Playing with Fire: A Magical Romantic Comedy (with a body count)(31)
“You—”
The crack of metal against a hard surface startled me into turning my head towards the hallway. Janet had her billy club out and smacked it against the wall. “That is enough, Cadet Winfield. If you interfere with her work, I will follow protocol to the letter. That involves my gun and your kneecap, followed by a pair of handcuffs and your immediate suspension from the academy. At the scene of a contamination, the certified CDC specialists are the law, and she’s working for the public’s safety. You are, at most, an observer and assistant.”
Maybe I’d let Perky ride in a cruiser and give Janet a lift wherever she wanted to go. I liked when the cops backed me, even if she was twisting the regulations just a tiny bit. Then again, she wasn’t, not really—she just didn’t know I had a gorgon dust disaster on my hands, er, hooves.
The cop and cadet engaged in a stare off, and I left them to their silent battle while I went to work getting a better feel for the situation. A glass wall separated me from the purported contaminated room, and dark brown fluid streaked the window. If the meter wasn’t shrilling its dire warnings over gorgon dust, I would have believed it to be bile. An initial reading of gorgon dust plus a reset reading and full scan showing the same result, without any evidence of bile in the area, meant the liquid was likely the dust.
What was the brown gunk? It looked like bile. It looked like every other gorgon bile sample I’d ever seen, so much so if I’d been going in with visuals only, I might have begun clean up without bothering to do a secondary scan. Then again, I always ran the meter just in case there was something else with the bile.
Why me? Why again? Had someone mixed the dust in with a fluid designed to mimic bile? Was the bile-like substance some prank gone disastrously wrong and the dust was from something else? No matter how it had happened, I was stuck. At my range to the contamination, I couldn’t leave. By the book, I was contaminated. If the dust was in the fluid, when it dried, the entire building would also be contaminated.
Hundreds upon hundreds of people—maybe even thousands—worked in the building. Anxiety prickled its way through me. With such a heavily ventilated building and no way of knowing if the dust had gotten into the air ducts, I couldn’t afford to request help, either.
I had no choice. “Cadet.”
“What?”
“Walk backwards. Slow-lee. Don’t dee-sturb air. Go ell-ee-vay-tur. Leave, to ground floor. Dee-mand meter. Call for glass coffins. You will need. You not con-tam-eenated, you would be stone, but you may carry res-ee-due.”
“What?”
“Officer Down-ning?”
“I heard you.” The woman remained near the elevators, straightened, and lifted her chin. “How can I help?”
If I got us all out of this alive, I would not only take her on a ride, I would find the best bar around so we could drink ourselves into a stupor. She seemed like the type of person I’d like to take to a bar and get exceptionally drunk with. “This not bile. Is dust. Gor-gon dust. Re-cep-shun con-tam-eenated. Leave. Sor-ree. I stay. In con-tam-eenated area. Hallway seem safe. For now.” While I could try to burn it, I couldn’t afford to take any risks, not with so many people in danger. The list of people qualified to demand a napalming was limited to upper officers in the police, upper management of the CDC, and people with top-level certification at the contamination site, like me. I lifted my head and forced my tongue to do my bidding. “I condemn this building and request napalm. Entire structure. All ducts, all ventilation systems. You call dispatch.”
Glass coffins protected humanity, and while there were ones designed for centaurs, they were few and far between and shaped specifically for them. I wouldn’t fit.
I would stay. There was no other choice.
Cadet Winfield’s eyes bulged, and he crept backwards.
Considering I could stand in fire and like it, maybe I’d survive. I’d even had C4 detonated while strapped to me. It had tickled. What was an entire building being torched with a full load of napalm compared to that? I watched the idiot cadet and decided to pull rank. All things considered, I couldn’t allow a loose cannon to put the public at risk. “Officer Down-ning, if he try to leave without scan or ree-fuse glass coffin, you shoot, put him in anyway. Risk to public.”
“He won’t, not on my watch,” she promised.
“I like you, Janet.” I did, too. It took real courage to face a leave-someone-behind situation with dignity. “Tell Officer Purr-keens to call Profess-ur Yale to pro-vide sec-un-dare-ee auth-or-is-zay-shun for nay-palm.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Go. Quick.”
The cops fled into the elevator.
When I was certain they were gone, I began hunting for the dust. Picking up the fish-eye camera in my mouth, I began the tedious process of pushing the meter around on the floor in search of the source. Why had I gotten qualified for dangerous material handling? Stupid me. I’d be inside the building when they started flooding napalm in through the top floor, probably pumping all sorts of magic into the gel to ensure it covered every possible surface in the structure.
Even if I survived the fire, if the floors didn’t collapse, I’d be astonished. Starting tomorrow, the government would begin planning the rebuilding of the site while a lot of stunned bankers tried to figure out what they’d do without their office space.