The Mesmerized

ed and rubbed her hands against her thighs to warm them.

“You can stay here if you like,” Alec said.

“No, it’s fine. Plus, the cold appears to be slowing you down a little.”

“I have pins in this leg. I’m not going to say I don’t feel every single one of them right now.”

Minji didn’t actually want to see the dead woman again, but Alec needed her help. She was a little unnerved by how quickly she was acclimating to the chaotic new world, but she supposed it was her nature to adapt to survive. Most of her life she’d been doing exactly that before Jake and the girls had brought stability to it.

Trudging toward the fake Bridge of Sighs that sprawled over the drive, Minji shivered in her lightweight jacket. It was growing colder. How much of that other world was leaking into this one? And exactly what was the other world? Another dimension of some sort? Reflecting on the images and sounds she’d witnessed during the visions that accompanied her blindness in the first attacks, she wondered if maybe Simone and Jesse had both been right in their assessments that they’d seen heaven or hell. Though she wasn’t inclined to believe the scientists had actually opened a path to the afterlife, Ava’s possession and the mesmerized were clearly unnatural. It made her innately uncomfortable to even consider that the event was supernatural, but it would be foolish not to consider the possibility.

“When I came out of The Venetian with the girls, the police escorted me over here.” Minji pointed to the tent they were approaching. “Dr. McCoy claimed to be from the CDC, but there was just something off about the whole scenario.”

“She definitely wasn’t CDC. That was just a cover story. I can imagine she was very excited to find people who were immune.”

“Like you are?” Minji sounded a little bitchier than she wanted, but the weight of what needed to be done to save everyone was burdensome on her mind and heart.

“I’m sorry to drag you into this,” Alec answered giving her a genuinely sorrowful look. “If I could do this myself, I would.”

Minji shrugged. “It is what it is.”

The heavy soles of her boots crunched on the debris littering the walk. Bits of glass, rocks, and shrubbery were mixed in with a thick layer of ash. The world was eerily muted except for the distant roar and crackle of fire. Returning to the tent where she’d witnessed the death of the scientist was particularly unpleasant. She suffered a pang of guilt. The last words the scientist heard before dying was Minji and Arthur arguing with her. Remorse sought to infect her, but Minji realized she truly didn’t have time to deal with the emotions wrapped up in the event. If she even let a tiny bit seep through her defenses, she might collapse. There was too much to process and not enough time.

“Here,” Minji said ducking into the tent. She pointed to the figure lying next to the toppled table.

“I’m going to have to open her hazmat suit. This is going to be very bad,” Alec warned her, carefully lowering himself to one knee and awkwardly extending the other to one side.

Minji wasn’t sure if there was anything that could faze her after the last twenty-four hours. All she’d experienced had inoculated her to the horrors of the world. Or maybe she was just in shock. Whether she was developing a thick skin or emotionally numb, it was futile to attempt not to watch Alec at his gruesome task. Curiosity, no matter how morbid, would win out, so Minji gave up and squatted next to Alec.

“I need to get to her actual I.D., not the cover story one,” Alec explained, pointing to the fake CDC badge. He started to open the suit, flinching when the first puffs of putrid air escaped it. “It should be somewhere on her person.”

The smell hit Minji a few seconds later. She swallowed the bile creeping up her throat and adjusted her facemask, but the thin white mask couldn’t keep the smell at bay. Her throat burned from stomach acid and her eyes watered. Pushing aside her revulsion, she helped Alec pull open the hazmat suit. Beneath the bulky suit the woman was wearing blue trousers and a pink blouse. Around her throat was a gold necklace with a Mobius strip pendant. These little details of the dead scientist’s lost life made the woman’s death somehow even more terrible.

“I’ll do it,” Minji volunteered. “Let her have some dignity in death.”

Alec inclined his head. “All right.” He stood with some difficulty and leaned heavily on his cane.

Pretending to be made of stone and steel, a trick from her childhood when kids picked on her at school, Minji reached into the suit and skimmed her hand along the dead woman’s body searching for pockets. In the front right-side of the woman’s pants, Minji found a small aluminum wallet and pulled it free. When she saw the purple metallic case with a unicorn sticker pasted on the lid, her resolve slipped and a soft whimper escaped her lips. The sticker instantly reminded her of something Ava would do. It was so easy to imagine a child pressing it onto their mother’s wallet. Dr. McCoy had been a mother and now she was gone. Where was her child? Was that child alive? Dead? And when this was all over, would the child be an orphan?

Straightening, Minji popped the case open and immediately saw a small picture booth photo of Dr. McCoy and a little boy. The tiny glimpse into the life of the woman who now lay dead at her feet struck deep into Minji’s psyche. As a mother, she wanted nothing more than to save her children and their father so they could be whole again. But Dr. McCoy no longer had that hope. Her child was without a parent, and perhaps a partner was now without their spouse. Reverently, Minji touched the small photo.

“Minji?”

“I’m fine,” she answered, then dug her teeth into the inside of her bottom lip so the pain could steady her emotions. “I was just wondering about her. She must have been so excited to find me and Arthur. She must have thought we were salvation for her little boy.”

“You are,” Alec assured her. “We’re going to beat this thing.”

“If we can find a way in.” The case contained credit cards, a driver’s license for the State of Nevada, and a blank white card with a strange holographic inset on one side. “Is this it?”

Alec took the card, flipped it over, then nodded. “Yes. This is it.”

“But there’s no name or anything on it? Shouldn’t it say the Department of such-and-such?”

“Actually, no. The facility is technically owned by the Department of Energy, but various agencies rent it out. Whoever is leasing the first and second facility would just be known as ‘the tenant.’”

“That sounds ominous.”

“Most likely she’s employed by a company with Department of Defense funds behind it.”