Beside the sphere of ice, there was a phone with a touchscreen lighting up as a call came through. Two wires ran from the phone, through a hole in the table, and underneath the ice.
The ice spheres began to glow from a blue light embedded at their centers.
“Get out!” I screamed.
The SWAT team was already halfway up the stairs.
Nadine followed frantically behind them.
I saw everyone disappear onto the main floor, and I was several seconds from the bottom step when the basement went white.
I felt an immense pressure on my chest.
Then I was lying on my back on the floor, staring up at the exposed insulation under the main level.
The visor of my hood was cracked and scratched in numerous places, and there were tiny, clear fragments speared through the plastic. I didn’t understand what they were until one of the slivers of shrapnel dripped a freezing drop of water into my left eye.
I managed to raise my pistol and shine the light on my suit. It had been shredded and punctured in more places than I could count.
Writhing panic.
Pain flooding in.
My arms and legs—every surface of my skin not protected by body armor—suddenly burned as if I’d been stung a thousand times.
WHEN I TOOK A breath, a crushing agony constricted my chest.
I heard myself moan.
Opened my eyes.
I was lying in a hospital bed.
On a stand beside me, a vital-signs monitor beeped at regular intervals and an IV bag fed something into my vein through an intravenous needle taped to my heavily bandaged left arm. My other arm and my legs had been wrapped in gauze. More disturbing was the opaque plastic partition completely enclosing me and the bed. Beyond, I could only see silhouettes and vague shapes. The voices I heard were distant, muddled.
I tried to retrieve my last waking memory, and whether it was because of the drugs or my injuries, it took some effort to find it.
I’d been lying on the dirt floor in the basement of a Victorian we’d raided in Denver. There’d been an explosion. I had tried to get up, but the pain in my chest had been paralyzing.
And so I’d lain there in the dark, wondering where the rest of the team had gone.
Wondering if I was dying.
Pain distorts time, so I had no idea how much of it had passed when I finally heard the thunder of footsteps descending the stairs into the basement. A medical team in full hazmat gear had surrounded me, and seeing my extreme pain, one of them had mercifully loaded me up with some beautiful drug.
I’d sailed away into a blissful sea of darkness.
Until I’d woken up here.
Wherever here was.
“Hi, Logan. How are you feeling?”
The voice came through a small speaker on the bedside table—a deeper-than-average female voice.
“Breathing hurts,” I said. “A lot.”
“How would you rate your pain on a scale of one to ten?”
“Seven. Maybe eight.”
“On your right, there’s a wand thing with a purple button on it. Press that a couple of times and you’ll get some morphine flowing.”
I started to reach for it but stopped. I’d had morphine before—in the wake of a botched Inland Empire raid that had taken my first partner’s life and left me gutshot. I loved morphine. But it left me so relaxed I could barely bring myself to follow even the simplest of conversations. And in this moment, I needed some answers.
“Where am I?” I asked.
“Denver Health Medical Center. My name is Dr. Singh. I’m an intensivist.”
I took another painful breath.
“I’m in intensive care?”
“Correct.”
Wow. With new viruses and mutations of known illnesses constantly circling the globe, ICU beds were always in high demand, and often unavailable. Either the GPA had pulled some strings to get me in here or I was in seriously bad shape.
“Am I dying?”
“No, your vitals are good now.”
“What’s with the plastic?”
“Do you remember what happened last night?”
“I was on a raid. Something blew up.”
“An improvised explosive device detonated in that basement. You may have been exposed to something.”
A rush of paralyzing fear enveloped me.
“Like what?” I asked.
“A pathogen or a toxin.”
“Was I or not?”
“We don’t know yet. We’re running tests. I will say it’s not looking like you were poisoned. Your organ function is good.”
“What about the others who were with me? My partner, Nadine. The SWAT team.”
“They’re in quarantine here as well, just to be safe. But they were out of the basement when the device went off. Their suits weren’t compromised.”
I shifted uncomfortably in the bed.
The pain was intensifying, the purple button calling to me.
“What are my injuries?” I asked.
“Two broken ribs. Three cracked ribs. Your left lung was collapsed, but that’s been fixed. And your arms and legs are covered in lacerations from the ice fragments.”
“Was it that bad of an explosion?”
“You were in a confined space, so the differential between your air-filled organs and the pressure wave caused some damage. Fortunately, nothing life-threatening. Nothing you won’t recover from.”
I figured the pain had reached the threshold of becoming at least as distracting as the morphine would be.
I pressed the purple button several times.
The relief was instantaneous.
Instantly I felt weightless and warm.
“I see you just activated the morphine pump. Try to get some sleep, Logan. I’ll check in on you in a couple of hours.”
* * *
—
I woke again.
Something was different this time.
Something was wrong.
There was still that radiant pain in my chest, but now my body ached as well, and I felt unimaginably hot. The sheets were soaked with sweat. It was running down into my eyes, and I wasn’t breathing so much as panting.
The vital signs monitor beeped too fast.
Someone stood at my bedside, injecting the contents of a syringe into my IV line.
“What’s happening?” I asked.
My voice sounded dreamy. My words slurred.
The doctor or nurse peered down at me through the face shield of a hazmat suit. I tried to read the gravity of the situation in their eyes, but it eluded me.
Their voice came through a speaker in the face shield. It sounded like the doctor I had spoken to previously, although I couldn’t recall her name.
“You’ve spiked a very high fever, Logan. We’re trying to get your temperature down.”
“How high?”
“Too high.”
I said something that, even to me, sounded delirious.
A door in the plastic unzipped and another hazmat-suited medical worker stepped into my bubble.
“I have the cold packs, Dr. Singh.”
“Thank you, Jessica.”
Dr. Singh set the syringe down and drew back the blankets that had been covering me. I had sweated completely through my bandages and hospital gown.
Dr. Singh carefully lifted my head off the pillow as Jessica wrapped a cold compress around my neck.
I tried to ask if I was dying, but the words rushed out in vibrant colors. I could actually see them leaving my mouth in a train of exploding fireworks.