Chain Reaction

Security and Containment Facility, Southeastern Idaho August 8, 7:39 a.m."WHAT THE HELL AM I doing here?" Mia Kearney paced around the hospital room, talking to herself, the monitor behind her beeping in agitation as she moved too far away, stretching the leads that connected it to her body. Despite all the testing and probing, as best she could tell there was nothing wrong with her. Nothing, at least, that she could identify. She hadn't seen anyone except medical personnel since she'd woken up a couple days ago. At least she figured it was about two days. There wasn't a clock, and no one would give her straight answers. Only that there had been a nuclear accident of some kind, the resulting radiation affecting the people of Cedar Branch. She'd asked to see someone else. To talk to Nancy or Patrick, even Joe. But so far they'd insisted she was better off in isolation. Her mother had always hated the idea of all the nuclear reactors in Idaho, predicting dire consequences if the plants weren't closed. Well, time had proven her mother rightif not in Idaho per se, then with incidents like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. All of which meant that most of the reactors in Idaho were gone. There was still a test facility, but it was miles from Cedar Branch. Which left Mia with a load of unanswered questions. Maybe a silo? The remains of cold war posturing were scattered throughout the Northwest, but she'd always been told the nearest live missiles were in Montana. Seemed a little far away to cause a local accident. Maybe it was an attack of some kind? But why would terrorists focus on Cedar Branch? There weren't more than fifty people in the whole county, and only a handful in town at any point in time. Not that Idaho was devoid of crazies. There were extremist groups all over the state. People who believed that violence was the only way to solve problems. But as far as she knew none of them lived nearby. And even if they did, Cedar Branch wasn't the kind of place one chose as a target. New York or L.A., or even Boise, would be a better place to garner the kind of attention terrorists wanted. It just didn't make any kind of sense. And to top it all off, Mia didn't feel the least bit sick. She'd racked her brain trying to remember the symptoms of radiation poisoning, but hadn't come up with anything concrete. Still, she was pretty damn certain that by now she'd be a lot sicker if she had in fact been exposed. All of which begged the question she'd voiced earlier. What the hell was she doing here?She'd stopped taking the sedatives they were giving her, pretending to ingest them and then flushing them down the toilet. She just acted dazed whenever hospital personnel were in the room. But it was getting harder to be cooperative, everything inside her signaling that something was very wrong. And it didn't help that her memory seemed to have gone wonky. The last clear thing she remembered before waking up here was buying coffee from Nancy. They'd talked about Danishes and eating and free meals. And then she'd gone to her studio and, after a couple of bites of food, had begun to work. Just thinking about her latest project ratcheted up her agitation. The piece had been commissioned by a collector in Sante Fe. he'd seen some of her work at the gallery and requested a piece for his wife. It wasn't an exhibition in SoHo, but it was a step in the right direction. And opportunities like that didn't come along every day. All the more reason to get out of here and back to her own life. She'd tried leaving once, but hadn't made it three feet down the hall before an orderly with arms like steel girders had intercepted her and escorted her back to her room. From then on the door had been kept locked. As if she were a threat or something. And to make it all the more confusing, the brief glimpse she'd had of the hallway hadn't looked like any hospital she'dDavis, Dee is the author of 'Chain Reaction ', published 2007 under ISBN 9780373772063 and ISBN 0373772068.