Fallout

by Wil Mara

  “How did that happen?”

  “Every nuclear reactor has a coolant system,” Mason said rapidly, “and when the coolant stops flowing through the reactor, the reactor overheats. From there, all sorts of things can cause an explosion. If there’s still a small amount of coolant remaining in the reactor, it rapidly turns to steam and the pressure builds. I’m pretty sure that’s what happened here—the coolant stopped flowing, the remaining water in the reactor overheated, and the pressure from the steam caused the containment vessel to blow.”

  “And now all the escaping radiation is being pulled into the storm system.”

  “That’s exactly it.”

  “What amounts of radiation are we talking about here?”

  “The basic unit used in measuring radiation dosage is a ‘millirem,’ and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has determined that the average person receives about 350 mrems each year. That’s normal and safe, meaning your body can absorb it without any detrimental effects. Some people will have higher stats due to things like medical procedures.”

  “Like X-rays?”

  “Yes—diagnostic X-rays, thyroid scans, just like that. Then there are all the little things that contribute to a person’s annual total, like watching television, having our luggage inspected at the airport, or even wearing a luminous wristwatch.”

  This last example tweaked Sarah’s attention hard. Emilio was a watch enthusiast and had about twenty in his collection, some of which had luminous dials. In fact, she remembered, the one he wore to work most often bore that characteristic, sinister-looking greenish glow during the night hours.

  “Are such watches actually dangerous?”

  “No, glow from a watch doesn’t even deliver a single millirem over the course of a year. But my point is that we are hit with tiny doses all the time without consequence. And people who work around radioactive material obviously absorb much more. The NRC jacks up the acceptable limit for such workers to around five thousand.”

  Now for the question she had to ask. “And the residents of Silver Lake are likely to be exposed to a lot more than that today, right?”

  “I can’t give any concrete numbers at this point,” Mason said, “but it’s reasonable to estimate that it’ll be in the tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands.”

  Sarah felt her heart skip a beat. “Holy God,” she said sharply.

  “This is very serious. Here at the site of the breach, we’re losing about a hundred and twenty thousand millirems per minute.”

  “No.…”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then I need to…” She trailed off.

  After an extended silence, Mason said, “Sarah?”

  “I was going to say evacuate the town, but that’s not possible, right?” This wasn’t really a question.

  “No chance. The residents won’t be able to outrun it. Even in their vehicles, they’ll be highly susceptible.”

  “But this happened less than twenty minutes ago.”

  “I know, and I could give you a lot of technical jabber to make you understand, but there’s no time for that. Just trust me when I tell you that radioactive materials are pouring out of here in huge quantities and getting swept up into the storm system.”

  “Can you repair the breach?”

  “I don’t know.”

  A latent anger that had been percolating for a while finally found its way to the surface; her voice rose throughout her question: “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

  “It’s not like a jar where you can just put another lid on, Sarah. The explosion blew out one side of the containment structure!”

  She knew that—he’d begun their conversation by briefing her—but it hadn’t really sunk in. A bolt of lightning … a freakin’ bolt of lightning. She hadn’t realized the plant didn’t have lightning rods, and it shook her to her bones to learn that they weren’t required by law. Beyond absurd.

  She’d tucked away the worry of this day in the basement of her soul, wrapped up neatly, in a box sealed with metaphorical duct tape. She suspected just about everyone in Silver Lake harbored the same unease. The whole time the plant was being designed and built, the townspeople had been given repeated assurances. Nuclear power is clean and safe.… No carbon fingerprint.… Your electric bills will drop.… Three Mile Island was blown out of proportion by the anti-nuke crazies—but no one was harmed by what happened there.

  Silver Lake was a middle-of-the-road community, politically, though if Sarah was pressed, she’d say the town tilted a little to the right. Just enough to color the collective opinion on certain issues, like nuclear power. A few townsfolk definitely did not like the plant, and they were happy to expound on those views in the diner, the barber shop, and the checkout lines. But at the end of the day, nothing came of their opposition. Most people had other things to worry about. The possibility of the plant exploding was in about the same position on the daily priority list as an invasion from Mars.

  “That entire portion of the vessel is gone,” Mason went on. “It’s not like we can just throw a tarp over it!”

  “I’m aware of that. But I need the facts so I can figure out what to do.”

  “The most salient fact is this—the amount of time before Silver Lake begins getting showered with fallout can be measured in minutes. The storm is heading right for you.”

  Of course it is, she thought. Miles and miles of undeveloped forestation to the west, but the radiation has to blow east instead and go right down Main Street. “And it isn’t supposed to let up until around midnight,” she added out loud without meaning to do so.

  “That’s right,” Mason said.

  “Shit.”

  “Silver Lake isn’t the only town that’ll be affected.”

  “No?” She was on the computer now, trying to locate the right emergency-response documents.

  “The storm will blow this stuff all over the place. The Chernobyl disaster caused adverse health effects on people hundreds of miles away.”

  “But we’ll get the brunt of it, won’t we?”

  “Yes, so you’ve got to act now.”

  “Give me some ideas of what should be done.”

  “First and foremost, get people inside. Then they need to close everything: windows, doors, vents, whatever. If there are any cracks and leaks in the house—any place that rain or wind can get in—they need to cover them with something—towels, sheets, duct tape, whatever.”

  “I’m in a new building,” Sarah said. “Am I okay here? It’s just a few years old.”

  “The window seals should be solid. Make sure they’re all closed and locked.”

  Older homes … she thought, and grabbed a blank piece of paper to make notes. They’ll have little cracks and holes all over the place. And new-construction projects, too. She remembered seeing a few permit applications last week, including the addition of a second floor to one of the houses on Finch. She added this to the list with a hand that refused to keep steady.

  “Air-conditioning units,” Mason went on. “Any kind of air-circulation unit, really. Most of them draw from the outside, so they need to be shut down. They should be covered, too, wherever possible.”

  Fear shuddered through her as she realized there was central air in the building she occupied now. In fact, there was a vent just a few feet away, in the wall, a few inches up from the floor. There was another one out of sight behind the copying machine. Are they spewing death right this minute? she wondered. Am I already breathing it in? She hadn’t even considered the AC angle, and that led to what, in her mind, was the most unsettling thought of all—What else am I going to overlook?

  She scribbled this down, noting in capital letters that she needed to shut down all the AC units in the building as soon as this call was over. “Okay, what else?”

  “The next step will be evacuating everyone later, in a safe and, hopefully, orderly manner.”

  “I’m going to guess the military will be involved with that, along with local and
state services.”

  “That should be the case, I imagine,” Mason said. “Your own response plan should have further details.”

  Sarah found and opened the PDF file—Planning Guide for Response to a Nuclear Detonation—and scanned the table of contents. “I’m reading through it now.”

  “Good. Okay, I gotta go. But I’ll be available if you need me, and I’ll try to stay in touch and give you updates. Unless, uh.…”

  She had the sense that his next comment was going to be an attempt to make light of the situation, something along the lines of, Unless my insides get fried like an egg and I drop to the ground dead.

  Deciding that there were some situations that lay well beyond the influence of humor, she said, “Thank you for speaking with me.” She was surprised by how steady she sounded. “I’ve got a lot to do, so I’ll take it from here.”

  For a moment the only sound on the open line was the steady drum of the rain on both sides. Then Mason said evenly, “Sarah, you need to understand something.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The chances are that not everyone is going to survive this.”

  Another few bars of silence played out.

  “Yeah, okay,” she said. “Good luck.”

  “You, too.”

  * * *

  Fear moved through Sarah like a serpent as her imagination pumped out worst-case scenarios—elderly residents who couldn’t possibly be expected to run around their homes stuffing towels around windows and applying tape to ceiling cracks … children on bicycles riding through in the storm because it was just plain fun to get soaked … corpses wrapped in sheets being carried by people in hazmat suits and masks. She thought about the kids at the day care, about odd-couple store owners Oliver Ebbett and Michael Garvey, about the maintenance crews still out there, some of whom had become good friends through the years.

  Realizing that these thoughts were as toxic to her as the poisons that would soon be showering her beloved town, she summoned the fortitude to shove them aside in order to focus on the matter at hand. Being able to set her emotional burner on simmer was an ability she’d had as long as she could remember, and she knew intuitively that it was not just an uncommon trait but one that characterized a natural leader.

  She went to the thermostat and shut down the AC, then sent a quick email throughout the building that everyone else should do likewise with their own thermostats. By that time, most of the wording for the town-wide emergency message had come together in her mind.

  11

  Roughly thirty minutes later, Peter Soames sat in his home office with the phone pressed against his ear after the message ended. No, he thought, no way did I just hear that. He hit “4,” per the automated instructions, and played it again. Terror settled onto him like a light frost as Sarah’s recorded voice spoke each word crisply and clearly.

  He snatched up his cellphone from the desk. It had vibrated at the same moment the landline rang; the sure sign of an incoming municipal alert. There had been five other alerts concerning the storm over the past few days. Now that the blow was in full swing, he’d figured this message was simply another update of some kind. The Soames’s house was in a no-flood zone—Pete and Kate had paid extra for that and had felt it was worth every dime, especially after their two sons were born—so he hadn’t been all that worried.

  Now Pete opened his texting app and found the message Sarah had mentioned in the automated call. The lengthy missive included a bulleted list of do’s and don’ts. For some reason, that list expelled whatever lingering doubts he had—something had gone very wrong at the nuke plant.

  He leaped out of the leather chair—the force of his movement sent it rolling back until it clunked against the old radiator—and got to the other side of the room in three bounding steps. Yanking the window shut, he twisted the lock with his left hand while thumb-navigating his way to his eldest son’s contact info with his right. The phone rang seven times as Pete raced from room to room, closing all the windows on the second floor, before the call went to voice mail.

  Oh, come on, Mark … please answer!

  Pausing at the top of the staircase, he opened a fresh text message and typed:

  Mark, there’s a > very < serious situation going on with the storm right now.

  He paused, wondering how much he should reveal. The main sticking point was the amount of time he would have to waste on the details—details he could give his son in a matter of seconds … if he would just answer the damn phone.

  There’s been a breach at the nuke plant and radiation is going to be spread all over town. Please get inside as quickly as you can. Close the windows, doors, and everything else. Then call me—PLEASE. I know we had a rough exchange this morning, but I’m worried about you and I love you. CALL ME AS SOON AS YOU GET THIS MESSAGE.

  He slipped the phone into the pocket of his jeans and pounded down the stairs to the first floor, remembering when he’d first learned that the fixer-upper he and his wife were thinking of purchasing was just a few miles from a nuclear power plant. He’d made a point of acting casual about it—no big deal, there were nuclear plants all over the place, and stuff like Chernobyl doesn’t happen that often. And even when it does, it won’t happen here. Kate had expressed more concern; she’d been as demonstrably nervous as Pete felt. But they’d rationalized themselves into a comfort zone. It’s cleaner than fossil fuels.… It’s here to stay, so why fight it.… The bills will be lower.… It’s just one more way we don’t have to be dependent upon other nations for our energy resources.…

  Yes, he’d decided at the time, that was how adults thought: rationally, logically. Gut instincts were for kids and private detectives and the occasional military commander. But prospective home buyers faced with the remote possibility of having their insides turned into cream soup while their skin turned black and hard and slid away in bleeding hunks.… They had to disassemble the issue, analyze the parts, and come up with a sound conclusion. Now that same conclusion was making him feel like the tuna sub he’d had for lunch was riding its way back up the tracheal elevator.

  Before he even reached the last step he could smell the electrified damp of the rain. Every damn window would be up at least a quarter of the way, and a few would be open wide enough to make it look as though the house was on fire and they were going to jump out. He and Kate both loved the rain, the smell and the sound and the whole vibe, and it had been a long-running tradition to lift the windows and let a little by-product of nature’s fury drift inside. When a storm wasn’t quite as vicious as this one, and before either of the boys had been born, they would take long walks in the downpour, fully clothed and reveling in the lunacy of it.

  Spring and summer were best, and nighttime rains were an added bonus. Once they’d trekked deep into the patch of woods over by Brigantine Park, found a reasonably soft, reasonably flat, and reasonably clear spot, and gave in to their primal urges. A clap of thunder arrived just as Pete reached the Big Moment, and they both broke down laughing. Even to this day, they would chuckle at the memory, and sometimes Kate called him “Thunderbolt”—a smutty little nickname she was careful not to utter in earshot of the offspring.

  As Pete slid the first window in the living room down, he caught a whiff of something unusual in the air. The scent was similar to the ozone-y smell produced by lightning’s ion discharge … but more metallic, almost coppery. It reminded him of the last laser printer he’d had, the one with the drum that overheated all the time. An intuition that dwelled deep within—one that was usually spot-on when it came to danger—sent up a warning flare. His heart began hammering. He hurried to the next window, and then the next.

  When he got to the kitchen, he was confronted by a bone-freezing sight—Kate and Cary standing at the sink, washing vegetables, with the window wide-open in front of them. The curtains were even swaying in the breeze. Christ, he thought as his heart jammed in his throat, it’s blowing right in their faces.

  Kate, in jeans and a pla
in purple T-shirt, saw him and smiled. An instant later that smile dropped like its strings had been cut.

  “Pete? What’s wrong?”

  He just about flew across the room, nearly knocking them over as he reached for the window frame’s handles.

  Cary, who was smallish even for eleven, watched his father in bewilderment. A large potato was clutched in his hand, and water from the snake-neck spout was pouring over it. “Dad? What’s going on?”

  “Cary, do me a favor, would you? Go up to your room and try to get your brother on his cell. He’s not answering me, and that’s probably because of our little back and forth this morning. But he’ll answer if you call.”

  The boy put the potato down with the others and dried his hands on a dish towel. “Can’t I just try him down here?” Kate turned off the faucet, her gaze fixed on Pete.

  “No, upstairs in your room, please.”

  “But—”

  “Just do it, okay?”

  Cary scurried off, a faint “’Kay” drifting in his wake. Tears would likely come next; his sensitivity was already the stuff of legend among his family and friends.

  “That was a little harsh, Pete,” Kate said, giving him the appalled look she normally reserved for the morning news. She had never been fond of his occasional flashes of temper, although afterward he was always apologetic. And she trusted him enough to know that when he snapped, he usually had a reason that at least made sense.

  He stopped, hands on his hips, and let out a long breath. “I’m sorry, Katie. Look, we’ve got a problem. A big one.”

  She followed him into their bedroom, where he rapidly closed and secured each window.

  “What is it, Pete? What’s happening?” she asked.

  He went to the dining room next. There was a big window by the china cabinet, open as far as possible. The curtains were dancing about wildly and Pete could feel the force of the wind roll over him. He covered his nose and mouth with one hand while sliding the frame down and locking it with the other.