What did it say about the curtains, Nick wondered, when even the vandals left them alone?
“Here you go,” the driver said. “I delivered a few boxes for you last night. That’s them over there.” He pointed to a spot in the back of the room where a dozen cardboard containers lay stacked in an awkward pyramid. “Your friends should be here shortly. I know the place looks creepy, but don’t let it get to you. It’s safe. No one will be by who’s not supposed to.”
As the driver let himself out of the room, Nick called after him, “Where are you going?” but the guy ignored him. It probably was none of his business, anyway.
Three hours passed in silence, and Nick busied himself with the task of reading through the thick printout he’d brought with him.
It all came back quickly: the layout of the plant, the perimeter of the exclusion zone. He remembered it all so clearly, as if the intervening decade and a half had just dissolved from his mind. Preparing for the Newark cleanup had been his first solo shot as site safety officer, and he’d been determined not to blow it. If he’d done his job well, he’d have had it made.
Months before the entry-team cowboys showed up with their attitudes and their silver suits, he had been there with his assessment team, pulling samples out of the soil, air, and water to determine what might have leaked out over the years to threaten the fishes and the squirrels. It was nasty, filthy work-real wet-feet, dirt-under-the-fingernails stuff-the result of which was a stack of reports and maps and diagrams that empirically demonstrated just how little anyone knew about Uncle Sam’s Arkansas root cellar.
Sometimes, though, the absence of information told as important a story as a computerful of data. As he reviewed the ancient charts and graphs there in the moldy motel room, he remembered the sleepless nights these papers had generated so long ago. It had been his responsibility to select the equipment the Silverados would use to make that first entry, and his sleep had been haunted by the penalties they’d pay if he miscalculated the risks.
In the end, of course, the reality had played out to be far more horrifying than any nightmare. He simply had not foreseen the possibility of a terrorist attack.
Not that the Silverados could have known that. Not that they cared. All they heard were the explosions, if they’d heard even that much. Sometimes, in the darkest days of his depression, Nick wondered how many of his dead friends had spent their last instant on earth cursing him for screwing up the one job he had to do.
Hardly a day went by-even before Jake and Carolyn resurfaced in the news-that he didn’t think of those bodies; the way they dropped where they stood, strewn all over the roadway leading to Magazine B-2740. By the time anyone even tried to reach the exterior team, the corpses of those decon people and admin staffers were caked in soot. The ones closest to the open blast doors had melted into their moon suits, testament to the ferocity of the fire which had simply been allowed to burn. Further away, the bodies were just dead; so many lumps of flesh, contained within their protective garments, where their blood pooled out of sight.
Nick’s mind replayed the recovery operations, where each of the contaminated bodies was placed inside an enormous rubber pouch that had been designed for just such a use, albeit with an eye toward a radiation accident rather than a chemical one. The bagged bodies had been taken to a staging area, where they were bagged yet again and shipped off to a military base for decontamination and autopsy.
Not the entry teams, though. Their bodies were deemed to be contaminated beyond recovery. Unlike biological agents, which would have been killed by the extreme temperatures, the chemical agents in Magazine B-2740 merely changed form as they were burned, recombining with the products of combustion to form wholly new, and potentially even more hazardous, compounds. The products of such reactions were reasonably predictable when the process started with known entities, but as more chemicals were added to the recipe, the list of potential combinations grew geometrically, quickly reaching the point where meaningful predictions became impossible. In the Newark Incident, where no one even knew what the original chemical combinations were, the possibilities were infinite.
During the fire itself, the magazine had been a boiling cauldron of fire, smoke, and chemicals as burning rocket propellant and high explosives ignited crate after crate of chemical warheads, raising the temperature within those walls to 4,000? Fahrenheit. According to the accident report-itself an educated best guess-the inferno created its own windstorm, sucking in huge quantities of air through the same opening through which the fireball was trying to vent itself, thus causing a continuous recirculation of the same poisonous atmosphere.
Faced with so much uncertainty, the professional whiners and camera hogs at the EPA did what they did best: they played it safe, declaring the building’s threshold to be the absolute limit to entry. No one could take a step beyond the doorway without violating federal law. That the bodies inside were once people’s sons, or that they were once friends of Nick’s, was deemed an irrelevant detail.
He brooded on what he was about to do. What if the EPA know-it-alls were right? What if we are walking into a toxic nightmare? Even if he and Jake and Carolyn could figure a way to engineer the hazards down to the remotest possibility, how could he ever justify taking this kind of risk, just to put the past back on the right track?
As the sound of an approaching automobile pulled his attention back through the front window, he realized his answer had just arrived.
“I’m not staying here,” Travis said firmly as he climbed out of the Cadillac and saw what was left of the Ouachita Grove Motor Hotel.
“Hush, Travis,” Carolyn hissed.
“But I…” Jake’s gentle hand on his shoulder told him that it was prudent to shut up.
Carolyn moved only her eyes as she took it all in, her jaw slightly agape. “Oh, my God,” she whispered.
“One each, Arkansas-issue ghost town,” Jake mused aloud.
“You guys actually slept here?” Travis asked.
Jake smiled. “Well, it wasn’t quite this bad back then.”
They all jumped as the door to room 24 opened, and Jake and Thorne simultaneously swung their hands to their holsters. Jake stopped the instant he saw who it was, but Thorne kept going, bringing a huge, chrome-plated. 45 to bear on the new arrival.
“Freeze!” Thorne shouted.
Nick Thomas’s eyes popped to the size of saucers, and he threw his hands in the air. “Jesus!” he shouted. “Holy shit!”
Jake threw a hand toward Thorne. “No! That’s Nick! Don’t shoot him!”
Thorne held his aim for another second or two, just to make sure, then brought the gun down. “Goddamn amateurs,” he grumbled, stuffing his weapon back under his sports coat. “You keep surprising people like that and you’re gonna die young.”
Nick haltingly lowered his hands, and his legs wobbled a bit as color drained from his face. Carolyn darted forward to help him sit down before he fell. “Holy shit,” Nick said again. It seemed to be the entire breadth of his vocabulary. “Holy shit.”
Travis started to chuckle but stopped when Jake nudged his shoulder.
“I’m sorry, Nick,” Jake said, hurrying over to help. “Are you okay?”
“He nearly shot me!” Nick declared. “You send some thug to drag me all the way out here, and then you point guns at me?”
“He’s not a thug,” Carolyn corrected, but no one seemed to hear.
Jake shrugged, looking a little pained. “We didn’t know it was you, Nick. You just startled us.”
Nick looked at him like he’d grown a third eye. “Startled you?” he said incredulously. “Jesus, Jake, you were gonna shoot me for startling you? Suppose it hadn’t been me?”
Jake and Carolyn shared an uncomfortable glance, then changed the subject.
“So. What’s new?” Carolyn asked, sparking a welcome laugh all around. She ventured a hug, as best she could there on the sidewalk, and Nick returned the effort.