Interference

by S. L. LUCK

  “Dried up twenty years ago,” Dan said.

  “Didn’t just dry up. Baront was drilling one of their gas wells near there. Won’t say they drilled too shallow, but they drilled too shallow and fracked it. Lawyers saved their asses.” His lips pressed together angrily.

  His food arrived and he ate quickly while Dan settled both their bills. Together they left the restaurant, with Boyce joining Dan in his cruiser because it had better tires. Though it was early evening, the moonless sky had grown dark, and there was a chill that caused Dan to crank the heat. October snowfall wasn’t unusual for the city, but it always seemed to stun disbelieving residents as if shovels and snow tires and antifreeze were afterthoughts better employed in colder cities. As they pulled from Boomer’s parking lot and headed north toward Garrett’s municipal block and the mayor’s office, unprepared vehicles slid past stop signs and skated anxiously away from other bumpers. Tired and stressed, they exchanged accounts of the last few days while Dan drove.

  “You finally get that wrestling team from the river?” Boyce asked.

  “Wouldn’t be here if we didn’t,” Dan said. “Wasn’t so bad. Joe had his engines in and out in an hour. It was that damn daycare that was a bitch. You’d think that with all the warnings that they’d stay away, especially a kiddie group like that. But no, they got to collect shells and rocks for their macaroni crafts. They were stuck so hard, one of my guys popped his knee trying to get a little one out. Ministry pulled the daycare’s license this morning. Thank God.” He tightened his grip on the wheel, remembering.

  “It’s hard to protect stupid, ain’t it?” Boyce said. “I caught a fella taking pictures in our treatment plant this morning. Said the river is our fault and that he was going to prove that we’re holding the water back just so we can increase taxes. Can you believe it? Damn near shit my pants when I ran into him.”

  Dan raised an eyebrow. “You want an officer on that?”

  “Nah. I threatened to throw him in the sludge tank if I caught him again. He skedaddled pretty fast.” Boyce drew a roll of antacids from his pocket and popped two into his mouth, chewing while breathing through his nose.

  Before long, the brick and limestone façade of City Hall bloomed into view. The area was mostly empty, save for a scattering of holiday vendors making their last business of the day. Steam rose from booths selling hot chocolate, specialty ciders, and roasted chestnuts while aromas of pine, cinnamon, cranberry, and leather sprang from craft shacks displaying autumn décor, potpourri, candles, moccasins, and fur-lined mittens. In the center, a man playing a saxophone rose from his stool and began packing his instrument away. Dan parked, and as they walked through the departing crowd toward the mayor’s office, chatter about the river and of the bus accident and of Anabelle Cheever was all they heard. “Let’s cancel the Fall Festival and give them something else to talk about,” Boyce suggested.

  Dan shrugged. “Don’t tempt me.”

  Down the sidewalk, around the shuttered fountain, and up the steps of City Hall they went. The building was usually closed by this time, but tonight, on the other side of the glass, lights were on, offices were open, and people were working. Through the revolving door, they were greeted by a security officer who directed them up the stairs to the second floor where Ada Falconer was waiting for them.

  “Aren’t you two a sight for sore eyes,” she said, coming from around her desk to greet them. The woman could run marathons in stilettos, but now she was shoeless, in skirt and stockings, and with little smudges of makeup around her eyes. Her blouse was untucked, for which she made no apology to Boyce or Dan. She extended a hand to them and directed them to sit.

  “What fresh hell have we been hit with today?” Dan asked. “The sky falling now? Maybe a volcano has surfaced beneath the city and we need to evacuate?”

  Boyce and Ada shared a groan. She put glass bottles of sparkling water in front of them and said, “Same hell as this morning, though aliens could land at this point and it wouldn’t faze me. How are you two doing?”

  “Stretched, that’s for sure,” Dan reported. “We’ve got support from London—eight officers there—and another thirteen from Toronto. Ministry rented out the Best Western for their investigation and deployment teams and the Red Cross is holed up in the Clarion. I have two guys on that damn reporter too. We blink and she’s got her nose where it doesn’t belong, no matter how many times we toss her out. Last thing we need with all the shit that’s been going on.”

  “Thanks for helping with that,” Ada said.

  “No trouble,” Dan said.

  Ada leaned back in her chair and sighed. “So, how close are we to solving this thing?”

  “We’re not,” Boyce said. “But we’re working on it. I wish I could give you a timeline on this one, Ada, but your guess is as good as mine. Best guess is someone drilled a hole through the aquifer and hit a cavity, but so far, the geologists haven’t found anything that would support that. They might not know for weeks; hell, even months.”

  Ada frowned. “How does this change our water?”

  “Not much, thankfully. We’re already drawing from Lake Huron, but now our backup will be our sole source. I would keep the boil-water advisory for at least the week, until we get the reports back from the ministry, just to be safe, but it’s the output that’s going to cause us problems. The collection tanks will need to be emptied, but we now have no channel to do that. We’re going to have to haul it to a disposal site. The MNRF is going to cut us a deal on this, for the time being.” The Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry had, in fact, been a huge support to Boyce, for which he was sincerely grateful. The city manager for going on thirteen years, Boyce was paid to prepare for emergencies, but he could never have predicted the immediate drainage of the city’s primary water supply. While the ministry had graciously offered support, it was by no means a quick fix. Hauling the city’s sewage required strategic planning and that precious commodity, time. They would get it done, but not so quickly that the city wouldn’t stink to high heaven before they did.

  He conveyed these concerns to Ada, who put her face into her palms. “Think we can get a deal on air fresheners somewhere?”

  “A city that stinks together, links together. Our new motto.” Dan smirked.

  “I’ll tell that to the Prime Minister,” Ada groaned. “You know, this is not the kind of attention I was hoping for our city.”

  “Feds?” Boyce looked at Dan.

  “Of course,” Ada acknowledged. “They’re just as interested as everyone else. You know how proactive they are when it comes to Canadians’ water supply.” Dan and Boyce nodded knowingly at her gibe. “Anyway, be sure to keep me updated. Working hours are out the window. I don’t care if it’s three a.m., I want to know if there’s progress. The city needs some good news, whatever it is.”

  “Understood,” Boyce agreed, while Dan tipped his chin.

  Ada removed a packet of almonds from her desk drawer, ripped the corner open, and poured some into her hand. She plucked a few out of her palm and chewed them thoughtfully. “Dinner,” she said, and took a drink of water. “Now for the crazy part. You know of the situation at the hospital?”

  “Don’t tell me there’s dogs now,” the police chief straightened, waiting.

  “No dogs, they’ve had none of those problems since Jesse took them all away, but they’ve come to an impasse that you two need to be aware of.”

  Dan braced himself for bad news. “Oh?”

  “The ICU patient needs to be moved. Her doctors have worked with the positioning of her bed to reduce the risk of bedsores, but they believe they’re at the point where she almost certainly has them, potentially many of them. They are treating her with antibiotics just in case, but—and here’s the bigger issue—she just had her skull repaired and they need to check her incision and run her through some tests. They can’t do that if anyone who touches her gets electrocuted.”

  “Why don’t they just ground her?” Boyce asked. �
��I’m no electrician, but isn’t that the simplest thing to do?”

  Ada shrugged. “Anyone who touches her closes the loop, or so the electrical engineers explained in layman’s terms. You would think her bed does that, but for reasons beyond their understanding, it doesn’t. They have a potential solution they want to try, however keep in mind there is absolutely no guarantee it will work. They’re not anticipating any disruptions, but they’ve warned us just in case.” She held her hand up when Dan began to object. “I know that’s the last thing this city needs right now, but I also want you to imagine what would happen if we lost that girl. We have a duty to try everything we can to help her. Also, and pardon me for being a bit morbid here, if she passes, we don’t know when her body will cease to generate electricity. Dead or alive, we have to figure this out, or our only hospital may lose its ICU.”

  “What are they proposing?” Boyce’s face knotted in apprehension.

  Her eyes swung outside, toward the closed shacks two stories below. Then she looked at them squarely. “Understand that I know this solution sounds absurd. I do. But it’s the only one they’ve got. At eleven o’clock, they are going to clamp cables to Anabelle Cheever and hook her up to a battery bank. They’re hoping that by drawing power from her to the batteries, it will temper the charge. I can’t remember how they explained it, but that’s the gist.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.” Boyce’s hands went to the sides of his bald head. His mustache twitched.

  “I wish I was.”

  “What exactly does this mean?” Dan asked.

  The mayor’s cheeks swelled with a long push of air. She smoothed her dark hair behind her ears and removed her earrings. At last, she said, “We need to be ready for anything.”

  14

  In the dark hours of a cold October night, after the city’s streets were cleared of snow and local emergency service departments and Ontario’s Independent Electricity System Operator (IESP) were apprised of potential electrical disturbances, Mayor Ada Falconer authorized Garrett General’s plan for connecting Anabelle Cheever to the battery bank. Police, fire, maintenance, and medical teams were readied across the city while Garrett’s bureaucratic complement, in the pressure-soaked City Hall, waited by phones and computers, set to respond to whatever awaited them. Now, on the deserted fifth floor of Garrett General, six brave souls assembled around the nursing station, reviewing their strategy.

  Doctors Greg Huxley, Adhira Tanti, and Abe Nkosi listened attentively while Chief Electrical Engineer Bruce McKiskin, using the nursing station whiteboard behind him, briefed the team. He’d drawn a respectable stick figure of Anabelle Cheever in the hospital bed. Gray loops circled the figure’s feet, and from this ran two red lines to the end of the bed and down to the floor, where they would meet the cables leading to the battery bank system outside.

  “Now,” Bruce explained, pointing to the top of the whiteboard, “if a conductor were to be connected in such a manner, it would feed through here and make its way to the bank system outside. The hospital’s power system is designed to accommodate surges as they occur, but we can’t be sure she won’t overload it and impact the city’s power grid. For this reason, we are going to switch to our emergency generators until it is safe to return to the city’s grid network. It’s not pretty work, by all means, but it’s the best we could do given our time frame. Lakehead Power is ready to react to any outages; all we have to do is make the connection.” A trail of sweat ran down the length of the engineer’s back, and as he swung around to face them, they saw similar sweat marks down the front. He regarded their faces and said, “Can’t say I’ve ever done anything like this before.”

  Abe leaned over and rested his elbows on the nursing desk. His finger air-traced Bruce’s drawing as he mumbled the procedure to himself. “Take me back a bit. Won’t she still be energized? How does hooking her up to the battery bank change our ability to treat her? And how are we to get the clamps around her feet? We’ve never been able to touch her.”

  “Good questions,” Bruce said. “You’re right, connecting generators of electricity to exterior sources do not render them powerless, but we think—now, this is our best guess—that channeling her power might help us to moderate, if not control, her charge. The bed itself should run a current because Anabelle is lying on it, but as you experienced yourself, it does not. This tells us that we are working with peculiarities that could actually work in our favor. As for how we’re going to get the clamps on, I’ll let Kate take care of that.” Bruce gestured to the serious-looking woman beside Huxley.

  Without delay, Kate gestured to a black oval near the bottom of the board. “This is our magic weapon. Most, if not all of you, have operated a drone at some point, so you will be more or less familiar with the technology. In this case, your Canadian Tire or Walmart variety apparatus can’t do much more than hover above our patient. Courtesy of the Canadian Military, we’ve secured a much more advanced drone with robotic capabilities. As Bruce earlier mentioned, the connection to Anabelle’s feet must be made without connection to the floor. A drone is the only way to do this. The technology has been around for years, but with helicopters and power lines. This is just a smaller version of that.”

  “You can do this?” Adhira’s face cramped with doubt.

  “We’ve already done it,” Kate explained. “While Bruce and his team completed the preparations here, Frank and I practiced a simulation on a dummy in that bed near the entrance.” She motioned to the empty bed beneath a wall clock, toward which all heads turned. “Our wires weren’t live, of course, but we did manage to get the clamps onto the dummy’s feet. It’s going to sound alarming, but it should reassure you that we use this technology when working with explosives overseas. I’m very familiar with it, and I’ve been working with this particular drone for over three years. We can do this.” Her small shoulders and delicate face belied the authority within her, but the doctors nodded on appreciatively as she spoke.

  Bruce said, “All of our teams are ready. We just want your agreement before we proceed.” He capped the pen on his marker and set it on the bottom lip of the board, then he stepped back and rolled up his sleeves, waiting.

  Huxley looked at Abe and Adhira. “Well?” he said.

  Abe removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He put one of the earpieces to his lips and bit gently on it. “We have an extraordinary situation that requires an extraordinary solution. If we proceed, we don’t know what will happen to the patient, but we do know that if we don’t proceed, our patient will most likely die. Science has taught us that if we proceed through the conduit of fact, we can be reasonably confident of what we will see ahead, even in the dark. Your experience”—he gestured to Bruce, Kate, and Frank— “and our experience combined give me reasonable assurance that this will work. At the very least, we know that if this works her probability of survival greatly increases.”

  “And if she dies because of it?” Adhira interjected.

  “I don’t see this as any different from surgery, where there is always risk involved,” Abe said.

  The engineers quietly observed the doctors’ deliberation. Huxley’s hands went to the small of his back, then he drew his shoulders together and stretched his spine. “He’s right,” he said to Adhira. “This is exactly how we need to look at this. It’s just a different kind of surgery. An electrical surgery, if you like.”

  Adhira dragged her palms down her face, stopping at her chin. “I wish they’d taught us how to prepare for this in medical school. I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but if you two believe this is the right course of action for this patient, then I’m with you.”

  “I’ll have them switch the generators on,” Bruce said. Then he picked up the phone and ordered his team to proceed.

  The next twenty minutes were busy with last preparations. Reporter Jessica Chung was again not-so-gently escorted out of the building, and calls were made, power was switched, and the battery bank was prepared. The
drone was engaged, then it pinched Anabelle’s blanket and pulled it off the bed so that her frame was revealed. The girl’s body seemed to have evaporated with the removal of the blanket. So thin it was that the lumps and folds which could have been construed as her body were realized now as only pockets of air.

  At the sight of Anabelle’s gowned figure, Kate gasped slightly, and Frank looked away. Once more the doctors checked Anabelle’s monitors before Adhira inclined her head, indicating that the engineers could proceed.

  At precisely 11:05 p.m., the wires were drawn from the floor and connected to the clamps affixed to Kate’s drone. Then Kate took the controller in both hands and lifted the drone from the floor. Six pairs of eyes followed the wires as they drew upward and hovered over Anabelle’s bed, then six mouths closed with held breath.

  The whir of the drone grated on them and Adhira cringed, wanting the sound to stop. She looked away, back at the bed, away, biting her thumbnail until her tooth broke through and she had to tear her ripped nail off with her other hand. The drone went lower, lower still, and then the robotic arms holding the clamps depressed their levers and the clamps opened over Anabelle’s feet. As Adhira glanced back at the drone, Abe’s fingers tightened over her wrist. She opened her hand to let him clasp it. Their dark skin was squeezed white. Huxley himself laid his fist on Abe’s shoulder, then pressed his forehead to his fist.

  Abe said to them, “Keep your eyes open for the miracle, we owe her that much.” Huxley squeezed Abe’s shoulder. Adhira squeezed Abe’s hand. The doctors watched.

  With steady hands and unblinking eyes, Kate navigated the drone to just three inches over Anabelle’s feet. Steadily, she maneuvered the clamps onto Anabelle’s feet and then released the levers.

  The hospital went dark.

  15

  On the other side of the quiet city, Sylvia Baker woke with a scream. Despite the sedatives, sudden pain tore through the medicated membrane of her consciousness and flung her upright in a strange new darkness. Again she wailed, reaching with her good hand to the unlit spaces around her. Someone had hit her. Wetness curtained the lower half of her face and her fingers touched it now, feeling for tears or blood. A cone of light invaded her room, followed by Georgia, the nurse who had helped her with her suitcase just a few hours before.