First Glimpse

By M. K. Dreysen

Wayne has a good job, in a quiet place. The kind of job that gives him all the time he needs, and plenty of space to enjoy it.
All he has to do is tend the Pile: a Cold War relic, a nuclear waste dump that has, so far, found no cause for trouble.
Only... the Pile has been whispering. It has a demand. A small one. Just a tiny little thing, an opening for something from within the Pile to pass through.
Wayne's definitely not ready for his first glimpse of what might come through...

• Language: English
• Publisher: M. K. Dreysen
• Release date: Jan 27, 2020
• ISBN: 9781370520862

Book preview

This is just an experiment. I'll just delete it when I'm done, maybe. Probably. I've never done anything like this.

Sure, that sounds like one of those corny Penthouse letters. Problem is, it's true, and my teachers always said to write what was true. So there I am.

Besides, nobody'll ever see this, so who cares how it sounds.

Right. So, it starts with what we were doing. Don't worry, you'll never find the place. It'll be nothing but an empty field by now.

Not government, except by accident. It was a private company, the one that owned the lab. No secret agencies, either.

Somebody's gotta work on all the nuclear waste. The shit the government's been throwing down holes and into concrete bunkers, or even old metal barrels and pray to God no one ever digs too deep.

So that's what we were supposed to be doing. That's what we did. I was just a bench chemist, nothing fancy, with the unfortunate timing of graduating into the worst oil bust in a generation. No jobs in the refineries or the other chemical plants. Not for a few years, anyway, and it's awful hard to pay student loans on promises and wishful thinking.

No environmental jobs, either. Funny how the states and feds all lose interest in environmental problems when their royalty income drops. Ha.

Well, part of the feds, anyway. As it turns out, there was, well, is, part of the federal government that's, shall we say, countercyclical. The nuke gang get their money one way or another. Especially when there's a game of hot potato with which party's going to be in power when the next waste dump comes to light.

Not that it's enough funding; perish the thought. But it was enough for me to get paid what I needed to fend off the hounds. And that was plenty for a kid who was the first one in his family to graduate from college.

The wolves weren't at the door. But I could hear 'em howling when I pulled into town. Braxton, out beyond beyond, just down the road from the Hanford site. They'd interviewed me by phone, then told me they were happy to just go ahead and hire me. Did I have a bank account they could wire the relocation money and signing bonus to?

Did I? I couldn't get the paperwork signed fast enough.

All together, it was enough to heal my beater well enough to make the couple thousand miles, with me and two suitcases and a stack of maps building up in the driver's seat.

Oh, and I graduated in December. So I built up my winter wardrobe first thing off the bat, too.

But this ain't about that. What it's about is the lab. The one that stumbled onto something. See, everyone there, it turns out, was my kind of accidental hire.

Marsha, the x-ray tech, she was a physicist, First black woman to graduate from that department, and damned good at it. She'd have had her pick of grad programs, But the money here was too good for that. Like me, she'd found it too hard to pass up the check when she got the first statement on her student loans after graduation.

Raymond was a burnout case, biochemist who'd headed up north looking for a job with someone who wasn't chasing an NIH grant. Paco was another biochemist, the two of them were our environmental team, always on the lookout for signs that the waste dump we were working had found its way into the local flora and fauna. Trish was our manager, a chemical engineer who'd been put in charge because somebody in the higher ups had been reading airport business books.

I was the fill-in. As in, fill in the chemistry when one of the others needed some help. Analysis, mostly, when Ray and Paco came in with samples from the outer world, that's when me and Marsha had to figure out what we needed to isolate and measure. The state of the art has built up, but when you deal with things that can change their chemical identity at random, the tried and the true involves a constantly moving target.

My baby was the pile, though. If half my time was the analytic stuff, titrations and chromatography and cracking the nut when Marsha found a new crystal form, the other half was answering the never-ending question: what's the state of the waste pile?

What was in it? God might know, but nobody else did, not for sure. The barrels had been thrown together in the lead-up to half a dozen different pilot projects. The original bombs, the ICBM work-ups and the chase for smaller faster better; more powerful.

When a plant for producing a given warhead was up and running, the waste disposal part of things was well developed. Mostly. But when they were doing a pilot plant, there were more than a few times where they put the not-so-hot stuff, the stuff that wouldn't immediately react and cause a problem,