“You from the plant?”
Allison shook her head ‘no.’ “I’m Dr. Allison Wright from Winston Medical Clinic. This is Mr. Gibbs from the newspaper.”
Blanche lowered the rifle. “Hell, don’t just stand there. Get out of the rain.”
They followed the woman into the house. The kitchen smelled of Ajax. Josh spotted a Winston News coffee mug—the product of a recent circulation promotion drive—in the draining rack by the sink.
“How long have you lived here, Mrs. Lee?” he asked.
“All my life.”
“Wasn’t everyone supposed to leave when the plant came in?”
“Not all of us did. My momma’s buried in Betheltown. So’s my daddy. And two brothers and a sister. And two kids. Hard to be torn out of a family place especially if you have no reason to leave.”
“But you’ve lived all this time with no utilities, no police, no power, no phone, no water.”
“Never had nothing but an outhouse anyway. Propane runs the stove and the lights. No one’s gonna mess with me. I may be eighty-five but I can still shoot.”
“What about water?” Josh asked
“We share a well.”
“Who’s we?”
“Me, Spike, all of us do.”
Allison and Josh exchanged a look. “Spike?”
“My grandson.”
“Sells jewelry?” Allison asked.
“Makes it and sells it. Come to think of it, maybe you could take a look at him. You said you’re a doctor, right? His hands are a mess and he’s been throwing up constant two straight days.”
Spike lay on a bed in a small room covered by a white sheet. What remained of his hair clung to his head in clumps. Black eyes burned from his hollow skull. The piercings in his lip and eyebrow had turned into gaping holes. He was wasting rapidly. If she hadn’t known better, Allison would have said that he was suffering from full-blown AIDS.
“How you doing?” she asked gently.
“Bad,” he croaked.
She pulled the sheet away. Spike’s body had shriveled to a fraction of its former self. His flesh oozed. Bones poked through the burned flesh of his hands. Spike was the sickest person she had ever seen. Death was inevitable and approaching quickly. No treatment could save him.
Allison replaced the sheet. She touched Spike’s shoulder “I’ll try to make you more comfortable.”
“I’m sorry,” she told Blanche back in the kitchen. “Radiation poisoning. There’s nothing I can do. It’s too far gone.”
“I told him nothing good could come of stealing,” she wailed. “I told him not to break into that safe.”
“The safe he took from Dunn’s,” Josh remembered.
“He said Darryl owed him. He got his metal from Darryl so he was sure something valuable was in there—gold or silver. He worked on it all night before he finally broke in. But he said all he got was dust and a piece of metal that glowed bright blue. He liked that. But then he started getting sick.”
Just like the Brazil children who died after painting their bodies with glowing blue matter from a radiotherapy machine, Allison thought. She took a deep breath. “The blue stuff was cesium. Do you know where it is?”
“Day before yesterday, he threw it in the lake.”
Allison’s stomach dropped. “You need to see a doctor right away. The material is radioactive. It could be in the well water. Everyone in Betheltown needs to leave immediately. How many people are still here?”
“Twenty-three remaining.”
“The Remaining,” Josh whispered.
Blanche nodded.
“Do you know Jimmy Mayes?” he asked.
“Lives right up the road.”
“Let’s go,” Josh said to Allison.
“No point,” Blanche said. “Haven’t seen him in days.”
Chapter Fifty-Two
Allison’s mind raced.
This was cascading into something far worse than anything she had imagined. What had started with isolated cases among body jewelry aficionados—she still hadn’t found them all—had led to Spike, the jewelry manufacturer. Between his jewelry sales and the stolen cesium polluting the lake used by the Remaining, who knew how many people Spike might have exposed?
Spike had led them to his metal supplier, Darryl Dunn. Surely Spike wasn’t Dunn’s only customer. Who else did Dunn sell radioactive metal to?
And where did Dunn’s metal come from?
At each stage, the circle of endangered people grew larger and larger. Already, more people had been injured than had been at Three Mile Island. Was Winston’s water supply threatened? To what degree had she and Josh been exposed?
A comparison to Fukushima might end up being more apt, Allison thought grimly. A slew of federal agencies would need to be involved—from Homeland Security to Public Health to the Centers for Disease Control. There was no time to spare. She pulled out her cell phone, thinking she could get Coretha to make calls for her, but there was no service. She resumed her march to the car, blazing a shortcut trail through the thick woods.
She stepped on a fallen tree trunk. It disintegrated into rot, plunging her boot into a slithering nest of baby copperheads. She screamed and bolted fifteen yards. A few feet later, a branch hissed and insolently slithered away. Snakes. The place was infested with them.
“At least we know where Jimmy caught his fish,” Josh said when they arrived back at the car.
Allison was about to agree when she thought of something. “Didn’t Spike’s mom say he dumped the cesium in the lake day before yesterday?”
“Yes.”
“That’s the same day the fish showed up at the newspaper.”
“Right.”
“Those lesions weren’t brand new and that thing was already starting to decay.”
“So?” Josh was having trouble seeing where Allison was going.
“The fish was a few days old. It had to have been caught before Spike dumped the cesium. If the fish came from the lake, that means the lake was radioactive even before Spike did his thing. There would have to be a prior source of contamination.”
Josh looked at his watch. The special section was now on the press. The short-session bus with Katie wouldn’t be arriving from camp for several hours. “We could poke around some more.”
Allison removed two lead protective aprons from the cargo area. She handed one to Josh and put the other one on herself. She retrieved a shoebox-sized device from the back seat and switched it on. It clicked irregularly. “Normal background radiation,” she pronounced.
“Geiger counter? Where’d you get that?”
“Let’s just say it’s on loan from the radiation safety department at the hospital. I thought it might come in handy. You can hide a lot under a lab coat.”
They headed back to the lake as another squall swept through.
They had traveled a quarter-mile when they came across a fire hose snaking down the hill. Allison traced it to its end where a torrent of foul-looking sludge pulsed into a rain-swollen gully, raced down the slope, and billowed like a building storm cloud as it poured into the Betheltown lake. Allison saw that the lake was rising. Radioactive soup lapped at the top of the banks like coffee in an over-filled cup.
Josh switched on the Geiger counter. Static hit like a hailstorm. “Red zone,” Josh read on the dial. Panic rose in him. He knew nothing about radioactivity. He wondered if there was a way to protect himself, if he should try to run, if it would even matter.
He looked to Allison for guidance but she was already tracking the hose up the hill where the woods ended in a clearing. Josh followed. If a medical professional was willing to take the risk, he decided he could, too.
The hose crossed a dirt road and over a dirt berm which was topped by a cyclone fence. Allison scrambled up the muddy bank. Josh was right be
hind.
In front of them, hundreds of carbon arc lights buzzed like giant one-legged-mosquitoes, creating diffuse balls of yellow light suspended in the rain and gloom above a parking lot. Beyond that lay the Recovery Metals plant—a giant gray box sprouting pipes, valves, and a towering smokestack, surrounded by a hundred desolate acres where pile after pile of scrap awaited weighing and sorting before reprocessing.
“It looks just like that photo the Martian Lander spacecraft took of itself,” Josh said. “A human creation plopped in a landscape devoid of life.”
Allison thought about the analogy as she took in the scene. Forklifts moved like dodge ’em cars while electromagnetic cranes scanned piles of scrap for ferrous metals. Hard-hatted workers swarmed over the property like ants on a playground candy bar. Some wore HazMat coveralls. Smokers on break huddled on a loading dock. A line of loaded dump trucks, tractor trailers and tankers idled outside the industrial gate while a guard checked their plates against a clipboard and motioned them through one by one. Empty trucks exited through another gate. A ten-foot cyclone fence topped by razor wire surrounded the entire enterprise.
They moved closer. Odor and clamor overwhelmed them: hot tar, burning rubber and ozone from an electrical fire; the loud, deep rumble of the diesel engines on huge trucks, the grunting and grinding of a fleet of bulldozers, the jarring clang of metal on metal and, above all, the roar from the furnace and the smokestack.
Paint peeled from the walls of the main plant building. Flaming hot gases sparkling with bits of still-burning ash shot from the top of the massive smoke stack which, Allison noticed for the first time, was stained with long columns of rust. The tiny things hitting her skin, she realized, were not gnats but flecks of ash which fell in a light, never-ending gray snow.
A tug pulled a railroad hopper car brimming with scrap into the incinerator building, giving her a glimpse of the glow and flicker of one furnace and an army of mask-wearing, coverall-clad workers, soot coating their faces with grime so dark they could have been mistaken for coal miners.“Like something out of Dante,” Allison yelled. Proximity had transformed the high-tech Martian Lander into a crude, filthy, industrial colossus.
She traced the fire hose to a large lagoon of electric green liquid bordered by an eight-foot red clay dam. “They’re siphoning,” she noted. She walked the perimeter, searching for a way through the fence.
Josh stopped her. “Electrified,” he said, pointing to a thin wire at the top “This place is buttoned up tighter than Fort Knox.”
Allison spotted a small corrugated aluminum building by the perimeter road. “Maybe time to leave,” she said.
“I don’t think anyone’s home.”
Allison pointed to tire tracks in the mud. “But someone’s been here recently.”
Josh hurried fifty yards to the hut, snuck around a corner to a window and eased up to look inside. A desk. A phone. A logbook. A couple of magazines. An easy chair. A reading light. A radio. And hanging on the wall, a raincoat with something stenciled on the back. It took a moment before Josh realized it spelled Winston Police. He sprinted back to Allison. “Chief Holt’s security shed. This is where he hangs out when he’s not on plant patrol.”
Allison looked at the tire tracks. “Why would he be moonlighting on a Monday afternoon?”
A car moved slowly toward them along the perimeter road. “Beat it!” Allison commanded. She hustled down the berm and into a grove of trees. Josh was right behind.
A sweet smell flooded their nostrils when they permitted themselves to breathe. Allison recognized it as the cloying odor of deteriorating flesh.
They followed their noses deeper into the woods, the smell becoming more putrid with each step. The pinched, twisted face of a dead possum appeared in a pile next to half-eaten carcass of a deer crawling with maggots. The flattened bodies of a couple dozen rabbits floating in a yellow custard of decay. Josh felt his gorge rise.
Next to the rabbits, a pile of geese, some already just bones and fathers, other apparently freshly dead. On top of the geese, the stinking remnants of a fox.
“Geurnica,” Allison whispered.
She switched on the Geiger counter. The machine erupted. “The animals are radioactive.” She backed away from the pile. Her hands shook.
Allison was more scared than she had ever been in her life, more scared than she had ever been with Vince. Vince was a threat only to her. This was a threat to her, to Josh, to Katie and to everyone else in Winston. Beyond that, she knew the kind of evil Vince could bring. This evil was entirely unfamiliar.
They tried to put things together back at the car. “Even if the plant is allowed to handle radioactivity, which I don’t think it is, this kind of thing can’t be normal,” Josh said. “No way those workers should be exposed.”
“This is bigger than us, Josh,” Allison answered. “We have to get someone’s attention. If contaminated jewelry, a dead metal dealer, high radioactive levels at the plant and a mountain of dead animals aren’t enough to divert everyone from River Days, I don’t know what is.”
Chapter Fifty-Three
“You need to do a story.”
“We’re not ready,” Josh said as they drove back to town. “Still too many holes.”
“Like what?”
“Like how do we know the Geiger counter works? Maybe the hospital had it on that shelf because it was broken. Or maybe the plant’s allowed to do this.”
Allison looked unconvinced.
“And we don’t know for sure where the hot fish came from,” Josh continued. “All we got is Spike’s word that Dunn is the bad guy. We’re really no farther along that we were.”
Allison threw up her hands in frustration.
Josh felt badly about being so negative. “But I still have posters,” he added.
Allison wasn’t mollified. She was worried about the threat to public health. Josh was in the best position to warn people quickly. He had seen the same evidence she had. She simply couldn’t fathom his reluctance to go public.
“You’re a journalist, for god’s sake! This calls for a full-blown story, not some anonymous posters! I’ll help with the research. Maybe other recycling facilities have had radiation problems.”
“We can’t afford a mistake.”
Allison boiled over. “You need to get over Atlanta,” she snarled.
Josh felt like he’d been kicked in the gut. “It’s not about Atlanta,” he protested. “Everything is working against us. We still have no confirmation and we don’t publish for two weeks.”
“What about the River Days section?”
“Already on the press.” He looked at his watch. “Anyway, I have three hours until Katie gets home. I’m going to be out of commission for days.”
Allison understood the roadblocks but she still believed Josh was afraid—though not without good reason. A story about radioactive contamination was sure to invite intense scrutiny. People with reasons to hide the truth would attempt to knock it down by discrediting the writer. The unpleasant past would be dredged up, including the old comparisons with Janet Cooke, the Washington Post reporter whose Pulitzer was withdrawn after it was discovered she had invented things. Josh would be forced to relive the nightmare.
But that didn’t outweigh the demand that they alert the town. Lives were at stake. Josh would have to make peace with the past sometime and there would not be an occasion more important than this. She would do whatever she needed to help him.
She touched him on the shoulder. “Everyone knows what happened in Atlanta, even in Winston. The only person who hasn’t forgiven you is you. Josh, this isn’t just about telling people not to buy nipple rings from strangers. This is about a potential nuclear catastrophe and we’re at ground zero. We’ve got thousands of people coming to town and you’ve got the best way to warn them. I need you—we need you—to be a journalist again.”
Allison was just like Katie in some ways, Josh thought. The night they had returned from the devastating visit to Columbus, Katie had stopped him with a question as he tucked her into bed: “You know those kids we saw in the waiting room at the hospital?”
He recalled the room of children—boys and girls and with translucent skin and emaciated frames, with head scarves, bald heads, and missing limbs giving the lie to the bright colors and cheerful cartoon animal décor of the waiting room. He remembered his feelings at the time: How can this be right? How is this part of any plan?
“Yes, I remember.”
“I feel so sorry for them,” Katie had said.
I feel so sorry for them! Even in the darkest times, Katie’s concern had not been for not herself, it was for others. Just like Allison.
Josh realized that Allison was right. He had screwed up. He’d given up the decisive World Series homerun. But the problem wasn’t that he’d never been put back in the lineup. The problem was that he’d never asked for the ball.
They hurried to the newspaper and into the pressroom where the pages of the River Days section flew through the rollers. He searched frantically until he finally made eye contact with the foreman. “Stop the presses,” he signed.
Chapter Fifty-Four
Furbee met them as they left the pressroom.
“Bad news,” she reported. “We’re getting sued.”
“By whom?” Josh was stunned. The Winston News had never been sued in more than one hundred years of publishing. “What for?”
“Dunno. We haven’t been served yet.”
Josh was about to back-burner the problem—people occasionally threatened to sue but never followed-through—until Furbee added, “Charles told me it’s going to happen. It’s all the buzz at the plant.”
Josh looked at Allison. Their eyes met. Furbee’s boyfriend, Charles Angerson, worked in finance. He was the friendly plant insider they’d been looking for. “I should have thought of him earlier,” Josh said.
He turned to Furbee. “He says the plant’s suing us?”
Fallout Page 24