Lethal Exposure by Kevin J. Anderson, Doug Beason

Trish vented her own frustration and alarm through her work in the PR-Cubed. She had also kept in occasional contact with Dumenco himself and followed his work in Fermilab, had even visited him shortly before his accident.
    And now she had to attend him as he died from the very thing she feared the most.
    Dumenco appeared to be resigned to his fate, interested in what would happen to him from a coldly analytical point of view. “I want to know all the details, my dear lady,” he said. Under the light of the sidewalk lamps on the hospital grounds, he looked at the reddening skin of his hands, his swollen joints. He licked his dry and cracked lips, which were already purple from hemorrhages underneath.
    “It’s not going to be pleasant, Georg,” Trish answered, distracting herself by pushing him along. “Maybe it’s better if you don’t know.”
    The sidewalk sloped gently downhill, toward the Fox River that curled slowly across the farmlands. Joggers ran by, with steam puffing out of their mouths. A young couple sat on a bench, looking out at the dark river, more absorbed in each other than in the scenery.
    “Of course it won’t be pleasant,” he said. “This is death. It’s not supposed to be pleasant. But I’m also a scientist, and I have what you might call a morbid curiosity as to the sequence of events. I am, after all, about to experience them far more intimately than I had ever wanted to know.”
    Trish swallowed hard, trying to act professional, to look at him as a patient rather than a human being she admired. At least she had dragged him away from his intense scrutiny of the recent accelerator results.
    “If this helps you to prepare. . . there’s nothing I can do to help you.”
    “I understand that, my dear lady,” Dumenco said. “But knowledge is still more comforting than ignorance.”
    “You might not say that in a minute,” Trish said, but her faint edge of humor became brittle. “Within the first hour or so, you started experiencing what we call the ‘prodromal’ syndrome, erythema or redness of the skin, fever, nausea, weakness, cramps, and diarrhea. We treated those effects with intravenous fluids to prevent dehydration, antiemetics to control the nausea and vomiting. Fortunately, we haven’t had to use vasopressors to constrict blood vessels and keep your blood pressure up to a safe level. So far the IV fluids have been enough.”
    She continued, focused on the lighted sidewalk ahead, listening to the crackle of dry leaves under her shoes, under the wheels of Dumenco’s chair.
    “Your bone marrow is also destroyed, your immune system ruined. Your number of white blood cells and platelets are both going down already, and your body won’t make any more of them. That means you won’t be able to resist infections, and you’ll bleed easily—especially inside your body. Although no more red blood cells will be made either, that really doesn’t matter. Even the high radiation dose you received didn’t much affect the ones you already have, and red blood cells usually live for three or four months. But you won’t be around long enough to become anemic. Bone marrow transplants were tried at Chernobyl, but in most cases did not prove to be helpful.”
    Dumenco shuddered. “My family is . . . not available as bone-marrow donors, even if it would help.”
    Trish knew that Dumenco’s wife and children had not come with him when he fled to this country, and their whereabouts were in question. Trish had been contacted by a member of the PR-Cubed, a Ukrainian in fact, who had been searching for Dumenco’s family, citing a study on family effects of Chernobyl survivors. But she had no information to give the man, despite his persistent questions. Dumenco had never spoken to her about what had happened to his family. She expected they had succumbed to something more terrible than radiation, back in Eastern Europe.
    She turned back to the problem at hand, as if reciting a report. “We can