by The Behrg
“Shit!” Joje looked around as if a solution might be hanging from one of the server towers. “Did you bring the tank?”
It was Blake’s turn to look around blankly.
“We’re running out of time! Do you want to get caught? Go get it!”
This time Blake ran. Outside he opened the back of the SUV, hefting the tank out and closing the rear door. Black block letters ran across the side of the small red tank. Though Blake had no idea what it meant, he knew what it spelled. Disaster.
The faint yet unmistakable sound of sirens pushed through in the distance. Their window of opportunity was about to come to a suffocating close.
Blake carried the tank up the outer steps and into the loading area. Out of the corner of his eye, he almost thought he saw the mounted camera swivel toward him. Through the double doors and down the dark hall, he pushed through the door into the warehouse.
Joje stood directly in front of him. “Someone’s here.”
“I heard sirens—”
“No, inside the building. This gas should ignite at the slightest spark, will that be enough?” He pointed to the servers.
“The towers?”
“All those components, that electricity?”
“I . . . I have no idea,” Blake said.
“Start at the far pillar, break the seal, crank that valve, then run that tank between the other two pillars on your way back. Then get your ass out to the car.”
Blake’s hesitation was more than visible.
“Just think of your son. I have faith in you.”
“What about whoever’s in here?”
“Run fast.” Joje patted him on the shoulder, the door closing behind him.
A second alarm seemed to go off in Blake’s head. Joje was going to leave him. Blake would walk out, the building crumbling behind him, to a squad of cop cars and guns pointed at his head. Just a disgruntled ex-employee exacting revenge on the company that had recently let him go. Guilty as charged.
He stared out at the dark warehouse floor, wishing he could simply wait and turn himself in, ending this nightmare in at least some fashion. Instead, with the tank clanking against his leg, he took the first step forward into a world where he would be the villain.
5
The truck finally shuddered to a stop, a giant beast resting its head on the ground after an arduous journey. Adam could almost feel the walls of the trailer breathing in and out, the final vibrations and groans of machinery settling. While everything around him was cooling down, his body’s temperature spiked, the rhythmic pulsing of his heart going into overdrive.
The trip had been long—too long for him to follow the twists and turns of their course. It pissed him off that Joje was once again using him as the object lesson for Blake’s mistakes. The vendetta Joje carried against his father had become personal. Adam wished he understood the motivation behind it; with that knowledge he might finally get a peek into the workings of Joje’s mind. After all, understanding someone was the first step in learning to control them.
The darkness in the trailer was absolute. Adam released his grip from the metal rack attached to the wall and pondered how much longer he had to live. Just yesterday he had been ready to walk into that ocean without looking back; now he had returned to plotting, manipulating, living.
As he stepped away from the rack, one arm blindly reaching in front of him, his foot collided with the body on the ground.
There you are.
He bent down, hand out, a finger pressing into the fallen man’s nostril and quickly pulling back. Still not moving. That was a good sign. He hoped.
The guy’s helmet with night-vision goggles had fallen loose during their scuffle, the only reason Adam was standing while the other guy was on the ground. He had expected Adam to be frightened, docile, willing to please. But Adam wasn’t any of those things.
His father would have let himself be tied up, counting on his cooperation to buy him rapport for good behavior. Joje, on the other hand, would have slipped the noose from around his own neck into doleful strings, his captors quickly becoming marionettes to dance at his beck and call.
Who would Adam emulate? Who was he most like?
The question hadn’t been difficult, and the body—unconscious only because Adam hadn’t dared fire a weapon with the amount of explosives in here—was the only proof he needed.
The truck doors slammed closed outside. His nerves were racing—these were the moments he really felt alive. Hundreds of scenarios played before him, projected onto a gridded chessboard. Thousands of possibilities. So many weapons at his disposal.
Hell of a place to keep a prisoner, he thought.
Light sprang into the back of the truck as the door rolled upward, causing Adam to squint. Two silhouetted men, black phantoms of shadow, loomed before him. And as was often the case, Adam found himself embracing the most unlikely of moves, pulling strings he hadn’t known were there.
“Please, help me!” He curled up into the fetal position, dropping to the bed of the truck and holding his arms over his face.
“Milt? Milton!” one of the men outside called.
“What the hell happened?”
Sobs came, on cue.
“Neither of ’em were strapped in, coulda hit his head.”
“Please don’t kill me,” Adam said. “I don’t want to die!”
“You think he did something to him?”
“He’s a kid.”
Adam smiled, hidden behind his raised arms.
6
Slithering along the rug that stretched across the upstairs hall, Jenna paused as the front door slammed. It seemed to send vibrations down the length of her body. She wouldn’t have time to make it to her bedroom. Up on her elbows she clawed her way to the guest bedroom, almost shutting the door and pressing the button inward on the flimsy lock.
Better to make him think I’m not here, she thought, leaving the door cracked. The stone Buddha in the corner may have been facing the bed, but it felt like the statue was making sidelong glances in her direction.
Halfway to the bed something roared from outside. It sounded like the ocean had broken through the walls of their home; a head-on collision with two cars made of glass. Thunder, tinkling crystal, and shattering glass echoed down the hall on a continuous loop, its noise refusing to end.
After what felt like minutes, the rattle of glass and crystal, chains and light bulbs, came to a settled silence. Their chandelier now lay in pieces on the wooden floor of their foyer.
Jenna ducked her head, barely squeezing beneath the rail of the bed, its uneven bamboo reeds scratching at her face and back like fingernails as she pulled herself beneath.
More noise broke from down the hall, filled with anger and immediacy. Furniture breaking, trinkets falling, objects being hurled at walls.
“You’re not behind the bookcase,” Drew announced from the hall.
She heard the glass from a picture frame shatter, something hard thudding against a wall.
“Not in your son’s room,” he shouted. Jenna heard the door to the Jack and Jill bathroom open from Adam’s end, the clutter of colognes and lotions, candles and pebbles on display racks being swept to the tiled floor. “Not on the toilet or shower.”
The door flung open to the guest room from the bathroom. Jenna kept her breathing slow, though she could do nothing about the pounding in her chest. She had positioned herself with her head at the end of the bed so she could watch him come for her, know when he was in the room.
Drew’s boots stepped farther in, the rubber soles worn, frayed strings dangling from their sides. She saw the tip of the sword dip in and out of view, heard him swinging it like a cane or umbrella. She had nothing—nothing she could use to stop him from finding her or stop him when he did. He walked along the edge of the room, the sword rising above her view. He swatted at the wall hangings, the matted Japanese symbols hitting the ground, frames breaking, slashes making them more indecipherable than they already were.
A wooden chest was thrown over, its hinges snapping, its top resting at an angle that would never close again. Wooden spools and balls of different sizes tumbled from its depths. Drew made sure to step on each one, the intricately carved and formed wood pieces cracking and popping beneath his heavy feet.
“Not hiding in the chest. On guard,” he shouted, jumping forward and slashing at the screen partition next to the bed. Fabric pieces fell like confetti. Overturning it he moved on, dragging the blade against the wall, that grinding sound causing the fillings in Jenna’s teeth to ache.
No more, she thought. He knows I’m here.
She opened her mouth to give herself up when she felt the mattress above her sink down as Drew jumped onto the bed. It bowed, boards creaking, the curved mattress almost touching her.
“This bed is crap,” Drew said. “No wonder she wanted us sleeping here.”
She heard the sword swish through the air, its whine stopped by a muffled catch at the end. Again and again, he swung, feathers falling over both sides of the bed. Pillows came next, thrown to the corners of the room in pieces, fluff flying out with them. The weight from the bed raised then plunged down, Drew jumping as if he were a child, and then with a large jump the blade sank through, nicking her right shoulder as it slid off. She didn’t dare move; he would hear her if she did. It came again, this time far from where she lay. She felt his weight come down toward the top of the bed once, twice. And then the sword slid down from above, an inch from her face, every muscle in her control going taut. With a final bounce Drew jumped from the bed back to the floor.
“Not in the guest room,” he shouted loudly, slapping the side of the blade against the stone Buddha’s belly. “For good luck,” he said before exiting back into the hall.
She heard the crashing of the projector and other equipment from the theater room across the hall. Still her body refused to relax, as if she were clinging to the side of a building twelve stories up instead of resting beneath a bed on the floor.
The bedroom door crashed back open with a bang. Jenna barely kept herself from screaming. Drew was breathing hard, the exertion of his activities apparent.
“You’re not there, are you?”
He dropped to the floor a few feet from the bed, his head parallel to hers. “Hi.”
Jenna closed her eyes, feeling the tears leak down the contours of her face.
“You’re like a rat. Squeeze through anything,” he said. “Let’s see what can squeeze into you.”
His hands came reaching for her, barely fitting beneath the bed siding. As he began pulling her out, her head knocking into the rail, she realized she didn’t even have another scream to summon.
7
Blake darted between obelisks of electronics, thick weaves of braided cables waiting to ensnare him at every turn. He arrived at the far column of the building without seeing anyone, immediately finding Joje’s handiwork. A pale, thick paste had been carelessly slopped onto the column, small tubes peeking through, cemented against the plaster. Two wires descended from the tubes, connecting on the floor into the cable Blake had unrolled earlier.
Blake had no idea how plastic explosives worked, but he had a pretty good idea he didn’t want to be here when they went off. The column of the building stood about three feet away from the nearest server tower. How long would it take the gas to disseminate enough to catch the electricity from these machines?
If it caught at all.
A rattle of something bumping into a nearby tower brought him back to the moment at hand. They were closing in. Whoever they were.
He broke the seal around the canister’s turn handle and with a last inhalation of unpolluted air twisted the dial until he heard the soft sssssisp of gas spitting from the nozzle. No turning back now.
He pointed the nozzle toward Joje’s masterpiece, the weight of the tubes held in the pale plaster already starting to pull from the wall. Hopefully, they’d hold long enough. As the plaster started dripping from the spray of gas, he ran, dodging server towers through the diagonal path toward the second column. How long did he have? And would Joje let his family go if he didn’t make it out alive?
The building column surprised Blake, arriving around a turn when he had thought he still had another few to go. The tubes on this column had already pulled free and were lying on the floor. Blake turned the nozzle on the tubes, dousing them in the spray of air. Tiny droplets of moisture percolated on the tubes. It would have to be enough.
Darting back in a nearly opposite diagonal angle toward the last column and his eventual exit, he rounded the corner of a blinking tower, colliding into one of his pursuers. The tank released from his grasp, clanging down the aisle as they both went down in a flurry of motion. Blake rolled to his side, bringing up the flashlight. He looked into the wide eyes of a gaunt-faced youth, the stubble on his face like the patchwork of wild weeds, without design. He wore a light ball cap pulled low onto his head with a matching jumpsuit—at least in the amount of stains they both had.
A janitor. The bucket of slop had spilled on the floor, a mop entangled between the kid’s legs.
“Get out!” Blake yelled, rising to his feet and recovering the canister. “Go! Now!”
The kid stared at him blankly. Blake half expected a long line of drool to drip from his open mouth. “Go! Get out! The building is going to blow!”
His threat, or really his attempt to help, was lost behind a flash of light and heat that Blake had only ever experienced when sitting in the front row of a big-staged magic show. The room was no longer dark. From the rear of the warehouse, where Blake had come from, an intense light swarmed like a sun lifting above the horizon. The gas had ignited. It would follow the currents in the air much like a trail of gasoline on the ground until it reached its source: the canister in the aisle.
The wide-eyed youth hadn’t moved. Blake looked into his uncomprehending eyes, turned, and ran.
The entire room was now aglow, the cry of the alarm lost behind the gaseous explosions behind him. It was like a pyrotechnics show gone horribly wrong, each blast of combustible air multiplying, setting off the charges next to it.
Blake could feel the oxygen being pulled from the room, his chest tightening, his clothing becoming damp against his body. He changed his trajectory to the outer door.
He slammed it, throwing the door wide. Flames leapt above his head into the open corridor in a scorching fireball, rushing and consuming the oxygen in the fresh room. Blake dropped to the floor, sure he would be aflame. To his surprise only his hand had caught fire—the hand that had held the nozzle of the tank. Unnatural blue flames flickered behind the orange glow covering his right hand like a glove.
Stumbling to his feet and keeping his head low, he ran toward the end of the corridor. He pulled his sweatshirt over his head, wrapping his hand in it and squelching the flames. He burst into the loading area at the rear of the building, no fireballs following him out. His run was now the staunch gait of an injured animal, kept in motion only by the instinct to survive.
As Blake poured out from the back door, he expected Joje to be gone, was almost certain he would be. This was a suicide mission, a sacrificial offering to an orange-haired devil in exchange for the life of Blake’s son. Not a rule for a rule, but a soul for a soul.
To his surprise the Escalade was there, idling in the loading dock. A cry escaped from Blake that sounded almost like a laugh. He ran the final steps across the dock, ignoring the stairs, and hurtled onto the top of the Escalade’s roof. He gripped the bike rail with his good hand as he tapped the top of the roof with a furious thump. The SUV leapt backward, and Blake barely managed to keep from toppling off.
They shot across the rear parking lot until the Escalade came to an abrupt stop. Blake rolled backward over the roof, his body spilling onto the pavement in a drop that left him mostly breathless. Police sirens were no longer in the distance, they were coming at Blake from every direction.
Surrounded.
“Bwake,
you do it?” Joje asked, leaning out the driver’s window.
Blake sat up, looking for the cruisers that should have been closing in. Through the far, shaded gate he could see siren lights whirling. He made out the shape of at least three cop cars.
They had gone to the wrong building?
Confused, Blake moved to the door behind Joje, opening it and climbing into the backseat. He lay across it, looking up at the ceiling.
He closed his eyes. He didn’t want to see this next part.
“Did it work?” Joje asked.
Blake held up his quivering hand. The outer layer of skin had completely melted away, leaving a mucous-like membrane covering the pulsing pink-and-burned flesh beneath.
“You weren’t supposed to light yourself,” Joje said.
“There’s a janitor . . . inside,” Blake said. “Just a kid . . .”
The car was moving, the motion lolling Blake further into darkness.
“Dumbass just doing his job, huh?” Joje said.
Before Blake could answer, his thoughts were lost in the sheer force of the explosion behind them. It felt like the world was caving in, the car caught in a whirlwind like Dorothy’s crippled house. Windows shattered, a violent gale rocking them back, tires screeching at the unexpected thrust. And suddenly the explosion doubled, tripled in size—a nuclear detonation, the fiery glow coursing into the vehicle a preview of hell.
Joje laughed, the cackle of a psychopath, as their vehicle increased its speed. Blake glimpsed out the shattered passenger window at the building hidden behind a rumbling thunderstorm of black clouds. The sight was more impressive than he could have imagined, in the most disturbing of ways. Within that churning smoke, another blast ignited, house-sized chunks of concrete and rubble spewing out as if a volcano had erupted.
And somewhere in that building was the body of a stubble-faced youth who had probably been working for eight bucks an hour. Blake could almost see the janitor’s face, still unable to make a sound. The janitor and building weren’t the only things burning back there—a part of Blake’s humanity had been torched, a piece of his psyche that he would never get back.
