Chapter Two

CHAPTER TWO

COUNTDOWN TO ZERO HOUR 16 HOURS AND 37 MINUTES

FIFTY-FIVE MILES SOUTH of the town of Waketa, every office building in downtown Minneapolis went black. Every traffic light blinked off. Every supermarket freezer stopped humming. Every heater in every house in the surrounding suburbs clicked off.

A man at a gas station heard the pump shut off but his truck’s tank was only a third full. A kid at recess pushed the silver button on the drinking fountain and ran off, still thirsty, after nothing came out. People in an elevator fell into one another as the cab jolted to a stop. The couple in the front row of a roller coaster looked down the steep drop, wondering if the long pause was part of the ride. A surgeon stayed his hand, the scalpel hovering over the patient’s chest cavity, no longer able to see in the pitch-black OR.

As the nearly three million residents of the Minneapolis–St. Paul area looked at one another in that first moment, wondering aloud, “What happened?,” most were curious but not terribly concerned.

It was the first misjudgment of the day.

In Waketa, the impact had been less subtle.

A woman flinched as a neighbor’s front window shattered at the boom.

Her arm shot out, yanked forward by her dog’s leash as the golden retriever took off down the road. Running after him, she lost control and fell forward, slicing open her knee, as the dog dragged her onto her back, where, looking up, she watched in disbelief as an aircraft engine dropped from the sky, headed straight for her.

Flames roiling out the back, fan blades still spinning, the engine whistled in its incoming approach. The woman closed her eyes and curled into a ball, and moments later, she felt the heat as it passed overhead before crashing into a neighbor’s mailbox, sending catalogs, bills, and torn metal in every direction.

Half a mile away, a farmer bouncing along in his tractor watched a burning chunk of metal sail through the sky and smash into the side of his barn, sending cows running and splinters of rust-red siding high in the air. Distracted, he jammed his foot into the brake pedal at the last second, cranking the tractor wheel to the right in a desperate attempt to miss the single row of aircraft seats that crashed into the freshly tilled soil in front of him.

The seats were not empty.

In the center of town, the water tower stood tall, WAKETA declared proudly in faded green across the front. No rebellious teens were up on the platform scratching their names into the paint as generation after generation of young Waketans always had, which was a stroke of luck, as that was the exact point where a four-hundred-pound beverage cart impaled the bulbous metal tank. Water exploded into the air and began pouring out the side as the most recognizable landmark of the town bled out, splashing mud and grass up onto its rusty, weathered supports below.

Not far away, a section of fuselage hurtled into the center of Main Street with such impact that two manhole covers shot into the air like steel Frisbees. When they fell back down to earth, one crashed through the bank’s front window while the other landed on top of a pizza delivery car. The owner of the pizza parlor and the bank’s secretary both rushed out to see what had happened. All they could do was gape at each other and the destruction all around them.

Fishermen standing in their waders on the banks of the Mississippi River flinched at the big boom, wondering aloud: “What the hell was that?” Moments later, they ducked for cover, pelted from above by falling objects smacking into the river. The fishermen watched charred debris float downstream around them, everything from a suitcase and a coat to tiny bottles of Jack Daniel’s and a still burning book. But it was a shoe bobbing past that stopped the men cold.

The foot was still in it.

A grazing herd of white-tailed deer suddenly took off, startled, not knowing what the hissing whistle of the incoming metal shrapnel was. Leaping through the trees and brush, they fled out of the forest, into the open area beside the highway, directly in front of the oncoming headlights of a semitruck.

The driver slammed on the brakes but didn’t cut the wheel—unlike the two-door Honda beside it. The car swerved to the right, missing the deer but clipping the semi’s back wheels. Spinning around, the car became lodged under the truck, pancaked flat as the semi dragged it down the highway, sparks erupting from the undercarriage.

Brakes locked, the semi’s driver struggling to maintain control, the truck jackknifed, twisting perpendicular to the road. The box tipped and rolled forward—one, two, three times—flattening four cars in its path while its cargo rolled out the back. Wood pallets splintered into pieces as cardboard boxes filled with bottles of olive oil burst on the highway. Broken glass and thousands of gallons of oil covered the asphalt in every direction.

A family sedan rear-ended a pickup truck full of yard equipment. The tailgate dropped, and rakes, leaf blowers, and a riding lawn mower scattered across the highway as bags of lawn clippings burst, sending grass and leaves into the air and onto windshields, making the cars’ disoriented drivers swerve.

A large SUV lost control and dropped down into the grassy median, where it hit a boulder, flipped up on its nose, and somersaulted end over end into oncoming traffic on the other side of the highway.

A car full of college kids heading home for the weekend didn’t see the vehicle in front of them brake until it was too late. The one who wasn’t wearing a seat belt was violently ejected, his body landing fifty yards away at the edge of the forest where the deer had first appeared.

In less than a minute, the traffic on I-35, the primary route in and out of Waketa, Minnesota, came to a complete stop in both directions as seventeen vehicles piled up in a tangle of twisted metal and broken bodies. By the time it was done, the only things moving were the few surviving deer leaping awkwardly around the mangled, burning cars and injured, bloody humans as they made their way to the woods on the other side of the road.

Carver Valley Elementary School’s playground was buzzing, the kids sugar-rushing from their class parties on the last day of school before the Easter weekend.

Legs pumping, fourth-graders on the swings went higher and higher. A group of second-graders were on a ladybug hunt under the tall oak tree. The sixth-graders, the big kids on campus, played soccer; the game was tied, two to two.

Miss Carla knelt beside one of her first-grade students, who was crying loudly, sand stuck to his scraped knee.

“It’s okay, Leo,” she said. “Let’s get you to the nurse. She can—”

A loud boom sounded. Everything halted.

The swings went back and forth, propelled by gravity and momentum, no longer the pumping kicks of nine-year-old girls. A ladybug crawled out from under a leaf and no one noticed. The soccer ball rolled to a stop on its own. Miss Carla instinctively pulled Leo in close as both their gazes rose to the sky.

Every student, every teacher, the crossing guard, the janitor—they all looked up in awe as an aircraft wing, fully intact but separated from the plane, careened over their heads like a flying saucer. They watched as the wing disappeared over the line of trees beyond the parking lot, and together, they waited for what came next—a deafening crash followed by a roiling cloud of orange flames and a plume of black smoke rising up into the clear blue sky.

The church long behind him, Steve dropped his speed to eighty-five and gawked at the mushroom cloud rising into the air to his left. He instinctively wanted to turn the wheel toward it as he wondered, Is that… the school?

Matt.

Adrenaline shot through Steve’s system. Was Matt okay? Should he go to his son? His mind flashed to Claire’s fourth-grade classroom, even though it no longer belonged to her. If she were there, Matt could have run to her. He could have been safe with his mom.

But not now. She was gone. And Matt was alone.

Steve rode the brakes, coming to a stop in the middle of the road, his heart pounding with parental worry. Either figure it out and fix it or keep going. Steve took a deep breath, forcing himself to look at the big picture—clearly, not through a distorted lens of fear and grief.

He could tell the billowing black smoke was actually on the far side of the tree line, the river side. It was in the general direction of the school, but it was not coming from the school itself. Carver Valley Elementary was fine. Matt was fine.

Steve nodded and told himself that he was doing the right thing as he accelerated the truck back up to felony-level speed, racing away from the area. Matt was okay and Steve had to get to work. Because damage there was a far greater threat.

As he tore down the single-lane dirt road, taking in the smoke plumes large and small that rose across the whole valley, Steve shook his head. Things like this didn’t happen in a place like this, a place this quiet. And Steve knew that disbelief coupled with the kind of confusion and terror he’d felt in the church was being felt right now all around Waketa, including at the school. It couldn’t get any more horrific than a plane crash like that, he knew they were all thinking.

He knew they were wrong.

He turned at the sign that proudly declared CREATED TODAY TO POWER TOMORROW and came to a stop at the main entrance to Clover Hill nuclear power plant. Holding his badge out the window, Steve was surprised when the door to the security shed opened and an armed guard in a full-body hazmat suit came out. The man scanned the badge, and Steve’s face popped up on the computer in the guard shack.

STEVE J. TOSTIG—FIRE CHIEF

CLOVER HILL ON-SITE FIRE DEPARTMENT

FULL OPERATIONAL CLEARANCE

“Bill, is it that bad?” Steve asked, motioning to the hazmat suit.

Bill shrugged as he pushed a button and the arm to the gate went up. “You tell me. They’re too busy to call us and give an update. Read that how you will. I’ll radio your crew and let them know you’re headed back.”

Broken glass crunched under her boots as Joss stepped over one of the framed diplomas that had fallen off her home office’s wall. Grabbing her work go-bag, she brought it out to the kitchen, setting it on the coffee-splattered newspaper she wouldn’t get to finish reading.

Powering on the satellite phone, she rifled through the bag’s contents—full-body hazmat suit, masks, gloves, rubber boots—until she found the bottle of pills. Shaking one into her hand, she knocked back the radioprotective potassium iodide with some of the still-warm coffee she wouldn’t get to finish drinking.

“C’mon…” Joss whispered impatiently as the sat phone booted up. Taking a deep breath, she stared out the kitchen window at the smoke rising in the distance while she waited.

Behind her in the living room, last night’s empty Chinese takeout container sat on the unopened moving box she used as an end table. She’d been back for nine months, but so far, her office was the only room in the house that showed it. After throwing a coat on over her worn brown sweater and faded blue jeans, she grabbed her keys from a hook on the wall with a glance down at the set of Thomas the Train picture books covered in Thomas the Train wrapping paper that sat on the counter. It seemed like another lifetime when she’d planned her day to include a post-office run to drop off her nephew’s birthday gift, which, she realized now, probably wouldn’t get there in time.

The phone in her hand beeped and the screen lit up. Joss looked down as an alert box popped up, confirming that what she’d assumed had happened had actually happened.

INCIDENT AT CLOVER HILL NPP

REPORT IMMEDIATELY

POSSIBLE LEVEL 7

Joss tossed the go-bag over a shoulder and hurried out to her car without glancing in a mirror to see if she still had sleep in her green eyes or if her shoulder-length brown hair needed to be brushed. There was no time, and none of it mattered anyway.

When you work in nuclear power, you never fully forget what it is you do. How dangerous it is, how horrific the potential could be. You always, always respect the potential.

But you learn to let go of the fear.

Workdays become routine and uneventful in a strictly regulated industry full of regimented protocols enacted with airtight precision by highly trained professionals. Accidents don’t happen because accidents can’t happen. So when the unthinkable does occur, when something does go wrong, the fear returns, swift and unrelenting—as Joss assumed everyone inside the plant was just finding out.

But her hand was steady, her heart rate low. Because Joss had always known a day like this was not a matter of if but when .

And she knew that when it came, when the rest of the world discovered what she already knew, while they were tearing themselves apart in fear of the horrifying possibilities—she would be steady.

For her, controlling the fear was easy.

Because it never left. Joss was always scared.