Rogue Oracle

by Unknown

  “When were you evacuated?” Tara asked.

  “Not for several days after the accident,” Irina said, distractedly, as she filled out her forms. “I don’t think anyone, not even the party bosses, really knew what we were dealing with. At least, I’d like to believe that.”

  They piled back into the car and continued down the road, past a field full of rusting cars and Soviet helicopters. “This is a storage yard for contaminated vehicles. They’ve been pretty well stripped for parts,” Irina explained. “I occasionally find something there to fix the car, but not often. I don’t like the rats much.”

  Tara’s skin crawled, imagining Irina scavenging the junkyard for parts.

  Harry asked, “Where are the highest radiation levels you’ve recorded? We think our suspect is looking to dig up some old reactor fuel.”

  Irina frowned, considering. “Radiation is a capricious thing. One house on a street may be within normal parameters, but the one next door might be hot. I’ve often wondered if something as simple as the color of paint might have something to do with it. You may be looking a long time, if you want to examine all the hot spots. But … the most consistently high levels I’ve found are around the Sarcophagus itself. You might start there and fan out.”

  Irina drove them another two kilometers to the plant itself. Tara couldn’t help but feel a sense of foreboding as they approached. She stopped at a gate on the perimeter … This would be one of the official, manned gates that Irina had described. It was on a paved road and had a little guard house with a red-and-white painted stop arm.

  “I will ask them if they’ve seen anyone.” Irina pulled the car up behind the guard house. She leaned out of the car and rapped on the window, but no one answered. Her brows drew together. “There should be someone here.”

  Tara and Harry climbed out and circled around the guard house to the unlocked door. A dead guard sprawled on the floor, wedged between the bottom of his chair and the console.

  Irina sucked in her breath and swore in Russian. Tara checked for a pulse, but found none. The man was stiff and cold.

  “How long are their shifts?”

  “Twelve hours. He’s been on since last night.” Irina stepped over the guard to the radio apparatus on the small countertop. The aging radio had been cracked open and the microphone ripped out of the housing. “The radio’s been destroyed.”

  “Our Chimera’s close,” Harry muttered. Tara saw that his gun was drawn, that he’d wrapped his clumsy gloved fingers over it. “He must have brought a car.”

  “If it’s here, we’ll find it.”

  They piled back into the car and idled down the main street of the industrial complex. Irina guided the car down rows of blocky buildings studded with glass and concrete. Some of them had to be administrative and supply buildings, Tara guessed. Some still had electricity: one had a digital sign on the side that displayed the time and radiation levels. They passed one that displayed eighty-one millionths of a roentgen per hour. Tara stifled a shudder. Normal background radiation was supposed to be between six and twelve millionths.

  Irina wound down to the reactor complex, behind the peeling red and white paint of a smokestack. “We’re coming up on unit four … the one that failed. Until recently, the others had still been running.”

  “Unbelievable,” Harry muttered behind his respirator.

  Unit four was unmistakable. The Sarcophagus covered part of the white building in a black box, holding in the radioactive debris from the reactor. If the spent fuel from the other reactors was being stored somewhere, this would be a good place to put it, behind this formidable lead-lined casket.

  And the Chimera apparently thought so, too. A truck was parked in front of it. Irina parked several meters away behind the edge of a crumbling building to let Harry and Tara out.

  “He’s here. Can you go get more guards?” Harry asked.

  Irina nodded. “I’ll have to get to the next town for a radio, but I will bring them.” She glanced at the Sarcophagus. “Are you sure—?”

  “Yes.”

  “Be careful.” Irina handed them a heavy flashlight through the open window.

  The small car buzzed away, leaving Harry and Tara in the shadow of the Sarcophagus. A stiff breeze rattled pebbles across the pavement and bent grasses and warped pine trees. Harry approached the truck, gun drawn. Tara clutched the flashlight like a club as they advanced on it.

  The truck was the kind used to transport cattle, with a ramp and slats to keep the cattle from pitching over the sides of the bed. Inside the bed were a dozen metal drums. Some were open, and some were closed. As Tara approached, the alarm on her dosimeter wailed. She stifled it, turning off the volume. A glance told her the background radiation was almost a full roentgen. It vibrated against her hip furiously, like a hornet caught in a jar. Tara could feel the vibration crawling along her skin underneath her suit, the prickle of radiation that felt like standing too close to a stereo speaker.

  Harry peered into the cab. “Nobody home.”

  “It’s hot. We can’t let him take the truck out of here.”

  Harry slid into the driver’s seat. No keys in the ignition. He reached under the dashboard and ripped the wires out from under it. “It’s not going anywhere, now.”

  The back window of the truck shattered in a hail of glass. Instinctively, Tara hit the ground, recoiling when she discovered that it was covered in contaminated moss. When she lifted her head, she saw a figure advancing upon the truck with a rifle at his shoulder. Her breath caught in her throat.

  The Chimera was not the figure of the World she’d seen in her dreams. Instead, he was an angry man dressed in dusty black pants, black T-shirt, and a miner’s helmet with a light that flashed in the sunshine. A radiation burn blistered over his skin, turning his angular countenance red and furious.

  Another shot slammed into the pickup, and Tara ducked behind the truck’s bulk. She gripped the flashlight, crawling around the corner of the truck. She didn’t think the Chimera had seen her yet. Perhaps she could circle around …

  Harry returned fire from the back of the truck. Unfazed, the Chimera advanced. Tara heard Harry swear about cheap ammunition, heard him slam the gun against the dash. The gun had jammed. And the Chimera was coming.

  GALEN ADVANCED ON HIS QUARRY, TRAPPED IN THE TRUCK CAB like a bug in a jar. He shouted at the man to come out, banged on the flank of the truck with the butt of the rifle. A man in a white plastic suit tumbled out of the cab, hurled a gun at him, and charged.

  Galen was tackled into the metallic-tasting moss. The rifle was trapped between the two men, and Galen struggled to re-establish control of the weapon. The gun fired near the truck, deflating one of the tires in a hiss.

  No. He would not allow this interloper to interfere with his plans. For an instant, Galen wondered who this intruder was. He was too overdressed in protective gear to be a stalker, but there would be no one else here …

  Galen’s bare hand clawed at the man’s face, knocking the respirator off. His palm made contact with the man’s face, a man whom he recognized from Veriss’s memories: Harry Li. His hot palm seared into Li’s face, feeling the burning of memory there. For an instant, he could hear Li’s voice in his head, that churning mass of fear and determination and frustration. He heard Li howling outside him, but heard his voice and memory beginning to leak into his head, like a water tap turned on low. He flashed on a memory of a beautiful, dark-haired woman tangled in sheets and scars.

  That memory was clubbed out of him by a blow to the back of his head. Galen reeled back, and was struck over and over by something heavy that slammed his head again and again into the moss-covered ground.

  He ripped away from Li, lashed out at the new figure in white who was clubbing the hell out of him with a flashlight. He knocked that peculiarly solid ghost to the ground, against the howl of Li’s voice in his ear.

  He clambered to his feet and ran, ran to the Sarcophagus.

  Overhead, the sky split op
en, and it began to rain.

  “HARRY.”

  Tara cradled Harry’s head in her lap, stroking the side of his face where a handprint-shaped burn bloomed. Rain speckled his cheek. The Chimera had only had the chance to touch Harry for a second before she clubbed him. But the touch had seemed to affect Harry like acid. She shook him, and rainwater sluiced off his suit in runnels to the ground.

  “Harry, please talk to me.”

  He didn’t move. He was still breathing. She could feel the rise and fall of his chest under her gloves. His pulse was quick, but thready. What had the Chimera done to him? She cradled his head in her hands, and tears gurgled into her respirator. Had the Chimera sucked Harry’s mind dry, like he had the others? Was this the sacrifice the Hanged Man had foretold?

  Irina would bring help, soon. But she wasn’t going to leave him here, in the puddles and toxic moss. Tara grasped Harry under the arms and dragged him away to a piece of broken concrete that jutted above the ruined lot. It was clear of moss and water, and out of the line of sight of the truck if the Chimera came back, but not so hidden that Irina’s men couldn’t find him. Tenderly, she arranged his hands on his chest. She was reminded of the Four of Swords she’d seen in her dreams, the knight asleep in effigy.

  Tara pulled aside her respirator and kissed him. Underneath his plastic armor, Harry made no move. What had been magick in her dream world was dreadfully ordinary in this one.

  But, unlike in her dream world, she wouldn’t allow the Chimera to win. Tara’s hands balled into fists, and she searched the broken pavement for Harry’s discarded gun. She popped the jammed round out of the chamber with some effort, saw two shots left in the clip behind a distended spring. It would have to work.

  Squaring her shoulders, she confronted the Sarcophagus. Her white-shrouded feet split the surface tension of uneven puddles as she approached. The shadow of the Sarcophagus loomed cold over her, though straw from bird nests leaked from the seams between its uneven and hastily erected lead plates. The windowless façade was streaked with rust from disintegrating bolts and seams forced open by wayward plants. Rain peppered her radiation hood, and she felt water begin to creep in at the neck, mingling with sweat. She paced the perimeter of it until she found an opening, a ripped panel beside a warped pine tree.

  The Chimera wasn’t afraid of this place, and she was determined not to fear it, either.

  She expected nearly total darkness, waited a moment for her eyes to adjust. It was dark, but light streamed in from split seams in the roof, drizzling water from rusted beams. Stripped electronics panels confronted her, windows pulled open and wires snaking out of steel cabinets. She wound her way around the cabinets, the plastic-draped consoles with silent dials, some scavenged for use elsewhere, leaving gaping holes in annunciator panels. Even here, in the control area, steel had creased and buckled under the force of the explosion. Overhead, rain drummed with a deafening sound.

  At her hip, the dosimeter vibrated furiously. Tara ignored it, and tried not to imagine what was in the dust she shuffled through as she made her way through the maze. Spray-painted radiation readings were scrawled along the walls with the dates … In May of 1986, the background radiation was .5 roentgens per hour. Tara glanced down at her dosimeter. Her dosimeter crept near 1.0 roentgens … suggesting that whatever the Chimera had accomplished here had breached containment.

  She swore under her breath, muffled by her respirator.

  A rusted, bowed set of stairs extended before her. A padlocked door leading to them had been ripped open, a steel radiation sign curled back like paper. Tara guessed this was the path to the main reactor hall. The stairs were lit by dull yellow emergency lighting. She climbed them with her pistol at the ready, sweat trickling between her shoulder blades. The saliva in her mouth tasted like tinfoil, and she could feel the prickling of radiation along her skin, under her suit. Why any human being would voluntarily go in here was beyond her.

  The floor of the reactor hall was filled with nearly two feet of uneven concrete and disintegrating bits of yellow plastic foam, poured in an attempt to reduce contamination. Beyond that, the debris field appeared largely untouched. In the dim yellow lighting, it looked like a scene from an apocalypse: torn I-beams warped around massive slabs of concrete and steel reaching four stories tall. Clay and boron particles dusted over the scene like snow, dropped from helicopters decades earlier. Shafts of light and water from the disintegrating ceiling poured through to illuminate the debris. Overhead, a bird flapped, trying to escape the rain. The weak structure groaned under the pelting of the rain, making a sound like sand dunes sighing that Tara could feel in the soles of her feet.

  A shattered window to the main reactor perched on a ruined wall. Tara stood on tiptoe to peer in, through gravel and bits of glass melted yellow and blue. Part of the shell of the refueling station had crashed through that wall and landed on its side. This was where the fuel rods had been placed into the machine. Melted fuel, like frozen magma, extended below it from the sleeves where the fuel rods would have been inserted. She could see evidence of digging here: one of the barrels from the truck, hand shovels, and hastily made reinforcement efforts with scraps of metal.

  Tara shivered. It seemed ungodly, the immense scale, the force. Unnatural. Evil.

  The movement of a light glimmered on the top of the reactor, swept a beam in Tara’s direction. She lifted her gun.

  “Chimera. Stop.” She didn’t know what else to call him. He was as much an abomination as this place.

  He turned, regarding her. His rifle was at his shoulder. “What did you call me?”

  • • • •

  “CHIMERA.”

  Galen cocked his head, looking at the small woman standing on the catwalk below him. He leapt down, curiosity stinging him as much as the air stung his flesh. This was the only living human who understood what he was. He heard Harry Li’s voice buzzing in the back of his skull. He knew Tara. Knew that she was special.

  “You know what I am.”

  “I know you survived this.” Her free hand, the one not holding the gun, sketched the devastation. “I know it changed you. And I know it shouldn’t have happened.”

  Galen snorted. “It was inevitable.”

  “It was human error.”

  “Human error is inevitable in any endeavor. No matter what the precautions, there will always be an error.” Galen took a deep breath, tasting the dust at the back of his throat. His lungs ached. He could feel them burning.

  “What are you doing here?”

  Galen licked dust from his lips. “Everyone thought this place was dead. All the old fuel melted and hardened into rock, wrapped in lead and concrete. But that wasn’t true. I learned from the old spies that this place was being used … used to store radioactive debris from other sites, other reactors, other projects. And then forgotten.”

  “Why not leave it alone? Let it rot here in lead.”

  Galen laughed. “This place is a cancer. And they fed it, made it worse. I want the rest of the world to experience it, to understand what a fucking mess this is, until someone calls a stop to it.”

  “That’s why you sold the information, the whereabouts of the other nuclear debris.”

  “There’s enough poison for all of us.” The cesium in his mouth tasted bitter. The ceiling of the Sarcophagus creaked above him, as if underlining his point.

  “And now … why get your hands dirty, why dig this out yourself?”

  He stared up at the vast, dark ceiling. “I am like the firemen who knew they were dying. I have nothing left to lose. I am rooted to this place.”

  “I cannot let you go.” Tara stared down the barrel of the gun at him. Her voice was short, breathy, as if she were having difficulty breathing through the respirator covering half her face. “You must be held to account for your crimes, for spreading this misery to others.”

  Galen sighed. The stock of the rifle was pressed to his shoulder, moved with each breath. “I won’t go with you.”


  The look of sadness in the woman’s eyes reminded him of the nurse in Minsk who snuck him apples. “I am sorry.” She pulled the trigger of the gun.

  And nothing happened.

  She pulled it again, with the same echoing click.

  Galen let loose a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding, coughed on his shoulder. That was the same piece of shit gun that Harry Li had. Useless. He advanced forward on the catwalk to her. Her eyes widened, and she lifted her chin.

  “This is a good death,” Galen said. “A hero’s death. Unlike the men and women who died here of fire and burns, and who will continue to die here, of cancer … this will be quick. No invisible force cooking you alive as you sleep. Just a clean bullet.”

  His finger flexed on the trigger.

  “Harry,” she said.

  The voice in Galen’s head that belonged to Harry Li howled at him. Galen’s grip on the gun shook. He saw, through Harry Li’s eyes, her scars and her smile. Her strength, how she had survived being buried alive. How she had found him, using her cartomancer’s talents. She was like Galen. A monster, in her own world, in her own way. But he could feel Harry’s love for her, strong and proximate. Not the distracted wistfulness Carl had felt for Lena. Galen could not understand how Harry had been able to leave her alone, and his fingers twitched. Galen had longed for that kind of love his whole life, that kind of a union, being understood with judgment suspended. But Harry had cast it all away, not realizing what he had lost.

  “You’re a witch,” he said. “A witch who knows something of the horrors practiced by man.”

  “An oracle. An oracle who knows something of horror,” she admitted. The plastic on her respirator flexed and caved inward.

  “Tell me something.” He licked his sunburned lips. “Will this happen again?”

  Tara stared at him with those inky blue eyes. “It might. All I can say is that I will do everything in my power to keep it from happening. There is an order of oracles which tries to keep this from happening—one of the stalkers here foresaw it, but no one would listen to her.” She shook her head, sucking the plastic close to her face. “I can make you no clear prediction, only say what I will do.”