Free Mercury Falls by Robert Kroese Page A

I was with. . ." It occurred to her that it was probably inadvisable to say more. Her meeting with Isaacson was supposed to have been a secret.
    "So you were spelunking in a house then?" asked the woman.
    "Spelunking?" said Christine. "Why would you. . .?"
    "This was pinned to your jacket," the nurse said, handing Christine a crumpled piece of paper. It read, in neatly handwritten block letters:
    SPELUNKING ACCIDENT
    "We had to look up 'spelunking,'" explained the nurse. "We thought it might be something, you know, kinky ."
    Christine stared at the note uncomprehendingly. "Hang on," she said. "You mean you just found me here? You didn't see anyone drop me off?"
    The nurse shook her head. "The admissions nurse just looked up and there you were in the waiting room, with SPELUNKING ACCIDENT pinned to your shirt. There didn't seem to be anything particularly wrong with you, but we couldn't wake you up. Figured you were just tired from a hard night of spelunking. So we cleaned you up a bit and gave you some oxygen. Anyways, like I said, it would be helpful if you could check out at the front desk before six."
    The nurse continued to stand there, smiling disingenuously at Christine, as if she expected her to clear out that very second.
    Christine smiled back. "It's not six o'clock yet," she said, and picked up the remote control for the television.
    The nurse sighed disgustedly and trudged off.
    Christine turned on the television, flipping through the channels to find some kind of report on what had happened with Isaacson. Every four or five clicks she would land on a news report of some kind, but the top story of the day seemed to be the release of the latest book in the Charlie Nyx series. She couldn't fathom what would prompt scores of people to dress up as wizards and goblins and camp outside a bookstore for three days for a silly children's fantasy book, but there they were, in London, New York, even places like Minneapolis, where one would think people had more sense. It was surreal that mere miles from the epicenter of the war, people were more concerned with a fictional teen warlock than with the mounting toll of the fighting. And just when she thought the reports had exhausted everything that could possibly be said about a book which no one had yet read, there were the obligatory shots of religious fanatics protesting the book's release—in Nashville, Houston, even places like Denver, where one would think people would have more sense.
    Christine alternated between flipping rapidly through the channels in an attempt to land by chance on an actual report on the war, and waiting out the fluff on a given channel in the hopes that eventually they would have no choice but to report some actual news. The results of both strategies proved disappointing.
    Eventually she settled for a channel that showed a young Frenchman in a flack jacket standing among some sort of ruins and yammering mellifluously into a microphone about something that one could only assume was happening just over his right shoulder. He was not at all unpleasant to watch. He reminded Christine of a younger, French-er Peter Gabriel. Unfortunately, Christine was disappointed to find that she could understand virtually nothing of what the flack-jacketed, Peter Gabriel-esque man was saying.
    She had no good reason to think she might understand him; her misguided hope rested on the scant French she had learned during the single semester she spent as a French major in college. She had gotten two-thirds of the way through French 101 before despairing of pronouncing French vowels correctly and deciding that if she ever traveled to France, she could just as well be mocked for not speaking the language as for speaking the language through her nose. She had abruptly switched her major to English and, as a result, could only be certain that the young, French Peter Gabriel was not hailing a taxi or ordering foie gras.
    As if the torrent of vowels and soft consonants pouring