All the workers, exclusively men, had shaggy mustaches and proud bellies that strained the waistbands of their overalls. Several of them had their sleeves rolled up, showing arms covered with tattoos. Again, in the movies, nuclear workers look and act like buff robots. These guys at Rocky Flats had this ambling beer-guzzling, blue-collar manner about themselves. It was as if America’s nuclear arsenal had been entrusted to bikers.

A worker turned into the hall too sharply with his supply cart and bashed into a protruding corner, adding another gouge to the already scarred surface. He backed away from the corner and continued, crunching over chips of plaster that he had knocked loose.

Down the hall I found the archives office, entered, and locked the door. The two male clerks on duty heard the click and turned toward me. One was as skinny as the other was fat. Standing next to each other they looked like the number 10.

I removed my contacts and hypnotized them both. I left them standing like a couple of zombies who had forgotten what to do next. Spit drooled from their open mouths. I unhooked the key rings from their belts.

Banks of file cabinets shared floor space with stacks of safes. I asked the skinny clerk for Dr. Wong’s file.

He twitched and gagged in the effort to answer me. “Redlight.”

I asked him what “Redlight” meant but he was too stupefied to reply. The fat clerk wasn’t any more coherent.

I could bite them and let my saliva do its work, but for the moment I wanted to keep my lips off another man’s body.

Scanning the cabinets, I bypassed those labeled PERSON-NEL. Too obvious. At the far end, against the wall, stood a gray cabinet with a TOP SECRET placard. It took two different keys to unlock the cabinet, a safeguard to prevent any one individual from getting access. Fortunately, between the clerks I had both keys, and within a minute I was rustling through the drawers, looking for anything marked “Redlight.”

I thumbed through the folders and felt my anxiety rise as the minutes ticked by. Nothing mentioned Redlight.

At the back end of the bottom cabinet I discovered Dr. Wong’s file. After feeding his papers through a copy machine, I returned the originals to their place and tucked my copies, which I had neatly folded, into the waistband of my underwear. I’d study the documents later.

Confident that this case was starting to break open, I walked back to the tunnel. I joined a group of five workers waiting to exit through the metal detector and radiation monitors.

An alarm shrieked, sending a grating, pulsating blare through the building. Lights along the walls flashed.

The worker in front of me spun around. His braided ponytail smacked me in the face. “Holy shit, that’s the criticality alarm.”

That meant there was plutonium nearby that was ready to explode. The deafening scream of the alarms gripped my ears with their shrill cry of doom.

One guard stepped in front of the metal detector to block our passage through the tunnel. He pointed to the nearest door inside Building 371 and shouted, “Everybody outside.”

The six of us rushed outside. We slipped on the dirt and gravel surrounding the building. We remained trapped inside the wire of the Protected Area. The wail of the alarms echoed around us, screaming of danger.

The man behind me went, “Uff,” and he sagged against the wall. A red blot appeared on his chest.

Bullets tore at the wall. I grabbed the collars of the two closest men and yanked them to the ground. We flattened our bodies against the dirt. One slug ricocheted in front of me.

What the hell was going on? First the criticality alarms. Now a crossfire. Were we under attack by terrorists?

Another volley of bullets stitched the wall above me.

The guy with the ponytail began to sob. “We’re going to die, man. If we don’t get crapped up from the plutonium, we’re going to eat lead.”

“No one’s going to die,” I shouted to him. “Stay calm.”

The wounded man lay on his back. I crawled over to him and unbuttoned the torso of his overalls. Warm blood bubbled from a hole in the left side of his chest. I slid my hand through the blood and crammed my index finger into the hole. The smell of the fresh human blood excited my vampire hunger. My fangs grew. I wanted to attack, to feed.

Then I remembered the other time I had done this, had washed my hands in human blood. The wail of the Iraqi girl tore into my skull. My arms tensed and I fought the urge to spring up and run away. My left hand trembled and started to slip away from the wound. I grasped my left wrist and kept my hands steady.

The wounded man clasped my shoulder and gave a weak squeeze.

I patted his head and left clumps of blood in his hair. “Stay with me. We’ll get out of this.”

We lay still and waited for another volley of bullets. The scream of the alarms overwhelmed my vampire hearing. I might as well have been deaf.

My breath puffed into the dirt. Blood ran down my sleeve. The folded copies of Dr. Wong’s file dug into my belly. Was this a terrorist attack or simply the work of a lousy shot gunning for me?

The alarms abruptly became silent. From inside the building, someone shouted, “All clear!”

“You see?” I told the group. “We’re okay.” I patted the wounded man on the forehead.

“Don’t move, any of you,” growled a voice. “Stay on the ground. Put your hands behind your head.”

Two pairs of black combat boots tramped around my head. The blast deflector of an M16 rifle knocked against my temple. “You-I said to put your hands behind your head.”

I arched my neck and stared up the barrel of the rifle. Both guards looked like demons in their black helmets, hoods, and tinted goggles.

“But this man has a serious wound.”

The guard rapped the rifle muzzle against my forehead again. “I didn’t tell you to look up. Do like you’re told. Let us worry about that bastard.”

Dropping my head, I withdrew my bloodied hand.

The guard nudged my cheek with his boot. “All right, Florence Nightingale, give me your badge.”

I scraped my hand under me and pulled my badge free.

The guard took my badge. “So you’re Felix Gomez? Get up.” He grabbed my collar. “You’re coming with us.”

TWO SECURITY GUARDS LED me to the plant manager’s office. The taller of the guards hurried ahead and opened the door. Cradling his HK submachine gun in his left arm, he beckoned us to proceed.

I entered the office and walked across a plush maroon carpet to a chair in front of a massive wooden desk.

The plant manager, Herbert Hoover Merriweather, sat in a high-backed leather chair behind the desk. This was the first time I’d seen him in person, though I recognized his face from the official DOE photos that hung about the plant. Merriweather was a retired U.S. Navy captain, a former nuclear submariner-what DOE wags called a “sewer-pipe driver.”

Merriweather’s black complexion was as dark and bumpy as the creosote on a wharf piling. He had a squat face, a low crinkled brow, and a nappy flattop haircut that made you think that at least once in his naval career someone had slammed a deck hatch on his head and squashed his skull. His flat nose and wide nostrils accentuated the horizontal impression of his features.

He wore a navy-blue polo shirt that fit snug around his broad chest. The silhouette of a submarine and the designation “SSN 42” in gold thread decorated the left breast of his shirt. Like most newly retired officers, the beginnings of a paunch swelled his belly.

On the wall over his left shoulder hung a gold submariner’s badge, two dolphins flanking the cylindrical conning tower of a submarine. To the untutored eye it looked like a couple of carp fighting over a garbage can.