The Dead Boys

The next morning, Teddy robotically spooned cereal into his mouth, occasionally missing and spilling it on the table. He hadn’t slept all night. Thankfully, nothing else weird had happened, and when the sun came up, the world seemed normal again.

Parks do not completely change in a half hour, Teddy thought, and windows do not open themselves.

He had almost convinced himself that the day before had been a quirky bad dream by the time his mom whirled into the kitchen at eight thirty and handed him an envelope.

“Two chores for you to do while I’m at work,” she said. “Take this check over to the landlord at 613 Lynwood Court, and try to meet some more kids today. I saw a few outside, you know.” She gave him a purposeful look. “Do not sit in the house and surf the internet all day. Comprendez?”

“Si, señora,” Teddy replied. He pocketed the letter and dumped half a spoonful of Sugar Flakes into his lap.

His mom gave him a kiss and set a cell phone on the table beside him. “Be good,” she said. “My new work number is programmed into the phone.” She grabbed her purse and headed for the door.

Teddy looked out the big front window. Some kids were riding skateboards over a homemade wood ramp down the block. But the air above the scorching blacktop was shimmering with heat, distorting their shapes into a grotesque mirage.

Teddy promptly headed upstairs to the study and settled into the desk chair beneath the air-conditioning duct to surf the internet.

He clicked through some video game sites, but they reminded him of Albert and made him feel strangely guilty. So he typed in a search for Richland instead and found the local news website.

There was nothing about a missing chubby kid, which made him feel better. If Albert had run into real trouble, there would have been some mention of it. Teddy still felt queasy about hitting Henry Mulligan in the head with a rock—after just one day in town, he already had to watch his back. The changing park still bothered him too, but he decided to chalk it up to the heat and chaos of the encounter with Henry Mulligan at the river.

Teddy typed in a search for Leslie Groves Park, and Wikipedia articles about Richland and the Hanford Nuclear Site popped up. Teddy clicked on them and scrolled through the history sections, curious about his strange new home.

He discovered that Richland was originally no more than a few small desert farms irrigated by the Columbia River. That is, until 1943 when General Leslie R. Groves of the U.S. Army came to Washington hunting for a site to build nuclear reactors for the Second World War.

General Groves found the desert along the river to the north of Richland ideal. He swooped in, seized a chunk of land half the size of Rhode Island, and forcibly removed two farm towns and a small Indian tribe from the area. The army turned Richland into a closed government town as part of the Manhattan Project—a secret nuclear program for which the Hanford nuclear plant produced radioactive plutonium for the “Fat Man” atomic bomb used to obliterate Nagasaki, Japan.

By 1945, twenty-five thousand workers were living near the nuclear plant, and everything about the town was related to atomic energy. The bowling alley was called Atomic Lanes, and the uniforms for the high school had mushroom clouds on them. The government itself built houses for the families and provided them with everything they needed, from free bus service to lightbulbs. The Feds even planted trees in the yards.

Teddy discovered that each type of government house was assigned a letter. A-houses were the biggest. There were B-houses, C-houses, and so on, all the way to Z. There were some pictures, and when he scrolled through them, he was surprised to find one that looked exactly like the old home next door. It was an A-house.

There was also a section in the article about radioactive waste. Weapons-grade plutonium and uranium were made in Richland during the Cold War years, and by the time the last reactor was shut down in 1987, 53 million gallons of radioactive waste had been left behind. In fact, waste was secretly dumped straight into the Columbia River until 1971, and contamination was found downstream as far west as the Oregon coast.

The worst incidence of radioactive waste dumping, known as the “Green Run,” happened in 1949, when the government intentionally released a huge concentration of radiation into the air over two days, causing deadly diseases in humans and animals. In plants, the effect was unknown.

Teddy was almost through reading the article when a terrific bang startled him out of his chair. A distant clunk and hiss followed before the vent above him stopped pumping cold air.

He went downstairs to the kitchen. It already felt hot in the house, and it seemed to be getting hotter. He checked the thermometer in the window over the sink, which read almost eighty degrees inside. With any luck, he thought, the problem might be something obvious that he could fix—a handle he could reset, perhaps, like a breaker switch.

Outside the house, he found a green, sheet-metal air-conditioning unit against the beige wall. The unit was tilted at an odd angle, and blue fluid was bleeding down its exterior into a greasy puddle.

He got down on his hands and knees and looked under one end of the unit. The concrete pad to which the air conditioner was bolted was split down the middle. A tree root had cracked it and forced it apart, bending the thick metal housing of the unit in the process and tearing loose a copper hose.

There was clearly nothing he could do himself, so Teddy headed to the back door to go inside and call his mom. But when he tried the knob, it didn’t turn. He shook it, but it was no use; the door had locked behind him.

With a sinking feeling, he realized that he’d left the Hide-a-Key inside. And the cell phone with his mom’s new number was sitting beside it on the kitchen table.

Gazing through the window, Teddy cursed his own stupidity. He turned to his bike, which was leaning against the fence, and checked to make sure he still had the letter he was supposed to deliver. With no other options, he climbed on and pedaled off to find 613 Lynwood Court.