Free Into the Inferno by Earl Emerson

Okay. Maybe those things happened around the same time. But now we’re a month later. If you guys got this on the same alarm, don’t you think all five of you would come down with it together?”
    “There’s nothing says it has to happen that way,” said Beebe. “You heard about the state patrolman who was at the hazardous materials spill directing traffic, accidentally got some chemicals on his trousers, went home, and his wife washed his pants in the same load with his kid’s baby blanket. The baby ended up dying. The patrolman never even got sick. If he’d forgotten those pants in the bottom of his locker and taken them home half a year later the baby would have died six months after the incident and the death never even would have been connected to the haz-mat spill. This could be something with a built-in time factor we’re all tripping in our own way.”
    “Jesus,” said Ian, with a sly grin. “If I was dying, I wouldn’t spend my last day with a mug like me or a lady-killer like Jim. I’d be home with my family. Or in Jim’s case, at a whorehouse.” He looked at me and laughed.
    “Thought I’d get on the computer and compose my epitaph,” Stan replied grimly. “ ‘He lived a life—he had a wife—he did his best—now he’s at rest.’ What do you think?”
    I’d never heard anybody feel so sorry for himself, not even me when I’d dipped into the swamps of self-pity after Lorie ran away. Stan was doing everything but sizing himself for a coffin. If it hadn’t been so pathetic, it would have been almost comical.
    “You feeling sick?” I asked Beebe, thinking about the headache I’d woken up with this morning.
    “You don’t have to feel sick to be dying.”
    “What made you go to the doctor in the first place?” Ian Hjorth asked.
    “Three days ago I started falling down. I had this junk on my hands. I knew Joel and Jackie had the hands, so I started investigating.”
    “I never noticed Jackie’s hands,” Ian said. “And Joel’s wife wouldn’t let anybody in.”
    “She let me in,” Stan said. “I dug up the autopsy report on Newcastle. Same thing. A whitish discoloration of the hands. Then I started thinking about Joel going off that roof. I’d been on a roof when I fell, I mighta got hurt. I’d been driving like Jackie, I mighta crashed. Out in the woods like Newcastle, dead. So I went to Dr. Brashears. He’s the one treated Jackie.”
    “What’d he say?”
    “He started running tests.”
    “And?” I asked.
    “He sent my blood away to some special lab in Texas. He sent some hair samples and tissue to Washington, D.C. Won’t find out anything until next week. It’s a pisser, ’cause I won’t be around next week.”
    “Of course you will.”
    “Don’t believe me, Jim. It’s no never mind to me. But remember what I’m telling you, because after you realize you have it, you’ll wish you’d listened. It’s a seven-day cycle. Who knows what triggers it, but from the minute it starts to the time you sign off . . . seven days. Get your affairs in order. Say good-bye to the people you love.”
    “Don’t be telling me I have seven days left.”
    “You
don’t
. You have six. The waxy hands come on day two.”
    I couldn’t help doing the math. Today was Tuesday. If Stan was right, sometime on Sunday night I’d become a vegetable. Maybe if a team of doctors were telling me this, I might believe it; but this was Stan.
    Aware that he had no way of knowing about my headache or the weak feeling in my legs, I asked him to list the symptoms.
    “The first day, yesterday for you, the hands start shaking for no reason. Day two: trembling legs, pressure on your frontal lobe, usually in the form of a mild headache, the backs of the hands take on a waxy look.”
    He’d pegged the last two days perfectly.
    I’d never truly believed all the horrors visiting our department could have been coincidences. On top of that, I’d been living with a feeling of impending doom since