#it was also €3 which i feel like is bordering on highway robbery but i did get it from a hotel vending machine so i think that's on me

[batemanofficial]

yall weren't kidding european chocolate really is better

[roxywashere]

New Light

Rey takes her date where no date has gone before

Rey waited outside of Baby’s Diner for her date to finish her shift. It was 4 in the morning. Not an exceptionally late night for her, but she was tired. She cycled some plasma in and out of her veins, to see if that would help her keep energized. She then did a lap around the state park the diner bordered, which did very little to help.

She pulled out her phone and looked up something she thought she remembered. She chuckled when she found it, and then opened up the group chat.

                                          Hey, Shay

What

                                           You’re not going to believe who                                            has tasteful, professionally photographed nudes                                            from back in the 40s

Who

                                           Aradia Johanna Christa Scomparsa-Prince-Furst

You send me those nudes right goddamned now I’m going to give her so much shit for this

                                           Elle make sure she doesn’t hurt herself

Rey shook her head and put her phone away, just as her date, Felicia Kyle, pushed out of the front door of the diner

“So, how was the fight?” Felicia asked.

“Stopped a bank robbery, burned down someone’s garden, broke a rib. Ya know, your standard save the world stuff.”

“Wait, you broke a rib? And then ran here?”

“I got better. Superheroes are pretty tough, you know.”

“Why don’t you tell me more while I drop my car off at my place.” It was a short 15 minute drive to her place, in a trailer park in the nearby township of White Deer.

“This place is…” Rey started to say as she climbed out of the car.

“Let me guess, ‘Rustic’?”

“I mean, in not so condescending a tone. But… yeah.”

“It’s cheaper than living in the city, I bet.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“I’m gonna go get changed out of my uniform. You wanna come inside or wait out here?”

“I’m good out here. I’ve still got to psych myself up.”

After Felicia went inside, Rey massaged her rib. She lifted up her shirt and took a look at it: Aradia’s magic had fixed the physical break, but the flesh around it was still bruised, dark violet and a sickly yellow. Rey’s superhuman physiology would heal it quick, but it definitely wouldn’t be painless by the end of the night.

When Felicia came back out, she had almost completely transformed. She almost looked like she belonged in Rey’s group of friends: Torn jeans, black leather jacket, black crop-top.

“Lookin’ good,” Rey said.

“I know how to fix myself up all cosmopolitan-like. I wasn’t always a trailer park gal, you know.”

“Oh yeah? Where you from?”

“Austin, Texas.”

“Can’t get much more cosmopolitan than Austin.”

“So, how’s this going to work? Are you going to… carry me? For 700 miles?”

“You’d be surprised.” Rey activated her power and had Felicia in a bridal carry before she could blink. “You want to go straight to Danesville? Or do you want to sightsee first?”

“Depends where you take me. What sights are there to see?”

“Ever been to the top of the FursTech tower in New York?”

“Isn’t the top third completely closed off to the public?”

“I’m not the public anymore, am I? Me and Rad, we’re basically besties now.”

“Alright, then, my hot young steed, lead the way.”

Rey bolted from the trailer park and and down the road, and onto the highway, east towards New York City. It was 3 minutes later when Rey stopped in front of the FursTech tower, and put Felicia down to let her catch her breath.

“Holy shit, Rey.”

“That’s how it is for me all the time.”

“Pick me back up, this almost better than sex.”

“You’re gonna eat those words later on.” Rey scooped Felicia back up, and stared up at the tower. “Brace yourself.”

Rey ran straight up the side of the tower, slower than she usually would but fast enough that Felicia wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. They were at the top in less than a second. Rey set Felicia back down so she could enjoy the view.

“Jesus, this is unbelievable…”

They sat at the top of the tower silently for ten minutes, watching the lights of the cities and highways.

“So, where next?” Felicia asked.

“Ever been to the west coast?”

“I visited LA for vacation once.”

“Good enough for me.” Rey picked Felicia up once again. “Oh, there’s one more thing I have to show you. I only just learned this since you texted me the first time.” Rey braced to run, and bolted straight off the edge of the building, coming to a stop about a hundred feet from the edge, before starting to fall. Felicia screamed and covered her eyes.

Rey slowly activated her power to slow her fall, until she was going horizontally. After sufficiently long time not having hit the ground, Felicia cracked her eyes open again, and looked around, astonished. “You can fly?”

“You betcha.”

“How fast can you fly?”

“You wanna find out with me?”

“Fuck yeah.”

Rey ramped up her power, to the point where she could feel her plasma reserves empty, and needed to draw from the Heart on her back. She kept going, pushing herself even further. She felt the Heart draining. She’d never burned through this much plasma so fast ever, she may not have even used up this much plasma in the entire rest of her life. She didn’t know how fast she was going, but she was beyond words like “fast”.

“Hey, you seeing that?” Felicia asked. Rey was pretty sure she was. It looked like she was seeing her plasma trail in front of her. She raced past streak after streak, until they merged together, and the streaks became a solid tunnel of plasma.

“What the fuck is happening…” Rey muttered.

“Are you gonna stop speeding up?”

“I think I did…”

Rey and Felicia suddenly hit a wall of light, and were spat out of the plasma tunnel above a bright sunny desert, and very quickly slowed to a stop.

“Where the hell are we?” Rey asked.

Felicia, looking around, pointed behind Rey. “I think I see some buildings over there.”

Rey turned and flew in that direction. When they reached it, they found a vast slumped skeleton of a massive skyscraper, draped across the desert, less than two miles from the sea. Much smaller towers poked out of the desert around it.

“Rey… I think this is Dubai. That’s the Burj on its side right there.”

“What the fuck happened? It looks like the city’s been abandoned for a thousand years…” Rey gave Felicia a disturbed look.

“Did we just fucking time travel? Did you go so fast you punched through time?”

“Hey, this is new for me, too.”

“Identify yourself!” ordered a voice from behind Rey. Rey turned to face the source, and found a familiar face floating a few dozen feet from her.

It was the Archangel, the mysterious benefactor of Astra’s League, wearing what looked to be a suit of sleek golden power armor, helmetless, with a long flowing sky blue cape.

“Rey?” the Archangel asked, apparently just as perplexed as Rey was. “How did you get here? We detected an interversal incursion… Was that you?”

“Fuck if I know.” Rey answered.

The Archangel sighed. “You speed-forced it, didn’t you. You went so fast you broke the barrier between worlds. You weren’t this powerful when we fought Therion.”

Rey spun around, showing the Archangel the Heart that Aradia had given her. “Rad spotted me an upgrade. She said you made it.”

“I did. I am happy to see him being put to good use. Who is this with you?”

“This is my date, Felicia.”

“That’ll explain it. I remember when I used to be that much a show-off…”

“Where are we?”

The Archangel hesitated for a moment. “…Let me show you.” She turned and started flying northwest, quickly picking up speed. Rey had no trouble keeping pace. They crossed the middle east in only a minute, eastern europe and scandinavia in another two, and the north atlantic in another five. As they shot past a winterset europe, Rey thought she saw spots of gold glimmering in the snow, but from miles up it was hard to tell. It was a similar story across Canada, but when they neared the midwest, it was a solid blanket of gold with small islands of snow instead of the other way around.

A massive metroplex stretched from northern Minnesota, around the coastal edges of Wisconsin and north Michigan, down through Illinois, and across southern Michigan and into the southernmost reaches of Canada. The sun was just rising here, and every building that could see the sun was glittering golden in the light of dawn.

The Archangel flew down towards the center of the city, where Danesville would have been if this were the Earth that Rey knew. She landed swiftly in a park in front of a massive palace, and the power armor unfolded and she stepped out of it. She was wearing a skintight bodysuit, upon which were mounted a series of decorative golden plates. The cape that had been threaded out the back of the armor was revealed to be a light cloak, held around her shoulders by a small pin with a image of a sun on it, radiating 16 points of light.

Rey landed a bit rougher, and put Felicia down.

Despite evidently being the dead of winter, the air was comfortably warm and the grass was a vibrant green. There were dozens of people milling around the very large park, playing in the snow or walking through it. The were also many animals walking around: elephants, rats, wolves and dogs, otters, cats, pigs and boars, and even some dolphins and octopi floating through the air or in small blobs of floating water, and then countless birds: crows and ravens, and parrots and pigeons, and some hawks and eagles. The animals were dressed in the same style as the humans: an interchangeable assortment of bodysuits, robes, and decorative armor.

“This… is New Jerusalem,” The Archangel said, “my homeworld.”

“It looks like Earth,” Rey said.

The Archangel led them towards the palace, and up the marble steps that rose nearly 100 feet above the park. “We did once call it that, and some still do. Years ago this world was just like any other Earth. I was seventeen when the Revelation occured, and changed all life on this world forever. It’s a very long story, but the short of it, is every living human on Earth was gifted powers by the Goddess of this ‘verse, and we used our powers to build Utopia on Earth. No-one here wants for anything, all is provided free of scarcity.”

The doors of the palace were 200 feet tall, and made of marble and gold. The Archangel gently pressed her palm against them and they silently opened, frictionlessly floating on their hinges until they just as gently stopped.

Even though the sun was still rising behind them, the enormous chamber behind the doors looked like it was lit through the skylights above it, and when Rey examined it closely she realized the skylights were actually an impossibly complex series of mirrors. The roof was held up by 10-foot thick pillars of gold and marble, and on each pillar was a lamp that looked like someone had taken a Heart, much like the one Aradia had given Rey, and carefully peeled it open to reveal the miniature sun within.

“Jesus Christ…” Felicia muttered.

As they neared the end of the hall, they stopped in front of a 20-foot-tall lifelike statue of a young girl, with brown hair and golden eyes, holding up a hand towards the sky, above which was levitating a golden orb, peacefully spinning according to some unknowable pattern. Her eyes were crying a fountain that ran down her face and over her clothes until it reached the pool at the bottom.

Rey found the girl familiar, but couldn’t place why.

On the other side of the fountain was another door, half the size of the first, and through it was another skylight-mirror lit room. At the end of it was a Throne, one designed for a human twice the normal size, beneath enormous tapestries hanging from the ceiling detailing events Rey could only barely comprehend, battles between angels and demons and gods and aliens and other unknowable things. Sitting in the throne was a giantess, ten feet tall, wearing white and gold robes and an elegantly ornate golden crown with a glowing white jem on the brow.

“Good morning, Roxy,” the giantess said. “I see you have brought some guests, they look not to be from around here. I trust you remember the policies for introducing the unready to our world, and the punishments.” The giantess subtly reached for the two giant weapons on either side of her throne: a hammer with a head the size of an oil drum on her left, and a sword as tall as she was on her right.

“Calm down, Romana.” the Archangel insisted. “Rey traveled between worlds under her own power. If that’s not proof of her readiness then there is no such thing. And arriving here on accident, the metanarrative guided her. This was meant to be, for whatever reason yet to be revealed.”

“We’ll see.” Romana leaned back and relaxed.

A large raven flew in from the entrance of the throne room, and perched on the end of the handle of Romana’s hammer. “What do we have here? Are you bringing us another child of yours from another unspeakable escapade?”

“For once this one isn’t mine, I’m pretty sure.”

“I’m sorry, can we go back a step,” Felicia pleaded. “That bird can talk.”

“Humans weren’t the only ones given gifts by our Goddess,” the Archangel explained. “All the most intelligent creatures of Earth were uplifted. This is Muninn, Prince of the Corvans.”

“At your service,” Muninn said, bowing.

“We’re headed for my workshop, would you like to accompany us?” the Archangel asked Muninn.

“I would be honored.” Muninn hopped down from the hammer and glided to the Archangel’s shoulder.

The Archangel led Rey and Felicia deeper into the palace, walking down seemingly endless halls and past lush gardens. Eventually they reached a 20-foot tall door made of a black metal banded by gold. The Archangel pushed through it, and as soon as the door cracked open the sound of hammering suddenly washed over them.

Behind the door was a enormous chamber lit by a dozen furnaces lining the walls, and a dozen holograms that sat throughout the room, lines of light tracing patterns both arcane and technological.

On the back wall was a ring a foot deep made of gold, silver, and black metal, forty feet in diameter, behind which was a blank wall. About twenty feet in front of the ring was a small dias covered in glowing sigils and runes.

At one of the furnaces were two ten-foot-tall humanoid constructs, glowing from within by a white light, hammering away at a large piece of white-hot metal. In front of one of the holograms was a woman, wearing a silver bodysuit and armor and a pair of spectacles, drawing at the hologram, modifying the design it displayed. Next to her was a tall bearded indian man, wearing a close-fitted black robe and an eye patch, with scars poking out from beneath them.

The Archangel glided quickly to their sides and whispered something in their ears, which Rey had no chance of hearing over the sound of hammering, though Felicia did tilt her head as if she were attempting to.

“These are my friends, Eitri and Jayadev,” the Archangel introduced once she was done conspiring with them. “E, J, this is Rey and Felicia, from Astra’s Earth. Rey is friends with Aradia.”

Eitri and Jayadev turned to face their guests and bowed. Rey suddenly realized that she recognized them.

Eitri seemed to notice the look of familiarity on her face. “You did attend the Astra Academy, correct? You must have met our counterparts Ethel Adams and Jake Newark, then.”

“Yeah, I did. I was in their classes.”

Eitri walked around to another hologram, and started typing at a panel of glyphs next to it. “Just to fill you in,” she started, “The Astraverse, as we call it, is a heavily metanarrative reflection of our world, which is why, as you have discovered, it tends to produce individuals identical to individuals in ours, to the point where with only a scant single exception, every single person born on your world has or had a counterpart here.”

“Who is the exception?” Rey asked.

“Astra herself, which is the reason hers is the name we use to identify your world.”

“Wait,” Felicia interrupted. “You said Newark. Isn’t that the last name of Babalon? Are you related?”

Jayadev visibly winced at the mention of the supervillainess. “In both your world and ours, my sister succumbed to the enticing call of wickedness. She is powerful, a scourge that I deeply regret I hadn’t eradicated before it took root.”

The Archangel rested a hand on Jayadev’s shoulder. “That was as much my failure as yours, J. I’m the one who drove her to it.”

“I just fought her in my world,” Rey said. “I don’t blame you at all for not being able to stop her.” Rey lifted up her shirt to expose her deeply bruised ribs. “She’s a caliber all on her own, fast as Hell and hits like a truck.”

“If you fought her and lived you must be quite powerful. What are your powers, if I may ask,” Jayadev said to change the subject.

Rey held out her hand and drew some plasma out of the Heart, forming it into a ball in her palm, before absorbing it into her veins, briefly allowing it to overcharge her, causing her to visibly vibrate, and then she dashed to the other side of the room and back, leaving behind her plasma trail to indicate that she had moved at all.

“Very impressive,” Jayadev said. “Speedsters of your caliber are few and far between. And how about you?” He asked Felicia.

“Oh, I’m not-” Felicia responded. “I’m just a normal human.”

“Aren’t we all.”

“Since it’s only fair,” Eitri said. “I have an expanded intellect and enhanced stamina.”

“I,” Muninn said, “have an uplifted mental capacity, and reflexes, and a boost to flying speed, and can mildly telekinese to compensate for my evolutionarily unforgivable lack of fingers.”

“For me,” Jayadev said, “It’s best to show you.” He ripped off his robe, revealing a black bodysuit underneath it, and stretched, cracking his joints. In less than a second, he dramatically transformed, his limbs becoming longer and leaner, his face sharper and elongated, dark black fur spreading across his skin, until he was a large man-shaped wolf, and then continued until he was completely a wolf with all human traits removed. His clothes had all dissolved into his skin, excepting only his eyepatch, which remained covering a still heavily scarred eye. Even as a wolf on all fours, he was still taller than the Archangel.

The Archangel reached over and gave him a scritch around the ears, which he leaned into enthusiastically. “Don’t be afraid of him, he’s really just a big puppy.”

“I can’t wait to talk to Aradia about all of this,” Rey said. “She’s been here too? You said they knew her.”

“That’s the thing…” The Archangel started. “I have brought her here secretly, but because she's not yet technically earned the readiness that our law requires to introduce her to our world, I cannot show her everything I wish I could.”

Rey realized something. “She had a counterpart here, you were close with her. That statue outside the throne room, that was Rad, I recognized her.”

The Archangel nodded. “She was my niece. She died before she was given a chance to flourish as she has in your world. I’m so proud of what she’s accomplished, all of her progress to make your world more like ours. But we miss her dearly here.”

“Making our world like yours… I’ve never seen anything like this place, it seems so perfect. Peaceful.”

“Just wait until you see the gladiatorial combat,” Eitri dryly noted.

“Our world is peaceful because we have no need to fight for resources and manpower. People work if they desire work to do, but if they don’t they live free of cost. Everyone is free to spend day and night doing whatever they wish. All soldiers are volunteers, signing up to protect their world because they are capable of defending it, and are willing to pass on if they were to give their lives in the process. But our world didn’t just come into being fully formed. Countless people bled and died to each take a turn to swing the hammer to help forge it. When Therion, the Demon King, made his first attempt to conquer our world he did so by first slaughtering 99% of humanity with his army of 100,000 fellow Demons.”

“The Demon King sounds like more and more of a nightmare the more and more I hear about him,” Felicia said.

“Therion makes the Joker look like a youtube prankster, and Thanos look like a schoolyard bully. I helped create Astra’s League in your world to give your world even the slightest chance to survive encountering him, and it was only barely enough.”

“Therion was borne to cause strife and suffering, fundamentally: it’s coded into the very structure of his soul,” Eitri said. “So we took the mantle of stopping him and his ilk from plunging all of the omniverse into chaos.”

“Above you used to be Astra’s League, the guardians of your world,” The Archangel said. “Now that you are a member of Astra’s League, above you now is us, Yggdrasil, the guardians of the multiverse. As for what’s above us, well, maybe one day we’ll all find out.” The Archangel walked over to the dias in the back of the room. “You should head home.”

She punched in a series of glyphs into the panel on the dias, and then a portal opened within the ring on the wall, showing the peak of FursTech Tower in Danesville on Rey’s Earth.

Aradia was meditating in her workshop, and when she suddenly heard the hammering in the Archangel’s workshop she was shocked out of her meditation. She ran to the balcony near the portal. “What is it? Is something wrong?”

Rey sheepishly peered around the edge of the portal. “Hey, Rad… Guess what I learned I can do…”

“Oh, fuck me,” Aradia muttered, cradling her face in her hands. “You speed-forced it, didn’t you.”

“That was the exact same thing she said!” Felicia pointed out.

“Rey, you and I need to have a very long talk about your responsibilities and expectations as a member of the League. Thanks for getting her back home, Roxy.”

“You keep a close eye on her, Rad,” The Archangel told Rad. “She’s got even more potential than we first thought.” She turned to Rey and Felicia. “Now, git. I’ve got work to do.”

Rey picked Felicia up and floated through the Portal and landed on Aradia’s balcony. The Archangel pressed the big central button on the dias, and the portal snapped shut

“What were the results of the soul scans,” She demanded as soon as it did.

“Well,” Eitri answered, “for one, Felicia lied about not having powers.”

“I could tell.”

“As for Rey, there’s no doubt about it: she’s a native New Jerusalemite. How does she not know?”

“I’ll be looking into it.”

[kidsviral-blog]

What Happens When A Truck Carrying Radioactive Material Gets Robbed In Mexico?

New Post has been published on https://kidsviral.info/what-happens-when-a-truck-carrying-radioactive-material-gets-robbed-in-mexico/

What Happens When A Truck Carrying Radioactive Material Gets Robbed In Mexico?

Last December, a truck containing lethal radioactive cobalt-60 was stolen outside Mexico City, briefly causing an international panic. Then, almost immediately, the story quietly disappeared — but the questions surrounding it didn’t.

On the morning of Dec. 3, 2013, Francisco Sanchez, a farmer on his way to work in Hueypoxtla, a rural town near Mexico City, found a pile of old machine parts strewn in the field behind his house. One piece, which resembled a water pump or a large diving bell, was so big and heavy he couldn’t move it. There was also a metal box with a scratched-away label that he couldn’t read, and a cylinder about 3 feet long, which Sanchez thought he could use to split firewood.

The other farmers hadn’t yet arrived, so he grabbed the cylinder with both hands and heaved it over his shoulder, carrying it a few yards over to the corn husks that had been piled in the field to dry. He was sure no one would find it in there.

Sanchez hadn’t yet heard the news, but these were parts of a radiation therapy device that Mexico’s Social Security Institute was replacing throughout state hospitals, stolen from a truck the day before. Even though the machine was considered obsolete as a medical device, it contained 3,000 curies of cobalt-60, a Category 1 (the most dangerous classification) synthetic radioactive isotope — more than enough to kill anyone exposed to it.

View this image ›

The Pemex in Tepojaco where the robbery occurred. Photo by Mary Cuddehe for BuzzFeed

The hijacking had taken place 12 miles away in Tepojaco, a town popular with truckers traveling in and out of Mexico City. The driver was en route from a public hospital in Tijuana to a nearby disposal site for hazardous waste and had pulled off the highway to sleep in an unlit spot across from a Pemex gas station. At around 1 a.m., he heard a tap on the window and saw two men with guns standing outside. They forced their way into the cab and bound the driver’s hands.

The driver’s partner was in the back and heard the noise of the driver being tied up. He managed to slip away without notice. Security footage revealed little else; the robbery had taken place in the middle of the night. Armando Ramos, a federal agent who responded to the scene, told me that the truck, a white 2007 Volvo, could be made out pulling into a spot directly behind another truck, which obscured it from view. Soon the truck pulled away; the culprits were never seen. There was also no way to guess where the truck had gone.

The hazardous materials were being transported without security, and though the truck was, according to some early reports, outfitted with GPS, it hadn’t been turned on — which looked suspect. Initially, said Ramos, “we assumed the driver had something to do with it.” According to one study, 10,000 highway cargo thefts occurred per year between 2006 and 2010, a rate of 27 per day, and the highest concentration is in the towns encircling Mexico City — and autorobo, when companies are in on the robberies to take a cut as well as collect insurance, is also commonplace.

That theory was ruled out against the more mundane reality that the hijackers didn’t know what they’d taken. Instead, the thieves had followed a standard script: Rather than hurting the driver, they simply let him out down the road, alive, and continued on, another night’s work. They would have known that no one was watching them and believed they would not be caught. Victims of crimes often don’t bother reporting them to police, who aren’t likely to solve them, and who may have a stake themselves. According to Amnesty International, complaints of civil rights violations at the hands of authorities have increased 600% between 2003 and 2013.

But this robbery broke through, ascending to an increasingly rare category in Mexico: that of a notorious, headline-making crime. The hijackers who thought they were pulling off another score instead had pulled off the most brazen theft of radioactive materials in memory. Twenty-four hours later, the world knew what they’d done.

Major U.S. networks devoted coverage to the missing “ingredients for a radioactive dirty bomb,” in the words of one headline. The White House said it was “closely monitoring” the situation. Juan Eibenschutz, the director of Mexico’s National Commission for Nuclear Safety and Safeguards, who’d flown straight home from Paris to handle the crisis, made a public plea: “If anyone finds a big chunk of metal with radiation symbols all over it they should notify us immediately.”

In the world of nuclear safety, stories of mishaps and misidentification abound. The most infamous case involves a Brazilian man who was so mesmerized by the cesium-137 capsule that turned up in his junkyard that he opened it up and passed out the contents to neighbors, who rubbed it on their skin. Even in Mexico this had happened before: A source of cobalt-60 was melted into rebar that became dining table legs bound for the U.S. market; they weren’t discovered until a delivery truck took a wrong turn in the vicinity of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and triggered alarms.

But this was a theft, not an accident, perpetrated in the midst of a vast economy thriving on the traffic of illicit, dangerous things. What if the cobalt-60 was removed from its protective encasement, sold, and harnessed for a dirty bomb — an apocalyptic twist straight out of Dr. Strangelove? Mexican officials privately believed that a terrorist plot was as unlikely as the Doomsday Machine. But as long as the cobalt-60 was missing, the possibility couldn’t be dismissed. The International Atomic Energy Agency deemed the teletherapy machine “extremely dangerous.” Eibenschutz added, “It’s almost absolutely certain that whoever removed this material by hand is either dead or about to die.”

And then, just as suddenly as it had appeared as the latest crisis on the evening news, the cobalt-60 was safely recovered and the story vanished. A year — and zero known radiation-related fatalities — later, it’s still not clear who was behind the theft. And whether that’s a cause for relief or a cause for greater worry is up for debate.

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Illustration by Adam Setala for BuzzFeed

Removed from the country, it’s easy to think of Mexico as suffering from a single form of cartel-related bloodshed. But up close, a more insidious form of violence has crept in. Criminal organizations once devoted to trafficking drugs have diversified widely: A single recent operation against La Familia Michoacana, a militant group with a mythically devout ethos, revealed that the group had sold 1.1 million tons of illegally extracted iron ore in China for $42 million. In 2012, Mexico estimated that in lost wages, foreign investments, and public health bills, crime at large had siphoned $16.5 billion, or 1.3%, from the GDP. Overall killings are down, but in a recent self-reported survey, kidnapping and extortion were up. And everyday crimes are the ones that pull at the social fabric, making life and labor miserable. Perhaps most instructive of all: The perception of violence has risen. More Mexicans feel less safe.

President Enrique Peña Nieto recently attempted to address the problem by unveiling a special economic crimes task force composed of fresh-faced officers who, as a selling point, had never before worked for the police. Though, as one analyst told the Associated Press in a report about the new gendarmerie, “We have been creating new police forces for decades — armored police, ‘incorruptible, super-trained police.’” But to little effect.

In the aftermath of the December hijacking, little focus went to the thieves or the farmers who found the cobalt. The five men arrested allegedly belonged to a truck theft gang centered in Zumpango, a commuter town on the Mexico state–Hidalgo border, booked within days of the robbery. Local police had rounded up the suspects and handed them over to federal agents. The Mexican government often trumpets its marquee arrests, but the attorney general’s office couldn’t even dig up a press release when I called. And so, along with the culprits, the other issues surrounding the hijacking that had roused public attention — the fact that government contractors were transporting lethal radioactive waste through gang-rife territory without security or even GPS — were soon forgotten. People were understandably less interested in some common thieves than the specter of a dirty bomb. There’d been no media parades showcasing the suspects, no presidential tweets, only a quiet booking. The men were shipped off to a federal prison in Tamaulipas to await judgment.

Five months after the hijacking, I flew to Mexico City. I hired a driver, Marco Callejas, to get around the towns outside the capital, and he picked me up in front of a Starbucks on a sunny morning last May. Marco wore a sporty uniform of track pants, sneakers, and wraparound sunglasses like the kind off-duty police officers wear. His car was an old maroon Tsuru, Mexico’s ubiquitous Nissan Sentra. The taxi company had randomly assigned him, so when Marco said he’d grown up near Pachuca, the capital of Hidalgo state, which forms a triangle with Tepojaco, where the cobalt-60 was stolen, and the cornfield in Hueypoxtla where it was found, it felt comforting, like good luck. Marco patted the front seat, the only one besides his with a belt. “Come on up!” he said. I climbed in.

As Marco and I drove out of Mexico City, I asked if he remembered the hijacking. “Gosh, it would be so easy to cross something like that over the border.” Marco shook his head. “It’s a good thing the Mexicans and the Arabs aren’t friends!”

We took a road veering off the highway and drove for a long time on dirt roads, passing through small towns. The countryside looked like an old Western stage setting with cacti and mountains in the distance, except for the billboards advertising a hotline for kidnapping victims and the highway sign riddled with bullet holes. None of the addresses we plugged into the GPS seemed to work. So we stopped a man on a horse for directions.

In Zumpango, we pulled up to the scrapyard belonging to one of the alleged thieves, Luis Angel Torres. His father, also named Luis, was standing in front talking to a customer with his arms crossed over a black T-shirt that read “The Queen of Convenience Stores Works Here.”

He led us through the scrapyard’s receiving garage, which opened up to a large sorting area where workers were crushing metal into perfectly compressed squares. According to the family, Luis Angel was accused of, among other things, dismantling the stolen truck, crushing it to pieces, and selling it off. (Luis Angel is facing charges relating to organized crime and abandonment of radioactive materials, according to the family’s attorney; repeated requests for information about the hijacking from state and federal officials were denied or ignored.) The office was painted bright lavender and had a large shrine to Jesus.

Torres made himself comfortable. He put his feet up on the desk, over a collage of family photos overlaid with plastic. Torres said he was a family man. Scrap metal was all his boy had ever known, he said.

Luis Angel, who was 25 at the time of his arrest, was the youngest of Torres’ five children, a father of three, and the fourth generation to work in chatarro, a business his great grandfather had started out of a pushcart. Now the Torres empire extended to four or five scrapyards. Three months before his arrest, Luis Angel had opened his own.

The way Torres told the story, on the afternoon following the hijacking, Miguel, a childhood friend of Luis Angel, showed up at Luis Angel’s new shop with a large wooden crate for sale. “There was nothing on the outside marking it,” Torres said. The next day, Luis Angel’s 16-year-old part-time employee Andres opened the crate and began to unpack the contents. Dust poured out of the box, and he peered inside, noticing a small radiation symbol. Luis Angel and Andres suddenly felt a wave of nausea — an early sign of radiation poisoning — and rushed to a local clinic.

As Torres was talking, his daughter wandered into the room. She was also dressed in black. She waved a hand over her soiled shirt and said something about “getting our hands dirty.”

Torres continued. Returning from the clinic that night, Luis Angel was frightened. News of the missing materials was making rounds on the radio and on the evening news, and he would have known what he’d purchased by then. He and Andres loaded up an old Dodge truck and headed out of town. After a while on the dark road, skirting the main highways, the field in Hueypoxtla must have seemed desolate enough.

Dumping the material was Luis Angel’s mistake, Torres said, not stealing it. “We say we’re innocent. But who’s going to listen to us?”

The following afternoon two men arrived at Andres’ house claiming to have been sent from the public health administration. Upstairs they found Andres, Luis Angel, and a cousin of Luis Angel. In fact they were ministerial police. They had received a tip from the clinic about two men exhibiting signs of radiation poisoning. All three were taken into custody.

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“This whole story about a dirty bomb is a bunch of fantasies.”

Back in Mexico City, I had gone to see Juan Eibenschutz at his office in the center of the city. The building sat on a quiet leafy street not too far from tony Reforma Avenue, where the federal police work in gleaming towers. Evidently nuclear safety wasn’t receiving the same funding as organized crime was, but Eibenschutz seemed as unconcerned with status as propriety. “What really scares people, in particular the authorities” — he emphasized the word — “is the psychological damage a terrorist could inflict if he says, ‘I’ve got a source and I’m gonna activate it and everyone’s gonna die.’”

“But wasn’t it considered a Category 1 source? And isn’t that considered highly dangerous?” I asked.

He smiled at me, the way that an adult smiles at a child. “It’s highly dangerous. That’s what I’m telling you! If you have this thing at, say, one foot during half an hour, you’re dead.” But, he said, the material wasn’t an ideal choice for a bomb. “You pack a bomb with dynamite or conventional explosive, surround it with highly radioactive material and explode it. … Most of the material gets dispersed.” He went on: If anyone wanted to use the cobalt, they’d have to extract it safely first, and the pellets had been properly sealed.

But what if they did?

“Well,” Eibenschutz chuckled, “I don’t have the mentality of a terrorist.”

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After a couple of days in the car together, Marco had started to feel less like a hired driver than a co-conspirator. He talked about the way this gang or that gang operated, and pointed out landmarks. “There used to be a lot of assaults here. Truckers would pull onto these dirt roads, and a lot of women were raped,” he said one afternoon as we passed an empty street. He seemed to enjoy being an investigator. He asked a lot of questions, and offered theories of his own. It occurred to me that Marco might have worked in law enforcement. But when I asked, he said, “No way. Mexican cops are symbols of corruption and mediocrity.”

Francisco Sanchez lived outside Hueypoxtla on communal farming land. When we pulled into his driveway, he was outside in the shade of a giant flowering prickly pear cactus, the plant that jutted out of the earth everywhere. Sanchez’s house, like all the houses there, was a hodgepodge of brick, stone, mud, and corrugated tin. The indoor space blended into the outdoors. Hueypoxtla is a windy, dry place, but it’s never too cold, and the climate is good for growing crops like barley and alfalfa. Marco pointed out that the maguey plant grows wild there. The maguey is the plant used to make pulque, the ancient Aztec spirit, which, also according to Marco, the poorest residents of the region sometimes feed to their children when there’s nothing else to eat.

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That afternoon, Sanchez pointed to his perch under the prickly pears and disappeared into the house, re-emerging with the boxes of the medications he has had to take since he got sick and pictures of his radiation burns that his wife, Yolanda, who was washing dishes in their outdoor sink, had snapped in the hospital. Sanchez had been hospitalized for six weeks with radiation poisoning and still wasn’t able to expose his skin to sunlight for very long. He was only 41 but looked like an old man, sun-weathered.

He wasn’t wearing a shirt and had a large bandage covering his left shoulder and another taped over his hand. Radiation sickness can be fatal, but Sanchez said he’d had on a thick jacket that morning and had only carried the cylinder a few meters. “Look,” he said, then slowly peeled the bandage to reveal skin that was still seared and pink. Normally, he said, he would have been out in the fields preparing for the summer rains, but he hadn’t worked since that morning in December. As we were talking, his 9-month-old son wheeled by on a mobile high chair.

The cornfield was only a couple of kilometers away down the slope of a dusty road, just past the Marie Curie kindergarten. “Crazy about that name, right?” I said, as we passed the school, to silence.

I had noticed empty canals lining the fields, and Sanchez explained that effluent from Mexico City was pumped out there, which the farmers use to irrigate their crops. I imagined the wastewater-fed crops being sold back to the capital and being consumed and then surging back through the pipes to Hueypoxtla like some giant closed-loop digestive tract.

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We reached the field. Stepping out of the car, Sanchez seemed possessed by his memory. He retraced his steps, circling the place he’d found the cylinder. He had noticed six deep tire ruts that morning, indicating to him that whoever discarded the materials had labored to do so. One of the tracks was still visible, baked into the earth. He straightened his back and swept his arm, motioning to the emptiness. “Why would anyone leave this here?”

After he hid the cylinder, Sanchez had felt ill and experienced what he called “a tremendous vomit,” but he hadn’t made the connection, so he went back to work, and he didn’t tell anyone what he’d found. Throughout the day others had tried to move the parts. The biggest piece, the shield, was too heavy, and night fell with the pieces as Sanchez had found them.

For the first week, Sanchez had been afraid to talk about what was happening to him, even as 100 Marines, federal agents, and local police cordoned off the field and dispatched a robot to retrieve the cobalt. He watched the evening news, clutching his son tightly, and asked Yolanda to rub ointment on his shoulder. Finally he let on to a friend. “I was dying of panic,” he told me. “People ask why I waited so long, but what they don’t understand is that I was totally blocked.”

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A neighbor, Mauro Moya, a truck driver, took a walk to the field with his son and son-in-law and circled the objects like the farmers had done the day before, measuring and weighing them with their eyes. The biggest piece couldn’t be lifted with a wheelbarrow or a tractor. But they estimated that the metal was worth $400. It was enough to cover the family’s expenses for two weeks. Moya hurried back up the hill for his truck. He hooked chains around the shield and dragged it up the road to his property, kicking up a trail of shimmering dust. With the shield safely on his lot, the ecstatic Moya family took turns posing for photos, squatting down beside it, making peace signs, sitting on it, laughing. The celebration didn’t last long. Someone from the community had already called the police.

The Moya family soon began to think of their discovery as a curse. Three weeks later, the son-in-law, Juan Antonio Saldivar was arrested in a separate incident for stealing a cement truck. The attorney his family hired told me that the arrest glared with irregularities, chief among them the fact that it preceded the actual crime by half an hour. Officers rifling through his phone saw the photos of the shield and, in an apparent attempt to bolster their profile of Saldivar as a seasoned hijacker, stated in charging documents that he had been “detained” by authorities “in relation to the cobalt-60 theft.” Authorities questioned his family after the cobalt was recovered at their home but didn’t arrest them. Saldivar has now been in jail for 11 months and is facing a sentence of 16 years for the cement truck theft.

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Later that day, as we were getting ready to leave Hueypoxtla, Marco pulled up a photograph on his phone of him in a federal police uniform. “I was a federal police officer for 10 years,” he said.

I stared at the image. It was definitely him. He had his back to the camera and was flexing his biceps. “Policia Federal” was emblazoned on his shirt; a pistol was sticking out of his belt.

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“I’ve been suspended,” he said, quietly. “I’m being investigated for corruption.” He began to tell me a story about a friend who was involved with the narcos and had implicated him but it was all a lie, political stuff. But I couldn’t absorb any of it. The realization dawned that I’d hired a stranger who might or might not be a crooked ex-policeman to ferry me around the hijacking epicenter of Mexico in search of bandits with possible connections to organized crime or even terrorists and that I was now stuck alone with him in the country. But I wanted to go back to Zumpango to find Andres. Marco knew how to get there.

I had already gone by the place a couple of times. The story that Torres had told me implicated police officers in a corruption scheme and painted his son as an innocent man. But when I’d asked to see the truck that Luis Angel had used, he said the family had sold it. There was a third employee in the shop with him that day, but he had disappeared. Miguel was also nowhere to be found. Other details didn’t add up. Andres had been released by authorities on account of his age.

At Andres’ house, salsa was blaring and a big red truck was parked inside the gate. A tiny old woman in an apron answered the door. She said no one was home.

Down the street from the house, I had seen four men drinking cans of Modelo under an awning. “The truck was right there,” said one, pointing to a spot down the street, in front of Luis Angel’s shop, the one that had been raided by police. Torres had told me police had taped it off and the family was stuck paying the rent, but it looked open; a couple of cars were parked inside.

“Why was the truck sitting outside?” I asked.

“There were too many trucks in the shop already!” said another. They all laughed and continued dishing about the Torres family. According to them, Luis Angel had a chop shop. One of Luis Angel’s co-defendants, a man Torres had told me was a new acquaintance, in fact worked with him, they said, painting the stolen vehicles.

“I live across the street and sometimes there were so many trucks in there they had to park them outside,” said one of the men.

What about Miguel? I asked.

“There’s only one Miguel in this town,” the man said. “He went to the United States 15 years ago.”

The woman from Andres’ house walked down the street toward us. She passed the group in silence, looking straight ahead.

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Julio Cesar, the Torres family’s attorney, had an office in a development outside Mexico City. The place had a disorienting bleached-out quality, like a condensed version of the Inland Empire, and his office was in a row house that looked exactly like all the others on his street.

Cesar swung open the door. He was short and round, like an egg. He had on a pink shirt, a pink tie, a blue sweater-vest, and blue slacks — Danny DeVito and Mr. Rogers at the same time. His partner, a pretty blonde with big brown eyes in a brown pantsuit, descended the stairs. Cesar invited me to have a seat on a brown-and-white leather sectional. I stared down at a zebra-print rug and, to my right, a pair of electric guitars upright in stands, at the ready.

I had hoped Cesar would give me a copy of the police report and charging documents. Such things can be tough to come by in Mexico, even after a case is closed. The files would clarify the questions I had about the Torres family’s story and the official versions that police had furnished to local press.

“So,” Cesar began. “Do you know how justice works in Mexico?” My heart sank as he went on. “If the courts find out that you’re interviewing witnesses — believe me, apart from affecting the defense, there’s juridical revenge. You start seeing stuff in the newspapers, on the radio, on TV. It just gets very complicated.”

He stood up. “What this case needs right now is for things to cool down.”

He showed me the door.

Back home, I followed up with him for a while, but the answer was always the same: He needed more time.

Not long after, Marco, who had added me on Facebook, posted the photo he’d shown me in the car of himself in uniform. The comments suggested that Marco’s friends didn’t know he had ever been a police officer. “What clothesline line’d ya steal that uniform from?” read one. “It’s not from a clothesline. It’s rented!”

I thought back to going to a federal police campus in Mexico City, where Marco told me he’d been “noticed” by one of the officers, who observed the particular way he jumped out of a van. A normal person — me — would exit facing forward. But Marco climbed out sideways, a reflex, he explained, from all his years carrying a long firearm. They’d spotted him and knew he was one of them.

Had Marco invented that story? Was he not a police officer accused of corruption? I thought it over for a couple of days. But I decided it was better not to ask him. I didn’t think I would get a straight answer.

On June 8, another source of radioactive material was stolen from a warehouse near Zumpango. This time it was a source that authorities considered less dangerous than the cobalt from the December heist. Police weren’t able to track it, but 10 days later it turned up in a garbage bag by a sewage canal. A security guard who spotted it believed the bag contained a body. Reports said it had sat by the canal untouched for several days, free for anyone to haul away.

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