by Shows, Greg
Another set of doors were in front of her, a mirror image of the other side of the building—minus the blood splatter and drag marks and dust.
This end of the building looked mostly undisturbed, with little dust on the floor. Beyond the building an open dust field led to the baseball stadium and the dead green belt at the edge of campus.
Safety awaited her beyond those trees, but she wasn’t ready to leave. She looked right to where a pair of double doors with stair signs awaited.
“Do what you came here to do,” her grandfather’s voice said, and she turned and walked toward the stairwell doors.
Chapter 6
Sadie found the Chemistry Department on the top floor of building. It was on the opposite end from where she’d started.
She’d explored every floor of the building working through the Astronomy Department, the Physics Department, the Molecular Bioscience Department, and the Human Ecology Department. All the way up the smell of vinegar clung to her, burning her sinuses and making her eyes ache.
As she searched through the chemistry labs across the hall from the chemistry department’s offices, she wondered what had happened to all the professors. Had they been killed and eaten by the maniac downstairs? Had they slipped out of town and been evacuated? Had they died of starvation or disease or violence, along with the majority of the population over the past nine months? Were they still alive somewhere in Shanksborough but dying now?
The first lab was a mess. The lab table islands were all in place, but overturned lab stools were scattered through the room, and she smelled urine so strong it overpowered the vinegar stench.
She swept her flashlight beam over tables and shelves, ignoring the old chemistry books and lab manuals scattered across the floor. She passed by the glass beakers, round bottom flasks, Ehrmeyer flasks, test tubes, plastic pipettes, and glass tubing lined up on the table tops.
Her grandfather’s buried trailers would have this kind of equipment inside them, and she didn’t want to try to carry it across the country. But when she found a length of rubber surgical tubing she rolled it up and stuffed it into the inside pocket of her parka.
As she approached the instructor’s lab table the urine stink grew stronger.
She shined the light over the floor.
A few dozen empty pseudoephedrine boxes lay scattered and crushed among shards of broken glass and torn paper. A cooking set-up—complete with a propane tank, electronic scales, a burner, and round bottom flasks—sat on the instructor’s desk, some moron’s idea of a joke.
The jokester had been cooking meth.
“How cliche,” she said, and let swept her flashlight over the room again.
To the right of the whiteboard behind the instructor’s lab table, a door stood partially open. Sadie moved quickly to it, using her boot to push a crushed cardboard box out of the way so she could open it.
Sadie stepped into the darkness behind the door and found a long hallway-like storage room. It was similar to the storage and supply room she’d escaped through downstairs, only this one was three times as long—probably due to the layout of the labs.
“Heck yeah!” Sadie said. Then she shined her flashlight along the floor and walls and all elation vanished.
All the cabinets and pantries stood open, their contents pulled out and thrown to the floor
Some of the cabinet doors had been ripped off their hinges and hurled down the long room, or rammed through the sheetrock walls so that they hung suspended.
Three vent hoods hung over work benches covered in garbage and broken glass. Counter tops had been built above the floor cabinets, but they were covered in broken and smashed containers. Spilled powders and liquids had mixed together and melted part of the countertops or dried to a hard crust.
Sadie shined her light over the floor, which was littered with plastic bottles that had been opened and flung in all directions. Old chemistry books—some of them from the nineteenth century—had been torn to shreds and scattered like confetti.
Hundreds of footprints covered the multi-colored powders and crystals and wires and broken lab equipment now crushed and ground together in a mess on the floor.
Sadie shook her head when she found the bright yellow pile of sulfur that had been dumped on the floor and had become contaminated with a reddish powder that might have been rust, or neutral red staining powder, or red phosphorous.
If she ran a magnet over the pile or heated it she might be able to tell. But then again, she might poison herself or blow herself up experimenting.
As she continued down the long storage area, she couldn’t help thinking about how stupid people were.
Whoever had destroyed this lab hadn’t understood the wealth of raw materials they’d had right in front of them. So they’d smashed everything they didn’t recognize as immediately useful.
For fun.
She hoped in a moment of spite that they had gone on to starve to death.
“Maybe we really are too stupid to live,” she said, echoing her ex-boyfriend’s most prevalent sentiment. Then she saw the empty plastic bottle with the words “Sodium Acetate” on it. She could see the powder on the floor, trampled and mixed with dirt and other powdered chemicals.
“Damn,” she said. She would love a bottle of it right about now, since she could mix water with it to make a reusable hand warmer.
Sadie travelled up and down the room several times, her flashlight illuminating it one section at a time. She checked and re-checked each cabinet and pantry, looking for anything useful the idiot raiders had missed in their rampage.
Beneath a floor cabinet she found a one-foot length of iron rod. In the back corner of one cabinet she found a broken glass bottle of manganese oxide that looked like it hadn’t mixed with anything.
Everything else had been destroyed or scattered or contaminated or carried away.
She had to fight to keep from crying.
She wondered if maybe she shouldn’t crawl into one of the roomy cabinets beneath one of the counters and try to sleep for awhile, but the thought of the dead girl on the table downstairs creeped her out too much. She was already steeling herself for the trip out of the building and down the creek to her bike when she found the door.
It had been there the whole time, at the far end from where she’d entered. She’d missed it because of the stainless steel lab table someone had pushed up against it, and the giant plastic poster of the periodic table they’d hung above the table.
The table was six feet wide and waist high, and its edge blocked off access to one of the chemistry labs she’d searched earlier. You could open the lab door to the lab, but you couldn’t walk through. That part didn’t make a lot of sense to Sadie, so she shined her light over the periodic table.
“Why would anyone hang a periodic table this back here?” she whispered to the silent room.
The answer came when she trained her flashlight onto the poster and looked closely enough to see the outline of the door frame behind it.
Sadie’s heart began to pound, and her stomach fluttered. She climbed up onto the table, which was also covered in spilled powders and dried liquids, and pulled down the poster. The top half of the door and the two inch gap between the back of the table and the solid wooden door were revealed.
Sadie folded the poster and reached behind the table and turned the knob. The door swung open.
“Nice,” Sadie said, and shined her flashlight into the room.
Quiet and undisturbed, glittering with promise, was a room full of shelving that held intact jars of dry powdered chemicals, unbroken brown bottles of various liquids, miles of surgical tubing, and hundreds of pieces of intact glassware, pipettes, metal stands with adjustable clamps and support rings and wire mesh gauze.
Next to the shelving were wooden lockers like the one she’d seen downstairs in the slaughter room. A tall metal locker was against the wall. A big steel Master Lock held it closed.
Sadie climbed over the table and stepped down
inside the tidy room. She spun slowly, shining her flashlight over everything, getting more and more excited as she realized she’d found things to make her trip here worth it.
But she was running out of time.
Even now her legs were quivering and she was starting to feel a little faint. She needed to eat. And to rest. To lie around while her abused muscles and joints healed.
Sadie pulled off her pack and unzipped the main pocket. She had only two or three inches of open space at the top of the pack, and could maybe fit some other items down into the lower pockets. So what should she take?
She went through the entire inventory of chemicals twice before selecting anything. Even then she only took a few small bottles: glycerin, potassium permanganate, magnesium ribbon, aluminum powder, methanol, hexane, three containers each of calcium hypochlorite and calcium hydroxide, and a plastic canister of sulfur.
By the time she’d finished packing all the new acquisitions into her bag, her she was on the verge of vomiting. She’d been in the building over an hour, and the constant explosions of thunder that somehow penetrated all the way into the lab had exhausted her. She was hungry and anxious, and she needed to lie down.
Downstairs, in a science building in Shanksborough, Ohio, there’s a guy canning people. To eat.
Sadie knew she should leave. That she should head out into the lightning and sludge storm raging outside since it would be the perfect cover for her escape.
But that locked cabinet wouldn’t let go of her. It was as if she'd morphed into a cat named Pandora—a cat whose curiosity was just dying to get her killed.
“Why can’t I be like a coyote?” she asked herself, and considered how a lack of curiosity or desire to meddle would be a great effective survival mechanism.
If only.
Sadie wanted inside the metal locker, but didn’t have the tools to get it open: no bolt cutters, no acetylene torch, no air chisel.
But she did have something she could use, so she crawled back over the metal table. She used her metal bowl to scoop up the manganese oxide she’d found, then grabbed the iron rod. She returned to the meth room to retrieve the electronic scales and carry them to the table.
She made several trips up and down the narrow supply area, carrying a folding metal chair and a stack of chemistry textbooks, adding her footprints to the hundreds already present. The last thing she brought was the three brick pieces she'd seen lying among the shattered glass on a shelf in the third lab she’d searched.
After gathering her supplies Sadie went back through all the lab rooms and closed the doors, sniffing the air for any increase in the scent of vinegar. She listened for any sound from the whistling giant, but all was quiet and dark.
Unless youcounted the thunder claps and black hailstones striking the roof and windows.
Even if someone was coming up from downstairs, she doubted she would hear them.
Her back and arms prickled at the thought.
“Focus,” she said.
Back inside the storage room she set her flashlight on the table and pointed it at the locker. She shoved the front of the chair as close to the locker doors as the chair legs would allow. Then she piled on the text books, stacking them one atop another next to the locker door so that they would form a platform high enough to reach the lock.
Once she’d arranged the books she lifted the lock and slid a final book beneath it. When she let go of the lock it lay flat on the book’s cover. Afterward she set the brick halves on both side of the lock and angled them in toward each other so that they made a sort of triangular form.
Sadie put her pack on its back and wedged the flashlight into the top of it so that its light shone across the table top. In the round pool of yellow light she set up the scale.
The batteries inside the scale were dead, but she had the Chinese batteries for the Geiger counter so she replaced the dead ones and poured the manganese oxide out of the bowl to weigh it. Once she knew how much she’d gathered, she poured it back into the bowl. Then she weighed out the amount of aluminum powder she thought she’d need.
Doing the stoichiometry in her head wasn’t all that hard, even after all these years. She didn’t have to calculate it down to the hundredth decimal point, and Dr. Willis wasn’t here to check her numbers—or to yell at her for messing around with chemicals without gloves or an eye shield.
After weighing the aluminum powder she scraped it into her metal bowl and mixed the two powders together with her fingers.
“Wash your hands,” she reminded herself a few minutes later when she poured the mixture into the brick form and covered the lock completely. The powder she’d mixed would melt the flesh off her fingers if she wasn’t careful, so she dribbled drinking water onto her fingers and wiped them on pages she tore from a lab manual.
To finish her preparation Sadie pulled her torch lighter out and tore a strip of magnesium ribbon off the spool.
“Ready or not,” she said, and pulled her folding hatchet out of her bag. She opened the hatchet and put it onto the table next to the iron rod.
Before proceeding, she repacked most of her belongings, leaving out only the things she needed in the next few minutes. She zipped up the pack and set it on the end of the table. She needed to be able to snatch it up on her way out if things went wrong.
Remembering how her grandfather had worked on making his fireworks so carefully and meticulously, she rechecked everything. Then she clicked her lighter and held the flame against the magnesium ribbon. When the ribbon caught she shoved it into the form, only to see the glow fade to black.
“Crap,” she said, and wondered if she shouldn’t try some other ignition method. But then she relit the ribbon and shoved it inside the form, and knew immediately it had worked. A six foot white flame shot out of the form, barely missing her leg.
Sadie jumped sideways and banged her hip against the table.
She barely noticed.
The reaction from the powdered mixture was incredible.
White sparks sprayed out, accompanied by tongues of fire that blasted against the metal shelves and glassware on the other side of the room. A wave of heat blasted across Sadie’s face and she was blinded by the ignition, as if she’d managed to direct a lightning strike into the room. She stood blinking sparks popped and crackled and sprayed in all directions. Several times she had to swat at the burning metal slag sticking to her parka and pants.
Finally the white hot flame retreated back into the form and the intensity of the sparks lessened. The room darkened as the powder, which was undergoing a thermite reaction, continued to pop and crackle inside the metal form. Sadie hoped the reaction had melted the steel hasp of the Master Lock—or at least the metal rings it passed through.
By the time Sadie could see clearly again the textbooks and lab manuals beneath the form had caught fire.
She laughed.
The strange irony of chemistry textbooks becoming part of a chemical reaction—turning plant cellulose into carbon, heat, and light in an exothermic reaction—was too much.
She watched the fire burn, enjoying the heat against her face and hands—despite it being just a little too hot in the room. Cold wet sludge awaited her return to the outside world, and she’d wish she was back here when that time came.
After a few more minutes the crackling inside the form subsided and the white flames disappeared. All that was left was the glowing red metal inside the form.
Sadie picked up the iron rod and her hatchet and kicked the chair over. She stomped out the flaming chemistry books, then shoved the end of the iron rod against the steel hasp and pinned it against the metal cabinet behind it.
The metal rings through which the lock was secured had softened and began to give way beneath the iron rod. Sadie tapped the other end of the rod with her hatchet, using short hard strokes so she didn’t miss the target and smash her fingers.
She winced every time the metal clanged.
The sound was deafening, as if someone
was repeatedly kicking an old locker in the hallway of a high school. But the metal rings were giving way, and when she smacked the rod with a final hard shot the rings separated from the rest of the locker and the lock fell to the floor with a dull thump.
“Jackpot” Sadie said as the metal doors swung open and her flashlight illuminated the contents of the cabinet.
Chapter 7
It wasn’t a money jackpot, but for Sadie, it was a gold mine. She snatched her backpack off the table and unzipped the top. She folded and stuffed her hatchet back inside, then tossed in the electronic scale. Next she grabbed her flashlight and started snatching bottles of chemicals off the cabinet shelves.
She pulled out a small bottle of arsenic, its death’s head label warning her not to eat it, and a bottle of acetonitrile and another of diethyl ether. To these she added three small jars containing sodium, lithium, and potassium in mineral oil—after sealing each inside heavy duty Ziploc bags she carried in her pack.
She was stunned that all the chemicals had been stored together. It gave her a hint of what must have happened here: when the Crisis hit the last professor or graduate student standing had hidden a bunch of chemicals in this room, storing them together in a manner they would have been fined for in the days before everything went crazy. They’d known there’d never be any repercussions for doing so because of how bad things had gotten.
Maybe they’d thought they’d be able to come back and retrieve the chemicals, but the cannibal freaks showed up and killed them. Or maybe they’d just been hoping someone like Sadie would come along and find them—and know what to do with them.
When she checked the highest shelf in the cabinet she got the biggest surprise of her day, month, and year. Possibly even her life.
It wasn’t the iodine Benzaldehyde or the MDMA that surprised her, though those were huge finds in and of themselves. But the dimethylmercury...now that was something.
