Chapter One
The Gray
By the time the council voted, 3 to 2, to bring down the Number Four Bridge that separated the island from the mainland, and post round-the-clock sentries, it was clear to just about everyone that life would never go back to the way it was. The only people coming across the bridge anymore were stragglers from nearby Sumner. They came looking for refuge or solace or just a bite to eat. The islanders had listened to their determined mayor in the wake of the escalation and made the kind of preparations that those across the channel had not. For them, the boundaries of the known world now began with the channel and ended with the Waccasassa Bay in the Gulf of Mexico.
Everything beyond that was lost.
It’s not easy to destroy a bridge, in the best of times. When everyone gathered in the city park to work out the logistics of how it would be done, it seemed they would have to settle on a long project with sledgehammers and pickaxes.
“That’ll take forever,” John Mitchell bellowed.
He was a massive man—tall, wide, and loud. For thirty-two years, he ran the water and sewer service on the island, becoming invaluable as the only person who really knew where all the pipes and lines were. If the mayor was the figurehead of island leadership, John Mitchell had been the grizzled sergeant in the literal trenches of the town, keeping the water running and the toilets flushing. That kind of power transcends the ballot box, and the economy with which he used words added emphasis to everything he said.
“I’ll sink that joker in half a second if no one objects.”
“I’m not picking up a sledgehammer if I don’t have to,” replied the mayor.
“I know we still got laws. I ain’t real clear on which ones still matter and which ones don’t, but I don’t want to hear nothing about how I came to have a little dynamite.“
“How much is a little?” asked the mayor.
“Enough.”
Cedar Key is a southern town. It lies at the western terminus of State Road 24 in rural Levy County, an hour’s drive from Gainesville and the University of Florida. The town is mostly situated on Way Key, one of a cluster of thirteen barrier islands that comprise the Cedar Keys National Wildlife Preserve. They range in size from 1-acre to 165-acres, beginning just across the Number Four Bridge from the mainland and extending roughly five miles into the Gulf of Mexico. Most of the islands are deserted or never contained any meaningful development.
With a few breaks here and there, for most of the past thirty years someone from the David family had sat in the middle seat on the town council, behind the little typed sign that read The Mayor.
Hayes David, its present occupant, was first elected when he was just 23 years old. He had assumed the office almost by ascension from his father Mark, who ran the largest fish house on the island before a statewide ban of commercial net fishing upended a generational way of life and a business that had fed a century of Cedar Key Davids. They were not, particularly, political folk. They had occupied Levy County continuously for eight generations since their earliest forbears sailed from Denmark and built their first makeshift homestead on the lost shore of the Waccasassa. Their foray into governing was a utilitarian answer to the idealism of outsiders whose plans for the island never seemed to include keeping it the way it was.
Hayes had been at the helm for most of the past 20 years, ruling by merit and by fiat on the singular mandate that someone had to stand in the gap between an island lost in time and those that would seek to change it into an amalgam of every other coastal place in Florida. Despite his occasional flash of temper and an aloofness that kept him a step apart and above many of his fellow citizens, Hayes was the implacable wall into which the development plans of yankees and mainlanders would reliably crash. This alone made his perpetual, reluctant, candidacy for an office that paid almost nothing and cost at least a pound of flesh a year, a juggernaut with no meaningful challenge.
Hayes briefly left Cedar Key after high school, as many youngsters often did, but was unable to escape for long the reach of its familial and environmental tendrils. The island had a way of holding folks in place firmer than other towns, its trashy siren call something short of beautiful but no less appealing.
It had called to Augustus Steele, widely regarded as the town’s founder, when he purchased the land and remaining buildings that had been ravaged and then deserted after a hurricane in 1845. It called again to David Levy Yulee, a prominent plantation owner and senator, to bring the railroad to the island in 1860, connecting the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic Ocean. Until recently, it called still to an armada of pontoon boats and Carolina Skiffs most weekends of the year, and to housewives and retirees seeking the world-famous Tony’s clam chowder or a sunset boat tour.
The more famous keys at the southern end of the state bore little resemblance to the one dangling just off the coast of Levy County.
“Sand gnats and mosquitos big as cats,“ Geoff McCloud would often say, bellied up to the end of the bar at The Steaming Clam on Dock Street.
By his fifth or sixth beer, Geoff could be relied upon to tell anyone who would listen about his family being among the first white people to permanently settle the island.
“But if that sumbitch Thomas don’t stop writing all that good stuff about us, we’ll be overrun with snowbirds. He needs to write about the sand gnats and the stinking damn mud to keep ‘em away.”
Tides move in and out of Cedar Key like a revolution. The high tide casts the island in idyllic tropical splendor; the low carries the water hard away, leaving the back bayous and bays a shimmering mudscape that smells like a bait bucket left too long in the sun.
Thomas Buck would get sentimental even about the mud.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Thomas had said to a lady friend visiting from Gainesville.
He was sharp and well-spoken, once described by the mother of his high school girlfriend, to his dismay, as a silver-tongued devil. His comfortable charm and perpetual smirk gave him a boyish quality that was disarming and a weapon at once.
“If you say so. It was nice this morning, but where’d the water go?” she asked.
“Wherever it goes before it comes back,” Thomas answered wistfully.
“So, half the time it just looks like this?” she inquired further, her delicate nose turned up like only girls from the city can do.
“Yes. Isn’t it perfect? I love Cedar Key because the ugly is right out front where you can see it. I always know where I stand here. And when it is pretty, the pretty’s never tacky Miami neon or a Jimmy Buffet song you have to sing along to just because everybody knows the words.”
“I love Jimmy Buffet,” she said.
“Of course you do.”
“Wasting away again in Margaritaville,” She sang, atonally but determined.
“Spoiler alert,” Thomas interrupted, “There actually was a woman to blame. There always is.”
The girl smiled because he was smiling when he said it and they stared at the mud together thinking different things. She imagined she might like to get closer to Thomas. He thought of how Annie never would have smiled at even playful misogyny. For a moment, he missed her disapproval like an aimless former prisoner homesick for the familiar walls of his cell.
“Well,” he said to her, trying to fill the silence as he always seemed to want to do, “The great thing about the tide is that if you don’t like it, another one is always coming.”
“I like that,” she replied warmly. Then they kissed because there seemed like nothing else to be done in the moment and Thomas closed his eyes hard the whole time, knowing he would not choose to see her again.
After the meeting in the park, Thomas thought again of kissing the girl by the mud, and of Annie, naturally, and a jumbled array of unrelated topics as he waited with the rest of the town while John worked. The morning dragged into the afternoon until, with little warning, he heard a booming voice cry out, “Fire in the hole!”
In an instant, the only way onto Cedar Key was by boat or swimming, and in the wake of John Mitchell’s dynamite the residents were resolved to keep the broken world away by all means at their disposal.
Terry Jay wasn’t from Cedar Key and held no special affection for it. He lived in the nearby gulf front community of Crystal River, 58 miles from the island by car and 35 by boat. He looked like the kind of man that made his living wrestling alligators or as an enforcer for the redneck mafia. He was distractingly built for a man of sixty. His Popeye arms and barrel chest had led Thomas to give him the affectionate nickname Grandaddy Bench Press, though most folks called him TJ. Despite his appearance, and his affection for airboats, mud bogs and spearfishing, TJ had made his living as a nuclear engineer, working much of his career at the Duke Energy nuclear power complex just outside of Crystal River.
The nuclear reactor was taken offline in 2009 but its iconic smokestacks were never torn down or imploded. It was water vapor, not smoke, that rose from the twin hyperbolic cooling towers, but even when told this fact people still called them smokestacks. For the better part of a half century, they had been a prominent feature on the horizon for people looking across the water from Cedar Key.
While TJ was ambivalent about Cedar Key, he was wild about one of its native daughters, Samantha Maye, a Marine Corps veteran who had made a career driving heavy equipment in Middle Eastern war zones and a life driving weaker boys to distraction with her acerbic tongue and impossible body. She was as comfortable in a mink coat with a martini as she was in a bikini with a box of cheap wine. She had fluttered in and out of Thomas’s embrace but kept him on as a friend and emergency contact when she needed rescue from a drunken golf cart crash or someone to moon her doorbell camera with regularity. Samantha seemed to be everyone’s cousin on the island, most notably Hayes’, so Thomas took to calling her Cousin most of the time, both as an honorific to the level of deep care he felt for her, and as a way to link himself with the David family he so admired.
It was dumb luck for TJ and, as everyone would come to grimly know, the island, that Cousin had been down with a stomach bug the first week of that crisp February. Normally she would have made her regular pilgrimage to TJ’s big house on the water in Crystal River. At 7:11 AM of most mornings over the previous year, she would have just been waking there, her dyed blonde hair draped over TJ’s solid frame. Because she was home sick, TJ had been with her on the island when the smokestacks across the bay were enveloped in a microsecond of piercing light, and at least from the perspective of those looking across the bay from Cedar Key, simply vanished. All but a fine mist of ash of their physical form was erased from the earth. In less time than the duration of Cousin’s first languid morning stretch, almost everyone TJ knew in his hometown reached chemical equilibrium, erased in a moment from the rolls of living people of the world.
Those slightly further from the plant were gone minutes to hours later, and slower processes of dying began in Cedar Key and everywhere else.
Because the island now housed a bona fide nuclear engineer, it would have, if nothing else, an educated narrator informing the awful scenes to come. While the details of how and why the flash had finally come would not be available to those on the island, TJ would be able to provide some insight into what might happen next.
Anyone following the political crunch of the previous months would have seen the list of probable nuclear targets running almost daily on the news. The NAS Jax and Mayport naval bases to the northeast in Jacksonville and MacDill Air Force base to the south in Tampa were near certain targets, along with the Tyndall and Eglin Air Force bases to the northwest. With so many military installations having more strategic value to an enemy, only something approaching total war, it seemed, would have led to Crystal River’s civilian power plant being on the target list. Nevertheless, the smokestacks were conspicuously gone from Cedar Key’s southern horizon, replaced with a harrowing wall of gray nothing. Only, as TJ relayed to Hayes in the frenzy of activity in the minutes after the flash, it wasn’t nothing at all.
When it came to nuclear energy, the gray was everything.
During a decade’s-long cold war, movies about nuclear crisis often showed scientists with Geiger counters and other instruments ominously discussing radiation by reporting the number of rads present. The Chernobyl and Three Mile Island incidents placed the topic of nuclear disasters fresh again into the public consciousness of the 1980s. In the intervening decades, however, years of peace and relative prosperity put the nuclear issue out of mind for most people.
This was not the case for TJ, whose daily work life had operated in the shadow of a potential nuclear catastrophe. TJ knew that the proper unit for measuring the absorption of radiation in a unit of mass being irradiated was the gray, symbolized as Gy. Technically, the gray was defined as the absorption of one joule of energy per kilogram of matter. Visually and practically, the gray horizon across the Waccasassa Bay from Cedar Key was an expanding wall of heat and death, incongruously light and capricious as the winds on which its fallout would be carried.
Eighty years of high-wire diplomacy and bumbling near-misses had transpired since Hiroshima and Nagasaki—a false alarm of Soviet attack during the Suez Crisis in 1956, Kennedy’s showdown with Khrushchev in Cuba, a nuclear bomb accidentally falling out of an American B-36 and landing unexploded in a North Carolina field, the heroic efforts of the accidental watch commander Stanislav Petrov, and countless others—somehow culminating in there being no detonations of nuclear weapons in hostility since the Second World War. But walking such a prolonged tightrope requires only a single misstep to cause ruin.
The specter of such ruin generated a significant amount of scholarship to estimate the probability of a nuclear war. Such endeavors tended to go down intertwining esoteric rabbit holes that focused as much on discrediting competing methodologies of study as they did on making firm conclusions. For want of some number to think about, there seemed to coalesce support for a rough probability of one percent.
Stanford cryptologist and mathematician Martin Hellman, in his paper On the Probability of Nuclear War, had cautioned that any discussion of a probability—like an interest rate on a loan— had to be framed within a context of time. He continued this logic by noting that whatever the correct probability of nuclear war turned out to be didn’t matter much. Ten percent per year meant we could expect a nuclear holocaust to happen within ten years; one percent per year meant we could expect it to happen within one hundred years. He concluded, “The lower probability per year changes the time frame until we expect civilization to be destroyed, but it does not change the inevitability of the ruin. In either scenario, nuclear war is 100 percent certain to occur.”
It seemed ironic and irrelevant that the misstep to ruin would finally come in the form of an unresolved conflict on the Korean peninsula from the middle of the last century. The series of Rube Goldberg events leading to the smokestacks’ demise were not individually significant, but in unison and in moments brought more destruction than Genghis or Atilla and the sum of all natural disasters in human history.
Hayes and TJ stood, transfixed, on the floating dock that ran parallel to the outside boat ramp, trying to make sense of what they were seeing across the bay.
“What’s the worst case?” Hayes asked with unusual calm for the moment.
“If that’s what it looks like, it’s hard to imagine much worse.”
“People will think the reactor blew, but I know it’s not operational anymore.”
“This wasn’t an internal explosion.”
“None of our plans considered there’d be one this close. Why would they hit Crystal River?”
“I was hoping you might know,” TJ replied. “My foreign policy knowledge doesn’t go much past Citrus County.”
“At least tell me something to tell everyone to keep them safe,” Hayes insisted.
“Stay inside. Interior rooms away from windows. We’re gonna get plenty of grays with the wind coming off the water like it is.”
“How bad will it get?” the mayor asked, a hairline crack beginning to open in his calculated resolve.
“Luckily there are still some miles between us and that,” TJ said, pointing at the advancing column of smoke.
“Enough miles to matter?”
“Hard to say. Maybe. The heat will dissipate pretty quickly, but we won’t be able to see or feel any radiation we get.”
They stared together at the featureless bay, resolute in the crush of sounds and movement and panic. The moment for contemplation passed quickly and both men pushed into the fray shouting instructions and trying to help. A scatterplot of people scurried for the cover of homes and shops and Denny Gall’s breakfast café on 2nd Street. An unnatural, skin-searing warmth drifted onshore in a slow but determined advance until even Hayes and TJ retreated indoors to the City Hall building.
“How long until it’s safe for us to get back out there? People need to know we have a plan and that we’re going to work it.”
“However long it takes. Look at your arms. You’re burned pretty good. So am I,” TJ replied.
“I’ve had worse from a sunburn,” Hayes protested.
“No, you haven’t. And for no longer than we were out there, this is more tissue damage than I’d expect.”
“Christ, the tide,“ Hayes said as the color drained from his face.
“What about it?”
“It was super low this morning. Almost a blow-out. I bet there were a dozen boats on the clam leases.”
TJ said, “There’s no cover on those boats. They’re in real trouble. Anyone that happened to be looking in the direction of the stacks was almost certainly blinded. Probably just temporarily… but the grays are gonna eat them up.”
“Then we have to go get ‘em,” Hayes said. “Thomas was working this morning out on the Corrigans leases. He’s got the one on the far end, the closest to Crystal River.”
Hayes headed instantly for the door, but TJ was able to grab the back collar of his jacket before he got there.
“Goddammit, stop. You can’t do anything for him right now. Where are the PRDs you had the council buy?”
“In a box in the Chief’s office… why?”
“I’ll put one on and start monitoring the levels. As soon as it’s safe, I’ll go with you to look for the clam farmers that don’t make it in. But it won’t do anyone any good if we get sick. Things are going to get a whole hell of a lot worse.”
Before Hayes could respond, there was a flicker in the fluorescent lights above them, a terrifying half second of dark before they came on again.
The town did not get its electricity directly from Duke Energy and it was this fact that had been reason to hope the flicker was a hiccup and not a final gasp. Even stern men like Hayes and TJ, though, felt the jolt in their guts when the lights went dark again with a sudden clap. It was still morning in Cedar Key but the edges of objects in the room blended into a muddled haze that would come to permeate life on the island for the indeterminate future.
The heat outside would not last long. Even as fires burned on horizons around the world, their warmth eventually gave way to the creeping monotone of the skies. The gray set in overhead and all around, determined to keep the sun away from the land and waters.
A backwards retelling of the creation story began in earnest on the Earth—Genesis in reverse.
