Butterflies

It started with several tenacious plants growing near the waste center of a nuclear storage facility. A facility just one hundred miles to the North of where John stood. A facility for the Department of energy and quietly built fifteen years ago over the protest of locals and the homes that were razed because of it. Few people, at least nowadays, even knew it was there still, or why if they did. Although nature didn't care and plants still grew.

Those odd plants, as it happens, were native and near the staging area to the underground facility that housed a million pounds of radioactive chemicals already. Radiation, only slight, had been taken in by those plants and, as part of the food chain, so too the caterpillar. A very particular caterpillar that favored those native plants while it fed itself for the incredible metamorphosis it was soon going to commit itself to.

Radiation, but well within government standards, and ignored because of those standards, was still too high for something so delicate as a butterfly. Of course the government's standards might be a point to argue, because it was the government that set those standards. Although that was neither here nor there as those caterpillars ate ravenously. As always, it would be their last meal.

As it also happens those same plants are the plants that Swallowtails like as caterpillars. Those plants are called the Hop tree or Ptelea Trifoliata, to those in the know. One of those food sources for the Papilio Creshontes Cramer or Swallowtail, but only when it is a caterpillar host and then only until creating it's chrysalis.

That radiation was high, but not high enough to alarm anyone at the site. At least not until the Geiger counter's clicks increased one day. A seam, unknown but nearly 400 meters long, allowed a small amount of radiated gas to seep upward and finally outward.

Fortunately, even if it was harmful, that plant was already sealed in a thick yellow plastic bag marked both nuclear and hazardous before it could harm anyone. That plant, in it's bag, was also now heading into a vast chamber dug out of the limestone and seven hundred feet below ground.