Bombshell (19 page)

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: B
ROWNS
F
ERRY
N
UCLEAR
P
OWER
P
LANT
. 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 before 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.”

“Not . . .
not in that car outside?
I couldn't help but see that it's kind of beat up.”

“No, no! It wasn't that.” Fuck, she's seen it. New Mexico plates, also. She's the type that remembers, and maybe the type that talks. For a moment, Cash imagined winding the telephone cord around the woman's throat, thin bubbles of saliva frothing from her puckered lips.

“I don't mean to pry, anyhow. I'm sorry. Grief is terrible. I know it.”

“Funeral in Savannah, too many drinks, late night of driving. It was all too much, you know?” Cash pushed her fingers through her rust-red hair. “But I can go home soon. I'm feeling a lot better. But I would prefer to lie down some more, first.”

“Oh, yes, you should.”

“Thank you for the tea, Virginia.” Cash saw herself relinquishing her grip on a telephone cable and the receptionist's body collapsing to the floor.

“I'll shut the door,” the old woman said, as her nylon uniform hissed against the doorjamb.

Cash reclined on the red cover of the bed, staring at the rippled magnolia ceiling. She would leave during the night, without paying further. There was still time remaining to intercept the youngest Winters son. Then she would have to find another vehicle to go north. Molly's decomposing car seemed to be attracting corpses and ghosts. She lay in the silence of imagined murders, her heart beating fiercely as the hours elapsed, and slowly the nausea passed from her flesh. She took her bicycle chain necklace from the bedside table and fastened it. The green shard of trinitite and the gris-gris bag settled against her pale skin. With her own room unlit, through a gap in the dirty cream curtains she studied the parking lot and what she could see of the crescent of other motel rooms, watching the lights go out. Weak beads of rain trailed against the glass. Finally, she checked the room for things that she might have left behind, and made an inventory of her khaki bag. She opened the door quietly, and moved through the rain to the low-rider.

APRIL 14, 2011. KIP WINTERS, THE YOUNGER OF THE TWO SONS
of Evelyn Winters, rinsed his razor in the China blue enamel basin of his bathroom vanity and wiped the bergamot foam from the faucet and antique taps. The first year of his thirties brought the first strands of white to his blond hair. His father told him that he looked like the young Tab Hunter, although this meant nothing to him. From the upper floor, the bathroom window afforded him a view of his front lawn, deep emerald grass and a weeping willow tree within a low wrought-iron fence grasped by rose briars. He pulled on a clean white shirt and rolled his tie softly inside his suitcase, where he had prepared a series of low-maintenance combinations of clothing that would not be destroyed in transit to Washington, D.C., or throughout his hectic week there. He would miss Savannah, he regretted, but the anticipation of his first visit to the Capital gave him a tangible thrill; and that the conference was close enough to Ford's Theatre on the fourteenth sent a strange pulse through his skull, a morbid, erotic beat. Furthermore, he would see his brother Frederick's home, at last, and their father would be there.

For a moment, he listened to his wife and twin girls hastening about their modern-rustic kitchen, below him, preparing to leave for school. Six years old, already, he thought. He descended the polished wooden stairs and stood in the doorway, leaning on the white frame, regarding his family with something close to sorrow, seeking to fix them like waxworks in his mind. He found himself speaking out loud.

“It's only for a few days.”

His two daughters embraced him as he crouched before them, opening his arms. He tried to inhale the soft anodyne scents of their bathed skin, their damp chestnut hair.

“We'll miss you,” his wife said. She was dressed in partial formality for the school run, a silent agreement between the women that they must not embarrass their children or disappoint one another. She wore pleated navy pants and a fitted ivory blouse. “Is my lipstick all right?”

“It's sensational, but don't get it on my shirt, please.”

She kissed the warm air beside his cheek and maneuvered the children outside, toward the car. “I'll get it on you when you come home.”

“See you, darling.” The hairspray from her blond hair lingered about his face, sweet and with nostalgia factored in with the chemicals, although the color was genuine.

“Look out for your taxi.”

Suddenly, they were gone. He was alone, with an hour to kill before he needed to make for the airport. There was a light wicker chair on the porch
that he favored in rare moments of solitude. He retrieved a fresh packet of American Spirits from the pocket of his black sports jacket, leaving the coat hanging on the back of a kitchen chair. He stepped outside, feeling the humid air on his skin. Reclining in the creaking wicker, he smoked, watching the insects shifting on the turquoise-painted wood slats of the house. He observed the plumage of the birds between the trees, and the slow crawl of a motorcar, its tires hissing on the wet street. It stopped before the house, and he stood up instinctively, as though another tourist needed directions from the picturesque arcades of his neighborhood. He loved the privacy granted by the ancient trees. The 1974 Chevy Impala was finished in dark gunmetal, almost black. Its long form skimmed the road surface on fourteen-inch radials. It was damaged. It reminded him of a mutilated shark.

“Señor Winters?”

The young woman extended her slim legs from the dark interior of the car before standing on the sidewalk at his gate; she had on opaque white hosiery, motorcycle boots, a short red skirt, and a ripped black leather jacket. Cash had waited at the edge of the block, methodically applying scarlet lipstick to her small misshapen mouth, tacky warpaint in the humid Southern morning. She had seen photographs of Kip Winters's wife, of them together in
The Wall Street Journal
, and of their children.