Chapter Ten

CHAPTER TEN

COUNTDOWN TO ZERO HOUR 15 HOURS AND 27 MINUTES

“ASSUME EVERYTHING HERE can kill you,” said Steve.

The Waketa Township ladder truck had finally arrived at the plant and the local firefighters were hanging on every word of Steve’s briefing.

When someone says, If you don’t want to die, listen to me, you typically listen.

“Don’t sit. Don’t lean. Don’t touch,” he continued. “There’s no time to test what pieces of the rubble are radioactive and what’s safe, so it’s guilty till proven innocent today. No bare-skin contact. Masks on at all times. You’re firefighters. You fight smoke and fire. Today’s enemy is invisible. You can’t see it or smell it. You have no idea where it is. Because of this, you might be tempted to think it’s not that bad and you’re not in danger. Let me be clear: It is, and you are. You might not regret it today. But if you let down your guard, I promise you that in a year or two when the doctor tells you it’s cancer and there’s nothing they can do, you’ll regret it then.”

The local firefighters were scared shitless and they looked it.

They should be, Steve thought as the image of Vinny in the truck bed flashed in his mind.

Steve shouted out assignments and directions; it was one of his men for every two of theirs. As they headed out, Chief Loftus’s radio beeped.

“Engine Forty-Two calling in a second request for the foam trailer at the bridge off Route Seven near Carver Valley Elementary.”

“Request denied, Forty-Two,” Loftus said into the comms. “Our sole trailer is at the plant. Where you should be. Get here now.”

“Sir, we have a situation.”

“So do we, Dani,” said Loftus. “A nuclear meltdown. Unless you can top that, you are needed here. I cannot authorize those resources for anything less. I told you today would be about tough choices. I’ll make this choice for you. Get your engine to the plant, now.”

Dani slammed the radio back into the holder.

They would be out of foam in minutes and the fire was nowhere close to extinguished. Water wasn’t an option; it would only make the fuel-based fire spread. Foam was the only way to put it out—and every bit of foam in the county was going to the plant.

“Loftus denied the trailer request and ordered us to the plant,” Dani said as she jogged back down to the crew.

The other firefighters stared in disbelief. That denial was a death sentence for the boy.

“He wants us to just leave the kid?” Levon said.

“He wants us to help stop a nuclear meltdown,” said Frankie.

“Yeah, by abandoning a little kid who needs us.”

“Lee, c’mon. Waketa’s only got one truck, one ladder, one trailer. And one nuclear disaster.”

“But federal help will come for them,” Dani said. “The plant will get what it needs. Connor will get nothing. No one’s coming for him. We leave now, we know exactly what happens to the boy.”

“And if we stay, then what?” Frankie shot back. “You know we can’t do shit with that fire burning, and we have no way to put it out. A plane’s fuel tanks are in the wings. You know that, right? That was a big plane. Needs a lot of fuel. That wing seems to have plenty left to burn. And the other wing, by the way—where is it? Burning up a nuclear power plant? Fuck me, Chief. Keep the foam trailer there, we’re on our way. How is it anything besides that?”

“I’m not leaving Connor,” Dani said.

“That’s not your call!”

“I’m not going either,” Levon said.

Frankie couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Forget the fact that you’re disobeying a direct order. You’re saying that one life, one kid, is as important as everyone else’s combined. ’Cause you get it, right? You do get the stakes? Nuclear meltdown?”

“Take the truck, then,” Levon said. “If you want to walk away, take the truck.”

“It’s not about what I want to do! It’s about what we have to do! We go, I will never sleep at night. I know this. I will watch his dad die over and over again while I hear the boy call out for his mom, and I will rot inside like the spineless piece of shit I am. But a nuclear power plant is burning. We have no choice.”

Infighting was unusual for them. They all looked at one another, not sure where to go from here. Especially because none of them was wrong.

“Boggs. What’s your call?” Dani asked the rookie. “We go, we know what happens here. We stay, we still may not be able to get to him, and it probably means our jobs.”

“And to be fair, it could mean the fate of the whole country too,” Levon added, extending a hand to Frankie, who nodded.

Boggs listened, never turning his attention from the wing. “I’ll do whatever you decide,” he said as the foam began to sputter out of the hose. “But I became a firefighter to help people. If a single life isn’t enough to qualify, this isn’t the job I signed up for.”

The other three looked at one another.

Frankie swore under his breath. “All right. Let’s get the kid out.”

Steve stood under a stream of hot water watching his skin turn pink as he scrubbed the bar of soap against his arm. Body scoured, he quickly lathered shampoo into his hair and leaned his head back. He closed his eyes and mouth as whatever poisons he might’ve come in contact with slid down the drain. There was no conditioner in the decontamination zone. Conditioner made radioactive material stick to your hair.

The wet, clear plastic walls of the temporary shower blurred what was happening on the other side, but he could still make out the plant workers in full head-to-toe hazmat suits hosing down his turnout gear just outside the improvised emergency station. Ninety percent of radioactive material could be eliminated just by removing your outer layer of clothing and washing your skin.

The other ten percent wasn’t as easy to shed.

Survivability of an event like this came down to several factors: the length of time one was exposed to radiation, one’s proximity to said radiation, and the potency of the radiation. The strategy was to avoid exposure if you could, protect yourself when you couldn’t, and then clean it off quickly after the fact.

Whatever happened beyond that was out of your control.

As he shut off the water, a soft-toned ding rang out, followed by the sound of a throat clearing.

“All right, everyone.” Ethan’s voice came over the PA through every speaker at the plant. “We’ve got our bearings. We know a baseline. Time to act. Here’s what we have working for us: It was an isolated event. It wasn’t an earthquake with aftershocks. There’s no tsunami coming. We don’t know for sure, but we’re assuming there’re no more planes crashing.”

“Because they’d be shot down before they ever got the chance,” Steve said to no one, toweling off.

“The incident is over. These are our conditions. Whatever’s working is working. We have stabilized the plant.”

Steve pulled a clean, plant-issued sweatsuit off the stack as Ethan continued. The men didn’t know each other well, didn’t interact much. Steve stayed in the firehouse; Ethan stayed in the control room. They came together at quarterly meetings or the occasional training session, but that was it. He wondered how it would go between them the rest of the day.

“Any nonessential personnel still on-site are to evacuate the plant immediately. Essential personnel, if you are at an undamaged portion of the plant, leave a skeleton crew of minimum viable operators to ensure things continue running smoothly, but beyond that, every engineer, technician, operator—every spare brain in this plant—is to report to R2 control to work the problems we are facing.”

Steve pulled the sweatshirt on over his head and stepped into some disposable sandal slides. He was heading for the door when Ethan concluded, “We’re going to figure this out. We’re going to get through this. For our plant, our community, and for our families.”

Steve stopped in his tracks.

Damn it.

He’d been doing so well. He’d shut it out, all of it . It wasn’t that Matt and Claire hadn’t come to mind. He’d been thinking of his son and his wife constantly. But every time they did, he immediately compartmentalized—and they slipped away. He made himself busy, replacing his grief and worry with some task, some protocol, some procedure. He’d become a master at compartmentalization. He’d had to. It was the only way he’d been able to survive the past sixteen months since Claire died.

Steve thought about Matt, wondered where he was. Was he okay? Was he scared? Steve shut his eyes. Don’t. Focus. The school has protocols. They have emergency-preparedness plans. Trust it. Let it go. They got him. He’s fine. That was his new mantra: Trust it. Trust it. Trust it.

But as he stood there in the quiet hall outside the decontamination zone, without a crew to protect or a fire to fight, the thought of his only child was too potent to shut out.

Since his mom had passed, Matt hadn’t been able to compartmentalize like his dad. Matt was eleven, and although the boy liked to think that was full-grown, he was just a child. A child in pain. Matt didn’t need protocols. He needed tenderness, love, vulnerability, attention—everything Claire had given him. On his best days, Steve was hardly capable of accessing those things for himself. How was he supposed to share them with his boy?

Since Claire’s death, Steve felt constantly in over his head. He had no idea how to be a single father, how to be both mom and dad. He had no idea how to process his own grief or understand his own feelings. How in the world was he supposed to help Matt do it? Every day, Steve just wanted to hit pause on everything and scream as loud as he could, I don’t know! It was all moving too fast; if he could just pause it all, he could figure it out. But that wasn’t possible. So, instead, he compartmentalized and just kept going.

Steve knew it wouldn’t work in the long term. Matt’s acting out was the first warning that the ways they were getting by were unsustainable. But Steve also knew that in order to make his way through this grief, this pain, he would have to ask for help. And while Steve was great at many things, asking for help was not one of them.

Steve hustled to the R2 control room, but when he turned a corner, he stopped in his tracks. Members of the plant’s emergency response team in charge of on-site medical had set up rooms for the injured. Steve and his crews had assisted many of the people who had been transported there—people who were hit with debris or injured in the impact. But so far, only one person Steve knew of needed to be treated for radiation exposure.

Steve peered through the glass pane in the door at Vinny, alone, stretched out on a bed, eyes swollen shut. If someone had told Steve how quickly the radiation would take hold, he wouldn’t have believed it. The bright red skin. The oozing blisters. The moaning in pain. It was the pictures from training brought to life that fast. It was only when Steve heard footsteps approaching that he turned away.

Steve headed down the hall and thought again of Claire. Of her lying in the hospital bed, tubes twisting in and out of her body, as the staff did everything they could to fight the cancer. Compared to Vinny’s suffering, her death seemed almost merciful.

Almost.

“—then. Let’s focus.”

Ethan was organizing the troops as Steve walked into the control room. The two men acknowledged each other.

“We got two major issues we need to solve,” Ethan said. “One: How do we fix the structural leaks in the spent fuel pool? Two: Do we vent the accumulating hydrogen in the pool’s containment building? We do not have time to work these problems individually. They will be worked simultaneously. Every person in this room is smart enough to figure this out. Every person in this room is trained and qualified to be here. Every person in this room will contribute. Got it?”

Heads nodded.

Ethan split the room into two groups. “Steve, you’re with pool damage. You guys are Red Team. Me and Joss are on venting; we’re Blue Team. Red Team, head to the training classroom on the first floor. Blue Team, stay here.”

And with that, they all went to their groups, focused and motivated.

“All right,” Ethan said to the Blue Team while the Red Team filed out. “The white smoke and whether or not we vent is the biggest problem. Because if we get that wrong, the pool damage won’t matter. We will have already lost the whole plant and the town.”