The Longest Night (38 page)

“You're saying this now,” Paul said flatly, disgusted. He willed himself to keep his bearing: If he went apeshit they wouldn't listen. He planted his feet shoulder width apart and measured out each word in doses. “I know that building. Its vents lead directly to the outside air. There's going to be a radioactive plume, and it's invisible, but it doesn't just go up into outer space. It follows the wind.”

“We don't know if there's much radiation going out,” Richards said, but Vogel nodded at Paul.

“The prevailing wind is to the southeast,” Paul said. “That's where the plume will go, probably for hundreds of miles. It will drift right over the town. We
do
know this.” He turned to Vogel. “This kind of thing doesn't affect people immediately, you know that. They won't be falling over in the streets. It's years from now, the blood cancers, lung cancers. Think of children. And the unborn—you
know
this, Vogel. Radiation before birth has ten times the effect.”

Richards also looked at Vogel, who examined the ground.

“I have a newborn baby,” Paul said. Then understanding bloomed suddenly in his mind, and he nearly laughed. “Oh, I see,” he said. “
Your
families already know.”

There was a pause. Richards shifted. “Yes. My family and I will be leaving as soon as they let me go. Which should be soon; I didn't ride in the ambulance.”

“No,” said Paul icily, “you didn't.” He turned to Vogel. “And your wife?” he asked, trying, in the dark and from his distance, to look the health physicist in the eye.

“I told her,” Vogel said quietly.

“What did you tell her to do?”

“I told her to take the kids to her sister's in Seattle.”

“Thank you for being honest,” Paul said. He turned back to Richards. “And what did you tell Mrs. Richards to do? Did you tell her to go on a little trip for a few days, a week? Or did you tell her to stay right where she was with your little girl, because it's so safe?”

“You're out of line, Collier. What my wife does is my own business.” His eyes squinted. “I'm sure you wish you could say the same.”

Vogel looked at Richards curiously.

Paul was so stunned by this cruelty that he stood rooted to the spot. He felt as if his heart and lungs and gut had suddenly been wrung out once, hard, and released some kind of poison in him.

“Can I call my wife?” he asked. His voice came out ragged and he struggled to control it. “Or can you? Can someone please at least tell the operators' families?”

Richards and Vogel waited, looking at each other.

“All right. We will,” Richards said, suddenly generous. “We'll give you that, Collier. We'll call your wife.”

“And the other operators'—”

“Don't go overboard.” Richards's voice cut him off. “We said we'd call your wife.”

“You will, personally?” Paul asked. “Or you, Vogel? Which one of you?” His voice was too loud and he found himself looking from one man to the other, his finger waggling back and forth.

“We need to get you to decontamination,” Vogel spoke up, almost chipper. “Come on, now. The master sergeant will call your wife. Won't you?” He looked back at Richards.

“Yes,” Richards said. “I'll call her.”

Paul felt as if the tight strings holding his muscles together had suddenly been cut, and his shoulders sagged. “All right,” he said, and he walked ahead of Vogel back to the car. He could see the nurse's face peering out fearfully and was ashamed that he had lost control. “He'll call her?” he muttered to Vogel. “He'll call Nat for me?”

“Yes,” Vogel said brightly, climbing into the driver's seat. “He said he would. We're going to get you three all cleaned up.”

“How are you going to do that?” the nurse asked, scooting aside to let Paul in. Her eyes flicked to Paul's face as if for reassurance, but he stared straight ahead, not wanting to give anyone anything. It struck him how ridiculous and erratic all these safety efforts were: Vogel tried to stay away from him outside, but was now sitting with him inside a car. Did anyone know what was going on here?

“Don't worry about a thing,” Vogel said. “The sooner we get you clean, the sooner we can get you home.”

“Will it be safe for us to be around our children?” the nurse asked.

“Yes, eventually.”

“I was in the ambulance the longest,” the driver blurted. “I'm worse off than either of them.”

“But we were right next to the body,” the nurse pointed out, which, Paul knew, was a bigger concern.

“Are you taking us to a hospital?” the driver asked.

“We can't do that,” Vogel said, pulling out onto the highway as a police officer stepped aside to let him through. “We need to get you decontaminated and keep you away from the public for a while before we do anything else.”

“My insides are sick,” the driver said, his voice loud now, quavering. “I can feel them. They're melting like goddamn popsicles.”

“Calm down,” Paul said. “That's impossible.”

“I'm going to die now, just because of that stupid man,” the driver raged. “Why did we have to drive him anyplace? He was already dead. Did you see his
face
?” He whirled on Paul, jabbed an accusing finger in his face. “
You
don't care if you die!”

The nurse looked at Paul, trying to determine whether this were true. Paul recalled the cigarettes in his pocket, found them, and shoved one toward the driver, who stared at it, strings of saliva quivering, finger still naming Paul. “
Take
it,” Paul said, and finally the man did. Paul lit it and one for the nurse, also. The ambulance driver turned forward again and sat over his cigarette, sniffling. Paul gave him the dignity of pretending not to hear.

He
did
care whether he lived or died. It occurred to him that this had been voluntary, this mess he was in, though it hadn't felt that way in the moment. What he wouldn't give to be back at home with Nat and his children: his new baby, sweet as a bunny, swaddled in cotton; his goofy big girls springing from the couch and dancing at his homecomings. Nat, hurt eyed and angry; would she forgive him now? But he couldn't have left Webb, and his eyes burned over the thought of that fatherless twenty-year-old, a lot like Paul if Paul had been softer, less guarded, a better person. How could Paul have lived with himself if he'd abandoned him, left him facedown on wet cement to take his last breath alone?

He tapped the small, flat cigarette box in his pocket. It felt comforting there, a light weight. There were two cigarettes left. Though he craved one, he felt he should keep them for later. Suddenly this seemed very important, as if saving them were a test of some kind.

Paul took one glance back as they pulled away. The headlights of the small group of cars lit up a circle in the dark, and just beyond them, invisible, sat the ambulance, its lifeless passenger throbbing a sphere of radiation into the desert night.

C
OLD WATER POURED OVER
and around the bar of soap in Paul's hand. He shivered. He had stood in this shower for two hours now, and the bar was translucent, a flinty hole starting in the center. He pushed at the hole with his thumb.

A health physicist in a radiation suit peeked into the room, his head covered by a white hood that cinched almost goofily around his face. “Keep washing,” he called. “I'll test you in ten minutes.” His eyes lingered on Paul for a moment. Paul had spent much of his first hour sweeping his own vomit down the drain, and he seemed to make the doc nervous.

The ambulance driver, who stood next to Paul, jerked out of his lull and slapped his bar of soap against his chest, washing in wide circles. Paul placed his thin bar on his own shoulder. He was freezing. The bar hardly lathered. It was some kind of industrial-strength oil soap, yellow and stinky. Robotically Paul wiped it over his head, down his chest, armpits, balls, feet, up and around again, while the ambulance driver did the same. They swung through these motions without speaking.

The scrubbing, Paul knew, would remove only the scantest amount of radiation. The rest of it throbbed within their bodies, fading slowly in proportion to their exposure. He wondered bitterly if the main reason they were kept washing themselves was so that they'd have something to do.

Still, obediently, he washed. Sometimes it kept Webb's crushed face away. Other times there was nothing he could do: His mind lit there again and again, as if a path to that image had been greased in his brain and it was the only place his thoughts could go.

The door creaked open, and his head jerked up. In came a new health physicist, also in a hazard suit, leading three men: Chief Sechrist, the firefighter Esrom, and Master Sergeant Richards. Paul spied Richards and felt his upper lip rise. He turned back to his washing as if it were possible to ignore anyone when you stood naked in a big empty room, rubbing yourself like an ape.

“Clothes off,” the health physicist said to the newcomers, unwrapping three bars of soap and laying them on a bench like gifts. “Wash until I tell you to stop.” He collected their belongings, even wallets and keys, in a large garbage bag. “These will be buried,” he added, watching them defiantly as if they might rise up in rebellion over lighters and ballpoint pens. Each man took his bar of soap and moved toward the showers. Then the doc gestured to Paul and the ambulance driver. “You two, over here.”

Paul sloshed ankle-deep past the three clothed men and over to a sink, and the driver followed. The doc turned to them and switched on his radiation detector. It buzzed perkily over their bodies, up behind them, to the tops of their heads, down the front. Paul was shaking unabashedly now; the shower water had gone cold an hour before. He heard a yelp from one of the new men entering. “Christ, this is cold,” said Richards. Paul wanted to grab the back of his boss's head and smash it into the floor. Instead he stared bleakly at the radiation wand, heard its busy chirps gathering speed. When the wand cruised over his hands and wrists it revved ecstatically, as if to announce that Paul were winning something.

“Do you know if they're evacuating Idaho Falls?” Paul asked, trying to keep his voice low, but the men in the showers looked over anyway.

“I have no information that they're doing anything of the sort,” the health physicist said.

Paul glanced over his shoulder to Richards's bare ass, white and hairy. “Master Sergeant,” he called. “Did you contact my wife?”

“What?” Richards shouted, his hands over his head, lathering soap.

“Don't step there,” the ambulance driver warned Richards. “Collier puked there.”

Richards glanced at Paul as if this were disgusting, as if Paul could have helped it. He turned his back, rinsing his hair.

The health physicist clicked off his monitor, set it aside, and produced a fresh bar of soap. He held it out until Paul, struggling to focus, took it. “Keep washing,” he said.

H
OURS LATER, CLEANER AND
yet dirtier than he had ever been in his life, Paul found himself shuffling into a windowless waiting room. His hair was parted and combed and he was wearing a white dress shirt and black slacks, though he had no idea where these had originated. He felt like a little boy ready for church. His skin stung raw; it twitched when it rubbed against his clothing. Every minute or so his whole body would clench and spasm in a giant tremor, and he felt as if he would never be warm. He crouched in a folding chair, his hands in his lap. The floor was gray and the walls were gray and the ceiling was gray. There was no one else in the room.

“You,” a man's voice said, and Paul nearly toppled out of the folding chair. He stumbled to his feet.

It was yet another health physicist, his white suit crinkling as he pulled a dosimeter from his hip. The docs kept changing so that no one in particular would take on too much exposure. “Roll up your sleeves,” this one said, nudging his glasses up onto his nose with his wrist.

Paul followed him to the sink by the wall, rolled his sleeves to his elbows, and allowed the familiar, clicking monitor to roam around him.

“Where are we?” Paul asked. The ambulance driver was in the room now, pacing the far wall opposite.

“You're in the gas-cooled reactor facility,” the doc said, without looking up. He seemed either sad or slightly bored. His dark eyes were magnified by the curve in his large, heavy spectacles.

“Why this place?” Paul asked.

He shrugged. “It was as good a place as any.” He set the monitor aside and produced a large squirt bottle of bright purple fluid. “Potassium permanganate,” he explained, shooting the liquid up Paul's forearms, through his fingers, swirling it over his wrists with a flourish, as if he were decorating a cake. “Rub,” he said.

Paul watched the juice dribble down his fingers and into the drain. He was suddenly reminded of Nat, how she'd dig around in the garden and chat with him as she rinsed her hands under the hose, mud running rivulets off her arms. Always fussing with those tomatoes in the backyard. When he thought about Nat, his stomach wove into a knot. He shook his head, once, twice, hard, which the doc seemed to accept as some mild tic; he glanced at Paul but let it go.

Paul was trying not to talk too much. He knew he'd been attracting attention in those first hours after the accident, bleating his pathetic questions about evacuation and when he could call his family. He needed to shut up and look for some kind of an opportunity. He might be able to ask someone else to call Nat for him, someone who'd get to leave sooner than he would. The docs were not even letting him near a phone. They seemed to fear what he'd say, as if he were the sort to stir up trouble without reason. Paul was their most contaminated man, and they were keeping their eye on him.