Hot Water (30 page)

“How?” Ty asked, matching the man’s tone.

The man’s smile widened—his mom called that kind of smile a smirk, and now David understood why she was always telling him to wipe it off his face. It wasn’t a pleasant smile. Instead it was ugly, ugly, ugly.

“I used Satan’s own hell fire against him. Their own technology—they think they’re so smart. But they weren’t smarter than me.”

“Of course not,” Ty nodded in agreement. “So you—”

“I took over their computer systems and used it to start Armageddon and no one can stop it.”

“Armageddon?” David blurted out.

“You mean the reactor?” Ty said, somehow his voice still calm. “You’re going to blow up the reactor?”

“No,” the man said, his voice almost dreamlike. “It’s going to blow us up. Everyone. The world ends today. And I started it. The Rapture begins here and now with me.” He raised his face to look at the ceiling. “I’m ready, Lord! Ready to be bathed in your glory!”

As if in answer, alarms began to shriek, and everything went black.

THIRTY-ONE

I reached Morris’s office just as the lights went out and alarms began to blare. Low-level emergency lighting came on, enough for me to see Morris and Owen arguing. Morris stood beside his control chair, turning in a circle. His face looked haggard.

“It’s all my fault,” he was saying.

Owen pounced on that. “You? You did this? Coddling those damn protestors. Were you working with him? Did you give him the security codes, Morris? Are you trying to kill us all?”

“No,” Morris stammered. “Of course not. I—I never—it’s not my fault! I only wanted—” Tears choked his words and he turned away.

“He just wanted you to stay,” I interceded.

Owen spun toward me and stared for a long, hard moment. Then he lunged for Morris, slapping him so hard that Morris’s body snapped back a step.

“You stupid sack of shit!” Owen slapped him again, sending him reeling against the wall. “All my life you’ve held me back and now I finally get a chance and you—”

“Stop it!” I pushed myself between them. Morris was cowering, arms held over his head, trying to protect himself, refusing to fight back. “You stole everything from him—his designs, his chance at a career. You used him all your life.”

“Like hell I did. He’d be nothing without me, nothing! No one would have ever seen his fancy designs because he’d be too scared to let them. This place would have never been built without me, and you know it!” He aimed another blow at Morris, who scurried sideways along the wall, dropping to a crouch, whimpering, but still not defending himself. “To hell with you! All of you!”

“Wait, you can’t go. Who’s going to fix this?” I gestured at the darkened computer screens.

“He broke it, he can fix it.” He stormed out.

I ran after him. The claxon’s alarm changed to a more ominous pitch. “You can’t be serious. Grandel, there are lives at stake here—”

He shook me free so hard it wrenched my arm. “Yeah, my life. And I’m not hanging around to let it get fucked up any more than it already has been.”

He pushed through the door. It slammed shut behind him. I ran to Morris, who had staggered to his feet. “Are you okay? What’s going on? How do we stop this?”

I followed him from his office into the control room. Dozens of different-pitched alarms sounded, adding to the confusion and sense of chaos.

The controllers were all scrambling, some futilely punching their computer keyboards in the dim light, others working manual instruments. Morris ignored them, running from work station to work station, taking in the analog readings.

Finally, he hit a button, silencing all the alarms, and stood in the middle of the room. Everyone around him stopped, looking to him, hope shadowing their faces.

“It’s no good,” he said. “He knew what he was doing—the one combination that could never happen. I underestimated one thing when planning: how devious a human mind could be.”

“Morris, stop beating yourself up and tell us what to do,” I said, yanking on his arm, guiding him to a work station.

“We’ve lost secondary and tertiary backups,” his voice held a hint of amazement. “He’s shut down the pumps, closed all the coolant system valves.”

“Can’t you open them from here?”

“No. He’s circumvented all the overrides.”

“What about those control rods—the ones you said could shut down a reactor? Scram it?”

“They’re locked into place. He put them in maintenance mode before he killed the power.” His face focused on one last indicator. This one was now lit up in red, making his face look like it was covered in blood. “We’ll have to manually lower them as well.”

“Just show me what to do.”

His face cleared as determination crowded out his guilt and confusion. “Not you, me.”

He clapped his hands. “I need everyone working on the same page. We’ll be working protocol eighteen—this guy pulled the ultimate Stuxnet on us, so remember you can’t trust any of your readings. Every valve must be checked and if need be, opened manually.”

“Do you have any idea how many miles of pipe we’re talking?” someone called out.

“Twenty-six,” Morris answered. “And nine hundred twenty-eight valves.” A groan went up but no one stopped working. “We don’t need all of them, though. Just the emergency coolant lines.”

A few workers were handing out walkie-talkies. “We have the turbine and coolant crews,” one operator said, listening to his radio.

“I’ve made contact with the containment crew,” another put in.

“Good.” Morris took a radio and began speaking into it. “What’s the situation?”

A voice over the radio answered him. “The sudden spike in pressure—” There was a sputter of static. “Catastrophic failure . . . reactor pressure-overflow relief valve blew.”

The entire room tensed at that. I had no idea what a pressure-overflow relief valve was, but I could tell it was bad.

Morris was the first of us to regroup. “I need Team One working on manually bypassing every valve in the emergency coolant system, get it flowing a.s.a.p. Team Two, you get the generators back up and running—and remember, go manual, we can’t trust any system that he might have had access to.” He paused. “What’s the situation with the control rods?”

“Not good. He used some kind of random sequence when he locked down the system. If we try to reset them all together we’re only resetting some and actually freezing up the others.”

“You’ll have to do them one by one, then.” Morris’s voice was grim. “In the meantime, I’ll be going in to pull the plug on the quench tanks manually.”

Everyone froze and stared at him.

“All four reactors?” one man asked.

“What’s a quench tank?” I asked the operator closest to me.

“A tank of gadolinium nitrate that will smother the core. They sit above each reactor in case of a direct hit from above like a jet or missile strike.”

“Morris, you can’t,” someone protested. “With the relief valve blown, it’s suicide.”

“Not if you all move fast enough and get those rods down before I need to go that route.” He began to leave and I scrambled to follow.

“What about your robots, can’t they do it?” I asked, envisioning C3PO walking into the reactor. Better than Morris.

He didn’t slow, merely shook his head.

I caught up with him. “What can I do to help?”

He paused. I thought for a moment he was going to order me to leave.

“With communications out, I’ll need someone to relay information via a handheld—these guys are all gonna have their hands full. Come on, we don’t have much time.”

This entire day was not turning out the way Hutton had expected, and that frustrated him to no end. He should have had AJ on the stairs—he’d never failed like that, not when he was that close. It just shouldn’t have happened.

Of course, the whole impending nuclear meltdown thing wasn’t exactly on his agenda either.

He knew he should have joined the stream of people racing to their cars, but he couldn’t resist one last look at AJ. She fascinated him.

From the plant manager’s empty office, he watched her join the workers in the control room below. There was a speaker on the wall, so he listened in shamelessly. It was pretty obvious that things were dire and that there wasn’t much time. One guy, apparently the guy in charge, had just signed up for a suicide mission. And AJ was joining him.

Maybe this day would end as planned after all. Of course, if AJ died in a meltdown that meant there was a good chance Hutton wouldn’t be around to collect his paycheck. But it wasn’t like he could do anything to help the situation. His best bet was to make sure the kid made it to safety—Masterson had been very clear about that in his instructions. No harm was to come to the child.

Hutton left the office when AJ left the control room. He went back downstairs, reaching the security office just in time to see Ty Stillwater, the deputy with the impeccable timing, usher his prisoner outside. He followed, hanging back out of sight but within listening range.

“The sheriff’s station is twelve miles up 170,” one of the security guys was saying as two more joined the prisoner in the back seat of a black Yukon. “We’ll meet you there.”

“I’ll be right behind,” Stillwater said.

Hutton noticed a sheriff’s vehicle marked
Smithfield County
with West Virginia plates parked not far from the two crashed SUVs. He ducked back into the shadows just as Stillwater, his dog, and the boy exited the plant and headed to their vehicle. Time to blow this pizza joint.

AJ Palladino’s life he’d leave in the hands of fate.

For now, at least.

I followed Morris into the locker room. The plant was now empty except for the men and women working furiously to save it.

Morris no longer acted like the congenial absent-minded professor I’d met yesterday. Instead, he radiated an intensity that made me give him more room than usual, afraid to crowd out any important thoughts.

I understood that kind of focus—it was exactly how I got when I was hard at work and felt “in the zone.” Never with the fate of thousands in my hands, though.

While he donned his own suit, he talked me through putting on a heavy-duty radiation suit. Instead of the flimsy yellow ones I’d seen when I was decontaminated, these were made of a heavy black material. Demeromn, Morris told me, as if knowing the brand name would reassure me. It didn’t.

We put on headsets and microphones along with full-face masks, another departure from the respirators that the health physicist and NRC guy had worn earlier. Funny how I hadn’t seen them rushing to help. I wondered when they’d abandoned us.

“Because of the shielding near the reactors,” Morris explained as we hurried down to the containment area, his voice surprisingly calm, “my radio may not transmit all the way to the control room. You’re my failsafe. You’ll be standing outside the containment area, so you should be shielded from any radiation. All I need is for you to repeat everything I say to the control room and then relay any information they have for me.”

“Redundancy,” I muttered, a little frustrated that my job was to stand there and play Whisper Down the Alley.

“Failsafe,” he corrected. “There’s a window that you’ll be able to see me through. If my radio totally fails, you’ll have to use the whiteboard to send me messages.” He pulled a small whiteboard with a pen attached from a pocket on his pants leg and pointed to a duplicate one on my suit.

It was hard enough moving in the heavy suit, which was way too big for my frame. I wondered if I’d be able to write anything legible with the thick gloves I wore. Hoped it wouldn’t come to that. The suit’s interior was hot, my hands and face were sweating, and if I breathed too hard the facemask fogged up.

We passed through several thick doors, the last two painted magenta with large yellow radiation warnings printed on them. I remembered Morris’s lecture about the importance of redundancies. Finally we reached the containment area. No one else was here. Morris steered me to a narrow horizontal window.

“I’m going inside. I need to climb up to the upper level and manually open each tank.” He pointed to a narrow steel ladder fastened to the concrete wall, barely visible in the emergency lighting.