Free Blind Eye by Jan Coffey Page B

against the wall and her knees gathered to her chest. The air in the facility was becoming dank. A familiar odor hung in the air. She realized what it was. It was the Monday-morning smell in the meat department at the grocery store where she had worked during the summer when she was in high school. It was the smell of death.
    Whether she sat there for ten minutes or an hour, Marion didn’t know. Time had lost all significance. She stared up into the darkness around her. The penlight she’d placed on the floor was growing dimmer. She patted her pocket for the other one she’d taken from Andrew Bonn’s desk. It wasn’t there. She guessed it had dropped out of her pocket when she’d gotten sick inside the room. That was where the facility emergency notebook had fallen, too, along with the clipboard she’d gone back into the control room to get.
    Marion recalled what her advisor had told her as he’d taken his last breath. The samples—the contamination. He’d asked her to seal the containers. She’d tried to get into the lab as she’d made her way from the control room. She hadn’t been able to open the door. Perhaps there was another emergency generator in the facility that she didn’t know about. Even a backup battery source. There had to be something, she thought.
    She had yet to calculate the hours before that timebomb would go off. She needed to know how much time she had left.
    Marion realized she needed to go back inside the sleeping quarters and get the things she had dropped.
    She was angry with herself for not paying attention to details. She’d had other things to focus on and had decided early on that among the experts in the facility, they’d take care of any possible emergencies. She’d been wrong. They were all dead.
    It was now up to her. She didn’t know how to get inside the lab, but she had to find a way. But then, even if she did get in, the cementation procedure wasn’t something she could do in the dark, without the proper apparatus. There was a long and complicated set of steps to follow to effectively seal the containers. Marion didn’t know how she could accomplish any of that. Not by herself. Certainly, not without power.
    Her head was pounding fiercely again. The darkness all around was disorienting. She took the phone from her pocket and turned it on. The sunny beach wallpaper on the display made her pause. This was it. This was the end of her life as she knew it.
    She stared at the time on the display. No one had come after them. There had been no rescue. She couldn’t fathom what the people at the power company’s R & D group were doing. It didn’t make sense for them not to respond after so many hours. They communicated with them via e-mail on an hourly basis. It just didn’t make sense.
    Her fingers moved of their own accord and pressed the address book on her cell. Marion wondered if any of the people she had listed there would know that something had happened to her. Most importantly, how many of them would care, or do something about it?
    There weren’t too many names in the address book. There were even fewer people that she called on any regular basis. Since the start of the project, she’d been incommunicado anyway. Looking at the dearth of names, she realized she’d been incommunicado her entire life.
    Her world had been studying, school, trying to make something special out of her future. She’d wanted to prove her mother wrong. There was life outside of Deer Lodge, Montana. She could make a life somewhere else. She wouldn’t return as Kim had.
    Disappearing with some eight older scientists for three months had been no problem for Marion. She had no boyfriends, no social life, no family that she visited or that visited her on regular basis.
    Her fingers scrolled down the list. She stared at the name that came up.
    â€œMark Shaw,” she whispered under her breath.
    There