Michael Crichton - State Of Fear

Kenner was draping the clothes over the engine. He took her skirt, draped it over, too. He arranged the angora sweater to lie on the top.

"What are you doing?"

"Lie down," he said. "Lie flat on the floormake yourself as flat as you canand don't move."

She pressed her body against the cold concrete. Her heart was pounding. The air was bristling. She felt a shiver down the back of her neck.

"Three amp;two amp;one amp;"

Kenner threw himself on the ground next to her and the first lightning bolt crashed through the room. She was shocked by the violence of it, the blast of air rushing over her body. Her hair was rising into the air, she could feel the weight of it lift off her neck. There were more boltsthe crashing sound was terrifyingblasting blue light, so bright she saw it even though she squeezed her eyes shut. She pressed herself against the ground, willing herself to be even flatter, exhaling, thinking Now is a time for prayer.

But suddenly there was another kind of light in the room, yellower, flickering, and a sharp acrid smell.

Fire.

A piece of her flaming sweater fell on her bare shoulder. She felt searing pain.

"It's a fire"

"Don't move!" Kenner snarled.

The bolts were still blasting, coming faster and faster, crackling over the room, but she could see out of the corner of her eye that the clothes heaped on the engine were aflame, the room was filling with smoke.

She thought, My hair is burning. And she could feel it suddenly hot at the base of her neck, along her scalp amp; And suddenly the room was filled with blasting water, and the lightning had stopped, and the sprinkler nozzles hissed overhead. She felt cold; the fires went out; the concrete was wet.

"Can I get up now?"

"Yes," Kenner said. "You can get up now."

He spent several more minutes trying to break the glass without success. Finally he stopped and stared, his hair matted by the sizzling water. "I don't get it," he said. "You can't have a room like this without a safety mechanism to enable someone to get out."

"They locked the door, you saw it yourself."

"Right. Locking it from the outside with a padlock. That padlock must be there to make sure nobody can enter the room from the outside while the facility is closed. But there still has to be some way to get out from the inside."

"If there is, I don't see it." She was shivering. Her shoulder hurt where she was burned. Her underwear was soaked through. She wasn't modest, but she was cold, and he was nattering on amp; "There just has to be a way," he said, turning slowly, looking.

"You can't break the glass amp;"

"No," he said. "You can't." But that seemed to suggest something to him. He bent and carefully examined the glass frame, looking at the seam where the glass met the wall. Running his finger along it.

She shivered while she watched him. The sprinklers were still on, still spraying. She was standing in three inches of water. She could not understand how he could be so focused, so intent on "I'll be damned," he said. His fingers had closed on a small latch, flush with the mounting. He found another on the opposite side of the window, flicked it open. And then he pushed the window, which was hinged in the center, and rotated it open.

He stepped through into the outer room.

"Nothing to it," he said. He extended his hand. "Can I offer you some dry clothes?"

"Thank you," she said, and took his hand.

The LTSI washrooms weren't anything to write home about, but Sarah and Kenner dried off with paper towels and found some warm coveralls, and Sarah began to feel better. Staring in the mirror, she saw that she'd lost two inches of hair around her left side. The ends were ragged, black, twisted.

"Could have been worse," she said, thinking Ponytails for a while.

Kenner tended to her shoulder, which he said was just a first-degree burn with a few blisters. He put ice on it, telling her that burns were not a thermal injury but were actually a nerve response within the body, and that ice in the first ten minutes reduced the severity of the burn by numbing the nerve, and preventing the response. So, if you were going to blister, ice prevented it from happening.

She tuned out his voice. She couldn't actually see the burned area, so she had to take his word for it. It was starting to hurt. He found a first-aid kit, brought back aspirin.

"Aspirin?" Sarah said.

"Better than nothing." He dropped two tablets in her hand. "Actually, most people don't know it, but aspirin's a true wonder drug, it has more pain-killing power than morphine, and it is anti-inflammatory, anti-fever"

"Not right now," she said. "Please." She just couldn't take another of his lectures.

He said nothing. He just put on the bandage. He seemed to be good at that, too.

"Is there anything you're not good at?" she said.

"Oh sure."

"Like what? Dancing?"

"No, I can dance. But I'm terrible at languages."

"That's a relief." She herself was good at languages. She'd spent her junior year in Italy, and was reasonably fluent in Italian and French. And she'd studied Chinese.

"And what about you?" he said. "What are you bad at?"

"Relationships," she said. Staring in the mirror and pulling at the blackened strands of her hair.

As Evans climbed the steps to his apartment, he could hear the television blaring. It seemed louder than before. He heard cheers and laughter. Some sort of show with a live studio audience.

He opened the door, and went into the living room. The private investigator from the courtyard was sitting on the couch, his back to Evans while he watched television. His jacket was off and flung over a nearby chair. He had his arm draped across the back of the sofa. His fingers drummed impatiently.

"I see you've made yourself at home," Evans said. "Pretty loud, don't you think? Would you mind turning it down?"

The man didn't answer, he just continued to stare at the TV.

"Did you hear me?" Evans said. "Turn it down, would you?"

The man did not move. Just his fingers, moving restlessly on the back of the couch.

Evans walked around to face the man. "I'm sorry, I don't know your name but"

He broke off. The investigator hadn't turned to look at him but continued to stare fixedly at the TV. In fact, no part of his body moved. He was immobile, rigid. His eyes didn't move. They didn't even blink. The only part of his body that moved was his fingers, on the top of the couch. They almost seemed to be twitching. In spasm.

Evans stepped directly in front of the man. "Are you all right?"

The man's face was expressionless. His eyes stared forward, seeming to look straight through Evans.

"Sir?"

The investigator was breathing shallowly, his chest hardly moving. His skin was tinged with gray.

"Can you move at all? What happened to you?"

Nothing. The man was rigid.

Just like the way they described Margo, Evans thought. The same rigidity, the same blankness. Evans picked up the phone and dialed 911, called for an ambulance to his address.

"Okay, help is coming," he said to the man. The private detective gave no visible response, but even so, Evans had the impression that the man could hear, that he was fully aware inside his frozen body. But there was no way to be sure.

Evans looked around the room, hoping to find clues as to what had happened to this man. But the apartment seemed undisturbed. One chair in the corner seemed to have been moved. The guy's smelly cigar was on the floor in the corner, as if it had rolled there. It had burned the edge of the rug slightly.

Evans picked up the cigar.

He brought it back to the kitchen, ran it under the faucet, and tossed it in the wastebasket. Then he had an idea. He went back to the man. "You were going to bring me something amp;"