by Wil Mara
Whether Corwin hated his father or not, she couldn’t say. Even with the benefit of hindsight and the added clarity of what he’d written in his letter to her, she could not venture a guess about that. But it was obvious that Andrew hated what his father had done … and when the opportunity arose, Andrew had taken action to expose him.
I so misjudged him.
The guilt that flowed from this confession, she sensed, had its origins in a simple question—if she had studied the man evenhandedly from the start, had spotted the fortuity of his intent and worked with him to achieve mutually beneficial goals, would the calamitous events of this day have occurred? Maybe not. The lightning still would have struck, but everything that happened afterward … Maybe Reactor 2 would have been shut down today. If she had already released the exposé material that Corwin provided—hell, even just a fraction of it—the whole plant probably would have been taken offline pending a full investigation. Perhaps the Feds would have forced a stem-to-stern upgrade of the facility that included lightning rods in all sensitive locations. At the very least, Corwin would have had to present an emergency-response plan for approval that, in turn, would have enabled them to handle the accident more effectively.
The job of any good journalist was to inform the public, and she thought she’d been doing that. She was sure of the integrity of her actions when she began digging into Corwin Energies. She smelled a rat and was determined to flush him out. But in real life, the children of rats weren’t necessarily rats, too, right? She remembered the sons of Bernie Madoff reporting their father and his multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme to the FBI immediately after Madoff revealed it to them. It had never occurred to her that Corwin might be like that.
But then there was all the other stuff, too, wasn’t there? The Saturday mornings distributing food in South Philly. The homes he helped build with Habitat for Humanity. And the two months he spent administering medication to village children in Burundi. Weren’t you impressed by the way he didn’t just write checks like so many of his kind but instead went right to the heart of the crises and actually got his hands dirty? Or were you too busy explaining away these things as PR strategy?
And there was the truth of the matter. She was sure he was just trying to perfume the wretched legacy spun by his father; heck, maybe it was even on the father’s instructions. Sure, they all did that, didn’t they? They were all rats, right?
Tell the public everything. Promise me.…
“I will,” she said softly. “And I’ll try not to make the same mistake in the future.” That, she decided, was how she would make it up to him.
Her cellphone vibrated; a text message. She didn’t need to look to know it was Darren Marcus, pushing her for another blog entry. She hadn’t posted in a while and the public was getting upset. They’re worried for you, he wrote, I’M worried for you. Are you okay? His phony concern was particularly irritating, and it took all the strength she had left to keep from letting him know precisely what she thought of him. She wrote back that she was preparing another entry that would be posted shortly, that she wanted to get the words just right. When Marcus wrote back asking what, exactly, she meant by that, she ignored him.
A man sitting at the front of the bus stood up, turned to face everyone, and removed his oxygen mask. It was Gary Mason, the amiable plant manager. In the weak light of the cellphone he held in one hand, he looked drawn and ashen.
“I have news,” he said, checking the little screen as he spoke. “The leak from the containment vessel in Reactor Number 2 has finally been suspended. There will still be some incidental leakage until the damaged vessel can be permanently capped. But this secondary leakage will be fractional compared to what was liberated from the system today. Capping measures will likely commence at once.”
There was no immediate reaction to this information; not even a stray, halfhearted clap.
“How did you finally stop it?” a woman toward the front asked.
“A combination of factors. The sand and clay we dumped into the exposed core certainly helped, as did the boron. But the turning point came when we brought in a tanker truck filled with more than five thousand gallons of liquid nitrogen.”
“So the driver had to get close to the site of the explosion?”
Mason shook his head. “No, we had two of our people operate the vehicle. They were dressed in the appropriate gear. They got the hoses in place, opened the valves to release the nitrogen, and the radiation levels immediately began dropping. More sand and clay were dumped in a few hours later, and now we’re trying to figure out how to cap it permanently. Concrete or graphite, something along those lines.”
“What about the radiation that’s already escaped?”
“While this is a very early estimate, it appears that, taking the path and strength of the storm into consideration along with the amount of fissile material that is believed to have escaped, the larger cities in relatively close geographical proximity to the incident site will not experience major irradiation. These include Philadelphia, New York, and Washington, D.C., as well as their nearby towns and villages. Public water supplies appear to be unaffected, as well as farmlands, livestock, key tourist areas, and so on. The radiation will be dispersed by the storm system to such a degree that it will not pose a significant threat when it reaches those places.”
“The town of Silver Lake and a few of the surrounding communities, however, have become heavily irradiated, and—” he faltered, staring at his phone, unwilling to look anyone in the face “—may not become habitable again for some time. A full, uh … a full estimate of that damage will be forthcoming.”
Mason drew a shaky breath. There were sniffles and whimpers all around, and some people hugged each other for comfort. Marla’s first thought was that all of her possessions were here, and that she wouldn’t be allowed near them for decades. A sinking feeling began creeping in, but she fought it off using the same method as always, by letting go of the personal issues and shifting to an academic focus. She debated whether or not to parse the information she’d just received into another blog entry. It was exactly the kind of data she should be distributing, exactly what all those millions of insatiable followers were clamoring for. And it would serve the secondary purpose of shutting her editor the hell up. But her heart just wasn’t in it.
Mason continued. “We will be stopping so that each of you can undergo a brief decontamination process, followed by more detailed treatment at one of the nearby hospitals. I don’t know which at this point. And then there is, uh … just one more thing.…” He held up a finger. Then he looked down and covered his face with his free hand, and his big body shuddered as he tried with only partial success to stifle an upsurge of despair. After an unbearably long pause, he gathered himself just long enough to announce that Andrew Corwin’s body had been recovered at the scene and officially pronounced dead.
Marla knew Corwin had gone on a suicide mission, and in some ways she had already recalibrated her mind to think of him in the past tense. But hearing it formalized now, elevating the presumption to established fact, struck a greater blow than she’d expected.
I misjudged him and he knew it, and he still treated me like a friend. She thought about his polite manners, his happy little smile, his boyish ways. And under that, a core of steel. He never let anything—even me and my relentless badgering—pull him from his mission. She shook her head and looked back out the window at the passing landscape.
She took out his letter and read it one more time.
Then she wept, not caring if anyone saw.
30
The last seven vehicles—four military troop transporters, General Conover’s Humvee, a dump truck of ghastly size, and the sedan that Sarah had tried unsuccessfully to abscond with—rolled convoy-style down a service road that cut through the heavily forested western side of town before linking with Interstate 84 three miles on. Many referred to this obscure throughway as “Silver Lake’s back door.”
The du
mp truck chugged along at the rear of the column with its bed tilted; four suited men pushed tetrapod barriers off the edge as fast as they could. Until four years earlier, the road had been mere dirt and gravel, and the town council was particularly proud of the fact that they’d found enough spare funding to finally cover it with macadam. Made of solid concrete and shaped like a massive jack, each tetrapod punched a giant crater into the pebbly black surface when it landed.
The plan from the start had been to barricade all routes in and out of Silver Lake, in line with a federal quarantine order. The most recent report was that the radiation level was now, on average, eighty-seven times higher than the permissible limit, and that number was going to continue to rise as the storm worked toward its final crescendo. With everyone now evacuated save for the wayward Emilio Rodriguez, the town was being locked up tight.
The back door on the driver’s side of the sedan flew open, and Sarah scrambled out amid a hail of profanity. Her attempt to steal a vehicle earlier had ended shortly after it started, with a small group of soldiers toting machine guns blocking the road. Without her oxygen mask or any other protection now, and with no regard for the fact that she had already been decontaminated once, she ran desperately away from the convoy. I’m going to find him … her enraged mind screamed. If I die with him, I die with him.…
She managed to get past the first three troop transports before a large, yellow-suited figure stepped into her path and hooked her around the midsection, lifting her off the ground with one arm and little effort. She screamed and kicked like an electrified cat, her hair swinging around in soggy strings. He toted her back to the sedan, then the pair jogged alongside the vehicle to obviate a second escape attempt.
A mile and a half farther on, the big dumper ground to a halt as the rest of the procession continued forward. The tetrapods had all been deployed; four of the six soldiers in the truck bed hopped down and the remaining two began feeding them lengths of chain-link fencing which were topped with spirals of razor wire. Once the truck had been unloaded, all six soldiers went to work erecting the final barrier with Olympic speed.
The last pieces set in place were a pair of sliding gates with wheels along the bottom. After they were rolled shut, a heavy-gauge chain was wrapped around the joint and secured with three separate padlocks. As five members of the team hustled back to the truck, the sixth installed the last of eleven identical signs that now hung around various points in Silver Lake, attaching it to one of the gates with short lengths of heavy wire. The yellow metal sign read, in black type and block lettering:
QUARANTINE AREA
NO ENTRY OR REMOVAL OF GOODS
AUTHORIZED PERSONS ONLY
HEAVY PENALTIES APPLY
After giving the sign a quick shake to make sure it was secure, the hazmat-suited soldier rejoined his fellows in the truck, which sped off to catch up to the rest of the convoy.
Seeing some of this from the backseat of the sedan, Sarah continued screaming.
31
Kate left Cary in the waiting room with his beloved notebook, then went up to the second floor. She walked down the ICU corridor, stopped at the long window, and watched them—three unconscious bodies in three separate beds, dressed in blue hospital gowns and covered by starched blankets. Monitors beeped and blinked in a spectacular display, which she watched closely. There were alarms in place to catch anomalies, she knew, but she remained vigilant anyway. It was one of the few things in the situation she had the power to do.
Sharon Blake had a few extra gadgets parked next to her because of the baby. Tests had determined that the fetus was about ten weeks along. Kate responded to this revelation with a look of complete bewilderment, which led to a long span of awkwardness. The staffers who had initiated the conversation managed to gracefully extract themselves shortly thereafter, leaving her to puzzle through her ignorance. She was surprised to find that her primary concern wasn’t whether the baby was the product of her son’s indiscretion but if it would be affected by the exposure. Four lives at risk now, not three, she thought, feeling the added weight settle onto her emotional load.
She’d been doing some research, a habit she developed long ago—whenever she found herself in an unfamiliar situation, she immediately went into data-gathering mode. She’d gone to Google, not because she had unswerving faith in Internet sources but because there wasn’t time for anything else. What she uncovered was categorically horrifying—internal bleeding, damage to the nervous system, brain hemorrhages, deterioration of intestinal lining, various forms of cancer.…
On a page posted by the niece of a firefighter who’d been at Chernobyl—who had been ordered to attempt to douse the blaze from the roof of a building next to the reactor—Kate had learned that the man had been so contaminated that when he died his body had to be welded into a lead coffin before burial. Good God.
She tried to get a sense of just how much exposure was considered dangerous. According to the EPA’s Web site, the average person should not come in contact with more than about a hundred millirems of radiation in a given year. Kate didn’t know what a millirem was, but she had no trouble grasping the base-point reference that the site established—the average X-ray delivered about eight to ten mrems into your body. And even then, she thought, they put a lead-lined apron over your body for protection. She had never been one for the luxury of denial, and she had no illusions about whether or not their bodies had absorbed more than a hundred mrems while lying unconscious in an irradiated rainstorm for hours. Another site expanded the nightmare by making note of the fact that there are different types of radionuclides, some more pernicious than others—and uranium 238, which was used in great quantities on a daily basis at the Corwin plant, was among the most toxic of all. When she saw that it was also one of the forms used to create nuclear weapons, she become sick to her stomach and barely made it to the kitchen sink to vomit. That was also when the wall on her emotional damn crumbled and the tears finally came. There were two more breakdowns after that, and she had no doubt there would be others.
A doctor she hadn’t seen before came through the swinging doors to her right. He was like a character out of a TV show, young and handsome with some five o’clock shadow; his stethoscope was slung around his neck like a dead snake. He wore scrubs under his white lab coat, and his shoes were covered with polypropylene booties.
“Mrs. Soames?” His voice was soft and flat. Kate searched his face for information but saw nothing beyond genuine concern. She detected a hint of apprehension in some intangible way, but thought—hoped … prayed—that this was merely her imagination.
“Yes.”
“I’m Dr. Hale,” he said, offering his hand.
“Nice to meet you.”
“You, too. Umm…” He paused to flip through a few pages on the battered clipboard, then looked straight at her and asked, “So, how are you doing?”
She managed a tiny smile. “I’ve had better days.”
“I’m sure. Would you care for something to help with the stress? I’m not the kind of doctor who reaches for the prescription pad every time there’s a problem, but I’ve loosened that policy a little bit today.”
Kate shook her head. “No, no, thank you. Just please … tell me how they’re doing. Straight out, no bull. I’d rather know than not know.”
Hale glanced through the window, his gaze moving expertly over the monitors, then turned back to her.
“They’re receiving pain meds and intravenous nutrition. And as you can see, they’re on respirators. I haven’t yet prescribed medication to ward off future seizures, but I’m not ruling it out, either.”
“Okay…”
“You’re aware that they were out there for a long time,” he said. Kate began to cry and was somehow gratified when he didn’t stop talking. “It’s hard to say exactly how much radiation they were exposed to, but it was certainly well above safe levels.”
“Yes, yes.”
“Nevertheless, I believe it’s reas
onable to expect that all three of them will survive.”
“Oh, God … oh, thank God…”
“At this stage, there is no indication of serious problems like internal bleeding, organ damage, or brain damage. And as for the development of cancer, that’s something that’ll have to be monitored frequently in the years ahead. Having said that, I wouldn’t be surprised if they remained cancer-free as a result of today’s events.”
Kate permitted herself a smile. “So you’re saying they’re okay?”
Hale raised a hand, palm facing out, signaling “not so fast.”
“None of this means they’re going to come through this completely unharmed. Let’s start with your husband. Considering his age—he’s not an old man, but he’s not a teenager, either—there are plusses and minuses. On the plus side, unless you are planning to have more children, there is no risk of hereditary mutations being passed down.”
More children was something they’d discussed on occasion, although those conversations were becoming less frequent as the years rolled on. She turned forty-five three months ago, and her ob-gyn told her she’d better get moving if she wanted another one. She had secretly hoped for a girl, and she always wanted at least three children regardless of gender. Pete seemed on the fence about a third, although she was pretty sure she could sway him. Now, however …
“Are ‘hereditary mutations’ just what they sound like?”
Hale nodded. “Any future children produced by you and your husband could suffer a variety of problems.”
“Like—”
“Everything from an unusually small head and undeveloped senses to severe mental retardation.”
She stood there slack-jawed, her eyes drifting to the glass and the room beyond.
“Beyond the reproductive risks,” Hale went on, “your husband will have bouts of fever, nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea for the next few weeks, and in the months thereafter he may have to deal with localized skin discoloration, hair loss, and even some mild, albeit temporary, cognitive impairment. Same with the other two, I’m afraid—your son and Sharon Blake.”