Critical Reaction

by Todd M Johnson

  “Go check out room 369. It used to be a storage locker. Should be clean. Take air and dust samples then come back to me. I’ll be here in room 301,” he said, gesturing across the hallway. “Seems like a waste of time for our last night. The permanent crew should be able to handle sampling these corners of the building when they’re back tomorrow. But there you are. And let’s move it along. This is our last night here, so if we get the checklist done, I’m sending us home early.”

  Kieran took the clipboard and pouch of air and surface sampling equipment. Taylor had complained a few times the past week about “make work” projects that could’ve waited for the return of LB5’s permanent testing crew—away now on some training exercise. He and Taylor hadn’t been assigned to test any of LB5’s lower level glove-box rooms, production lines, or anywhere else where plutonium had been handled in abundance—typically the highest priorities. But as Taylor often said, he didn’t make up the work lists, he just got ’em done. His comments tonight were the closest Kieran had ever heard Taylor come to complaining.

  Lab Building 5 was a long rectangle, its corridors stretching for nearly a hundred yards. Kieran left Taylor behind, trudging the distance toward room 369 at the furthest end of the third-floor hallway. As he walked, he marked his progress by counting off the hallway detectors bolted into the floor every fifty feet, humming as they continuously monitored the air for radioactive contamination. Each was crowned with small lights showing green if the air was safe, red if hazardous. They weren’t as sophisticated as the tests the lab would perform on samples taken by Kieran, but they reassured him. Like Christmas bulbs on shin-high pines, the green glow always comforted Kieran as he walked the Hanford corridors.

  He was nearly to the hallway’s end when Kieran detected a brush of heat on his right ear. Another step and it was gone. He stopped—then backed up. There it was again.

  To his right was an interlocking pair of steel pressure doors labeled room 365. He pressed a hand against the metal surface. It was warm to the touch.

  The temperature in these old buildings was carefully controlled. Kieran reached for his walkie-talkie to call Taylor. Except, he recalled, his super didn’t like being bothered with half information. Kieran set the testing equipment and clipboard beside the door on the hallway floor and turned the knobs to open each of the double doors.

  They wouldn’t budge. He tried again, leaning into each of the doors and pressing with his legs. This time, they slowly gave way.

  As he stepped inside, his equipment belt rattled. The sound echoed in the dark interior—just as a wave of heat and humidity rolled past and out the open doors behind him. An instant sheen of sweat rose on Kieran’s forehead.

  Startled, he swept the black with his eyes for a sign of fire. There was none.

  His fingers found the wall switch and he flicked it on. Light flooded a cavern at least thirty yards deep.

  The space was filled with aging industrial vats lining each wall, split by a narrow walkway down the middle of the room. Each of the containers was pierced by a collection of pipes and valves, giving the appearance of a ward of metal giants on life support. Some of the pipes led to adjacent vats; others angled into the floor.

  The sight was familiar. Kieran had sampled these rooms in other buildings where he’d worked. This was a mixing chamber. When this was a working production building, chemicals were stored in these containers for transfer to other vats for mixing, or to be pumped to labs and glove rooms elsewhere in the building.

  The heat was coming in waves from deeper in the room. Kieran took cautious steps forward, the sweat thickening on his face the further he walked from the doors.

  The slow pace finally brought him near the far wall. Here, to his left, hung a towering vat. It was eight feet tall at least, suspended from the ceiling with thick steel posts. The enormous cylinder looked like the queen of the room, with pipes angling into it from every direction. Among all the pipes stabbing its surface, the largest was a single iron tube that descended from its bottom perpendicularly into the floor. Vat 17 was stenciled across its girth.

  Kieran moved closer. Moisture was dripping in rivulets of sweat on all sides of the huge vat’s surface, released, Kieran saw, from pressure valves near the vat’s lid.

  This had to be the source of the heat and humidity.

  Nearly beneath the container, Kieran heard a splash at his feet. He leaned into the shadows under the vat.

  The sole of his left boot stood in a puddle of pooled condensation from the vat’s sides. Satisfied, Kieran straightened up—only to be jerked back into mid crouch. Startled, he looked down again.

  The edge of his T-shirt had caught on another valve attached to the iron pipe extending into the floor. Kieran untangled it, then stood fully upright.

  The surface of the vat was only three feet away now. Kieran reached out his bare hand and touched it gently.

  His fingers recoiled from the scalding metal. In that same moment, he heard his pulse pounding in his ears. Heat shock, he supposed. Or nerves.

  He’d had enough. Kieran reached for the walkie-talkie on his hip.

  Only the pounding wasn’t in his ears, he suddenly realized—and it was growing, not subsiding. Kieran turned his head to one side. The rhythmic pulsing was coming from Vat 17 itself.

  An image flashed through his head of a thin-skinned teakettle expanding like a balloon as it reached a boil.

  He was running before he was aware of a decision to flee, sprinting toward the distant doors with fear pricking his skin like a thousand beestings. Maybe he was imagining it, but the thump of the vat seemed to match his pounding steps, growing louder and deeper as he ran.

  Please, don’t blow; don’t blow. The mantra cycled in his head. But he heard it from his lips as well, in rhythm with his breath.

  The doors were nearing through his sweat-blurred vision: he was going to make it. He’d leave the room and round the corner into the hall, out of the path of the coming explosion.

  Then another voice spoke with equal certainty that he was wrong. Because the doors, still twenty yards away, were arcing slowly shut, edged by the rising pressure in the room. And once they were shut, no power on earth would open them again in the face of that pressure.

  His wet left boot slipped, nearly taking him down. He stumbled through two strides before straightening again, the boot squeaking angrily on the concrete floor as he regained his pace.

  The voices were silenced as the exit drew near. Kieran leaned forward, vaulting toward the shrinking gap between the doors with outstretched arms. His left shoulder skimmed one door’s edge; his right knee scraped the other one hard. Then the steel panels grabbed his outstretched left ankle like a vise as his body slammed to the hallway floor beyond.

  He lay face first on the cold surface of the corridor. His left ankle was locked at an angle above him. His ribs knifed with pain where they pressed against the floor.

  Kieran strained to look over his shoulder at the foot. The effort hurt his ribs, but he could just make out that his ankle was still wedged between the mixing room doors, as the pounding sound leaked through the gap.

  Kieran’s muscles lit with panic once more. Sliding back toward the doors, he gathered his right knee to his chest and kicked furiously with his free foot at the nearest panel. The door yielded inches. He kicked again. And again and again and again. The fifth kick burst the door open for an instant and his left foot sprang free, stripped of his shoe and sock and layers of skin. Then the panels sprang instantly shut again, their final boom echoing down the empty corridor.

  Kieran huddled on the floor, his muscles twitching, his clothes clinging with sweat. His ankle throbbed and bled. His ribs, forgotten briefly, now ached with pain at each breath.

  He didn’t care. Kieran sucked in wonderful breaths of cool air. He was safe. Safe in this peaceful space that was anywhere but in the mixing room beyond the heavy steel doors.

  Metal groaned. Kieran opened his eyes and rolled to his back to look to
ward his feet.

  The door panels strained on their hinges.

  Kieran clambered to his feet, pain knifing the bloody bare one. He struggled into a limping run down the hallway, gripping his ribs with one arm. “Taylor,” he tried to shout. The walkie-talkie tapped at his hip like it should mean something, but he kept shouting as he stumbled on.

  A distant sixty yards or more away, Taylor emerged into the corridor. Kieran still heard the rising groans from the doors behind him and tried to quicken his pace. The supervisor’s hands dropped to his belt, grabbing a HEPA mask hung there. He pulled it across his forehead and over his face.

  Without breaking his stumbling stride, Kieran felt for his own mask—then sickened as Taylor lifted a second mask in the air.

  It was Kieran’s own, taken in the entryway to the dark side.

  Still dozens of yards away, Taylor broke into a run toward Kieran with the second mask clutched in one fist. Taylor tried to communicate a command with his other hand—but the big man had made only two strides in Kieran’s direction when the hall was swallowed by a roar and a shock wave that rocked the walls and floor, lifting Kieran from his feet as though launched from a spring. He twisted through the air, dust and flying paint filling the world—then his hips and back slammed the hard floor, triggering the screaming rib pain again and squeezing the air from his lungs.

  The universe hurtled out of control as another roar shook the hall; then another. Kieran bounced off the floor with each succeeding cataclysm, consciousness slipping away—aware only of a final image locked in his mind like high definition.

  It was the radiation monitors lining the walls between Kieran and Taylor’s prone body on the hallway floor still a hundred feet away. Through a haze of settling debris, Kieran could see the monitors, unmoved by the explosions, bolted solidly in place.

  What made them curious to watch were the changing hues of their light bulbs—solidly green before, but now flicking to red, one after another, like runway lights racing away down the hallway away from him.

  3:01 A.M.

  LAB BUILDING 5

  HANFORD NUCLEAR RESERVATION

  “Gin.”

  Patrick “Poppy” Martin cast a narrow-eyed grin and spread a handful of tattered cards across the edge of the desk. “That puts me out.”

  “Geez, Poppy, you had my seven,” Lewis Vandervork spat, tossing his own cards.

  Still grinning, Poppy reached out and patted the younger man’s shoulder.

  “Of course I did.”

  Outside, tiny droplets slid down the window of the rooftop guard shack surrounding them. Poppy stood and squinted out of the glass.

  The rooftop guard shed was located along the north end of Lab Building 5, making Poppy’s view from the window a southerly one over the full length of the vast roof expanse. A tall smokestack for LB5 stood apart from the building off to his left. It was difficult to make out now because he could see a thin cotton veil of fog rolling across the tarred roof surface from the desert, the moisture sparkling in the glare of the overhead perimeter lights surrounding the building grounds. “Deal again,” he said to Lewis. “Let’s play one more hand before we walk the roofline.”

  Lewis grunted and gathered the cards. “I will,” the younger man said. “I got time to clean Beverly before we go?”

  Poppy shook his head. “You can clean Beverly at the end of the shift, like always. You treat that rifle better’n I treat my wife.”

  Lew smiled, shaking his head. “That’s the difference between my army training and your navy training, Pops. I know how to treat my weapon—and my woman. So, the building manager downstairs told ya we’re done in a few more days here?”

  Poppy nodded. “He left me a note with my time card. Said the permanent security detail finishes its training early next week and we’re gone.”

  None too soon, he thought. Even in a place as spread out as the Hanford Reservation, this building was isolated. Coming here added twenty minutes to Poppy’s usual daily commute, each way. And LB5’s small permanent crew—eight most evenings—were just plain unfriendly when they crossed paths with them. He looked forward to getting back to his job rotation nearer to home.

  Poppy listened to the sputtering of the fan on the corner space heater that filled the shack with hot, dry air, then the ripple of cards as his companion shuffled. Through the glass, he could make out the small cafeteria building that perched on a hillock twenty yards beyond LB5’s southwest corner. Every evening shift since he and Lewis got transferred here for temporary duty, he’d seen people coming and going from there around this hour—registered on his log as HVAC workers. As though in confirmation, the door on the small building swung open and two figures emerged. Poppy watched as they turned and started down the hill on a sloping driveway that quickly led them out of his sight along LB5’s west side.

  The sight of the workers reminded Poppy: just four more hours on his own shift tonight. Then it was home in time to see his wife and visiting grandson before heading to bed. Later today, after he was up again, they’d have Suzy’s fettuccine. What had she told him to pick up on the way home? Bread and . . . something. She was right: he should have written it down.

  He glanced at his watch. It was time to walk the roofline and check in with the front office. Poppy reached for his jacket beside the gun rack. “On second thought, Lew, let’s—”

  His fingers brushed the jacket collar as the reinforced steel roof rippled under his feet like it’d been hit by some monstrous sledge. Poppy’s knees buckled and he grabbed for the desk edge as the window splintered into a fine web. The computer monitor bounced from the desk, shattering on the ground; drawers from the corner file cabinet crashed to the floor; and over a fearful howl from Lewis, Poppy’s eardrums were smothered by a piercing explosion to the east.

  The sound was coming out of the smokestack, he thought, his ears aching—then he was down completely as a second even more violent wave slammed through the roof, like a tsunami crashing onto its surface. Then the terrifying crescendo of a third concussion rocked the shack, lifting the desk from the ground and heaving the window glass from its frame in a final shattering collapse.

  This is it, Poppy thought—surprised that he could think at all, that he wasn’t frightened past any sensibility. He looked across the floor at Lewis, twenty-five years younger and terrified, clawing at the shack floor with his fingernails as though it could shield him from the maelstrom boiling up below.

  How pointless, he thought with a sharp pang of pity as a tear curled down Lew’s cheek.

  You might as well accept that no amount of steel’s going to save us, ’cause something’s gone critical down there, he thought. And you and me and the poor boys working below are about to go up to God in a hellfire mushroom cloud of heat and blood and radiation.

  With that, his mind began a slide toward resignation and a strange welling of peace about it all. He started to mutter a prayer.

  Then, as quickly as he’d begun, Poppy stopped. The world had gone silent and still.

  Poppy braced for another inevitable blow; he heard Lewis moan through tightly clenched teeth, his hands now clasping his knees in a huddled ball. But the blow didn’t come. The only sound other than Lewis was a breeze rattling the few remaining shards of the pulverized windowpane.

  Poppy tried to assemble his thoughts, which drifted like scattered smoke. Then he was swept with a rush of exultation that he was alive.

  Poppy pushed himself to his knees. His wife and grandson—he’d see them after the shift. The hunting trip next weekend—he’d still do it. He was alive.

  The despair was leaching away, replaced by a different, vague impression. There was something he had to do. Poppy reached out and shook Lewis’s shoulder. “Lew,” he heard his voice say, through the ringing of his ears. “Lew.”

  The young man’s moans stopped, but his eyes were still glassy. He should call someone for Lewis. No. He couldn’t do that. No one should see Lewis like this. And besides, that wasn’t
what he had to do.

  Poppy rose, wobbly, and stepped toward the gun rack. He fumbled with the keys to unlock the padlock, watched himself withdraw an M-16 and a full clip, and forced his fingers to load the weapon. His boot kicked something. He looked down. It was a flashlight. He leaned over carefully and grabbed that too. He pulled on his jacket and stepped outside.

  The fog seemed thin in the bright spotlights. Poppy stepped onto the tarred roof surface, surprised that it was still solid beneath his feet.

  His head ached and his limbs felt drained, but his thoughts were assembling now. Why was he here? To check the ground along the roof perimeter. What for? Observation. Look for injured. What else? There was something else even more pressing.

  Sabotage.

  His Hanford training rushed back like an accelerated recording. If there was an explosion, the first duty of this post was to monitor the building exits for saboteurs—while maintaining contact with the central office on the front of LB5. If he observed potential saboteurs, he was to shoot. No, no, no, that wasn’t it. He was to shoot . . . to kill.

  All strength had been wrung from his legs, but he forced himself into a disjointed jog across the length of the roof toward the southern edge, where the building’s rear emergency exit emptied out onto the grounds below. He pushed through the cotton in his mind to tick off the evening personnel log: the night building manager and assistant, front side offices; supply tech, dark side entryway; two sampling techs somewhere inside; HVAC engineer on the front side, second floor, north. Then there were two HVAC maintenance guys on the grounds tonight—probably those guys in the cafeteria building. So the only exits likely to be used were out the north, on the front side.

  Poppy shifted the rifle to his left hand and reached for the walkie-talkie on his hip to check in.

  The hand closed on air. Poppy slowed. He’d forgotten his gear back in the shed—his walkie-talkie, his mask. Everything except the rifle and flashlight.

  Poppy turned—and was startled to look directly into Lewis’s flushed face. Beverly was slung over Lewis’s shoulder and in his hand he extended a walkie-talkie. The young man’s eyes were red and swollen, full now with a different kind of fear.