Chapter Nine

CHAPTER NINE

COUNTDOWN TO ZERO HOUR 15 HOURS AND 39 MINUTES

THE PROBLEM WITH being a fireman in a small community was that you knew almost every victim and their families by name. So as Engine 42 made its way to the south entrance of Clover Hill with siren blaring and lights blazing, the dark pillars of smoke, large and small, that popped up along the horizon all around them felt personal.

One might be a house fire; it looked awfully close to the Vasquezes’ place. Another—a car crash? That was near the spot where Roosevelt Road took a sharp turn at the bottom of Fred Clarke’s land. But they had no idea. No one could call in for help.

“How are we going to get to them all?” asked Boggs, the rookie.

None of the firefighters answered. They didn’t want to say it aloud.

We’re not.

Dani and Levon clocked the elementary school across the field, thinking the same thing. The most important person in each one’s world was inside that building. Her daughter. His wife. Did they have any idea how much danger they were in, how bad the situation could get? Were they scared? Probably. But not nearly enough.

Dani thought of Brianna, already without a father—what if she was without a mother too? Who would take care of her? Marion, of course. But Daddy was getting older and he wasn’t in the best of health. What would happen to her baby girl if something happened to both Dani and Marion?

That was Dani’s worst fear as a firefighter. Not her own death—orphaning her child.

Clover Hill’s footprint was enormous. Land in Waketa was cheap, and the plan, way back when the plant was built, was for rapid expansion. But growth never came, and every effort to sell the land failed, seeing as no farmer could get land that close to a nuclear plant insured. So the space went untouched for decades, creating, ironically, countless acres of pristine nature preserves.

As they passed the wide swaths of rich Minnesota soil and rugged woodlands along the winding Mississippi River, Dani couldn’t help but think of “the Zone.” The thousand-square-mile exclusion zone surrounding Chernobyl—forbidden to humans, reclaimed by nature—an area so many families had called home before the accident, now desolate and uninhabited.

Pripyat before the accident could have been Waketa’s sister city; it was the town where the employees of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant worked and raised their families—families who were forced out of their homes with only what they could carry, forced to leave their animals in the pastures and their fields to grow over. Pripyat was the center of the Zone. No longer a quaint hamlet in the countryside, the town was now nothing more than a creepy time capsule of a frozen moment in history: Abandoned apartments with clothes still in the washing machine, food left to rot in the fridge. Rusted cars lining weed-covered streets, gas still in their tanks. Empty classrooms; pencils on desks; textbooks open; April 26, 1986, still written on the blackboard. The Zone was a geographical freak, cast out from the rest of society, left to rot in its own mistakes.

It was unthinkable that something like that could happen here, Dani thought. But surely that’s what the people of Pripyat had thought too.

As the road sloped down toward the river, the fire engine rounded a curve, then suddenly braked hard. The firefighters whiplashed as the rig came to an abrupt stop.

“Oh my God,” Frankie muttered.

Piling out of the truck, they jogged down to the two-lane bridge, struggling to make sense of what they were looking at. The bridge was completely impassable. Because lying across it was the wing of an aircraft. A gargantuan, shredded metal slab of machinery…

… that burned.

The air reeked of jet fuel. With each step closer they took, the heat became more intense. The firefighters stared in awe at the bright orange flames leaping off the wing’s flat surface and reaching high into the air. Thirty feet below, the Mississippi River raged.

The wing was wedged into the bridge like a cork in a bottle, and the firefighters knew they did not have the time, manpower, or equipment to remove it. Which was fine; they would simply turn around and find another way to the plant, viewing this as nothing more than an impassable road they would deal with later.

If not for what they saw as they got closer.

A minivan had met the wing head-on. Its bumper, hood, and front two wheels were smashed completely flat and pinned underneath the wing. The vehicle must have twisted as it was dragged along under the wing, because the van now hung out over the river like a plank off the side of a ship. The bulk of the van—the passenger interior all the way to the back bumper—remained intact, albeit beat up. But the van now dangled out over the water in the middle of the bridge, its rear wheels still spinning, U2’s “Beautiful Day” blaring out of the van’s speakers.

While the wing was burning, the van was not… yet. The most intense section of fire was at the front of the wing, closer to the firefighters than to the van—but the position of the wing, wedged like it was, made it impossible for the firefighters to reach the vehicle because of the flames. They tried to see inside the van, but even from that distance, they had to shield their eyes from the blaze. Dani shifted to the side for a better angle. She was the first to see inside clearly.

Blood-covered deflated airbags in the front. Behind the wheel, a middle-aged man stirred. Next to him in the passenger seat was a middle-aged woman, blood oozing from a severe head wound. Her motionless body made it clear she was gone. In the far back row of the van, sitting all by herself, was a teenage girl. Maybe thirteen? She wore hot-pink headphones, her head resting at an unnatural angle. Like her mother, she was utterly motionless.

Dani called out to the other firefighters, “Adult female, front-seat passenger. Teenage female, back row, driver side. Both likely deceased. Driver is middle-aged male, alive. Badly injured—”

Dani stopped cold. She’d just gotten a good look at the middle of the van.

“Middle row. Bucket seat, passenger side,” Dani said, her voice shaky. “Young child. Male.” The little boy was too far away for Dani to hear him, but she knew what a four- or five-year-old’s cries sounded like. “Alive.”

Dani and the team sprinted for the truck.

Frankie was the first to the engine. He hopped into the driver’s seat, put the truck in gear, and began positioning the rig as close to the bridge as he could. Dani and Boggs didn’t wait for the engine to stop moving before they hoisted themselves up, grabbed their helmets, and started unloading the hose. Levon ran down the edge of the embankment toward the water to get as close as he could to the van, but he was still over twenty feet away.

“Sir!” he yelled to the man in the driver’s seat, cupping his hands around his mouth. “Sir, can you hear me?”

The man behind the wheel looked up. Confused. Probably concussed. But his eyebrows raised slightly in acknowledgment, although Levon wondered if he was merely registering noises and lights around him.

“Sir, can you turn off the car?”

“Engine Forty-Two requesting foam trailer at the bridge off Route Seven near Carver Valley Elementary,” Dani said into the radio at her shoulder as she hoisted a tightly folded hose onto her other arm. “Class B fire. Jet fuel and auto. Two victims, one adult, one child. Two survivors, one adult, one child.”

“Sir! Can you—” Levon paused, taking the megaphone Boggs handed him. “Sir,” he repeated, his voice projecting loudly across the river to the van. “Can you turn off the car?”

The man blinked at Levon a few times, then looked ahead as if it had just dawned on him that he was in a car. He reached forward, and a moment later the van’s back wheels stopped spinning and Bono’s voice stopped blaring out of the shattered driver’s-side window. With that, the sound of the river rushing grew louder.

“That’s great,” Levon said. “Great. What’s your name?”

The man thought for a second, then said something.

“Paul?” Levon tried, reading his lips. The man nodded. “Paul, we’re gonna get you out of there. What do you—no. No, look at me, Paul. Stay with me, man. Paul, what do you do?”

“I… I’m…” Paul said, his voice faint and far away. Levon could barely hear him. “ER,” Paul continued. “A doctor.”

“Fantastic. Look, here’s what we’re going to do, Doc—no, look at me. Stay with me.”

But Paul had seen her. He stared at his wife’s lifeless body, dumbfounded. Levon watched as the gamut of emotions played out on Paul’s face: disbelief, panic, grief, anger, more. He reached up for the rearview mirror, grimacing in pain, and angled it to the back. The horror of discovery played itself out all over again at the sight of his daughter.

Paul next tried to turn to check on his son, but the pain and the way he was pinned in made it difficult. Through wide, tear-filled eyes, the little boy watched his dad struggle. Levon could see Paul talking to his son, and the son seemed to be answering his dad, but Levon could barely hear what they were saying. After a moment, Paul stopped straining to see his son and faced forward, bowed his head, and cried.

At the rig, Frankie initiated the aqueous-film-forming foam pump. The faded yellow tube jerked to life and, seconds later, a dense white foam shot out of the hose in Dani’s hands, raining down with precision on the base of the fire. Levon glanced at the other members of the crew. There was no need to talk. They all understood the situation. Until that fire was out, there was no conceivable way to reach Paul and his son.

Movement inside the van brought Levon back; looking over, he saw Paul’s focus turn from his son to himself as he started to examine his own situation more closely.

“No, don’t, Paul,” Levon said. “Don’t look down there. We’ll get you out, then we’ll handle it. Look at me. Stay with me, Doc.”

Paul ignored Levon’s pleas, checking out his legs before he explored the injuries on his torso. His hands worked with a doctor’s precision across his abdomen and when he held them up a moment later, Levon could see the thick layer of dark red blood coating his fingers.

Levon raised the bullhorn to talk to Paul, but the doctor slowly shook his head. Paul was dying and he knew it. Now so did Levon.

Dani, still working the foam hose, witnessed this silent exchange between the two men and the back of her neck went numb.

She was about to watch this man live out her worst fear.

“Paul,” Levon said. “Paul, listen, we’re—”

But the man ignored Levon, the firefighters, the burning wing, and the river below and focused on the only thing that mattered anymore: his son. From his car seat, the boy cried, mouthing one word clearly over and over.

Mommy .

“Mommy’s sleeping,” Paul said to his son, his voice breaking. “It’s okay, buddy. It’s going to be okay.”

Paul winced in agony, pressing his hands to his abdomen, trying to stanch the bleeding.

“Connor,” Paul said to his son through clenched teeth. “Connor, this is important. You need to listen to the firemen. They’re going to help you, but you need to listen. You need to do what they say. Can you do that? Can… can you…”

His tears slowing, Connor nodded, his mop of blond hair going up and down.

“I love you, buddy. I love you so much,” Paul said to his son as his head began to droop. He slumped forward, rested his head on the wheel. “I’m… I’m going to sleep for a little bit too.”

And with that, his eyes closed forever.

As the firefighters stared at the van, there was no longer a burning wing. There wasn’t a plane crash. There was no seventeen-car pileup. No national catastrophe. There was no ticking clock counting down to an uncontrollable nuclear crisis.

There was only Connor.

There was only that one little boy.