Fallout

by Wil Mara

  “Hey, Randy, this is Mark’s dad again. I’m sorry to keep calling but we still haven’t located Mark. Please give a call back as soon as you can.”

  He hit the END button and stared at his phone, which was slick with perspiration; no surprise, since he’d been holding it for over an hour. He scanned the list, checking the notes he’d made next to each name to see if there was anyone worth trying again. He and Kate were embarrassed by how many phone numbers they’d had to get from other people—Mark’s peers and their parents. It made them feel irresponsible and indifferent, made them think about all the times Mark went out the door, sullen and uncommunicative, without them asking where he was going. It wasn’t that they didn’t care, but neither of them wanted to deal with the scorching he’d give them over their “interrogating” him.

  There were fourteen people on Pete’s list, and he had tried all of them at least twice already. Three kept going straight to voice mail. One rang and rang with no pickup of any kind, not even voice mail. Another turned out to be a wrong number; that one he only called once. The rest received multiple text messages. Although Pete managed to connect with a live human being five times, no one had any idea where Mark was. Given the uniformity of their answers, Pete couldn’t help but wonder if there was a cover-up going on. He hoped that no one would do such a thing under the circumstances, but he had no delusions about the binding power of friendship among rebellious youths when facing the Evil Parental Establishment.

  His mind wandered from the list and went around the room. He was seeing beyond the boutique desk and the God-awful love seat and the brick-and-bluestone fireplace, browsing through the rich catalog of memories. It was here, in front of that fireplace with three large hunks of red oak blazing away, that he and a six-year-old Mark hooked up Mark’s first Xbox to the flat-screen television that used to be where the desk now stood. It was here that they would sit with a big bowl of popcorn and watch all the shows that Pete had always loved and Mark accepted without question, like M*A*S*H and The Odd Couple and Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Mark had taken a particular shine to the latter, and for years the two of them would reenact the skits whenever the urge took them. And it was here that Pete worked with Mark night after night in years past to break down the mental barriers that were preventing him from grasping some of the more perilous concepts of algebra, geometry, and trigonometry. The deterioration of their relationship had begun by then, but it wasn’t yet in an advanced state. In spite of the occasional shouting matches that broke out, Mark was still capable of issuing an apology followed by a Thanks for helping me out, Dad before either of them went to bed.

  The tears came hard and fast now, and Pete brought a shaking hand up to his mouth. My Mark … my Mark … Jesus Christ, where is he???

  “Please, God,” he whispered. “Please let him be all right. I’ll do anything you want. Anything. Mark, I promise I won’t be mad. Please … please call us and let us know where you are. I’m so sorry I yelled at you this morning. I’m so sorry.…”

  The phone tumbled away and bounced on the carpet as he covered his face and sobbed. He tried to keep as quiet as possible, but the sorrow seemed to have become a living thing all its own, too powerful to contain.

  At the touch of a hand on his shoulder, he almost yelled. He turned and found Kate there, the lightest of smiles on a face that was otherwise placid and untroubled. She reached up and delicately brushed a stray hair from his forehead. He barely noticed, just pulled her close, wrapping his arms around her as he hitched and sniffled.

  “Jesus, Kate, it’s my fault he left in the first place.” Tears kept rolling out, leaving shiny tracks on his cheeks. “If I’d just kept my mouth shut, he’d still be here.”

  “Don’t start blaming yourself,” she said softly. “He’s a teenager and he’s hard-headed. If he hadn’t gotten into it with you, he probably would’ve had an argument with me instead. It’s just the way he is right now.”

  “I still should’ve tried harder. I’ve been trying to be better with him. Trying to hold my temper and be more flexible.”

  “I know you have. And he knows it, too, believe me.”

  She pulled back and held out a tissue, seeming to produce it out of thin air. It was a reminder of one of the qualities he admired most about her—she always seems to know what you need before you do.

  He thanked her and wiped his face. Then he pulled her close again, kissing the top of her head. “I can’t imagine what on earth I’d do without you.”

  “Let’s not find out,” she said.

  He smiled. “Good idea.”

  They were still embracing when Cary came running into the room, waving Kate’s cellphone in the air and screaming.

  “Brett McDonald says he knows where Mark is!”

  Pete never moved so fast in his life. He took the phone in hand and switched it to speaker.

  “Hello? Hello?”

  “Mr. Soames?”

  “Yes, hi, Brett.” Pete liked Brett McDonald. He wasn’t exactly among the academic elite of Silver Lake High, but for as long as he and Mark had been friends, he always held down a job of one sort or another. Didn’t like to sit idle and waste his time, and knew the importance of earning your own way and having a few bucks in your pocket.

  “You know where Mark is?” Pete asked.

  “I think so,” the boy said nervously.

  “Where?” Pete demanded.

  “He’s went to Sharon Blake’s apartment.”

  “Her apartment? Not her house?”

  “No, she moved out a few months ago.”

  Pete and Kate exchanged puzzled glances. They knew Sharon had serious issues with her parents. More than once, they’d discovered Mark and his other friends in the basement playroom, trying to comfort Sharon while she bawled like a toddler. One time she walked into their home sporting a black eye, and when Pete found out her stepfather du jour had given it to her, Kate had to restrain him from going over to the Blakes’ and giving the sonofabitch a little taste of his own. Kate had talked with Sharon a few times alone, offering support, advice, and whatever else she might need to get through another day.

  “Is she still living in town?”

  “Yeah, she’s on Emerson, number thirty-six, second floor.”

  “How do you know Mark went there?”

  “He called me when he was on the way. He said you guys had … uh … that you.…”

  “We had another fight, yeah,” Pete said. It wouldn’t be a normal day if we didn’t, right? Kate rubbed his back, probably in response to the guilt he could feel on his face.

  Brett laughed uneasily but diplomatically said nothing.

  “You’re sure he went there? Absolutely sure?”

  “When he called me, he said, ‘I’m going to see Sharon for a little bit’ and told me I could come over if I wanted. But I had to work, and then this whole thing with the nuke plant happened and—”

  Pete handed the phone back to Kate and headed for the basement.

  * * *

  The utility room was partitioned from the rest of the basement by a thin run of cheap paneling from the seventies. Half the space was used as a pantry for dry goods, cookbooks, paper plates and plasticware, a colorful variety of party items, and the kind of pots and pans that were called to duty only once or twice a year. The other half housed the furnace and the water heater, plus a small knotty pine dresser that had once been in Pete and Kate’s bedroom but now stored Pete’s work-around-the-house clothes.

  He dropped into the folding chair next to the dresser and flipped off his loafers. Kate entered as he was pulling open the bottom drawer, where a pair of heavy work boots lay on their sides next to a plastic tub of rolled-up socks.

  “Hon,” she said, “you’re not seriously thinking of going out there, are you?”

  “No, not thinking about it—I’m doing it.” He unrolled a black pair of woolies and pulled them onto his feet.

  “Pete, that’s crazy.”

  He didn’t respon
d.

  “The rain is—”

  “I know, sweetheart, I know.” He stepped into the boots, cinched them tight, and stood up.

  “We’ll call the police,” she said. “They’re already out, with their protective suits and oxygen masks.”

  “We tried calling them,” Pete said bitterly. “They’re too busy.”

  The first 911 call, about an hour and a half ago, resulted in a busy signal. The second had not connected at all. At that point, Pete had called the station directly. The phone rang eleven times before someone answered. The person on the other end told Pete that Mark’s description would be passed to the officers on patrol. The Soameses had no idea if that had been done; they hadn’t heard anything since.

  “Then I’ll call Sarah,” Kate said.

  She was on very friendly terms with Sarah Redmond. They had worked together on PTA fund-raisers, food drives, holiday decorations on the big fir tree that stood in front of the library, and numerous other functions. Several times Sarah had asked Kate to consider running for town council, with her election all but guaranteed because of Sarah’s endorsement. Pete had encouraged Kate, too, but his wife loathed politics and refused.

  “No,” Pete said, shaking his head. Her suggestion smacked of the kind of favoritism he saw in every other quarter of society and couldn’t stand. “Please, Kate, don’t do that. She’s got enough on her plate right now. I can handle this.”

  “I’m just talking about one phone call. Surely she can get one officer to—”

  Pete took her by the shoulders. “I’m the reason this happened, and I’m going to be the reason it gets resolved.”

  “You’re going to get sick out there. How is that going to help us?”

  “I’m not going to get sick,” he said. “I have a plan.”

  “Which is…?”

  “I’m taking the slicker we keep in the garage. That’ll keep the rain off me.”

  “And the air? How are you going to keep the air away?”

  “The paint mask,” he said, cutting through the kitchen and reaching for the garage door. “The one I used when I sprayed the garage walls last year. Remember?”

  The bare cinder blocks in the garage couldn’t be painted correctly with a brush because of the deep pitting, so he had to resort to a spray gun connected to an air compressor. Even with the bay doors and all the windows open, there was so much drift that he had to invest in a self-contained oxygen mask. He had commented at the time that it made him look like a World War I soldier fending off an attack of mustard gas.

  He found the slicker in the cabinet by the slop sink and slipped it noisily over himself. The mask was on a high shelf in a box marked “painting stuff.”

  “It’s not like I’m going to be swimming in the flood on Ventnor Avenue. I’ll be in the car until I get to Sharon’s apartment, then I’ll stand on the porch and keeping ringing the bell until he comes out.”

  Cary had come up behind Kate and was studying his father with growing horror. The unspoken sentiment that flashed across his face appeared to perfectly mimic that of his mother—Oh, my God, you’re not actually going out there, are you?

  “Pete, I really don’t think—”

  “Here,” he said, reaching into his back pocket and pulling out his Bluetooth headset. He worked it into his ear and turned it on. “I’ll call you as soon as I get out there, and we’ll stay in touch the whole time.”

  He detached the charging cable from their silver Toyota Prius, hopped in, and started the engine.

  “I’m going to open the garage, so please go back inside.”

  Kate hesitated before saying, “Okay.” Then she closed the door with Cary shadowing her. The feeling that she would never see her husband again was overpowering. She heard the garage door rattle up, then down again.

  Pete called a moment later, as promised.

  19

  Marla had to return to the high window in the staircase to take fresh pictures of the damaged reactor and give an updated blog:

  Most of the staff has been evacuated for decontamination; very few people outside now. The helicopters keep coming with the sand, and the burning chunks of material from the blown-out reactor vessel have been extinguished. The fire truck that presumably was used to do this is still sitting out there, but the firemen are nowhere to be seen. I’m going to guess they were ordered to evacuate along with the others. There’s a massive amount of smoke pluming from the damaged vessel, no doubt loaded with radioactive particles. I have tried to get Gary Mason on the phone to ask if the boron is now involved, but he has not been answering.

  She sent this and the new photos to her editor—the cell signal was considerably stronger up here—then hurried back down to where Ellerton was waiting.

  * * *

  The door that Ellerton stood by was a massive, disc-shaped structure, with eight cylindrical locking bolts around the perimeter and a center-mounted handle that resembled a ship’s wheel. It looked like something in a bank vault.

  There was an audible puff of air as the seal fractured, and Marla said, “Won’t we need masks? And for that matter, are we in any danger from what’s happening outside right now?”

  Ellerton glanced at the climatic monitor above the electronic keypad where he’d entered the unlocking code. “No, we’re fine. Buildings at nuke plants are constructed to shield radiation. There are things like multiple layers of concrete and steel, thick panes of glass, and emergency shutdown switches for ventilation systems. If it wasn’t safe in this area, I wouldn’t have brought you here. Anyway, let’s get back to the reason why I did.…”

  He stepped in and switched on the lights, revealing a room filled with steel drums, neatly arranged on pallets in groups of sixteen. There was enough space between each cluster to allow passage of a hand truck or a small forklift. Every barrel was bright yellow and had the standard three-bladed radioactivity symbol on the side.

  “Is this what I think it is?”

  “What do you think it is?”

  “Enriched uranium?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “And you’re sure it’s safe to be in here?”

  “I wouldn’t stay overnight,” Ellerton said, “but we’re not going to be long.”

  He led her to the far corner of the room. The lighting was poor, and Marla noticed that the bulb in the overhead fixture wasn’t just out—it had been removed.

  Ellerton removed the Maglite from his belt with the fluidity of a gunslinger and shined it on the floor. The bright circle of light revealed badly eroded concrete and the building’s exposed foundation. There was significant discoloration of the gravel and cement, not just within the scar but well beyond.

  “What happened?” Marla asked.

  “A spill, four years ago.”

  “Of this stuff?”

  “Yeah. Forklift operator, young guy. Wasn’t paying attention and put one of the blades right through a barrel. It was all over the place.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “It took over a month to clean and decontaminate.” He pointed to the damaged floor. “They’ve repaired it about ten times since the accident, but the concrete keeps flaking away.”

  “A spill is a huge safety violation.” Marla paused. “I don’t remember hearing anything about it.…”

  Ellerton shook his head. “There are no official records. It never happened.”

  Marla’s jaw tightened as the smoldering anger she had been keeping on a leash for the last hour and a half threatened to break free. This was the fifth stop on Ellerton’s guided tour. After the hidden cask repository, he had taken her to another sub-basement chamber, where two large pipes ran through a concrete wall. He explained that the wall was new construction, built about eight feet in front of the original. It concealed a cracked-and-repaired length of pipe that had been leaking tritium and strontium, which had seeped into the water table. Leo Corwin had done nothing about the problem until, after several years, there were a few reports of loca
l children developing problems with bone and dental growth.

  In one of the reactor rooms, Marla was shown a freshly painted section of the vessel head. Ellerton scraped away some of the paint, revealing the speckled remains of boric-acid corrosion. Instead of replacing the damaged head and reporting the incident, per procedure—which would have cost millions and likely shut down the plant for a time—Corwin instead had the rotted seals filled in and the damaged surface areas sanded and sprayed over.

  And in a locked room near the plant’s main transformer, Ellerton worked hard to move three filing cabinets away from an insignificant-looking control box, the exterior scarred and blackened by extreme heat. This, he told her, was the only remaining evidence of a fire that had broken out three years earlier and damaged both the plant’s backup generator and its emergency turbine. Repairs had cost nearly eight million and NRC inspectors had reviewed the work. But no official records were ever filed, and the plant continued standard operation throughout the repair period, though if an accident had occurred while the secondary generator and turbine were offline, the results would almost certainly have been catastrophic.

  Now, Marla began taking pictures of the damaged floor. “Even the Corwins won’t be able to buy their way out of this,” she said as she clicked away.

  A text from her editor arrived with a soft ping.

  Three million followers now. IN-CRED-I-BLE. Do you think you’ll be able to get to everything before the evac?

  Marla thought about the evacuation and chuckled to herself. They probably wouldn’t bother to evacuate me anyway, she thought with grim amusement. They’d leave me behind. According to Darren Marcus, a small but fairly vocal slice of those three million followers were calling for her head, including pro-nuke types, anyone related to or good friends with a Corwin Energies employee, and a fair number of politicians, including Pennsylvania’s Governor Kent. There was also a swarm of attorneys coming out of the woodpile to offer their services free of charge, eager to attach their names to the high-profile lawsuit that was heading Marla’s way. She found that amusing as well.