Marla knew Corwin had gone on a suicide mission, and in some ways she had already recalibrated her mind to think of him in the past tense. But hearing it formalized now, elevating the presumption to established fact, struck a greater blow than she’d expected.
I misjudged him and he knew it, and he still treated me like a friend. She thought about his polite manners, his happy little smile, his boyish ways. And under that, a core of steel. He never let anything — even me and my relentless badgering — pull him from his mission. She shook her head and looked back out the window at the passing landscape.
She took out his letter and read it one more time.
Then she wept, not caring if anyone saw.
30
The last seven vehicles — four military troop transporters, General Conover’s Humvee, a dump truck of ghastly size, and the sedan that Sarah had tried unsuccessfully to abscond with — rolled convoy-style down a service road that cut through the heavily forested western side of town before linking with Interstate 84 three miles on. Many referred to this obscure throughway as “Silver Lake’s back door.”
The dump truck chugged along at the rear of the column with its bed tilted; four suited men pushed tetrapod barriers off the edge as fast as they could. Until four years earlier, the road had been mere dirt and gravel, and the town council was particularly proud of the fact that they’d found enough spare funding to finally cover it with macadam. Made of solid concrete and shaped like a massive jack, each tetrapod punched a giant crater into the pebbly black surface when it landed.
The plan from the start had been to barricade all routes in and out of Silver Lake, in line with a federal quarantine order. The most recent report was that the radiation level was now, on average, eighty-seven times higher than the permissible limit, and that number was going to continue to rise as the storm worked toward its final crescendo. With everyone now evacuated save for the wayward Emilio Rodriguez, the town was being locked up tight.
The back door on the driver’s side of the sedan flew open, and Sarah scrambled out amid a hail of profanity. Her attempt to steal a vehicle earlier had ended shortly after it started, with a small group of soldiers toting machine guns blocking the road. Without her oxygen mask or any other protection now, and with no regard for the fact that she had already been decontaminated once, she ran desperately away from the convoy. I’m going to find him… her enraged mind screamed. If I die with him, I die with him…
She managed to get past the first three troop transports before a large, yellow-suited figure stepped into her path and hooked her around the midsection, lifting her off the ground with one arm and little effort. She screamed and kicked like an electrified cat, her hair swinging around in soggy strings. He toted her back to the sedan, then the pair jogged alongside the vehicle to obviate a second escape attempt.
A mile and a half farther on, the big dumper ground to a halt as the rest of the procession continued forward. The tetrapods had all been deployed; four of the six soldiers in the truck bed hopped down and the remaining two began feeding them lengths of chain-link fencing which were topped with spirals of razor wire. Once the truck had been unloaded, all six soldiers went to work erecting the final barrier with Olympic speed.
The last pieces set in place were a pair of sliding gates with wheels along the bottom. After they were rolled shut, a heavy-gauge chain was wrapped around the joint and secured with three separate padlocks. As five members of the team hustled back to the truck, the sixth installed the last of eleven identical signs that now hung around various points in Silver Lake, attaching it to one of the gates with short lengths of heavy wire. The yellow metal sign read, in black type and block lettering:
QUARANTINE AREA
NO ENTRY OR REMOVAL OF GOODS
AUTHORIZED PERSONS ONLY
HEAVY PENALTIES APPLY
After giving the sign a quick shake to make sure it was secure, the hazmat-suited soldier rejoined his fellows in the truck, which sped off to catch up to the rest of the convoy.
Seeing some of this from the backseat of the sedan, Sarah continued screaming.
31
Kate left Cary in the waiting room with his beloved notebook, then went up to the second floor. She walked down the ICU corridor, stopped at the long window, and watched them — three unconscious bodies in three separate beds, dressed in blue hospital gowns and covered by starched blankets. Monitors beeped and blinked in a spectacular display, which she watched closely. There were alarms in place to catch anomalies, she knew, but she remained vigilant anyway. It was one of the few things in the situation she had the power to do.
Sharon Blake had a few extra gadgets parked next to her because of the baby. Tests had determined that the fetus was about ten weeks along. Kate responded to this revelation with a look of complete bewilderment, which led to a long span of awkwardness. The staffers who had initiated the conversation managed to gracefully extract themselves shortly thereafter, leaving her to puzzle through her ignorance. She was surprised to find that her primary concern wasn’t whether the baby was the product of her son’s indiscretion but if it would be affected by the exposure. Four lives at risk now, not three, she thought, feeling the added weight settle onto her emotional load.
She’d been doing some research, a habit she developed long ago — whenever she found herself in an unfamiliar situation, she immediately went into data-gathering mode. She’d gone to Google, not because she had unswerving faith in Internet sources but because there wasn’t time for anything else. What she uncovered was categorically horrifying — internal bleeding, damage to the nervous system, brain hemorrhages, deterioration of intestinal lining, various forms of cancer…
On a page posted by the niece of a firefighter who’d been at Chernobyl — who had been ordered to attempt to douse the blaze from the roof of a building next to the reactor — Kate had learned that the man had been so contaminated that when he died his body had to be welded into a lead coffin before burial. Good God.
She tried to get a sense of just how much exposure was considered dangerous. According to the EPA’s Web site, the average person should not come in contact with more than about a hundred millirems of radiation in a given year. Kate didn’t know what a millirem was, but she had no trouble grasping the base-point reference that the site established — the average X-ray delivered about eight to ten mrems into your body. And even then, she thought, they put a lead-lined apron over your body for protection. She had never been one for the luxury of denial, and she had no illusions about whether or not their bodies had absorbed more than a hundred mrems while lying unconscious in an irradiated rainstorm for hours. Another site expanded the nightmare by making note of the fact that there are different types of radionuclides, some more pernicious than others — and uranium 238, which was used in great quantities on a daily basis at the Corwin plant, was among the most toxic of all. When she saw that it was also one of the forms used to create nuclear weapons, she become sick to her stomach and barely made it to the kitchen sink to vomit. That was also when the wall on her emotional damn crumbled and the tears finally came. There were two more breakdowns after that, and she had no doubt there would be others.
A doctor she hadn’t seen before came through the swinging doors to her right. He was like a character out of a TV show, young and handsome with some five o’clock shadow; his stethoscope was slung around his neck like a dead snake. He wore scrubs under his white lab coat, and his shoes were covered with polypropylene booties.