General Groves found the desert along the river to the north of Richland ideal. He swooped in, seized a chunk of land half the size of Rhode Island, and forcibly removed two farm towns and a small Indian tribe from the area. The army turned Richland into a closed government town as part of the Manhattan Project—a secret nuclear program for which the Hanford nuclear plant produced radioactive plutonium for the “Fat Man” atomic bomb used to obliterate Nagasaki, Japan.
By 1945, twenty-five thousand workers were living near the nuclear plant, and everything about the town was related to atomic energy. The bowling alley was called Atomic Lanes, and the uniforms for the high school had mushroom clouds on them. The government itself built houses for the families and provided them with everything they needed, from free bus service to lightbulbs. The Feds even planted trees in the yards.
Teddy discovered that each type of government house was assigned a letter. A-houses were the biggest. There were B-houses, C-houses, and so on, all the way to Z. There were some pictures, and when he scrolled through them, he was surprised to find one that looked exactly like the old home next door. It was an A-house.
There was also a section in the article about radioactive waste. Weapons-grade plutonium and uranium were made in Richland during the Cold War years, and by the time the last reactor was shut down in 1987, 53 million gallons of radioactive waste had been left behind. In fact, waste was secretly dumped straight into the Columbia River until 1971, and contamination was found downstream as far west as the Oregon coast.
The worst incidence of radioactive waste dumping, known as the “Green Run,” happened in 1949, when the government intentionally released a huge concentration of radiation into the air over two days, causing deadly diseases in humans and animals. In plants, the effect was unknown.
Teddy was almost through reading the article when a terrific bang startled him out of his chair. A distant clunk and hiss followed before the vent above him stopped pumping cold air.
He went downstairs to the kitchen. It already felt hot in the house, and it seemed to be getting hotter. He checked the thermometer in the window over the sink, which read almost eighty degrees inside. With any luck, he thought, the problem might be something obvious that he could fix—a handle he could reset, perhaps, like a breaker switch.
Outside the house, he found a green, sheet-metal air-conditioning unit against the beige wall. The unit was tilted at an odd angle, and blue fluid was bleeding down its exterior into a greasy puddle.
Teddy frowned—a leak was not something he could fix.
He got down on his hands and knees and looked under one end of the unit. The concrete pad to which the air conditioner was bolted was split down the middle. A tree root had cracked it and forced it apart, bending the thick metal housing of the unit in the process and tearing loose a copper hose.
There was clearly nothing he could do himself, so Teddy headed to the back door to go inside and call his mom. But when he tried the knob, it didn’t turn. He shook it, but it was no use; the door had locked behind him.
With a sinking feeling, he realized that he’d left the Hide-a-Key inside. And the cell phone with his mom’s new number was sitting beside it on the kitchen table.
Gazing through the window, Teddy cursed his own stupidity. He turned to his bike, which was leaning against the fence, and checked to make sure he still had the letter he was supposed to deliver. With no other options, he climbed on and pedaled off to find 613 Lynwood Court.
CHAPTER 5
Biking through the heat, Teddy rolled along Saint Street until he came to a sign that said LYNWOOD COURT. He skidded to a stop and pulled out the letter to confirm the address—613 Lynwood Court.
The street ended in a cul-de-sac with a circular expanse of blacktop ringed by a ribbon of gray sidewalk. But there were no homes around it. Instead, Teddy saw only wood frames jutting from bare concrete foundations, mere skeletons of houses not yet built. Open trenches almost ten feet deep had been dug through the sand and tumbleweeds between the home sites for a future sewer line.
Teddy checked the street name again. It was definitely correct. He coasted over the blacktop pavement into the unfinished cul-de-sac for a closer look.
“Hello?” he called. There didn’t seem to be any workmen around, but considering the desert heat at midday, he didn’t blame them.
Suddenly, he heard the frantic banging of what sounded like a hammer. Teddy homed in on the pounding. It was coming from the second home site on the left.
There was a boy in plaid shorts, long white socks, and a T-shirt with a cartoon Chevy van on it sitting on the half-finished second floor of the house. He was at the top of a staircase with no rail, holding a hammer, and he seemed to be taking great delight in whacking things around him at random.
“Excuse me,” Teddy called out, waving to get the boy’s attention, “do you know where 613 Lynwood Court is?”
The boy looked down at Teddy. “Who wants to know?” he asked.
“Me, I guess,” Teddy replied. “I’ve got a letter for them.”
“Next door.” The boy smirked and pointed to the empty foundation on the next lot over. “But I don’t think they have a mailbox yet.”
“Weird,” Teddy mumbled, stuffing the letter back in his pocket. For a few moments he sat on his bike wondering what to do next, then the boy called down to him. “Hey, kid, you live in the neighborhood?”
“Since yesterday.”
“Where?” he demanded.
“By the old abandoned A-house.”
It seemed to be the right answer, because the boy nodded approvingly. “All right, then,” he said. “Wanna see something groovy?”
Teddy hesitated. The boy seemed suspicious of him, and Teddy wasn’t sure he should be messing around on a construction site. But then again he did want to see something groovy, so he parked his bike on the sidewalk and stepped onto the site.
“I’m Walter, and this whole block is my domain,” the boy said as Teddy walked carefully up the incomplete stairs. “Until people move into the houses, I suppose. Isn’t it great?”
“Will we get in trouble for being here?” Teddy asked, looking around. The floors were bare plywood with nails sticking up all over the place, and there was scrap wood scattered about. There were no walls either—only vertical two-by-fours every two feet that formed the frame of the house—and the roof wasn’t on yet. It looked like a big, square wooden jail cell.
Walter ignored Teddy’s question. “The workers leave stuff lying around when they go home.”
“Really? Like what?”
“Just today I found two lighters and a Hot Rod magazine—you should see the new Camaro.” Walter held up the magazine, dropping the centerfold open so Teddy could see the car. It looked like an old Camaro to him.
“But that’s not all,” Walter said, wiggling his eyebrows. “The construction guys also leave their tools.”
“What’s so cool about that?” Teddy asked.
With a grin, Walter raised the hammer and hurled it past Teddy’s head into a sheet of wallboard. It smashed a hole through the sheet, and a cloud of white dust exploded into the air.
“Ha! You flinched!” Walter bent over, laughing hysterically as the wallboard dust settled on Teddy like fallout from a bomb.
“Fun stuff, huh?” Walter said, wiping tears from his eyes. “Now you do it. Go ahead. I won’t flinch. I don’t flinch.”
The damage made Teddy feel uneasy, but he had to admit, the hammer-throwing explosion was sort of cool. A screwdriver lay on the stairs. Teddy debated picking it up. He was pretty sure he could throw as well as Walter.
“C’mon, chicken,” Walter chided.
I’m not a chicken, Teddy thought.
He snatched up the screwdriver and hurled it end over end between Walter’s legs. The sharp tip buried itself in the stairs just below Walter’s plaid shorts. It stuck there, vibrating back and forth.
He didn’t mean to throw it so close, but Walter loved it. “
Whoa! Faaaaa-ar out,” he cackled.
“Uh-oh,” Teddy said. “I think I damaged the stairway.” There was a large crack in the board where the tip of the screwdriver had stuck in.
“Yeah.” Walter grinned. “Now we’re talkin’!” He pulled out one of the lighters he’d found and set the end of a short wooden dowel ablaze. “Look, it’s the Olympic torch.” Teddy watched it burn, mesmerized for a moment by the dancing flame. But as he watched the torch burn, he was horrified to notice that the hand Walter held it with was missing its index finger.
“You like fire?” Walter said knowingly.
Teddy shook his head. The sun-dried wood around them looked dangerously flammable, and Walter’s missing finger was downright creepy. “I think we should put it out,” he said.
Walter grinned again. “Oh, yeah? I’ll bet I can set fires faster than you can put them out.”
With that, he romped off through the half-built house, thrusting the torch out at random and singeing the two-by-four framing and plywood floors as he went. In his wake, he left charred black marks, a burnt smell, and bursts of laughter.
Feeling a strange mix of exhilaration and guilt, Teddy followed, trying to keep up. Mostly the flames didn’t catch, but once Teddy had to stop and stomp out a newspaper that was starting to send up tendrils of smoke.
When he had made a full circuit through the house, Walter darted between the two-by-four framing and leaped from the second floor down into a huge pile of dirt on the ground. He ran to the next unfinished house to resume his scorching.
Teddy hustled down the stairs behind him, his excitement fading as Walter showed no signs of stopping. He ran to the next house, desperately following the trail of smoldering wood and black scars his new friend had left behind.
“Walter! You’ve gotta stop!” he yelled.
When he entered the next unfinished home, Teddy found the discarded torch on the floor. But Walter himself had disappeared out the other side and was nowhere to be seen.
Then he heard Walter’s voice. “Down here, slowpoke!”
Teddy walked to the edge of the sewer trench between the building sites and spotted Walter standing at the bottom, ten feet down.
“Fun stuff, huh?” Walter said again.
“No,” Teddy said. “I don’t think setting fires is fun. We should get out of here before the workmen come back.”
“Looky here.” Walter picked up a shovel and smacked the dirt-and-rock wall of the trench. A small section of wall caved in, and he leaped aside as it scattered rocks across his feet.
“Dare ya,” Walter said.
“Dare me what?”
“Dare ya to make a bigger avalanche.”
“I don’t think so,” Teddy said.
“What, no guts?” Walter snorted. He raised the shovel again. “Scaredy cat?”
“I wouldn’t keep doing that,” Teddy warned.
“No. You wouldn’t.”
With a smirk, Walter swung the shovel at the wall right below Teddy’s feet. A refrigerator-sized chunk of earth broke away, and Teddy leaped back as the bank caved in beneath his shoes.
Below, Walter dodged the tumbling debris, diving along the bottom of the trench as rocks and dirt fell behind him. Once it stopped, he stood up, laughing hysterically.
“That was awesome!” he cried. “C’mon down and try it.”
From the edge of the trench, Teddy surveyed the wide, crescent-shaped scar Walter had made in the dirt. Exposed rocks and the crooked ends of still-quivering tree roots jutted out.
“No way,” Teddy said, looking over his shoulder for his bicycle. It suddenly seemed like a good time to say good-bye to Walter.
“Please,” Walter said in a suddenly serious tone. “This is my last chance.”
Teddy wasn’t sure exactly what Walter meant, but shook his head—there was no way he was going down there. At that moment, the wall of the trench suddenly shifted. The tree roots sticking out of the wall jerked and twitched, knocking small stones loose, and a long crack began to snake through the dirt near Teddy’s feet at the edge of the pit.
“Run!” Teddy yelled as Walter watched the crack widen above him.
Walter didn’t run. He stood in place with a resigned look on his face and reached up, pleading. “Help me, Teddy. Grab my hand.”
But Teddy wasn’t listening anymore. Instead, he stared in horror as the gnarled, handlike tree roots writhed forth from the wall of the trench and grabbed Walter’s ankles and arms, holding him in place. Then the wall collapsed, covering his new friend with ten feet of dirt and rock.
CHAPTER 6
A wailing patrol car banked hard onto Saint Street. Teddy waved from the sidewalk in front of the house at 550 Saint—a half block from the construction site—where he’d run to call the police.
The car screeched to a stop. “Where’s the buried kid?” a police officer shouted out the window.
“Down there in Lynwood Court!” Teddy yelled back. The car lurched forward and disappeared around the corner. Teddy hopped on his bike and followed it down the street.
When he arrived at the cul-de-sac, the officer was pacing beside his car in front of a series of completely finished homes with lawns, welcome mats, and cars in their drive-ways. The Lynwood Court sign was in the same place, but it was faded, not shiny and new. And there were no construction sites.
Teddy wheeled his bike up a driveway and kicked a garage door that hadn’t been there before in disbelief. It was real.
“Calm down there, son,” the officer said. His blue uniform read BARNES across the pocket.
“But it was here,” Teddy said.
“What was here?” Officer Barnes asked.
“Lynwood Court.”
“This is Lynwood Court.”
An ambulance squealed to a stop behind the patrol car, and Teddy began to feel the need to explain something he didn’t understand.
“Yeah, I know,” he said. “But the houses were under construction before.”
“Before what?”
“Before I called.”
“Young man,” Officer Barnes said, “Lynwood Court was under construction forty years ago.”
A fire truck pulled up now too, its crew leaping out to assist with the horrible emergency Teddy had reported. As Teddy watched them, shifting from foot to foot and wishing he were somewhere else, he began to feel sick to his stomach. The homes in the cul-de-sac before him did look forty years old.
Paramedics and firemen joined Teddy and Officer Barnes on the sidewalk, huffing from their mad dash to the scene with their heavy equipment.
“Where’s the trench?” one of the firemen asked.
Teddy shrugged. “It was between the houses around here somewhere, but now it’s all lawn.”
Officer Barnes harrumphed. “Okay, so you saw a boy buried in a trench that you can’t find now. What was his name?”
“Walter.”
“Walter what?”
Teddy sighed. “I don’t know.”
“I see. So a boy you don’t know disappeared in a hole you can’t find.” Barnes shook his head and waved the emergency crews away. He opened a notebook and took out a pen. “And what’s your name, son?” he grumbled.
Teddy’s shoulders slumped. He dropped his head onto his chest; he couldn’t look Barnes in the eye anymore. “Teddy,” he said.
CHAPTER 7
Once the emergency crews had cleared out, Officer Barnes drove Teddy home. He was reluctant to leave Teddy stranded outside his house without a parent, and it took Teddy a long time to explain that he didn’t know the location of his mother’s new high-security job and that her phone number was locked inside the house. He also declined Barnes’s offer to break in for him, and, finally, Barnes had simply left with his name and home phone number so that he could call Teddy’s mom later, probably to tell her how much trouble Teddy had gotten himself into by telling such a ferocious lie.
Teddy was still outside on the porch when his mother pulled up after work to find him
sitting there sunburned as red as a lobster. He didn’t tell her about Walter—he wasn’t exactly sure what to tell her. Instead, he simply said that the air conditioner had broken, he’d taken the check over to Lynwood Court, then he’d hung out in front of the house, all of which were true.
If I’m lucky, he thought, Officer Barnes will get busy and forget about me.
His mom made spaghetti for dinner, and Teddy silently plowed through two full plates to make up for missing lunch. As he ate, he listened to her talk about her new job at the nuclear plant.
“I like the lab here,” she was saying, “and I’ll get a raise after my probationary period. Until then, we’ll have to watch our budget. Thank goodness you’re responsible enough that I can leave you home without—”
“Can nuclear waste make people hallucinate?” Teddy interrupted.
“Well, no,” she answered, seeming surprised about his concern with toxic waste, “although it can be dangerous.”
“How?”
She thought for a moment. “Some highly radioactive material gives off energy in large, lethal doses—it kills things. Low-level material takes a longer time to decay, but the energy still seeps out, and it can mutate living cells. They’re very careful with it nowadays, though.”
“How long does it take to decay?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Just interested in your new job,” Teddy fibbed.
“It varies,” she answered. “It has what they call a half-life. Half the energy of something radioactive is drained over a period of time. It takes that same amount of time again to drain half of what’s left, and so on. The energy dwindles until there’s almost nothing left.” She paused to take a mouthful of spaghetti. “But don’t worry,” she reassured him. “I work in a very safe area at the plant.”
Teddy nodded that he understood. But it wasn’t an area at the plant he was worried about.
CHAPTER 8
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