The first stage involved picking up all the rubbish, clothes and toys and putting them in their appropriate places, be it the bin, the dirty washing basket or the toy box. The front room was usually the worst so he started there, collecting the toy planes and stuffed animals and dropping them into the box. There were toys strewn throughout the rest of the house too, but he would get to that in a minute. There were empty drink containers, chip packets, and tomato sauce-covered plates. Wei worked methodically, not pausing to look at the clock on the kitchen wall.
The kitchen bin liner was overflowing, so he tied it up and took it to the outside bin. Something did not seem quite right out here. Perhaps it was the faded look of the houses on the far side of the suburban street, or the unusual quality of the afternoon light, but Wei felt ill at ease. The sun was shining but it did so without warmth. He put the rubbish in the bin and hurried inside, but something seemed to have subtly changed in his absence. The house, which had previously seemed grubby but lived in, now seemed devoid of life, as though no one had lived here in years. He got on with his tasks, plugging in the vacuum cleaner and making a start on the front room, but although the vacuum cleaner was a new one and usually very effective, he did not seem to be making any progress. Perplexed, he went back into the kitchen.
The dishes in the sink were still dirty, the crumbs and plates on the bench still scattered, but now there were bigger issues to contend with. If he wasn’t mistaken, there was rubble strewn across the floor. Part of the roof had caved in.
“What’s wrong, Papa?”
Wei spun around, startled. His six year-old daughter Lijia was staring at him, a solemn expression on her face. “I’m just looking at…this. Do you know what happened here?”
“There was an accident at the reactor,” his daughter said.
“What reactor?”
“Silly, Papa. Don’t you know? The town’s being evacuated.”
He stared at her, but her expression was unchanged. “Then why are we still here?” he said. “We’d better leave.”
She shook her head. “Can’t. You’ve got to clean up first.” She strode off in the direction of her bedroom, leaving him alone again.
Wei stepped over the rubble and started washing the dishes in the sink, but again he did not seem to be making any progress. The pile of plates was not diminishing, and if he wasn’t mistaken the floor in the kitchen was sticky. Looking at his feet, he saw that the floor was blackened as though having been scorched by fire. It was like walking on soft tar.
“Are you all right, sir?” Chen Da asked. He had come into the kitchen from the front room. He had some kind of cleaning apparatus strapped to his back.
“You’re shampooing the carpets?” Wei asked. “I haven’t finished vacuuming in there yet.”
“Carpets, sir?” Chen Da asked. “I don’t follow you.”
Wei stared at his subordinate intently. What was that thing strapped to his back? “What are you doing at the moment?” he asked.
“I’m trying to clean up the garbage, sir. This place is a mess.”
“Yes, I know. The kids… ”
But Chen Da had gone back into the front room. The sink looked less like a sink and more like a long metal trough now, such as those animals feed from. He couldn’t find the wash-cloth.
Lijia was in her room. Sitting on the corner of her bed, she was brushing her brown, shoulder-length hair. Her feet didn’t quite reach the ground. Her face was pure and unblemished and her eyes were as dark as his own. She was wearing a frilly red dress and white sandals. He took her into his arms and held her tight.
“Papa!” she exclaimed, struggling against him. He put her down. “I’m scared, Papa.”
“It’s all right,” he soothed.
“Can we go now? There are scary men in the house.”
“It’s okay, little one. It’s just Chen Da and the team. They won’t hurt you.”
She looked at him through tear-moistened eyes. “Promise?”
“I promise.”
“Papa, I’m still scared.”
“What is it? You can tell me.”
“Papa, I don’t want to die. I’m still little.”
He cupped her head and held her close to him for a long time. He held her so tight that he thought that the bones of her little body might break. Her breathing slowed and he wondered if she were falling asleep. He could put her to bed for a while until he had finished cleaning. Her eyes were closed, her mouth open. Wei squeezed his daughter once more and then carefully placed her on the bed and put the cover over her. She was asleep and all that he wanted to do was to keep her safe forever.
“We’re moving onto the next sector, sir,” Chen Da said from the doorway.
“Yes, all right. My little one will be safe here, won’t she? Look at her sleeping.”
“Sir, I don’t see…”
“Look how her eyelids flutter! What are you dreaming about, my little princess? Come now, Chen Da, I don’t want to disturb her.”
“Yes, sir.”
His men were assembled in the main chamber. They all wore some kind of flimsy face-mask, like those Wei imagined deep-sea divers might wear, but he could tell them apart easily enough. They seemed to be waiting for him.
“We need to move out,” Zhou Sen said. “We’re getting too much radiation.”
“I can’t feel my legs,” Wang Meng complained.
“Sir, your mask has slipped down,” Zhou Sen said. “Let me fix it for you.”
Zhou Sen fiddled with something near to Wei’s face. It was absurd; he wasn’t wearing a mask. But wait – he was. And this did not seem so much like a house; more like some kind of industrial complex. There was rubble and pieces of twisted steel scattered all over the concrete floor.
“Where are we?” he asked.
“We’re in the reactor!” Ma Jian snapped. “Are you mad?”
Wei had a mind to reproach the man for his insolent tone, but now his eyes were seeing things that could not easily be explained, and the matter of Ma Jian’s insolence paled. They were in the reactor. There must have been an explosion, for further along flames were rising from something black and sticky that looked like melted coal.
“There’s been an accident?” Wei said in wonder. “What are we doing here?”
His men looked at one another.
Finally Chen Da spoke: “We’ve been cleaning up the garbage, sir. We’re getting at least 1000 millisieverts an hour down here, and we don’t have time for fucking idle chit-chat. We’re getting out.” But their eyes were those of men who knew they were leaving this world.
“Okay, I’ll wake Lijia up and be right with you.”
But there was no Lijia and there never had been. If she existed anywhere, then it was in a future time that might now never come.
35. The Green Zone
The crowd was bottlenecked at the gate to the Green Zone. Sylvia and Peters were a couple of hundred metres back, at the periphery of the throng. The mood was restless and Sylvia felt the human tide yearning to surge forward through the blockage. Water cannons from local fire engines sprayed the crowd with a fine mist, not to repel them, but to wash the radioactive dust away. Tiny black waves lapped at Sylvia’s toes.
“This could take hours,” Peters said.
“I’m still worried about the cameras,” Sylvia replied. “There’s one up there.” No doubt it was also recording their conversation.
“I think the security bureau has more pressing issues to attend to, don’t you?”
“Like that?” Sylvia said, indicating to the vibrating razor wire fence ahead. People were shaking the poles and the fence was starting to yield. Then a great cheer went up as a section of the fence clattered down. She felt the weight of those who had gathered behind her pushing forward. Then there were screams as those unlucky few at the front were slashed by the razor wire as the mob sent them tumbling over the downed fence.
“Get back!” Peters cried amidst the rising din. He shunted her back with surp
rising strength. Now they were at the edge of the crowd, gasping for breath but temporarily safe. Sylvia fell to her knees. The moans and sobs of the injured – some gored, others trampled – became apparent. As the numbers thinned, Peters helped her up and they made their way toward the ruined gate. The fire crews and a handful of medics attended to the fallen. The injured were mainly children.
“Come on,” she said to Peters, who was crouching next to a traumatised child huddled against an unbroken section of the fence.
Peters straightened as a medic led the girl away. He looked Sylvia in the eye, a terrible thunder on his face. “You and your husband were better suited to each other than you knew,” he said, turning away.
That stung, but Sylvia said nothing. There were no words for any of this; the time for recriminations would be later. She stepped across the threshold of the Green Zone and waited to see if Peters would join her. He did.
“We’ll be arrested if we don’t hurry,” she said. She wanted to justify her need for flight to him, but the words wouldn’t come. He nodded and nothing further was said between them.
Looking up, Sylvia saw a pair of low-flying helicopters heading toward the reactors. Then Peters drew her attention to a scientist in a bright orange radiation suit walking along the boulevard toward them. The scientist stopped periodically, taking what she presumed were readings of the radiation level.
“Where can I get one of those suits?” Peters asked, but not loud enough for the scientist to hear. “And more importantly, how desperately do I need one?”
“I thought you said it was okay,” Sylvia said.
He shrugged. “We won’t die of cancer this month.”
They watched as the scientist was corralled by a handful of angry townspeople. Their words were whipped away by the wind as soon as they were spoken, and the scientist did not deign to respond. The situation was threatening to turn nasty, and Sylvia could imagine the scientist being stripped of his suit and paraded around the street, a sign around his neck denouncing him for his crimes. Then a warning shot was fired. The shot came from a second similarly dressed scientist wielding a high powered rifle. The crowd scattered and the scientists abandoned their readings and withdrew.
Further along, a convoy of trucks was parked in the middle of the street. People were being loaded on like refugees from some war-torn country.
“What do we do now?” Sylvia asked. “Run?” She knew as well as he did that the bushland surrounding the town was almost completely devoid of life. There was nothing out there but the Waste.
“No,” Peters replied. “They won’t have time for checking IDs now.”
“I hope not.”
They allowed themselves to be herded onto one of the trucks, which Sylvia recognised as identical to those used in the Preparedness training she had been compelled to attend. Did this explain her reluctance in boarding, simply in that the truck reminded her of the rope ladders and obstacles courses she was never able to traverse in time?
“Where are we going?” Sylvia asked.
“They’re setting up a camp out of town,” a fat woman with bedraggled hair said. “At least until they clear up the accident.”
Sylvia nodded and sat back as the truck’s engine thrummed to life. Those two words, ‘the accident,’ were repeated in her mind. It had been an accident after all. A terrible mistake. She noticed that Peters was watching her, so she gave him the smallest of nods to indicate that she knew that this conversation was already on dangerous ground. There was a part of her that wanted to denounce David this very moment, to allow her rage to boil over, but the greater part of her advised caution.
“You know,” Sylvia said to the woman, “I work in advertising. I just designed a new ‘vert for the town. It may never see the light of day now.”
The truck made its way out of town.
36. Fallout
By mid-afternoon, the situation in the makeshift camp on the edge of town was starting to settle down. The seemingly endless flood of evacuees had all but abated. Like Rion, the other citizens of Yellowcake Springs had been given potassium iodide tablets, as well as a cold shower, a dry towel, and a change of clothes: one-size-fits-all overalls in a putrid shade of beige. Now everyone looked the same, their individuality stripped away. Rion saw each of these trials as rituals in his citizenship ceremony. If they were dejected, then he was elated; where they saw their lives being taken away from them, he saw his own being handed to him for the first time.
The next ritual would be the roll call.
Rion marvelled at the efficiency of the operation, blighted only by the dirty smudge in the western sky over the Red Zone. Another much closer fire was a pyre for all the radiated clothes the townspeople had been wearing. People scurried to and fro, called to active duty in the defence of the town by the disaster, as people were already calling it. If Rion wasn’t mistaken, then a number of them looked, if not precisely happy, then at least invigorated. For the most part, the citizens had been – superficially at least – untouched by the disaster. There were few injuries that he could see. No blackened corpses or retching invalids. This camp had been constructed as a field hospital, and yet there were few patients to tend to.
But the radiation; of course there was that. This was a subject about which Rion was mostly ignorant. His tuition, such as it had been, consisting mainly of old magazines and a mouldering encyclopaedia, had not covered this. He knew a little of nuclear attacks on cities – of Hiroshima and Peshawar – and of the accidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima, but he knew little about radiation per se. Eavesdropping on the conversations taking place all around him, he surmised that most of those assembled here were equally ignorant. This most invisible and unsettling of enemies would stalk their dreams relentlessly.
At a loose end, Rion wandered over to the edge of camp. The scrubland consisted almost entirely of dry, spiny bushes and sandy soil. It was unremarkable in itself, but something had drawn his attention and he wasn’t quite sure how to describe it. There was a very fine shimmer; it was almost as if – and here he was embarrassed to think of it like this – the landscape had been sprinkled with fairy dust. Tiny particles of something were scattered on the bushes and in the sand. It would have consequences that far outreached this particular camp on this particular day, and it would outlive them all. This was fallout.
“What do you think it is?” a man standing nearby said. Rion looked and saw that it was Ben, the man who had spoken knowledgeably about radiation before.
“Something from the reactor?” Rion asked.
Ben nodded. “These people,” he said, “they feel safe now, and it’s true that they aren’t in any immediate danger, but things might look different a decade from now.”
“The radiation?”
Ben nodded again. It seemed to be a customary gesture for him. “It hasn’t rained here yet. When it does, the sparkly stuff will wash away into the ground water.”
“Do you know what it is?” Rion asked.
“I can make an educated guess. Let’s see. We’ve got caesium, strontium and iodine. A little plutonium – that’s the worst stuff – but probably not a great deal of that. And then there’s lead, zirconium, cadmium, beryllium, boron.”
“That seems like better than an educated guess.”
“Well, I’m an environmentalist,” Ben said. “I take an interest in these things.”
“I see. You’re not involved in…”
“Not involved in the ‘accident’ here? Perhaps I am. I haven’t seen you around before today, friend, but I can recognise a kind face when I see one. I’d love to speak further, but first I’d better make a small confession.”
Rion’s insides began to churn. He was being inexorably drawn back in to the sordid sweep of events. Gillam. Misanthropos. David Baron. “Go on,” he said.
“You see, my name’s not really Ben. My real name is Clyde Owen.”
“I’m Rion...Jones.”
“Pleased to meet you, Mr Jones. You haven’t asked why
I lied about my name, but I can see that it’s the question on your lips, so I’ll spare you the trouble of asking. I’m afraid to say that I am implicated in this little plot here. I’m not the only one, of course.”
“You’re part of Misanthropos?”
“If I were to admit that, I’d be in considerable trouble, wouldn’t I? With the authorities here.”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
“Well, if it were true, I might want to keep it under my hat, mightn’t I?”
“I think you would.”
“Good,” Clyde exhaled. “Well, I confided in you. That makes you my confidant now.”
“Why are you telling me this? I mean, I don’t know you.”
“No, you don’t know me, but it’s not true to say that I just happened to randomly pick you from the crowd. You see, I do know a little about you. Not much, but a little.”
Rion looked at him and said nothing. Perhaps if he stayed very still, then the big man would stop talking and he could go back to blending in. It had been a mistake to isolate himself from the crowd. Somehow, by some means unknown to him, they knew. They knew he was different, that he was an outsider, that he was other.
Clyde was waiting for a response and now, in the absence of one, he spoke again: “I know that your name’s Rion, that’s R-I-O-N, but I don’t think you have a last name of Jones. But I told a lie about my name too, so we’re even.”
“What do you want from me?” Rion asked.
“Nothing, nothing,” Clyde said. “This isn’t an interrogation. I’m holding you in suspense, so I guess I’ll just come out with it. It’s true that I’m a member of Misanthropos, although not as senior a member as your girlfriend’s husband. Oh, that was crude. She’s not really your girlfriend, is she? Not exactly.”
“Just tell me what you want.”
Clyde seemed surprised. “Want?” He paused to consider it. “I guess I don’t want anything. Where I’m going to there’s no coming back from. I’ve gone down a difficult path, Rion. In a few minutes they’re going to do the roll call, and I’m not much of a runner, and even if I was, there’s nowhere to go. But I don’t need to tell you that, do I? You know more about the outside than anyone, don’t you? Which is why you’re trying to stay inside. Can’t say I blame you. We’ve got different perspectives, you and I, but I can understand where you’re coming from.”
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