Half Past Midnight

“Debra! Get that fallout meter.” I scrambled to my feet. “Zach, Megan… Everybody! Get in the shelter. Now!”

No one wasted time asking questions, immediately hustling inside. Ken and I dragged the partially completed second door to the opening at the other end of the shelter.

“How long do we have?” Ken kept his voice controlled, but fear was in his eyes.

I tried to reassure him. “The indicators are barely glowing, and there isn’t much wind. I’d say we’ve probably got at least a few hours. We’ll know more once we get a reading on the KFM.”

“KFM?”

“Kearny fallout meter. It’s a homemade fallout meter made out of a soup can and strips of aluminum foil.”

“You’re shitting me!”

I couldn’t help it. I laughed. “As crazy as it sounds, it’s real.”

As if on cue, Debra popped her head out of the opening. “Here’s the meter.”

“Got the tape?”

She silently handed me a roll of scotch tape and held up the stopwatch we had brought with us, all the while, her expression telling me what a stupid question I had asked. After all, she was the woman who never forgot.

“Tape?” Ken asked.

“Just watch.”

I set the KFM on the ground and quickly unrolled about a foot of the tape two inches in front of the charging wire. “Ever noticed how scotch tape creates a static charge when it’s unwound?” Ken nodded. “Well, we’re just taking that charge and putting it to good use.” I moved the freshly unwound tape about a quarter of an inch away from the charging wire and slowly passed the full length in front of it. The wire accepted the charge, and the aluminum foil leaves on the inside of the soup can instantly separated.

“Time,” I called, and Debra started the stopwatch. I quickly measured the distance between the bottom of the two leaves. “Seventeen millimeters. Give me four minutes.”

“Got it.” Exactly four minutes later, she called, “Time.”

I took another reading. “Thirteen millimeters.”

We checked the chart together. “A difference of four millimeters in four minutes. That gives us a reading of…” I ran my finger down the reference chart on the side of the can, “point eight rems per hour.”

I looked at the second chart on the other side of the can. “According to this, we could stay out here for more than five days, if the radiation level stays the same. Unfortunately, there’s not much chance of that happening. It’s bound to go up.”

“But for now…” I stood and patted Ken on the shoulder. “We can count on having at least another hour before things get critical. So let’s wind all this up and get in the shelter as quickly as possible.”

“I’ll go along with that.”

“Debra, you think you know how to read this thing?” I pointed to the KFM.

She pursed her lips and frowned. “I guess it looks easy enough. When should I take the next reading?”

The chart displayed five columns, one each for fifteen-second, one-minute, four-minute, fifteen-minute, and one-hour readings. “Take a four-minute reading every fifteen minutes. If the results start climbing, use the second column on the chart with a one-minute reading every five minutes. If you reach the point to where you lose the complete charge during your one minute timing period, yell out. Then take a fifteen-second reading using the first column on the chart.” I grabbed Ken. “Come on, let’s get everything inside and cover up this hole.”

We herded as many goats and chickens as we could find into the house and covered all of the windows and attic vents with plastic sheeting to hopefully protect the livestock from fallout and ensure that we would have a source of food when we came out. It wasn’t a lot of protection for them, and it was sure to create a major cleanup problem, but it was better than leaving them outside. The chickens, at least, were supposed to be fairly resistant to radiation; I couldn’t find any statistics on goats. Now all we could do was hope.

Just over an hour later, we scrambled for any last minute items we could think of, then sealed ourselves into the shelter. During that time, the fallout had risen to six-point-two rems per hour.

After we finished latching down the blast door, Ken turned to me. “Now what?”

“Now we pray.”

“Dad, Megan hit me!”

“You farted in my face! What did you expect me to do, you little sh-”

“Megan!” My tone shut them both up. “Don’t hit your brother.”

Zachary smirked at his older sister. “And, Zach? You do that again, and I’ll fix that little butt of yours where farting in someone’s face is the last thing you’ll want to do.”

His smirk evaporated and he trudged back to his hammock. “Don’ know why it matters anyhow. This place stinks like farts all th’ time.”

Debra raised an eyebrow at me, and I shrugged. We were both too tired to worry about another spat between the kids. It had only been a week, but we all felt the pressure of living in a darkened, confined space. And, Zach was right. The place did always smell like farts-or worse. There were seven of us living in less than three hundred square feet of dimly lit tunnel, and around the corner at one end of that tunnel was what passed for our bathroom. There was no way the place couldn’t stink, but usually I managed to block it from my mind.

The first few days had been pretty bad. Everyone was scared, uncertain about what kind of world we would emerge into-uncertain about when we would be able to emerge, or if we could ever emerge without certain death being the outcome. On top of that, I’d been putting off a particular conversation.

I’d waited at first to try and find the right time to tell Deb and the kids about Dad, but I finally realized that there just wasn’t ever going to be a “right time.” So, on the third day in the shelter, I sat them down and told them what had happened. After the inevitable tears from everyone, the conversation took a turn I hadn’t anticipated.

“Dad, do you think Grandma…” Megan hesitated. “Do you think she’s still alive?”

Evidently, that hadn’t yet occurred to her younger brother. “Whaddya mean? Gramma’s all right!” He turned to me for reassurance. “She’s okay, right, Dad?”

I sighed and shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know, Zach. There’s no way for us to tell.”

“But you said you left her a note, an’ you told her to come here when she got home, right?”

Megan interjected before I could figure out what to say. “She didn’t have time to get away from Houston, Zach.”

“She did too!” Zachary turned back and forth between his sister and me, his quivering voice practically begged for reassurance. “Dad?”

“No she didn’t.” Megan’s voice took on a bitter tone. “No one who was still there got away. Everyone we knew is gone.” She looked at me, tears streaming freely down her cheeks. “Aren’t they?”

I couldn’t help it. My own eyes began to fill at the thought of my father, and the likelihood of my mother also being dead. No! Time enough for that later. Trying to be discrete, I coughed and wiped my eyes on my sleeve. I swallowed the lump in my throat and took a deep breath. “I don’t know.” Pulling Zach onto my knee, I wrapped my arms around him. “We’ll probably never know. All we can do is hope.”

Debra leaned over and put an arm around Megan, who buried her face in her mother’s shoulder. “Josh is dead, isn’t he?”

I felt two feet tall. I’d completely forgotten her boyfriend, and things had moved so quickly that I’d never thought to talk to her about him. Debra answered, “I don’t know. It’s like your dad just said, we might never know.”

Zach turned his face up to me, suddenly realizing the further implications of what we were saying. “What about Jeremy. Or Kenny?”

Ken spoke from his hammock. “I have a brother in California. He lives in the mountains, in Sierra City. I wonder what happened there.”

Zachary turned his attention to Ken as Ken sat up and smiled kindly at him. “I like to think he’s over there on