Critical Reaction (2 page)

“How about my air filter?” he said. “I told you my first day here that this one’s too small. Feels like a kid’s snorkel. Don’t they issue you supply guys adult equipment here at LB5—”

Taylor took a step toward Kieran and grabbed the mask from his outstretched hand. “C’mon,” the supervisor growled through his thick moustache, then led the way through the security door for their shift.

With a final glance at Whalen’s flushed face, Kieran passed the equipment counter and followed Taylor into the dark side.
He only let his grin surface once he was through the door and out of the supply manager’s view.

Looking at his supervisor’s hunched shoulders, Kieran feared that he’d ticked off Taylor by baiting Whalen. He didn’t want a lecture tonight about how
“nobody complained
back when Hanford was making the plutonium that went on
the trains to Rocky Flats.
Everybody knew how important
that mission was. This isn’t just another job. . . .”

Taylor had it in him, that vein of pride that rivaled the old-timers. But he must’ve known Kieran was just letting off steam, because the lecture never came.

Their boots clopped on the concrete floor of the first-floor corridor of LB5’s dark side. Every Hanford building ever used for plutonium production had its dark side—the name everyone used for areas where plutonium was produced before the Department of Energy turned out the lights and closed all these buildings for good. Kieran had heard somebody say they chemically recaptured plutonium here at LB5. He didn’t exactly know what that meant. Frankly, he didn’t care. He worked for a company whose job was to do monitoring and testing ordered by Covington Nuclear—sampling for radiation in the air; checking the contents of aging storage containers with long-disused chemicals; taking swipes off the walls and floors for leaking contaminants or rads. Whatever else they told him to do. He didn’t need a history lesson about the Hanford Nuclear Reservation for this job. Growing up in Sherman next to the place, he’d had enough of those to last a dozen lifetimes.

Kieran glanced at a plaque on one of the locked doors they passed in the empty hallway. At Hanford, that meant somebody had gotten a fatal dose of rads in the room, along with the standard compensation issued to the family. Kill boards the old guys called them—or agony plaques. The nicknames said it all: it was no way to die.

Kieran mouthed the name on the plaque they’d just passed:
Severson
Room
. Likely he died in the fifties or sixties. That’s when most of them went; when production was so rushed that lots of corners were cut. He wondered who the man was, whether he’d had a wife and kids. Probably both. Most of these guys were family men, good providers given the top-notch pay out here.

Providers like Kieran’s dad—a thirty-year Hanford man. They never worried about money, always had decent cars. Every Christmas topped the one before it. Trips to Disneyland every couple of years, and that surprise trip to Hawaii. College wouldn’t have been a problem, that was for sure.

There was no plaque for his dad out here on the grounds, because he didn’t get a sudden big dose of plutonium or tritium or some other rad that took you out in a flash. He got it slowly, sucking it into his lungs on long daytime shifts. Maybe eating what had settled invisibly onto his sandwich on breaks. Then hiding away deep inside him until the cancer surfaced in his bones before migrating to his lungs. Two years of chemo and he was gone the spring of Kieran’s junior year of college

Nobody offered a plaque for that kind of death.

They passed a room numbered 140. There was no plaque on this door, just a number. He’d never worked in this building before last week—but the room number struck a chord. In a different Hanford lab building miles away was another room 140—the first room Kieran entered as a Hanford worker two years before. Kieran was Taylor’s rookie assistant then, and the supervisor had started him out in a “clean” computer lab—one that wasn’t supposed to be too crapped up because they’d never handled radioactive materials in the space.

But before they passed through the door, Taylor’d looked him in the eye and told Kieran to forget about “clean” rooms or “crapped up” ones. It was fine, Taylor had said, to reserve the HEPA mask just for emergencies,
“’cause you can’t really do your job with it
on anyway.”

“
But other’n that,
” the big man had commanded through that thick brush of lip hair he was so proud of, “you act like every room has the potential to dose you. I know they trained you that turbines in all these buildings pull the air through filters to scrub it—and that’s true. But if those filters caught everything, you and I’d be out of a job. Fact is, there’s hot dust in the cleanest room and any mote of it could end up in your bones or your thyroid. Think of this place like it’s full of black widow spiders: you don’t want to touch
anything
you don’t have to.”

Then, to underline his point, Taylor’d pointed up at the nearest sample of dark tape that lined all the Hanford walls at the eight foot level. “And don’t you
ever
let me catch you climbing ladders or standin’ on chairs above that line.
Never
. Because the dust on the light fixtures up there’s as thick as in your grandmother’s attic. You take in a mouthful of that and a girl’d be a fool to ever kiss you again.”

Those words rang in Kieran’s ears that first shift, making him almost tiptoe into the darkness of “clean” room 140 in that other building. Then Taylor had flipped the light switch behind him and Kieran had stopped like he’d stepped knee deep into soft tar.

Fat computer monitors and plastic keyboards lined tables and desks scattered around the room, each covered with the faintest layer of dust. Tools lay on benches like they’d just dropped from workers’ fingers. A calendar from the late 1980s decorated a wall next to lab coats still hung on hooks.

Kieran stood frozen, waiting for a shift of ghostly workers to shoulder past him, each layered in that same frosting of powdered dust, to pull on the old lab coats and take their places before the silent computers and benches.

Taylor had walked past and laughed at Kieran’s expression. “Relax. The crews left things like this after their last shift in ’89 ’cause no one told them they weren’t coming back. Nobody knew when, or if, they were coming back. Then the Berlin wall came down and
poof
. Job done.”

That conversation was two years ago. He still thought about it before every shift.

Kieran’s mind returned to the present as Taylor, a step ahead of him, reached the stairwell of LB5. He followed his supervisor up the dimly lit stairs to the third-floor hallway. There they stopped. Taylor smoothed his moustache with a finger and thumb. Then he handed Kieran a clipboard and testing equipment.

“Go check out room 369. It used to be a storage locker. Should be clean. Take air and dust samples then come back to me. I’ll be here in room 301,” he said, gesturing across the hallway. “Seems like a waste of time for our last night. The permanent crew should be able to handle sampling these corners of the building when they’re back tomorrow. But there you are. And let’s move it along. This is our last night here, so if we get the checklist done, I’m sending us home early.”

Kieran took the clipboard and pouch of air and surface sampling equipment. Taylor had complained a few times the past week about “make work” projects that could’ve waited for the return of LB5’s permanent testing crew—away now on some training exercise. He and Taylor hadn’t been assigned to test any of LB5’s lower level glove-box rooms, production lines, or anywhere else where plutonium had been handled in abundance—typically the highest priorities. But as Taylor often said, he didn’t make up the work lists, he just got ’em done. His comments tonight were the closest Kieran had ever heard Taylor come to complaining.

Lab Building 5 was a long rectangle, its corridors stretching for nearly a hundred yards. Kieran left Taylor behind, trudging the distance toward room 369 at the furthest end of the third-floor hallway. As he walked, he marked his progress by counting off the hallway detectors bolted into the floor every fifty feet, humming as they continuously monitored the air for radioactive contamination. Each was crowned with small lights showing green if the air was safe, red if hazardous. They weren’t
as sophisticated as the tests the lab would perform on samples taken by Kieran, but they reassured him. Like Christmas bulbs on shin-high pines, the green glow always comforted Kieran as he walked the Hanford corridors.

He was nearly to the hallway’s end when Kieran detected a brush of heat on his right ear. Another step and it was gone. He stopped—then backed up. There it was again.

To his right was an interlocking pair of steel pressure doors labeled room 365. He pressed a hand against the metal surface. It was warm to the touch.

The temperature in these old buildings was carefully controlled. Kieran reached for his walkie-talkie to call Taylor. Except, he recalled, his super didn’t like being bothered with half information. Kieran set the testing equipment and clipboard beside the door on the hallway floor and turned the knobs to open each of the double doors.

They wouldn’t budge. He tried again, leaning into each of the doors and pressing with his legs. This time, they slowly gave way.

As he stepped inside, his equipment belt rattled. The sound echoed in the dark interior—just as a wave of heat and humidity rolled past and out the open doors behind him. An instant sheen of sweat rose on Kieran’s forehead.

Startled, he swept the black with his eyes for a sign of fire. There was none.

His fingers found the wall switch and he flicked it on. Light flooded a cavern at least thirty yards deep.

The space was filled with aging industrial vats lining each wall, split by a narrow walkway down the middle of the room. Each of the containers was pierced by a collection of pipes and valves, giving the appearance of a ward of metal giants on life support. Some of the pipes led to adjacent vats; others angled into the floor.

The sight was familiar. Kieran had sampled these rooms in other buildings where he’d worked. This was a mixing chamber.
When this was a working production building, chemicals were stored in these containers for transfer to other vats for mixing, or to be pumped to labs and glove rooms elsewhere in the building.

The heat was coming in waves from deeper in the room. Kieran took cautious steps forward, the sweat thickening on his face the further he walked from the doors.

The slow pace finally brought him near the far wall. Here, to his left, hung a towering vat. It was eight feet tall at least, suspended from the ceiling with thick steel posts. The enormous cylinder looked like the queen of the room, with pipes angling into it from every direction. Among all the pipes stabbing its surface, the largest was a single iron tube that descended from its bottom perpendicularly into the floor.
Vat 17
was stenciled across its girth.

Kieran moved closer. Moisture was dripping in rivulets of sweat on all sides of the huge vat’s surface, released, Kieran saw, from pressure valves near the vat’s lid.

This had to be the source of the heat and humidity.

Nearly beneath the container, Kieran heard a splash at his feet. He leaned into the shadows under the vat.

The sole of his left boot stood in a puddle of pooled condensation from the vat’s sides. Satisfied, Kieran straightened up—only to be jerked back into mid crouch. Startled, he looked down again.

The edge of his T-shirt had caught on another valve attached to the iron pipe extending into the floor. Kieran untangled it, then stood fully upright.

The surface of the vat was only three feet away now. Kieran reached out his bare hand and touched it gently.

His fingers recoiled from the scalding metal. In that same moment, he heard his pulse pounding in his ears. Heat shock, he supposed. Or nerves.

He’d had enough. Kieran reached for the walkie-talkie on his hip.

Only the pounding wasn’t in his ears, he suddenly realized—and it was growing, not subsiding. Kieran turned his head to one side. The rhythmic pulsing was coming from Vat 17 itself.

An image flashed through his head of a thin-skinned teakettle expanding like a balloon as it reached a boil.

He was running before he was aware of a decision to flee, sprinting toward the distant doors with fear pricking his skin like a thousand beestings. Maybe he was imagining it, but the thump of the vat seemed to match his pounding steps, growing louder and deeper as he ran.

Please, don’t blow; don’t blow
. The mantra cycled in his head. But he heard it from his lips as well, in rhythm with his breath.

The doors were nearing through his sweat-blurred vision: he was going to make it. He’d leave the room and round the corner into the hall, out of the path of the coming explosion.

Then another voice spoke with equal certainty that he was wrong. Because the doors, still twenty yards away, were arcing slowly shut, edged by the rising pressure in the room. And once they were shut, no power on earth would open them again in the face of that pressure.

His wet left boot slipped, nearly taking him down. He stumbled through two strides before straightening again, the boot squeaking angrily on the concrete floor as he regained his pace.

The voices were silenced as the exit drew near. Kieran leaned forward, vaulting toward the shrinking gap between the doors with outstretched arms. His left shoulder skimmed one door’s edge; his right knee scraped the other one hard. Then the steel panels grabbed his outstretched left ankle like a vise as his body slammed to the hallway floor beyond.

He lay face first on the cold surface of the corridor. His left ankle was locked at an angle above him. His ribs knifed with pain where they pressed against the floor.

Kieran strained to look over his shoulder at the foot. The effort hurt his ribs, but he could just make out that his ankle was
still wedged between the mixing room doors, as the pounding sound leaked through the gap.