“What’s wrong with her?” the cop asked.
“Radiation poisoning, I’m pretty sure. Where’s your quarantine area?”
“Huh?” The cop looked as disoriented as the teacher.
Emilio slapped him on the leg. Due to the stiffness of the hazmat suit, it sounded like he’d struck a bag of potato chips.
“Hey, wake up! I asked you where your quarantine area was?”
“Over there.” The cop pointed to the far right corner of the cavernous room, where two folding partitions had been set up in a right angle, screening off a portion of the space.
Emilio brought Dempsey to her feet and tried putting her arm around his neck. When it became obvious this wasn’t going to work — she had virtually no strength left — he lifted her in both arms.
“You should get this cleaned up right away,” he said, nodding toward the vomit. “It’s loaded with contagions.”
“Sure… okay.”
When Emilio got to the quarantine area, he discovered that it was nothing more than several blankets laid on the floor. Three were currently occupied. On one lay a very elderly man in a short-sleeved shirt. Moaning rhythmically, he had covered his eyes with his forearm. A young mother and her infant son were using the other two blankets, and they both appeared to be sleeping. All three patients were wearing the light blue dust masks — the sight of the huge mask over the tiny child’s face struck Emilio as particularly disturbing — and all three had dried vomit on their clothing.
“Good God.”
Emilio lay Dempsey on the blanket farthest from the others; the closest he could come to a “private room” under the circumstances. As he brushed the hair out of her face and straightened her clothing, he felt an onrush of despair. This really is happening, he thought, the town is being covered in radioactive fallout. Jesus… The sight of his former neighbor lying there — a person who had babysat him from time to time, gave him lemon drops that he loved to this day, and even helped him learn how to read by going over newspaper articles with him — was almost impossible to register.
He got up and peered around the partition. One of the yellow-suited cops had found a mop and rolling bucket somewhere and was swabbing the last of Dempsey’s leavings. A few other officers loitered nearby with fading interest in keeping the lines orderly. The rest of the refugees maintained a safe distance, huddled in a giant mass with sheer panic etched on their faces. Emilio knew almost every person there, yet at this moment he barely recognized anyone. Outside, the toxic rain swept against the windows in a torrential fury.
It’s all coming apart… it’s all coming apart…
Another hazmat-suited figure approached — Bill Brighton, a long-timer on the Silver Lake police force and truly one of the town’s finest. He had been blessed with physical bulk that made him seem about twenty percent larger than the normal male. He was holding a small device — almost the exact same shade of yellow as the suit he wore — that Emilio recognized as a dosimeter, the standard portable instrument for measuring ionizing radiation.
The last time Emilio had seen it, it was gathering dust on the top shelf of a cabinet in the police station. The sight of it now, suddenly very important, compounded his apprehension.
“This thing’s giving me a reading of around 24,500 millirems in this room right now,” Brighton said, “depending on where I stand. It’s a little bit higher over by the crowd. Closer to 26,000.”
“That’s way too high.”
“How do you know?” the other man asked.
“I’ve been doing a little reading on the Internet in between calls,” Emilio told him.
“The Internet’s an informational wasteland,” Brighton scoffed.
“No, no, all legitimate sites. CDC, PBS… The average worker in an industry where radiation exposure is normal is supposed to absorb no more than 5,000 mrems in a year, Bill.”
Brighton’s face paled. “My God.”
“Yeah, and the minimal amount that has been positively linked to cancer is one hundred.”
Brighton looked down at the instrument to make sure he had the reading right, then glanced at the crowd.
“Have you measured outside yet?” Emilio asked.
“I did. It was 32,700 about an hour ago, and then 38,000 a half hour after that.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah.”
“That means there’s nothing but poison out there.”
Brighton nodded. “It appears so.”
“You’re going to need to greatly expand the quarantine area. There are going to be a lot more cases like Mrs. Dempsey. A lot more.”
“I know.”
Emilio looked directly at him. “Not everyone will survive, either.”
Brighton took a deep breath, which fogged the inside of his mask for a moment. “And that’s not all.”
“No?”
“We’re doing a pretty good job of maintaining order right now, but it won’t last. I’ve been in situations of widespread hysteria before. I know the patterns and the signs, and I’m seeing them here. It’s classic.”
Emilio knew Brighton’s history — his first eight years as a cop had been spent in urban Philadelphia, including two on the southwest side, which was blighted by terminal industrial decline and off-the-charts crime stats.
“As compliant as we like to think of ourselves in this happy little burg,” Brighton went on, “civility will only stretch to a point, and when it snaps — which it will, believe me — the whiplash is going to be incredible. You won’t believe what people will do when the panic hits.”
“Terrific,” Emilio said, looking across the room at the familiar faces and wondering who would be the first to throw decorum overboard.
He was about to say more when his cellphone went off. The pleasant female voice in his earpiece announced Sarah’s name and number.
“Sarah’s calling, so let me answer.”
“Go to it,” Brighton said, and walked off.
Emilio began moving toward the exit, noting that both Torres and the blankets she and Navarro had been on were no longer anywhere in sight. Through the windows he could see his two partners getting back into the ambulance.
“Hello,” he said softly.
“Hello,” Sarah replied. He could hear the strain in her voice. “This is insanity, pure insanity.”
“Tell me about it.” He pushed through the two sets of doors and back outside.
“I’m calling to see how you’re managing, but if you’re too busy, just tell me and hang up.”
“No, I’ve got a second,” he said, then recounted the events of the last thirty minutes as he got into the driver’s seat of the ambulance.
“That isn’t the only fistfight I’ve heard about,” she told him. “I’ve been keeping the scanner on. You wouldn’t believe what’s been happening.”
“Bill Brighton said it’s only going to get worse,” he said.
“Please tell me he didn’t really.”
“Yeah. He said he’s seen it before. I’m sure he was talking about his time in Philly. Said once the civility snaps, all hell will break loose.”
“Great.”
“We’ll manage it, don’t worry.” He put as much iron into his voice as possible.
“You think?”
“Absolutely. Don’t even think twice about that.”
“I don’t know what else could go wrong. Maybe the dam will burst.”
“Is that a possibility?” Emilio asked with unabashed alarm.
“No, no — the engineers who did the assessment a few months back said it was structurally sound. That’s one upside to a nuclear-core breach, I suppose — it doesn’t affect dams.”
“Thank God for small blessings.”