Three A.M. (19 page)

“Please turn both the hot and cold handle on and then off. Then open this cabinet—” He pointed to each object he listed, careful to keep his own hands to himself. “—this drawer, that drawer, and then lay a hand on the doorjamb.”

“No,” I said flatly. He shook his head, sighing, then looked past me and nodded. I spun round just as Callahan touched a shock rod to my neck. I howled in pain and my knees gave out. My head bounced off the tile countertop as I went down.

Callahan leaned over me. “Don’t fight, Tom. Don’t make this shit worse than it has to be. For any of us.” He grabbed me under both arms and hoisted me back onto my feet. I stood unsteadily.

“Turn on the faucet, touch the cabinet, open the drawer—”

I cut Kirk off. “Fuck. You. I’m not—” The prod crackled against my spine, right above my pelvis, and I stumbled forward. Kirk sidestepped, letting me crumple to my knees. Callahan walked over to me and jammed the shocker into my left thigh. Shrieking, I went down, my vision blurred by the pain.

“Vale. Comply. This is all going to happen, so just deal with that knowledge and comply.” Kirk and Callahan together stood me up as Kirk stared into my eyes.

“Okay … Okay, asshole, I’ll do it. I’ll touch wherever and whatever you say. But afterwards, you’ve got to tell me everything you know.”

“All right.” He nodded.

They led me around the house, laying my hands all over the place. I rifled through drawers, opened and closed cabinets and closets. I took a piss and flushed. It was all a goddamn farce. In the living room, I thought I made out a rusty bloodstain on the oriental carpet but thought better of asking.

Their attitudes had changed. Kirk was cold and businesslike, Callahan all too happy to use the shocker. After half an hour, they seemed content with my print-planting, and Kirk led me back into the living room.

“Sit down,” he said, pointing to one of the two couches in the rustic, cozy room. “Go ahead, Tom. Ask me whatever you want.”

I leaned back against the cushions of the couch, moving a hand-embroidered pillow from under my arm. The unfinished wood of the frame rubbed against my flesh. I had taken off my jacket and draped it over a chair in the corner. Across the room, Kirk watched me from where he sat in a corduroy upholstered recliner. It seemed so odd—almost funny, really—that we would leave behind the foggy city and the jail cells and all of it and sit here, in this warm country den and discuss the why of everything.

I sat up again, resting my elbows on my knees and clasping my hands together. Callahan was clattering around in the kitchen. “I don’t know where to start.”

“Well, we’re not going to hang around here all day, so find a place,” he said without venom.

“I … I haven’t seen the goddamn sun or a blade of grass or any of it in fifteen years, and here we sit.” I pressed the heels of my hands to each eye for a while. “Jesus fucking Christ, can a guy get a drink or something?”

“Callahan! Bring some liquor and two glasses!” Kirk called out. “Now, ask away, Tom.”

“I guess I’ll start with the fog. You say you didn’t make it. Someone did. All those metal spires or towers or whatever you call them.”

“We call them stacks.”

“Like a smokestack?” He nodded. “Okay. Why did you—why did they make them? Make the stacks. The fog. Why did you do it?”

“I was in energy. Nothing at all to do with that. Initially, anyway. But to answer your question, at first it was for protection. Everyone’s. Yours and mine.”

“What? Protection from what?”

“Radiation.” He held my gaze for a second and then shouted, “Callahan! What’s the holdup?”

“I got it, I got it,” grumbled the squat man, entering the room with a bottle of liquor and two mismatched glasses. He handed one to me and the other, with the bottle, to Kirk. Kirk nodded thanks and then waited until Callahan left the room.

“Cutty Sark.” He said quietly, “Your brand, yes?”

“Yes,” I answered quietly as he rose and filled my glass. He sat back down and poured a few fingers for himself. Kirk looked out a window as I sat, staring at the side of his head. “Radiation?”

“Sixteen years ago. Well, it started before that—it started over twenty years ago. The Department of Energy commissioned a new nuclear plant to replace all the coal-fired operations. All of them, you see? This was a test. A pilot program. It failed.”

“Sixteen … years ago?”

“Yeah,” he said, barely above a whisper.

“It was radiation. It … sixteen years…”

Kirk was silent for a while. My lips trembled and my chest grew tight. I took a large sip of scotch, choking on the amber liquid.

“I fought for the dam, okay? We could have phased out coal and used hydro and tested the new gear on a smaller scale. I fought it. My team lost.”

“It was radiation,” I said again.

“Yes, Tom.”

“My family … everyone…”

“Almost everyone for over three hundred miles. Not you. Not me. Not some of us. Everyone else. My wife and newborn daughter.”

I was numb, dizzy. My head spinning, I set my glass down on the little table beside the couch. Kirk sat resolute as the room swirled before my eyes. Finally, barely audibly, I whispered, “Why the fog?”

“Fallout. The isotopes didn’t penetrate it. They would swirl back into the lighter air. Those of us who survived the first week and got everyone into town started off using smaller machines near the meltdown site to tamp down the fallout. Someone made the connection between the death rate dropping and heavy air from a weather system a few miles north, so we stuck the foggers on the backs of trucks and drove around the city, blasting mist twenty-four hours a day. People stopped getting sick, so we made more fog. We didn’t know what else to do—it was all so big. So horrible.”

“Sixteen years, Kirk. We’re sitting here in a house surrounded by fields and grass and sunlight … sixteen years gone by. Why?”

“To keep people safe. We had to at first. No one understood cold fusion. No one knew how long the synthetic iridium would radiate. The brightest minds thought they had the future all wrapped up, and now, almost two decades later, we’re still scratching our heads.”

“What the fuck is cold fusion?”

“It’s supposed to be the antithesis of what happened. Supposed to be safe. Nearly endless power at room temperature. This was just the beginning, Tom. Plants big enough to fuel the country and battery cells small enough to run a car for years without new iridium. That was the problem. Iridium is more rare than platinum, so—why am I explaining this? Does any of this make sense?”

“No.” I practically gasped.

“I suppose not. Anyway, when the research team began to experiment with a synthesized metal to replace the raw element, they fucked up. It wasn’t inert. And it blew up and hell rained down. That’s the short story.”

He took a small sip of liquor. I picked up my own glass and downed it. He continued. “Then we—fucking Christ—then two years had passed and we’d built all the stacks and everything was stable. I thought it would be a generation before the area was safe. Maybe fifty years, maybe more. But the half-life wasn’t nearly as bad as we thought, and eventually … eventually people had dealt with it anyway. The fog. Their lives. So they—we decided to keep the program running while we cleaned up and then … then it was a decade and a half later.”

“Why didn’t you just tell us?”

He sat forward quickly, his face flashing with anger. “Tell you what? Tell you all we fucked up? Tell the twenty thousand poor bastards living in gray that it was all because of a mistake? Tell you millions died because of a design flaw? Tell the world that? Tell our enemies we fucked up and oh, by the way, here’s how to make a superweapon! Sorry! We blew it and now, hey, fog for these poor assholes! You don’t grasp the magnitude of what happened at all, my friend.” His jaw was clenched, his eyes flashing. “Cold fusion has been the dream of geniuses and dictators alike—we were so close. Maybe on a different day, it would have worked. Maybe one decimal was off in some equation. But now … now it has fallen to me and a very small group of others to make damn well sure no one ever finds out. Finds out about the science or the catastrophe. Tell you about it? Don’t be so naïve. Or go ahead and shake your fist in righteous indignation—frankly, I don’t give a rat’s ass anymore. What happened, happened; what’s done is long since done and almost forgotten.”

I leaned back on the couch, slowly sliding down until I was lying sideways. His chest rose and fell rapidly as he stared at me. “I bought it. Bought it all, Kirk. The sickness and weather … the talk about—what did you all call it? Hemorrhagic fever? Yeah, I remember it now. Somehow related to new pressure systems, right? It doesn’t make much sense, really, does it? But none of us ever questioned too deeply. We just bought it.” I laughed sadly.

He shook his head slightly and took in a breath to answer but exhaled wordlessly. “Why would any of us poor fucks have guessed anything else? We were traumatized—too scared to guess anything else. We thought we could trust you types. Thought you were looking out for us.”

“I was!” he exclaimed sharply. “I tried to! Junk science! I fucking knew it, and I said it.” Veins stood out on his neck, and he took in a long slow breath to calm himself. “I never wanted the plant, but they built it and it melted down. When we figured out that mist could protect people, I supported it. It saved lives. And it’s a sustainable system, at least. You were all safe. Turn on the stacks at two fifty-seven every morning, ease them off at midnight, everyone lives, no more sickness, no—”

“The fog turns on at two fifty-seven every morning?” I interrupted, my voice distant.

“That’s when we found that statistically the fewest people were awake. There’s a hiss for a minute when the stacks come on, and the haze gets noticeably thicker. We didn’t want to scare anyone.”

“Two fifty-seven…,” I said to myself. “And here I thought three was my special time.”

“What?” I said nothing, and after a moment Kirk looked away. “Anyway, now you know, Vale.”

“I need to know more.”

“Well, time is precious. You’re going to have to content yourself with this much.”

“No. I need to know more. I need to know why me?” He had been sitting forward in his chair as if to rise but now leaned back, his shoulders sagging. “Why me, in the midst of all this shit? You just framed me as a goddamn murderer. Why?”

Kirk looked down and sighed, closing his eyes. He shook his head slowly, as if this were the part he’d most hoped to avoid. He poured more liquor into his glass, then shoved the cork into the bottle. Motioning for me to catch it, he tossed the scotch to me, saying, “One more drink.” Kirk rose and walked over to the large bay window overlooking the front porch and the land beyond. “You, Thomas, because of bad luck. Because of Watley. You stuck your nose around things you shouldn’t have sniffed. Anyone would have done fine, really; you just ended up being perfect.”

I took a swig from the bottle while he was looking away and then refilled my glass. Kirk turned to face me. “We’re not going to do this forever, Vale. We’re not evil. We just got in deep, that’s all.”

“Who’s we?”

“We. Them. Us. The ones who were in control before and didn’t die. I’m just an engineer at heart. A scientist by trade. There are other scientists and there are soldiers and administrators. There’s a structure—a hierarchy that runs the city. Your world. And we are the liaisons to the few out there who know the truth.”

“What’s out there?”

“Out there?” He pointed out the window and then swept his arm in a circle. “Life. Normal life. The world over. Progress and history and families and babies and cars and music … divorces and love and pain and wars and joy—nothing changed out there.”

“No one asked what happened? Where we went?”

“Why would they? The world knows exactly what happened: You all died of an airborne plague. The whole area is still infected and likely will be for, say, another thirty, forty-five years. That’s what they know. For a few years, people tried to sneak in, tried to find loved ones. That was the hardest part, I think. Healthy people—people who should never have been involved—trying to come in from outside. We … we couldn’t let them get back out, and we couldn’t let them spread word within. So … more losses. But it convinced others that the virus was very much real, when no one ever came back.”

Hot tears stung my eyes, and I blinked them back. A deep black rage began to seep into my soul, and I knew soon it would cloud my thinking, turn me into an animal. I held it at bay for now. I needed to know. “Why me?”

“Like I said, we’re not evil. This whole … experiment … this project will be finished in fifteen, twenty years. A generation will be dead. People sterilized. Memories will be hazy for those now young. That’s why we’re starting to clean out all the operations like what’s-his-name’s … Vessel?”

“Eddie?”

“Yeah, Eddie—that’s right.”

“What do you mean cleaning up?”

“No one wanted all this to happen. Me less than anyone. But it did, and we’re going to make damn sure no one ever finds out about it.”

“So you’re destroying the past? Erasing people’s lives?”

“The way I see it, we’re setting people free. People have lived through plagues and wars and all of it, Vale. They’ll deal with this. Every day, people adjust a bit more. Let go of a bit more. Eventually, they’ll feel liberated to live in the present.”

“Instead of robbed of their past,” I added coldly.

“Yes, if you need to frame it like that. Anyway, Ayers was killed, and we needed someone to blame. We’d been following you for weeks, and bad luck, Tom. It was two birds with one stone.”

“Weeks? Who was it, Lucid Jones? Rebecca?”

“What? How—?” He looked up at me sharply, his guard dropped for just a second. Then, more calmly, he asked, “How do you know about Jones?”

“He introduced himself to me. The night before you jabbed that needle into my leg, in fact. Was that just three days ago? Time flies, huh?”

“He introduced himself.… That’s unusual.…”

“Why’s that?”

“He’d been on you for weeks, but we never told him when we planned to apprehend you. He’d been on you since you first started sniffing around Eddie Vessel’s. Back before we knew a damn thing about you.”