by Paul Moomaw
He settled back onto his heels and stepped cautiously forward, irritated to be worried, still, that the water had begun to find its way through the seams of the shoes.
Beyond the corner, the corridor continued for another eight or ten yards, where metal double doors interrupted it. He pushed the right hand door open just enough to peek through into a large room. The water, which had been more of a trickle up to then, flowed heavily through the channel he had provided it by opening the door. It rose to his socks, and he instinctively rocked back up onto his toes momentarily.
The room he peered into was as silent as everywhere else, but not empty. A man’s foot, lying on the floor, filled part of his view. He pushed the door, cautiously, further open and stuck his head through. The foot was well attached to a body in a soggy suit. Tarbell recognized Delon. He slipped into the room. Another body, that of a man he didn’t know, lay across the floor from Delon. Both men appeared to be dead; the man he didn’t recognize looked as if someone, or something, had snapped his neck for him. He hoped the man was a friend of Delon.
Tarbell peered around the rest of the room, looking for some sign of Susan or Elaine. He saw nothing at first; then, as his eyes swept the room again, his heart sank. Susan’s purse lay against a wall, looking like a little island projecting from the swirling water. He was sure she would not have left it voluntarily; the thought of the possible alternatives made him want to vomit.
The opposite wall from where he had entered was filled with large windows. He peered through them into a circular chamber he guessed lay above the central reactor core. At one end of the room, a passageway curved out of sight, doors visible in its walls.
If I have to search every room in the place, I will, he thought. But he felt, at the same time, an emptiness. He had a numbing certainty that, if Elaine and Susan were in the building, he should have a sense of them. He had always had that kind of connection with Elaine, although it had dwindled some with Susan. Its absence left him terrified that they were dead.
He began working his way down the passageway, stopping at each door, listening for signs of life, and opening those that would open. Then he heard the voice. He couldn’t make out words, couldn’t even tell if it was a man or a woman. It sounded for all the world like someone singing. He shook his head. Trick of the acoustics, he decided.
The voice grew louder, and when he reached the next door, he was sure the sound came from the other side. He tried to open the door, but it wouldn’t budge. He pressed his ear against the door, but that didn’t help; it made the voice louder, but even less clear than before. He pressed closer, and in doing so inadvertently banged the barrel of his pistol against the steel of the door. It clanged, and the voice stopped.
Tarbell shrank back against the wall. Something clattered on the other side of the door, and then it slid open. He waited, but nothing else happened. Slowly, hoping the water helped muffle his steps, he edged toward the door and looked in. He saw a forklift, and nothing else—no sign of people. He stepped halfway through the door, straining to see if the room had another entrance.
He had just enough time for a premonition that he had made a mistake before something hard and terribly painful hit his head. Then everything went black.
The singing—his ears had informed him correctly about that, after all—had returned when he came back to awareness, slowly and with a headache so bad it made him sick to his stomach. It hurt to open his eyes, but he forced the lids to stay apart. The rest of his body hurt, as well, seemed to burn.
The singing came from out of his line of sight. He shifted his eyes, trying not to move his head, and brought the singer into view. It was a man, one he thought he recognized, but couldn’t place—a skinny little man with a monkey’s face and dark, wiry hair which covered most of his naked body. He had an erection, and his penis was comically large, almost dwarfing the rest of him. Tarbell had a momentary fantasy that he had somehow managed to wake up in the middle of some awful, pornographic cartoon. The singer stood amidst a jumbled pile of steel bottles that Tarbell recognized immediately as containers for radioactive material. Several of the bottles lay open on their sides, and the singer was in the process of opening another. He got the top unscrewed, and rested the bottle on a table which appeared to be the room’s only furniture, except for the forklift.
The naked man poured black powder from the bottle onto the table. He picked up a handful and rubbed it onto the hair on his chest. He grabbed another handful and rubbed it onto his penis, then began to prance around the room, bare feet splashing in the water, masturbating and singing. Tarbell recognized the words as German, but in some peasant dialect, and too badly slurred to understand.
He began to be aware that his mouth and tongue were coated with something that burned, and at the same time, the burning sensation over the rest of his body became stronger, more insistent, demanding his attention.
Tarbell glanced down, and realized for the first time that he, too, was naked—his clothes lying in a sodden pile next to him on the floor. With a sense of sick horror, he saw that his own skin was covered with the shiny black powder, and realized that the burning came from that.
Frantically, he gagged and spit, and when he rubbed his mouth and lips, his hand came away smeared with the same black stuff.
The singer leaped up and down, hooting like a demented chimpanzee. He pranced across the floor and grabbed Tarbell’s penis, tugging at it as if he wanted to pull it off at the root. Tarbell lashed out in a panic and hit the other man in the face. His attacker stepped back, a look of bewilderment on his face. Then he kicked Tarbell’s head, slamming it into the floor. He laughed and leaped back over to the table. He grabbed up a double handful of the black powder and brought it back to Tarbell, who was too stunned to resist as the other man rubbed it over his face, and chest, and shoulders, and massaged his penis with it, then forced some of it into Tarbell’s mouth.
Tarbell started to struggle, then let himself fall back. His skin burned more fiercely every minute; it required all his effort to attend to anything but the pain.
He was going to die. He had never thought of death with such immediacy before, even when he had been in dangerous situations. Now he lay on the floor, not resisting as the other man returned with more black powder and rubbed it over his face and neck. He hurt, and he knew that he would experience far worse pain, and that death, when it finally came, would be a mercy. He wondered vaguely if he could managed to drown himself in the water which covered the floor, but the pain kept him from thinking about anything in more than brief fragments.
Gradually, through the agony and the fear, he became aware of an immense sadness.
Chapter 53
The damned suit was noisy, a fact Pray discovered as soon as he began to walk around in it. Made of a laminated plastic material, the decontamination garment crackled with every step he took. Worse, the crackling was all he could hear; the suit appeared to muffle outside sounds to the point of extinction.
People in these things have to communicate somehow, Pray thought. Instinctively, he pawed at himself until his hands felt, through the suit’s heavy gloves, something square and hard on his waist, right at the belly button. He looked down. What he had taken for some kind of buckle when he first slithered into the suit was actually a small power pack with a rocker switch.
Pray hit the switch, and the situation immediately went from bad to worse. Somewhere in front of his face, a fan began to force air through the hood’s filter, making a constant roaring sound. His movements, which before had caused a muffled crackling from the decontamination suit, now triggered a sound that reminded him of a fire fight in Vietnam. The power pack apparently operated earphones as well as the fan.
Pray stopped moving again, and discovered that his breathing now did a poor imitation of Darth Vader. Outside sounds came through, but with more echo than an old Elvis Presley record, and the water which poured across the floor, and which had made no sound at all before that he had noticed, sudd
enly resembled a waterfall.
Pray shrugged and started walking again, both motions setting off another avalanche of pops and crackles.
Then he discovered a second thing that was wrong. He was unarmed. His derringer was empty, and even if it had been loaded, it was inaccessible under the decontamination suit.
Delon provided the solution to the second dilemma. He still sprawled where Pray had left him. Better, he was definitely dead, as was Moreaux, who lay a few yards away. Delon’s weapon, a new-looking Walther nine millimeter pistol, still rested in the dead Frenchman’s fingers.
Pray picked the gun up, ignoring the thunderstorm of noise the movement triggered from the decontamination suit. He straightened and looked around. There was no sign of anyone near, and no indication of where Peter or Tarbell might be. He walked cautiously toward the curving corridor and looked down it.
Not far along the passageway, a door stood open. Pray tried to remember which of the doors lining the curved wall had been the one Peter had locked himself behind. His memory declined to come up with an answer; but an open door was an open door, he decided, and offered a place to begin, if nothing else.
Slowly, trying to reduce the suit’s noises to a minimum, and pausing every few steps to see if he heard anything besides his breathing and the rippling water, he moved toward the door.
The suit’s hypersensitive earphones picked up a new noise, a funny whimpering moaning, interspersed with something that sounded incongruously like giggling. The earphones offered no sense of direction, but the noise grew louder as he approached, in cautious stops and starts, the open door. Then he saw Chet Tarbell, lying on the floor.
Something was wrong with Tarbell. His clothes were off, and he was the person doing the moaning, and he was jerking and writhing. As a boy, Pray and his friends had amused themselves on summer afternoons by catching copperhead snakes, killing them, and laying their bodies on the nearest tree stump possessed of a good population of ants. The ants would go for the snake, and as they began to bite it, the long, skinny body would twitch, curling and uncurling on the stump. It went on for half an hour, sometimes.
Tarbell looked like that, Pray thought.
Peter appeared suddenly in the room, also naked, and wild eyed. The little Austrian, a jumble of what looked like giant steel vacuum bottles, and a pile of glinting black powder on a table in the middle of the room, all registered on Pray’s senses at once. He had an instant to realize that this odd apparition was the source of the giggling. Then Peter leaped over Tarbell and through the door.
Pray lifted the Walther and fired instinctively. Peter kept coming, and at first Pray thought he had missed. Then, as he squeezed the trigger again, he realized that most people don’t have two belly buttons.
The second shot caught Peter in the shoulder, spinning him half way around. He slapped at the wound the way a man might slap at a bee that had just stung him, and staggered toward Pray again, giggling as he came.
Pray fired a third time, and a fourth, and Peter finally fell down. Even then he didn’t die, but sat cross legged, his fingers splashing the water like an idle picnicker, and stared at Pray.
At least he’s stopped giggling, Pray thought.
The moaning had stopped as well. Pray stepped over to Tarbell, who was also watching him now, his eyes glazed over with pain.
“I’ll get help,” Pray shouted, unthinkingly trying to make himself heard through the hood. His voice rumbled back at him like thunder, and hurt his ears. “I’ll get help,” he repeated, more quietly.
Tarbell shook his head.
“No,” he said, his voice distorted by the earphones.
“You’ve got to have help,” Pray said, and started to step away.
Tarbell shook his head more violently and grabbed at the leg of Pray’s decontamination suit.
“I’m already dead,” he said. He waved weakly at his body. “This stuff isn’t just on the outside. The son of a bitch stuffed me like a prize buck. God only knows how much I swallowed and breathed.” He coughed violently, his entire body shaking with the effort. Then he stared up at Pray again, still hanging onto his leg.
“Where are Elaine and Susan?”
“They’re safe,” Pray said. “They’re fine. They’re outside, worrying about you.”
Tarbell let go of Pray’s leg and let his head sag back into the water.
“Shoot me, Adam,” he said.
“No. I can’t do that.”
“Goddammit, I’m going to die anyway. I just want it to be fast. I want you to be able to tell them I didn’t suffer a lot. I’ve caused them enough shit, they don’t need to watch me decay from radiation sickness.”
Pray was torn. He understood Tarbell’s pain, sympathized with his need. But he could not, would not, take responsibility for his life. Then he saw a handgun a few feet from Tarbell, and thought he might have found the answer. He picked the gun up.
“Is this yours?”
Tarbell nodded. Pray held it out to him.
“You’ll have to do it yourself, old friend,” he said.
Tarbell reached for the gun, then pulled his hand back and shook his head.
“Not with mine,” he said. “Any evidence of suicide, and my insurance doesn’t pay a penny.” He tried to laugh, went into another fit of coughing instead.
“I had them write it that way, years ago, to save money,” he said. “Must have saved at least ten dollars a year in premiums that way. Pretty smart, huh?” He stared up at Pray, desperation in his eyes.
“Pretty smart,” Pray said. He placed the gun beside Tarbell. Then, reluctantly, he held out the Walther.
“This one belonged to Delon,” he said. “Nobody’ll ever guess.”
Tarbell wrapped his fingers around the gun. He had trouble gripping it.
“I don’t know if I can get the job done, Adam,” he said.
“I’ve never seen a job you couldn’t handle,” Pray said. He straightened up, blinking tears away. “What should I tell Susan and Elaine?”
“Tell them I was already dead when you found me.” Tarbell scratched violently at his plutonium blackened chest and moaned. “Promise me you’ll tell them that? It’s kinda true, anyway. Please promise, Adam. I need to hear you say it.”
“I promise.”
Tarbell managed a smile. “Thanks, old buddy,” he said.
Pray walked to the door, turned back. Tarbell was holding the gun with both hands, struggling to point it at his chest. “Nobody’ll notice powder burns with all this other shit on me, will they?”
“Nobody will ever guess a thing,” Pray said. He gazed at Tarbell, his heart aching.
“I’m so sorry, Chet,” he said.
“So’m I, old buddy. God knows.”
The sound of the gunshot, followed almost right away by another, reached Pray’s ears as he walked toward the main entrance of the power plant.
Tarbell had always liked to make sure a job was really done, Pray thought, remembering their days together in Vietnam, where Tarbell had been the methodical balance to Pray’s youthful impatience. He kept walking, out of the building, through the gate, to where Gabriela waited with a cluster of other people. Susan and Elaine were nowhere in sight. Pray was glad of that. He didn’t feel able to face them yet.
Gabriela ran forward, and Pray threw out his hands to fend her off.
“Don’t touch me until I’m out of this,” he warned, and she backed off, alarm in her eyes.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“Not really.”
“Chet?”
“He’s dead.”
Two men in uniform approached Pray and led him to a portable shower that had been set up for the decontamination crew. The hosed him down, then stood back and let him take the suit off by himself. Then they approached him again, this time with a small radiation counter, which they consulted twice before declaring him clean and fit for civilized society.
Pray wandered back toward the fence, his mind blank. He sat
down a few yards from it and stared at the power plant. Then he felt arms around him, and Gabriela was sitting next to him. She rubbed his head and hugged him.
“You said you wanted to be a hero,” she said. “I guess you are one, now.”
He turned and stared at her, felt himself responding the concern in her eyes, felt something give inside with a soft snap. He shook his head the slightest bit.
“I don’t think I want to be a hero any more,” he said. Then he pressed his head against her neck and cried while she held him.
Chapter 54
It was the kind of afternoon that makes you wonder why anybody would want to live next to water. The Wolfgang-See cowered meanly in the gray light that managed to penetrate the low, thick cloud cover, little waves curling and glinting in the face of a raw, wet wind.
“And for this I left Seattle,” Pray said. He felt cold, soggy and grumpy. He hadn’t felt right since Cattenom, anyway, and was feeling a longing for his own fireplace overlooking Elliott Bay.
The tiled roof of Reinhardt Meissner’s house peeked through the trees. “I hope they have the heat on,” Pray said.
“At least we don’t have to worry about the place blowing up,” Gabriela said.
Pray pulled the car into the circular drive in front of the house and turned the engine off. The driveway was empty. The garage, its doors open, contained two vehicles. But the house had that special feeling, Pray thought, unique to places where nobody is ever going to be home again. He stepped out of the car. “Got your lock picks?”
“Sure,” Gabriela replied, as she walked with him to the front door of the house. “But I bet we won’t need them.” She grabbed the brass dragon and pushed, and the ornately carved door swung open. “See?”