Uranium ➵ The Old Guard

➵Prologue

"Good day miss," the guard, Christian, acknowledged. Aleandra dipped her head in greeting as he kept staring straight.

Aleandra Dimitrov loved and hated working at Kurchatov-77, a nuclear fuel plant. She could learn so much about uranium while being shoved away from her colleagues.

They were all in the nuclear waste facility waiting for her to arrive and talking amongst themselves. She had proposed the idea that they take a closer look at the cooling system keeping the vat of waste from exploding. Surprisingly, they had all agreed with her.

"I'm here," she announced softly. They turned towards her and said their 'hello's'.

"I had just been talking about checking the cooling system to Alexei a few days ago," David Borodin said. "Right Alexei?"

"No," he answered, flipping open a file with the cooling system designs. A few members chuckled at David and Aleandra gave a hesitant smile. 

"Shall we get started?" someone suggested. Aleandra nodded eagerly and everyone turned their attention to Alexei as he gave a brief overview. Aleandra was pushed to the back of the group and craned her neck to get a better view.

Alexei wasn't taking his job seriously, goofing up and making light humor. It angered Aleandra that he could be so nonchalant about such a serious issue. The chemicals were supposed to explode in America, not in the very building that kept their leftovers. Aleandra wished she could yell at the group for not taking their job seriously, but she was, most of the time, a rock in their boot.

Her frustration must have been stronger than she thought as she started sweating from her boiling blood. Her face had turned red and she waited for someone to notice her cherry skin. But no one turned to laugh at her they continued with the overview with their sticky foreheads and fanning hands.

Aleandra noticed it then, the air was too thick, too hot. The smell, oh the smell. She could never forget that smell. She turned to the only perpetrator, the only thing that could do this. Tank 3.

"We have to fix the tank!" somebody yelled. A few members from the group had also found the guilty man.

Alexei began shouting orders at the workers, trying his hardest to direct them in the quickest way to success. He sent Aleandra to inspect the top, the lid, to make sure it was secure enough. The smell was worse. The acrid smell of uranium.

She felt the cold air whip at her face blowing the black hair from her tight bun out. She cursed the air and yelled down to Alexei.

"We need to fix the top!" she shouted down at him. He flipped frantically through the folder as David came running with a box of tools.

"Which one do I need?" he asked anxiously. Everyone knew what would happen if the top blew. They'd all be dead.

Igor clambered up to the top next to her and started screwing a sheet back in place. He handed her a tool and she did the same on the other side. 

A loud bang erupted from the vat, throwing everything back in an explosion. Aleandra could feel the air hold and release her down splat onto the floor in the most painful way to die.