Bombshell

by James Reich

  The clock showed something after 4 AM but her vision blurred as she tried to read it. She reached Meridian and from there crossed into Alabama as the sun rose. Shivering, she forced herself into another bland motel room in Tuscaloosa. All motel rooms were trapped in the Cold War. She reached for the yellowing telephone at her bedside and dialed to speak with Molly. She did not answer. Cash dialed the number for her own house. Again, there was no answer. She undressed and tried the shower. She switched on the television. The irradiated rod of her grief bore through the dirty carpet, through the delicate carapace of the earth, downward, unstoppable. It sucked time into its black hole like the television when she switched it off and fell back upon the motel bed. Everything swam and boiled.

  12

  1986. THE FIRST CONTAINER SHIP, WITH ITS RUSTING RED iron hull, had carried them from the port of Odessa, across the chill of the Black Sea to the sprawl of minarets, cranes, and high-rise hotels of Istanbul. Telegraph wires cast black rubber webs across the pale suburbs, prayers distorted from bullhorns and air raid sirens; television aerials weaved into the rosewater dusk. The second iron ship bore them from Istanbul along the glittering languid Mediterranean to Tangiers, beyond the ape-strewn slope of Gibraltar. Each container vessel was greater than the last. The final ship departed from Tangiers with a full moon upon the Atlantic, ghostly gulls pursuing her as though something precious was being stolen from the land. The man and woman experienced the vessels in the manner of mice between vast metal coffins. They held their infant daughter between them, huddling in the canyons of cargo, wrapping her in the folk-patterned wool wraps and bright-knitted clothes they had made for her and had been unable to give up. Their colony, the dream arcades of Pripyat, were abandoned and condemned. There was nothing that they could salvage that was not contaminated with radioactive fallout; even the soft, sentimental baby clothes were a risk. They worried about the milk. The tiny girl seemed to be asleep in the metal drone of the engines. This third ship would take them to Veracruz.

  “I feel like Leon Trotsky,” her father said.

  Her mother answered: “I think we will feel better in Mexico, and afterward.”

  Something more than the heavy shadows of the bulkheads hung over them, the certainty that Reactor IV had lain death upon them, that even now the worm was at work in their child. Everything was tainted. Every word that they spoke trailed with Geiger counters, the scratching, fragmented buzz of broken speakers; their breath and blood carried mutation. They wondered when the sickness would hit them, but knew that their baby was the most vulnerable of all. It could not be voiced, only experienced in the yearning shafts of their breasts, the screaming hollows of their sleep. They felt that they could see it in her, that tiny spark of cancer, awaiting some breath of ignition. In the Atlantic darkness, the ship’s horn recalled the alarm of the meltdown. Her father said: “Toptunov must have been exhausted.”

  Two weeks passed before they saw the lighthouses of Veracruz, the stones of the humid port spread out in the gathering morning, huge cranes straddling other ships, raising the colossal containers onto the dock.

  Her mother sniffed the air. “When Cortez landed here, he didn’t speak the language either.”

  “It will be weeks before we can get to the border. We’ll be fluent by the time we reach Juarez and the connections,” he laughed. “And from there, God knows. Perhaps we should just try to defect, become dissidents. Romantic.”

  “Your American friends won’t fail us, will they? You all barely know one another, except through physics papers and correspondence.”

  “My love, scientists are incestuous, and they thrill when they have a secret that must be maintained. That’s why totalitarian states hate intellectuals, because intellectuals love to make heroic narratives of their selves, and they can do it in code, formulae, or poems. We use a different language.”

  “Varyushka will grow up without speaking her own language.”

  “She’ll find her own.”

  After weeks of riding the chicken buses, hitching in the hot emerald landscape, they reached Juarez and met their connections after making a series of calls from vandalized pay phones. They crossed the U.S.-Mexico border hidden in the ventilated trunk of an old car driven by two middle-aged American scientists. In their Hawaiian shirts and espadrilles, mirrored sunglasses and greasy baseball caps, the two men gunned the car toward El Paso and the first chance to let the aliens out and into the rear seat before the Texas heat suffocated them. Later, as they drove, her father pointed out a sign to her mother. “Radium Springs,” he said.

  “Yeah, we’re in New Mexico,” one of the men called from the passenger seat in front of them, sweat dripping from his eyebrows as he turned to speak. “This place out to your right, here, they call it the Jornado del Muerto! We’ll go around it! It’s a bitch, and mostly top secret government installations anyway.”

  “Where do we go?” her mother called out, as the wind beat through the open windows.

  “Silicon Forest. That’s what they call the part of Oregon you’re going to. Lots of good people there—hippies, scientists, freaks, and even some communists! No one is looking for illegal aliens in Oregon, unless there’s a crackdown on Canadians. The West Coast is in permanent revolution, comrades. We’ll take you so far, and then some friends will take over, and so on. It’s like the Olympics. You’re the flame!”

  “You see, Varyushka?” her father said. “They love this.”

  13

  APRIL 11, 2011. HER OWN VOICE, GENTLY PLAYING IN HER SKULL: Heavy metal sediment radiates from inside the body, the robot part. It outlasts everything; the skin and tissues peel back, the ribbons of muscles fall away, the bones disintegrate, as though they had only ever been the soft sheathing of an eternal machine. Robots work in the zones of alienation. One millionth of a gram enters and begins rewriting the body.

  It was late afternoon when she awoke. She looked out into the parking lot from her motel room. Even from that vantage she could see the scratched paint and smashed metal of the low-rider’s passenger side door. Fortunately, the window had not broken. The damage to the car would attract even more attention if she were to drive too much in daylight. She switched on the television as she prepared a hot bath, allowing the white noise from the faucets to drown out the soundtrack. She could see that the weather report showed high winds affecting most of the South and Tornado Alley.

  As the steam obscured the bathroom, she lay in the hot water thinking of Molly. There was a painful lump in her throat. She thought of Nona. She pictured the vacant snakeskins of grief that she had left all behind her. She began to scrub at her skin, scratching into it with her short fingernails. Abruptly, she stopped. She sat upright in the bath, feeling the water run down her back. She pulled her knees close to her breasts, holding her shins with her forearms. There was no time to be sentimental. No time for ghosts. She was moving deeper into the territory of the Winters Corporation.

  Cash climbed out of the bath. Without drying her body, she performed push-ups beside the bed. As her muscles burned, she made a mental inventory of the dangerous facilities that surrounded her. She was an intimate catalog of the salamander crawls of hundreds of reactor fires in the bulbs and crevices of a flawed architecture of horror, of the leaks of radioactive wastewater, of missing lengths of isotopes and fuel rods, of radon gas clouds hanging spectrally over impoverished towns, the unseen glittering of particle storms, tornado strikes, droughts, tritium bleeding from wounds in pipes and stone, boric acid dissolving monstrous cavities in reactor cocoons, the near-meltdowns, the paper-thin difference before ruptures and fallout; she apprehended them and absorbed them into the atoms of her flesh. It was necessary for her to become inscribed with the truth, to be the truth. Like an interstellar virus, more than fifty reactor plants sprawled from the South and along the eastern seaboard, where Cash would make new constellations, new zodiacs of anxiety. The bathwater dripped from her taut athletic frame onto the beige carpet. She counted 100 sit-ups, and then dr
essed. There was nothing but to wait for the darkness that would allow her to move more freely.

  April 12, 2011. When the time came, Cash drove three hours through the gloom of Alabama northward to Wheeler Lake, between Decatur and Athens, arriving there at midnight as Monday passed into Tuesday. She followed Browns Ferry Road close to the wildlife reserve. She imagined herself as a trace upon a map, and saw herself as a bright light snaking down from New Mexico to Louisiana before curling back up to the northern edge of Alabama. Those who would be following her would assume that she would be continuing northward, but she would instead pivot south again to Savannah, Georgia, before finally blazing up the East Coast.

  At Wheeler Lake, she pulled over on the south bank and stared down the danger across the starry water. She stood ahead of the car, feeling her boots sinking slightly into the soft ground. Lit with industrial lamps, the reactor in the darkness across the river appeared monstrous. She had researched the Winters Corporation’s reactors there: the Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant. It was as old as Chernobyl. Its first reactor came online in 1973, three years after its blueprints had been abandoned and their license revoked and the ill-formed machinery had been shut down and restarted several times. Within two years, on March 22, 1975, the reactor suffered a near-catastrophic fire. Without the knowledge of the plant workers, it had burned unseen and uncontrolled within the electrical conduits of the containment building for seven hours. Four years ago, drought had left insufficient lake water to cool the reactors. Watching from the muddy banks, Cash tried to imagine the insides of the reactor. There would be other fires, other droughts.

  Back at Decatur, she crossed to the north bank over the Bee Line Highway and made for the reactors along Nuclear Plant Road. Finally, she saw the floodlit Winters Corporation billboard announcing the site: BROWNS FERRY NUCLEAR POWER PLANT. It chilled her blood. Beyond this point, she could make out the hydraulic gates, razor wire, and security cameras that protected the outer perimeter. She stopped the car, switching off her headlights and letting the engine throb beneath the stars. If she was to act here, she needed to remember that she was at least eight hours from Savannah and the first of the Winters men. Without headlights she fixed her eyes on the lamps covering the gates. She barked at herself: “Got to go, now!”

  Her head was thrown back as the car lurched and then blasted into the darkness. The tires let out a banshee scream and acrid silver smoke rose behind her. In seconds she closed on the barrier, bracing herself against her driving seat. With the impact, the gates buckled, yet did not open. A red alarm light began to revolve above the electronic control box. A flock of birds erupted into the night. Cash slammed the low-rider into reverse and began to pull away. Sirens began to sound in the distance. Suddenly, something rushed the car. There was a brutal impact against the passenger side window and she turned to see a black dog barking at the glass, smearing it with saliva, its hot breath condensing almost upon her cheek. She felt its huge front paws raking the car.

  A flashlight probed through the windscreen, momentarily blinding her. The crippled gates, the trees, the entire nightscape came to her in negative as she heard the metal and rubber casing of the flashlight beating on the roof of the car. A male voice yelled at her: “Stop right there! Hold it!” Dragging his dog, the guard tried to work his way around the back of the car, seemingly intent on reaching the driver’s side door and pulling her from it. Her blood raced as she aimed the Impala’s dark hull at the man trying to apprehend her, fixing him in the rearview mirror, burning rubber. He feinted back to the left, and then crabbed right, his boots grinding on loose grit, his dog hauling him in spasms of rage. The white teeth and gray tongue lunged at her again. The leash was taut at the edge of the light as its handler struggled to hold the animal. As she gained traction and the car reversed, the flashlight moved behind her, reflecting off the chrome bumper, across the contorted face of the security guard as he lost his footing and fell behind the reversing vehicle. She saw the flashlight roll toward the dirty tree line from where the security guard and his dog must have burst. There was a suspended shard of cool anticipation before she ran over his clawing body. She felt the rear of the car rise as it crushed him beneath it, shattering his legs and forcing fractured bone through the shins of his uniform. His sickening screams silenced the dog. He had released the leash as he fell, and she witnessed the dark bulk of the animal retreating beneath the illuminated Winters Corporation billboard. Clearing the fallen man, who thrashed on the moonlit asphalt, she wrenched the car around and pushed the accelerator again, ever harder into the carpet until her thigh burned. From the man on the ground, a gunshot peeled behind her. His hands were shaking too violently to aim.

  There was barely enough moonlight to drive without lights, but she needed to remain concealed. On Nuclear Plant Road, a cop car screeched from a side street without seeing her and raced toward the scene of her attack. When she felt that she was clear enough she tried the headlights. One had survived the crash. If she was fortunate and did not become entangled in Birmingham, she could hit Highway 20 and get out of Alabama via Pell City and Oxford in three hours and beyond Atlanta, Georgia, before daybreak. Adrenal heat flushed through her flesh. They would have to start noticing her soon. She thought of these dead and wounded men as perimeter guards, where the perimeter was the entirety of the American landscape, and where on April 26, Indian Point would become its symbolic core. She was closing in. She thought of Valerie Solanas’s poster curling down above her bed, the lingering benediction of her kiss.

  When dawn began to gather, she reached the outskirts of Macon and another motel. She drove to the back of the parking lot and parked beneath a large willow tree, keeping the damaged passenger door and the broken headlight away from the sight of the reception office and the main drag. She checked that there was no blood from the guard at the back of the car before walking to the office to check in. As she handed the dollar bills across the brown Formica counter, the elderly black woman there asked:

  “You okay, sister? You look like you gonna be sick.”

  “I get carsick, I guess.”

  “Want me to get you some Alka-Seltzer? I keep some back here.”

  “No, it’s okay. I have something to take for it. But, thank you.”

  “What name?”

  “Wells. Kimberly Wells.” Jane Fonda’s name in The China Syndrome.

  “Can I see your driver’s license, please?”

  Cash put her palm across her lips, hesitating. “Damn. It’s in the car.”

  The receptionist looked at her. “You do look pale, honey. I don’t need to see your ID for tonight. What are you gonna do anyway, steal the damn motel?” The old woman laughed. “Here’s your key. Room 26. Go get some nice rest. My name is Virginia. If you need anything.”

  Walking across the slick parking lot to her room, Cash felt bile rising in to her mouth. Her stomach jerked as she turned the key and threw her pack onto the bed. Keep it together, she told herself. She was close enough to Savannah that she could get to the first of the Winters men tomorrow, driving the last few hours in the early morning when there would be fewer cops on the roads to see her disintegrating vehicle. They would not be looking for her in Georgia. If anything, her presence last night in the north of Alabama might force her enemies to assume that she was heading northeast toward Washington, D.C., where they might assume she planned to protest the pro-nuclear Low Carbon Symposium that was to take place two days hence, on the fourteenth. Security would be too tight there anyway, she thought.

  Another wasted day. The day that she had intended to reach Savannah she spent vomiting in the gray bathroom of the EZ-Rest Motel. She managed to call the reception desk to say that she would stay another night. Enervated and pinned to the linoleum by a fist of nausea that cramped her freezing skin and forced convulsions from her guts like toothpaste from a tube, Cash rested her brow against the enamel of the toilet bowl. She could not afford to be overtaken by horror or grief. She had to reach the youngest Winters befo
re he left for Washington. After several hours, she managed to stand and staggered back toward her bed. As she was about to lie down, there was an urgent knock at the door. Cash froze. The knocking came again.

  “Miss Wells?” She recognized the aged, low voice of the receptionist.

  “One minute, ah, Virginia.” As Cash opened the door, leaving the security chain attached, a wrinkled brown hand pushed a packet of Alka-Seltzer through the gap.

  “Take these. I figured you must be real sick. I brought you some chamomile tea, too.”

  Cash opened the door, and the receptionist shuffled into the room.

  “Let’s leave the door ajar for a minute, let some fresh air in. I don’t mean to be personal, Miss Wells, but when a person has been so sick, the atmosphere . . . ”

  “I know,” Cash nodded, taking the steaming mug of tea.

  “Do you know what it is?” She glanced at Cash’s stomach.

  “Funeral.” Cash pulled a black sweater from her bag, cautious not to reveal any of the other contents as the elderly woman stared at her.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m sick from a funeral. My father was in an accident.”