To the young liquidators who were fast becoming the liquidated. Maybe it was for their ears only.

A promise.

A vow.

An acknowledgment of their suffering.

I will not forget.

I won’t.

God sees everything, doesn’t he?

Someone was watching.

It wasn’t God.

It was a single glass eye.

It was a shutterbug zipping along at five hundred miles an hour.

Clicking away at fifty frames per second in a belly of aerodynamic steel. Whooshing above the radar, like Icarus on his way to the sun.

The U-2.

The secret plane.

Take a moment to marvel at the symmetry, to bask in the ironic glow before you laugh yourself sick.

America’s secret plane. On a secret flight. Over a secret Russian village. Which had just suffered the biggest secret nuclear explosion in history.

We won’t tell if you won’t.

We won’t tell because we’re not flying secret planes over Russian airspace. No.

You won’t tell because you’re not churning out secret plutonium that has just gone up in smoke. You’re not murdering your own children. No.

Deal.

God wasn’t whispering to the children.

It was the whisper of two enemies unable to scream.

Back home where the secret film was blown up and pored over and analyzed and dissected, they took what lessons they could. If something should ever happen here-not that it would, not that it could, but just supposing it did, just preparing for any contingency, no matter how preposterous, how blatantly ridiculous, but still-if it did, we’d know the drill. We’d understand how to deal with it.

We’d take the proper measures.

THEN IT DID.

FIFTY-ONE

Snapshots.

My days passed like an album being flipped quickly to the back page, little pictures that were sometimes blurry, sometimes not. Sometimes I was even able to remember them.

“HOW DID IT HAPPEN?” I ASKED HERMAN WENTWORTH.

Stay in a hospital long enough and eventually you get to meet the head doctor. Okay, the retired head doctor.

The head doc emeritus.

“Human error,” Wentworth said. “A little problem with the cooling system. It was trial and error back then.”

A little problem… trial and error. Talking about a nuclear plant blowing sky-high as if they’d been building a volcano in science lab and the teacher ended up with some black on his face.

Just a little accident.

It happens.

“That’s what happened in Russia,” I said. “The same thing. The cooling system malfunctioned.”

“Yes.”

Wentworth was injecting me with something. I was staring up at the father of our country up on the ceiling.

Hello, George.

“The Aurora Dam plant was just a cover,” I said. “They needed the water to cool down the core.”

“They had their secret plants,” Wentworth said. “So did we. It was a different time. We lived under the shadow of nuclear Armageddon. Hard to imagine now. The pervasive fear.”

“And when the plant blew, it was just a dam bursting. A flood. Only the water wasn’t swimming with dead bodies and microbes-not just dead bodies. It was swimming with radioactivity. You covered it up. Took whoever survived that day and hid them away. American’s own little Karabolka.”

“What do you think? It was 1954. Tell the world we’d just had a twenty-two megaton nuclear accident? Tell the Russians? Tell the American people? Like I said, it was a very different time.”

“There were a lot of things you didn’t tell the American people about back then. That boys’ school in Rochester. The pregnant women in Vanderbilt. And this place. When it was Marymount Central. By the way, VA Hospital 138-was that an inside joke? Uranium 138-where mushroom clouds come from.”

He didn’t answer me; he was pulling out the syringe.

“You let one go,” I said. “One survivor. The little girl-Bailey Kindlon. Why?”

“Ahh… Bailey. So scared, so little. She’d mostly stayed out of the water. Radioactively and relatively speaking, she was clean. And she was only 3-that too. She maybe wouldn’t have seen things some of the older ones did-or understood them.”

“When you told me you were in the 499th, I should’ve known right then. The good old days in Hiroshima. What’s in that shot? It hurts.”

“Something new. Think of it as sodium Pentothal. Times ten.”

“All those mutations in Japan. Then in Karabolka. They scared the hell out of all of you.”

“They educated the hell out of us.”

“Not enough. You needed more.”

“Everything has its price. Lab rats will tell you only so much.”

“So you used human ones. In Rochester. And here. Then Littleton Flats happened and you knew what to do. You knew where to bring them. You castrated them-no baby gargoyles to offend your sensibilities, to give birth to other mutations down the line. You drugged them into oblivion. Benjamin. And the other vet who got away, who wandered back to Littleton like a homing pigeon. You never forget the way home, do you?-even with your brain fried, you still know. Wren found him sleeping in the gazebo. Later he found his name there on the black wall in Washington. People can’t die twice, can they?”

“Is that what you read in Wren’s article? The one he wrote about the Aurora flood?”

“There was no article about the Aurora flood. Wren never finished it. It never ran.”

“Of course. It never ran. But maybe it was written. Maybe he left it somewhere?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“We’ll see.”

ON TO THE NEXT PAGE.

Rainey.

I didn’t know whether Rainey was in on it or not. Probably not. Just a soldier doing his job.

I asked him how I could be swallowed up. Legally. Not that anyone was playing by the rules. But just suppose they were.

“We are playing by the rules. People who are a danger to themselves or to others,” he recited. “I think you qualify.”

“I’m not a vet. This is a VA hospital.”

“ROTC. You qualify.”

“There was a psych who came to see me with the real Detective Wolfe. He thought I was perfectly sane. Maybe I can see him?”

“What’s his name?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s a problem. But if I run into anyone who thinks you’re perfectly sane, I’ll let you know.”

“How’s Dennis doing?”

“Hard to tell. He doesn’t say much.”

“I didn’t do that to him. I brought him in. I saved his life.”

“I’ll tell him to write you a thank you note.”

“I’m telling the truth.”

“Sure thing, Pinocchio.”

A STORM.

I could hear it raging outside the walls. Thunder. Like standing too close to a bass amplifier at a small club. The vibrations making my ribs rattle.

It’s a hard… it’s a hard… it’s a hard rain… gonna fallllll…

I sang.

I was my own iPod.

I stayed with the canon of Dylan.

You better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone.

Anna’s favorite quotation. Remember? Listed on AOL: Kkraab.

Maybe it had been another clue for the clueless.

The Aurora Dam Flood.

You better start swimming.

Benjy must’ve swum like a motherfucker that day.

And Eddie Bronson, whoever he really was.

And the plumber’s mom-her too. Swimming out of one kind of trouble and right into another. Right into the jaws of a shark.

Swallowed whole.

Who was Anna?

If she wasn’t Anna Graham, then who was she? Really?

Some of what everyone tells you is true. The first rule in the Liar’s Handbook. It’s what makes it believable. It’s what sells it.

I would have to ponder that one.

I really would.

THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT.

A faint red glow seeped through the door like blood.

I heard footsteps-more like a soft shuffling.

Stopping and starting, like a mechanical toy that moves two steps before it stops and needs rewinding.