Lewis drew his revolver and stood with his back to the wall, nodding at Telini. Telini opened the door as quietly as he could and stepped to the side as Lewis slid through, covering the room with his pistol. A short hall with a door on either side opened into what looked like a reception office with a desk, a chair, and a waste basket. On the back wall a couple of doors led deeper, and the one on the right had a blood smear on the handle. Lewis pointed Roquette toward the other door, and silently assigned everyone else tasks. They were guarding the room and going through the desk when he and Gomez entered a conference room. In the right rear corner Lewis saw some chairs pulled into a circle. Behind them, with the contents of his pack spread neatly around him, lay a man wrapped in a blanket.

Lewis removed the chairs quietly, and Gomez knelt beside the man to check his pulse. She was reading his vitals when Lewis saw the man’s right-hand move. It was moving so slowly that he thought he was seeing things, but no, it was indeed getting closer to a bag that lay nearby. Lewis tapped Gomez and made a ‘watch him’ sign, pointing at both eyes, and then from her to the man’s face. She responded with a nod, and he reached down and tapped the palm with his index finger. The hand then moved fast, but Lewis was able to grab the wrist as it went into the bag and removed a pistol. He slammed the hand down on the floor, causing the revolver to fall from his grasp.

“Hi, my name’s Lindy,” Gomez said. “And I’ll be your nurse while you’re here,” she said as she smiled sweetly.

“And I must be dead, cause I ain’t never seen a nurse as pretty as you before,” the man said quietly, and then he looked from her face to her uniform. “Get your guard off my arm, please ma’am.”

Lewis kicked the revolver a few feet away, and then he stepped back a little.

“What’s your name, dear,” Gomez asked, still smiling.

“Dingo, Hank Dingo,” the man said, wincing.

“What happened, Mr. Dingo?” Gomez continued.

“I drank too much whiskey,” Dingo said flatly.

“You were bleeding when you came here,” Gomez persisted. “Can you tell me why?”

“I saw the reaper, but I persuaded him to let me go,” Dingo replied. “It took a lot of persuadin’ and I’m a mite tired.”

“Go back to sleep, mister Dingo,” Gomez told him. “I’ll be right here with you.”

Dingo smiled and closed his eyes, after a while she gave him an injection and removed the blanket. Dingo’s clothes were shredded and he had tied some cloth around his right thigh and ribs on his left side. She stood up and removed a blanket from her backpack and spread it on the conference table. Then she found a clean blouse in her pack and put it on the end of the blanket. She spread the contents of the medical kit Micheal had given her onto the blouse.

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“Will you help me lift him?” she asked Lewis. They put Dingo on the table so she could attend to his rib injury. “Thanks, could I borrow Larry?” She asked, cutting his clothes off because they were too stuck to pull off.

Lewis walked out into the office where Larry was watching Telini trying to start a computer that was imbedded in the desk top. “Larry, I need you to go help Sergeant Gomez. Pay attention and do exactly what she tells you.”

“Yes sir!” Larry answered enthusiastically, running off to the conference room.

“I assume we have a patient,” Telini quipped.

“Yeah, looks like you do too,” Lewis said. “How’s it going?”

“It’s a bit groggy, looks like they left it in hibernation mode instead of turning it off,” Telini told him, with a grimace. “The lights are on, but the computer won’t let me in.”

“Where’s everyone else gone to?” Lewis inquired.

“Alice and Derrik are out in the hall checking the other doors,” Telini told him, and then nodded his head toward the door to the left of the conference room. “Fink’s in there, you should look at that room.”

Lewis walked over to the door and opened it. On the other side of the door was a catwalk that was twenty feet above the floor of a huge room filled with ten turbines on vertical axes. Each one had a diameter of fifty feet and were nearly twenty feet tall. A ladder and a catwalk allowed access to the tops of the turbines. A puff of steam floated out of the far side of each turbine every minute or two, in order from the furthest unit to the nearest one, like footfalls across the great room. He could see that the turbines were turning slowly without making a lot of noise. Huge pipes covered the ceiling in a grid, the highest pipes ones running the length of the room and the layer of pipes below the top layer was crossways. Fink was down on the floor, looking into a locker.

“Dude! I think I’ve got it!” Telini yelled, snapping Lewis out of his admiration of the scene.

Lewis went back and peered over Telini’s shoulder at the top of the desk where swirling blues and greens were congealing into the words,’ self-start program: please clear power plant floor while diagnostics program checks the system.’ A loud claxon sounded in the power plant, followed by a muffled pop.

“Well crap,” Telini muttered. “Buckle your seatbelt.”

Lewis hurried back to the plant door and whistled as loud as he could to be heard over the bells that were ringing. He saw steam erupting from five or six pipe joints here and there throughout the room, which was lit by rotating red warning lights. Fink was backing out of a cloud of steam down on the main floor with his arms full of something that Lewis couldn’t distinguish.

“Fink!” he bellowed. “Let’s go!”

Something off to the left exploded as Fink started running. A new cloud of steam rushed across the room and sprinklers went off all around the ceiling, knocking the steam down a little. Fink disappeared from view, then reappeared a moment later at the foot of the stairs. He was climbing fast with his arms still full.