The Boy Who Glowed in the Dark

CHAPTER 21

Nadia watched the truck disappear with Bobby beneath it.

Johnny looked ashen and disheveled. The remaining Russian lay unconscious beside him. “Where’s Bobby?”

“Gone.” Nadia ran to Nakamura’s body. “Get in the van. I’ll get the keys. They must be on him. Quick. We have to follow.”

“Follow what?”

“The truck. He’s on it. Or under it, to be more precise.” She cringed at the sight of Nakamura’s limp body. He’d been a doctor and healer until he came in contact with the formula. Now he was dead. She suppressed her discomfort with the task at hand, held her breath, and fished the keys to the truck out of his pants. “I’ll explain in the van.”

“Your bag,” Johnny said. “It’s in the house.”

Her wallet and passport were in the bag. “Shit.”

She raced into the house, down the hallways, and into the bedroom.

The old woman’s brow creased as soon as she saw Nadia. She unloaded a barrage of questions in Japanese. Nadia saw the panic button in her hand, the phone beside her. Good, Nadia thought. Her doctor was dead and the volunteer was gone. If she became ill, she could get help. By the time they arrived, Nadia and Johnny would be gone.

Nadia grabbed her bag and ran out the door. The phone rang behind her. The shrill ring gave way to the burble of the van’s engine. Johnny sat in the driver’s seat. Nadia raced to the passenger seat and climbed inside. Johnny took off.

“Left turn at the first intersection,” she said.

“Same way we came here.”

“That’s where he went.”

“It was a TEPCO truck,” Johnny said. “I saw the lettering on the side. He could get out the main exit if he has a hazmat suit. The guards didn’t seem to be paying much attention to the folks that were leaving the Zone.”

“Did those guys look like the type who would finesse an entry or exit?”

Johnny turned left. The tires squealed. “No. You’re right. They came in off the grid.”

Johnny pressed the throttle. They zipped through the residential area, passing home after home without sign of life. Johnny slowed down through the first two intersections, fearing another car would appear at the worst possible place at the fatal moment in time. When he reached the third intersection, however, he crossed it at full speed.

“I just can’t figure out why Bobby would do something so reckless,” Nadia said.

“Genesis II is on that truck, right? What did Nakamura say his name was? Yoshi?”

“Yeah. But Bobby’s no fool. He has his father’s instincts. He understands danger. He measures probabilities before he acts. He weighs pros and cons. He calculates a risk-adjusted reward for any action he takes. It’s all subconscious. It’s instinctive. But that’s how his brain works. You saw that in him when you got him off for murder, didn’t you?”

“Not sure his brain is working right.”

“What’s the probability he can hang onto that truck the entire trip?” Nadia said.

“What was the probability he could latch onto it in the first place?”

“And if he does hang on, what’s the probability the driver or one of his buddies at the destination sees him and kills him?”

“Is this Nadia staying positive?”

“Bobby knows that. But he still did what he did. What does that tell you?”

Johnny considered the question. “He must know something we don’t.”

“Impossible. He didn’t tell me what Genesis II meant initially. He just didn’t want to get into it. But his guilty conscience caught up with him before we left for the airport. He told me everything.”

“You’re sure he wasn’t playing you?”

“Positive,” Nadia said.

“You said it yourself. The kid’s a natural con artist.”

“No. Not that morning. He was emotional. He wasn’t acting. I’d stake my life on it. He told me everything that was in his heart.”

“Then if he does know something we don’t know, it can mean only one thing.”

“He learned something between the time we left the apartment and he ran after the truck.”

“Maybe from those Russians at the airport,” Johnny said.

“He didn’t talk to them.”

“Maybe he met someone at the hotel.”

“He wasn’t out of my sight long enough.”

They drove toward the center of town. Nadia kept her head on a swivel but didn’t see any trucks or signs of human life.

“There’s another thing we need to talk about,” Johnny said.

Nadia imagined the driver capturing Bobby. This time there would be no angel there to save him.

“The boomerangs,” Nadia said.

“Who threw them?”

“No idea. An angel.”

“You see anybody?”

“Nope,” Nadia said.

They drove another mile until they came upon the intersection to the main road in town. A bilingual sign instructed them to turn left for the exit from the Exclusion Zone. Johnny stopped at the intersection.

“We can drive around if you want,” he said. “But the odds are high this guy is out of the Zone by now. These guys were organized. They had a plan.”

Despair gripped Nadia. She’d found Bobby in a radioactive wasteland in Ukraine, and now she’d lost him in a similar one in Japan.

“Our best bet is to get back to the hotel and wait for a phone call. He’s got his own cell, right?”

“Yes.”

They put their hazmat suits back on. Their respirators cloaked their faces. Five blocks away from the open stretch of road that led to the exit from the Zone of Exclusion, Johnny pulled into a side street and parked beside a post office. He picked a spot that gave them a distant vantage point of the guardhouse. They waited until a vehicle arrived on the opposite side of the guardhouse, looking to gain entrance to the Zone. In this case, two enormous dump trunks arrived with three pickup trucks in tow.

Johnny wasted no time. He drove to the gate. The guard was engrossed in a conversation with the dump truck driver and waved them through. The hazmat gear prevented him from seeing Nakamura wasn’t at the wheel.

When she’d first arrived, Nadia had noted the similarities and differences between Chornobyl and Fukushima. Nature had reasserted its control over the former, while man was still wrestling with the residual risks of the latter. Both seemed casualties of unlikely events — the mismanagement of a crumbling Soviet empire and a natural disaster of unlikely magnitude. Now that she was leaving, Nadia noted another unfortunate similarity. She was leaving Fukushima as she’d left Chornobyl. In search of a boy who could change the world.

Except now there were two of them.