The journalist groaned. “It wasn’t the wound itself that killed him. The radiation must have gone right to his heart.”
“Bloody hell,” Lamont whispered.
The captain’s long fingers trembled visibly as they closed the lids of Rex’s blue eyes. “I never should have—” Carter started to say, and then stopped himself, clenching his jaw. Then he stood stiffly and began to flash his lamp along the edges of the chamber. “We’ve got to find Rosemary,” He said.
“These are her things,” Lamont observed. His eyes darted across the scene, absorbing a multitude of details. Rex was laid out atop an open silver coat, though he still wore his own. Beside him was the medical bag that Rosemary had been carrying. It was open, with a pair of forceps set atop a blood-spattered white cloth next to it. Circling around to Rex’s other side, Lamont pulled aside the collar of Rex’s open coat, averting his eyes from the pale face of the young man. There was a sizable patch of blood spread across the silver fabric of his expedition suit, originating from a wound just beneath his collar bone. The newspaperman frowned. In his limited experience, the injury looked bad, but not deadly.
He crouched to examine the medical bag. Its contents looked intact except for the white cloth, the forceps, and a ball of gauze strewn nearby. The forceps were clamped on a slender object. Picking up the forceps for a closer look, Lamont gasped. “Francis, look at this!”
The captain pulled himself away from the nooks and crannies into which he had been shining his flashlight and joined Lamont, who was shining his own light on the object held in Rosemary’s forceps. It looked like a small quill, similar to something that could be shot from a crossbow or blow dart. It was made from a reed-like shaft that Lamont quickly identified as the reed of a knocker, with iridescent red feathers of some kind at the end. At the tip was a small, sharp arrow made of metal, quite uneven in shape.
Francis reached his hand out to take the forceps and stopped short. “Look,” he said, nodding toward his hand. The dosimeter patch on the end of his sleeve was glowing an angry red.
Lamont had picked up the forceps with his left hand. He glanced at the patch on his right wrist. It was a violet color. As he moved his right hand closer to the forceps, the color shifted quickly into the red spectrum. He muttered a curse and dropped the instrument to the ground, along with the miniature weapon.
“That metal tip must be highly radioactive,” Carter said, taking a step back.
Lamont returned to the pilot’s body, this time pulling down the collar of his turtleneck. Beneath the white skin was an ugly network of bulging purple veins, tinged with a sickly yellow. The journalist groaned. “It wasn’t the wound itself that killed him. The radiation must have gone right to his heart.”
The captain took a few stiff strides away from the body and pounded a clenched fist into his palm. “He was wounded, probably outside. Rosemary must have dragged him in here for some reason. But then what? Where is she?”
Lamont had also stepped back a yard, compelled now by brute instinct to put some distance between himself and the irradiated corpse. Then his eyes flashed toward the cave floor and widened. “I think I’ve found something,” He said.
Next: An Ounce of Hope