Micro - Michael Crichton [3]
But then…there was something beneath the floor, he realized. An enormous, complex array of hexagonal tubes and copper wires, dimly visible. The floor was plastic, and he could look through it to see the electronics that had been buried in the ground.
Rodriguez crouched down to look more closely, and as he peered at the hexagons below, he saw a drop of blood spatter on the floor. Then another drop. Rodriguez stared curiously, before he thought to put his hand to his forehead. He was bleeding, just above his right eyebrow.
“What the—?” He’d been cut, somehow. He hadn’t felt anything but there was blood on his gloved hand, and blood still dripping from his eyebrow. He stood. The blood was dripping onto his cheek, and chin, and onto the uniform. He put his hand to his forehead and hurried into the nearest lab, looking for a Kleenex or a cloth. He found a box of tissues, and stepped to a washbasin with a small mirror over it. He dabbed at his face. The bleeding had already begun to stop; the cut was small but razor-sharp; he didn’t see how it had happened but paper cuts could look like that.
He glanced at his watch. It was twelve twenty. Time to get back to work. In the next moment, he saw a red gash open across the back of his hand, from his wrist to his knuckles, the skin spreading and starting to bleed. Rodriguez yelled in shock. He grabbed more tissues, then a towel hanging from the sink.
He ripped a strip off, and wrapped it around his hand. Then he felt a pain in his leg, and looking down saw that his trousers had been sliced halfway up his thigh, and he was bleeding from there, too.
Rodriguez wasn’t thinking anymore. He turned and ran.
Staggering down the hallway, back toward the front door, dragging his injured leg, aware he was leaving enough evidence to identify him later, but he didn’t care, he just wanted to get away.
Shortly before one a.m., he pulled up alongside Fong’s office. The light on the second floor was still on; Rodriguez stumbled up the back stairs. He was weak from loss of blood, but he was all right. He came in through the back door, not knocking.
Fong was there with another man Rodriguez had never seen before. A Chinese man in his twenties, wearing a black suit, smoking a cigarette. Fong turned. “What the hell happened to you? You look horrible.” Fong got up, locked the door, came back. “You get in a fight?”
Rodriguez leaned heavily on the desk. He was still dripping blood. The Chinese guy in black stepped back a bit, said nothing. “No, I did not get into a fight.”
“Then what the hell happened?”
“I don’t know. It just happened.”
“What you talking?” Fong said angrily. “You talk stink, man. What just happened?”
The Chinese kid coughed. Rodriguez looked over and saw a red arc was sliced beneath his chin. Blood flowed down his white shirt. The kid looked shocked. He put his hand up to his throat, and the blood seeped between his fingers. He fell over backward.
“Holy crap,” Willy Fong said. He scurried forward, looking at the kid on the floor. The kid’s heels were drumming on the ground; he was in spasm. “Did you do that?”
“No,” Rodriguez said, “that’s what I’m telling you.”
“This is a fucking mess,” Fong said. “You have to bring this back to my office? Did you think about it? Because cleaning this up is—”
Blood sprayed up the left side of Fong’s face. The cut artery in his neck pumped in spurts. He threw his hand over the wound, but it spurted through his fingers.
“Holy crap,” he said, and sagged into his chair. He stared at Rodriguez. “How?”
“No damned idea,” Rodriguez said. He knew what was coming. He just had to wait. He barely felt the slice at the back of his neck, but the dizziness came quickly, and he fell over. He was lying on his side, in a sticky pool of his own blood, staring at Fong’s desk. Fong’s shoes under the desk. And he thought, Bastard never gave me my money. And then darkness closed around him.
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