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fact.”
    Keith wants to hit him; he wants to knock those words back into George’s mouth. It is a truth he hasn’t been able to run from these last few years, but he has managed to comfortably ignore the progression of her cancer. She is the woman he loves, and he wants to be with her until the end.
    “I know what she means to you, Keith. I feel the same way about my family, but there’s nothing I can do for mine. At least you have a chance to keep protecting Maggie if we have to leave, and you have other family out there that might still be alive. I’m not going to let the two of you stay on this platform when we leave just so you can slowly die of radiation poisoning.”
    *
    Standing in the medical bay, George is going over the situation with everyone, including Maggie.
    “The Waterford Steam Electric Station is our main concern. I’m sure we will know if it has gone into meltdown within another five days with the direction the wind has been blowing.”
    “Why five days?” Maggie asks with a tone full of increasing strength.
    “From what I’ve read, it only takes a few hours to a day for a plant to go into meltdown. That is if there is a failure that can’t be corrected in one of the safety measures. We can expect the same amount or more of the diseased people leaving New Orleans and heading west toward the power plant as those that came across the bridge and through St. Bernard Parrish. The station is only twenty-five miles from the center of the city, so it takes less than a day to walk there. Anyone that was alive and stayed at Waterford to keep it running is most likely gone or dead by now. Another five days and we should find out if they had the time to shut it down properly.”
    “That doesn’t sound as grim as what you told us earlier,” Frank mentions.
    George gives Frank a look trying to make him shut-up, but Frank doesn’t stop talking, he just points out the obvious.
    “Maggie is a tough lady, George—probably tougher than all of us with what she’s dealing with right now. Tell her everything you told me.”
    “George, tell me. I need to know the truth,” she says.
    “We need to leave within five days but preferably earlier, before the radiation alarms start ringing. We don’t know how much fallout we’ll be dealing with when it starts, and even a short term exposure could be fatal.”
    “I thought you said we would have some time?” Keith says in frustration.
    “I didn’t create this situation, but I understand it. Please, let me explain what I researched and we all need to decide what to do together, okay?”
    Everyone nods or mumbles their acceptance so George continues.
    “If the workers at the Waterford plant were able to shut it down properly, a power plant takes continuous upkeep and maintenance to ensure those shutdown protocols keep functioning the way they should. Just like at this platform, complex machinery needs regular maintenance. If there were workers still there, unless they were underground, they would have been killed or run off by now. No army can stop the whole population of New Orleans from overrunning the power plant, and the military was the first to be infected. The entire area had one and a half million people, so at best, only two hundred thousand people will walk by or through the power plant property. That’s a lot of bodies to break something as they move by.”
    Then, let’s say best case scenario, the workers are alive, stay alive, and no equipment or generators are damaged. Power stations usually keep one week of fuel on hand for emergency generators. Even if they kept a month supply of diesel on hand, eventually the generators will shut down.”
    This dramatic information in George’s mind is met with blank stares by everyone in the group but Frank.
    “The generators run the coolant circulation for the reactor. No generators means no coolant, and no coolant means meltdown. No matter how carefully maintained they kept Waterford, even if it was one