Spring and summer were best, and nighttime rains were an added bonus. Once they’d trekked deep into the patch of woods over by Brigantine Park, found a reasonably soft, reasonably flat, and reasonably clear spot, and gave in to their primal urges. A clap of thunder arrived just as Pete reached the Big Moment, and they both broke down laughing. Even to this day, they would chuckle at the memory, and sometimes Kate called him “Thunderbolt”—a smutty little nickname she was careful not to utter in earshot of the offspring.
As Pete slid the first window in the living room down, he caught a whiff of something unusual in the air. The scent was similar to the ozone-y smell produced by lightning’s ion discharge… but more metallic, almost coppery. It reminded him of the last laser printer he’d had, the one with the drum that overheated all the time. An intuition that dwelled deep within — one that was usually spot-on when it came to danger — sent up a warning flare. His heart began hammering. He hurried to the next window, and then the next.
When he got to the kitchen, he was confronted by a bone-freezing sight — Kate and Cary standing at the sink, washing vegetables, with the window wide-open in front of them. The curtains were even swaying in the breeze. Christ, he thought as his heart jammed in his throat, it’s blowing right in their faces.
Kate, in jeans and a plain purple T-shirt, saw him and smiled. An instant later that smile dropped like its strings had been cut.
“Pete? What’s wrong?”
He just about flew across the room, nearly knocking them over as he reached for the window frame’s handles.
Cary, who was smallish even for eleven, watched his father in bewilderment. A large potato was clutched in his hand, and water from the snake-neck spout was pouring over it. “Dad? What’s going on?”
“Cary, do me a favor, would you? Go up to your room and try to get your brother on his cell. He’s not answering me, and that’s probably because of our little back and forth this morning. But he’ll answer if you call.”
The boy put the potato down with the others and dried his hands on a dish towel. “Can’t I just try him down here?” Kate turned off the faucet, her gaze fixed on Pete.
“No, upstairs in your room, please.”
“But—”
“Just do it, okay?”
Cary scurried off, a faint “’Kay” drifting in his wake. Tears would likely come next; his sensitivity was already the stuff of legend among his family and friends.
“That was a little harsh, Pete,” Kate said, giving him the appalled look she normally reserved for the morning news. She had never been fond of his occasional flashes of temper, although afterward he was always apologetic. And she trusted him enough to know that when he snapped, he usually had a reason that at least made sense.
He stopped, hands on his hips, and let out a long breath. “I’m sorry, Katie. Look, we’ve got a problem. A big one.”
She followed him into their bedroom, where he rapidly closed and secured each window.
“What is it, Pete? What’s happening?” she asked.
He went to the dining room next. There was a big window by the china cabinet, open as far as possible. The curtains were dancing about wildly and Pete could feel the force of the wind roll over him. He covered his nose and mouth with one hand while sliding the frame down and locking it with the other.
“The plant had a rupture,” he said, hustling around the table to the window near the fireplace.
“Plant? What pl—” Her eyes widened. “You don’t mean—”
“Yeah, the nuke plant. Something blew, and now there’s radioactivity being blown all over the place.” He went around the desk in the kids’ workspace and pulled down the window behind it. “It’s mixing with the storm.”
Taking his phone from his pocket, he reopened the emergency text.
“Did you get this from Sarah Redmond?” he asked, holding the phone up so she could see the message.
“My phone’s in my bag,” Kate replied, and went to get it.
After he finished with the windows, Pete went next to the air conditioners as well as — per Sarah’s list—“… other vents that may be allowing air to come in from outside.” He hurried into the central hallway and went down to the basement.
He had always been an organization freak, and at the moment he was thankful for that. Even as a child, he was the type whose clothes hung neatly in the closet and whose books were stacked to geometric perfection on his desk. It’s really not a neatness thing, he would insist to anyone who gave him crap about it (and quite a few had). It’s an organization thing. I don’t like to waste time looking for stuff when I need it. For the most part, this was a truthful self-assessment, but he had to admit that he felt a rarefied surge of joy seeing a freshly vacuumed carpet, a straight line of shoes, or a microwave oven with no fingerprints on its surface. He’d had a roommate during his sophomore year at UPenn who spent at least half an hour each day searching for his keys and/or wallet. Assuming the guy probably lost numerous other items on a daily basis, Pete conservatively figured he’d end up wasting about one-eighteenth of his life simply because he couldn’t subscribe to the oh-so-simple system of “a place for everything, and everything in its place.”
In the basement, he grabbed three items which were precisely where he expected them to be: a new roll of duct tape, which sat stacked under a nearly spent one in the cabinet by the table saw; a long roll of plastic sheeting which was kept with other supplies used to prep a workspace; and a pair of steel shears that were hanging on the pegboard over the worktable. Once upstairs again, he went quickly through the dining room to the den, where there was a massive air-conditioning unit in the wall to the left of the fireplace. It was beyond ancient — mid-1970s, he and Kate had guessed based on style elements such as the plastic wood-grain accents and the faux-chrome analog dial — yet somehow it chugged out its Freon coolant every summer without complaint.
Normally he would cover it only when winter really began bearing down — late October or early November. Pete usually went to great pains to cut a perfectly measured rectangle of plastic and apply it with double-sided tape that was all but invisible. Doing this just right took about a half an hour.
The amount of time he invested in the procedure now was less than two minutes. He did not measure the sheet but rather eyeballed and guesstimated. He didn’t use an X-Acto knife to make a laser-perfect cut with a two-by-four as a guide — he set the open shears at one end of the sheet and ran them down to the other. Lengths of tape were ripped harshly from the roll and multiple pieces were used on each side, just to be safe. He knew he would lose some paint when he pulled the tape off, but he couldn’t care less. When he was finished, he did not step back, as he usually did, to admire the orderliness of his achievement — he just felt around the edges for leaks. The plastic swelled and deflated as if it was a living thing. Death, Pete thought, that’s what’s breathing in there. Steady respirations of death.
As he headed for the living room to take care of the other wall unit, Kate reappeared.
“I’ll do that,” she said, holding her hands out, “if you want to get into the attic.”