“Air-conditioning units,” Mason went on. “Any kind of air-circulation unit, really. Most of them draw from the outside, so they need to be shut down. They should be covered, too, wherever possible.”
Fear shuddered through her as she realized there was central air in the building she occupied now. In fact, there was a vent just a few feet away, in the wall, a few inches up from the floor. There was another one out of sight behind the copying machine. Are they spewing death right this minute? she wondered. Am I already breathing it in? She hadn’t even considered the AC angle, and that led to what, in her mind, was the most unsettling thought of all—What else am I going to overlook?
She scribbled this down, noting in capital letters that she needed to shut down all the AC units in the building as soon as this call was over. “Okay, what else?”
“The next step will be evacuating everyone later, in a safe and, hopefully, orderly manner.”
“I’m going to guess the military will be involved with that, along with local and state services.”
“That should be the case, I imagine,” Mason said. “Your own response plan should have further details.”
Sarah found and opened the PDF file—Planning Guide for Response to a Nuclear Detonation—and scanned the table of contents. “I’m reading through it now.”
“Good. Okay, I gotta go. But I’ll be available if you need me, and I’ll try to stay in touch and give you updates. Unless, uh…”
She had the sense that his next comment was going to be an attempt to make light of the situation, something along the lines of, Unless my insides get fried like an egg and I drop to the ground dead.
Deciding that there were some situations that lay well beyond the influence of humor, she said, “Thank you for speaking with me.” She was surprised by how steady she sounded. “I’ve got a lot to do, so I’ll take it from here.”
For a moment the only sound on the open line was the steady drum of the rain on both sides. Then Mason said evenly, “Sarah, you need to understand something.”
“What’s that?”
“The chances are that not everyone is going to survive this.”
Another few bars of silence played out.
“Yeah, okay,” she said. “Good luck.”
“You, too.”
Fear moved through Sarah like a serpent as her imagination pumped out worst-case scenarios — elderly residents who couldn’t possibly be expected to run around their homes stuffing towels around windows and applying tape to ceiling cracks… children on bicycles riding through in the storm because it was just plain fun to get soaked… corpses wrapped in sheets being carried by people in hazmat suits and masks. She thought about the kids at the day care, about odd-couple store owners Oliver Ebbett and Michael Garvey, about the maintenance crews still out there, some of whom had become good friends through the years.
Realizing that these thoughts were as toxic to her as the poisons that would soon be showering her beloved town, she summoned the fortitude to shove them aside in order to focus on the matter at hand. Being able to set her emotional burner on simmer was an ability she’d had as long as she could remember, and she knew intuitively that it was not just an uncommon trait but one that characterized a natural leader.
She went to the thermostat and shut down the AC, then sent a quick email throughout the building that everyone else should do likewise with their own thermostats. By that time, most of the wording for the town-wide emergency message had come together in her mind.
11
Roughly thirty minutes later, Peter Soames sat in his home office with the phone pressed against his ear after the message ended. No, he thought, no way did I just hear that. He hit “4,” per the automated instructions, and played it again. Terror settled onto him like a light frost as Sarah’s recorded voice spoke each word crisply and clearly.
He snatched up his cellphone from the desk. It had vibrated at the same moment the landline rang; the sure sign of an incoming municipal alert. There had been five other alerts concerning the storm over the past few days. Now that the blow was in full swing, he’d figured this message was simply another update of some kind. The Soames’s house was in a no-flood zone — Pete and Kate had paid extra for that and had felt it was worth every dime, especially after their two sons were born — so he hadn’t been all that worried.
Now Pete opened his texting app and found the message Sarah had mentioned in the automated call. The lengthy missive included a bulleted list of do’s and don’ts. For some reason, that list expelled whatever lingering doubts he had — something had gone very wrong at the nuke plant.
He leaped out of the leather chair — the force of his movement sent it rolling back until it clunked against the old radiator — and got to the other side of the room in three bounding steps. Yanking the window shut, he twisted the lock with his left hand while thumb-navigating his way to his eldest son’s contact info with his right. The phone rang seven times as Pete raced from room to room, closing all the windows on the second floor, before the call went to voice mail.
Oh, come on, Mark… please answer!
Pausing at the top of the staircase, he opened a fresh text message and typed:
Mark, there’s a > very < serious situation going on with the storm right now.
He paused, wondering how much he should reveal. The main sticking point was the amount of time he would have to waste on the details — details he could give his son in a matter of seconds… if he would just answer the damn phone.
There’s been a breach at the nuke plant and radiation is going to be spread all over town. Please get inside as quickly as you can. Close the windows, doors, and everything else. Then call me — PLEASE. I know we had a rough exchange this morning, but I’m worried about you and I love you. CALL ME AS SOON AS YOU GET THIS MESSAGE.
He slipped the phone into the pocket of his jeans and pounded down the stairs to the first floor, remembering when he’d first learned that the fixer-upper he and his wife were thinking of purchasing was just a few miles from a nuclear power plant. He’d made a point of acting casual about it — no big deal, there were nuclear plants all over the place, and stuff like Chernobyl doesn’t happen that often. And even when it does, it won’t happen here. Kate had expressed more concern; she’d been as demonstrably nervous as Pete felt. But they’d rationalized themselves into a comfort zone. It’s cleaner than fossil fuels… It’s here to stay, so why fight it… The bills will be lower… It’s just one more way we don’t have to be dependent upon other nations for our energy resources…
Yes, he’d decided at the time, that was how adults thought: rationally, logically. Gut instincts were for kids and private detectives and the occasional military commander. But prospective home buyers faced with the remote possibility of having their insides turned into cream soup while their skin turned black and hard and slid away in bleeding hunks… They had to disassemble the issue, analyze the parts, and come up with a sound conclusion. Now that same conclusion was making him feel like the tuna sub he’d had for lunch was riding its way back up the tracheal elevator.
Before he even reached the last step he could smell the electrified damp of the rain. Every damn window would be up at least a quarter of the way, and a few would be open wide enough to make it look as though the house was on fire and they were going to jump out. He and Kate both loved the rain, the smell and the sound and the whole vibe, and it had been a long-running tradition to lift the windows and let a little by-product of nature’s fury drift inside. When a storm wasn’t quite as vicious as this one, and before either of the boys had been born, they would take long walks in the downpour, fully clothed and reveling in the lunacy of it.