by Jude Hardin
Fred was the junior member of the troupe and had been with Nitko for only a few weeks. “Anything like this ever happen before?” he said.
Like what? Shelly thought. Like thinking you’ve hit bottom and then everything goes to shit? Only every day of my life.
“We have drills sometimes,” Shelly said. “But the procedure is to get everyone out of the plant before initiating emergency lockdown. I’m sure you saw the safety videos when you were on orientation.”
“I kinda slept through some of those videos,” Fred said. “So you think this is a drill?”
“I don’t know what it is. I think-”
“It’s some sort of test,” Hal said. “The Old Bastard is testing us, trying to see who freaks out under pressure. I guarantee you Drew and all the other supervisors are in on it. The best thing we can do is sit here and calmly wait it out.”
“I ain’t sitting here forever,” Fred said. “If Drew ain’t back soon, I’m bailing.”
“Where you going to go? The whole damn place is sealed up like a Mason jar.”
“I’ll find my way out of this place somehow.”
“We’re the Old Bastard’s playthings,” Hal said. “Can’t you see that? He makes over a million dollars a year while we struggle to make ends meet, and now he’s going to toy with us like a kid catching fireflies. I guarantee you that’s all this is. Think about it. The suits are having a good laugh about now, thinking about us peons sitting around in the dark. I guarantee you-”
“Shh,” Shelly said. “Did you guys hear that?”
“Hear what?” Fred said.
“I thought I heard something. Like a door slamming or something. Listen.”
Everyone shut up and listened for a minute, but the only sound they heard was the battery-operated clock hanging on Drew Long’s office wall. The plant was as void of sound now as it was of light, and a disturbing thought streaked across Shelly’s consciousness like a lightning bolt.
The ventilation fans.
With the power off, the fans were off, and that meant the chemical fumes would accumulate unchecked. Eventually the fumes would displace the oxygen, and everyone trapped in the plant would suffocate. Shelly had no idea how long that would take, but her guess was a few hours tops. And even before the fresh air ran out completely, the fumes would start making people sick. They would become weak and vomit and have seizures and suffer agonizing head-to-toe pain. Just thinking about it put a knot in her stomach.
So much for dying slowly instead of dying quickly, she thought. One last fucking brilliant choice to cap off the life list.
“I don’t hear nothing,” Fred said.
“Maybe it was just my imagination. Fred, I think you’re right. We can’t just sit here and wait forever. If Drew isn’t back in a few minutes, I say we try to escape.”
“And just how do you suggest we do that?” Hal said.
“The ventilation fans.”
“Huh?”
“We could climb up there somehow and take the grates off and then crawl through. Maybe one of you guys could raise me up with a forklift.”
“Sounds like a damn good idea to me,” Fred said.
“It’s forty feet up, and then forty feet down on the other side,” Hal said. “What are you going to do, take a parachute with you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe we can make a rope out of stretch wrap or something.”
“Even if all that works, there’s still a problem with the idea. Two of us might be able to get out, but the third would be stuck with nobody to operate the forklift. The third wouldn’t have any way to get up to the fans.”
“Only one of us needs to get out,” Shelly said. “Then whoever it is can find a telephone and call for help.”
“Hell yeah,” Fred said. “There’s all kinds of houses and businesses around here. I say we go for it. I’ll even volunteer to be the one to crawl through and rappel down the other side.”
“What if the power comes back on while you’re crawling through?” Hal said. “The fan blades will cut you in half.”
“What’s the likelihood of that happening? A million to one? Fuck it. I’ll take the chance.”
“Hal has a point,” Shelly said. “I never even thought about the power coming back on. And even if that doesn’t happen, which it probably won’t, it’s still going to be a risky operation. Maybe we better just wait a while and think it over. Maybe there’s another way.”
“Y’all can sit here and wait if you want to,” Fred said. “I’m getting out.”
“Just stay put for a few minutes. You can’t get up to the fans by yourself anyway. Drew will probably be back any second. Then we’ll see what he thinks.”
“Turn that flashlight on for a second,” Hal said. “We got trucks coming in later. I want to see what time it is.”
Shelly switched the flashlight on and pointed it at the clock. It was
8:41 a.m
All this killing had made K-Rad thirsty. He stopped at the drink machine for another Mountain Dew, but of course the machine didn’t work with the power off. He thought about trying to break into it, but he didn’t have the right tools. He’d brought a pair of bolt cutters in his backpack and in the wee hours had used them to cut through the fence, but he needed a pry bar to break into the drink machine and he hadn’t thought to bring one. He hadn’t anticipated the need for one. Fuck. He really wanted another Dew, and he wanted it now, and there was only one way to get it.
8:43 a.m.
The overhead fluorescents blinked to life.
“Ha!” Hal said. “I told you it was just a test. Now let’s get back to work.”
Shelly squinted against the sudden brightness. “We’ll get back to work when Drew comes back and tells us to get back to work,” she said.
Drew was happy, Shelly thought. He’d married his high school sweetheart and saved all his money until he could afford that adorable three-bedroom house and plastic flamingos for the lawn. So what if he was boring and people made fun of him? He’d made all the right choices in his life. So let him make this one-God knows his track record is better than mine.
Fred opened the office door and looked out. “The lights and the fans are on, but the loading-dock doors are still shut. Looks like we’re still in lockdown. I’m with Shelly. We should wait for Drew.”
“We got two semis coming in at four o’clock and we need to stage the product before they get here. If we don’t get a move on-”
“Chill out, Hal,” Shelly said. “If they’ve got us locked down, they can’t blame us for not doing the job.”
“Bullshit they can’t,” Hal said.
Shelly let out a bark of a laugh. “Yeah,” she said, “but they can blame us for violating protocol if we don’t follow safety procedures. So since they’re going to fuck us whatever choice we make, let’s go with the one that doesn’t have us out there breathing fumes.”
Hal stood up and walked toward the door. “Go ahead and write me up if you want to. I’m going back to work.”
“I will write your ass up,” Shelly shouted, but Hal had already slammed the door and walked away.
“What’s with him?” Fred said.
“I don’t know. Maybe the heat and the fumes got to him.”
“Are you really going to write him up?”
“Yeah, because what I really want out of life is to give management an excuse to dock Hal’s pay so they can shovel a little more money to the Old Bastard,” Shelly said.
She sat down and folded her arms over her chest and stared at the wall. She didn’t know how much time had elapsed when Fred said, “Earth to Shelly. Hey, you think Drew’s ever coming back?”
She popped out of her trance. “Damn. Since the lights are back on, maybe the phone’s working, too.”
She picked up the receiver, and the room went black again.
8:47 a.m
While the lights were on, Matt had taken the opportunity to dash through the walkway to the production area. From his position by the
Human Resources office, he’d heard the footsteps and jingling keys fade off in another direction and figured it might be his only chance to make a run for it. Now he was out in the warehouse and the power was off again, but a small amount of light seeped in through the ventilation fans. He couldn’t have read the biggest letters on an eye chart from two feet away, but it was enough light to keep him from busting his head on a steel shelf or something as he made his way toward Shipping and Receiving.
He passed through the oily fumes emanating from the Petrol area and wondered if anyone back there was still alive. The chemicals in Waterbase were bad enough, but the ones in Petrol could knock you flat on your ass. They had special vents in that area, and with the power off the fumes were probably building to explosive levels. Matt hoped the employees had gotten out of there before succumbing to the noxious vapors.
He made it to the Fire and Ice tanks and took a right at the big press. From there it was only a short distance to the Shipping and Receiving office. He tried the knob, but the door was locked. He banged on it twice with his fist.
“Drew?”
Matt recognized Shelly’s voice.
“It’s me,” he said. “Let me in.”
The door opened and Matt walked into the Shipping and Receiving office. Shelly wrapped her arms around him and said, “Damn, am I glad to see you.”
“Listen, we’ve got a serious situation here. There’s a guy with a gun shooting people up in the front offices. Kelsey Froman in HR and McCray in the security office are dead. There may be more.”
“Oh my God,” Shelly said. “We thought it was just a drill or something. Drew’s out there somewhere, and so is Hal.”
Matt could feel her trembling in his arms now. “Just try to stay calm. We’ll figure a way out of this.”
“I don’t know about y’all,” Fred said, “but I’m getting the fuck out of here.”
Matt hadn’t known there was someone else in the room. “Who’s that?”
“That’s Fred,” Shelly said. “He’s only been working here a month or so. Fred, you just stay put, now. If you go out there you’re liable to get your head blown off.”
“You think I’m just going to sit here and wait for the motherfucker? Screw that. Let’s do what we talked about earlier, raise a forklift up by the vent fans and take the grates off and climb out.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” Matt said. “One of us could climb out, find a phone, and call for help.”
He was about to suggest they proceed with the plan when a series of muffled gunshots erupted.
9:01 a.m.
K-Rad had turned the power back on just long enough to buy a can of Mountain Dew. With the lights off again, he’d donned his night-vision goggles and traversed the walkway from the office building to the production area carrying the soda in one hand and a 9-mm Beretta in the other. When he rounded the corner by the big tanks, he saw Drew Long, the Shipping and Receiving supervisor, heading toward his office.
K-Rad fired three times.
The plant was like a huge, eerily quiet cathedral now, and the Beretta’s silencer muffled the shots but did not squelch them completely. Drew’s knees buckled on the third shot, and he dropped to the concrete floor like a sack of wet Dicalite.
Dicalite. Ha! At least K-Rad would never have to mess with that shit again.
Dicalite was a white powder added to batches of Fire and Ice. It came in thirty-pound bags. When wet, the powder formed a sort of putty that gathered on the press panels and aided in filtering the product as it was pumped into fifty-five-gallon drums or five-gallon pails or one-gallon jugs. Once all the product was packaged, the press had to be disassembled and all that moist Dicalite putty had to be scraped off the panels and stuffed into plastic bags for disposal. Up until last Friday, scraping the presses had been part of K-Rad’s job.
But last Friday, a few minutes before K-Rad’s shift was over, a coworker named Shelly Potts tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Mr. Hubbs wants to see you in his office.”
K-Rad finished what he was doing, parked his forklift, and plugged it into the charger. He hosed the Dicalite off his boots, wiped the sweat from his face with some paper towels, and clomped to the glassed-in foreman’s office in Waterbase. Hubbs was sitting at his desk sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup. An armed security guard-Officer McCray-stood at parade rest a few feet to his right.
“Shelly said you wanted to see me,” K-Rad said.
“Sit down, my friend. Can I get you a cup of coffee?”
Friend my ass, K-Rad thought. “No, thanks. What’s the guard for?”
“Listen, I’m going to get right to the point. We’ve decided to let you go.”
K-Rad felt a chill wash through him. He wanted to make sure he’d heard correctly.
“You’re firing me?” he said.
“I’m sorry. The decision came down from the main office. There’s nothing-”
“I’ve been here twelve years. You’re going to can my ass, just like that? Why?”
Officer McCray shifted his stance.
“I think you know why,” Mr. Hubbs said.
“I don’t have a clue.”
“When you were on nights a couple of months ago, one of the loading-dock doors was damaged. Someone obviously forgot to lower the forks on their forklift, but nobody ever came forward and confessed. It cost the company a lot of money to fix that door.”
“I didn’t do that.”
“But you were in charge that night.”
“So?”
“The bigwigs upstairs figure you either did it yourself or you know who did it. I’m sure you remember the meeting we had about that.”
K-Rad felt like jumping across the desk and twisting Mr. Hubbs’s head off like a bottle cap. “I didn’t wreck the door,” he said. “You can’t blame me for somebody else’s actions.”
“Again, the decision came from upstairs. Officer McCray here is going to escort you to your locker, and then to the parking lot.”
Officer McCray escorted Kevin Radowski to his locker, and then to the parking lot. He told K-Rad to have a nice day.
Now everyone’s going to have a nice fucking day, K-Rad thought. He sipped his Mountain Dew and walked toward the fallen Drew Long.
Drew was still alive, but his breathing was rapid and shallow. He was on the way out. K-Rad pointed the gun at his skull and cocked the hammer back.
“Why are you doing this?” Drew said.
K-Rad smiled. “A stitch in time saves nine,” he said.
He pulled the trigger, and Drew stopped breathing.
9:04 a.m.
A minute or so after the initial burst, there was a single gunshot and then silence. Matt felt his way around the dark office until he found a chair. He sat down, and Shelly sat beside him.
“Oh my God,” Shelly said.
“What are we going to do now?” Fred said. “We should have gotten the fuck out of here when we had the chance.”
Matt stood up and found the doorknob. He twisted the little brass dial to the locked position. “Well, we can’t leave the office now. Stepping to the other side of this door would be suicide at this point. Is there a desk in here?”
“I’m sitting at it,” Fred said.
“Let’s push it up against the door as a barricade. If he can’t get in here, he can’t shoot us.”
Matt felt his way to the desk, and he and Fred pushed it flush against the door.
“We’re going to run out of air pretty fast,” Shelly said. “The fumes are going to choke us to death.”
“All we can do is hope some help comes before that happens,” Matt said. “Unless-”
Shelly switched the flashlight on. “Help’s not going to come. Help never comes. Unless what, Matt?”
“Unless one of us goes out there and tries to rush the guy.”
“You said yourself it would be suicide to step on the other side of that door.”
“I know, but it might be our only chance.”
“I’
ll do it,” Fred said. “I’ll go out there and take the motherfucker down.”
“No way. If anybody goes, it’s going to be me,” Matt said.
“I’ve only been here a few weeks, Matt, but you’ve only been here two days. I know the plant better than you do. Way better. I can find my way around in the dark and ambush the guy. Let’s move the desk and I’ll get on with it.”
“You might know the plant better, but I’m stronger. If it comes down to a hand-to-hand combat situation-”
“Look, we can stand here and argue about it all day, or we can do this.” Fred reached into his pocket and pulled out a quarter. He flipped it in the air, caught it, and slapped it on the back of his hand. “Heads or tails. Loser has to go to battle.”
“Heads,” Matt said.
Shelly pointed the flashlight at the coin on the back of Fred’s hand. The quarter had landed on heads.
“That settles it,” Fred said. “I lost fair and square. Help me move the desk.”
Matt sighed. “You sure you want to do this?”
“I’m sure.”
“You’ll need a weapon. Something…”
“There’s a toolbox over by the scales. I’ll grab a drum wrench.”
“Any idea where to start looking?”
“Not really.”
Who would just waltz into the plant and start shooting people? Matt wondered. What could the killer possibly want? What was his plan? He thought about the first questions a police detective might ask.
“Do y’all know of anyone in particular who might have a grudge against Nitko?”
“Could be anybody,” Fred said. “There’s been days-”
“I think I know who the shooter is,” Shelly said.
Matt turned to her. “Who?”
“Last Friday a guy named Kevin Radowski got fired. He’d been here a long time, like, twelve years or something. He worked in Waterbase, and they blamed him for one of the loading-dock doors getting messed up. It was almost quitting time, and the foreman told me to find him and send him to the Waterbase office. He was escorted off the premises. Those fuckers wouldn’t even let him finish out the week.”
