A Bomb Built in Hell

by Vachss, Andrew

  “Sure. That’s only about one-hundred-and-twenty-two Fahrenheit—I looked it up. These rigs work both ways—they can heat as well as cool ... no problem.”

  “Okay,” Wesley said, “here’s the deal. Under pressure, this gas’ll set up in about ten minutes ... enough to fill the big tank after the small tanks of carbon monoxide are emptied. I need the explosive so that when I blast it all open, it’ll mushroom low. It gets too high, it won’t do the job for us. This is a nice, heavy gas—it should stay low.”

  “How you know it’ll work?”

  “We’re going to test it first. In one of the small tanks with just a small piece of the nickel. We’ll stuff it into this,” he said, holding up the pressure tank for the miniature blowtorch. “You’ll be with me on the test. And then that’s all, right?”

  The kid was already silently at work and didn’t answer.

  82/

  Two days later, the experiment was ready. The cab pulled out—Wesley driving, the kid in the back. The kid was dressed in chinos and a blue denim work shirt. He carried a duffel bag over his shoulder. In his pocket was a roll of bills totaling $725. It was 11:15 p.m. when the cab pulled up past the corner of Dyer and 42nd. The kid stepped quickly out of the back seat and walked toward the Roxy Hotel.

  The kid looked nervous as he approached the desk clerk, a grey, featureless man of about sixty. The kid pulled a night’s rent from the big roll—the .45 automatic was clumsily stuck into his belt, not completely covered by his tattered jacket. The clerk gave him a key with 405 on it and the kid turned to climb the stairs without a word.

  Wesley entered the hotel just as the kid disappeared up the stairs. He wore his night clothing, the soft felt hat firmly on his head. Under the hat was a flat-face gas mask of the latest Army-issue type. It had replaceable charcoal filters which could be inserted in the front opening and could withstand anything but nerve gas for up to thirty-five minutes. It was held on top of Wesley’s head by elastic straps and was invisible from the front. Wesley approached the clerk, whose hand was already snaking toward the telephone.

  “Remember me?” Wesley asked.

  The clerk didn’t know Wesley’s face, but he knew what those words meant. He whirled for the phone again as Wesley slipped the gas mask into place and pressed the release valve on the miniature blowtorch. The greenish gas shot across the counter and into the clerk’s face. He coughed just once as his face turned a sickly orange. The clerk slumped to the floor, his fingers still clawing for the phone. As he hit the ground, the kid came down the stairs with a gas mask on his face, carrying a Luger with a long tube silencer. He walked deliberately past Wesley, who had already stuffed the now-exhausted gas cylinder into his side pocket and pulled out a pistol of his own.

  The kid slipped the gas mask from his face as he climbed into the front seat of the cab—the chauffeur’s cap was on his head, and the flag dropped as Wesley hit the back seat.

  The cab shot crosstown, toward the East River. The kid spoke quietly. “I had to waste one of the freaks upstairs—he came into my room with a knife before I could even close the door.”

  “You leave the room clean?”

  “Perfect—I never got a chance to even sit down. Anyway, the charge in the duffel bag will go off in another few minutes.”

  “That clerk was gone before he hit the ground,” Wesley said. “The stuff is perfect.”

  “Was he the same one?”

  “I don’t know. But he was guilty, alright.”

  The cab whispered its way toward the Slip. It was garaged by midnight.

  83/

  Thursday night, 9:30 p.m. Wesley and the kid were completing the final work on the truck.

  “Tomorrow there’ll be a full house. The Friday assembly period’s at 11:30, and there’ll be almost four hundred kids in the joint.”

  “Wesley...”

  “Yeah?”

  “How come you’re taking the gas mask?”

  “I’m not going out that way, kid. The gas’s for them, right? I won’t leave them a fucking square inch of flesh to put under their microscopes—no way they’re coming back here to look for you. You going to keep this place?”

  “I don’t know,” the kid said. “I guess so. But I’m going to find a couple other places, too ... and fix them.”

  “Yeah. And be out there, right? Everything you learn, teach— there’s a lot of men out there who’d listen, and you know how to talk to them.”

  “Women, too.”

  “They already know, kid. You see how the pillow snapped back into place in Haiti? It was a woman who held it. She must of been the one behind the old man, and the kid, too.”

  “Maybe.... It don’t matter anyway—I’ll know who to talk to.”

  “You got to be different from us, kid. We never had no partners, except in blood. I never could figure out how all those freaks run around calling each other ‘brother’—all that means is that the same womb spilled you, anyhow.

  “You’re not going to be alone, kid. You know why? ‘Cause if you are, you end up like me. Carmine thought he built a bomb, but he didn’t. I’m a laser, I think. I can focus so good I can slice anything that gets in the way. But I can’t see nothing but the target. When I was in Korea, I thought I’d be the gun and they’d point me. But it didn’t make no sense, even then. It don’t make sense to have any of the other assholes point me either....”

  “What other assholes?”

  “Like them Weathermen or whatever they call themselves—writing letters to the fucking papers about which building they going to blow up ... and blowing themselves up instead. Bullshit. But I know how they feel—they got nothing of their own to fight for, right? The blacks don’t want them; the Latinos don’t want them; the fucking ‘working class,’ whatever that is, don’t want them.... They don’t want themselves.”

  “Why didn’t the blacks want them?”

  “Want them for what? All those nice-talking creeps want is to be generals—the niggers is supposed to be their fucking ‘troops.’ The blacks can see that much, anyway.”

  “I talked to a few of them—the revolutionaries. I can’t understand what the fuck they’re talking about.”

  “Nobody can but themselves—that’s what they should stick to. It’s like a fucking whore everyone in the neighborhood gangbangs, right? You might get you some of it, but you damn sure not going to bring her home to meet your people.”

  “I would, if—”

  “—if you had people. But you not like them. Now listen; that’s what their asshole politics is like—good enough to fuck around with, but not good enough to bring home, you understand?”

  “Yeah. I guess I did even while they was talking.”

  “They’re out there, kid. Driving cabs, working in the mills, mugging, robbing, fighting, tricking ... in the Army ... all over ... there’s a lot more of us than there are of them, but we don’t know how to find each other. You got to do that ... that’s for you.”

  “Why me?”

  “Carmine had two names, right? And Pet had one and a half ... Mister Petraglia? How many names I got?”

  “One, Wesley.”

  “And how many you got, kid?”

  “I see....”

  “But they won’t. I got another name someplace—I had one in the Army and I got one in the records up in the joint and I had one that the State gave me until I really didn’t have one no more. You ever see a giant roach?”

  “No. Wesley, what’re you—?”

  “One time Carmine and me decided to kill all the fucking roaches in the joint. We made this poison, right? It was deadly, whacked them out like flies. But after a few weeks we saw all kinds of strange roaches around. Some were almost white-colored. And then we saw this giant sonofabitch—he musta been six inches long. And fat.”

  “That was a waterbug, Wesley.”

  “The fuck it was. I seen too many roaches to go for that—it was a goddamn mutant roach. They breed much faster than humans and they finally evolved
a special roach that ate the fucking poison, you see?”

  “No.”

  “That giant roach would’ve died if Carmine and me hadn’t fed him, kid. All he could live on was the poison, and we didn’t have too much left. When we ran out of the stuff, he just died.”

  “How is that like your name?”

  “I’m like that giant roach. I can only live on the poison they usually use to kill us off ... or make us kill each other off. That’s why I’m going home tomorrow. But the poison can’t kill you—you don’t need it to live on, so you’ll be the ghost who haunts them all.”

  “How’m I going to find the answers?”

  “I don’t know. They’re not all in books. And don’t be listening to all kinds of silly motherfuckers ... test them all. You got enough money to hole up fifty years if you have to, right?”

  “Yeah. How’m I going to bury you, Wesley? I don’t want the—”

  “The State birthed me—the fucking State can bury me. Just watch the TV real close tomorrow. You’ll see me wave good-bye.”

  84/

  They both went back into Wesley’s apartment and, after Wesley told the dog to stay put, he showed the kid all the systems, where everything was. It took several hours. Then Wesley stood up. “I’m going up on the roof, kid. Get everything ready—I’ll be pulling out around ten tomorrow.”

  Wesley smoked two packs of cigarettes on the roof, thinking. The News only reported the “heart attack” death of the desk clerk because it was in the same hotel where a half-nude man was found shot to death—a bullet in his chest, one in his eye, and another in the back of his neck. A low-yield explosion had blown out most of the room.

  He thought of calling Carmine’s widow to tell her about the fifty thousand in the basement, but decided to tell the kid about it instead.

  He spotted a tiny fire out on the Slip—it was getting cold again and the tramps would have to make their usual arrangements. Wesley realized that he wasn’t sleepy. And that he’d never sleep again.

  85/

  By 10:30 the next morning, everything was ready. The dog sat on its haunches in the corner of the garage. It ran forward and leaped into the truck’s cab when Wesley snapped his fingers. Wesley started the engine; it rumbled menacingly in the sealed garage.

  He looked down at the kid, who was looking up.

  “How old’re you, kid?”

  “Twenty-eight, I think.”

  “I don’t want to see you for a lot of years, right?”

  “I’ll be here, Wes.”

  “You got your own brain, but you’re my blood. All my debts are cancelled—the only reason you out here now is for yourself, right?”

  “For all of us.”

  “If something fucks up, I’ll get across the Bridge before I let go. You know what to do if they come here?”

  “I always knew that.”

  Wesley pressed his hand against the window glass, palm out—the kid’s palm flattened against his.

  86/

  The kid turned and hit the garage button. Wesley released the clutch and the big truck rumbled out onto Water Street. As the truck headed for the Bridge, Wesley spoke to the dog. “Keep your fucking head down. As ugly as you are, they’d see something was wrong for sure.”

  The dog sat on the floor of the cab on the other side of the gearshift lever. The thermometer on the dashboard, calibrated in centigrade, read a steady fifty degrees, the speedometer an equally steady forty-five.

  Wesley remembered not to take the exact-change lane since he had a truck this time. He paid the Whitestone toll and motored sedately onto 95 North. The big truck moved through New Rochelle without problems. It wasn’t the only rig on North Avenue.

  It was almost 11:30 when Wesley turned onto Pinebrook Boulevard. A squad car passed him by without a glance. By 11:45, he was turning into the school parking lot.

  Wesley drove the truck right up to the front entrance of the huge building. He got out quickly and threw a series of switches. The carbon monoxide hissed into the giant tank with the nickel bars, a heavy-voltage current shot through all the hardware holding the truck doors closed, priming the system to release the explosive at the same time.

  Wesley drew a couple of curious glances, but nobody said a word. He opened the cab of the truck and snapped his fingers for the dog to jump down. Then he pulled two large suitcases and a heavy canvas duffel bag from the cab. He reached back inside and pulled what looked like the choke cable. A tiny, diamond-tipped needle slammed into the plastic distributor cap and five cc’s of sulfuric acid ran into the points; nobody could hope to start the truck now, even with a key. A quick twist on the valve of each tire sent a similar needle slamming home and the tires started to drain—the hiss was audible only if you stood very close.

  Wesley shouldered the duffel bag, grabbed a suitcase in each hand, and walked up the flower-bordered concrete to the main door, the dog trotting along behind him as silent as a fish in clear water. Students and teachers looked at him curiously, but the elderly lady didn’t seem surprised when Wesley stopped in front of her. “Pardon me, ma’am. Could you direct me to the auditorium?”

  “Certainly, young man. It’s just down the end of this corridor,” she gestured with a ringless left hand. “You’ll see the signs.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  Wesley turned and began to walk down the corridor. A teacher who looked like a college kid, with long brownish hair, a red shirt and a silly-authoritative face stopped him. “Can I help you?”

  “The auditorium,” Wesley replied. “Gotta go fix the lights.”

  The young man looked at Wesley critically, but finally shrugged. “It’s straight ahead,” he said, and went back to his dreams of a marijuana paradise where all men were brothers.

  Wesley found the auditorium. It had three doors across the back and an entrance on each side—five in all, too many to cover. The floor plan had been accurate. It was empty. Wesley walked down the center aisle to the front row. He threw his equipment up on the stage and opened the duffel bag. He pulled out a pair of holsters and cartridge belts and strapped them on, sticking an S&W .38 Special with a four-inch barrel in one, the silenced Beretta in the other. He pulled out the grease gun and bolted in the clip. The stopwatch on his wrist told him four minutes had elapsed—ten minutes to go to be safe.

  Wesley pushed all the equipment toward the back of the stage and tested the PA system to be sure it was working. He climbed off the stage and started to walk back up the aisle when the young teacher with the long hair came running down the aisle toward him.

  “Hey, you! I just called Con Edison and they said there wasn’t any—”

  Wesley’s first shot with the Beretta caught the young man in the chest, knocking him over two rows of seats. There was no reaction to the muffled sound. Wesley kept walking unhurriedly toward the auditorium doors. The Permabond went all around the openings of both doors, leaving the middle one open.

  Wesley checked his watch—no more time. He snapped his fingers and the dog rose from where he had been resting. Wesley pointed toward the left-hand side door, said, “Guard!” and the dog trotted into position. Wesley quickly bonded the door and switched positions with the dog again, finishing the other one.

  Leaving the dog lying down near the center of the stage, Wesley walked through the middle door toward the signs that said ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICES.