Discovery: Proton Field #1

by Laurence Dahners

  Myr didn’t respond, merely funneled her hate into a glare, hoping that it might be just as helpful to Newhouse if Kelley thought no more FBI people were outside. Myr thought, If no one stops her, there’s not a chance she’s going to let us live.

  Changing to a no-nonsense tone, Kelley said, “Sit!”

  Myr sat down.

  Kelley smiled broadly, even though the smile looked patently false. “Now, tell me where you’re keeping the data on this fusion stuff everyone’s so excited about.”

  Myr glanced at her mother whose eyes were wide. Her mother mouthed, “Tell her it doesn’t actually work.”

  Myr knew her mother actually didn’t believe her daughter had invented anything, but decided it might be a good tactic. Sullenly, she said, “It doesn’t actually work.”

  Kelley laughed as if she’d just heard the most delightful joke. Her eyes hardened, “Then, tell me where you’re keeping the information on the imaginary fusion thing.”

  Myr shrugged, “At work.”

  Kelley tilted her head, “Now, I’m thinking you just might be lying to me again? Before he died, your friend Joe told us you don’t keep anything on the computers at work.” She winked broadly, “And everybody knows you don’t keep it in your apartment, right?”

  Myr shook her head.

  “In fact, I’d be willing to bet you’re keeping some kind of high density drive right there on your person, aren’t you?”

  Myr shook her head again.

  Even though she could feel the terabyte jump drive in her front pocket.

  Kelley stepped back behind the kitchen’s peninsula and pulled open a couple of drawers while keeping her eye on Myr. Glancing down into the drawers, she said, “I think I might just have to do something to dissuade you from lying to me.”

  Stomach clenching, Myr assumed Kelley was looking for a knife, but instead she pulled out a rolling pin. She walked back out into the area next to the kitchen table, hefting the pin by the handle on one end. Myr steeled herself for a blow as Kelley lifted the pin, but instead Kelley’s vicious swing hit Connor in the arm. Myr could hear the crack of the bone breaking over the thump of the impact. As Connor cried out, Carol lurched to her feet and reached for his arm. Myr started to rise, but found herself looking down the barrel of Kelley’s gun.

  “You ladies take your seats before I break the retard’s other arm,” Kelley hissed in a nasty tone.

  Myr chomped down on her usual impulse to angrily tell an idiot that Connor’s intelligence was normal. She slowly subsided into her seat.

  Kelley resumed her false cheerfulness, “Now, why don’t you stand up and empty your pockets.” She winked, “Remember, I’ll be patting you down afterward. If I find anything you didn’t put out on the table,” her tone got ugly, “I will break his other arm.”

  Myr looked at Connor. He looked resigned even though he was gritting his teeth and hunching to the side. Tears ran down his cheeks. She stood and started to pull off her coat.

  Cheerful again, Kelley said, “Now you’re sure there’s nothing in the pockets of that coat?”

  Myr stopped with it partly off, shrugged back into it and patted the pockets. Immediately, she felt her small focal point generator. She slid her hand into her pocket and casually laid it on the table, trying to act as if it were nothing important. Then she shrugged out of the coat and hung it on the back of her chair. Reaching into her back pocket she pulled out her AI and tossed it on the table. Her stomach flip-flopped as she reached into her front pockets, wondering whether she could palm the terabyte jump drive. Deciding she couldn’t take that risk with Connor’s left arm, she tossed it on the table too. She made a show of patting her pockets to be sure she hadn’t missed anything. She wished she’d found something else, having only three items on the table seem to cast the jump drive in stark relief.

  Kelley grinned at her, “Seems like you might’ve forgot about that jump drive?”

  Myr nodded grimly, still not saying anything, though she suspected the look in her eyes said plenty.

  Chirpily, Kelley said, “Now, the hard drives poor Aleks got out of your computer had some kind of super-duper encryption on them.” She paused for a moment, then continued, “And I must confess, I’m told our people haven’t been able to get past it. So, I’m gonna have to ask you to decrypt those files and,” she tossed another jump drive out on the table, “put them on this drive in the clear.”

  Moving slowly, with the thought that every bit of delay gave the FBI more time to realize something had gone awry and work out a rescue, Myr picked up the encrypted jump drive and jacked it into her AI. When her AI requested the decryption password, she gave it. Looking up at Kelley, she said, “It’s a big drive. It’ll take a while.”

  “While we’re waiting,” Kelley said musingly, her eyes on the proton field generator, “what’s that other thing?”

  “It’s a… focal field generator,” Myr said slowly, her heart starting to beat harder as she thought about it.

  “It’s not off the shelf… It’s something you guys built, right? Something to do with fusion?”

  “A… prototype, yes.” Myr said reluctantly.

  Kelley’s eyes narrowed, “So you could do fusion with it?”

  Myr shrugged, “You’d need hydrogen, but… yes.”

  “What are all the buttons and switches?”

  Myr reached out and picked it up, hoping the trembling in her hand wasn’t visible. “You turn it on with this rotary switch at the base,” she said, turning it to the third detent. “This slider moves the focal point away from the end of it,” she said as she slid the slider all the way to its end, trying to disguise the fact she was pointing to the cylinder at Kelley and worrying about the fact that Kelley’s gun was pointed at her chest.

  A knock came on the door. Vinn’s voice said, “You okay in there? What’s the holdup?”

  A frisson of fear slid up Myr’s spine as she imagined what would happen to Vinn if he came in the door. And, probably to Agent Newhouse, as well, but… more importantly Vinn.

  Myr felt a little surprised to realize just how much she didn’t want Vinn to get hurt.

  Kelley shot Myr an excited grin, “Tell him to come on in. Say you need help with the wheelchair.” Kelley’s gun swung toward the door, “Then tell the AI to open the door fifty percent.”

  Starting to stand up, Myr called out, “I’m gonna need help with the wheelchair.” As she stood she transferred the field generator to her right hand. She slid the thumb slider to the end and depressed the button at the base with her little finger. “Come on in,” she said loudly, then lunged forward to what she thought was a three-foot distance, pointing the generator at Kelley’s head and depressing the index switch.

  Events seemed to pass in slow motion. For a long moment, Myr thought she hadn’t reached far enough, or had reached too far, or the battery was dead, or something else was wrong.

  She expected the gun’s muzzle to turn toward her.

  But then she realized that Kelley’s eyes had retracted back into their sockets. The woman started to fall.

  Horrified, Myr let her fingers off the buttons.

  Kelley fell to the floor and bounced bonelessly, the gun skittering out of her hand as she flopped onto her back. Distantly, Myr noticed her eyes no longer looked hollow.

  They had a flat lifeless look, like a beached fish.

  Carol stood and stepped around Connor. “What happened to her?!” she asked in a morbidly curious tone as she walked to Kelley and kicked the woman’s gun away. Then she stepped past Kelley to kneel beside Agent Dalrymple and feel for a pulse.

  Again a knock came at the door. Myr heard Vinn’s voice again, “You’re going to have to open the door if you want any help!”

  Her eyes still locked on the horror that’d been Kelley, Myr said, “AI… open the door. Call 911 and ask them to send ambulances.”

  Outside, Vinn heard the door latch throw and a motor start to crank the door open on power. As he’d said he wo
uld, Agent Newhouse dove low through the door, gun out. He’d told Vinn he’d be trying to move quickly across anyone’s field of fire.

  Vinn moved to where he could see Newhouse through the opening door. Newhouse stood and Vinn could tell he’d stopped worrying about any threats in the room. Vinn could see someone laying on the floor… Agent Dalrymple with a woman kneeling beside him.

  Newhouse knelt with the woman at his partner’s side.

  Newhouse had said Vinn shouldn’t come in until Newhouse gave him the all clear, but Vinn thought Newhouse’d forgotten about him. Vinn desperately wanted to see that Myr was okay, so, though he wasn’t sure whether it was brave or foolish to enter the lion’s den in absence of the go-ahead, Vinn also stepped inside. In an effort not to be completely imprudent, he at least moved laterally across any field of fire.

  Inside the room, Vinn didn’t see any threats. A blonde woman lay on the floor. Myr looked dazed as she put things in her pockets. She glanced at Vinn, but didn’t say anything. Instead she walked over to kneel beside Newhouse and the other woman. Vinn realized from her appearance that the woman must be Myr’s mother.

  “How is he?” Myr asked

  “I don’t know,” Ms. Sevii said, sounding unhappy. “He’s got a pulse and he’s breathing, but…”

  Vinn could see a bullet wound in Dalrymple’s cheek and some swelling on the side of his head. Newhouse was wide-eyed and looked pretty upset.

  “I already called 911,” Myr said.

  Myr’s mother sighed, “I don’t think there’s anything else we can do until he gets to a hospital.” She got up and moved over to look at the blonde woman lying on the floor, taking her pulse as well. After a minute, she looked up at Myr. “She’s… I don’t know… unresponsive, like in a coma.” She frowned, “What the hell happened to her? No one even touched her!”

  Myr shrugged but didn’t say anything.

  Vinn stepped closer to look down at the blonde woman. He said, “This is her, isn’t it?”

  Myr stood up from where she’d been kneeling by Dalrymple and stepped over next to Vinn. In a choked-up voice, she said, “Yeah, that’s her alright.”

  Vinn put an arm around Myr’s shoulders. A moment later she buried her face in Vinn’s neck, clinging to him, sobs shuddering through her shoulders. As he stood holding her, he thought. This isn’t exactly how I hoped my first hug from her might happen. “Hey… It’s okay,” Vinn said, trying to sound reassuring, “She doesn’t look like she’s going to hurt anyone anymore.”

  “Because I—I, killed her!” Myr croaked into his ear.

  “What? How?”

  “Proton field…” Myr sobbed, reaching down and pulling one of their small prototype field generators out of her coat pocket. “I opened it in her head.”

  “Oh…” Vinn said, staring at the generator and thinking about what had happened to his chicken wing back in the lab. It would have sucked some of her brain down to a point, crushing it to nothing. Then if Myr turned the field off, that brain would’ve reappeared in her skull as gelatinous mush. He squeezed Myr, “Hey, she’s been killing people right and left. If you hadn’t, probably a lot more people would’ve died.”

  Myr let go of Vinn to wipe her eyes on her sleeve. “I know. But…”

  Flashing lights announced the arrival of the ambulances.

  ***֎֎֍֍***

  Myr didn’t find it surprising that she and her mother were still sitting with Connor in his little cubicle in the emergency department several hours later. They’d been to ERs a lot with Connor and knew that if it wasn’t a screaming emergency, it always took forever. What was surprising was the fact that Vinn was still there with them. She kept thinking he’d make his excuses and go home. Myr’d even told Vinn they were okay, in case he’d only been hanging around because of her histrionically hugging him and crying on his shoulder back at her mom’s condo.

  He’d just said he wanted to stay with her and her family to help in any way he could.

  Which gave her a warm fuzzy feeling.

  Finally, the bone specialist came back in and called up Connor’s x-rays on the wall screen in the room. After introducing herself, she turned to Connor and said, “You can see that your arm bone or humerus is broken here in the middle.” She pointed at the screen. Myr winced at the way the bone had broken into two big pieces with some smaller shattered pieces right in the middle where it’d sustained the impact from the rolling pin. The doctor continued, “Most breaks like this are treated in a kind of plastic cast and do quite well. It can be treated by surgically putting a plate on the bone. That has the advantage of letting you use the arm sooner,” she shrugged, “but the disadvantage of requiring surgery. Surgery, of course, has some concerns in that it damages the muscle in your arm when we make an incision.”

  Connor uncertainly turned and looked at his mother. She said, “It’s up to you Connor, you’re twenty-one now and you need to be deciding these things for yourself.”

  Connor turned back to the doctor, “So, with my muscular dystrophy I probably should avoid the surgery because I can’t afford to have any more of my muscle damaged, right?”

  The doctor sighed, “Yes, that’s true. But, with your arm in the plastic cast you won’t be able to use it, so your muscle will atrophy from disuse. I’ve done an electronic search of the medical literature to see if anyone has advice for how to treat humerus fractures in patients with muscular dystrophy and I can’t find any papers on the topic. My gut feel is that it’d probably be better to have surgery and get back to using your arm as soon as possible, but I don’t have any evidence to back it up.”

  “How bad does the surgery hurt?”

  “It probably hurts worse for a couple of days because of the incision, but then the pain’s probably better because the bones aren’t wiggling around inside of your arm every time you move.” She shrugged, “Casts don’t hold bones completely still like most people think.”

  Connor glanced at his mother and Myr. “I think I’d rather have the surgery, what do you think?”

  Carol said, “It’s probably for the best.”

  Myr said nothing, just nodded. She knew her brother wouldn’t live a whole lot longer, so it seemed like the best thing would be to get his arm working again as soon as possible. She didn’t want him to lose even more time with his arm disabled in a cast.

  Connor nodded, “I’ll have the surgery.”

  The doctor arranged for Connor to be admitted to the hospital and set his surgery up for the next day. As Myr and her mother walked with Connor and the nurse pushing Connor’s stretcher up to his hospital room, Myr felt even more surprised to find Vinn still tagging along. Vinn was walking alongside the stretcher talking to Connor while Myr and her mother were walking behind. Carol leaned close to Myr and quietly said, “He cares a lot about you, doesn’t he?”

  “Sure, he’s my brother. Do you think surgery’s the right thing?”

  “I think whatever Connor decides, we should back him up. He doesn’t need us second guessing him.” She poked Myr in the side, “But, I was talking about your young man… He’s crazy about you.”

  “My what…? You mean Vinn? He and I just work together!” Even if I’d like something more, she thought.

  Carol shook her head, “You may think you just work together, but I’ve seen the way he looks at you when you’re not looking.”

  He does? Myr thought. Out loud, she said, “Mom! He’s four years younger than I am. He doesn’t want to date an old lady!”

  Carol laughed, “Oh, you should’ve seen the look on your face. You’ve got it bad for him too, don’t you?”

  Myr felt a blush rising, but was saved by a voice from back down the hall behind her, “Ms. Sevii?”

  Carol and her mother both turned to look. Agent Foster was trotting after them. “Can I have a few words?” he asked.

  As one, the two women turned to look at Connor. “I’ll be fine,” he said.

  Vinn said, “I’ll stay with him.”

 
; Carol shook her head, “We need to go with Connor so we’ll know where his room is.”

  Foster said, “No problem, I’ll go with you to his room and then we can talk in one of the waiting rooms near there.”

  Myr had a sick feeling that she knew what Foster wanted. She dropped back a little further, tugging on the agent’s sleeve so that he’d fall back with her. “How’s agent Dalrymple?”

  Foster said, “The bullet went through a couple teeth and some of his sinuses then along the side of his skull. It exited in the back where we couldn’t see the wound at first. It didn’t hit his brain so the doctors think he’s going to be okay.” After a pause, he continued, “Well, he’ll need some surgery for his face, but that’s a lot better than dead.”

  “That’s… that’s wonderful,” Myr said. “What are you wanting to talk to us about?”

  “We’re trying to figure out what happened to the killer, Kelley Simpson. The doctors say she’s brain-dead, though her body’s fine. MRIs of her brain show a big area that’s… They don’t really know what’s happened to it. They just say it’s,” he waved his fingers in little quotation marks, “ ‘lost its structure.’ There aren’t any marks on her though. Did you see anything hit her or… I don’t know, see any other explanation for whatever happened to her?”

  Myr said, “Um… Would the person who did it be in trouble?”

  Foster turned to stare at her curiously, “Somebody did it?” Then he waved the question away, “No, never mind. No one would be in trouble. She was actively murdering people. Anyone who stopped her would have our undying gratitude and they certainly wouldn’t get charged.”

  Myr blinked, “Should such a person have a lawyer anyway?”

  Foster took a deep breath, “It’s never my place to tell people they don’t need legal representation. But, no one’s in trouble here. We’re just trying to figure out what happened?”

  They’d stopped walking by then. Myr looked off into the distance for a few seconds, thinking. Finally, she said, “I’d better get back to you on this. I know what happened and I expect that I’ll be able to tell you, but I need to talk to some other people, if not lawyers, before I talk to you about it.”