Finally, the day had come. He got up early, dressed, ate a hearty breakfast of twelve toaster waffles before anyone else got up, enjoying the solemn ceremonial feel of this occasion, this day, August 12, 2006. A day that would appear in future science books, in news stories, in TV specials, maybe even movies. All this wonderful fallout would take a while, but right away, at least, he’d be in the local news. His story would wipe Hurricane Grayson off the front page of the Tallahassee Democrat and would do the same to the stories about Reverend Buffington Coffey, and give Rusty some peace and quiet.

He missed Rusty. She hadn’t been around since all the fuss started with Suzi and Rusty’s father. He’d texted Rusty and asked her to call him, but she didn’t, so he called her and left voice messages, saying that he missed her and that his reactor was nearly finished and he wanted her to be there when he put it together. When she didn’t call him back, he called again and added that he was sorry for everything that had happened with her father, and that he didn’t blame her and that he really, really liked her—he didn’t mention the word love again—but she wouldn’t text or call him back. There was so much he needed to tell her, so many things he’d had to do without her.

She’d missed out on the blowtorch. He loved his blowtorch. He loved the roaring noise, the metal mask he wore, the bright flame, and she would’ve loved these things, too. She could’ve helped him take apart the replacement mantles that the two of them had stolen from Target, extracting the thorium strips. She could’ve helped him dump the strips into his cast-iron frying pan, and he would’ve let her fire up his blowtorch and reduce those suckers to ash. Watching Rusty do it would’ve made it even more fun.

Next he’d had to isolate and purify the thorium from the ash, and he’d had a little chat with Granddad about how to do that. Granddad had suggested using lithium fragments to absorb the unwanted ash. Lithium batteries, his grandfather said, would be the best source.

He wanted to tell her how Granddad had become a virtual prisoner in his den, with himself as his own jailor. He was so scared of being accosted by Mrs. Archer that he never went outside anymore. He gazed longingly at the front yard, commenting on the yard work that needed to be done, but he wouldn’t venture out. He wouldn’t even go on walks with Otis and Parson, which had been one of his favorite things to do.

And his mother, who usually fussed over Granddad almost as much as she fussed over Ava, had stopped reading to Granddad and asking after him and bringing him snacks. It was all about Suzi now, taking Suzi to counseling, talking to Dad, in loud enough voices that even somebody who wasn’t trying to eavesdrop could overhear, about the four other girls from the youth group who were also pressing charges against Buff.

When he heard all this talk about Buff, Otis thought of Rusty, whom he realized now must’ve known something was screwy with her father. She’d called him a phony and a perv, and he felt really bad for her. She must feel so embarrassed and ashamed to have everyone know. And the worst thought he had was that maybe her father had tried to do some of the same things to her. Maybe he had done them. Otis had read about men doing those things to their daughters, but he’d never tried to imagine how a daughter with that kind of father might feel. In fact, until he started wondering about Rusty and missing her and feeling bad for her, he’d never thought much about anybody other than himself—maybe because he’d never really spent a lot of time with another person, outside his own family, that is. Gotten to know her. Shared experiences with her, like stealing and vandalism and creating dangerous nuclear devices. So this is what it feels like, he realized, to let another person into your world. It felt much more dangerous than any nuclear device he could create, because he had no idea what the possible chain reaction would be. But when he thought about all the bad things he and Rusty had done, it made him happy, and he was glad of all of it. He thought about her at night, in bed, until he ached, and there was only one thing to do for that, but a different sort of ache came back right after. He missed her.

So, in order to keep the memory of Rusty alive, he went out and shoplifted lithium batteries from CVS and Walgreens and Target and Walmart, even though he could’ve paid for them. Once he got them home, he cut them in half with wire cutters and removed the shiny lithium strips and dropped them in a beaker of Crisco oil to prevent oxidation. Then, donning his gas mask, lead suit, and latex gloves, he put the thorium and lithium into a sealed aluminum foil ball and dropped it into a pan of oil, cooking it on his propane stove for half an hour. When he tested the ball, after it cooled, with the Geiger counter, all indications were go.

Then he had the thorium all ready to shoot the gun at. He had the beryllium strips for part of the fuel, but his final step was to transmute the radium—obtained from the clocks and the hidden tube of paint and the chunk ordered online—into a workable form. He ordered some barium sulfate online and mixed it with radium and strained the brew into a beaker. In the beaker it emitted a glow that told Otis it was ready.

A few days earlier he’d loaded up his gun with his uranium and beryllium and tried shooting it at the thorium. Nothing happened, nothing that could be measured with his Geiger counter. He tried this for three successive days with no results, and he began to get agitated.

That night he drove by Rusty’s house, looking for her, but it was shut up tight. No cars there, no lights on. Another night he walked over to her house, dressed in black, wanting to propose some Mrs. Archer harassing if she was up for it. The black SUV was in the driveway, but no lights were on. He knocked on Rusty’s window, but there was no response, so he snuck across the street and did some halfhearted Mrs. Archer tormenting by himself—tossed some gravel at her windows, picked up a flowerpot with fake daisies in it and placed it on the roof of her car—not very original tricks, but it was something to honor Rusty, and he slunk back home, missing her.

He discussed the problem of his gun not firing with Granddad, who suggested that in this situation one might slow the neutrons down using a filter of water and tritium, which could be obtained from night-vision gunsights. Otis looked them up online and discovered that night-vision gunsights cost more than a thousand dollars apiece. For two days after this discovery he wandered about in a daze, and one evening, when everyone else was all worked up about some new revelation in the Buff case—a fifth girl, one from Buff’s old church, had just come forward—Otis just walked into his parents’ room and took his father’s credit card from his wallet and ordered three gunsights to be sent to him FedEx overnight.

When the box arrived he took it with shaking hands to his shed. He carefully pried the sights open, and when he realized that he could extract the tritium, a waxy substance, and reassemble the gunsights with no evidence that they’d been pried open, he decided to scrape the tritium off all three of them, using coffee stirrers he’d lifted from Wendy’s, and then return the gunsights to the company, claiming they were defective. That way, as long as his father didn’t check his credit card balance until after the sights had been returned, he’d get away with it. A brilliant plan, if he did say so himself.

August 12, 2006. He stepped outside onto the back deck. Another coolish, airy day, sunny but not hot, scuddy white clouds blowing across the sky. A great day to complete his project. Wanting to give Rusty one more chance to be there when he made history, he stopped outside his shed and called her cell phone again. This time she answered. She didn’t sound happy to hear from him. She sounded sullen and snippy, like the old Rusty used to before he got to know her. Remembering that she usually slept late, he apologized for calling at eight thirty in the morning, but she said she was already up, had been up, and what did he want already?

Otis ignored her bratty tone and asked where she’d been, why she hadn’t called him back; and she acted annoyed, as if he were merely pestering her. “Why do you think?” she said. “Duh. Anyway, I don’t live in your neighborhood anymore. I don’t live in Tallytown anymore.” She told him that she and her mother and Angel were staying down in Lloyd, twenty miles away, with her mother’s parents. Then she added that her mother was divorcing her father, whom she would henceforth refer to as the demon seed.

Otis told her he was sorry, but he didn’t know if that was the right response to her parents’ getting a divorce.

“Seriously, don’t be,” she said. “It’s a big relief, right? Now I don’t have to lock my door.”

Otis felt a chill, even though it was plenty hot in his backyard.

“I meant I’m sorry about all of it,” he said. “I’m sorry it happened.”

There was a sniffling sound. Was she crying? He hadn’t meant to make her cry, so he started talking, quickly relating the trial-and-error process he’d been through in the past few days, the gunsight scam, shoplifting the batteries, and how today was the day he was assembling the entire thing and how he knew, just knew, it was going to work.

He heard the sniffling again, which puzzled him, but then he realized she was laughing. “What’s so funny?”

“Oh, nothing. You. You’re so … I don’t know. Earnest.”

“Okay.” Otis didn’t know why that was funny, but he realized he was smiling, too. “I wish you were here,” he said.

“Me, too. Good luck with your whatsit. I’ll be there in spirit, cheering you on.”

“When are you coming back?”

She sighed. “Nothing’s been decided. I won’t be living in Canterbury Hills again, that’s for sure.”

“You’ll visit, though. You’ll come see me. I could drive down to Lloyd.”

“Uhmm. Don’t think my mom would be too glad to see anyone from your family right now.”

Otis protested that he hadn’t had anything to do with the “scandal” and that it wasn’t fair to blame him, and Rusty agreed and said it wasn’t fair but that nothing was and that she had to go now and please don’t call for a while. “I took one of your radium paint chips,” she told him. “For my medicine bag.”

“Don’t!” Otis said. “Don’t put it in your bag. Throw it away.” Why was he getting so upset?

“Sheesh,” said Rusty. “Okay, spaceman.” She hung up.

So, on the big day, Otis went into his shed alone and, feeling something of a letdown, after he’d put on his lead apron and mask and plastic gloves, he wrapped the uranium powder and beryllium in little foil cubes and arranged them around a block of carbon inside the lead gun, then wrapped the thorium ash in foil packets and distributed them around the outside layer of the gun, next to the packets of uranium and beryllium. Then he wrapped the whole thing up with duct tape and weighed it. It weighed two pounds. He set it down and left the shed, locking the door behind him. The deed was done.

* * *

Although everything had changed for Otis, he didn’t feel it was the right time to break the news about his invention. Not until he knew for sure it was working, he told himself. For the next couple of days, three times a day, he checked the level of radiation in his shed with his Geiger counter, recording his findings in his logbook. Every time the reading was higher, until finally the needle went to the top of the dial, which meant at least 50 mrems. He hadn’t decided how and when to reveal to the world what he’d made, and he wished he could talk to Rusty about it. He didn’t want to announce his accomplishment until he’d made good and sure it was working.

One day he decided to measure the levels outside his shed, and he picked up radiation all over the backyard. How much was too much? He’d never cared enough to find this out. But when he saw Parson sniffing around in the yard, right where he’d been picking up radiation, he grew uneasy. He scooped her up and brought her inside.

That night he visited his grandfather in his den and posed that question. How much was too much?

For once his grandfather looked at him straight on. “Why are you asking, son?”

Otis, settling himself into the chair, was startled. His grandfather had never directly questioned him like this.

When Otis didn’t respond, his grandfather, who was staring at him, said, “You aren’t actually thinking of making one of those things, are you? Because that would be very foolish.”

Otis felt himself flushing.

“You don’t want to endanger people’s lives. Make them sick.”

Otis nodded, but he thought of Rusty and Parson Brown, and he himself felt sick inside. Did this mean his grandfather would not be proud of his accomplishment? If his grandfather wasn’t proud, would anybody be proud? He didn’t intend to endanger lives. He wanted to prove that it could be done, and done safely.

“You worked with radioactive materials and it didn’t hurt you,” Otis said. “You said it was a lot safer than people realized.”

His grandfather turned back to the TV set, to the news hour that he watched every evening. “Bad business about your sisters,” Granddad said. “Terrible. Your mother just told me. I knew something was wrong around here. Why did she feel she had to protect me? I’m their grandfather!”

“I don’t know,” Otis said. Had the news about his sisters jarred something loose in Granddad? He seemed more with-it than he had in a long while. He pictured Granddad’s head full of marbles, shaking and clacking.

The man on the news hour—the old guy with the bags under his eyes—was going on about Hurricane Grayson, which had made landfall again over Naples and was moving northeast across south Florida, flooding everything and drowning people. There was nothing about the war in Iraq, but lots of interesting facts about the hurricane.

“Areas in Florida have already received up to twenty-five inches of rain, causing serious flooding. Alligators were seen in flooded neighborhoods after high water forced them from their habitat. Hundreds of homes were flooded in Brevard and St. Lucie counties; some locations were inundated with up to five feet of standing water. Early estimates from Brevard County show ten to twelve million dollars in damages to homes and infrastructure. Hurricane Grayson had caused the drowning of one person swimming off Neptune Beach and another swimmer in Duval County. Three people were killed in traffic accidents. A twenty-eight-year-old kite surfer was critically injured in Fort Lauderdale when winds associated with Hurricane Grayson slammed him face-first into the ground and then dragged him through streets until he hit a building.”

Otis got caught up listening to the report and when his grandfather said something to him again, he’d almost forgotten what they were talking about.

“I was involved in a research study, a long time ago,” his grandfather said. “We thought we were doing the right thing, but we weren’t. We hurt lots of innocent people. Caused deaths. I don’t want you to ever take those chances.”

“I won’t,” Otis said in a matter-of-fact voice, but his ears were humming and he couldn’t concentrate on either his granddad or the news show.

“How ’bout a game of checkers?” Granddad asked him.

Otis told him maybe later. He got up and walked out of the room and through the empty house—everyone was gone these days—out the back door and down to his shed. There was a full moon, and the sky was unusually clear, smattered with stars. He got his Geiger counter from the shed, turned it on, and began sweeping it around the backyard. The dial on the Geiger counter glowed in the dark, and Otis saw that the radiation levels in the yard were now up to the top of the dial, just like in the shed. But all this meant was that if he stood there beside the reactor for fifteen minutes he’d be absorbing 50 milligrams of radiation. A dental X-ray was equal to 150 milligrams, and that was way safe! The only thing was that this particular Geiger counter didn’t measure levels higher than 50. It was a piece of crap. So he actually had no idea of the true level being emitted.

His insufficient instrument registered top of the dial radioactivity three houses away.

There was always the Marines. A good option, if it weren’t for the Iraq war.