CHAPTER
TWELVE
Jake couldn’t hear anything but
himself. Why won’t she answer
me?
He could barely see through the
spiderweb of broken Plexiglas in front of his face, but that didn’t
slow him down a step. He’d never run this hard; never felt so
frightened. Yet Carolyn kept slowing down. Then she wouldn’t answer
up on the radio. He saw her hitting the transmit button once, but
his earpiece remained silent.
His earpiece! That was it. It must
have jarred itself loose as he was being tossed around. He
considered stopping to correct the problem but dismissed the notion
as crazy. He had a hole in his fucking suit! The bullshit lectures
from Nick Thomas flooded back into his brain as he tried to
remember the details.
Time,
distance, and shielding. He remembered that: the
three factors that controlled exposure to toxic chemicals. Limit
the time, increase the distance, and shield yourself from the
hazard. Well, shit! He’d been standing in a damn smoke cloud for
who knows how long with a hole in his goddamn suit.
The negative thoughts opened the door
for terror, and the panic that it brought. What had Nick said
during the last pep talk? Oh yeah. A
little dab’ll do ya. Big laugh, lots of grab-ass. Now
this stuff was going to kill him!
So he kept running, dragging Carolyn
by whatever body part he could find. They’d be out of air soon, he
knew. They had forty-five minutes’ working time under normal
conditions. Certainly, the designers had never run numbers that
assumed their customers would be blown up and shot at before
running like deer through the woods. How much air was left? Thirty
minutes? Less? How long had it been already? No telling. It felt
like a week.
At least his air pack was still
working; he was breathing clean air. That was his greatest concern.
Out of nowhere, Nick’s voice popped into his head again and
contradicted him. Three routes of
entry. That’s what he said, wasn’t it? Inhalation was
the worst, but that left absorption and ingestion.
Chemical agents are designed to be toxic
by absorption through the skin.
And I’ve
got a hole in my goddamn suit!
Jake’s worries about panic started to
materialize as the real thing once he realized how light-headed he
felt. Oh, God, I’m going to pass
out! He fought with growing desperation for control
of his mind, trying to remember the signs and symptoms of
overexposure, but the details just weren’t there.
If it looks
like a duck and it walks like a duck . .
.
That was one of Nick’s favorite
expressions. Sure, it was hot as hell out there, and he was more
frightened than he’d ever been in his life, and he was probably
dehydrated down to zero, but was that the reason he felt sick, or
was it this big fucking hole in his suit?
Jake yelled—literally yelled—as the
low-pressure warning vibrated his facepiece.
“Oh, shit! Oh, fuck! God
damn it!” This was it.
Five minutes to live—no, make that three, the way he was gulping
lungfuls of air. He stopped dead in his tracks, unaware that he
continued to hold a fistful of Carolyn’s suit, and he fought to
clear his head. It was his nightmare come true: stranded inside a
suit with no one to help.
He sat down heavily in the leaves—fell
down, really—and snaked his arm out of his sleeve to find his ear
mike, dangling against the sweat-soaked belly of his coveralls. His
fingers did all the seeing for him, locating the mike, then winding
its way up toward his ear. Over the din of his alarm and the
heaving of his breath, he could hear the buzzing of Carolyn’s
panicked cries.
“. . . wrong?”
Jake used his finger to trigger the
transmit button. “I’m sick, Carolyn,” he gasped. “I’m fucked.
Buzzer’s buzzing. I’m dead.”
“Bullshit.”
The tone of Carolyn’s reply surprised
him. She sounded argumentative; not the least bit grieving. He felt
her tugging on the sleeve of his suit, then saw a bundle of duct
tape in her fist.
“What are you doing?” he asked. Then
he saw. The atropine. “Wait!” he yelled. “Maybe it’s just the
heat!”
Carolyn had never been a nurse; never
wanted to be, as far as he knew, and it was a damn good thing. She
jammed the needle into his leg like she was squashing a bug. He
wondered if she lodged it in his thighbone. The pain changed from
sharp to burning as she mashed the plunger, and then the head rush
came. He fell backward for an instant; then it passed.
The shot of pain cleared his head. The
buzzer was slowing now. Time was short. He had to get out of the
suit. Now. Right now.
Body bag
with a window.
The zipper was a little thing, nestled
somewhere behind his head and sealed under a velcro flap; designed
specifically not to be readily opened. That way, you couldn’t
accidentally snag it on something and ruin your day. Jake fumbled
for a minute looking for it.
“Use your knife,” Carolyn’s voice
instructed, seemingly from inside his head. He looked up in time to
see her give herself an injection, noting just how gentle she was
with her own thigh.
The knife. Yes, of course, the knife.
How was she staying so calm? It was a stretch snaking his hand down
to his pocket, but the instant his latex-clad fingers found their
mark, he was rewarded with the feel of locking-blade Buck. Opening
a knife was a two-handed operation, though, requiring him to pull
his other arm out of its sleeve as well.
Working strictly by feel, he wrestled
the blade out of its slot, just as the buzzing of his facepiece
stopped. He’d never drawn a tank down this far before, but popular
theory stated that once the vibrator stopped, only thirty seconds
of air remained.
Shit!
Gripping the blade in his fist, he
thrust it through the suit just below his chin. The five plies
fought him every inch of the way, but he worked like a madman,
ripping the suit to the crotch, then changing his grip to take the
cut down to his knee.
And his air tank died. In midbreath,
the air just went away, as surely as if someone had pinched off his
nose and mouth. His lungs screamed and his gut muscles tugged for
air, but it just wasn’t there. In those seconds, he forgot all
about his suit as panic seized him. He dropped the knife down his
pant leg into his boot and clawed with both hands at his facepiece.
His struggles had drawn the pressure in the mask down so far that
it made a quiet burping sound as he pulled it away.
“Thank God,” he said aloud, bending at
the waist and resting his hands on his knees. He could breathe
again.
“Get out of your suit,” Carolyn
commanded. “You’re dirty, Jake.”
The
suit. God, it was filthy, contaminated with whatever
had burned up in there. Jake stopped breathing again—this time by
choice—and shrugged and stepped his way free of the moon suit. He
stumbled away from it in his stocking feet, quickly scrambling a
good ten yards before stopping to look back.
He propped himself against a tree and
he breathed. The hot August air felt cool by comparison, and the
simple act of drawing breath in and out of his lungs seemed
blissfully unregulated. And he was alive.
“How do you feel?” Carolyn asked. She
was still in her suit, still talking to him over the radio, and in
the background Jake could hear through his earpiece that her buzzer
was sounding, too.
“You’re using me as a guinea pig!” he
shouted, palming his transmit button. He laughed. “You shithead!
You were waiting to see if the air was going to kill
me!”
Like a bird emerging from some bizarre
silver egg, Carolyn cut her way out. Clearly, she’d practiced this
before, if only in her mind, and her motions seemed smoother than
his; graceful, even, as if her knife were somehow sharper and the
effort somehow easier. After emerging from the moon suit, she
stepped free of the boots, then walked downrange a good distance
before methodically removing the tank from her back, then the mask
from her face. Last things off were her gloves, which she
meticulously turned inside out as she snapped them off, thus
preventing cross-contamination.
When she was done, she looked through
the trees to Jake, who stared back at her for a long moment, before
they started to move toward each other.
“We’re alive,” Carolyn said. Her tone
carried none of the happiness that the words should
bear.
Jake wanted to say something
clever—something to lighten the moment—but a sudden rush of emotion
staggered him. Shadowy, surreal memories of fires and explosions
and friends’ bodies swirled in his head, and he found himself
suddenly overcome. He still had Carolyn. That much made sense, even
if nothing else did. And as she said, they were still alive. As
they hugged each other in the silence of the woods, he had a
nagging fear that the ordeal wasn’t over yet.
They walked for nearly four hours
before stumbling upon the cabin along the river. It was a one-room
affair, done in Early Hobo, with an old Army cot in one corner, a
chemical toilet in the other, and a propane camp stove in the
middle. The door hung from one hinge, and it appeared that no one
had visited for weeks.
“Charming place,” Carolyn
mumbled.
Jake smiled. “Yeah, a real
fixer-upper. I don’t suppose you see a phone anywhere, do
you?”
She put her hands on her hips and
rolled her eyes. “Yeah, sure. I think it’s over there in the
butler’s pantry.” She strolled toward a broken window.
He sighed. “We need to get to the
cops.”
“Well, as soon as . . . Hey! They’ve
got a boat!”
Jake hurried to peer through the
window, over Carolyn’s shoulder. “Where?”
Carolyn led the way back out the front
door and down toward a makeshift dock. About halfway, next to a
disorganized stack of firewood, lay a well-abused aluminum canoe,
turned upside down in the leaves. “Think it’ll float?” she
asked.
“You can’t just go steal a guy’s
canoe! Christ, they probably hang you for that out
here.”
She made a face. “You have a better
idea? I’m done walking barefoot through the woods, thank you very
much, and I’m not inclined to stay here in this
shack.”
Jake looked around, as if someone was
watching. “Jeeze, Carolyn, I’ve never stolen anything
before.”
“Oh, yeah, like I’m John Dillinger,
right? It’s not like we have a lot of alternatives
here.”
He took a deep breath and held it,
scanning the horizon for inspiration. Finally, he shrugged. “Oh,
what the hell. In for a dime, in for a dollar, right?”
He rolled the canoe onto its keel and
dragged it down toward the dock, while Carolyn carried the paddle
that had been stashed underneath. “Not overexerting, are you,
dear?” Jake grunted, struggling not to smash his toes under the
boat.
She smiled.
Once he got the boat past the
firewood, it actually slid pretty easily across the sloping grass
and into the water. Standing submerged up to his hips, Jake helped
Carolyn down into the canoe before climbing in himself, taking the
rear position.
They paddled for an hour, past endless
stretches of forest. “Think we’ve gone five miles yet?” Jake asked,
his first words in a long while.
“I think we’ve gone a thousand miles,”
Carolyn said, groaning. She lay on her back on the bottom of the
canoe, her arm slung over her eyes to block the sun. Jake’s
question was really a test to see if she was awake. “Why do you
ask?”
“Well, since the contingency plan
calls for evacuation within a five-mile radius, I just wanted to
make sure we’re safe.”
She lifted her arm a fraction of an
inch to sneak a peek. “You’re so full of shit, Jake Donovan. You
never read the contingency plan.”
He shrugged with a smile. “No, but you
read it to me.”
“Next time I’ll show you the
pictures,” she said, once again retreating under her
arm.
The river narrowed considerably in the
next twenty minutes, and as the banks grew closer together, so did
the distance separating the homes that lined the riverbank. “I
think we’re reentering civilization,” Jake announced, prompting
Carolyn to sit up.
The houses on either side had lost
their hunting-cabin feel, and while the yards continued to double
as junk heaps—dumping grounds for old stoves, refrigerators, and
the like—people obviously lived here. Set precariously close to the
water’s edge, the houses looked dank and pitiful among the towering
trees which cast them in perpetual darkness, sheltered from the
invading rays of the blistering summer sun.
As Carolyn took it all in, she tried
to imagine what it would be like to fight a perpetual battle
against mildew. She shuddered at the thought of what these
un-air-conditioned shanties must smell like.
“How can people live like this?” she
asked, mostly to herself. Her mind conjured up images of filthy
children playing in squalor as they awaited their next
malnutritious meal.
Jake slipped his Budweiser T-shirt
back over his head and shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said
charitably.
She smirked lovingly at his
never-ending optimism. “Nobility of the poor, right?”
“Well, there’s certainly no shame in
it.” Jake sounded a little defensive. “For all we know, these
people work three jobs to afford what little they’ve
got.”
“Whatever,” she scoffed.
He recognized her tone as the one that
dismissed his outlook on such things as naive and ill informed. It
was a quirk in his wife’s personality that he’d never been able to
understand. She’d set a standard for herself that no mere mortal
could possibly attain, and even as they wallowed together in that
stage of their lives where an evening out for pizza and beer had to
be carefully budgeted, she showed a disturbing, almost cruel
intolerance for people who were “poor.” Every time Jake tried to
point out that their income hovered perilously close to the poverty
line, she’d insist that he was missing the point. It was their
potential that made the
difference, she’d say. As college graduates, with degrees in a
worthwhile, technical field, they had limitless potential. The fact
that Jake’s father had spent a career in the coal mines, working
night shift until the day he died, and that his mom had cleaned
houses to make ends meet didn’t seem to impress Carolyn in the
slightest. She was funny that way. Jake figured it all had
something to do with her childhood; something that twisted her
outlook on the world. In all other ways a charitable, giving wife,
Carolyn could be brutal where money was the issue.
Jake let it pass. “Where do you think
we are?”
Carolyn craned her neck, as if she’d
be able to recognize this stretch of river by sight. “No idea,” she
said at length. “Downstream from where we were before.” She smiled,
lighting up the whole boat. All the snottiness and intolerance in
the world couldn’t cheapen the pure beauty of that smile, Jake
thought.
A few minutes passed before the
horizon changed again, revealing a line of dilapidated shops,
which, like the surrounding residences, were built right up against
the edge of the river. The tallest of the structures also looked to
be the oldest, built of stone at its lowest level, with two
additional stories stacked on top, sporting faded wood siding and a
once-red, hand-painted sign, “Bobby’s Bait and
Tackle.”
“Hey, look,” Jake said, pointing.
“Let’s go see if Bobby’s has a phone we can use.” He steered the
canoe toward shore, running it aground against the gravel parking
lot, where it joined the waterline. He got out first, holding the
boat steady as Carolyn joined him. Together, they pulled the canoe
safely ashore and chicken-walked through the gravel, unconsciously
flapping their elbows as they guided their bare feet across the
sharp-edged rocks. Thirty yards later the gravel gave way to smooth
concrete, and they paused to let the pain subside.
“Welcome to Buford,” Carolyn
said.
Jake cocked his head. “How do you know
that?”
She giggled and pointed across the
street. “Buford Hardware.” Then, pointing two blocks down the
street, “Buford Motel.”
“Your powers of deduction are truly
awesome,” he teased. “How do you know that some guy named Buford
doesn’t own a hardware store and a motel?”
She shot him her know-it-all smirk.
“People named Buford don’t own businesses.”
The town was bigger than Jake had
expected. Stretching on for several blocks in three directions, it
sported an interesting mix of old business district construction,
with its tall false fronts and wrought-iron fencing, interspersed
with the pastel and glass architecture of the sixties. The mining
town where Jake grew up had been a lot smaller than this, and it
bragged ten thousand residents. Using that as a benchmark, he
pegged Buford—if indeed that’s what it was called—to be good for
about twenty. All the more remarkable, given the fact that not a
soul was in sight.
“Where is everybody?” Carolyn asked,
speaking Jake’s thoughts.
“Kinda spooky, isn’t it?” Bobby’s Bait
and Tackle, like every other building in sight, was locked tight,
with the lights off. “Didn’t I see a Twilight Zone that started like
this?”
Carolyn shivered inadvertently, and
then she got it. “They must have been evacuated!” she proclaimed.
“The fire down at the plant must have run them off.”
Jake scowled. “Jeeze, you think so?
This far away?”
“Well, we really don’t know how far
away we are. Five miles is a long way.”
“And this is a big town,” he finished
for her. “What a nightmare getting all these people moving.” He
placed his hands on his hips and looked up and down the street. “Do
you see a pay phone?”
With none in sight, they started
moving toward the Buford Motel. Surely, they’d have one there. They
walked quickly, gripped by an odd paranoia. The total absence of
people, at a time when the streets rightfully should have been
packed, felt strangely post-apocalyptic. Jake half expected to see
Mad Max appear with his band of refugees.
Could it be that the contamination had
actually extended this far? Five miles was the default evacuation
distance for hazmat disasters, and as such carried a safety factor
of at least five, meaning that the evacuation zone encompassed five
times the distance that was truly in danger. Was it possible, in
this case, that wind directions or thermal inversions, or any
number of other physical or meteorological anomalies, had actually
put them in harm’s way?
They discussed these things as they
wandered across the street, but Jake was the one who put it in the
proper perspective: “Too late to start worrying about it now. If
this is a danger zone, then we’ve been exposed all
day.”
Clearly, he and Carolyn had dodged the
bullet for the most acute hazards of whatever they might have been
exposed to. Now they’d just have to wait another twenty or thirty
years to see what chronic effects might lie ahead. Cancer maybe. Or
blindness. God, there were countless possibilities. Signs and
symptoms could take decades to show themselves. In any case, that
particular horse was out of the barn.
And that’s what made this such a scary
business. Some of the most hazardous chemicals on earth were
colorless, odorless, and tasteless, with toxic effects that took
years to manifest themselves. How could a person know if the tumor
that materialized after his sixty-fifth birthday was just another
tumor, like the last three that the oncologist had treated, or if
it was the result of some ancient chemical exposure?
The parking lot of the Buford Motel
was deserted, just like everything else in town. A single story in
height, the complex looked like every other motel constructed in
the 1960s. A couple dozen rooms stretched out at parking lot level,
anchored on the near end by a small, glass-walled office. Being
this close to a bed and an air conditioner made Jake realize just
how exhausted he was. Suddenly, each step took just a little more
effort than his legs were willing to give.
“Not bad, all things considered,” he
commented. Someone here had quite a green thumb. A sea of phlox and
pansies surrounded the small swimming pool, itself an obvious
afterthought, planted as it was smack in the middle of the parking
lot. Geraniums grew in uniform clusters in colorful window boxes
outside of every room.
“You suppose they rent for whole
nights, or just for a few hours at a time?” Carolyn
quipped.
Jake shook his head. “You’re such a
snot.” He was careful to keep a smile in his voice.
She chuckled. “Well, I can afford to
be snotty when I’m so fashionably dressed.” He hadn’t thought about
it until that very minute, but they looked like hell. Sweaty,
sunburned, barefoot, and filthy, they truly were quite a
sight.
“I need a nap,” he said, reaching for
the tinted glass door to the office. The door pulled open
easily.
Like the building itself, the
furniture was old yet clean. Sort of Early American, with some
Colonial and Danish Modern thrown in for flavor.
“How nice,” Carolyn mumbled
sarcastically.
“Shh,” Jake snapped. “Hello?” he
called to the room. “Anybody here?”
“Maybe we shouldn’t be here,” she
whispered. “I feel like a burglar.”
“Well, hi there!” The two of them
jumped a foot as the clerk materialized from behind the counter.
Pushing seventy, with a genuine smile brightening his stubbly face,
the guy looked way too old to be greeting visitors at the counter.
“Sorry, folks. Didn’t mean to startle you. Name’s Terrell. Can I
help you?” Terrell’s smile remained unchanged, but his eyes
darkened as he took in his visitors’ appearance. “Y’all okay? You
look sorta . . . Well, everythin’ okay?”
Carolyn opened her mouth to answer,
but Jake touched her back lightly. “We’re fine, thanks,” he said.
“But we’ve had a bit of an accident. Mind if we use your phone to
call the police?”
Suddenly, Terrell’s smile disappeared,
replaced with a deep, concerned scowl. He hurried out from behind
his counter. “Goodness, folks,” he said, motioning them toward some
chairs. “You hurt?”
Jake waved him off with a smile. “Oh,
no thanks, nothing like that. Just had a bit of a problem with our
boat, is all. Sure could use a cop.” He could feel Carolyn’s eyes
boring into him for his transparent lie, but he ignored
her.
“You’re sure you’re okay?” Terrell
seemed ready to drive them to the hospital in his own
car.
“Perfectly fine,” Jake assured
him.
Terrell regarded them for a moment
longer, then pointed to the seats. “Please, sit down.”
They did.
“You’re welcome to use the phone, but
unless there’s somebody dead in the road, or the Russians are
invading Little Rock, you’d best save the quarter. Every cop within
a hundred miles is up at Newark helping with the evacuation.
Threatened to arrest me, as a matter of fact, if I didn’t leave,
but gave it up once they got word they had to evacuate the jail.”
Terrell laughed hard, triggering a cough.
Smoker, Jake thought. Menthols. “Evacuation?”
The look Carolyn shot him spoke
volumes. What are you
doing? Again, Jake ignored her.
“You ain’t heard?” Terrell gasped. It
was as if they’d just admitted they didn’t know what a Razorback
was. “There was a big explosion and fire out near Newark. Got nerve
gas, nuclear weapons, all kinds of stuff, and it all leaked into
the environment. Every place within fifteen miles has been
evacuated.”
Jake did a great job of feigning
surprise. “No kidding! Are we in danger?”
Terrell scoffed and strolled back
toward his counter. “I don’t believe in none of that stuff. I
figured if the Good Lord wanted me with him today, I’d be havin’ a
heart attack in the evacuation shelter, know what I mean?” He
disappeared around the corner but kept talking the whole time. “Way
I figure it, this is a perfect time for punks to come around
lootin’. They come around here, though, and I got one hell of a
surprise for ’em.” He produced a sawed-off twelve-gauge, with a
combat grip where a stock should have been. “Now, tell me, wouldn’t
you think twice about taking my stuff if you were staring down one
of these?”
Carolyn gasped. Jake felt his stomach
cramp. So much for Grandpa
Hospitality.
At the sight of them, Terrell turned
immediately apologetic and put the gun back behind the counter.
“I’m sorry. There I went and scared you folks a second
time.”
This time the Donovans’ laughter
sounded a bit forced. “No, no,” Jake said. “That’s okay. Guess that
should make me feel safe.”
The grin returned to Terrell’s
face.
“So how long before they lift the
evacuation?” Carolyn asked.
“Can’t say as I know,” Terrell
answered, shifting his eyes. “I can’t imagine it’ll go on much
after tomorrow. Can y’all wait that long for the
police?”
Jake looked to Carolyn and made a
face. “I gotta tell you,” he said at length. “What I really need is
some sleep. Maybe we could rent one of your rooms and call the
police from there?”
Terrell’s eyes brightened even more.
“Well, I can sure as shootin’ accommodate you there. You can have
your pick of the rooms.” He pulled a registration card out of a box
and a pen out of his pocket. “Just fill out this information
here.”
Jake filled in all of the blanks on
the card, fighting off a final wave of exhaustion. His brain felt
numb. When he was done, he handed the card back to Terrell. “You
take Visa?”
“Oh, we take ’em all.” Terrell
laughed, clearly delighted there’d be at least one customer
today.
Three minutes later the Donovans were
making their way across the parking lot toward room 15, which,
according to Terrell, had the best view of the pool.
“You want to tell me what that was all
about?” Carolyn asked.
Jake shrugged; kind of a shiver,
really. “I don’t know, I just got a funny feeling. This place is so
inbred, for all I know, that sniper on the hill might be Terrell’s
brother. Just didn’t seem like a good idea to share the story yet.
I want to tell it directly to a cop.”
They arrived at their room, and Jake
opened the door. Same decorator as the office.
Carolyn collapsed dramatically onto
the bed. “So are you going to call right away?”
“In a minute,” he said.