No one answered the door or the phone and at Rennie’s, no one was home. The door to her own place had been left open and dust and sand had blown in and crawling things had made their homes on her floors.
Desert Haven was a ghost town. Not like the one they’d seen during that road trip, Red Mountain with its old mining shafts and wooden buildings, the old-timey general store, the wagon wheels that drew at least a few tourists on the weekends. A hundred years from now, Emine wondered, will anyone drive out of their way to see a faux Spanish-colonial subdivision in foreclosure? Where she had spent four years.
Alula, Emine thought. Why not? Now she sent an email. Yes, she would come.
And if she was headed to the Northwest, there was still work to do.
She tried to phone Don Billingsley at the Hanford site about the remediation plan. Eleven million tons of contaminated radioactive soil dug up from along the Columbia River was just a start and she didn’t like what the contractor planned (or didn’t plan) next. As far as she could determine, sediment contaminated with cobalt-60, cesium-137, and plutonium-239/240 (exactly the substances poor Alula wanted to get her hands on!) could migrate downward to the water table. While her findings, admittedly, were not definitive, the risk was too great to ignore.
The security code had been changed. No surprise. Her email was blocked so she would have to go in person and track him down. Before the new security protocols came in, she’d done what she always did and copied the files to her laptop so she could work at home. Now she had the update, her own executive summary, the raw data, the maps and charts all on the thumb drive to give him. Before Hanford, Pendleton, the Umatilla Reservation. She’d leave a copy with the tribal council. There were places near the river where the vadose zone was less than a meter in depth, and this beneath the most sensitive, contaminated areas. According to her computer modeling, at times when the river ran high, contaminated groundwater would find channels between the gravel sequence and the more compact Ringold Unit. None of it apparent during previous measurements when the river was at low or normal flow. Billingsley and DOE would have to listen, but if he—they—didn’t, the tribe could take it to legal counsel.
Otherwise it would be as bad as 9/11, but in slow motion.
And look, just look at what 9/11 had done to the Americans. They waved flags. They dropped bombs. They tortured. And mass murder--did they really have no idea what they had unleashed in Iraq? While at home, they took periodic blackouts and road closures and gas main explosions and collapsing bridges and homeless people in the streets and disgruntled employees with assault weapons and illiterate teenagers for granted. Everything that Americans considered normal still surprised her.
But it wasn’t her business. It wasn’t her country and she’d be gone soon.