Today, from the ground, this part of the facility was so overgrown that nature had camouflaged everything. Trees now grew where roadways used to be, and thick undergrowth-kudzu, mainly, cohabitating with countless other varieties of the region’s most hearty bushes, vines, and creepers-had long ago choked out any ground cover as fragile as grass. To the casual observer, these woods might have been around since the beginning of time, untouched by any human. On closer examination, though, beyond the thick tapestry of leaves and the random angles of the foliage, the repeating pattern of the land became obvious, rising and falling at precisely the same height and precisely the same interval. Like staring at one of those computer-generated 3-D art creations, the longer Travis examined his surroundings, the more the place began to look like the explosives storage facility it once had been.
The image solidified in his mind the instant he saw the first of the concrete-filled steel blast doors, set back in an overgrown tunnel, precisely in the center of one of the earthen mounds. Having seen one, it became easy to see others; dozens of them just by pivoting his head.
“Whoa,” he breathed, his tone alive with wonderment. “This place is unreal.”
“Are we safe, Nick?” Carolyn asked.
Nick’s head bounced noncommittally. “Well, I wouldn’t want to build my dream house here, but it should be pretty safe, yeah. Certainly for the short time we’ll be around.” He opened the door and stepped out. The others followed as he walked up to the fence and cut a hole big enough for people to pass through. That done, they all climbed to the crest of the nearest mound. “See there?” Nick asked when he got to the top. They all followed his finger. Two rows away, they could just make out a brownish black stain against the bright, fall-colored foliage. “That’s where we’re going,” he said.
“God Almighty,” Jake said, clearly overwhelmed. “It’s a moonscape.”
“Pretty close,” Nick agreed. “Won’t get much to grow there for the next hundred years.” He looked first to Carolyn and then to Jake. “Ready to rock and roll?”
“Um, guys?” Travis said, an odd look on his face. “I–I don’t know how to work any of the equipment.”
Jake smiled and rumpled the boy’s hair as he descended the steep hill. “That’s good,” he said. “Because you’re staying here.”
“I am not!”
Jake stopped midway and made his smile disappear. “It’s not because you’re not good enough, Travis, or not smart enough or not strong enough. It’s because we only have three sets of gear. You need to stay back and keep an eye out for the security people. If you hear anything, you’ve got to let us know.”
Travis looked for a moment as if he might argue but ultimately said nothing, choosing instead to help unload the car.
Deputy Sheriff Sherman Quill mumbled audibly to himself as he pulled his nightstick out of his Sam Browne belt and slid it into its spot next to the driver’s seat. I hate going out to this place.
Ever since he joined the force, Newark Industrial Park had been the bane of his existence. Every time he turned around, there was some damn thing going on out there, and with only the two of them in the department, he handled fully fifty percent of the calls. For some unfathomable reason, the local teenagers-local, hell, he’d arrested them from as far away as Little Rock-found it to be a romantic spot.
To date, no one had been stupid enough actually to climb the fence and get it on, but they’d come damn close, giving themselves away by jiggling the lock on the gates. But for the coils of razor wire along the top of the fence, he had little doubt that people would be scaling the thing every day. Crazy kids.
Now he was on his way to “check the place out,” whatever the hell that meant. Apparently, some hotshot FBI lady had called the chief and told him to expect some kind of trouble out there. If Sherman had heard correctly-and he must have, else why would the chief have said it twice? — the same people who started it all way back when were returning to do it again.
“Don’t make no sense,” he grumbled, putting his ten-year-old Ford in reverse. “Ain’t nothin’ left out there to burn, for God’s sake.”
Damned entertaining thought, though, getting his hands on the son of a bitches who squeezed all the life out of this town. Sherman’s family had come from these parts for generations; even stuck around during the bad times in the sixties, when Sherman himself was coming up as a teenager. People used to stick around, because sticking around was the thing to do. Now the kids were flying out of Newark as soon as their wings were big enough to support them. The luckier ones got to go to college somewhere and then get decent jobs. For the others-folks like Sherman, who struggled through high school with just enough Cs and Ds to warrant a diploma-it was damned difficult to find something that paid enough money to keep food on the table. As it was, downtown Newark had all but closed up. Places like the health clinic stayed open just because the state said they had to. God knows they had enough business to go around, just none of their patients had any money to pay their bills with.
Goddamned sad state of affairs is what it was. If Sherman could get his hands around those punks who made the whole world afraid of his hometown, then that just might be the best present anyone had ever given him.
One of the funny things about all this hazardous waste stuff was that no matter how much you rationalized the problem away in your head, and no matter how hard you listened to all those suit-and-tie experts the EPA sent out to tell you just how safe everything was, it was tough not to listen to the rest of the world. When everybody thought of Newark, Arkansas, in the same light as Love Canal or Chernobyl, it was hard to stand up as a resident and say, “No, no. My home is safe!” The instinct was to listen to what the other people had to say. The instinct was to avoid the place like the plague.
Which was why Sherman hated going out there so much. He’d signed on as a cop eighteen years ago to deal with crime and criminals. God knew they could be dangerous; especially on Friday and Saturday nights when the knife and gun clubs got together after an evening of drinking and hollering. But the biggest and the baddest guys he’d ever run into on the street were visible, living creatures. Well, the winners were living, anyway, and the losers didn’t pose a hazard to anybody. Out there at Ground Zero, the worst hazards were invisible.
The suits from the EPA were very clear about that. The chemicals that were spilled out there were mostly odorless and tasteless, and the ones that weren’t were so toxic that by the time you smelled them, you were already poisoned. They’d say this stuff, and then in the next breath, they’d tell Sherman and his neighbors that they were perfectly safe where they remained. How stupid did the government think they were, anyway?
What Sherman wanted to know was how the hell could they be so sure that there was nothing wrong if there was no way to know the hazard was there in the first place? That just didn’t make any sense.
So what did the EPA do to protect the community? They built a damn fence. They start with a hazard that nobody can detect, and then they try to throw a fence around it! Like the germs or the atoms or whatever the hell you called those toxic little monsters were afraid to cross a line drawn in the dirt. Who was kidding who here?
Sherman was no scientist; far from it, and he’d be the first to admit it. But he knew that things that were invisible weren’t going to stop at any fence line. They were going to get picked up by air currents, and they were going to be spread all over hell’s half-acre, poisoning everything and everyone they came in contact with. Unless the government had come up with some special kind of force field that they hadn’t told anybody about, and if they’d done something like that, why wouldn’t they have said?
No, sir, a fence was just a fence, nothing more. It wasn’t designed to keep out anything but people and animals.
Which made him reflect that, after fifteen years of inbreeding, some mighty scrawny, mighty strange-looking deer lived inside those fences. Sherman and his buddies-avid hunters all of them-had talked about that a lot over the years. One of these days, Sherman liked to say, one of them deer was going to talk back to him, and when that happened, he was leaving town for good.
God damn he hated this part of the job.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Clayton Albricht’s closest staffers had redubbed his office the War Room. The place was bedlam as a dozen people manned fifteen phone lines, all in a united effort to save their boss’s ass.
Everyone agreed early on that staying at home and running damage control from there was exactly the wrong image for the senator to project. Illinois’s ship of state needed to look strong and steady, even as the hull leaked
