Virtual Destruction

CHAPTER 12

Looking both ways, Duane Hopkins peeked out of the bathroom door in the Plutonium Facility. He hoped no one had noticed how long he had hidden inside the rest room. He had already spent a lot of time that morning washing his badge and recovering from the shakes, hoping never to see Ronald and his mean friends again.

He had vowed to get even with them, but it probably wouldn’t work, and then they would be on his back even worse than before. So he had hidden there during the afternoon break, avoiding any chance at another confrontation.

He hesitated when he heard someone come toward him, almost turning around to rush back into the rest room, but he forced himself to keep going ahead. He stepped away and tried to regain his composure before somebody else hooted after him.

“Hey, it’s Diarrhea Duane!” He looked up and saw Ralph Frick chuckling next to two other guys. Ralph had always been an OK guy, ribbing him instead of openly insulting him — but lately Ralph’s teasing had taken on a more bitter tone, harsher, and Duane just couldn’t laugh it off any more.

He tried desperately to think of a come-back line, but all he could manage was a red face. Duane hurried back to his glove box station in the metallurgy lab. He had to stay away from the bathroom, at least for the rest of the day.

He looked at his digital watch. Hours to go yet, with each second passing like a blacksmith’s mallet hitting an anvil. His stomach had been knotted all day long. He wondered if he had time to get the stuff for Gary Lesserec.

Duane flinched every time he looked at his badge, afraid that invisible radiation kept pouring out of it into his body, streaming through his chest and lungs.

After all the years he had worked in the Plutonium Facility, Duane had a healthy respect — no, a mortal terror — of radiation. He was playing with fire every day he went in to work.

His biggest scare had come early in his career at the Lab, back when it had been called the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, long before the strict handling procedures had been put in place. Nobody knew any better. It had been shortly after his marriage to Rhonda, when Duane had walked with a spring in his step fresh from leaving his short stint in the Army, aglow with his training under the GI Bill.

He was happy then. He hadn’t known the world was so full of nightmares. He used to smile. He talked openly to people because he hadn’t realized how much better it was to remain quiet, never to open up to everybody.

Back then, the group of bullies had been led by a man named Bodie. A different group from Ronald’s gang, but just the same nevertheless. No matter where he went, they seemed to target Duane Hopkins.

Duane had talked to everyone about how wonderful it was to be a newlywed, all the plans and dreams he and Rhonda had. They had wanted to have kids, three or four of them. He said that a lot; he talked about it at the lunch table where everyone could overhear.

Duane had been stupid, unsuspecting.

Bodie and three of his wise-ass friends were standing outside one of the materials vaults. The halls of the huge Plutonium Facility echoed. Back then yellow lines had been painted on the floor showing allowable separation distances between carts that contained sealed sources or canned parts: follow the yellow brick road! Yellow and black radiation alarms were mounted on the wall with neutron counters. The harsh white fluorescent lights washed away all shadows, all softness of color. The building really hadn’t changed much in fifteen years.

Duane had been going about his business, pushing his cart along, probably even whistling to himself. He had his inventory card hooked to the bottom of it, returning a sealed sample to its appropriate lead-lined can on its appropriate shelf in the vault.

“Hey, Duane,” Bodie called from inside the otherwise empty vault. “Come here, we’ve got a wedding present for you.”

Duane raised his eyebrows. “A wedding present? I got married months ago.”

“Yeah, so we’re late,” Bodie said. “Come here,” he gestured for Duane to come into the vault.

Even now as he thought about it, Duane winced. He wished he could go back in time and change what he had done. That one act of stupidity may have doomed him for the rest of his life, and all of Stevie’s.

Inside the vault Bodie said, “Heard you want to have kids. That’s nice.” It was Bodie’s favorite phrase, Duane remembered. That's nice. “We wanted to warm up your sex life a little bit, Duane.”

Even then, Duane had been more baffled than afraid. Nobody else was in the corridors. The Plutonium Facility was a big, ugly building with a maze of halls and corridors, but not a bustle of people inside.

“What do you mean?” he asked. Bodie looked at his two companions and they each grabbed one of Duane’s arms, yanking him into the vault.

“Hey!” he said, “What’s going on?”

Bodie unclipped one of the quart-sized metal cans and reached in, wearing his rubber glove. He pulled out one of the small nickel-plated plutonium buttons from its wire cage bin — a small hemispherical disk about as big as a silver dollar. He flashed it in the light. “Hoo, it’s still warm. That’s nice.” Bodie made a great show of tightening his rubber glove. He held the metal button up to Duane’s face.

“Plutonium,” he said in an evil whisper. “Valuable stuff. This is what they make the atomic bombs out of. Highly radioactive. You can feel the heat from the radiation.” He smiled, then reached forward to yank the waist band of Duane’s trousers, reaching through the open flaps of his lab coat.

Duane squirmed. “Stop it!” he said, but Bodie just snickered, grabbed the elastic of his briefs and dropped the slick plutonium button down into Duane’s underwear.

Terror flowed like lava through him. He couldn’t believe what Bodie had done. He could feel the plutonium button, heavy metal dropping down into his crotch. It was warm—it was warm, hot with the radiation!

He screamed.

He could feel the crackling neutrons or gamma rays or whatever they were called sizzling around his testicles. He yowled another soul-wrenching scream and writhed, thrashing about like a snake. The plutonium button still clung to his groin. Duane howled as if he were being eaten alive.

In sudden shock, Bodie’s two friends simultaneously released his arms and stepped back, looking confused. Bodie also lurched backward and slapped Duane on the face.

“Criminy, Duane! Can’t you take a joke? That’s not nice.”

Duane reached his hand down his pants, still sobbing, frantically grabbing for the hot piece of metal, which he tore out of his waistband and hurled to the other side of the vault where it clanged and clattered against the metal cages. He tried to shout obscenities at Bodie, but his mouth would make only wordless noises.

“Come on, Duane,” one of Bodie’s friends said. “It’s all right, for Pete’s sake. The thing’s shielded. Nickel plated. You didn’t get any dose. It’s safe. Jeez, what a baby.”

But Duane never believed any of that. He fled the vault leaving his cart in the hall. He ran down the corridors turning left and right, not sure where he was going until finally he stumbled to the lunch room. He grabbed his jacket and left the facility, taking sick leave for the rest of the afternoon. He did receive a reprimand from his supervisor the following day for not logging and securing the radioactive samples on his card.

Again being stupid and naive, he had reported the incident to his supervisor. Because of a long list of other infractions, Bodie was fired, his goon friends placed on temporary suspension.

And Duane’s car had been smashed with a sledgehammer in the middle of the night, a brick thrown through his living room window. Threatening phone calls for weeks, and the police wouldn’t do anything. He never told everything to Rhonda, just that one of the guys at work didn’t like him. Rhonda couldn’t believe he would let some bully terrorize them, and she kept mocking his manhood.

Later, when Rhonda had gotten pregnant, Duane spent many sleepless nights biting his nails and afraid that some lizard-faced mutated monster might be growing within her womb. He tried to convince himself that would never happen.

At first, baby Stevie had seemed normal, and Duane had felt frigid relief for a few months… until the mysterious symptoms of cerebral palsy started to show up. The doctors insisted that Stevie’s condition had nothing to do with exposure to radiation in Duane’s job at the Plutonium Building. In fact, they were too quick to say that, no doubt to prevent Duane from suing the Livermore Lab for wrongful exposure to harmful substances.

But Duane knew, no matter what the doctors said, no matter how safe everything supposedly was, he knew… and now Ronald had been playing games with radiation again.

Duane looked down at his green laminated badge. Year after year he had put up with this torture. No one would ever leave him alone. He wasn’t as big or as tough or as confident as any of the others, but Duane wasn’t helpless.

He kept telling that to himself as he went back to his workstation still shaking, still afraid, hoping to get even with Ronald, or his buddies, or even Ralph Frick, or any of the other ones who preyed on his day after day.

It didn’t really matter to him. He just had to prove that he wasn’t helpless. He kept telling it to himself.

I'm not helpless!