Critical Reaction (3 page)

Kieran’s muscles lit with panic once more. Sliding back toward the doors, he gathered his right knee to his chest and kicked furiously with his free foot at the nearest panel. The door yielded inches. He kicked again. And again and again and again. The fifth kick burst the door open for an instant and his left foot sprang free, stripped of his shoe and sock and layers of skin. Then the panels sprang instantly shut again, their final boom echoing down the empty corridor.

Kieran huddled on the floor, his muscles twitching, his clothes clinging with sweat. His ankle throbbed and bled. His ribs, forgotten briefly, now ached with pain at each breath.

He didn’t care. Kieran sucked in wonderful breaths of cool air. He was safe. Safe in this peaceful space that was anywhere but in the mixing room beyond the heavy steel doors.

Metal groaned. Kieran opened his eyes and rolled to his back to look toward his feet.

The door panels strained on their hinges.

Kieran clambered to his feet, pain knifing the bloody bare one. He struggled into a limping run down the hallway, gripping his ribs with one arm. “Taylor,” he tried to shout. The walkie-talkie tapped at his hip like it should mean something, but he kept shouting as he stumbled on.

A distant sixty yards or more away, Taylor emerged into the corridor. Kieran still heard the rising groans from the doors behind him and tried to quicken his pace. The supervisor’s hands dropped to his belt, grabbing a HEPA mask hung there. He pulled it across his forehead and over his face.

Without breaking his stumbling stride, Kieran felt for his own mask—then sickened as Taylor lifted a second mask in the air.

It was Kieran’s own, taken in the entryway to the dark side.

Still dozens of yards away, Taylor broke into a run toward Kieran with the second mask clutched in one fist. Taylor tried
to communicate a command with his other hand—but the big man had made only two strides in Kieran’s direction when the hall was swallowed by a roar and a shock wave that rocked the walls and floor, lifting Kieran from his feet as though launched from a spring. He twisted through the air, dust and flying paint filling the world—then his hips and back slammed the hard floor, triggering the screaming rib pain again and squeezing the air from his lungs.

The universe hurtled out of control as another roar shook the hall; then another. Kieran bounced off the floor with each succeeding cataclysm, consciousness slipping away—aware only of a final image locked in his mind like high definition.

It was the radiation monitors lining the walls between Kieran and Taylor’s prone body on the hallway floor still a hundred feet away. Through a haze of settling debris, Kieran could see the monitors, unmoved by the explosions, bolted solidly in place.

What made them curious to watch were the changing hues of their light bulbs—solidly green before, but now flicking to red, one after another, like runway lights racing away down the hallway away from him.

3:01
A
.
M
.
L
AB
B
UILDING
5
H
ANFORD
N
UCLEAR
R
ESERVATION

“Gin.”

Patrick “Poppy” Martin cast a narrow-eyed grin and spread a handful of tattered cards across the edge of the desk. “That puts me out.”

“Geez, Poppy, you had my seven,” Lewis Vandervork spat, tossing his own cards.

Still grinning, Poppy reached out and patted the younger man’s shoulder.

“Of
course
I did.”

Outside, tiny droplets slid down the window of the rooftop guard shack surrounding them. Poppy stood and squinted out of the glass.

The rooftop guard shed was located along the north end of Lab Building 5, making Poppy’s view from the window a southerly one over the full length of the vast roof expanse. A tall smokestack for LB5 stood apart from the building off to his left. It was difficult to make out now because he could see a thin cotton veil of fog rolling across the tarred roof surface from the desert, the moisture sparkling in the glare of the overhead perimeter lights surrounding the building grounds. “Deal again,” he said to Lewis. “Let’s play one more hand before we walk the roofline.”

Lewis grunted and gathered the cards. “I will,” the younger man said. “I got time to clean Beverly before we go?”

Poppy shook his head. “You can clean Beverly at the end of the shift, like always. You treat that rifle better’n I treat my wife.”

Lew smiled, shaking his head. “That’s the difference between my army training and your navy training, Pops. I know how to treat my weapon—and my woman. So, the building manager downstairs told ya we’re done in a few more days here?”

Poppy nodded. “He left me a note with my time card. Said the permanent security detail finishes its training early next week and we’re gone.”

None too soon, he thought. Even in a place as spread out as the Hanford Reservation, this building was isolated. Coming here added twenty minutes to Poppy’s usual daily commute, each way. And LB5’s small permanent crew—eight most evenings—were just plain unfriendly when they crossed paths with them. He looked forward to getting back to his job rotation nearer to home.

Poppy listened to the sputtering of the fan on the corner space heater that filled the shack with hot, dry air, then the ripple of
cards as his companion shuffled. Through the glass, he could make out the small cafeteria building that perched on a hillock twenty yards beyond LB5’s southwest corner. Every evening shift since he and Lewis got transferred here for temporary duty, he’d seen people coming and going from there around this hour—registered on his log as HVAC workers. As though in confirmation, the door on the small building swung open and two figures emerged. Poppy watched as they turned and started down the hill on a sloping driveway that quickly led them out of his sight along LB5’s west side.

The sight of the workers reminded Poppy: just four more hours on his own shift tonight. Then it was home in time to see his wife and visiting grandson before heading to bed. Later today, after he was up again, they’d have Suzy’s fettuccine. What had she told him to pick up on the way home? Bread and . . . something. She was right: he should have written it down.

He glanced at his watch. It was time to walk the roofline and check in with the front office. Poppy reached for his jacket beside the gun rack. “On second thought, Lew, let’s—”

His fingers brushed the jacket collar as the reinforced steel roof rippled under his feet like it’d been hit by some monstrous sledge. Poppy’s knees buckled and he grabbed for the desk edge as the window splintered into a fine web. The computer monitor bounced from the desk, shattering on the ground; drawers from the corner file cabinet crashed to the floor; and over a fearful howl from Lewis, Poppy’s eardrums were smothered by a piercing explosion to the east.

The sound was coming out of the smokestack, he thought, his ears aching—then he was down completely as a second even more violent wave slammed through the roof, like a tsunami crashing onto its surface. Then the terrifying crescendo of a third concussion rocked the shack, lifting the desk from the ground and heaving the window glass from its frame in a final shattering collapse.

This is
it
, Poppy thought—surprised that he could think at all, that he wasn’t frightened past any sensibility. He looked across the floor at Lewis, twenty-five years younger and terrified, clawing at the shack floor with his fingernails as though it could shield him from the maelstrom boiling up below.

How pointless, he thought with a sharp pang of pity as a tear curled down Lew’s cheek.

You
might as well accept that no amount of steel’s
going to save us, ’cause something’s gone critical down
there,
he thought.
And you and me and the poor
boys working below are about to go up to God
in a hellfire mushroom cloud of heat and blood and
radiation.

With that, his mind began a slide toward resignation and a strange welling of peace about it all. He started to mutter a prayer.

Then, as quickly as he’d begun, Poppy stopped. The world had gone silent and still.

Poppy braced for another inevitable blow; he heard Lewis moan through tightly clenched teeth, his hands now clasping his knees in a huddled ball. But the blow didn’t come. The only sound other than Lewis was a breeze rattling the few remaining shards of the pulverized windowpane.

Poppy tried to assemble his thoughts, which drifted like scattered smoke. Then he was swept with a rush of exultation that he was alive.

Poppy pushed himself to his knees. His wife and grandson—he’d see them after the shift. The hunting trip next weekend—he’d still do it. He was alive.

The despair was leaching away, replaced by a different, vague impression. There was something he had to do. Poppy reached out and shook Lewis’s shoulder. “Lew,” he heard his voice say, through the ringing of his ears. “Lew.”

The young man’s moans stopped, but his eyes were still glassy. He should call someone for Lewis. No. He couldn’t do that. No
one should see Lewis like this. And besides, that wasn’t what he had to do.

Poppy rose, wobbly, and stepped toward the gun rack. He fumbled with the keys to unlock the padlock, watched himself withdraw an M-16 and a full clip, and forced his fingers to load the weapon. His boot kicked something. He looked down. It was a flashlight. He leaned over carefully and grabbed that too. He pulled on his jacket and stepped outside.

The fog seemed thin in the bright spotlights. Poppy stepped onto the tarred roof surface, surprised that it was still solid beneath his feet.

His head ached and his limbs felt drained, but his thoughts were assembling now. Why was he here? To check the ground along the roof perimeter. What for? Observation. Look for injured. What else? There was something else even more pressing.

Sabotage.

His Hanford training rushed back like an accelerated recording. If there was an explosion, the first duty of this post was to monitor the building exits for saboteurs—while maintaining contact with the central office on the front of LB5. If he observed potential saboteurs, he was to shoot. No, no, no, that wasn’t it. He was to shoot . . . to kill.

All strength had been wrung from his legs, but he forced himself into a disjointed jog across the length of the roof toward the southern edge, where the building’s rear emergency exit emptied out onto the grounds below. He pushed through the cotton in his mind to tick off the evening personnel log: the night building manager and assistant, front side offices; supply tech, dark side entryway; two sampling techs somewhere inside; HVAC engineer on the front side, second floor, north. Then there were two HVAC maintenance guys on the grounds tonight—probably those guys in the cafeteria building. So the only exits likely to be used were out the north, on the front side.

Poppy shifted the rifle to his left hand and reached for the walkie-talkie on his hip to check in.

The hand closed on air. Poppy slowed. He’d forgotten his gear back in the shed—his walkie-talkie, his mask. Everything except the rifle and flashlight.

Poppy turned—and was startled to look directly into Lewis’s flushed face. Beverly was slung over Lewis’s shoulder and in his hand he extended a walkie-talkie. The young man’s eyes were red and swollen, full now with a different kind of fear.

“Pops—ya can’t tell . . .” Lewis pleaded in a hoarse whisper.

Poppy took the walkie-talkie. “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Relief flooded Lewis’s eyes as Poppy pointed toward the eastern roofline—the only side of the building with emergency exits other than the south, where Poppy was headed. “Check the east. The emergency exit on that side’s out of the lower level. Nobody should be down there, so anyone coming out is a presumed target.”

Lewis nodded his understanding and then trotted off in that direction, unshouldering his rifle as he went. Poppy punched the Talk switch on the walkie-talkie as he faced back to the south.

“Central, this is Roof 1,” he called as he began his run. “Central . . .”

He’d taken only two strides when he saw, through the wisps of fog, a gash of green and orange hovering in the air along the southern end of the building. Poppy slowed, trying to trace it with his eyes and make sense of the image.

It was a garish plume pumping from the top of the smokestack, where it stood now fifty yards to Poppy’s left. The plume was pouring out of the tall chimney, drifting like a contrail down onto the roof of LB5, then flowing across the roof surface like an enormous snake, its snout tumbling along the tar in front of Poppy, headed toward his right. At its nearest point, the cloud seemed about twenty feet away from Poppy, but it already formed
a barrier between him and his goal of reaching the southern edge of the roof.

He pressed the walkie-talkie switch again. “Central, Centr—”

“We hear you,” a voice crackled from the device. “Is the roof intact?”

It sounded like the LB5 night manager, though Poppy’d only met him twice. And what was he talking about?
“Is the roof intact?”
Was that all they were worried about? He pressed the Transmit button.

“The roof—I don’t know yet. It looks okay. But we’ve got another problem. There’s a plume—a big one, green and orange. It’s coming from the smokestack and heading across the roof in front of me.”

Chemicals? Radiation? What was in the thing?

There was a pause over the speaker. “Repeat.”

He did so.

Another pause. “Hold on.”

As he waited, Poppy gauged the flowing cloud again. Its nearest visible edge still appeared at least twenty feet ahead of him, but now he thought he detected a metallic taste on his lips and a mild sting brushing his cheeks. He took a step backwards and peered more closely at the plume. The thick mass was flattening and broadening on its journey across the roof—dissipating at the edges so that its true depth was disguised in the light fog.