Badwater

5

Old horror-flick scenes reeled through my brain.

Lab-coated scientists with Einstein hair pouring the wrong flask of purple liquid into the wrong vat. Repentant scientists — the victims usually being scientists who repent too late, or vapid pretty girls — writhing while their skin blisters and their pores ooze purplish blood. Tiny mutant monsters flailing in incubators. Post-apocalyptic landscapes stripped of vegetation — not unlike the landscape I stood in — while legions of giant insects stride across land that has been bequeathed to the quickly adaptable.

I watch too many dumb movies.

Scotty Hemmings bounded up. He had a meter in one hand and a pancake-shaped wand in the other. “Stand still,” he snapped.

I’d been running. Lumbering. I halted. Sweat cascaded down my flanks.

I glanced around. Soliano was coming to a halt nearby. We had nearly reached the road and if someone hadn’t stopped us we would likely have kept going to put another stretch of distance between us and the spill. Suited figures were converging on the area. A figure with binoculars jammed against his face plate was shining a spotlight across the slope to the ravine. Two others, down below, shined lights on the cask in the scrub brush.

I turned back to Scotty. “You said…”

“Hang on a sec.”

Long as you want.

He began at my feet, tracing my boots with the wand.

I stared at his bent hood, my heart hammering.

He shook his head and stood.

“Scotty?”

“Stand straight. Feet apart. Arms out, palms up. Stand still.”

I complied, straining to hear the Geiger counter. Was it crackling? Was it screaming bloody murder?

Scotty skimmed the probe along my body. He did my arms first and then jumped to the top of my head, zigzagging across my face, then switchbacking down my torso. He took his time, agonizingly slow, and he was stone silent and everyone, I noticed, was stone silent. Soliano, a silent statue like me, was being metered by a suit with the RERT logo.

“Turn around,” Scotty told me. “Feet apart. Arms out.”

I turned. Two suited figures were nearby. I identified Hap Miller by the yellow tape on his tank with his last name in black marker. He was monitoring one of the CTC workers — in his health physics capacity, I assumed. Miller spoke, loud enough to break the eerie silence. “Enlighten me, Chung, why you came charging into a contaminated zone before it’s been stabilized?”

The worker extended his middle finger. “Wasn’t roped.”

“You’re living proof,” Miller said, “that Mama Chung slept with a jackass.”

And then all was quiet again. I listened to the voice in my head going over every wrong step until I thought I would scream. I wished Scotty would speak. Anything at all. I turned my head and said, “How’d you get into this business?”

“Stand still.”

I froze.

He was silent for so long I thought he wouldn’t answer, then he did. “Was a lifeguard at San Onofre, beach in front of the nuke plant. Back before it closed. Plant had a spill and RERT showed up. Lifeguards in hazmat. I thought cool job, no sharks.”

“Just rads, huh?”

“Huh.” He said no more so I shut up. I’d gotten used to the hiss of my air and the wheeze of my breathing and I listened to that until he banged me on the shoulder and said, “No worry.”

I turned fully to face him. “So I’m not…?”

“You’re not crapped up.” He was reading his meter. His frown showed through the mask. “But I gotta say this is real weird. We gotta figure this out real fast. I mean, this stuff should be hot and you walked right through it and I didn’t get any reading off your booties.”

“Scotty!”

We turned. The guy with the binoculars approached, signalling. Scotty took the binocs and for the first time turned his attention to the spill. He yelled, “Shine another spot!” A second spotlight hit the spill, turning the white ashy powder even whiter.

“That’s not resin beads,” Scotty said. “What in hell’s going on here?”