Authors: Walter Jon Williams
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Thrillers, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Science Fiction, #Post-Apocalyptic
Larry saw, as the man pulled his hands from the water, that the backs of the man’s hands were bright red, too, and just as badly blistered.
“What happened?” Larry gasped.
The man blinked at him with pale blue eyes. “I was in the turbine house,” he said. “Primary steam line went.” The man’s lobster-red hands fumbled at his collar in memory. “I used to work at a plant in Santa Barbara, so I knew it was a quake right off. Soon’s I knew, I pulled my coverall over my face and ran for the door.” The man’s lower lip trembled. “Everyone else must’ve breathed the steam in, and died.”
Larry stared at him in shock. A primary steam line rupture would have flooded the turbine house with thousand-degree steam straight from the reactor. If anyone had breathed it, his lungs would have gone into instant shock and he would have died within seconds.
When the turbine had, a few seconds later, torn itself into murderous razor-edged shards of metal, everyone around it was probably already dead.
“Dang thing blew up behind me,” the man said. “I just kept running. Ran all this way.” He looked down at the water in which he was kneeling, then slowly put his hands into the water again. “Hurts,” he said. “The cool water helps.” He bent forward, lowered his blistered forehead into the water.
“You’ve got to get help,” Larry said. “You got to . ..” His mind flailed. “To get to the infirmary,” he finished.
“Figure it’s still standing?” the man said, his sad voice muffled by the water.
“I ... don’t know.” The infirmary was in the administration building, southeast of here, behind the smoke pall of whatever it was that was burning. Larry hadn’t seen it behind the smoke.
“I’ll just stay here awhile, then,” the man said. He sighed heavily, his body almost visibly deflating.
Larry splashed around him in agitation. “Listen,” he said. “I’m coming back for you. I’ve just got to ... I’ve got to run now.”
“Take your time,” the man said. “I ain’t got nowhere to go.”
Larry loped on, gasping in the humid air. His boots had filled to the ankles with water and they were like iron weights on the ends of his legs. The auxiliary building loomed up on his right, the building that held over thirty years’ worth of Poinsett Landing’s spent fuel in its stainless-steel-lined concrete pond. Larry looked at it anxiously as he jogged past. The buff-colored aluminum siding had peeled away here and there, revealing the ugly concrete beneath, but the walls seemed still to be standing. From the stumps of steel girders tilted skyward atop the flat roof, it looked as if part of the roof had caved in.
There were two separate pumping systems in the auxiliary building to keep cooling water circulating through the spent fuel. He wondered if either one of them was working.
First things first, he reminded himself. The reactor came before everything else.
Where was this
water
coming from? The geysers weren’t throwing up enough water to cover the ground like this.
As he splashed around the corner of the Auxiliary Building he saw a group of a dozen workers standing behind the building. Panting, he approached them.
“Hey, Mr. Hallock.” The speaker was Meg Tarlton, one of the foremen on the fuel handling system. Her red-blond braids peeked out from the brim of her hard hat.
“Hey,” Larry said, and then he had to bend over, hands on knees, while he caught his breath.
“What
was
that?” Meg asked. “A bomb or something?”
“Earthquake,” Larry gasped.
“Told you, Meg,” someone said.
“How’s the ...” Larry gasped in air. “Fuel.”
“It’s a mess. Roof’s caved in. Active cooling’s down. Fuel pond’s cracked in at least two places, but the leaking isn’t too bad just yet. I don’t think.”
“You’ve got...” Larry straightened, tried not to whoop for breath. “You’ve got to get in there and make an inspection.”
Meg’s eyes hardened. “You’re not getting us up on those catwalks again. Not till we know it’s safe.”
“But—”
“We had three people hurt bad. Jameel and some people just carried them to the infirmary.”
“We’re not going back in there, Mr. Hallock,” someone said. “Just look at what happened to the
tower
!”
Larry’s eyes followed the man’s pointing finger, and his mouth dropped open in wonder. Little trailers of steam still rose above the cooling tower— what remained of it— but the elegant double hyperboloid curves were gone. It was as if the concrete skin of the upper tower had peeled away, like the rind of a fruit, in long diagonal sections, leaving behind only a skeleton of twisted rebar.
First things first!
he reminded himself.
“Look,” he said, “I’ve got to check the backup diesel. Meg, can you and a couple others help me with that?”
Meg nodded.
Larry pointed around the corner, toward where the lone survivor knelt in the flood. “There’s a man back there, been badly burned. Can someone help him to the infirmary, or wherever it is that Jameel took those other people?”
Meg, who knew her people better than Larry did, made the assignments. The others following, Larry sloshed toward the backup diesel. Their route took them around a collapsed workshop and through a parking lot— water was up to the axles of the cars, and a geyser had coughed up a cone of white sand in the center of the parking lot. The cars were no longer parked in orderly rows: the moving earth had shuffled them like dominoes.
Well before Larry reached the diesel building he could see that there was going to be trouble. The walls and roof had fallen, and the only thing that kept them propped up was the steel mass of the diesel itself.
If the diesel were operating, Larry should hear it. It sounded like a locomotive.
The surface of the water trembled as an aftershock rolled beneath the land. The aluminum and steel walls and roof of the diesel building rattled and creaked as the earth shivered. Larry stopped moving, arms held out for balance. Fear jangled through his nerves. He could hear the workers muttering behind him, and a splash as one of them fell.
The earth fell silent. Larry slogged forward.
He approached the diesel building, his pulse crashing in his ears. The steel door was crumpled on its foundation, clearly unusable, but there were wide gaps in the walls, and Larry stepped through one of these.
“Sir?” someone said behind him. “You maybe want a hard hat for that?”
Larry stepped into the broken building. His nerves gave a leap as the broken roof gave an ominous creak. The silent diesel loomed above him, tall as a house and 150 feet long if you counted the generator stuck on the end. Its mass propped up fallen roof beams.
Oily water shimmered around Larry’s boots. There was a horrible chemical smell that didn’t seem to belong in this scenario. He gave a sudden cough as something stung his throat. He tried to remember all the backup procedures he’d once memorized, the schematics of the diesel’s systems. He hadn’t dealt with any of this in years.
The roof gave another groan. Larry’s eyes watered. “Mr. Hallock?” Meg called.
Larry backed out. “Batteries have spilled,” he said.
The batteries were used to power the diesel’s control systems once the big engine started. But the diesel hadn’t started at all, which meant that the mechanical system running on compressed air had somehow failed. So why hadn’t that worked?
He turned as he heard someone splashing up through the parking lot. It was Wilbur.
“Number three diesel’s kaput,” he said. “Fuel spilled, and it’s on fire.”
So that was the pillar of smoke behind the turbine house.
“Okay,” Larry said.
“And the administration building’s gone,” Wilbur said. His staring eyes gazed out from the blood that streaked his face. “Just
gone.
Nothing but wreckage.”
“Jesus,” said Meg.
“It was the turbine shaft.” There was awe in Wilbur’s voice. “It must have tumbled through the air and ... there’s nothing left.”
Larry put a hand on Wilbur’s shoulder. Thought about the reactor core simmering in its boric acid solution, heat and pressure building. The possibility of leaks, jammed valves, heat building in the core.
The core turning to slag. Steam exploding out into the containment building. And who could tell, the way things were going, if the containment building was able to contain much of anything?
“Waaal,” he said, “best get this ol’ boy started, then.”
He and Wilbur slipped into the diesel building again to check the compressed air cylinders. They were in a separate room, but were easy enough to find because the wall that separated the rooms had fallen to bits. In agreement with the massive redundancy that characterized the plant’s design, there were three cylinders, each big as a house. The pressure gauges showed that two had discharged at some point in the quake. The third still held its charge, but the valve atop the cylinder was in the open position, showing that it had tripped and tried, but failed, to discharge. With eyes that stung from spilled battery acid, Larry peered through the darkened, ruined building and traced the couplings that connected the diesel to the third cylinder. The couplings ran overhead, in plain sight, and Larry traced them into the diesel room, past another valve . ..
there.
When the roof had caved in, one of the roof beams had fallen across the valve. The weight had probably distorted the valve to the point where it wouldn’t operate properly.
Everything in order, Larry thought. He had traced the compressed air system, and now he traced the roof beam. His eyes were streaming. Okay, he thought, the beam connects
there,
and . ..
A sudden shock threw them both against the air cylinder. Pain jolted along Larry’s injured shoulder. He ducked and covered his head as, with a long metallic groan, more of the roof came down, metal panels falling like the blades of guillotines.
There was sudden silence as they waited for another shock. Larry’s heart throbbed in his chest. The silence was broken by Wilbur’s cough.
“Jesus,” he said, “my lungs are burning.”
“I got what we came for,” Larry said. “Let’s get out of here.”
They sloshed out of the diesel building. Larry’s stinging eyes blinked in the bright sunlight. “We need to move a roof beam,” he said. “Can we get something from the machine shop?”
“I’d hate to dig through there,” Meg said. “Can you show me what needs doing?”
Larry took a few breaths of clear air, then led Meg back into the crumpled building. He pointed out the beam, and Meg gave a laugh.
“My pickup’s in the lot just outside,” she said, “and I’ve got tow chains.”
Meg splashed off to her truck. Larry stood for a while outside, breathed clean air into his aching lungs while he wondered whether it would be safe to wash his eyes in this water. There was more splashing as someone ran up, and Larry saw one of his control room crew.
“I’ve been to the secondary shutdown room,” he said, “and it’s flooded.”
“Flooded?” Larry echoed, then looked at the water that was rising above his boots. Where was it coming from?
There was a roar and a splash as Meg drove up in her white Dodge Ram. Her crew helped as she shackled the beam to her truck, and then she shifted the Dodge into low gear and gave it the gas. Everyone stood back as the chains straightened and took the weight. The Dodge growled, its exhaust pipe almost under water. There was a long cry of metal as the beam began to move, as pieces of the roof spilled free with a cacophonous jangled sound. Larry held his breath. There was a clang as the roof beam pulled free of the structure, and Meg’s Dodge leaped free, water surging around its thick tires, the roof beam dragging behind.
Then there was a compressed air hiss, so painfully loud that Larry held his palms over his ears, and a throaty, hesitant rumble from the diesel. Larry held his breath. The diesel coughed, spat, coughed again.
Then caught. The fallen roof rattled and shivered as the diesel began a businesslike throb. Fumes gushed up from a broken exhaust pipe.
Larry found himself in a cheering knot of workers. Meg spun the truck around, returned to the others with the beam dragging behind. A big grin was spread across her face.
“Yes!”
Wilbur yelled, splashing as he jumped up and down in the water.
“Yes!”
Well, Larry thought. He had done it, by God.
But that only meant, when you got down to it, that he needed to get busy and do something else.
He looked down at the water, nearing the tops of his boots.
He wished he knew where it was coming from.
ELEVEN
In descending the Mississippi, on the night of the 6th February, we tied our boat to a willow bar on the west bank of the river, opposite the head of the 9th Island, counting from the mouth of the Ohio we were lashed to mother boat. About 3 o’clock, on the morning of the 7th, we were waked by the violent agitation of the boat, attended with a noise more tremendous and terrific than I can describe or any one can conceive, who was not present or near to such a scene. The constant discharge of heavy cannon might give some idea of the noise for loudness, but this was infinitely more terrible, on account of its appearing to be subterraneous.
As soon as we waked we discovered that the bar to which we were tied was sinking, we cut loose and moved our boats for the middle of the river. After getting out so far as to be out of danger from the trees which were falling in from the bank
—
the swells in the river was so great as to threaten the sinking of the boat every moment. We stopped the outholes with blankets to keep out the water
—
after remaining in this situation for some time, we perceived a light in the shore which we had left
—
(we having a lighted candle in a Ian-thorn on our boat,) were hailed and advised to land, which we attempted to do, but could not effect it, finding the banks and trees still falling in.
At day light we perceived the head of the tenth island. During all this time we had made only about four miles down the river
—
from which circumstance, and from that of an immense quantity of water rushing into the river from the woods
—
it is evident that the earth at this place, or below, had been raised so high as to stop the progress of the river, and caused it to overflow its banks
—
We took the right hand channel of the river of this island, and having reached within about half a mile of the lower end of the town, we were affrightened with the appearance of a dreadful rapid of falls in the river just below us; we were so far in the sock that it was impossible now to land
—
all hopes of surviving was now lost and certain destruction appeared to await us! We having passed the rapids without injury, keeping our bow foremost, both boats being still lashed together.
Account of Matthias M. Speed,
Jefferson County, March 2,1812
WHAM WHAM WHAM.
Omar lay in his front yard and watched his house shake to pieces. The old double shotgun home was lightly built— no need for heavy construction in a place where there was no winter, no weather worse than a thunderstorm— and it was not built to stand up to tremors on this scale.
All the work,
he thought.
All the work in this heat. And now it’s falling apart.
The brick chimney had rumbled down before he, Wilona, and Micah Knox had realized what was happening, and had run— staggered, really— out onto the lawn. Once there, it proved difficult to keep on their feet, and so they lay down in an open area, away both from the house and the magnolia tree in front, where nothing would fall on them, nothing but a blizzard of tumbling blossoms from the tree.
WHAM WHAM WHAM.
The earth quaked and shuddered and moaned.
Wilona gave a cry as the old shiplap house was shaken off its brick piers and came lurching to the ground. There were crashes from the interior as furniture tumbled or slid. The carport caved onto the car with a metal whine. Omar reached out and put an arm around Wilona’s shoulders.
“Don’t worry,” he called. “We’re insured.” And wondered,
Are we?
He didn’t have the slightest idea what the policy had to say about earthquakes.
Wilona just stared at the house, one hand to her throat as if to secure Great-Aunt Clover’s pearls, her one treasure. Her other hand clutched her white gloves, the only thing she’d snatched from the room on her way out.
Knox crouched on the quaking ground in a kind of three-point balance, like a football player waiting for a signal from the quarterback. His expression was a mixture of fear and excitement, like a kid on a roller coaster.
WHAM WHAM WHAM.
Shingles and chimney bricks tumbled off the roof. Paint flakes flew in little blizzards. Many of the clapboards shook right off the side of the building. Wilona’s lace curtains fluttered through empty windows. Omar could feel his teeth rattling together with every tremor.
And then the shaking faded away. In the silence they were aware of a baby’s shrieks, the frenzied barking of cur dogs, the blaring of a car horn. The quake was over.
But there was a rushing, and a coughing, and rubble burst from the yard of the neighbor across the street. It was like a mine going off, throwing debris arching into the air. Omar’s heart gave a leap. He threw himself over Wilona as stones and chunks of wood rained down. A gush of water came up, blasting from the fissure as if from a fireman’s hose. The neighbor’s trailer, which had tipped to one side with its metal wall tortured and bent, gave a tormented booming rattle as the geyser tried to tear the sides from the building.
Mist began raining down. Omar stood up, tried to shield Wilona. “Let’s move away from this,” he said.
Knox stood, swayed. “What
was
that?” he asked.
“Earthquake, I guess.”
“You got earthquakes,
too?”
Knox was staring. “Hurricanes and swamps and niggers just down from the trees and
earthquakes, too
?”
“Every hunnerd years, I guess,” Omar said. He helped Wilona to stand, and she began to walk toward the house. He caught her arm. “Don’t go back in the house, hon,” he said. “It might not be safe.”
“I want to call my Davey!” Wilona’s glare was fierce. “I want to know my boy’s all right!”
Omar blinked. Their son was attending LSU in Baton Rouge— could the earthquake have reached that far?
He drew her gently from the house. “Come to the car, hon,” he said. “We can make phone calls from the police radio.”
The mention of the radio reminded Omar that he was sheriff, that he was going to be needed here in this emergency, that people would be depending on him.
His mind swam. He had no idea what to do next. Numbly, while he tried to think, he began to steer Wilona toward the crumpled car port, away from the spouting water.
Knox danced in front of him. He seemed full of energy. His eyes glittered, and there was an intent grin on his face. “Hey, Omar,” he said. “Let’s get the carport off your car. You need to get to headquarters, establish a command post.”
The words seemed to enter Omar’s mind from a great distance. “Yeah,” he said. “Guess I’d better do that.”
“But what do
I
do?” Wilona asked.
Omar licked his lips. “Come along, I guess,” he said. “The courthouse is probably the safest place around.”
“Great!” Knox said. “You know— you should deputize me. You’re gonna need a lot of special deputies in a crisis like this.”
Omar wondered if this was something he could actually do.
“In fact,” Knox went on, “disaster on this scale, you’re gonna need a lot of paramilitaries.” He gave a glittering smile, bounced up on his steel-capped boots. “You’re gonna have trouble keeping order in this county— parish, I mean. You might just wanna call in the Klan. Everyone you can trust. Because sure as there is God in Heaven, nobody’s gonna be looking after the white people of this parish but you.”
*
Charlie Johns belly-crawled from his house as it rocked beneath him. He crossed the portico, tumbled down the stairs, and lay on the hot front walk gasping for breath. The earth heaved under him. Megan’s car, in his driveway, was jumping up and down in place, as if it had suddenly been possessed by the spirit of a pogo stick. In fact,
all
the cars on the street were jumping up and down.
Charlie’s head swam to the echo of thunder. There was a stench in the air. He closed his eyes and gasped for breath. He thought his head was going to explode.
The earth’s motion ceased, but it was some minutes before Charlie could move. He opened his eyes— the sky was full of murk— and he tried to sit up. His head spun and he had to close his eyes again until the spinning stopped.
He wondered if a bomb had gone off. Or a tractor-trailer rig filled with liquid natural gas. The bad smell made him think it must have been gas.
Charlie opened his eyes. His house was before him, strangely shrunken. Part of it seemed to have collapsed. The big oak tree in the front lawn had split in half, raw white wood showing, but it still stood. The garage had fallen on his car. The ornamental brick on the front of the house had peeled off and lay in little dusty piles. All the windows were broken and the yard was littered with cedar shakes fallen from the roof.
He couldn’t believe it. He had paid a lot for that house. It wasn’t supposed to just
fall down.
The sounds of shouts and screams came dimly to his ringing ears. He looked left and right, saw more ruin. All the houses on his quiet, expensive Germantown road were damaged. Windows gaped. Trees had fallen across hedges and rooftops. Chimneys sprawled across lawns. A three-story brick house, two doors down, had simply collapsed into a pile. Porches had fallen, and roofs leaned at strange angles. Stunned people lay stretched on lawns. Some people, somewhere, were calling for help.
Charlie stared dumbly at the carnage. It must have been a big bomb, he thought. Terrorists. No— probably the U.S. Air Force had dropped a bomb by accident. He would be able to sue for damages.
Megan’s BMW 328i, he saw, sat in his driveway with its hood and windscreen covered in cedar shakes from the fallen garage. She would be happy, he thought, the car hadn’t suffered much more than a few nicks.
Megan
.
She had been in the shower, he remembered. She was going to shower, and then they would make love on his big king-sized bed, and then they would open a bottle of champagne and wait for the caterers to deliver his canard a la Montmorency and Megan’s croustades aux crevettes, and they would celebrate the fact that they were both very, very rich. While he waited for Megan to get out of the shower, Charlie sat in the front room to listen to the financial reports on CNN.
And then the bomb, or whatever it was, had gone off.
Charlie wondered where Megan was. Perhaps she was still in the shower.
He tried to get to his feet. His head whirled, and his stomach was tied in knots. Vomit stung the back of his throat. He took a few steps to the house and leaned on one of the portico’s pillars, but the pillar swayed as he put his weight on it, and he saw now that the portico was no longer attached to the house, it had taken a few jumps onto the lawn, and there was a yawning two-foot gap, studded with nails, between the portico and the house proper.
“Megan?” he called. “Are you in there?”
He walked across the portico, feeling planks sag beneath his feet, and stepped across the gap between the house and the portico and into the front hall. Inside was a shambles: every shelf fallen, every glass object broken, the furniture moved around as if scrambled by a giant. The bottle of Moet had fallen from the bucket and rolled across the hall from the spilled ice.
“Megan?” he called.
He went to the back hall and looked down it. It was dark. Charlie flipped the light switch and the light did not come on.
There was a little closet off the back hall where the water heater and the furnace boiler were located. The door was open, and the water heater had fallen out and was sprawled in the hallway like a drunken sailor. Water spread across the thick carpet.
Charlie ventured down the hall and stopped before the water heater. He saw that the flexible metal gas line had been yanked taut when the water heater fell. He could smell a whiff of gas.
“Megan?” he called. “Are you there?”
He wondered if he should call a repairman, but then decided that the gas maybe couldn’t wait. He leaned forward and turned the gas tap off at the wall.
Then he went back down the hallway, picked up the phone, and tried to call 911. The phone line was dead.
Charlie returned to the water heater and looked at it a while. He took a big stride and stepped over the fallen water heater, then continued down the hall to the master bedroom. The wet carpet squelched under his shoes.
“Megan?” he called. “Love?”
Everything leaned at a strange angle here, and it seemed to Charlie as if he were walking downhill. The house seemed partly to have fallen into the cellar. The doorframes were very crooked. The water from the broken water heater was all running ahead of Charlie, down what had become a slope.
He paused at the door to the master bedroom. He was afraid to look inside.
Maybe, he thought, he should try calling 911 again.
“Megan?” he called.
He took a breath and looked around the corner into the master bedroom.
Acid flooded into his throat, and he turned away and fell to his knees and vomited.
Directly above the master bed and bath was the deck, with the hot tub. This was convenient, because the spa shared a lot of the plumbing with the master bath.
But the hot tub, which weighed over a ton when full, had gone through the deck, and everything was wet and Megan was dead and she was lying beneath the tub and there was no question that she was dead and the room was wrecked and the water was red and Megan was dead beneath the tub.
Tears stung Charlie’s eyes. He got off his knees and went down the hall as fast as he could, stepping over the water heater and almost running until he got to the front room. He picked up the phone again, but the phone was still dead. Glass crunched under his feet as he ran for the front door, and then he crashed down because he stepped into the gap between the house and the portico, and he fell hard and felt a bolt of pain as nails tore at his shin. He jumped upright— nails tore at his trouser leg—and hobbled forward off the porch. He ran to the middle of the lawn and then stopped, because he didn’t know where to go next.
The brick house that had fallen down entirely was on fire, big leaping flames jumping through holes in its curiously intact roof. Another building, across the street and two houses down, was also on fire, though the fire seemed to be confined only to one corner of the building. Smoke poured out the broken windows, but Charlie could see no flames.