Bombshell (27 page)

“Johnny. Hey, turn this up. They just interrupted the ball game. This might be important.”

The old man stared into the camera, his voice low and measured: “The world has never known a day quite like today. It faced the considerable uncertainties and dangers of the worst nuclear power plant accident of the atomic age. And the horror tonight is that it could get much worse. The potential is there for the ultimate risk of meltdown at Indian Point . . . ”

“That's impossible . . . ” Cash reached her hands to her head, almost imperceptibly clawing at the suede of her hair. The nightmare on the hot television could not be. It must be a conspiracy designed to force her to break cover after her massacre. Someone had discovered her plan for an assault on Indian Point, and they were attempting to preempt it. She whispered to herself: “Clever bastards.” With Schmalix beside her, staring at the screen, she fought to restrain fury. The calendar on the wall behind the bar had its elapsed days crossed out. Taurus was not yet over Indian Point; this must be a hoax. Yet, another fear imposed itself over her doubt. Something had changed, as though a knot had been tied in the cord that she had long ago strung between April 26, 1986, and April 26, 2011. Now the cord did not reach its endpoint. History, her zodiac, had a fault, a jolt in its rhythm. Had she predicated this by killing the last heads of the Winters Corporation too soon?

She slugged her drink down. “Okay, fuck it.”

She knew what she must do, and she had to do it immediately.

“I need to talk to you, Officer Schmalix.” Cash rose from her barstool and inclined her head toward the door. “Can we step outside?”

“What is it?” The cop held his Guinness an inch from his lips.

Cash leaned closer, made a show of casting her gaze to the corners of the bar and whispered huskily behind her hand. “I know something about the
woman who killed those men at the Winters Corporation, but we have to go now, okay?” Schmalix smelled of the cologne of a middle-aged man, diluted with city rainwater.

“What are you saying?” He wondered: How could this skinhead girl know anything about it? She wouldn't even know where the Winters building was located.

“Not here,” she said.

“Let me put my coat on.” Schmalix tossed several bills on the bar and drained his glass in a series of strong swallows. “See you later, Johnny.”

“Do you have a car?” Cash asked, when they were in the wet street.

“It's a block away, but—”

“A partner?”

“Gone home. Clocked off.”

“Good.” Cash gripped the soaked sleeve of policeman's coat. “I'll tell you what I know while you drive us, and I can repeat it all down at the station. We have to hurry.” When they reached the white patrol car and Schmalix unlocked it, she spoke sternly. “It's going to be difficult for you to believe some of what I'm going to tell you, but you have to take this seriously.”

“Okay, okay, but you're supposed to sit in the back.”

“That won't work,” Cash declared, closing the passenger door.

Schmalix shrugged in his seat and started the engine.

“Take us north first.”

“You're going to tell me then?”

“If you deviate from what I say, I'll shoot you in the face.”

Schmalix turned his head to see the barrel of Cash's pistol thrust toward his right eye. He flinched, inhaling sharply, and then letting out a slight groan. “I don't think I like you so much anymore, kid. Please be careful.”

“Turn off the radio and don't try a fucking thing.”

Schmalix did what he was told.

“Now put on your lights and siren and get us out of this traffic. You're taking me to Indian Point.”

“Indian Point?”

“Get us onto 87, and we'll follow the Hudson north. I just need an hour of your life, Officer Schmalix. Do it!”

As the patrol car flashed along the railings of Central Park West, Cash noticed that tears were beginning to swell in the cop's eyes. She broke the silence:

“It's an unusual name, isn't it:
Schmalix
?”

He nodded and snorted mucous as the first bright tear began to roll into a dry rivulet in his right cheek.

“If I didn't know better, I'd
swear
that someone was fucking with me.”

Schmalix drew upon some final drying reservoir of courage and cleared his throat. Still, he struggled with his words. “What do you mean?”

“Thing is, I'm not certain that no one is fucking with me. Schmalix was the name of the cop who arrested Valerie, see?”

“I'm sorry, but I don't know anything about who you're talking about.
Please
, don't become agitated, but I've never arrested anyone named Valerie.”

“No, no. You're probably right. You're still too young . . . ”

“You have me confused with someone else, I think.”

“Perhaps. Something is very wrong . . . Very wrong . . . ”

“But can we talk about the Winters shootings, like you wanted?”

“I killed them. My name is Varyushka Cash. Write it up later.”

“Why are we driving to Indian Point?”

“I have things to do there.”

“It sounded like it might be too late, for whatever.”

“
Fucking with me
. . . ,” she whispered.

The Winters Corporation had been Varyushka Cash's lion of the triple night. Those dead men were mere gatekeepers in the war as she approached her assault on Indian Point. What she did not know, as the bodies of the last two heads of the Winters Corporation hydra lay smoldering on the pile of their corporate carpet, silently mouthing and rattling toward their end, was that they would never be buried. There would never be a funeral for the man-head and scions of Winters Corporation. Their last resting place would be the autopsy table, naked on cold metal under blue light. There would never be another funeral in New York City, except for that of the city itself. No one would have anticipated the scale of the abandonment that left the city as a husk, its young body of steel and stone purged and empty, the bulimia of the metropolis letting out its molecular citizens. She did not know that packs of stray dogs would inhabit the subways, the hollow catacombs of the city, and its open arteries. She did not see the street gangs cavorting in swathes of abandoned penthouses.

Everything was closed north of the Cross Westchester Expressway, and traffic was being diverted into the New York State Thruway and out over the cold water of the Hudson, across the Tappan Zee Bridge, to the west side of the river, away from the reactors. Cash told Schmalix to pull over. For a moment, they sat in silence, both staring blankly at the windscreen wipers hissing across the glass and the headlights wheeling slowly toward the bridge. The rain had stopped. Only the spray from passing vehicles obscured their vision. Cash spoke. “Turn on the radio for a moment, but say nothing. I want to listen.” A pair of fire trucks passed them as they waited on the shoulder. Cash watched as they were admitted beyond the roadblocks. “Follow the next one through,” she said. “This is bullshit.” They pulled in close to the subsequent engine, and cops in black plastic capes waved them through the temporary barriers with their flashlights. “No one knows what's going on,” she said. The radio squelched with conflicting voices.

Finally, there it was.

Indian Point was in flames.

The fire clawed out of the containment building, huge fallopian whips of flame extending over the boiling river. Titanic nebulae of steam jettisoned white heat out of its ruptured body. Dials cracked in the control room where she had seen herself in Jane Fonda drag, emptying her ammunition. Gantries glowed and twisted before breaking from their moorings. The cooling towers would buckle and collapse. Lethal embers flowed upward into the night, parodies of red stars. She saw the firefighters and Liquidators of Chernobyl and knew that even as war was waged against the inferno at Indian Point, even those who might survive the night were already dead. The worst of it could not be perceived. Yet, Varyushka Cash saw it: the vast aurora of radiation hanging in the dark. The goiter in her throat pulsed in perverse rhythm with its flaring sheets. Transfixed by the ache at her larynx, the breaking of her heart, seduced, all that she was able to do was to watch it extending. It stretched a glittering green placental veil over the reactors, across the Hudson, dripping over Buchanan, a spectral burlesque flowing toward Manhattan, a scintillating wall of death.

“You can get out now, Officer Schmalix.”

She turned the patrol car back toward Manhattan as the torrent of flame climbed to 600 feet. The blast filled the wind with strontium, plutonium, cesium, and iodine. Deadly shrapnel set the trees aflame. Arms of hydrogen reached into the night and a pearlescent steam and smoke cloaked the fractured turbine halls. Back on the highway, staring into her rearview mirror, it seemed to Cash that she dragged it in her wake, back to the city. She pictured the gantries and the control room, hundreds of warning lights turning red before everything was vaporized. Soon, the dead would be
counted in the hundreds, and soon after that in the thousands and tens of thousands as the radiation swept the land.

She could feel the reactor plant splitting open like the hemispheres of a burning skull, hollowing fires gouging the death cradle out of the ground beneath it. She saw it, the embryonic little boy form of it, the certain death latent in its organism. Indian Point was becoming a heavy metal fireball, blooming. It was being brought to her on the spiteful north wind. She pictured the aurora of fallout extending down to the island of Manhattan. She had dreamed of it, the radioactive storm drawing a glittering hand over Trinity, Manhattan, extinguishing the city forever. New York was about to become another Zone of Alienation.

Cash turned on the lights and siren and the contaminated police cruiser began to part the traffic moving to the south on I-9. As she drove, she struggled to contain convulsions of shock and grief from not having been physically present at Indian Point when hell was loosed, an occluded grief like that of her mother, anesthetized and distant as blinding white light poured from her body, nebulae of bloody steam, a raw cry racing in banshee torrents from the wardroom and outside onto the cold stone steps of Pripyat Hospital, as her red and bawling girl was drawn from her wounded body as data from a dying star, the open city of skin. She understood that it was not possible to bear witness to one's own birth. That cracked hull sending steam and terror down the Hudson was her mother's womb. She split from it. Varyushka sprung from a fissure of love and flame. Tears came. Lava. Cities swam in it together. What had she done, and failed to do? Indian Point fell without her. She had spent her life stalking a demon, only to discover that the demon had died of old age.

She fumbled at the radio and heard the static-drenched voices advising that her rogue car should not be apprehended. The car hissed with radiation.
She, as all children of Chernobyl, had become untouchable. Now time was out of joint. The SCRAM was premature. She was supposed to have been there. She was supposed to be the catalyst, except that Indian Point was not meant to burn. Her specter ran along the metal gantries ripping holes in men with her silent pistol, gritting her teeth in the control room, removing her wig and wiping away her sweat as the alarms wailed around her. The atoms of her body shook apart. She could feel psychosis coming down on her, threatening to tear her apart.

The first hatched gas coiled over the suburbs, fingering the latches and breathing on the dissolving window seals, searching for vents. Those delicate, probing, invisible tendrils, the detached licks of the fire, were followed by an unstoppable wave of radiation, a wall like the blade of a bulldozer, miles across, shaving the land, seemingly without touching it, wiping the life away, or sentencing it to wither, fail, and perish. The inhabitants of Buchanan fled as the sirens began howling in their ten-mile perimeter, a spectral air raid. Fire set the night aglow. The smoke vapor passed over the reddening trees, dripping into the dirt, infiltrating the flora, the neat lawns, and tingling in the tissues of animals that sniffed the orange-black sky. Creatures twitched in dropping needles.

APRIL 19, 2011. THE SUN WAS RISING AS DRESNER DROVE INTO
Manhattan, against the early flow of the evacuation. The red light poured over the inert vehicles on the opposite side of I-95 as he drew closer to the Lincoln Tunnel. There had been little official, definitive information regarding the incident at the Indian Point nuclear plant, but there was a fire and
something
had leaked, and the rumors had swollen into a chaotic sprawl of fear. The Soviets had waited three days before admitting their problem, he remembered. His phone vibrated in his breast pocket, and as he flicked it open The Voice said: “Varyushka Cash kidnapped a cop and had him drive her to Indian Point. She released him and turned south again. We have spoken to NYPD and all concerned. No one will touch her before we do.”

Car horns and sirens blared in the early morning, a mechanical scream of traffic that moved achingly through the abandoned tollbooths. Some of the cars across the median had black or silver gaffer tape at the edges of
their closed windows. Inside the cabins, he witnessed the origin of a wave of psychosomatic coughing. He regarded the light flashing from a car interior that had been lined with silver foil at the windscreens and windows, leaving only a small hole for the driver to watch the road. Motorcyclists swerved between the slow cars. The scene looked like a movie. He wondered if that was the reason why he felt so calm. Dresner remembered the sense of distance he experienced when he watched the television reports of the evacuation of New Orleans at the time of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, anonymous black figures walking amid the congestion of slow cars in the wet furnace of those mornings, flotillas of slat board and dead dogs, shotgun shacks and eruptions of violence across the causeways. He did not feel that it was real. He had seen so many fictional disasters in popular culture that the prospect no longer terrified him. He was no longer even certain of his memory that the year had been 2005.