by Wil Mara
“What about money? Is there any stored away anywhere?”
“No. It’s going to be a huge problem.”
He hesitated with his next question, but it had to be asked. “What about Carl? Is he going to do anything?”
“Hard to say since he’s disappeared.”
“Shit, I didn’t know that. I’m really sorry.”
“Me, too.”
“Are you going to find a way to go to college?”
She let out a long sigh. “I’d like to, but I don’t see how.”
“What about work? Will you stay at the dollar st—”
Sharon cut him off with a smile so dazzling that it surprised him into wide-eyed silence.
“You know what I’d like to do right now?” she said.
“What?”
She sprung to her feet and the denim shirt floated open, affording him an even clearer view of the bump. My God, he thought, there it is.
Pointing toward the window, she said, “I’d like to take a walk in the woods back there, just you and me. You know how much I love walking through the woods in the rain, with the smell of the wet ground and all the noise in the treetops. Whaddaya say?”
In that instant he saw the old Sharon again, and nothing short of a written decree from God Himself could keep him from letting her down.
“Let’s do it!” he said.
13
The ambulance pulled up to the community center and continued onto the sidewalk, coming to a stop only after it was beneath the overhang and out of the rain. Six police cruisers were parked willy-nilly nearby, lights swirling. Signs reading REFUGEE CENTER B hung in the center’s panoramic front windows, made of single sheets of paper, each bearing one letter rendered in black Magic Marker. Centers A and C were located in the VFW hall on the south side and in the warehouse adjacent to the ShopRite at the end of Coleman Avenue.
The ambulance doors flew open and three figures in yellow hazmat suits jumped out. The hoods were fastened close about their heads and oxygen masks with wide facial shields were held in place with broad rubber straps. Each of the three was carrying a field kit that looked like a plastic tackle box. With Emilio in the lead, they walked quickly through the second set of doors and into the main auditorium, where they took one look at the developing scene and came to a halt.
Emilio had been here just a few days earlier, when preparations were underway for the dedication ceremony. Then, the white tile floor had shined like a mirror, with nothing on it but bright shapes of sunlight slanting through the east windows. Everything looked out-of-the-box new—floor, ceiling, walls, molding, fixtures. There was something nice about how pristine it was, Emilio had thought.
Now that vibe was long gone. Instead, the space was filled with four loose lines of terrified people of assorted ages, genders, and ethnic derivation, waiting to be escorted by volunteers to the decontamination area. Everyone wore respiratory protection of some kind, mostly disposable dust masks that had been obtained in quantity at the local Home Depot. A few held moistened wads of paper toweling over their nose and mouth. Some of the adults were sobbing, some of the kids were screaming.
Emilio had already been informed that people were being led to the lower level, where the locker rooms were. There, each individual had to strip down, scrub themselves thoroughly in one of the shower stalls, submit to handheld scanning for residual radiation, then re-dress and wait until authorities could figure out what came next. Contaminated clothing was stuffed into bags and set outside, where it would all be collected later and burned. New clothes came mostly through a request the town made for people to bring along a change for themselves, plus anything they were willing to donate. All such clothing had to be kept in sealed bags, e.g., large plastic trash bags, before arrival.
The police were attempting to maintain order in the reception area but they appeared to be having a tough time of it as more people arrived in their vehicles, and more parking spaces disappeared. Like the EMTs, the cops were bedecked in the bright yellow suits, with the word POLICE written in black marker across the chest.
One of the cops approached.
“They’re over there!” he said, pointing to a corner of the space and shouting to be heard through his mask. “You’d better take a look.”
The EMTs walked over and found two women lying on the floor on blankets. They were separated by about ten feet, and an officer stood rigidly between them with his feet apart and his hands together. Emilio recognized both patients—Valeria Torres, mother of two and manager of the convenience store at the north end of Main; and Juanita Navarro, dark-haired and pretty, and the owner of a dog-walking business that, according to the Silver Lake rumor network, was wildly profitable.
Torres had scratches all over her arms and face; a trail of dried blood started at her purple, swollen nose and ran about halfway down her T-shirt. Navarro’s arm was clearly broken—it looked like she’d developed a new elbow in the middle of her forearm. She was holding the damaged limb against her chest and trying not to cry. Both women were wearing baby blue dust masks.
“I’ll take care of Juanita,” Emilio said. He knelt beside her and set down his kit, then tried to undo the latch, but the hazmat gloves were far too bulky to allow for fine movement. He pulled them off, revealing a pair of surgical gloves underneath. He knew this increased his risk of radiation exposure, but only slightly, and nothing that couldn’t be remedied with a good hand washing.
“Not playing nice with the other children, I see,” he said with a smile.
She moaned. “It hurts so much.”
“It’s broken, I can tell you that just by looking at it. But I’m sure you already know.”
“She did it!” Navarro said, jabbing a finger in Torres’s direction. “I was just standing there, waiting to be—”
“You cut in front of me!” Torres growled, wriggling free of the EMTs and lifting herself onto one elbow.
“I was already there!” Navarro squawked back, spittle shooting from her mouth. “I just stepped away for a second to ask one of the police a question!”
“And when you step away, you lose your place in line!”
“No haces las reglas, perra!”
“Vete a la mierda!”
“SHUT UP, BOTH OF YOU!” the cop roared.
As Navarro sank back down, Emilio removed two long rectangles of hard plastic from the kit. He gently sandwiched her fractured arm between them, fastening the splint with a few careful winds of satin tape.
“We have to bring you to County General for a proper cast,” he told her, “but you need to be decontaminated first.”
He waved one of the other police officers over, recognizing her as Janice Pruitt, one of the force’s latest recruits. Emilio vaguely remembered her from high school—she’d been a freshman when Emilio was a senior, so they hadn’t interacted much. Through her face mask, she looked younger than her years … and quite scared.
“Janice, please take Ms. Navarro to decontamination right away. She needs to get to the hospital.”
“Okay,” she said, helping Emilio get the woman to her feet. Navarro shot a last dirty look at Torres, who lifted one hand and flicked her the bird even while the other two EMTs tended to her broken nose. Navarro turned away without further comment, her chin tilted upward.
“I’ll drive around back and pull the ambulance up to the door,” Emilio said. “We’ll need to get Juanita inside fast.”
Pruitt nodded. “Right.”
“As for her friend over there—”
A catalogue of strangled screams came suddenly from the crowd and Emilio turned to see a well-dressed white woman with a cloud of silver hair drop onto all fours. For a moment she was still, staring into space with half-lidded eyes, her face cursed with misery. Then her back arched and she vomited explosively, the pinkish stream spattering in all directions when it hit the floor.
The lines dissolved into one horrified throng as everyone backed away. The woman swayed, trying to catch her breath,
then hitched out another burst of vomit before collapsing with a wet slap onto the puddle she’d created. Emilio knew her—Bernice Dempsey, his family’s former next-door neighbor until her husband passed away and she moved into an apartment. He saw her around town once in a while, usually at the library or the supermarket.
Moving quickly, he got to her before anyone else and helped her back onto all fours. Then, as with Mrs. Hart, he went through her vitals. She looked dazed and didn’t react to the obvious indignity of her situation; Emilio thought there was something in that to be thankful for. Another cop appeared with a blossom of paper towels. Emilio took them gratefully and finished cleaning her up.
“What’s wrong with her?” the cop asked.
“Radiation poisoning, I’m pretty sure. Where’s your quarantine area?”
“Huh?” The cop looked as disoriented as the teacher.
Emilio slapped him on the leg. Due to the stiffness of the hazmat suit, it sounded like he’d struck a bag of potato chips.
“Hey, wake up! I asked you where your quarantine area was?”
“Over there.” The cop pointed to the far right corner of the cavernous room, where two folding partitions had been set up in a right angle, screening off a portion of the space.
Emilio brought Dempsey to her feet and tried putting her arm around his neck. When it became obvious this wasn’t going to work—she had virtually no strength left—he lifted her in both arms.
“You should get this cleaned up right away,” he said, nodding toward the vomit. “It’s loaded with contagions.”
“Sure … okay.”
When Emilio got to the quarantine area, he discovered that it was nothing more than several blankets laid on the floor. Three were currently occupied. On one lay a very elderly man in a short-sleeved shirt. Moaning rhythmically, he had covered his eyes with his forearm. A young mother and her infant son were using the other two blankets, and they both appeared to be sleeping. All three patients were wearing the light blue dust masks—the sight of the huge mask over the tiny child’s face struck Emilio as particularly disturbing—and all three had dried vomit on their clothing.
“Good God.”
Emilio lay Dempsey on the blanket farthest from the others; the closest he could come to a “private room” under the circumstances. As he brushed the hair out of her face and straightened her clothing, he felt an onrush of despair. This really is happening, he thought, the town is being covered in radioactive fallout. Jesus.… The sight of his former neighbor lying there—a person who had babysat him from time to time, gave him lemon drops that he loved to this day, and even helped him learn how to read by going over newspaper articles with him—was almost impossible to register.
He got up and peered around the partition. One of the yellow-suited cops had found a mop and rolling bucket somewhere and was swabbing the last of Dempsey’s leavings. A few other officers loitered nearby with fading interest in keeping the lines orderly. The rest of the refugees maintained a safe distance, huddled in a giant mass with sheer panic etched on their faces. Emilio knew almost every person there, yet at this moment he barely recognized anyone. Outside, the toxic rain swept against the windows in a torrential fury.
It’s all coming apart … it’s all coming apart.…
Another hazmat-suited figure approached—Bill Brighton, a long-timer on the Silver Lake police force and truly one of the town’s finest. He had been blessed with physical bulk that made him seem about twenty percent larger than the normal male. He was holding a small device—almost the exact same shade of yellow as the suit he wore—that Emilio recognized as a dosimeter, the standard portable instrument for measuring ionizing radiation.
The last time Emilio had seen it, it was gathering dust on the top shelf of a cabinet in the police station. The sight of it now, suddenly very important, compounded his apprehension.
“This thing’s giving me a reading of around 24,500 millirems in this room right now,” Brighton said, “depending on where I stand. It’s a little bit higher over by the crowd. Closer to 26,000.”
“That’s way too high.”
“How do you know?” the other man asked.
“I’ve been doing a little reading on the Internet in between calls,” Emilio told him.
“The Internet’s an informational wasteland,” Brighton scoffed.
“No, no, all legitimate sites. CDC, PBS.… The average worker in an industry where radiation exposure is normal is supposed to absorb no more than 5,000 mrems in a year, Bill.”
Brighton’s face paled. “My God.”
“Yeah, and the minimal amount that has been positively linked to cancer is one hundred.”
Brighton looked down at the instrument to make sure he had the reading right, then glanced at the crowd.
“Have you measured outside yet?” Emilio asked.
“I did. It was 32,700 about an hour ago, and then 38,000 a half hour after that.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah.”
“That means there’s nothing but poison out there.”
Brighton nodded. “It appears so.”
“You’re going to need to greatly expand the quarantine area. There are going to be a lot more cases like Mrs. Dempsey. A lot more.”
“I know.”
Emilio looked directly at him. “Not everyone will survive, either.”
Brighton took a deep breath, which fogged the inside of his mask for a moment. “And that’s not all.”
“No?”
“We’re doing a pretty good job of maintaining order right now, but it won’t last. I’ve been in situations of widespread hysteria before. I know the patterns and the signs, and I’m seeing them here. It’s classic.”
Emilio knew Brighton’s history—his first eight years as a cop had been spent in urban Philadelphia, including two on the southwest side, which was blighted by terminal industrial decline and off-the-charts crime stats.
“As compliant as we like to think of ourselves in this happy little burg,” Brighton went on, “civility will only stretch to a point, and when it snaps—which it will, believe me—the whiplash is going to be incredible. You won’t believe what people will do when the panic hits.”
“Terrific,” Emilio said, looking across the room at the familiar faces and wondering who would be the first to throw decorum overboard.
He was about to say more when his cellphone went off. The pleasant female voice in his earpiece announced Sarah’s name and number.
“Sarah’s calling, so let me answer.”
“Go to it,” Brighton said, and walked off.
Emilio began moving toward the exit, noting that both Torres and the blankets she and Navarro had been on were no longer anywhere in sight. Through the windows he could see his two partners getting back into the ambulance.
“Hello,” he said softly.
“Hello,” Sarah replied. He could hear the strain in her voice. “This is insanity, pure insanity.”
“Tell me about it.” He pushed through the two sets of doors and back outside.
“I’m calling to see how you’re managing, but if you’re too busy, just tell me and hang up.”
“No, I’ve got a second,” he said, then recounted the events of the last thirty minutes as he got into the driver’s seat of the ambulance.
“That isn’t the only fistfight I’ve heard about,” she told him. “I’ve been keeping the scanner on. You wouldn’t believe what’s been happening.”
“Bill Brighton said it’s only going to get worse,” he said.
“Please tell me he didn’t really.”
“Yeah. He said he’s seen it before. I’m sure he was talking about his time in Philly. Said once the civility snaps, all hell will break loose.”
“Great.”
“We’ll manage it, don’t worry.” He put as much iron into his voice as possible.
“You think?”
“Absolutely. Don’t even think twice about that.”
“I don’
t know what else could go wrong. Maybe the dam will burst.”
“Is that a possibility?” Emilio asked with unabashed alarm.
“No, no—the engineers who did the assessment a few months back said it was structurally sound. That’s one upside to a nuclear-core breach, I suppose—it doesn’t affect dams.”
“Thank God for small blessings.”
“Absolutely,” Sarah said. “And as for everything else, we’ll just have to stay on top of it all. And we will.”
“That’s my girl.”
She laughed through the phone—just a little sniff, but he was happy to hear it.
“I love you, you know that?”
Emilio smiled back. “And I love y—oh, heck, here comes another call.”
“Go to it, stud.”
“Yeah, talk to you later.”
“Wave to me when you drive past the building, and I’ll wave back!”
“Okay.”
“Bye.…”
Emilio pulled around to the back of the community center and helped get Juanita Navarro, who was strapped to a stretcher now, inside. As he pulled onto Barrett Avenue, he looked up at Sarah’s office window on the third floor. Visibility was severely limited due to the downpour, but he could just make out her figure while she waved madly. He chuckled and shook his head as he waved back. One in a million, he thought. No, make that a billion.
It was the last time they would see each other.
14
“There are still a hundred and sixteen people unaccounted for,” Sarah said into the phone ten minutes later, her brief but soothing intermission with Emilio rapidly fading from memory. “It’s been almost two hours since the explosion at the plant, and we’ve still got that many missing in action!”
Her office looked like a soft bomb had gone off in a recycling center. Empty Coke cans stood like little red silos everywhere, bright spots across an otherwise chaotic geography of loose papers, manila folders, and heavy-duty binders. The desk and table surfaces were fully occupied and the excess was beginning to populate the floor. Drawers were left half open, and all the phones were sitting on her desk, their long, modular cords ready to act as trip wires for the unwary.