City of Hillsville

City of Hillsville

Justina Ireland

City of Hillsville

Justina Ireland

Please join us tonight at Hillsville Senior High School for an informational meeting about possible site selection for a temporary waste facility in Hillsville. Refreshments will be served.

When the first informational meeting happened for the temporary nuclear waste facility on the edge of town, no one showed up. Well, no one except Hettie Lambert, but she was old and went to everything, even the monthly city council meetings.

The Campos and Johnsons said they would’ve gone if they’d known it was about a nuclear waste facility, and not just another e-waste recycling facility like the town had been talking about for the past five years. Melissa Egbert said she couldn’t go, since she had her ceramics class on Tuesday. Danny Parker didn’t go, but he’d just returned from his honeymoon on Mars so no one much blamed him. And the rest of us either didn’t care all that much or were consumed with the normal grind of school, or work, or both—activities that made up most of our daily life in Hillsville, shuttling kids from the elementary school to the sports fields on the edge of town, making a quick stop at whatever fast-food line was the shortest to grab a bite to eat. Then there was the inevitable mad dash home, the homework and evening baths and bedtime, maybe sneaking out after dinner to grab a beer down at the American Legion or the Pour House, if there was time, a blessed few hours of freedom in the evening after the kids went to sleep.

No one was trying to clutter up that time with an informational meeting about…what, exactly? A new recycling center? Please. We were busy with living.

But Hettie Lambert did go. As Hillsville’s self-described “busybody,” we all knew that we could rely on Hettie to let us know if there was something worth thinking about. Hettie was the one who’d shared the information about the access road that the town council wanted to build right through what had once been the state park, and with her guidance we’d gotten the state to reroute that eyesore through nearby Ellersburg, a win for everyone involved. After all, Ellersburg wanted the development that came with the new road. We didn’t. Hillsville was fine as is.

So when Hettie Lambert didn’t immediately take to the digital streets with proclamations of doom and gloom, we all figured that everything was just fine. After all, Hettie wasn’t one to let something like new development in town pass by without a brouhaha. If there was something to be angry about, Hettie would’ve posted it to the local social media groups with a fiery bluster that would’ve put Pastor Allen to shame.

But the day after the meeting there was only silence from Hettie, so we all kind of figured that whatever the informational meeting had been about, there was little to concern ourselves with. It was just like the new housing development that the county promised once every election cycle: all smoke and mirrors. And so, we forgot about it and went on living our lives.

Honestly, we all should’ve been a little more invested in something beyond our own small annoyances.

On the edge of Hillsville, right where the “Welcome to Hillsville: A Nice Town for Nice People” hologram has perched for nigh on a hundred and fifty years, are a set of sports fields. They sit on what had once been unclaimed investment land set aside by the city, but the rolling grassy hills and scrubby trees hadn’t been interesting enough to attract even a single housing developer. At some point after the road was repaved to allow for increased safety protocols on SNVs—self-navigating vehicles—people began to comment that the space would be a good location for a park. But it would be a while before the city would have the money to send out heavy-duty landscaping bots to level out the ground enough to put in a soccer field, a pair of pickleball courts, and a magnetic astro-pitch court, the hoops emitting a constant low-level electric hum, just waiting for someone to knee a ball into range.

The grass at the sports complex is green and soft, the lawns trimmed regularly by landscaping bots. In the spring the bots let the fields grow tall, the clover and dandelions feeding the earliest-waking pollinators. Butterflies and honeybees meander among the white blooms, giving the space a festive feel, as though the bumbling insects are drunken partygoers. And there, in the rustling of the tall blades, can often be seen a set of ears, a lone bunny nibbling at the grasses. The fields are serene and peaceful.

Beyond the sports fields, tucked into the lee of a hill, is the Hillsville Temporary Nuclear Storage Facility, the concrete pillars silent sentinels peering into the distant past when their atoms were split, and into the far future of gradual decay and disintegration. Once, those pillars had nearly destroyed a community.

Now, few residents even realize they’re there.

It wasn’t until nearly a year after the first notice that we heard anything further about the nuclear storage facility. This time, the post was the most talked-about entry in our Welcome to Hillsville social group, a place where people shared local events and fundraisers, but for the most part posted giveaway items that no one wanted, like secondhand neural implants and car seats with questionable histories.

It was Alicia Cannady who posted the notice, and while everyone agreed that Alicia was annoying, she was also the kind of person who got things done. She had single-handedly led the charge to fund the high school’s first trip to the Moon colony, raising the hundred and forty thousand dollars per student it cost to charter a private shuttle for the graduating class, while also starting an endowment so that each student would have a bit of a nest egg to build upon. Caden Smith, the owner of the Pour House, the town’s only real bar, had been overheard calling Alicia “a cross between a pit bull and a serial killer—terrifying and efficient.” None of us had disagreed.

So when Alicia posted about the upcoming meeting, people paid attention.

“We need to stop this nuclear DESTRUCTION of the landscape,” Alicia had posted, the opening of her wall of text the only thing most of us read. But it was enough.

When we streamed into the senior high school auditorium that Saturday afternoon, we did so with mixed feelings. Alicia stood in front of the stage between the raised platform and the first row of seats, holding court, talking about how if we let a temporary facility be built we were courting cancer clusters and a host of other problems, although cancer was really the one she kept talking about. She said it while widening her eyes, as though watching her eyebrows disappear into her hairline would convey the importance of blocking the site selection, just in case the big scary thought of cancer was not.

Brian Atlas, whose grandfather had worked at the nuclear plant when it was still operational, was much less worked up about the whole thing. “We should hear them out,” he said, shrugging as he spit a stream of tobacco juice into an empty soda bottle. “We had the nuclear plant up the road for nearly four decades, and ain’t no one got any sicker than before.” But no one much paid him any attention, because we all knew he’d voted against the mandatory recycling ordinance a few years earlier. His opinions were as suspect as the toupee he swore was his own hair.

Everyone else’s opinions fell between the extremes of Alicia and Brian. For the most part the meeting was a bunch of nothing, the city officials talking about “nuclear responsibility” and the chance to “do a public good.” But no one was buying it. That was the same kind of double-talk they’d used when they’d raised taxes a few months earlier. It seemed everything was for the public good whenever we balked.

There were also a number of people in boring brown suits nodding and listening intently, and it was only after nearly forty minutes of the local officials talking that the suits introduced themselves: people from the federal government, liaisons to the site selection committee. They all seemed like very nice, reserved people who’d somehow ended up in the unenviable position of telling us a whole bunch of bad news, like when your neighbor runs over your cat and feels obligated to share the grim details just in case it was really a stray and not your Fluffy. None of them seemed like they wanted to be there, and who could blame them? The whole evening was a waste of time.

In the end, nothing was settled. The mayor and his cronies dodged question after question before promising another meeting, this time with the team in charge of site selection leading the discussion, as though they were somehow barred from saying anything pertinent at the meeting we’d just attended.

As we left, no one really thought they’d show up again. Seemed like the same old runaround to us.

“They want to wear us down,” Alicia announced to anyone who was paying attention as we left the auditorium. “We won’t let them.”

In summer, the landscaping bots trimmed the grass of the sports fields on the edge of town shorter in increments, giving the local bunnies and bees and butterflies time to find new haunts as the days lengthened and the sports teams began their round-robin of games and matches.

Most summer evenings would bear witness to an endless parade of residents. Between youth soccer games, high school baseball games, and the various adult recreational leagues, the fields were always occupied, the sounds of cheering and competition traveling across the space, a chorus of humanity.

The sports fields were also a popular place for picnics, BBQs, birthday parties, even the occasional wedding. And just beyond these festivities stood the silent sentinels of the Hillsville Temporary Nuclear Storage Facility, presiding over all that existed around them.

Alicia was the first to begin rallying residents to her cause. She took to social media, creating post after post on Welcome to Hillsville. What had once been a pretty randomly updated page now became wallpapered with Alicia’s increasingly alarmist posts. She linked to studies from the early twenty-first century—ancient news—about the dangers of nuclear proliferation and the possibility of a “mobile Chernobyl” when the nuclear waste was hauled from its reactor to the storage facility. She used a graphic-design program to create desolate landscapes with a few recognizable Hillsville landmarks—the school, city hall, and Mercer’s, Hillsville’s longest-operating family restaurant—with clever taglines like “Don’t let this be our future!” and “Will you care when the land is POISON?” Her assault was relentless enough that even people like Louis Watkins—who never cared about anything beyond when the American Legion was going to have their next pit beef sale—began to complain about the proposed facility. That was how good Alicia was at activating people, once she sunk her teeth into a cause.

Brian wasn’t about to let Alicia post with impunity, though. While many of us were still ignoring her posts for the most part—or at least were smart enough to know that responding to any of them with anything less than glowing praise meant gearing up for a fight—Brian had no such reservations. He replied to every single one, leading to most of the increasingly argumentative threads being removed after a few hours or days by the group’s administrators, who didn’t want to deal with the drama. As for the rest of us? We relished it. This was the most exciting thing to happen in Hillsville since the new elementary school was built, and while Brian and Alicia fought via electrons, most of the rest of us tried to examine how we felt about the possibility of a temporary storage facility nearby.

Really, we weren’t all that sure why we should care. Ultimately, the government was going to do what it wanted, right? Why get all upset over it?

But Alicia and Brian weren’t going to stop their campaigns and they weren’t content to restrict their nuclear feud to the internet. Alicia began to prowl the after-school pick-up line, giving the barest of pleasantries before asking the harried parents she encountered how they felt about the possibility of Hillsville becoming a cancer cluster, or what would they do when our drinking water was no longer safe. For the most part we just muttered something incoherent before hurrying our kids along. After all, we had so many activities to get to, even if many of the gymnastics lessons and handball practices and play dates we cited were just lies to escape Alicia and her hyperbole.

Brian took up a similar crusade at the American Legion with the rest of the vets from the Mars Alliance War. He went from table to table, making small talk before predictably shaking his head and saying, “Not sure why everyone is up in arms over the possibility of this nuclear thing. Like we don’t take our lives into our hands every single time we get on the train. You know they’re powered by reactors, right?” Eventually, though, even Brian reached a snag in his crusade, as everyone would scatter when they saw him coming, so much so that the Legion asked him to stop harassing all of the nice veterans minding their business and trying to get drunk.

We, of course, knew about all of this: every single triumph and setback in their campaigns. The fight between Alicia and Brian had become the locus of town culture, a frequent topic of discussion and a reason to gather in front yards, linger on the sidewalk, or stop to chat in the grocery store aisles. It wasn’t that we favored Alicia or Brian, on the whole; in fact, we were pretty split on that. The reality was that most of us were afraid that Alicia might be right. But we were also resigned to the fact that nothing we said would change anything once the government made up its mind. After all, weren’t there hundreds of examples throughout history of the feds doing exactly as they wished? It would be stupid to argue with reality.

Traveling beyond the sports fields, past the concrete restrooms and multihued jungle gym, was a gravel access road that led directly to the temporary storage facility. The road hadn’t been used much since the facility had been shuttered, the last shipment of spent uranium tucked safely away in its concrete bed. Sometimes cottontail rabbits would run across the road, taking a shortcut between the fields of long grass that lined either side. Skunks, raccoons, and possums were frequent guests as well. But vehicles only traveled down that road precisely twelve times a day, and each and every single one of those trips belonged to the guards who monitored the nuclear site for safety.

The first shift arrived at midnight. They were the most junior of the crew and had only worked at the site since after the concrete towers had been sealed. None of them had ever watched the giant trucks trundle cautiously down the road with their loads, guides escorting them the last few hundred yards to the storage facility, the drivers looking wrung out and relieved to be finished with the undertaking.

That first shift of guards came down the road slowly and left quickly, a hail of gravel pinging on their undercarriage as they commanded the vehicle’s AI to floor the accelerator, the whine of the electric engine like a cloud of mosquitos on an August evening.

The second shift of guards were the most senior, close to retirement and doing everything at a slow, deliberate pace. They stopped for early-morning rabbits and took the time to lean out of their car windows and peer into the grass at blurred, fleeing forms, trying to ascertain whether they’d seen a fox or just a skunk, or a wayward cat. They were in no hurry to reach either end of their route. Besides, the facility wasn’t going anywhere.

And the late shift lived their lives somewhere in between. Both of these guards were parents, and they spent their work hours alternately exclaiming over and lamenting firsts. For every first step or lost tooth there were equally bitter failures, the sum total of childhood existence analyzed and discussed in between security sweeps and annotations, the many falls and scrapes and small victories a perfect complement to the temporary site’s own tumultuous birth.

The Alicia and Brian argument went on for months, until the city held their next meeting. This one was less informational and more combative, as though both sides had been saving up their effort for that single event.

The entire city council was in attendance, along with the angsty-looking people from the federal government, although who could say what department they worked for. Energy? War? We weren’t sure. We just knew tonight was going to be a scene.

When the initial plans for the site were unveiled, Alicia was the first on her feet. “So, this is moving forward without any public input?” she demanded, even though it wasn’t yet time for public comment. A few of us murmured, but mostly we were excited.

This was what we’d been waiting for.

“This is just the proposal that is coming to us from the federal government,” said one of the city council members, a nondescript white man with a receding hairline and a penchant for sweating too much. None of us knew what his name was. The city councilors had introduced themselves but we’d all promptly forgotten their names. Had we voted for them? None of us could remember, but we all agreed that we should probably start paying more attention to local politics.

Brian stood up. He obviously didn’t want to be outdone by Alicia, who still hadn’t taken her seat. “That’s on the outskirts of town, right? Away from any water sources and anywhere anyone lives?”

Another city council member, an older woman with tan skin and iron-gray hair pulled back into a messy bun, answered. “It is, but we really need to stress that this is just a preliminary plan, assuming Hillsville is chosen as a site. There are actually other locations, other cities, in competition with us for the storage facility.”

This of course made us all wonder if we were wasting our time. Hillsville might not even be selected for the site! Why were we getting so worked up over nothing?

At that moment, everyone began yelling.

“The long-term effects of nuclear contamination can be detrimental no matter where the site is located,” Alicia yelled.

“A facility like this could bring in jobs for the town. Stop being so shortsighted!” Brian yelled back.

“Who said this will create jobs?” demanded a gruff voice from somewhere in the back of the room, probably one of the vets from the Legion. “More than likely it’ll drag down our property values!”

“Why aren’t residents being consulted on these decisions?” yelled someone else. We thought it might have been Candace Plott, but it could’ve been Alanna Green.

“Look, is this going to get us a reduction on our taxes? Because the government is bleeding us dry!” We all agreed that was yelled by Roger Grayson. Taxes were his favorite topic of discussion, and he wasn’t even a CPA.

After that, it became pure chaos, a cacophony of people yelling, sometimes at each other, sometimes at the city council members and federal employees seated up on the stage, who looked as though they were beginning to realize what a terrible idea this had been. Just when we thought perhaps we should slink away before a fistfight broke out, a shrill whistle broke through the chaos.

“Enough! This is no way to conduct business,” Hettie Lambert said, leaning heavily on her cane. Everyone stopped talking when Hettie spoke up. She was eighty if she was a day, and we all knew that whatever she had to say would be worth the listen. Hettie had been one of the first settlers on Mars, and her stories of survival and communal living during the planet’s wild frontier days were one of the many reasons she was one of the most respected elders in Hillsville. She’d returned to Earth only because she was adamant that she wanted to die in the same place where she’d grown up, and while most of us pretended to understand that level of commitment to our town, for Hettie it was genuine. Her love of Hillsville was true and had always given Hettie an air of authority, especially in town matters. For most of us, Hillsville was where we’d ended up, through a chance home purchase or job transfer, or an accident of birth. Hettie had chosen Hillsville over every other place in the galaxy, even the luxurious man-made paradise of Mars.

How could we disrespect that?

Hettie pointed at the councilors, her wrinkled finger shaking a little as she did so. “Why haven’t you organized a local community action council to work with you closely on the site selection? They could bring the concerns people have to you in a logical way, instead of this scaremongering nonsense, and help liaise with the local county, state, and the federal government. No more of this silliness where we attack one another on the internet or shout like small children! None of you would have lasted a day in one of the colonies.”

Later, we would all marvel over the moment, each of us remembering it differently. Alicia would swear that Hettie had looked right at her when she spoke of someone to liaise with the federal authorities, but Brian said that Hettie only looked at Alicia while talking about how the whole process had devolved into nonsense. Either way, most of us were relieved that Hettie had given us a perfectly logical way forward, a way to advocate for ourselves like a community, so that our questions and worries and dissent could be heard and adjudicated without the constant after-school pick-up line harassment or everyone missing out on the cheap beers at the Legion.

The city council members began to agree, and stated that anyone who wished to serve on the citizens’ advisory council could leave behind their information with the steno-bot who took all of the minutes for the city. After that the meeting wrapped quickly, and even though things were now moving ahead in a way that felt less combative and more productive, there were still a few of us who wished Alicia and Brian had come to blows.

We were convinced it would’ve gone viral.

Beyond the guard shack with the rotating shifts of security guards were the pillars themselves. The dry casks were constructs of steel and concrete. Each stood around fifteen feet tall, and none had been opened in the twenty years the site had stood on the edge of town.

There were twenty casks in total, although the concrete pad they sat upon had space for additional storage. The site was surrounded by a chain-link fence, mostly aimed at discouraging the curious and keeping critters away from the immediate vicinity of the casks.

Every few minutes a patrol-bot navigated the spaces between the casks, checking for leaks and ensuring that the spent nuclear material decaying inside could reach its half-life in peace—at least until it was time for it to be moved again to a more permanent storage location, if the U.S. ever figured out where that would be built. The bot recorded everything, its footage sent to a facility run by the federal agency which provided oversight for storage sites across the country, Hillsville just one of many.

It was yet another boring facet of an utterly unremarkable, utterly forgotten temporary nuclear storage facility. And that was exactly how every resident in Hillsville had hoped it would be.

After the meeting with Hettie’s outburst, things settled down. There were monthly updates about the goings-on and negotiations with the federal government, and for the most part they were pretty tame. The citizens’ council came up with the idea to ask for concessions from the government, and so the construction of a massive sports park complex—one that Hillsville had long been unsuccessfully applying for federal community health grants to fund—was added into the plan.

We watched the groundbreaking, headlined by lots of officials whose names we would soon forget, and when construction started it was barely a blip on our radar. By that point it had been nearly a decade since it all began, and only a handful of us remembered the blow-by-blow of the fight that the site had engendered in the first place. What had once been as hot and toxic as a spent fuel rod was now more like the spent uranium smoldering peacefully in each of the casks—forgettable.

When they broke ground on the nearby sports fields the turnout was impressive, with people crowding around to see as the mayor and Jilly Richards—the first person from Hillsville to make the National Astro-Pitch Team—wielded the same golden shovels a few weeks later. It was much easier to be excited by a brand new magnetic astro-pitch court than it was about nuclear waste, so no one much felt bad that there were way more people to watch the mayor dig in the dirt the second time around.

Hettie was gone by the time things were finished, but as we looked at the new sports fields we all thought that she would’ve been proud of how things turned out.

And Alicia—a bit grayer but no less dedicated to her community—still swore that if it had come to it, she could have taken Brian if they had come to blows.

And Brian, for his part, was smart enough not to disagree.