I’m nearly asleep when I hear the click.

I tell my body to move, but it doesn’t respond. I’m lying on the surface of Jupiter, with twice the gravity of Earth sucking at my bones.

As the first dead bolt clicks open, I roll over and struggle to my feet. My belly pounds with terrifying pressure as I stagger over to the counter and pull the rubber gasket out of the countertop.

I’m only halfway back to my bag when Cyrus opens the door.

”What the fuck?“ he says. ”Look at this junkie motherfucker!“

Trying to turn toward him, I collapse on my sleeping bag.

”What the hell are you doing?“ he asks me. ”You mainline that whole bag or something?“

I groan in mock agony, but I don’t have to fake it much. The pains shooting across my face feel like someone’s pinching me with pliers.

Anger twists Cyrus’s face when he looks at the countertop. ”What the fuck? This place is a mess!“

”I’m sick,“ I grunt, twisting my sleeping bag around me. ”I’m sorry.“

”You sorry, all right.“ He walks into the room and stops. ”Motherfucker! You been up in my Pringles? “

”I was hungry.“

”Junkie motherfucker! I shoulda killed yo’ ass in the beginning.“

I writhe on the sleeping bag, then straighten out on my stomach. ”I’ll be all right soon. I just…I don’t know.“ I close my eyes and lie still. Right now hydrogen gas is rising through the hole in the counter in an invisible column.

”I got to get out of this place,“ Cyrus mutters. ”Got that old nigger in the guardhouse talking my ear off, and back here I got your nasty ass. I’m gonna lock you in a broom closet in the plant or something. Shit. “

”Witches’ Broom,“I whisper.

”What?“

I don’t reply.

”Hey, Blue!“ Cyrus yells. ”Shoot this motherfucker up. Shut him up for a while.“

Heavy footsteps sound in the lab, then soft creaks as Cyrus sits in the Naugahyde recliner.

”Shit,“he curses. ”My TV don’t work!“

”Probably the remote,“ says Blue, moving toward me with the blowtorch.

Cyrus gets up and walks somewhere. I want to look, but I don’t.

”No,“ he says, slapping plastic. ”It’s broken, man.“

”Plugged in?“ asks Blue.

The big man kneels beside me and picks up the baggie and the spoon.

”That’s it! This stoned motherfucker done got into my Pringlesand unplugged my TV. If it was me on that syringe, I’d waste his ass.“

Blue starts cooking the heroin. ”You ain’t gonna fight me this time?“

”No.“ The tiny roar of the blowtorch floods my system with adrenaline. If the hydrogen escaping from the cabinet fills this room fast enough, we’ll all die before Cyrus even picks up the TV plug. I groan and roll onto my side so I can watch Cyrus.

He has the plug in his hand. He’s holding it near the electrical socket, but he’s stopped to say something to Blue.

”You know why he ain’t fighting you? ‘Cause the rush is worth the pain.“

Cyrus grins, then pushes the plug into the socket.

There’s no flame, not even a flash, but that side of the testing lab moves to this side without visibly traveling the space between. My plan was to shelter under my sleeping bag, but everything happened too fast. Now Blue’s elephantine body lies across my head and torso, and it’s not moving. Someone is screaming, but it’s not Blue. I touch my mouth to see if it’s me.

It’s not.

With colossal effort, I roll Blue off me and look to my right.

Cyrus is writhing on the floor, screaming gibberish and clawing at his eyes. His entire body is peppered with bloody wounds. Shrapnel wounds, I realize, fragments of the lead plates in the batteries. They exploded out of the cabinet at supersonic speed and sliced through everything in their path.

That’s what killed Blue. The top of his head is gone, as though someone put it partway into a guillotine. When I glance at his lower body, I see that my own legs are bleeding from several wounds. I retch, but there’s nothing in my stomach.

The shrill ring of a fire alarm sounds over Cyrus’s shrieks. There’s no fire that I can see, but the explosion obviously triggered something. The custodian in the guardhouse is bound to investigate. Unsure of my legs, I flatten my palms on the floor and struggle to my feet. My legs are shaking badly, but they seem able to support my weight.

The lab door is standing open, but it may not be the only one between me and freedom. I try not to look at Cyrus’s face as I bend and take his keys from the ring on his belt loop. His jerking torso is almost too much to take. The acid blown out of the batteries has vaporized the cotton of his T-shirt and is now eating into his skin. Cyrus claws at my wrist as I lift the keys, but I yank my hand away and hurry to the door.

His screams follow me down the tiled corridor outside. I’m not familiar with this part of the plant. I have no idea where to go. Pausing by the door at the far end of the corridor, I try to recall anything I can.

”Hey!“ someone yells. ”Cyrus? Blue? What happened in there?“

Wavering on my feet, I move to the side of the door and flatten my back against the wall. The door bursts open, and a black man in a blue uniform runs through it, making for the lab. As he enters it, I leave by the door he just came through.

Now I’m in a much larger room; the ceiling is thirty feet over my head. The production line. The fire alarm is louder here. I see light, a streetlight shining through a high window. Low down on that wall is another door, and it’s standing open. I walk toward it, stumbling the last few yards. My pants are soaked with blood; I’m leaving a trail of it behind me.

When I clear the door, new sirens cut through the shrill scream of the fire alarm. I fall to my knees, but I keep moving. I have to get clear of the factory. The custodian could shoot me just to cover his ass, then blame my death on Cyrus.

I smell the river now-it’s only five hundred yards to the west-and kudzu, too, the greenest smell in the world. As I crawl forward, red light flashes crazily on the walls of the buildings around me. I force myself to my feet and hold my hands high in the air. A fire truck careens around a huge building on my left and bears down on me. I wave my arms frantically, but I don’t have the energy to maintain my balance, and I fall.

I hear a door slam, then nothing.

Four hours after the fire department rescued me-maybe twenty hours after Blue last injected me-I was lying in a bed in an intensive care unit, cold sweat bursting from my pores. By the twenty-four-hour mark, my skeletal muscles were cramping, twisting me into a fetal position. After thirty hours, every cell in my body was screaming for heroin. My father had to send a nurse to Jackson for methadone; there was none available in Natchez. An addiction expert he consulted by phone attributed my severe withdrawal after such a short experience with heroin to the likelihood that I’d received a steady flow of extremely pure product for six and a half days.

But it wasn’t completely pure.

When I arrived in the ER, Dad immediately diagnosed me with a dangerous vascular condition called hypersensitivity vasculitis. My guess had been right. Whatever had been used to cut the heroin had triggered my immune system to attack my own body, particularly my veins. My bone marrow had begun churning out proteins called immune complexes, which immediately began clogging my smallest veins-the venules. This silting process started in my extremities and steadily moved toward my core organs. A blood-pressure reading taken on my arm in the ER was 140/95, but a reading taken from a cuff on my finger was 145/180. I had an irregular heartbeat, and tiny patches of skin on my toes and penis had died. I assumed that stopping the injections of contaminated heroin would short-circuit this immune reaction, but Dad soberly informed me that as long as the adulterant remained in my system-and he feared that some of it was embedded in the walls of my veins-the potentially deadly immune reaction would continue. He was considering a treatment called chelation, but after he described it to me, I felt more inclined to wait it out and hope for the best.