Free Ground Zero (The X-Files) by Kevin Anderson, Chris Carter (Creator) Page B

behind the desk turned to give her an automatic smile—but froze with instant suspicion upon seeing
    69
    THE X-FILES
    her professional garb. Scully felt a sinking in her stomach. The young receptionist was in her early twenties, with skin the color of light milk chocolate and bushy hair knotted into a medusa swirl of dangling dreadlocks. Her necklace consisted of enormous rectangles of enameled metal; the voluminous wrap covering her body was a dizzying geometric pattern—some sort of Swahili tribal dress, Scully decided. She glanced down at the fancy engraved nameplate—probably a minor concession of importance for the volunteer workers—on the table that served as a makeshift front desk.
    “Becka Thorne.” Beside the nameplate, the table held a telephone book, telephone, an old typewriter, and some preprinted leaflets. Scully pulled out her ID. “I’m Special Agent Dana Scully from the FBI. I’m here to speak with a Ms. Miriel Bremen.”
    Becka Thorne’s eyebrows went up. “I…I’ll see if she’s here,” she said. Her voice was cold and uninviting, her guard up. Again Scully felt a pang of disappointment. Becka Thorne seemed to be pondering whether or not to lie. Finally she got up and glided to the back of the offices, her colorful wrap swishing as she moved. Somewhere out of sight behind movable fabric partitions Scully could hear an overworked photocopy machine churning out leaflets. While she waited, Scully studied the posters and photo enlargements mounted on the wall, presumably the Museum of Nuclear Horrors promised on the sign outside. A computer-printed banner had been tacked up at ceiling level, proclaiming in large dot-matrix letters: “WE’VE ALREADY
    HAD ONE NUCLEAR WAR—WE MUST
    70
    GROUND ZERO
    PREVENT THE NEXT ONE!” Grainy black-and-white enlargements of awesome mushroom clouds adorned the painted cinderblock walls. They reminded her of the hallway in Dr. Gregory’s home. There, though, the photographs had been trophies occupying honored positions. Here they were accusations. One poster listed known international atomic bomb tests and the amount of radiation each aboveground blast had showered into the air. She saw a chart with rising bars that showed the increase of cancer in the United States attributed to such residual radiation, particularly strontium 90 contamination in grass consumed by dairy cows, which was then carried into their milk and ingested by children who poured it over their artificially sweetened breakfast cereals. As the bars rose from year to year, the numbers appeared staggering. Another display listed the islands that had been destroyed in the Pacific Ocean, with pathos-filled photographs of natives from Bikini Island and Eniwetok Atoll as the U.S. military evacuated them from their island paradises to make way for atomic bomb tests.
    At the time, the evacuation efforts had been undertaken at enormous cost. For years the Bikini Islanders had petitioned the United States and the United Nations to be allowed to return to their homeland, but only after the United States footed the atrocious bill to remove the residual radioactivity from their coral reefs, their beaches, their jungles. Thinking of the island photographs on Dr. Gregory’s walls, as well as the satellite images and weather projections in his lab office, Scully inspected the exhibit with greater interest. In 1971 the Bikini Atoll had been declared safe, and the islanders were allowed to return. But tests in 1977 showed that the atoll still seethed with
    71
    THE X-FILES
    dangerous levels of radiation, and the inhabitants were forced to evacuate again. Residents of Eniwetok Atoll, which also was used for a prolonged series of hydrogen bomb tests, returned to their homes in 1976, only to learn that a nuclear waste dump on the islands would remain contaminated for thousands of years. In the early 1980s it was found that residents of islands even one hundred and twenty kilometers away from the original tests