Yellowcake Springs

by Salvidge, Guy

  “Let’s swap places,” Clyde said. “I don’t want to hold you up.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, let’s get you through.” Clyde placed a hand on his shoulder. “You did well.”

  “I did?”

  “Watch out. You’re up.”

  Rion stepped forward and extended his arm in the way he had seen countless others do before. His entire life – his mother; the slums of East Hills; his photo albums; his desolation – each element of his history could be boiled down to this moment. He would live or he would die. He would falter or he would go on. He offered himself to the machine, and then it was over and he was being ushered into a penned area where hundreds were milling around. Don’t look back, he told himself.

  The klaxons started to wail; there was a sudden commotion. Rion submerged himself in the crowd and there, in the mass of bodies, he let out his breath.

  40. The Burns Unit

  Everything had been a blur, a mad dash: the military police waiting for Lui Ping as she reached the top of the stairs at work; their sullen faces looking on as she scrabbled around in her new quarters for clothes, underwear, lipstick to throw into a battered suitcase; the confusion at the airport; signs on a board embossed with the CIQ Sinocorp logo. The company was paying for her flight – unusual enough that she wondered what it might mean. Would she be asked to pay it back?

  Each moment offered another tribulation, another barrier between her and Jiang Wei. Jiang Wei. No other thought in her mind. A clarity of purpose in the way that her life had suddenly been stripped of accoutrements. Just the rapidly shrinking distance between them as her plane raced across the sky. There was nothing else.

  Now she had arrived.

  Ping did not notice the different quality of light in this country, nor the unfamiliar faces, nor the wider streets. Her gaze had turned inward. But she saw the hospital, surprisingly modest in size, and her first thought was that there had been some mistake. But no, this was it – this was Regal Perth Hospital.

  “Where is Jiang Wei?” she demanded of the woman behind the front desk. Blank stare. She repeated the question in English.

  “Excuse me?” the receptionist said. “Where is who?”

  Her Sinocorp aide, a young man barely out of childhood, stepped in. Ping had been ignoring him. He spoke in short, clipped sentences. “Please excuse Ms Lui,” he said. “She is very distraught. We are here to see Mr Jiang. He was at the Yellowcake Springs reactor.”

  Those words changed everything. “Mrs Lui?” she said. “My apologies. Take the lift up to level 7. Turn left at the first corridor and follow it all the way around to the Burns Unit.”

  “Burns Unit?” Ping asked. “Why is he there?”

  The receptionist frowned. “Haven’t you been told?”

  But the aide was dragging her away. So Wei had been burned? How bad could it be?

  At the Burns Unit reception, Ping was introduced to the doctor. To speak to this doctor, one needed to face a screen upon which a face was shown. The doctor’s name was Leona. “You must be Ms Lui, Mr Jiang’s fiancée.”

  She nodded. Ping could understand spoken English well enough, but she didn’t trust herself to speak.

  “I will report back,” her aide said. She waved him away.

  “I need to fill you in on some information before you can see your fiancée. Do you understand?” Leona asked.

  She nodded again, holding back the flood of tears.

  “Jiang Wei and the other men were irradiated in the accident at the nuclear reactor. They’ve received such a high dose that it will almost certainly be fatal. There’s some hope, not much, but a little. But I need you to understand that he is very, very angry at the present time.”

  “Is he…burn?” she said in English.

  “Not in the ordinary sense, but yes, he has suffered enormous damage to his skin, although that won’t be fully apparent for a number of days. But it’s not just his skin, it’s his whole body. Completely irradiated. The bone marrow has been destroyed. His organs have suffered terrible damage.”

  “Can I look at him?”

  “Of course. Your fiancée and his colleagues are in a special sealed chamber to protect the rest of the hospital from the radiation. No one can set foot inside the chamber unless they are wearing a protective suit.”

  Ping looked at the row of bulky suits hanging from a rack along one wall. “Need help,” she said.

  “I’ll get someone to help you.”

  Dressed in the radiation suit, Ping felt ten kilos heavier. The helmet clicked down into place, cutting Ping off from the outside world. A hiss of air pressurised the inside of the helmet.

  She lumbered along the corridor past a row of inquisitive faces. The helmet cut down her field of vision to the extent that she couldn’t quite see who was guiding her. But she saw the metal door open, so she stepped through into a small chamber. It was an airlock. The door closed behind her and, after a few seconds, the door in front of her opened.

  What she saw next was a hospital ward, but one unlike any she had seen before. Each of the men was lying in bed, and each bed was covered by a transparent plastic shell. Ping could see all kinds of equipment inside the shells, tending to the men.

  There was a person in a radiation suit standing in the room.

  “Ms Lui?” a voice inside her helmet said in English.

  “Yes.”

  “My name is Marcos. I’m one of the nurses on this ward.”

  A nurse? But he wasn’t nursing the men directly; he seemed to have been monitoring a whole host of information panels.

  “Which one…Jiang Wei?” she asked. The men all looked the same, and none of them appeared to have noticed her come in.

  “At the far end,” Marcos said. “I’ll tell him you’ve arrived.”

  Her journey had come to an end and yet here were more barriers between them. Wei did not raise his head, but his eyes focused on her. Through the shield she could see that his face was puffy and red, his eyes like slits.

  “Can you hear me?” she said in her native tongue. “Jiang Wei?”

  “I hear you,” a voice inside her helmet said. His voice was weak, far away.

  There were a hundred things she wanted to say to him but suddenly she had frozen, and the words did not want to come out. All she could do was look at his prone body dressed in a thin hospital robe, look at the tubes that went in and out of him, look at the needles that were poised to puncture his reddened skin. Look at him there in his plastic coffin, his body useless but his eyes looking up at her.

  And then she cried in long, loud sobs. Snot and tears. And she couldn’t even wipe her face clean. She couldn’t even begin to think of the words that she wanted to say to him.

  “I’m pregnant,” is what she finally said, before a second flood of tears engulfed her. The helmet had fogged up.

  “Have you been to the doctor?” he asked.

  “Not yet, but I took a test,” she blubbered in reply. “Six weeks.”

  For a while he said nothing. She knew he was thinking, but it was too devastating to imagine that he was dying while she was growing a new life inside her. The child would never replace him.

  “I’m happy and sad at the same time,” he finally said. “Ping, promise me something.”

  “Anything.”

  “If it’s a girl, I want you to name her Lijia. I had a kind of dream while I was inside the reactor. I had a daughter and her name was Lijia.”

  “And if it’s a boy?”

  “Then you can name him whatever you decide. But I think it will be a girl. I saw her, Ping! But she won’t know who I was.”

  “I’ll tell her everything. I just want to hold you in my arms, Wei! How can I get inside with you?”

  “You can’t come in here,” he said in a firmer voice. “You have to think of the baby. Think of the radiation.”

  They looked at each other through the barriers that separated them.

  41. Escapade

  How
Sylvia managed to bluff her way through the gate she’d never know, but she’d done it and was then confronted with the enormity of the task before her. The road was lit up with streetlights but there was a vast nothingness on either side, and by night that nothingness felt hostile. She hadn’t slept a night under the stars in her life. Sylvia was not used to extended walking, and she found that parts of her body – her ankles, her knees – would ache for a few minutes only to fade and be replaced by a different ache. It was the wrong season entirely for walking at night, and the overalls offered little in the way of protection from the cold. Then she thought of the bed she might have been lying in now, had she stayed in the camp. Even if she’d been taken into custody, she’d still have somewhere warm to sleep. Was her freedom worth this?

  Sylvia tried to count the streetlights, but found that she did not even have the concentration required for as simple a task as this. After an indefinite time – certainly longer than an hour – she decided that she would try to rest. Her feet were killing her and her shoes were already beginning to wear away at the heel. She left the road and the light and tried to find refuge somewhere in the darkness.

  But it was freezing and the night was endless. She tried digging a hole in the sand and lying in it, partially covering herself with the sand, but there was no chance of sleep. Her thoughts began to run together in her weary mind.

  The night seemed to stretch to eternity, and as she closed in on a state akin to sleep, she began to question whether it would ever end. Perhaps this was her punishment. But why was she being punished? What had she done wrong? Later still, she longed for oblivion, for relief from this hated life.

  When she woke early on Sunday morning, Sylvia was very thirsty. The sky was bleak and perhaps it would rain, but for now there was no such relief. Her clothes were all sandy and her limbs half frozen from the cold. She got to her feet stiffly and attempted to brush the sand off, but it was in her hair, her mouth, her underwear. The breeze had finally died down. She couldn’t see the sun but it must be shortly after dawn, judging by the light. She could see the dark outline of Yellowcake Springs in the distance.

  It was only after she had been walking for some time that it occurred to Sylvia that she had better get off the road. She had a vague idea of where she wanted to go. There was a little town called Ridge Point to the south of Yellowcake Springs. The easiest way to get there was to follow the coastline, so she struck out in the direction of the hidden sea. The scrubland was sparse and it was not a difficult terrain to traverse, but the sand was loose and walking over it tired her out almost immediately. The bushes were prickly and she scratched herself a number of times. A little further along, she abandoned her shoes, hiding them in the sand so as to avoid leaving a clue regarding her whereabouts. Her mouth and throat were parched. She didn’t know how long someone could go without water but it couldn’t be very much longer than this.

  The coast wasn’t far from here; she could see how the land fell away. But it was a considerable distance from here to Ridge Point, something like fifteen or twenty kilometres by road. With sensible shoes, plenty of water, and a decent night’s rest, even someone in her physical condition could cover this distance fairly easily, even over sand, but Sylvia had none of those things and she wasn’t sure if she could take another step. But as she was starting to realise, she had far greater reserves of energy than she gave herself credit for. Probably everyone did. That, she saw in hindsight, had been part of the reason for her malaise: life had simply been too easy for her.

  Then it did start to rain, even if it proved to be a mixed blessing. The rain slaked her thirst, and Sylvia was certain that water had never tasted as pure as this, but no sooner had she drunk her fill, she began to shiver. The sun was trying to poke through the heavy cloud cover, but even on a clear day it was worth little at this time of year. Her joints were starting to seize up and her hands were burning.

  When the rain began to abate, Sylvia decided to try a different tack. She was soaked to the skin so she peeled off the sandy, wet overalls and stood shivering in her bra and underwear. Normally she’d feel self conscious but there was no one here to stare at her. The breeze dried her skin almost immediately. She considered ditching the clothes but thought better of it. And she wouldn’t walk; she’d run.

  Well, jog. For a short time this seemed to work, and she felt the life beginning to return to her limbs, but Sylvia was out of condition and the sand didn’t help. Each breath was a little harder to draw than the last and her lungs were soon heaving. For a while she stood gasping for air. It occurred to her that she would certainly lose weight if she kept this up for a few days. The thought of food hadn’t entered her mind for hours.

  Then she saw the sea. It wasn’t far, and although she was tired, it was a different kind of weariness to the mental exhaustion she’d known before. This was an honest, physical tiredness. She would find something or someone to help her on the coast.

  It had warmed up a little and the clouds were starting to clear. Perhaps, after all, Sylvia would survive. She had a sense that things were about to get easier for her, and for once she was proven right. She saw the roof of the fish farms before she saw the beach. But she’d have to be careful. What would the fish workers think of this strange, half naked woman plastered with sand?

  The car park was empty; she could see that before she set foot on the bitumen. True, it was Sunday, but surely the fish needed to be tended all week round? The fish farm was an ugly, ruffled structure made of some sludge-green plastic, and it sat half in, half out of the water, on the near side of the sea wall. The whole area was protected from tsunamis and the rising sea level by the sea wall, which stretched north to Taper Island and south past Ridge Point. Where waves had once crashed on these beaches, the whole area was now a lagoon. The nuclear reactors drew their water not far north of here.

  There was no one around, not a single soul. There was a hysterical part of her that wondered why she had been chosen to remain when everyone else had gone, but the analytical part concluded that this would work to her advantage. And so it proved, for the side door to the fish farm was, surprisingly, wide open. Sylvia stepped out of the cold, half expecting to bump into one of the farm’s employees, unsure of how she was going to explain her state of undress. She needed warm clothes, food, and preferably a place to lie down, and she needed them urgently.

  Inside the fish farm was a bewildering array of artificial ponds, presumably with different kinds of fish lurking beneath the surface. The whole area was criss-crossed with metal walkways and gantries, and Sylvia soon felt herself lost in a sterile world of flashing displays, chemical hoses and nutrient mixes. The vast room was dimly lit and she had to be careful not to slip and fall into one of the pools. Sylvia was unsteady on her feet and wholly incapable of taking in her new surroundings properly, but now her attention was drawn to something on the far side of the chamber. It was an office and someone had left the light on.

  Sylvia crossed the distance, wary of encountering someone, but there was no one around. The door to the office was closed but thankfully not locked. She hadn’t felt like smashing her way through the glass window although she knew she would have done so if necessary. She turned the handle and stepped through into a comforting space with desks, office chairs and a couch. There was even a fridge. “Please let there be some food in there,” she said aloud, the first time she’d spoken since leaving Yellowcake Springs.

  Jackpot. There were packets of sandwiches, containers of cold pasta, even bottles of fruit juice. Her stomach growled in appreciation. It would appear that this was where the workers stored their lunch, but was it today’s lunch, or yesterday’s? And where were the workers?

  It didn’t matter to Sylvia. She tore at the sandwich packets, gobbling the food down, then drank more than a litre of juice and went in search of a toilet. This she found, as well as a sink to wash away the worst of the sand. She even found a uniform in her size hanging in a cupboard, with the fish farm logo on it and
the name JANICE stencilled alongside. She would be Janice, if anyone asked. If she ever saw anyone again. Warm and full, Sylvia felt more content than she could ever recall feeling before. She would need to rest for an hour or two before continuing on her way. There was no bed to be found, but the couch in the office would suffice. She turned off the light and lay down.

  42. Lost and Found

  On Sunday morning, Rion and the other evacuees were loaded onto huge air-conditioned coaches to take them away from this place, maybe forever. No one seemed to know. This was a cause of angst for the residents of Yellowcake Springs, but Rion was unmoved. It did not particularly matter to him where he was as long as he was warm, safe and well-fed. The convoy of buses was headed for Perth, where accommodation would be found for the residents while the damage to the reactors was assessed. Rumour had it that the radiation leak had only been minor, that they’d be home in a month.

  Rion thought of the road ahead, the smooth tarmac and the silver streetlights. There was some traffic at this hour, but not much, and certainly not enough to delay their passage. The empty scrubland surrounding Yellowcake Springs gave way to rural properties, small towns and housing developments. Signage was everywhere; this whole area was being bought up piece by piece. Further south, past Florinton, the housing developments were well established. Here he saw signs for shopping centres, vehicle dealerships and fast food outlets. By the time the coach passed through Quindalup, the freeway was choked and the bus barely crawled. High-rise buildings towered on either side of the freeway. Rion thought that this must be the city centre, and was surprised to hear that they were still some distance from their destination.

  The real centre of Perth was hidden in the hazy blanket that enveloped the city. He had seen nothing like it, except of course in photographs. East Hills had been the centre of his universe; other places had only been a rumour. Now he saw how pitiful his universe had been. East Hills: a town where, in its heyday, ten thousand souls had lived. Even then, how could it have compared with the sheer scale of this city? And Perth, he was given to understand from his geography books, wasn’t exactly the centre of the universe either. There were bigger cities in other parts of the country, or at least there had been. Who knew if they were still standing today?