“Absolutely,” Sarah said. “And as for everything else, we’ll just have to stay on top of it all. And we will.”
“That’s my girl.”
She laughed through the phone — just a little sniff, but he was happy to hear it.
“I love you, you know that?”
Emilio smiled back. “And I love y — oh, heck, here comes another call.”
“Go to it, stud.”
“Yeah, talk to you later.”
“Wave to me when you drive past the building, and I’ll wave back!”
“Okay.”
“Bye…”
Emilio pulled around to the back of the community center and helped get Juanita Navarro, who was strapped to a stretcher now, inside. As he pulled onto Barrett Avenue, he looked up at Sarah’s office window on the third floor. Visibility was severely limited due to the downpour, but he could just make out her figure while she waved madly. He chuckled and shook his head as he waved back. One in a million, he thought. No, make that a billion.
It was the last time they would see each other.
14
“There are still a hundred and sixteen people unaccounted for,” Sarah said into the phone ten minutes later, her brief but soothing intermission with Emilio rapidly fading from memory. “It’s been almost two hours since the explosion at the plant, and we’ve still got that many missing in action!”
Her office looked like a soft bomb had gone off in a recycling center. Empty Coke cans stood like little red silos everywhere, bright spots across an otherwise chaotic geography of loose papers, manila folders, and heavy-duty binders. The desk and table surfaces were fully occupied and the excess was beginning to populate the floor. Drawers were left half open, and all the phones were sitting on her desk, their long, modular cords ready to act as trip wires for the unwary.
She had always classified herself somewhere in the midrange between organized and messy; just enough of the former to know where everything was, but not so much that it hampered her workflow. Today, she had drifted so far outside her comfort zone that she worried whether she’d be able to find the right map or telephone number or emergency guide when it was needed most.
Even the use of her trusty notebook, which Emilio called one of her “two external organs” (the other being her iPhone), had been forced out of its usual pattern. She normally filled a single sheet, maybe two, on a typical day. It wasn’t even midafternoon and she had already covered nearly thirty pages with hurried, harried scribble.
“A hundred and sixteen,” she repeated. “Just where the heck are these people?” She consulted the list that was open in Microsoft Word on her screen. “Norman Beale, for example. You know him, right?”
“A little bit,” Harlan Phillips replied, sounding stronger than Sarah had expected when she’d first picked up the receiver and heard him firing questions at her. Hearing his heart monitor beeping steadily in the background made her wonder how much of his attitude was sheer bravado. “He used to own the bowling alley, the one where those medical offices are now. They paid him a fortune for that land, and since then he’s lived like a hermit.”
“We called him a few times and got no answer. Not even a machine. And we have no record of a cellphone or an email address.” She let out a tuneless note of frustration. “There are so many like that — Callie Morris, Jack and Mary Dench, Bobby Crawford… I’ve tasked four people with the search, plus one uniformed officer is going to some of these addresses. But I don’t want to spend any more manpower than that. It’s one cop and one squad car not available for emergencies because people won’t answer their phones. And the officer — it’s Doug, by the way — is also using a hazmat suit. He needs it, of course, but we really don’t have enough to go around as it is.”
“How are the illness and injury numbers?”
“I’m getting updates every few minutes, either by text or by fax.” She walked over to the fax machine, where a new sheet had rolled out moments before Phillips called. It was from County General; she had already drawn a tight association between bad news and the intertwined C and G logo; just seeing it made her queasy.
“We’ve got four hundred and thirty-six cases of radiation poisoning. Forty-four of them are in advanced stages — high fever, dizziness, a drop in leukocytes, shock, diminished levels of consciousness…” Shaking her head, she went over to the window facing the community center. The parking lot was nearly full. The swirling lights of police vehicles splashed the area with a carnivalesque array of colors. “There’s also a mix of injuries from various altercations, including eight broken arms, two broken noses, and one broken leg from a car accident. Two drivers were trying to get out of town and neither would yield to the other.”
“They ran the roadblock?”
“No, this was just before the sawhorses went up.”
“A lot of the people you have listed as MIA probably got out of town already.”
“Possibly, but I’d like to be sure.”
“All the roads leading out are blocked now. Even Carteret, although it flooded awhile ago. I can’t imagine anyone being stupid enough to drive through those waters.”
She returned to her desk and sat, then grabbed her mouse and brought up a live satellite map of the area. Cloud patches in different colors — the shade depending on the amount of rainfall — moved in a jerky, stop-and-go fashion from northwest to southeast.
“The weather forecasters are saying that the storm isn’t going to let up until well after dark. The system is more than eighty miles across.”
Phillips said, “There are reports of radiation sickness in Lebanon, Hershey, Ephrata, and Lancaster.”
“How do you know that?”
“It’s on the local news. Plus, word has been spreading like fire on the Internet.”
“Oh, good,” Sarah groaned. “That should do wonders to keep public panic to a minimum.”
“All those towns are locked down, too. It’s only a matter of time before it hits Philly, Allentown, and Wilkes-Barre.”
Sarah closed her eyes and shook her head. “If this stuff rains down all over Lancaster, do you realize… oh, my dear God… do you realize what it’ll do to the Amish? To their crops? They’re farmers.”
“I know, but you can’t do anything about it. Focus on what you can do,” Phillips said. “Have you spoken with the governor yet?”
“That’s next, right after I get off the line with you.” Sarah thought about the relationship between the two men. Phillips had openly supported and campaigned for Kent’s opponents during the last two gubernatorial elections. He wrote at least a dozen editorials challenging Kent’s positions on a variety of issues. And when Kent refused to release state funds to repair the Carteret Bridge after it had been damaged the previous winter, Phillips did not hesitate to tell the news media that, in his opinion, the governor’s actions were motivated purely by revenge. The public seemed to agree, as Kent’s popularity rating dropped twenty-two percent in a matter of days and never fully recovered.
Sarah cleared her throat. “Isn’t he, um…”
“A first-class sonofabitch? Yes, he is. And you know he’s not a member of my fan club, right?”
“I do.”
“So be wary. Oh, here’s another thing — he’s pro nuke. Don’t forget that. And now that he can’t be elected governor again — thank the Lord God for term limits — his central concern will be his precious legacy. He’s not going to rest until they’ve named a few highways and hospitals after him. Weigh everything he says against those factors.”
“I will.”
She stared out the window for a few moments; moments that felt like years. Then she straightened in her chair and flipped to a fresh page in her notebook.