The Bridge

by John Skipp;Craig Spector

A violent wave of nausea hit her, brought the bile up to her throat. She couldn’t even taste it. Her flesh went flush with sweat as the taint coursed through her system. She bit into her tongue, felt pressure but no pain.

  There was a high ringing tone in her inner ears, as if her acuity had been boosted to the point where the air itself was audible, where every whisper of a blade of grass was like a buzz saw in the distance.

  I will not pass out, she told herself, I will not faint I will not…

  The ringing in her ears was a drone now, incessant and pulsing; a strange new frequency beating like the wavelength of life itself. She was aware of her body hyperventilating, fighting for consciousness and equilibrium, vaguely aware that she was moving forward. It was as if her flesh had gone onto auto-pilot, cocooning her consciousness into a chrysalis of sound and numbing sensation as she moved inexorably toward the bathroom and release.

  The angled wooden aperture that led to the door was before her. Gwen grabbed onto the corner post for support, looked up.

  And saw the deer.

  It stood shivering at the tree line some ten feet away. It was a yearling, its coat still dappled with snowy flecks of white, and it was injured. A dark smear matted its left side just beneath the lung, like a gunshot wound gone septic.

  It hobbled toward her.

  Gwen stood frozen, unable to move, watching as if from a great distance as the deer came up, nuzzling right into her belly like a suckling. Her thoughts kept de-rezzing into the slipstream, going god this is crazy this can’t be real it’s like a flashback i can’t let this happen i can’t.…

  Gwen tried to move; her limbs were clublike, leaden. The yearling nuzzled deeper, its hide glistening with sweat. Gwen looked down in horror, realized that the flecks of white were not fur at all, but moving, mottled discoloration under the surface of its skin. The deer shuddered, frenetic whole-body tremors that wracked its flesh as it tried to burrow into her.

  Gwen pushed her hands to the end of its snout, fighting to keep it off. She felt the wetness there, felt its tongue snake between her fingers, rough and smooth, licking her.

  A dark patch stained her shirt, growing.

  “NO!!” Gwen pushed away, feral and reeling. Her hands came up, trailing ropy stringers of saliva from its foaming mouth.

  She fell back against the wall, the whine in her head a roar as she sagged to the ground, the contact broken, her legs splaying out like a puppet with its strings cut.

  The deer buckled then, too, spindly stick-limbs giving way like a wobbly card table. It fell like a ruptured feed sack, squirting pale gelid goop thick as Campbell’s soup from the hole in its side.

  The wail cut off abruptly, leaving a curious black hole of sound in its wake.

  The deer shuddered as its eyes rolled back, fixed and dilated.

  And the wasps poured from its open wound.

  Dozens of them, flooding the air. Hundreds, swarming around and over the carcass. Thousands of them, madly buzzing: an entire colony at work. Breeding within the ravaged animal.

  Then eating their way out.

  Gwen screamed, full-throated and raw, as the insectoid cloud spewed forth from the hole: a black-and-yellow blossom, all noise and wings and stingers, their hard little bodies pinging off the wooden walls and coming back for more. Swirling around her, sealing her vision within a bright buzzing tunnel of shadow and stinging sound.

  When Gwen screamed again, one flew into her mouth; and as she continued, they went for her eyes, her ears and hands as she screamed and swatted and screamed.…

  Micki found her screaming and batting at the empty air, a look of dislocated terror plastered across her face. A dead deer lay beside her, its carcass shriveled and stiff. It had been dead for a week, maybe two, and had long since gone condo to the ants and insects.

  “I’m here, honey. I’m here,” Micki said, fighting down her own terror as she reached for Gwen. Gwen knocked her hands away, not seeing her at all, fighting off insects no one else could see.

  Micki pushed through the hysteria, helping her up, holding on for dear life. “Shhhh, it’s okay, baby, it’s gonna be okay…”

  “No,” Gwen rasped: hands clutching her belly protectively, head cocked as though listening for distant tremors in the earth. “No, something’s w-wrong…”

  “Shhh,” Micki said. “It’s a dead animal, baby. Just a poor dead deer…” She reached for Gwen, grasping her shoulders.

  “Something’s wrong!” Gwen cried, shaking loose of Micki, not even seeing her through the dread, terrible veil of certainty.

  “What?” Micki shuddered in her grip. “I don’t understand.…”

  “It’s DEAD!” Gwen wailed, suddenly snapping into focus. “CAN’T YOU SEE IT! IT’S DEAD…!!”

  Then unconsciousness swept over her, and she dropped to the ground like a stone.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  At twelve fifty-five, Reactor One began to sing.

  Fred Jenkel blinked back sweat, unable to deny what was happening even as he refused to admit the evidence of his senses. He was not having a good time.

  He had worked in nuclear power for going on ten years; he knew the heart of the plant from the ground up, every tick and hitch of its proper operation. The system worked, he believed that with all his heart…no, more than that. He knew it worked, because he knew how it worked and why it worked. Jenkel’s first article of faith stated that there were no miracles, only mechanisms; that all things physical ultimately functioned; and that functionality ultimately made sense.

  So when noon had rolled around and the borated water had failed to halt the power surges or significantly reduce the ion population, Jenkel’s next impulse had been as clear as it was logical. Increase the boron content of the coolant, he’d thought. Max it out.

  Supervising Operator Roger Sykes had agreed. He was a congenial man in his fifties, lantern-jawed and brush-cut, with a military trimness only lately giving way to civilian middle age. Sykes had spent fifteen years on Navy subs before moving into commercial nuclear power, and he ran a tight ship. He was an engineering anomaly, a good manager who was still a good engineer, and he and Jenkel worshipped at the same altar.

  “Increase the boron content,” he’d said. “Max it out.”

  This they did. It worked, for a while.

  Then, at twelve sixteen, the neutron count inched up again.

  “Hmmmm,” Sykes murmured. “Hmmmm…” They were not the type who panicked easily. Besides, it was nothing fast enough to trigger an automatic reactor trip or anything. It wasn’t unstable. Just drifting.

  Slowly. Relentlessly upward.

  At twelve thirty, Sykes turned to the crew. “Okay,” he said. “Do a turbine runback, shed the load.” He checked the meters. “Let’s slow this unit down.”

  Henkel and Jenkel obeyed, began stepping in the rods: the control rod clusters ratcheting down their exactly spaced chutes, each tucking in its portion of the fuel assembly for a nice little nap.

  By twelve thirty-seven the reactor core had slowed, rolling off as the rods stepped into place. Everyone nodded and breathed a sigh of relief, chalking the aberration up to the fact that it was an older fuel assembly ready for shuffling, with a higher number of spent rods and an overabundance of available neutrons, and hence was livelier than usual.

  At twelve forty-five, the power slid back up.

  It was surprising in its seeming willfulness; the meter arcing up as if some invisible arm wrestler had grabbed ahold of it. The reactor hit the one hundred and three percent power mark and tripped every alarm in sight.

  “Sonofabitch!” Jenkel gasped. He was reaching for the controls just as Sykes came hauling ass out of his office.

  “What the heck is this?” Sykes blurted. He wanted explanations and logic. He got neither.

  “Beats me,” Jenkel said. “The power just surged again. It’s getting pretty hot.”

  “Pull her back to thirty percent,” Sykes said, eyeing the meters, less alarmed than irritated. Jen
kel nodded and cut it back.

  It stayed down for even less time. Then up up up again.

  They continued this cat-and-mouse game for a while: borate and step down, borate and step down. The reactor didn’t seem to care. It just kept climbing back into the maximum operating range. Denying logic. Defying them.

  “Sonofabitch,” Sykes muttered. “What is going on in there?” They’d been dicking with the reactor for almost two hours now, and his alarm/irritation ratio had long since flipflopped.

  Sykes rubbed his temples and stared at the meters. The hum of the reactor made his fillings ache, put a hot lump of slag in the pit of his stomach.

  He looked over to the glass-walled cubicles lining the side of the control room. “Ros!” he called out. “Did you get through to the NRC yet?”

  “No, sir.” Rosalyn White’s face popped out of the doorway. She was a slender, pretty woman, the day shift clerk, and at the moment she looked very nervous. “I can’t get through,” she said.

  “What about PEMA?”

  “No, sir,” Ros said. “I can’t get through to anyone. No one’s in.”

  “Great,” Sykes muttered. “Keep trying!” he snapped, and was instantly sorry. He softened his tone incrementally. “And patch me through to ChemTech.”

  Ros nodded, disappearing into her office; a moment later the console phone started blinking. Sykes punched a line and picked up. “Control…” he said. “Sykes here.”

  “Yeah, this is Bergens in ChemTech.” The voice was female, with a slight Southern twang. “I got coolant sample readings for ya.”

  “Yeah?” Sykes replied. “So tell me some good news.”

  The ChemTech labs were a long, brightly illuminated set of rooms off in the main complex. Like the control room, they were safety-sealed, redundantly filtered. Becky Bergens sat at her station and stared at the coolant sample. She was petite, pretty, with a thick mane of russet-colored hair and widespaced, almond-shaped eyes.

  “Oh, it’s borated, all right,” Bergens said into the phone wedged in the crook of her neck. “You’ve got boric acid coming out the wazoo. That’s not your problem.” A furrow of worry lines etched into her brow.

  “The problem is…” she continued, then stopped, puzzling. “To tell you the truth, I don’t know what the problem is. I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

  “What are you saying?”

  Bergens held the beaker aloft, squinting at the contents as if they might bite; the water inside swirled, transparently viscous, woven into liquid striations. “I’m saying,” she reiterated, “that something’s not right about this water.”

  “What, is it contaminated?”

  Bergens shook her head. “If it’s a contaminant, it’s a damn sneaky one. It got past the carbon filters, the ion exchangers, and every other trap in this joint.

  “No,” she concluded, “this is something else. This is new.” She held the vial up to the light, tilted it this way and that. The water swirled lazily in its beaker.

  “Great,” Sykes moaned. “So the water’s not right. What’s wrong with it?”

  “You tell me,” she began. “It ain’t too hot on absorbing neutrons, for one thing. I’m double-checking, but I’ll tell you: the moderator characteristics are really screwy. And if the water doesn’t slow this fission properly, there isn’t enough of it in the world to keep your baby cool.”

  “Yeah, well, thanks for the good news.”

  “That’s what I’m here for,” she replied. Becky datelabeled the beaker with the coolant sample and shelved it next to other dated containers. Then she went over to her computer terminal to double-check on moderator characteristics.

  Slowly, the striations began to undulate, assuming a definitive pattern. The patterns became much clearer, as the oily striations began to swoop and dip and swirl.

  Over and over, over and over, over and over.

  A figure-eight pattern.

  Twenty seconds later, the liquid in the other beakers did, too.

  Back in the reactor control room, Roger Sykes was beyond pissed. He was getting nervous. “What do you think?” he asked Jenkel.

  “Not sure,” Fred said, looking a lot more worried than he sounded. “Dilution accident, maybe.” He pondered the point. “If untreated water got into the feed supply…”

  Sykes paled a little, completing the thought. God, throwing untreated water on a hot core would be like dousing a fire with gasoline.

  Sykes hit a switch and activated the acoustical monitoring system, a series of strategically placed microphones that relayed the sound coming from the inside of the reactor vessel to the control room.

  A deafening roar spilled out of the monitor speakers, the sound of coolant water pummeling the core into obedience. Henkel, Jenkel, and Sykes leaned forward, scrutinizing the rumbling wall of noise.

  Jenkel was the first to notice. “There,” he said. “Do you hear that?”

  Henkel and Sykes cocked an ear toward the sound. It hit them within seconds of one another. “Jesus,” Sykes whispered, as the fleshy part of his neck prickled with dread.

  It was an eerie barbed filigree of sound that rose and fell and twisted, not beneath the roar or behind it but somehow in it, a frequency-shifting inside the water-sound. As they listened one thing became clear. It was no accident. It was too complex and multi-timbral, too…intelligent.

  The reactor was singing.

  It was the scariest thing they’d ever heard.

  “No, no, no.” Henkel sat in his chair, mumbling a mantra of pure denial, as though it were up to a vote. “No, no, no, no. Not liking this. Not one bit.”

  The sound reminded him of something he’d read back in college, something about seductive creatures who lived in the water and sang to the sailors in passing ships. He reached into the recesses of memory for the name, felt it slap him in the face as it came back.

  Sirens.

  While over the speaker, under the water, an amorphous mesmerizing chorus shifted in and out of focus.

  Luring them onto the rocks…

  “Shit, what do we do now?” Henkel said, looking like a man who wished he’d gone into another line of work.

  Behind them, Sykes paced in tight little circles, the engineer in him butting heads with the manager until it produced a whanging headache. In the event of an emergency the utility’s unwritten policy was to stay on-line until the shit hit the fan, and not to go public until things were either under control or uncontrollable. In the post-Three Mile Island industry, emergency procedures were clear as they were limiting: do not guess. Do not diagnose. Treat the symptoms only.

  And hope that that’s enough.

  Sykes looked at the clock. Twelve fifty-eight. “The hell with this,” he said. “Trip it.”

  He turned to Jenkel. “Shut down, run a systems check, and isolate the problem. I want this thing up and back online ASAP.

  “Bob,” he turned, singling out the younger man, “get ready to open up the auxiliary feed lines and start pumping. Make sure we maintain the shutdown margin.” He looked around. “I’m notifying Biles. The clock starts now.”

  He looked around. “Well, what are you waiting for?”

  Henkel nodded, relieved. “Not a thing.” He went over to the switch-bank. “Shutting her down,” he said. “Now.”

  Henkel cut power, and inadvertently held his breath.

  …While deep in the reactor vessel, hundreds of yards away, the magnetic ratcheting mechanism de-energized. Over the monitor came a massive compressed roar as several tons of control rods slammed into the coolant pool, obliterating the song.

  At twelve fifty-nine precisely, they shut the reactor down.

  At 1 p.m., it started back up.

  All on its own.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Home, such as it was, was a low-slung postmodern split-level with a shared private drive, snug on the low rolling hills of the country club’s sixteenth hole.

  Inside, Blake retreated to his study. It was a qu
iet sanctuary with a southern exposure, recently redone in ebony inlay, burnished oak, and cloth-bound special editions. A small fire crackled in the zero-clearance fireplace, scenting the air with hickory and redwood; a pair of bronze dogs nestled before it on the sprawling hand-carved Aubusson rug, positioned so as to gaze with blind, doting eyes on the face of their master.

  Blake settled in behind his expansive antique barrister’s desk and brought thumb and forefinger up to pinch the bony ridge between his eyes. A tumbler of Chivas and a bottle of Tylenol sat before him, awaiting ingestion.

  He had a slight tension headache. Nothing serious, but enough to put him out of sorts. Carol had toddled off to her tennis lessons after performing her perfunctory wifely duties; downstairs the stereo thudded with the ceaseless caterwauling their deadbeat son called music.

  Butthole something-or-anothers, Blake winced in recognition; he was almost able to distinguish some of them from each other at this point, through sheer osmosis.

  He sighed mightily; his family was his bane. In the euphemistic lexicon of talk-show shrinks, they were dysfunctional; in reality, they simply hated each other.

  Not that their hate was simple. Indeed, it was a richly textured blend of disappointment, spoiled ideals, and abcessed emotion, a lifetime in the making. Werner’s climb up Country Club Road had been at the expense of much toil, many long hours at the office and on the road. He broke his back to provide the best of everything for his loved ones, only to have it thrown back in his face.

  Which left contempt as the linchpin of the Blake family dynamic. It was virtually the only thing they shared.

  Fortunately, the house was large and sprawling; big enough to contain three lives that crossed only when forced; big enough to afford him space and the peace to contemplate the business at hand.

  First and foremost, a follow-up call.

  Blake punched the number into the speakerphone, downed two caplets, and waited patiently as it patched through.

  “Hello?” A child answered; a young girl, from the sound of it. Very young. Thea, he recalled; Blake made a point of always remembering names.