunched past at a run, slamming into the office complex.
She bolted across the room into a closet, where a snarl of wreckage took her down. Crawling farther in, she eased the door shut, slipped a lab coat from the door hook, crammed it against the lower edge of the door, and tried the lights. One bulb, miraculously intact, lit her refuge. Straining her ears, she quietly cleared a path through specimen buckets, rocks, and zillions of sterile Petri dishes. At last, centered between exits, she took stock. How did those punks get in? God, I hope they don’t have a key. I’ve got lotsa good hiding places. Maybe they’ll think I got out and called for help. …Unless they’re watching the exits. I might be okay here until they give up and leave. Or either door could open any second. … Wait. This is my chance. If I can get to a phone, Vodopich’s team can hang these scum-suckers out to dry!
Maci picked her way to the bio lab end of the closet, tiptoed into the lab, and turned the TV/VCR on at full volume. Sprinting back through the closet, she stepped lightly across the chem lab and darted into the prep room to snatch the cordless.
“Uh-uh. Lay it down, baby.” This came from Tears, who stood in striking range, holding a wicked knife. Outraged curses in the bio lab out-blared the television.
Maci straightened, releasing the receiver and swaying away as Tears lunged. The knife hit its target, taking out the phone line with a flick. The television went suddenly silent as if it too had taken a blade.
“Got ‘er, Crush,” he called. To Maci, he said, “It’s okay, baby, all we need is a evaporator. Give it over, an’ we go. We even pay you.” He seemed amiable—except for the knife. “You c’n use five bills, huh?”
Maci returned his smile. “Sure.” Her fingers found the femur on the counter where Vodopich had left it. She dropped the smile and flicked her eyes to a spot over his shoulder. As Tears followed her gaze, Maci powered the knob of the distal epiphysis into the temporal squama of his skull. Her swing was so hot, it carried her full circle to launch the club through the window in a blast of glass.
Mile High Lab Rat excerpt: Booby Trap
Maci hit the campus on a roll, stripped off her cloak as she climbed the stairs, and charged into the prep lab. As she cruised past the counters just inside the lab door, her throat closed, and her lungs shrank back from an inhalation of acrid fumes. In the same instant, she heard something—glass?—crash onto the floor, then felt a splat against her heavy velour skirt. Whirling and dodging around the corner, she saw a geyser hit the ceiling and spread a wave of steamy heat. She threw her cloak and bag at a cart and kept running until she reached the spill pillow stash. Holding her breath, she tossed the kitty litter-filled bags into the cloud of fumes and then backtracked to switch on the exhaust hood. Her legs tingled and then stung as the liquid penetrated her skirt. Oh god, how bad is this stuff?
Dropping her skirt, she opened the distilled water cabinet and poured a gallon of water down the backs of her legs. Splatter spots on her boots hissed as she worked for a good angle from which to soak a spot at the back of her knee. A red smear on the cabinet handle caught her eye. Blood-red drops showed on the floor as well.
“No way. Where’s this coming from?” She found more dribbling down the jug handle, a streak on her thigh, and finally the source—an oozing slit across three fingers.
Grabbing a paper towel, she wrapped her fingers and clenched her fist to stop the flow. She ran another jug of water down her legs as white fumes still rose from the point of impact, but the acrid odor from the doorway didn’t seem to be spreading. All Maci smelled now was the usual lab scent with extra humidity. What just happened? I don’t get it. Did somebody throw something at my back?
As she buttoned into a lab coat, a visual flashback prompted her to pull the wastebasket from under the counter. She set her bloody paper towel aside to reveal two bottles.
“Concentrated hydrochloric and sodium hydroxide,” Maci read. “…Whole bottles of concentrated acid and base poured into beakers and left where they’d be knocked off the counter? No way was this an accident.”
She pulled on a bug-face respirator and looked closer. Some of the glass shards contained tiny reservoirs of what might be unreacted liquids, if they hadn’t gotten too contaminated in the geyser storm. She dipped pH paper into those glass shard droplets, and several turned bright red. Another shard reservoir turned the paper deep blue, confirming that the liquids were seriously acidic and alkaline. So, this probably is the hydrochloric and sodium hydroxide from the bottles
More interesting, though, was a loopy length of beige thread beneath the wreckage. Maci tweezed it out with forceps, causing a chunk of beaker to roll and dump its contents into the puddle. Mini geysers erupted. When she could approach again, she saw that the end of the thread had been taped to the beaker chunk. A shorter length of thread was taped to another chunk. Why? She could not recall a procedure that called for taping thread to beakers. Whatever the setup had been, Maci wasn’t cleaning up the mess until someone official saw it.
She called Bernie in security, asked him to come over, took pictures, and paced. A tripwire? Beakers of highly reactive corrosives connected by an inconspicuous thread stretched across a doorway…Oh my god, a finish line for my morning race to work.
She decided it would be all right to rinse and dispose of the spill pillows while she waited since they weren’t part of the sabotage. Lifting the now sodden mass with the tips of two gloved fingers, she glimpsed something odd along the bottom edge of one pillow: razor blades— taped discreetly to the underside. She scanned the lab uneasily, then stripped off her gloves and flooded the cuts to remove any contaminants the saboteur may have placed on the blades. In the fridge she found a still-sealed bottle of hydrogen peroxide, which she poured over the wounds.
Kicking her skirt into the distilled water puddle to soak up the excess, she watched for tripwires as she walked to the first aid cabinet, examined the latch, opened it a crack, and peeked in before swinging the door wide. As she applied Band-Aids, she scanned the length of the lab. A preserved rat had been hung by its tail from the emergency shower pull. She looked closer and found a large dissecting pin protruding from its chest.
Bernie arrived, and Maci greeted him with, “Now the deal is, you can’t call Hazmat. Caroline will kill me if a Hazmat team shows up here again.” He cocked his head, noncommittal, and listened to her explanation. As Maci led him to the rat, he pointed at a black heap and asked, “What’s this?”
“Oh,” she said, squatting to pluck it, dripping, into a sink, “it’s my skirt. I had to take it off.” Bernie stopped, looked at the skirt, sighted Maci’s thighs, and retreated. “I’m gonna call for backup.”
Maci looked at her knees, then up to see Bernie’s fleeing belt-load of protective devices. “Hey, come on, my legs aren’t that scary. No, really, wait. I’ll make an abaya with the fire blanket.”
Mile High Lab Rat excerpt: Man down
Denver, Colorado, September 1998
But tossing a brain into the dumpster would be so not cool. I mean, talk about trashing somebody…and oh my god, what if a kid climbed in there looking for pop cans and found…?
Heavy-soled boots thunking along the sidewalk, Maci paused her internal debate and slowed her jog as she crossed the curb. She did a double take on catching a glimpse of Santa Fe Mountain between buildings. Yesss, it’s virga. I wish the wind would blow it this way. How cool would it be to stand under a rainstorm and not even get wet? Actually, it would be even better if the rain made it all the way down, like maybe before everything green shrivels away? Maci’s time was also shriveling. She was late. Any later, and she would only be a little early.
She veered off course to pick up an aluminum can. As she crossed the parking lot to the Academic Building, something odd caught her eye. Was that a foot sticking out from behind a bumper? She watched for a second, long enough to see the foot not move. The foot was wearing a man’s dress shoe, and the gray pant leg above it sported a professional crease. As she got closer, she saw that the feet were splayed. He was facedown. Blood welled from the back of his head, pooling widely and reeking of iron.
Oh my god, oh my god! Stop the bleeding. Quick, something soft and clean… The back door of the car was open, a dolly and flattened cardboard boxes inside, no help. “Hey dude, mister? Can you hear me?” She had no jacket. Neither did he. She knelt and tried to seal her palm around the wound. The blood was warm, his hair slimy with gore. She took his forehead with her free hand to improve the pressure and keep his neck still. “Sorry, I hope that doesn’t hurt.”
The eyelid that she could see flickered up and down, and a neck muscle tensed as if to turn his head to her. His nose had a remarkable hump.
“Don’t move. In case your neck is messed up.” Don’t freak him out. Everything’s good. “You have an awesome nose. It’d be perfect for an Arabian Nights character.” Sure wish I had a cell phone…and another hand. Somebody come help me!
Somebody turned out to be a maintenance guy zipping along the sidewalk in a golf cart.
“Hey,” Maci shouted, “Call 911. There’s a man down. He’s bleeding bad.” Crap, I just traumatized the poor guy again. “It’s okay,” she soothed, “help is coming.”
Still in his cart, the maintenance guy conferred with his radio, then said, “I got the office. They’re calling it in.” From the back of his cart, he produced a heavy jacket.
Good thought, keep the guy from going into shock.
Holding the jacket matador-style, Maintenance Guy advanced cautiously and maximized his distance as he draped the coat around and over the injured man’s head.
“What are you doing? He needs to breathe?”
“I left breathing room. Boss says keep this on the low down. Nobody needs to know we got trouble here.”
Maci shot him an incredulous look and saw that he was fighting to hold his breakfast down. “Please put the jacket over his core. It’s not like it’s big enough to hide what’s happening here anyway.” She looked down at the pasty face under her hand as the coat came away. “Hey, buddy, try to stay with us, okay? I think it’s bad to, like, wander off. Looks like you took some kinda hit. How did—” Wait, bad place to go. Think happy place. “I saw the coolest thing this morning. Virga! It was so wizard! The sky was having, like, a private rainstorm, sucking the drops back up before they hit…
My novel, Mile High Lab Rat is set in the 1990’s because that’s when I started writing it. The struggle to get the story right dragged on so long that the technology had to be updated several times to stay current. I finally decided to revert to 1998, and by the time I put the finishing touches on a stellar draft, the ‘90s added an interesting perspective. The Internet was in its infancy and about as useful as a yoyo. Cell phones were upper income only, and we took pictures with cameras—using film.
When I wrote my first book Rocky Mountain Walkabout, in the mid 90’s my options for support were listed in the Yellow Pages, tacked on bulletin boards, or suggested by friends. I found my cover artist by going to a local gallery and looking for mountain scenes I liked. A writing group I discovered in a bookstore, apparently disbanded while I was away, so I asked friends and coworkers for critiques. They were readers, and they tried, but…
What a difference a couple decades make! CritiqueMatch.com hooked me up with an inspired author/animator in Canada. Another test reader, a forensic psychology writer in Virginia, responded to my plea on the Mystery Writers Facebook page. Through Fiverr I contracted a proofreader in England, a book formatter in Pakistan, and an Amazon wizard in South Africa. Social media brought me early review volunteers from Holland, the Philippines, France, and all over the US. Hard to imagine what resources will be available when I’m ready to launch the sequel.
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