Half Lives Read Online Free PDF Page A

‘No, the most recent intel is about a bio-terrorist attack.’
    ‘A bio-what?’
    ‘A fast-spreading and deadly virus. The initial projections are staggering. We need to get out of DC.’
    Then it hit me. I mean really hit me. I was falling, drowning and being electrocuted all at once. My mind flashed to every apocalyptic movie I’d ever seen – world wars, alien
attacks, explosions, floods, tsunamis, bombs, plagues. My knees gave out and I plopped down on the toilet.
    ‘Do you remember where your dad and I met?’ Mum asked.
    I nodded, confused by her sudden stroll down memory lane. They were on some committee that had to do with strategic planning – Mum’s expertise – and nuclear waste – my
dad’s. It had some bizarre name like Preventing Inadvertent Intrusion into blah, blah, bleugh. I’d always thought it sounded like the slogan for a new contraceptive device. ‘You
met on that mountain outside Las Vegas.’
    ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘We’re going there.’
    I squinted, trying to let what she was saying sink in. ‘You mean we are going to Las Vegas.’ She certainly didn’t mean the nuclear waste repository. The one that was the
subject of the committee that brought my parents together. The one that was supposed to store all the nuclear waste generated by the nuclear power plants in the country. She couldn’t mean
that because that would be beyond crupid.
    ‘We’re going to the bunker deep inside the mountain.’
    Mum was telling me we were going miles underground with the same tone she used to invite me shopping at Saks. My body started doing this weird earthquake thing.
    ‘Seriously?’ Had I joined the movie already in progress? Did I miss the part where my mum’s body was probed by aliens or inhabited by a demon?
    ‘Let me finish—’
    But I didn’t. ‘We are going underground with nuclear gunk.’
    ‘No. It’s not like that. Construction was never finished on the facility,’ Mum stated matter-of-factly. ‘No one wants nuclear waste in their backyard. It’s a
political minefield. Funding was cut, so the bunker inside the mountain has never been used.’
    ‘Is it safe?’ It felt as if she was giving me the rock-and-hard-place option. Bio-attack or buried alive? Some choice.
    ‘Now it’s just a big, empty tunnel into the heart of the mountain. They dug part of the main tunnel and conducted lots of geological studies to make sure that the site would be safe
for the long-term storage of nuclear waste. It was never more than a research site.’
    ‘But the nuclear waste . . .’
    ‘Billions more dollars would have to be spent to make the mountain ready to store the waste. Nuclear waste isn’t like shoving a box of old clothes in the attic. It takes a very
complex system of . . .’ Mum suddenly stopped mid-sentence and then seemed to switch channels. ‘Icie, I don’t have time to tell you any more now. You have to trust me. I think
it’s the only place we’ll be safe.’ Her voice quivered. ‘We need to forget about everything else and get to the mountain.’
    Get to the mountain
, I repeated the phrase, zombie-like, in my brain.
    She removed the piece of paper that she’d stuffed in my backpack earlier. She placed it on my lap, smoothing out the wrinkles. ‘Las Vegas is here,’ she said, pointing off the
side of the page towards my knee. ‘The bunker is in this mountain.’ She pointed her fire-engine-red fingernail to the middle of a series of three upside-down Vs. If the paper were
flipped the other way it might look like a flock of pterodactyls. Two squiggly parallel lines ran across the page and were marked with a highway number. There were two dots with what might be names
of cities.
    I studied the map. ‘That’s in the middle of nowhere, isn’t it?’ I asked.
    ‘That’s the way they designed it,’ she continued. ‘They didn’t want people stumbling onto it by accident. We experimented with how to mark the site with “Do
Not Enter”