The Rising(50)

Then, when neither prayers nor remedies provided the answer, fate intervened and smiled upon us.

By bringing us you, Alex.

You’ve heard me talk about Laboratory Z to your father, I know you have. I never really knew what went on there. I didn’t clean that part of the complex in San Ramon; nobody on the menial staff did, all of us lacking the proper security clearance to even enter that section of the facility. As a maid, though, I kind of melted into the scenery, becoming no different in my dark blue uniform than the artistic tapestries that adorned the walls. I was part of the woodwork and scientists in lab coats whose name tags featured bar codes instead of names spoke without reservation in my presence. Enough for me to discern that something very big indeed was happening here.

In Laboratory Z.

I was working outside the secure entrance to the lab the day fate brought you to me, when a shrill emergency alarm sounded. Drills were hardly unusual, and I assumed this to be merely another until a flood of personnel stampeded past me dragging panic behind them. The open doors let a peculiar smell emerge in their wake. It made my nose feel hot, actually hot, when it reached me. Something metallic and coppery, a combination of something left burning on a stove and spilled blood. Amid the steady flash of the emergency lighting, I heard cries and screams, plaintive wails coming from inside the laboratory.

Instinct took over and I dashed inside into a noxious white mist that burned my eyes. I took it to be some sort of fire suppressant at first, then wasn’t so sure. It didn’t seem to be coming from anywhere in particular, just seemed like, well, air. As if someone had taken a spray can to that air and painted it. Darker in some places than others, as if it were still drying.

Everyone who’d been inside the lab must have evacuated and I was struck by the awful fear I’d lost my way in the gray air, when I heard something that made no sense:

A baby crying.

I stopped and listened some more, trying to pinpoint the sound. The noxious odor grew thicker the deeper I ventured into Laboratory Z, intensified the more I sank into a white, dewy mist that felt hot and cold at the same time. Sparks flared, illuminating the semblance of a path for me. Cries and screams sounded, seeming to come from beyond a wall of super-thick glass that was fracturing into a spiderweb pattern even as I neared it. I caught glimpses of motion beyond that glass where the mist thickened the air to a soup-like consistency that formed a curtain over the world beyond.

I did my best to ignore whatever awful toxic thing was transpiring inside that mist, not wanting to picture the product of the leak, explosion, accidental release, or whatever had spawned the disaster. I sucked in mouthfuls of the stench-riddled mist, expecting it to be like smoke when it was more like, well, nothing but stained air, neither hot nor cold. I kept on toward the crying, a whirring sound reaching me then that reminded me of the noise an amusement park ride makes when it reaches the crescendo of its pace.

Instinct, a woman’s, drove me deeper inside whatever the mist contained. Tracing a line against the fracturing glass when the thick blanket finally stole my vision, tracing it to the sound of the baby. It stopped crying as I neared where it must have lay.

Please don’t stop, I willed, cry so I may find you.…

And, as if complying with my unspoken command, the cries started anew and I saw a disembodied shape emerge, a pair of arms with the rest of whoever they belonged to hidden by the mist. The crying, loud enough to stun my ears now, was coming from those arms because, I saw, they were holding a baby, extending it out toward me.

“Take him!” a voice screeched. “Get him out of here!”

I didn’t question, didn’t argue, just took the infant in my own arms and drew him tight against my chest protectively to shield him from whatever the mist might be carrying.

“Should I…,” I started.

But the arms were gone and the shape beyond them was gone too, pulled back inside the thicker portion of the mist. So I turned and did my best to retrace my route from the lab I realized was growing hotter by the second. I felt trapped inside a steam oven until my route got me back to the doorway and outside into the cool, clean air. I took a deep breath, realizing only then I’d been holding it the last stretch of the way that had seen me tuck the infant inside my regulation jacket to further shield him.

Maybe I would’ve still turned the child over once I reached the triaged chaos of the parking lot. Halfway across the asphalt, though, I was struck by a shock wave equal parts hot and cold that swallowed me up and coughed me out. I felt airborne but when I looked down, my feet had never actually left the concrete, which had cracked underfoot like thin glass. Everyone around me was rushing, the wail of sirens sounding intermittently in my head as if someone was turning them off and then on again.

There was no one to hand the baby I’d rescued to, so I held fast to him, charging through the parking lot I now saw was strewn with cars missing all their window and windshield glass. My own car was parked in a lot reserved for lower-level employees and my breath had long deserted me by the time I reached it, gasping for air with the burned-wire stench stuck in my nostrils that felt as if they’d been zapped by some medical freezing agent.

I got my door open and climbed inside my car with you nestled in my lap. You’d stopped crying, seemed to be smiling, your eyes meeting mine.

I fell in love in that moment and knew I could never part with you. You were mine and your father’s; fate had willed it so. Where the herbs had failed us, destiny had intervened and gave us what we wanted more than anything.