Watermind Read Online Free Page B

to the doctor, and get her detoxified. Yeah, and if he tried that, he could already hear Ceegie’s answer. He looked at his broad rough hands. What was the good of having such strong hands?
    Wind sawed the trees back and forth, and sun glittered across the jellied orange mud. Max swallowed a mouthful of ice water and felt its coolness spread down his gullet. He thought about how everything in the world tended to spread. Chemicals through the mud. Sounds through the air. Smells. Words. Someday, maybe everything in creation would spread through everything else, and there would be no difference between anything.
    Right now, for instance, the wind was mixing sounds. He listened to the sawing branches, the cricket noise, the beeps from Rory’s radio. Mixed together, they made the whole swamp sound menacing. Max dropped his head. He couldn’t go on feeling this way about Ceegie.
    â€œLook sharp. We got a bossman from Miami in town,” Rory announced to the crew.
    The lethargic workers eyed him. They lay sprawled in the grassy shade, slurping ice water from plastic cups. “Look sharp, ha ha. We do that.”
    Rory spat tobacco juice into the grass at his feet. “Clock’s tickin’,
mes amis.
Back to work. And suit up good, case we get inspected.”
    With one last look at the tupelo gums, Max drew on his gloves.
Swirl
    Â 
    Wednesday, March 9
    4:25 PM
    Â 
    â€œWater.” CJ spoke aloud in the empty Quimicron lab.
    Gene Becnel cocked his ear. Gene had long since alerted his security staff and placed a respectful call to the plant manager’s office. Two guards stood outside the lab door, waiting for Gene’s order to arrest the intruder, but Gene couldn’t give it. He patted sweat from his cheeks and covertly scratched the poison-ivy rash on his forearm. Mr. Dan Meir, the plant manager, leaned on the back of Gene’s chair, watching the screen over his shoulder. Mr. Meir said hold off, see what she’s up to. Worse, Mr. Meir had brought another man, a stranger from the Miami office. Gene didn’t like people coming into his control room, breathing his air. At least Mr. Meir was a bonafide ex-US Marine. The Miami stranger looked foreign.
    On the surveillance monitor, the female intruder was running one of her tests again. Gene didn’t like the way she kept talking aloud, as if somebody was with her, someone his cameras couldn’t see.
    â€œBizarre,” CJ said, completely unaware that she had anaudience. She’d run all the quick tests twice, but they only confirmed what her eyes and nose told her. The sample she’d taken from the poisonous effluvium of Devil’s Swamp was pure water, pure enough to drink.
    She rested her chin in her hand and stared at the spectrophotometer display. Her analyte of H 2 O contained nothing more than a trace of skin particles, probably her own, and mud, probably from inside her boot, plus a fleck of waterproofing material from her coverall pocket. “Okay, Harry, what next?”
    Questions swirled in her head. What kind of chemical reaction could form ice in hot weather? And purify toxic slops into clean water? And generate a magnetic field that pulsed in time to zydeco? Why had she fallen through the ice but not Max? And when the ice formed, what happened to all the heat?
    She sat in one position, doing and saying nothing, for long enough to make Gene Becnel’s thigh twitch. He wanted to stand up and stretch. He wanted to gulp another Kit Kat bar. He wanted the big brass to get the hell out of his booth and let him do his job.
    Gene already knew who she was—a college girl, probably a flag-burner, she came from up
North
—a word that, in Gene’s lexicon, rhymed with
Goth
. His state-of-the-art Texas Instruments security system, one of the great joys of his life, had already read the Radio Frequency ID tag in her badge. The RFID contained her employee number, which linked to her personnel file in the