Chuck Logan - After the Rain

The dozer driver was no longer hauling the Deere tractor. He had maneuvered it to the edge of the pit and was now trying to shove it in with the blade. But the two machines had tangled together, sixty tons of grinding steel. The driver stood at the controls, craning his neck to see Holly’s hand instructions. Working out some problem. They were mired in the mud, losing traction.

“Jesus,” Broker shouted. They were, what? — a hundred yards from the reactors?”

“Yeah, I know,” Yeager shouted back.

“How they doing?” yelled the Red Wing cop behind the wheel. His wide eyes filled the rearview mirror, a study in controlled panic.

“Trying to push it in and they got hung up in the mud,” Yeager shouted back.

“Not good,” yelled the cop, forcing himself to slow down, picking his way through a moving field of running people and vehicles. Headed for the parking lot.

“Hey,” Broker said as the Deere teetered over the edge. He saw Holly rapidly waving his arm-urging the dozer driver to drive his machine into the pit. Broker saw the driver jump as the dozer tipped in on top of the Deere. He landed on the ground next to Holly. They started to run…

Broker felt the concussion tug the fillings in his teeth-the day shivered, and in that split second Broker grabbed Yeager’s neck and pulled him down in the seat. “Duck…,” he yelled. Then they were slammed sideways. His mouth and eyes clogged with grit as he glimpsed, but did not hear, the rear window disintegrate. The seat of the cop’s pants appeared as he smashed forward over the dash, into the windshield. No one had been thinking seat belts.

Somehow the cop held on to the wheel, flopped back; bleeding from the head, face, neck, and scalp, he fought the wheel. No sound anymore, everything going fuzzy, then opaque with the rolling cloud of dust. They landed back on four wheels, skidded blind, and collided at about twenty miles an hour with something in the churning, silent gloom.

They came to a stop. Broker shook like a dog stepping out of a puddle. Cuts. Blood leaking through his mud-pie hands. Too quiet for all the stuff still flying through the air.

Must have burst his eardrums.

He groped toward Yeager, who was similarly attired in grime and bleeding cuts, tasted the particles of clay and silt and sand that coated his tongue, felt it embedded in his teeth. Just plain old dirt…

Then the sheer terror smacked him alongside the head. Could you taste radiation?

Was that how it was going to be?

Yeager’s lips moved. “What happened?”

Broker shook his head. Pointed to his ears. “Can’t hear.” Tried to read Yeager’s lips. “Don’t know. It went off.”

Lights probed the murky silence. Shadowy figures sleepwalking, fighting for their balance; cops in blue, firefighters in yellow. They were helping people to their feet. EMT was there. The white of dressings. The red of blood. Some people they left where they lay.

Broker had to know. He struggled out of the car, pushed aside the rescue workers. “Help him, help him,” he yelled, pointing to the barely conscious copper in the front seat. He lost track of Yeager.

Go find out. He started back toward the explosion. Clods of dirt were still raining down through the sandy half-light. He tripped on something. The flattened fence.

The next thing he tripped on was a twisted section of tread from the dozer. Like a smashed mechanical snake belly, the grouser pads had been ripped from the cleats, the treads themselves bent by the force of the blast.

Broker grimaced. Holly and the driver…They’d essentially been standing under a B-52 strike.

Did it hit the reactor?

Then- Oh shit -his feet went out and he tumbled down a slope of loose sand and- Jesus! — he hit something metal, red hot, that seared his forearm. Scrambling back, waving his hands in the dust, he tried to see.

Coughing bad now, eyes stinging. Impossible to see.

But he had to find out. Was it safe for his baby? Was it in the air, invisible? He balled his bleeding fists. Swung them in helpless fury. Somebody better tell me something, goddammit.

But he was half-blind and deaf, lost in the silent limbo.

Broker sat in a field about a mile from the plant and watched a giant traffic jam still in progress where they were evacuating the Treasure Island Casino. Someone was saying that back in the seventies, the BIA told the Sioux band it was just a steam plant they were being forced to host on their land. Broker, still having trouble hearing, didn’t catch it all.

In fact, he wasn’t catching much. He was vaguely aware of Yeager, keeping an eye on him. Less vaguely, he was becoming aware that all the stuff that only happened to other people-all that stuff he’d kept isolated in his compartments-had busted out and was creeping over him.

He’d always operated on the theory that someone had to accept the duty of being strong; and, usually, that was him. He ground his teeth. Christ, if he couldn’t even bring himself to say Holly’s name, how the hell was he going to tell Kit about her mother?

Missing.

Like the walls that used to shield him.

Broker sat and stared. Yeager watched him.

The men in protective suits had picked their way through the debris field and had checked the walls of the reactors and cooling pool. They returned and took off the suits and assured the exhausted cops, medics, and firemen that some engineers had stayed at their posts, that the damage was minimal. Emergency procedures. Backup systems. Yadda-yadda. They walked through the first responders, showing them the readings on their dosimeters. Very low numbers. Well within acceptable limits. It was under control. No general evacuation order. See?

No one there believed them.

Broker and Yeager had bathed in a makeshift shower, had exchanged their potentially contaminated clothes for baggy National Guard fatigues. They sat numb, dotted with minor dressings, drinking Red Cross coffee. A TV was propped up on the hood of a Goodhue County patrol car, plugged into an emergency generator. The governor of Minnesota was saying everyone should stay indoors, and that it was going to be all right. The hundred-plus cops, firemen, and medics who had been ordered off the blast site did not look convinced.

The governor said most of the blast had been absorbed by the excavation and the heavy dozer. Yes, the shock had caused minor damage to the cooling pool and one of the reactor containment walls. Some of the water pipes in the reactor were affected and there had been a small release of radioactive steam into the atmosphere.

But, the governor assured, it was minimal.

“Sure it was,” quipped a cop from Hastings. “That’s why he’s talking from his desk in St. Paul.”

Nine bodies had been retrieved. Eighty or ninety people had been injured, three critically. Most of the deaths and injuries were the results of flying debris and several car accidents in the dusted out aftermath of the blast.

Broker sat and stared, just barely making it out when Yeager started yelling his name.

“What?”

Yeager held up his cell phone.

“What?”

“It’s Norm, in Langdon. He’d put out a regional BOLO on Dale Shuster, remember?”

“Yeah?”

“They found him, dead, at a rest stop south of Le Sueur. And that Khari guy.” Yeager pounded Broker’s shoulder. “That ain’t all they found. She fucking made it, man. ”

All Broker’s remaining armor fell off at once and he began to tremble. It took an immense effort to unclench his fist from around the mashed blue cigarette pack. With shaking fingers, he withdrew the two remaining, battered smokes. He gave one to Yeager and put the other in his mouth.