THIS MORNING’S LOCATION is interesting. I’m at a Dungeons & Dragons-themed coffee shop in downtown Kitchener. This game got ridiculously popular while I wasn’t looking. I’m not really sure how to play it. There’s dice involved, and a lot of writing things down. And books with a lot of rules in them. I’m sure the commenters will have an opinion on the game and whether I should try it.
Lacroix has been trying to get me to come out to one of his games. He plays with a few other nerds at the university. I don’t know. Might be fun.
I was woken up in the middle of the night by a loud knocking at my door. I stumbled downstairs in my boxers and looked through the window. There were a bunch of people there. Some of them were in white protective suits, covered head to toe.
I groggily let them in, and they barged past me, holding what appeared to be scanning devices. The one with the obvious RCMP uniform shoved me into a chair while another scanned me.
“He’s still hot,” they said, and while I protested, I understood the need for them to drag me into the shower and scrub me down.
By the time I was reading normal, I was chafing, but alive, and wrapped in towels. They confiscated the hoodie, the bathing suit, and the sandals I’d stolen from the athletic club. They also examined my hand and applied some salve and bandages to my fingers.
About an hour later, I was sitting across the table from two stern-looking RCMP officials in a field office. They didn’t handcuff me, which was nice of them, but they threw all manner of questions at me, including questions about the job, about Jim and Wendy, all the others I’d met and seen, and all the locations they traveled to.
Finally, they got to the big question. The Grand Poobah of questions. Where was the MarShield canister?
“Locker 14 at the Vine Athletic Club,” I said, surprised that they didn’t know this.
But apparently it wasn’t there. The fire department confirmed nothing was on fire, secured the building, treated about a dozen people for radiation exposure, and called the police and RCMP, reporting a Category 7 radiological scenario. When a response team looked into it an hour later, they didn’t find anything in that locker, but just about everything in the locker room was radioactive.
In addition, they found two staff members murdered in the building, suggesting someone else was onsite and also looking for the storage canister.
They had some further questions regarding the package: How long might it have been there? Did anyone else know about it? Had it been opened at any point? Did it contain solid materials or a powder? I answered as best I could, but there wasn’t much more I could give them.
They thanked me for my quick action in evacuating the building, and asked me to stay in town for any follow-up questions they might have.
I asked how much radiation I’d been exposed to and they said it probably wasn’t too much, but they refused to quantify it. When I pressed them, they said it was no more than a thousand chest X-rays.
After they helped me back into my chair, they said they were kidding. But I should look for any swelling in my fingers over the next couple of days.