The Longest Night (36 page)

Maybe he could go to Franks's house, but with the wife and four children around that could be embarrassing. They'd all be staring at Paul, wondering who this guy was and how he'd managed to screw up his life so badly.

Or he could stay with Webb. Webb had a roommate, but that wasn't so bad. Paul could sleep on the couch, assuming they had one, or the floor. Webb would be surprised when he showed up—he always seemed to think Paul had the perfect life, the perfect family—but he wouldn't turn him away.

He remembered that the night shift was beginning the restart, though, and that Webb was there, filling in for Kinney. He thought of dropping by the reactor to kill time with the guys, but knew that in his current state he wasn't capable. One minute of talking to him and they would think he had dynamite strapped beneath his coat. His thoughts were worse than an illness; he couldn't get past them. He wanted to shake Nat, throw her out of the house, tell
her
not to bother coming home. He wanted to find her kind local person and gut him like a fish. He wanted to keep away forever.

He was so deep in thought that it took him a moment to notice the ambulance heading toward him on the horizon. It arced up over the road, a starry flare growing larger until it met and then passed him. He watched it glide away, bright but soundless. A minute later came two fire trucks, also without their sirens, and the chief's station wagon. He eyed them in the rearview mirror until they turned east.

These vehicles could mean nothing or anything. But their eeriness in the dead of night, the fact that they were headed toward the testing station, gave him a premonition. He pulled a U-turn and followed them, hanging back a little, as they streaked down the highway.

He saw that they did not continue into the heart of the testing station but stopped at the pocket of yellow lights that was the CR-1. His heart tightened.
It's just a false alarm,
he thought. Just a false alarm like usual, from the furnace room or something; the firemen would make their inspection and grumble and gripe, and then they'd drive away and everything would be normal.

But it was the night of the restart, when they took that reactor from stone-cold nothing to full power, the riskiest night of the year.

There was no one at the gate. The fire trucks were lined up, some of the men bustling back and forth between them and the chief patrolling around, but no one came out of the reactor to let them in. Usually an operator hustled down as soon as the alarm rang so they wouldn't keep the already-pissed-off fire crew waiting. The guys were being slow out of embarrassment, maybe, or because of the cold—but that was unforgivably rude. Seventeen below with the wind, Paul had heard on the radio; you didn't keep the firemen waiting in weather like that.

Come on, guys,
Paul thought.
Send someone down now.

He ran through the crew in his mind: Sidorski and Slocum along with Webb. Screw Kinney for cutting out on them. He'd claimed to be on a ski trip with his family, but who went skiing when it was ten degrees at the height of day? Everyone had whispered that he was just dodging the restart. Paul had never liked Kinney and now he felt a spasm of downright hatred for the man, who always sucked up to Richards.

One firefighter—the most junior on the crew, who had to ride standing on the back of the truck through the subzero air—hopped down, blowing into his hands, and walked to the guardhouse to call up to the control room. Where the hell was Slocum? He was shift supervisor; he needed to get himself outside. Paul thought of Webb and felt gathering anxiety:
Come on, Webbsy, get yourself downstairs now and tell us this was all some terrific fixable fuckup, CR-1 style.

The fire chief, Sechrist, left his car idling, stopped to check the guardhouse, then hunched over to Paul's window. His thick mustache flashed red and white in the spinning lights.

Paul rolled down the window. “Hello, sir.”

“The nosebleeds up there aren't answering,” Sechrist said, jerking his head toward the reactor. He squinted back at Paul. “Can't understand why you'd be out here when you could be at home.”

“I was just driving by.”

“This time of night?”

“I'm sure they'll be down in a second.”

“When I get ahold of those guys, I'm going to tan their hides myself.”

Another firefighter joined the first in the guardhouse, as if it took two men to work a telephone. Chief Sechrist went over to consult with them again and then stomped back to Paul's car. “Who's on security tonight?” he asked.

Paul thought for a moment. “Mullins,” he said. “I forget his first name. He comes inside sometimes for a cup of coffee with us.”

“That's sweet. Where's he at, you think?”

Paul said, “I'll go look for him.” He put the car in reverse and headed out around the testing station. He'd worked the night shift a hundred times, but always stayed inside the building or its gate. It was odd to drive through the site now, bumping over frozen dirt, the world around him the kind of dark you didn't expect to see until you died. He drove with his chest nearly against the steering wheel.

A couple of miles later he spied headlights to his left and honked twice. The truck honked back. It pulled alongside Paul and its window rolled down.

“Mullins!” Paul called.

“Yeah?”

“It's Collier.”

A flashlight blinded Paul for a second and then came to rest on his stomach. Mullins, a compact fifty-something man, leaned his balding head out the window. “What are you doing driving around?” he asked.

“Have you been by the CR-1?” Paul asked.

“No.” Mullins thumbed in the opposite direction. “Pipe burst out by Materials Testing, so I was helping those guys. The goddamn cold. What's going on?”

“The fire alarm's triggered at the CR-1 and no one's answering.” Paul realized that his hands were shaking a little and he gripped the wheel to steady them. “I'm sure one of the boys has come down and let the firemen in by now,” he said, “but would you come back with me, just in case?”

“Sure,” Mullins said and pulled out ahead of Paul, driving quickly. Two of the firefighters were shaking the chain-link fence when they pulled up, preparing to climb. “I'm sorry!” Mullins shouted, jumping from his truck and waving his keys over his head. “I'll get it.”

He unlocked the gate and opened both sides, and the vehicles drove through, Paul last. They parked in the gravel lot. The firefighters gathered in a circle and Paul joined them.

“We'll pair up,” said Sechrist. “Esrom, you're with me, we'll check the reactor floor. You two,” he pointed at a pair of firefighters, “you take the furnace room, see if that goddamn light is blinking and if it is, get it turned off. If it ain't blinking, check Admin.”

“The men won't be in Admin,” Paul began.

“Collier, you can come with us,” Sechrist said.

At the mention of Paul's name the young fireman spun to look at him, but Paul didn't have time to ponder this because the chief headed up the stairs.

The firefighter and Sechrist carried handheld radiation monitors, rectangular yellow boxes with meters inside. Paul could hear them clicking, their speed increasing with each step. Halfway up, the clicks accelerated into a choppy, propeller-like whirr.

“What the hell?” Sechrist snapped. “Esrom, is yours doing this?”

“Yeah, it's all revved up,” the young firefighter said. He had the slight country twang typical of locals.

“They're both doing it,” said Paul, listening. The sound made the hairs on his neck stand on end.

“Mine's reading two hundred R,” Esrom murmured.

“Well, then,” said Sechrist, “we'd better
hope
they're broken.”

Esrom had been focused on the chief as if, for some reason, he could not bring himself to look at Paul. But now his eyes darted to Paul's in a quiet appeal. “What do you think?” he asked.

“I don't see how they could both break at the same time,” Paul said.

Sechrist's disgust was palpable now. “It's the cold,” he said. “Goddamn things.” He shook his monitor and waved Paul and Esrom back down the stairs with it. “We've got more in the truck. Move it.”

Down the stairs they went, faster now. Esrom jogged ahead to the fire truck and tossed his detector inside, rooting around for another one.

“See,” the chief said, “of course they're gonna break, Ez, with you throwin' 'em around that way.” He took another monitor from Esrom and both men clicked theirs on. The monitors were silent for a moment and then began soft, steady beats. “Fine,” Sechrist said. “Good. Let's go.” They all breathed heavily now, moving back toward the stairs.

“I want to go ahead,” Paul said, feeling desperate, realizing he sounded like a little boy. He could not move past their bundled bodies on the stairwell. “Let me just check up there. Let me go first. I need to see the guys—”

The chief, partway up the stairs, raised his hand. The three men stopped. Their monitors were ticking faster, faster, until each click blurred into a steady drone.

“Two hundred,” Esrom said. “They both say two hundred again.” He and the chief looked at each other. Paul could see them going pale.

He knew now, for certain, that something had happened. He strained to move past the firemen. “Webb!” he called up the stairs. “Webbsy? Sloke? Hey! Answer us!”

“Collier, get back downstairs,” the chief said.

“Fuck you,” said Paul. He shoved through the firemen's thick, coarse jackets, stumbled, and righted himself, sprinting up the steps.

“Hey!” Sechrist yelled after him. “Hey!”

Paul took the stairs two at a time. His chest burned. He reached the landing and cupped his hands over his eyes to look through the window into the reactor room.

At first he couldn't tell what he was seeing: It didn't make sense. He wasn't looking into a room he had ever seen before. The materials were familiar, steel and concrete, but everything was in the wrong place, shifted and cut up and rearranged, like looking through a kaleidoscope. The room didn't even seem to be the right
shape
.

The entire reactor, he realized in horror, was blown out in the center. It looked as if a Tarzan bomb had cruised into the room and blasted a crater where the core had been. Man-sized chunks of concrete lay around the perimeter of the hole. Metal pieces had been flung to the walls—large, twisted hunks that looked as if a tornado had picked them up and thrown them, steel punchings and blotting papers scattered among the other debris like deadly confetti.

He saw two bodies. Both lay on the ground, one faceup and the other facedown. They were soaking wet, their coveralls clinging to them from so much hot steam and blood, as if the fabric were made of a much thinner material. Paul scanned frantically for the third man but could not see him, and that was when a movement from the nearer body, the one facedown, caught his eye.

He jerked his head, uncertain of what he had seen. For a moment he thought he'd imagined it. Then, suddenly, the man lurched up onto his side and reached out in front of him, and Paul saw his mutilated face. The sight hung Paul's heart in midair: The man's mouth was curled and immobilized into a strange openmouthed grimace, as if it had been blasted back into his face; his skin had peeled away in hot pink burns; his eyes looked terrifyingly dull and squashed, unseeing.

The man was reaching not to Paul but toward some apparition. He lay with his arm extended and torso slightly raised, as though his body had seized up on him and left him propped that way.

“He's alive,” Paul said, and shot down the stairs. One flight down he collided with Sechrist and Esrom, who were thundering up. “A man's alive, one of them's alive,” Paul said, and the chief's eyes widened. He turned around and led the way down the stairs, shouting to Paul that they would get a stretcher.

The brand-new Pontiac ambulance, previously idling near the back gate, had been pulled closer to the building, and a nurse sat in the back, staring into the distance. When Paul and Sechrist plunged out of the building she leaped in fright. Esrom pulled out the stretcher. At that moment they heard someone calling to them, and the health physicist, Charlie Vogel, ran up. He was dressed in plain clothes, his rectangular glasses askew, and his face was raked with worry.

“I'm calling a Class One,” Vogel said. “We need backup. We need to set up a checkpoint. If someone is alive we'll need decontamination—” He stopped and held Paul by the arm. “I'll take over,” he said. “You can't go back in there. You're not on the rescue crew.”

“It's one of my men in there,” Paul said, panicky. “We need to get him out!”

Vogel tried to look him in the eye. “Do you understand the radiation field in that building? Those men have been in there for an hour, maybe. There's no way,” and he stopped. “I can't in good conscience let a healthy man rescue someone who—”

Paul snapped his arm away. “Do we have suits?” he called. Chief Sechrist was already in the truck and handing out protective suits, which they struggled into, breathing hard, steam blooming and retracting in the freezing air.

“These suits offer limited protection,” Vogel was saying.

The chief pulled a mask over his face; he pushed one into Paul's hand and Vogel's. Paul yanked it over his head, turned, and grabbed the far end of the stretcher. A fireman held open the door, and Paul and Chief Sechrist rushed up the stairs, Vogel and Esrom behind them.

“We need to be as fast as we can,” Vogel shouted as they ran. “Hold your breath in the reactor room. Don't breathe at all in there! Get him onto the stretcher as fast as you can and then get the hell out.”

They got to the top of the stairs and the chief opened the door. He and Paul ran through, the door wheezing shut against the side of the stretcher and Paul shouldering it open again. “Hold your breath!” Vogel shouted again, just before pulling the respirator to cover his face, as they burst onto the reactor floor.