“Hey, Wooten, take it easy.” One of his peers lit a cigarette.
“Let’s open the bags of ice now,” I said. “I wish we had a tub, but we don’t. I see some books on those countertops, and it looks like there’s a lot of stacks of paper over there by that fax machine. Bring anything like that you can for a border.”
Men brought to me all sorts of thick manuals, reams of papers and briefcases that I assumed belonged to the employees they had captured. I formed a rectangular border around Hand as if I were in my backyard making a flower bed. Then I covered him with fifty pounds of ice, leaving only his face and an arm exposed.
“What will that do?” The man called Wooten had moved closer, and he sounded as if he were from out west somewhere. d to radiation,” I said. “His “He’s been acutely expose system is being destroyed and the only way to put a stop to it is to slow everything down.”
I opened the medical chest and got out a needle, which I inserted into their dying leader’s arm and secured with tape. I connected an IV line leading to a bag on a stand that contained nothing but saline, a harmless salty solution that would do nothing one way or another. It dripped as he got cooler beneath inches of ice.
Hand was barely alive, and my heart was thudding as I looked around at these sweating men who believed that this man I pretended to save was God. One had taken his sweater off, and his undershirt was almost gray, the sleeves drawn up from years of washing. Several of them had beards, while others had not shaved in days. I wondered where their women and children were, and I thought of the barge in the river and what must be going on in other parts of the plant. voice barely said, and at least
“Excuse me,” a quavering one of the hostages was a woman. “I need to go to the bathroom.” obody shitting
“Mullen, you take her. We don’t want n in here.”
“Excuse me, but I have to go, too,” said another hostage, who was a man.
“So do I.” he was young
“All right, one at a time,” said Mullen, w and huge.
I knew at least one thing the FBI did not. The New Zionists had never intended to let anyone else go. Terrorists place hoods over their hostages because it is easier to kill people who have no faces. I got out a vial of saline and injected fifty milliliters into Hand’s IV line, as if I were giving him some other magic dose.
“How’s he doing?” one of the men loudly asked as another hostage was led off to the bathroom.
“I’ve got him stabilized at the moment,” I lied.
“When’s he going to come around?” asked another.
I took their leader’s pulse again, and it was so faint I almost could not find it. Suddenly, the man dropped down beside me and felt Hand’s neck. Digging his fingers in the ice, he pressed them over the heart, and when he looked up at me, he was frightened and furious.
“I don’t feel nothing!” he yelled, his face red.
“You’re not supposed to feel anything. It’s critical to keep him in a hypothermic state so we can arrest the rate of irradiation damage to blood vessels and organs,” I told him. “He’s on massive doses of diethylene triamine pentaacetic acid, and he is quite alive.”
He stood, his eyes wild as he stepped closer to me, finger on the trigger of his Tec-9. “How do we know you aren’t just bullshitting or making him worse.”
“You don’t know.” I showed no emotion because I had accepted this was the day I would die, and I was not afraid of it. “You have no choice but to trust that I know what I’m doing. I’ve profoundly slowed down his metabolism.
And he’s not going to come to any time soon. I’m simply trying to keep him alive.”
He averted his gaze.
“Hey, Bear, take it easy.”
“Leave the lady alone.”
I continued kneeling by Hand as his IV dripped and melting ice began to seep through the barricade, spreading over the floor. I took his vital signs many times and made notes, so it seemed that I was very busy in my attendance of him.