He blinked as he saw a bent form in front of him, A man in coveralls kneeling in the water, debris all over, his back bent, face close to the surface. It looked like he was praying. It looked like he was dead.
Larry splashed closer. Slowed, heart rattling in his ribs. He stopped, panting for breath. Reached out a hand, touched the man on the back. “You okay?” he asked.
The man raised his head, and Larry’s heart turned over in shock. There was a dividing line across the man’s forehead, right at eyebrow level. Below the line the man’s face was very pale, and his lips a bit blue, but he seemed otherwise normal. Above the line the flesh was bright red, and shiny. It was the most unnatural color Larry had ever seen, like an overripe red plum stretched tight and about to burst. Huge blisters had exploded over his skin, and some of them had broken and were weeping fluid. Larry saw, as the man pulled his hands from the water, that the backs of the man’s hands were bright red, too, and just as badly blistered.
“What happened?” Larry gasped.
The man blinked at him with pale blue eyes. “I was in the turbine house,” he said. “Primary steam line went.” The man’s lobster-red hands fumbled at his collar in memory. “I used to work at a plant in Santa Barbara, so I knew it was a quake right off. Soon’s I knew, I pulled my coverall over my face and ran for the door.” The man’s lower lip trembled. “Everyone else must’ve breathed the steam in, and died.” Larry stared at him in shock. A primary steam line rupture would have flooded the turbine house with thousand-degree steam straight from the reactor. If anyone had breathed it, his lungs would have gone into instant shock and he would have died within seconds.
When the turbine had, a few seconds later, torn itself into murderous razor-edged shards of metal, everyone around it was probably already dead.
“Dang thing blew up behind me,” the man said. “I just kept running. Ran all this way.” He looked down at the water in which he was kneeling, then slowly put his hands into the water again. “Hurts,” he said. “The cool water helps.” He bent forward, lowered his blistered forehead into the water.
“You’ve got to get help,” Larry said. “You got to…” His mind flailed. “To get to the infirmary,” he finished.
“Figure it’s still standing?” the man said, his sad voice muffled by the water.
“I… don’t know.” The infirmary was in the administration building, southeast of here, behind the smoke pall of whatever it was that was burning. Larry hadn’t seen it behind the smoke.
“I’ll just stay here awhile, then,” the man said. He sighed heavily, his body almost visibly deflating. Larry splashed around him in agitation. “Listen,” he said. “I’m coming back for you. I’ve just got to… I’ve got to run now.”
“Take your time,” the man said. “I ain’t got nowhere to
Larry loped on, gasping in the humid air. His boots had filled to the ankles with water and they were like iron weights on the ends of his legs. The auxiliary building loomed up on his right, the building that held over thirty years’ worth of Poinsett Landing’s spent fuel in its stainless-steel-lined concrete pond. Larry looked at it anxiously as he jogged past. The buff-colored aluminum siding had peeled away here and there, revealing the ugly concrete beneath, but the walls seemed still to be standing. From the stumps of steel girders tilted skyward atop the flat roof, it looked as if part of the roof had caved in. There were two separate pumping systems in the auxiliary building to keep cooling water circulating through the spent fuel. He wondered if either one of them was working.
First things first, he reminded himself. The reactor came before everything else. Where was this water coming from? The geysers weren’t throwing up enough water to cover the ground like this.
As he splashed around the corner of the Auxiliary Building he saw a group of a dozen workers standing behind the building. Panting, he approached them.
“Hey, Mr. Hallock.” The speaker was Meg Tarlton, one of the foremen on the fuel handling system. Her red-blond braids peeked out from the brim of her hard hat.
“Hey,” Larry said, and then he had to bend over, hands on knees, while he caught his breath.
“What was that?” Meg asked. “A bomb or something?”
“Earthquake,” Larry gasped.
“Told you, Meg,” someone said.
“How’s the…” Larry gasped in air. “Fuel.”
“It’s a mess. Roof’s caved in. Active cooling’s down. Fuel pond’s cracked in at least two places, but the leaking isn’t too bad just yet. I don’t think.”
“You’ve got…” Larry straightened, tried not to whoop for breath. “You’ve got to get in there and make an inspection.”
Meg’s eyes hardened. “You’re not getting us up on those catwalks again. Not till we know it’s safe.”
“But—”
“We had three people hurt bad. Jameel and some people just carried them to the infirmary.”
“We’re not going back in there, Mr. Hallock,” someone said. “Just look at what happened to the tower!” Larry’s eyes followed the man’s pointing finger, and his mouth dropped open in wonder. Little trailers of steam still rose above the cooling tower—what remained of it—but the elegant double hyperboloid curves were gone. It was as if the concrete skin of the upper tower had peeled away, like the rind of a fruit, in long diagonal sections, leaving behind only a skeleton of twisted rebar. First things first! he reminded himself.
“Look,” he said, “I’ve got to check the backup diesel. Meg, can you and a couple others help me with that?”
Meg nodded.
Larry pointed around the corner, toward where the lone survivor knelt in the flood. “There’s a man back there, been badly burned. Can someone help him to the infirmary, or wherever it is that Jameel took those other people?”
Meg, who knew her people better than Larry did, made the assignments. The others following, Larry sloshed toward the backup diesel. Their route took them around a collapsed workshop and through a parking lot—water was up to the axles of the cars, and a geyser had coughed up a cone of white sand in the center of the parking lot. The cars were no longer parked in orderly rows: the moving earth had shuffled them like dominoes.
Well before Larry reached the diesel building he could see that there was going to be trouble. The walls and roof had fallen, and the only thing that kept them propped up was the steel mass of the diesel itself. If the diesel were operating, Larry should hear it. It sounded like a locomotive. The surface of the water trembled as an aftershock rolled beneath the land. The aluminum walls and roof of the diesel building rattled and creaked as the earth shivered. Larry stopped moving, arms held out for balance. Fear jangled through his nerves. He could hear the workers muttering behind him, and a splash as one of them fell.
The earth fell silent. Larry slogged forward.
He approached the diesel building, his pulse crashing in his ears. The steel door was crumpled on its foundation, clearly unusable, but there were wide gaps in the walls, and Larry stepped through one of these.
“Sir?” someone said behind him. “You maybe want a hard hat for that?” Larry stepped into the broken building. His nerves gave a leap as the broken roof gave an ominous creak. The silent diesel loomed above him, tall as a house and 150 feet long if you counted the generator stuck on the end. Its mass propped up fallen roof beams.