Badwater (The Forensic Geology Series)

by Toni Dwiggins

  He whispered, “You’re swimming in the SFP.”

  Oh no Hap, I’m not.

  I dove. It was a world of silt, sparkling in the sun rays. It was so cold my eyeballs ached. As I wall-crawled along I found the crack that my foot had grazed. My rock sense told me where it came from. This was the fissure I’d wagered upon. Before my air ran out I glimpsed a shadow in the crack and it put me in mind of snorkeling in Maui, glimpsing eel snout in a reef crevice. But this was not the ocean. And this was not the spent-fuel pool.

  Hap didn’t follow me down. He waited until I surfaced and gulped a lungful of air and then he lunged.

  He knew what I’d found.

  He wrapped himself around me, clinging like the limpets I’d seen clinging to the reef in Maui where the eel lived. My hands were free and I pounded his back but I could not get him off. He held onto me as if for life. Our legs entangled, trying to tread water. I used my hands to help keep us afloat. We spun lazily in the current, bumping gently against the chock. His head was pressed to mine. We were cheek to cheek, like lovers.

  I looked past his red hair frizzing in the heat, up to the sheep trail, watching for Walter.

  My thigh pressed against Hap’s and I felt the pinch of the knife in my pocket. If I could just get to it. And then dive to find the wire that was going to electrify that eel—only of course there’s a colony of eels all the way down that crack because it takes a shitload of charges to rip open this rock—and so if I can find one wire I can cut them all and do the job I’d jumped in here to do in the first place. But first I needed my knife.

  I arched, trying to throw us off balance.

  He snuggled in tighter. Shivering. I shivered, too. We shivered in synch. His shivers were blows, his knees knocking mine, his fists digging into the small of my back. His skull rattled mine—the two of us reduced to essence like the skull on the bighorn trail. He put his mouth to my ear. Lips of ice. “Want to live?” Breath so hot it warmed my ear. I nodded. Want to live. Want my knife. The skin of my thigh prickled, every nerve focusing on that pinch of knife in pocket, and then the prickling spread to include the feel of his thigh against mine. The bulk of his bandage. I saw no blood in the water and I guessed the cold had stopped the bleeding but he could surely feel pain. I pressed hard against him. He recoiled. A sliver of space between our legs now. I brought up my knee and jammed it into his bandaged thigh. He cried out and shrank away and I thought now I’m free and made to dive but he’d got me by the webbed belt that wove through my waistband. We were arms-length, now, attached at my belt. His face went livid. I hated him for showing pain, and for the way my knee had felt grinding his wound, and for goddamn choosing to shoot him in the first place—for my ownership of his pain. I fumbled at my belt, trying to unhook it. Cursing him. He opened his mouth to answer but no words came. He convulsed and emitted a gutful of yellow liquid and it lay intact like oil on water and then the current broke its surface tension and washed it away. I stared at the receding plume, understanding. It wasn’t me. It was the gents. He wasn’t faking it now. The gents got him. He turned them loose and they got him. He lifted his head and his face showed panic. Not my problem, not my doing, I wallowed in my innocence but he would not let me be. He was crying. I could not believe that Hap and I have the same feelings but we must because we’re both crying now. He put his face into the water, back humping up, and I felt his convulsions by the jerking of his hand in my belt. I went for my knife. He pulled himself close and wrapped around me and vomited hot stuff down my back.

  I yelped, like it could burn through my skin and lodge in my cells.

  “Let her go.” It echoed down from above.

  I looked up and saw Walter on the sheep trail.

  Hap clung now not like a lover but a baby, latched on for all it’s worth. He had the strength of desperation in that grip. He was hurt and sick but the water was his medium. I said into his hair “let us help.” He pulled his head back to look at me. Those radiant eyes shone between swollen red lids. I wrapped my arms around him, opening the blade of my knife behind his back. He felt it coming. He grabbed for the knife and I felt the buzz of steel on bone and then he screamed and I let go in horror. He curled away, cradling his hand. A rusty bloom colored the water. He spasmed and went under, taking my knife with him.

  Walter was crabbing down the talus slope, bellowing at me to get out.

  I couldn’t, even if I’d wanted. Hap had surfaced between me and the deck, treading water. His right hand cupped over the knife, which entered the meat of his palm and jutted out between the first two knuckles.

  All the pain of the day welled up, threatening to drag me under.

  Walter was on the deck. A broken record. Get out, get out, get out.

  I shook my head and pointed at the chock, trying to get a word in, calling out “extension fracture” and then “underwater” and then finally Walter shut up and looked where I pointed, and I gasped “wires.”

  And then he turned back to Hap and his gaze rested on the knife.

  Hap sank beneath the water.

  Walter jumped in, thrashing like a big wet dog.

  Hap surfaced beyond us both, swimming toward the shallow end. He was not the swimmer who had lapped the Inn pool time after time. He was fighting the current, and the depredations of the gents. I struck out after him but I was fighting my own depredations. Walter outpaced me and caught Hap around the waist. There was a boil of arms and legs and then Walter had him in a headlock. Walter reached for his arm, for the knife hand, but all he succeeded in doing was spinning them both. Hap went limp, head against Walter’s chest, arms outflung.

  Walter snapped, “I could use some help.”

  Leverage. Walter wants me to pull out the knife. I’ll never be ready for this but my gaze catches on the watch on my wrist and I’m stunned to see that nine minutes have gone which means we’ve got seven left and I can’t decide if that’s a lot or not much at all. So I kick for all I’m worth over to Hap’s outflung arm, to the knife hand coloring the water. I don’t trust him, I won’t get too close. I reach across the water, my fingers brushing his like sweethearts, and when his hand curls away I lunge closer and slip my hand into his palm. He gasps. My fingers freeze on the hilt of the knife. Walter says dear and so I shut my eyes and yank. The knife rolls. Hap screams. But the screaming fades and the sound that fills my ears comes from inside my head, a remembered sound, that wet crush when you twist the knife to core the apple and you hit the pithy heart and stall there. You can’t push any farther or pull out the knife so you gently rock the blade until it frees itself.

  I opened my eyes.

  Hap lay still, anchored on Walter. Hap’s hands cradled over his belly, one hand balled up like a squeezed orange leaking red-orange pulp, a blood-orange hand. His reddened eyes assaulted me. I raised the knife—already washed clean—in a salute. To life.

  Walter eyed my knife-hand, my watch-hand. “How much time?”

  “Seven minutes. No, six.”

  “Chopper’s on the way. Be here any minute.”

  “With divers?”

  Walter shook his head. Not likely.

  “Then give me a minute.” I know just where the wired eels live. Behind Walter and Hap, to the right, where that chert interbedding dips about twenty degrees north on the chockstone’s back head. Right beneath it. Maybe three feet down. In the joint.

  I gripped the knife and dove.

  49

  We lifted into the air, my stomach rising along with the chopper, my head spinning with the rotors.

  Below, the pool rippled with rotor-wash. Otherwise, we’d left no observable trace. Soliano’s divers were en route to dispose of the explosives. Good wilderness manners: leave only footprints, take only memories.

  And then, almost before we had cleared the ridges, we bellied down toward They-Don’t-Pay-Me-Enough Canyon. I pressed my face to the window and marveled at the scene. What a crowd. They seemed to have sprung up like desert blooms during my absence. Uniforms every
where—sheriff tan and FBI black and ranger green and RERT silvery-white. They wore the canyon colors. They were clustered high on the hill above the hot zone. Up even higher, on the ridge above the mine, surveying the scene below, legs crossed in an Indian sit, was Pria. She wore a ranger-green jacket, big as a tent on her.

  Had she looked up, I would have waved.

  What to say, if she’s waiting outside our door at the Inn when we pack up to leave? You saved us, twice. How did you do that, at fourteen? Maybe we should sign you up. But, then, you pulled that teenage stuff too. You scared the shit out of me, disappearing from my bathroom. You should have told Walter what you were up to. And you didn’t talk him out of coming after me. Okay, that worked, Walter coming after me. I didn't really get what you said—if he can't go he won't go. I get it now. He could, so he did. Bottom line, Pria, you didn't make my head explode, although it was touch and go. You let me talk to you, even though I don’t speak alien. You made me surprise myself. So if you’re waiting outside our door I guess I’ll just say thanks.

  The chopper banked and now I got a view of another chopper parked downcanyon of the mine. Milt was there, on a stretcher, attended by medics. So he was alive; beyond that, I could not tell. On the other side of the chopper, considerately out of Milt’s view, lay three body bags. I thought, fierce, Roy Jardine shouldn’t be allowed in the same neighborhood with Special Agents Darrill Oliver and Hal Dearing.

  Walter leaned close to stare out my window. I spoke, low, so as not to attract the attention of Hap on the gurney, although Hap lay with eyes closed, unconscious perhaps, in his own world certainly. I didn’t worry about the medic who squatted beside Hap or the pilot because I’d never seen them before and didn’t care if they heard me or not. Soliano, I cared about, but Soliano was up front and likely could not hear me over the racket of the engine. So I said, low, to Walter, “I never know how to tally the costs.”

  Walter settled back in his seat. “Don’t even try.”

  The chopper banked again, cutting across the canyon to avoid flying over the hot zone.

  Soliano’s head swiveled, showing his profile. He needed a shave. His whiskers were salt-white and I had to wonder if they’d been that color at the start of the week. And then I, too, looked where Soliano looked—down at the reservoir. From up here the beads appeared liquid, like a desert mirage.

  A RERT stood well uphill from the tub, hands on hips, studying the cleanup job below.

  I guessed they’d have to airlift in bulldozers and loaders to recapture all the beads, and empty casks to put them in, and telehandlers to move the casks. I wondered how many beads had been washed by the rain down into the soil. I wondered how far down the cleanup crew would have to dig to remove the contaminated earth. I wondered if they’d get it all.

  Soliano appeared to know what I’d been wondering. “EPA will make this a Superfund site.”

  I wondered how long it would take to remediate.

  The RERT I’d been watching sank to the ground, draping his arms across his knees. I could now read the name on his air tank. Scotty Hemmings. He bent his head and clutched his facepiece in his gloved hands.

  I guessed Scotty was wondering the same thing.

  50

  We took ourselves home.

  Soliano offered to send us by chopper but we needed measurable time and distance in getting from here to there and so we rented a car. There was a tense moment when the clerk placed the keys on the counter. Who would pick them up? I told Walter, “Go ahead.” Seemed to me he’d proved his abilities ten times over. But he declined. On the “minuscule chance,” as he put it, that he’d have an “untoward event” on the drive home, he declined. He preferred to wait for the all-clear from his doctor, at which point he would resume his place behind the wheel.

  And so I picked up the keys.

  We crossed the desert and when we came to the Sierra and began the climb to the plateau on which our hometown sits, each degree drop in temperature put more shielding between home and the pools of Death Valley.

  We fell, hopefully, into the routine. It was good to be back in our own laboratory with its view of trees and mountains. It was good to drink the snowmelt water of the Sierra. It was good, even, to bury ourselves in the newest work, a straightforward and largely mindless case of sabotage at a plastics fabrication plant. I had just identified the crystal under the scope as amphibole when Walter came through the door. He came balancing the day’s mail on top of a pink donut box. We’ve compromised. Donuts on Fridays. TGIF.

  I wanted to get at that mail before he sorted it.

  As he set the donut box on the counter in our mini-kitchen, I rescued the unstable stack of mail under the guise of helping out. Walter started the coffee. I took the mail to my workbench and put my eyes on the particulars.

  “Looking for something?” Walter yelled over the grinding of beans.

  Just when I think I’ve put one over on him I am reminded that he’s still sharper than anybody I know. I called back, “Yeah, the rebate for that iPod I bought.”

  No rebate, just bills and catalogs and the latest issue of the Journal of Forensic Sciences. And, near the bottom, the thick envelope I’d been expecting. I hid it in my drawer. Wait until the coffee’s ready so I can broach the subject when his mouth’s full of donut.

  Meanwhile, my attention caught on a large manila envelope with my name printed on a label and no return address.

  “Glazed or crumb?” he asked.

  “Crumb.” I opened the flap and pulled out a sheaf of papers. A blue post-it was stuck on top, and the handwritten note read: To Cassie, From Hap. Cassie, not Buttercup. The formality of that greeting put me on alert. In fact, getting mail from Hap put me on alert. Last I’d heard, he was in the hospital. I wondered what he wanted from me now.

  I pulled off the post-it and looked at the top sheet of paper. It was a printed form, the boxes filled in with the same neat cursive as on the post-it. My eyes skipped to the signature box at the bottom: Brendan F Miller, Licensed Health Physicist. The formal title chilled me.

  My eyes jumped to the block letters printed at the top. NRC Form 5. Occupational Dose Record For a Monitoring Period. My mouth went dry. What the...? Name (last, first, middle initial): Oldfield, Cassie E. Monitoring Period: 8-14 to 8-19. I rushed, a little wild, from box to box—Radionuclides, Intake, Doses. For crying out loud I had an entry in every box. I skimmed the numerals because I didn’t really know if those numbers were high or low or ALARA, and so I skipped to the comments box. The individual was exposed in the course of an emergency response to an incident. She has received above the recommended maximum yearly radiation dose. Long-term effects are not calculable. Recommend the individual limit future exposures. Hap had added a postscript, at kindergarten level: Recommend you take care out there.

  Walter set a donut on a napkin on my bench, sequestering it so as not to crap up the open dishes of soil with the crumbs. “What’s this?”

  I handed him the second sheet of paper, the form with his name.

  Walter sat down, reading. “How could he...”

  “Know the numbers?” Scotty’s the one who had our dosimeters, and Scotty had phoned day after we returned home to tell us “no worry.” Scotty promised to send the entire incident report, with our numbers, once the NRC review was complete. But I guessed Hap didn’t need to wait on bureaucracy anymore. Hap could get on the net and download NRC forms and then run his own equations. How many rads in the point source, how close I stood, how long I stood there. Still, Hap wouldn’t have exact numbers to feed into his equations. I said, “He took a guess.”

  “And why the devil is he sending them to us?”

  I didn’t want to know.

  There were three more forms in the pile. I had the urge put them through the shredder. I had the urge to stuff them back in the envelope, along with mine and Walter’s, and return to sender. Instead, I continued to read.

  Ballinger, Milton P. The numbers were huge but largely irrelevant becau
se the neat cursive in the comments box said it all. LD. Lethal Dose.

  Jellinek, Christine C. Lower numbers than Milt’s, far higher than mine. The individual’s shallow dose equivalent, max extremities, has required reconstructive surgeries of the hands and arms. Outlook for the individual’s short-term recovery is guarded; long-term effects are of grave concern.

  Miller, Brendan F. Double-digit microcuries, triple-digit rems. I closed my eyes. Breathed in, breathed out, settling my stomach. When I gained the nerve to read the comments I had to follow the arrow and flip the page. He’d needed more room than the comments box provided. Under the heading Long-term Stochastic Effects he’d written odds-on favorite to win the cancer lottery. Under the heading Thanks For Asking, he’d made himself a diary:

  Tuesday: Thought my latent stage would last longer but this morning when I rolled over I left my hair on the pillow. People think the hair falls out but what happens is it gets thinner and thinner and then you can’t even roll your head on the pillow without breaking it off. Here’s a health physics lesson for you—the parts of your body where the cells keep dividing are bullseyes for radiation. Like hair.

  Wednesday: Still trying to maintain my morning schedule. Been reading the papers. Guess what? Our story made page one of the Vegas Sun today. I know you disapprove of my demonstration, Buttercup, but you have to admit it made a point. Even interrupted. Wish I could sit across the breakfast table from John Q Public, watch him reading what nearly happened to the water. See how that goes down with his morning coffee. To be frank, not really feeling up to morning coffee myself.

  Thursday: Nurse put a diaper on me since I can’t seem to make it to the john. The cells that are supposed to maintain my intestinal integrity aren’t doing their job. Man in diapers talking about intestinal integrity—that strike you as funny?

  Friday: Too bad it’s not Halloween because I’ve got bloody fangs. Scared the nurse anyway when she made me go aaahhh. Mouthful of lesions. Yuck. Stem cells in my bone marrow went on strike—how’s that for loyalty?