The Dead Boys (4 page)

But as he crept through the dark to his bed, the tree branch scraped across his window again. Now that his mom was gone, it almost seemed to want back in.

Teddy took two quick steps, leaped onto the mattress, and dove under the comforter. He pulled his arms and feet inside, a position from which he planned to ignore all further noises.

Still, it was going to be a long night.

The next morning, Teddy robotically spooned cereal into his mouth, occasionally missing and spilling it on the table. He hadn't slept all night. Thankfully, nothing else weird had happened, and when the sun came up, the world seemed normal again.

Parks do not completely change in a half hour,
Teddy thought,
and windows do not open themselves.

He had almost convinced himself that the day before had been a quirky bad dream by the time his mom whirled into the kitchen at eight thirty and handed him an envelope.

“Two chores for you to do while I'm at work,” she said. “Take this check over to the landlord at 613 Lynwood Court, and try to meet some more kids today. I saw a few outside, you know.” She gave him a purposeful look. “Do not sit in the house and surf the internet all day.
Comprendez?
”

“
Si, señora,
” Teddy replied. He pocketed the letter and dumped half a spoonful of Sugar Flakes into his lap.

His mom gave him a kiss and set a cell phone on the table beside him. “Be good,” she said. “My new work number is programmed into the phone.” She grabbed her purse and headed for the door.

Teddy looked out the big front window. Some kids were riding skateboards over a homemade wood ramp down the block. But the air above the scorching blacktop was shimmering with heat, distorting their shapes into a grotesque mirage.

Teddy promptly headed upstairs to the study and settled into the desk chair beneath the air-conditioning duct to surf the internet.

He clicked through some video game sites, but they reminded him of Albert and made him feel strangely guilty. So he typed in a search for Richland instead and found the local news website.

There was nothing about a missing chubby kid, which made him feel better. If Albert had run into real trouble, there would have been some mention of it. Teddy still felt queasy about hitting Henry Mulligan in the head with a rock—after just one day in town, he already had to watch his back. The changing park still bothered him too, but he decided to chalk it up to the heat and chaos of the encounter with Henry Mulligan at the river.

Teddy typed in a search for Leslie Groves Park, and Wikipedia articles about Richland and the Hanford Nuclear Site popped up. Teddy clicked on them and scrolled through the history sections, curious about his strange new home.

He discovered that Richland was originally no more than a few small desert farms irrigated by the Columbia River. That is, until 1943 when General Leslie R. Groves of the U.S. Army came to Washington hunting for a site to build nuclear reactors for the Second World War.

General Groves found the desert along the river to the north of Richland ideal. He swooped in, seized a chunk of land half the size of Rhode Island, and forcibly removed two farm towns and a small Indian tribe from the area. The army turned Richland into a closed government town as part of the Manhattan Project—a secret nuclear program for which the Hanford nuclear plant produced radioactive plutonium for the “Fat Man” atomic bomb used to obliterate Nagasaki, Japan.

By 1945, twenty-five thousand workers were living near the nuclear plant, and everything about the town was related to atomic energy. The bowling alley was called Atomic Lanes, and the uniforms for the high school had mushroom clouds on them. The government itself built houses for the families and provided them with everything they needed, from free bus service to lightbulbs. The Feds even planted trees in the yards.

Teddy discovered that each type of government house was assigned a letter. A-houses were the biggest. There were B-houses, C-houses, and so on, all the way to Z. There were some pictures, and when he scrolled through them, he was surprised to find one that looked exactly like the old home next door. It was an A-house.

There was also a section in the article about radioactive waste. Weapons-grade plutonium and uranium were made in Richland during the Cold War years, and by the time the last reactor was shut down in 1987, 53 million gallons of radioactive waste had been left behind. In fact, waste was secretly dumped straight into the Columbia River until 1971, and contamination was found downstream as far west as the Oregon coast.

The worst incidence of radioactive waste dumping, known as the “Green Run,” happened in 1949, when the government intentionally released a huge concentration of radiation into the air over two days, causing deadly diseases in humans and animals. In plants, the effect was unknown.

Teddy was almost through reading the article when a terrific bang startled him out of his chair. A distant clunk and hiss followed before the vent above him stopped pumping cold air.

He went downstairs to the kitchen. It already felt hot in the house, and it seemed to be getting hotter. He checked the thermometer in the window over the sink, which read almost eighty degrees inside. With any luck, he thought, the problem might be something obvious that he could fix—a handle he could reset, perhaps, like a breaker switch.

Outside the house, he found a green, sheet-metal air-conditioning unit against the beige wall. The unit was tilted at an odd angle, and blue fluid was bleeding down its exterior into a greasy puddle.

Teddy frowned—a leak was
not
something he could fix.

He got down on his hands and knees and looked under one end of the unit. The concrete pad to which the air conditioner was bolted was split down the middle. A tree root had cracked it and forced it apart, bending the thick metal housing of the unit in the process and tearing loose a copper hose.

There was clearly nothing he could do himself, so Teddy headed to the back door to go inside and call his mom. But when he tried the knob, it didn't turn. He shook it, but it was no use; the door had locked behind him.

With a sinking feeling, he realized that he'd left the Hide-a-Key inside. And the cell phone with his mom's new number was sitting beside it on the kitchen table.

Gazing through the window, Teddy cursed his own stupidity. He turned to his bike, which was leaning against the fence, and checked to make sure he still had the letter he was supposed to deliver. With no other options, he climbed on and pedaled off to find 613 Lynwood Court.

Biking through the heat, Teddy rolled along Saint Street until he came to a sign that said LYNWOOD COURT. He skidded to a stop and pulled out the letter to confirm the address—613 Lynwood Court.

The street ended in a cul-de-sac with a circular expanse of blacktop ringed by a ribbon of gray sidewalk. But there were no homes around it. Instead, Teddy saw only wood frames jutting from bare concrete foundations, mere skeletons of houses not yet built. Open trenches almost ten feet deep had been dug through the sand and tumbleweeds between the home sites for a future sewer line.

Teddy checked the street name again. It was definitely correct. He coasted over the blacktop pavement into the unfinished cul-de-sac for a closer look.

“Hello?” he called. There didn't seem to be any workmen around, but considering the desert heat at midday, he didn't blame them.

Suddenly, he heard the frantic banging of what sounded like a hammer. Teddy homed in on the pounding. It was coming from the second home site on the left.

There was a boy in plaid shorts, long white socks, and a T-shirt with a cartoon Chevy van on it sitting on the half-finished second floor of the house. He was at the top of a staircase with no rail, holding a hammer, and he seemed to be taking great delight in whacking things around him at random.

“Excuse me,” Teddy called out, waving to get the boy's attention, “do you know where 613 Lynwood Court is?”

The boy looked down at Teddy. “Who wants to know?” he asked.

“Me, I guess,” Teddy replied. “I've got a letter for them.”

“Next door.” The boy smirked and pointed to the empty foundation on the next lot over. “But I don't think they have a mailbox yet.”

“Weird,” Teddy mumbled, stuffing the letter back in his pocket. For a few moments he sat on his bike wondering what to do next, then the boy called down to him. “Hey, kid, you live in the neighborhood?”

“Since yesterday.”

“Where?” he demanded.

“By the old abandoned A-house.”

It seemed to be the right answer, because the boy nodded approvingly. “All right, then,” he said. “Wanna see something groovy?”

Teddy hesitated. The boy seemed suspicious of him, and Teddy wasn't sure he should be messing around on a construction site. But then again he
did
want to see something groovy, so he parked his bike on the sidewalk and stepped onto the site.

“I'm Walter, and this whole block is my domain,” the boy said as Teddy walked carefully up the incomplete stairs. “Until people move into the houses, I suppose. Isn't it great?”

“Will we get in trouble for being here?” Teddy asked, looking around. The floors were bare plywood with nails sticking up all over the place, and there was scrap wood scattered about. There were no walls either—only vertical two-by-fours every two feet that formed the frame of the house—and the roof wasn't on yet. It looked like a big, square wooden jail cell.

Walter ignored Teddy's question. “The workers leave stuff lying around when they go home.”

“Really? Like what?”

“Just today I found two lighters and a
Hot Rod
magazine—you should see the new Camaro.” Walter held up the magazine, dropping the centerfold open so Teddy could see the car. It looked like an old Camaro to him.

“But that's not all,” Walter said, wiggling his eyebrows. “The construction guys also leave their tools.”

“What's so cool about that?” Teddy asked.

With a grin, Walter raised the hammer and hurled it past Teddy's head into a sheet of wallboard. It smashed a hole through the sheet, and a cloud of white dust exploded into the air.

“Ha! You flinched!” Walter bent over, laughing hysterically as the wallboard dust settled on Teddy like fallout from a bomb.

“Fun stuff, huh?” Walter said, wiping tears from his eyes. “Now you do it. Go ahead. I won't flinch. I
don't
flinch.”

The damage made Teddy feel uneasy, but he had to admit, the hammer-throwing explosion was sort of cool. A screwdriver lay on the stairs. Teddy debated picking it up. He was pretty sure he could throw as well as Walter.

“C'mon, chicken,” Walter chided.

I'm not a chicken
, Teddy thought.

He snatched up the screwdriver and hurled it end over end between Walter's legs. The sharp tip buried itself in the stairs just below Walter's plaid shorts. It stuck there, vibrating back and forth.

He didn't mean to throw it so close, but Walter loved it. “Whoa! Faaaaa-ar out,” he cackled.

“Uh-oh,” Teddy said. “I think I damaged the stairway.” There was a large crack in the board where the tip of the screwdriver had stuck in.

“Yeah.” Walter grinned. “Now we're talkin'!” He pulled out one of the lighters he'd found and set the end of a short wooden dowel ablaze. “Look, it's the Olympic torch.” Teddy watched it burn, mesmerized for a moment by the dancing flame. But as he watched the torch burn, he was horrified to notice that the hand Walter held it with was missing its index finger.

“You like fire?” Walter said knowingly.

Teddy shook his head. The sun-dried wood around them looked dangerously flammable, and Walter's missing finger was downright creepy. “I think we should put it out,” he said.