“We’re okay here,” said Duane, glancing at the meter as he said it. “These walls are concrete, and they’re pretty stout down here in the basement, so they’re good shielding. I’d like to figure out what kind of radiation this is, and how hot it is, before we do something as drastic as evacuating patients. If you start moving sick people, you can make them a lot sicker. But let me make sure the folks just above us aren’t at risk. Where’s the nearest phone?” Garcia pointed to the wall behind Johnson, and Johnson dialed a five-digit extension. “Hi, it’s Duane,” he said. “Listen, I’ve got an odd request. I’m one floor below you guys right now. Could you run a survey meter around the offices and labs up there, make sure nothing’s coming up through the floor?” I heard the faint sound of questions bleeding out of the receiver. “The morgue,” Duane said. “I’m down in the morgue.” I heard more faint questions. “Look, just do it, would you? Like, right now? And if your active dosimeter isn’t already on, turn it on before you do anything else.” I saw a look of impatience flash across his face; he paused long enough for me to hear urgency in the voice at the other end of the line. “We may have an incident down here,” said the physicist, “but I don’t have time to talk right now. Check the whole lab area, get people out if you need to, and page me if you see anything worth worrying about. I’ll call you back in a few minutes, but right now I gotta go.” He hung up the phone and turned to the four of us. “We’re right underneath the cyclotron lab,” he said, “where we make radiopharmaceuticals for PET scans. The floor’s really thick, there are no patients in that area, and the staff knows how to make sure it’s safe up there.” He eyed the corner of the hallway. Around it lay the door of the morgue and the danger lurking within. He drew a deep breath. “Okay, let’s see what we’ve got here.”
He went back to the cart and pulled out a bagged garment; as he unwrapped and unfolded it, I recognized it as a biohazard suit like the ones the DMORT team had worn. The DMORT team called the garments moon suits, but Duane called it a “bunny suit,” because its built-in booties and gloves and hood make it look like an Easter-rabbit costume, minus the ears. “Bunny suit” seemed an oddly innocent nickname, though, considering how concerned Johnson now seemed. Once he was zipped in, he took a red and yellow instrument out of the cart’s bin and switched it on. This gadget was similar to the Geiger counter—boxy and about half the size of a car battery, with a wand attached to a flexible cord—but instead of a dial with a needle, this one had a digital display. “So what is that,” asked Miranda, “the all-new, fully equipped 2009 Geiger Counter Deluxe?”
“Sort of,” he said. “It’s an ionization chamber. A Geiger-Mueller counter gives you a yes-or-no answer—it tells you whether or not there’s elevated radioactivity—but it doesn’t tell much more than that. This one tells whether the activity is alpha, beta, or gamma radiation, and it measures the wavelength and energy accurately.”
“Sounds like a better gizmo,” she said. “Why doesn’t everybody use these?”
“These cost about four times as much,” he said. “And usually the Geiger-Mueller counter is good enough, because usually it tells you there’s nothing above background radiation.”
“But not always,” said Emert, who’d had a deer-in-the-headlights look ever since he’d vomited in the morgue.
“Not always,” conceded Johnson. He checked the ionization chamber’s display and seemed satisfied with what he saw there, then handed the instrument to Emert briefly while he rummaged around in the cart. First he dug out a pair of toy-looking plastic rings, which he put on his two index fingers. “Ring dosimeters,” he explained, showing us a small square of metallic foil in the broadest part of the band, where a gemstone would be if the rings were jewelry. He rotated the rings toward the inside of each finger. “To measure how much exposure my hands get.” Then he fished out a lead smock, the sort patients wear while having an arm or leg X-rayed, and put it on. “The body’s core is more vulnerable to radiation than the arms and legs,” he said. “The GI tract and the bone marrow, especially.”
Taking the ionization chamber back from Emert, he stepped around the corner. I saw him reach for the morgue’s door and open it, then extend the wand through the opening. He let out a low whistle just as the monitor clipped to his belt began to shriek again, then scurried back around the corner and rejoined us. He scanned our worried faces. “There’s good news and bad news,” he said. “The good news is, from the reading I’m getting and from what you’ve told me you found in the body, this isn’t something that’s spreading contamination.”
Nobody else seemed to want to ask the logical next question, so I did. “What’s the bad news?”
“The bad news is, the source, whatever it is, is putting out some intense radiation. I’ll need to notify TEMA—the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency—and call the medical folks over in Oak Ridge. They’re some of the world’s best experts in treating radiation exposure.”
“Actually,” said Miranda, “just before you got here, I spoke with Hank Strickland, a health physicist I know at REAC/TS. He’s on his way over now.”
Johnson looked startled, but he quickly recovered. “While I call TEMA, call Hank back. Tell him we’re looking at an intense gamma radiation source. Ask him if one of their emergency physicians could meet you guys up in the ER.” I saw alarm in the faces of Miranda, Garcia, and Emert, and if they were looking, they saw it in mine, too. “It’s a precaution,” Johnson said. “Triage. We need to see how much exposure you’ve gotten, and we’ll need to start taking blood and urine samples for that.”
Just then Eddie Garcia grunted in pain, doubled over, and threw up. From my recent DMORT training, I knew that vomiting was one symptom of radiation sickness. I also knew that the sooner victims began to vomit after being exposed, the worse their condition.
Miranda knew it, too. The cell phone shook in her hands as she struggled to hit the redial button.