by Jude Hardin
“You could leave the country. You could go to South America. Anywhere. I’ve heard you can live like a king in the Philippines for five dollars a day.”
“Really?”
“Sure. So is it a deal? We can leave right now, and you can have the money in your hands in ten minutes. You can book a flight and-”
10:27 a.m.
“There’s only one problem,” K-Rad said. “That would involve letting you live.”
Matt was outside the office, standing to the side of the broken doorway. Fred was lying on the floor a few feet away with a knife handle sticking out of his throat, and the drum wrench he’d taken for a weapon lay a few inches from his lifeless hand. Surrounded by what seemed like gallons of inky black blood, he looked like a fallen character in a horror movie.
Matt picked up the drum wrench, pulled the knife from Fred’s throat, and stood by the broken door to the Waterbase office, listening.
“I want you to just think about my offer for a minute, Kevin. With twenty thousand dollars, you could fly anywhere in the world and start a new life.”
“I would be a fugitive. Living in the shadows. Who wants that? I want the spotlight for once. I want the world to remember the name Kevin Radowski for a long, long time. Forever would be nice. I want to be immortal. I’m not going to hide in South America. In a little while, after you’re good and dead, I’ll be sipping on a cold one at the Retro and thinking about how famous I’m going to be.”
“I’m begging you. Please don’t do this. You don’t have to do this. I have a family.”
“All you motherfuckers say the same thing. I have a family, blah, blah, blah. You think your family really gives a shit about you? They’ll shed a few tears at the funeral, and a few weeks later they’ll cash the life insurance check and fly to Maui and sit on the beach with tall blue drinks in their hands. They’ll guzzle twenty-dollar cocktails with the money you busted your balls for. You know, I’m tempted to let you stick around until eleven and see the show. It’s going to be fabulous.”
“What are you talking about?”
There was a pause, and Matt knew that K-Rad was about to shoot Hubbs.
Matt wanted to rush in and try to do something, to save Hubbs from his doom.
But he knew it would be suicide.
And he needed to stay alive, to beat K-Rad… and stop Shelly from whatever she was going to do.
One life-Hubbs’s-would be sacrificed for the many Matt could possibly save later.
It sickened Matt… but it seemed that he had no choice but to let Hubbs die.
Then again, maybe there was another way. Maybe a diversion would do the trick.
He hurled the steel drum wrench as far as he could, and it landed on the concrete floor with a series of loud clanks.
10:33 a.m
What the fuck?
K-Rad shouted through the demolished door. “Who’s out there? Identify yourself, or I’ll blow your fucking head off.”
He knew the sound. He’d heard it a million times before. It was the unmistakable clank of a drum wrench hitting the concrete. Someone was out there. Someone was fucking with him.
He turned and shot Hubbs four times in the chest. “Sorry, boss.”
K-Rad’s legs were cramping again, his head swimming. He should have thought to put some Gatorade or something in his backpack. How stupid of him not to. How utterly fucking stupid. He rooted through the drawers of Hubbs’s desk, found nothing but junk, pulled the drawers out in anger, and dumped everything on the floor. There was a coffeepot on a little table in the corner, but it was empty. He’d planned to walk to the water fountain after killing Hubbs, but now he was going to be forced to deal with whoever it was outside the office.
There wasn’t any Gatorade in his backpack, but there was something that could possibly help him out of this little jam. It was a hand grenade he’d bought from a guy he’d met at a gun show. It had cost him two thousand dollars. Two thousand for one grenade. He’d been saving it for a special occasion, and he reckoned being on the verge of collapse from dehydration was special enough.
It was a Vietnam-era Mk 2, commonly referred to as a pineapple grenade because of the grooves in the cast-iron shell, and it was capable of sending deadly shrapnel in all directions up to two hundred meters. You had to take cover after throwing it or you were likely to get hit yourself. K-Rad pulled the pin and tossed it out the door, toward the area the clanking sounds had come from.
10:38 a.m
Something flew out of the Waterbase office and clattered across the concrete floor. Matt didn’t know what it was, but his instincts told him he needed to get away from it. As he was diving behind the forklift by Fred’s corpse, there was a bright flash and an earsplitting boom. Sparks rocketed in all directions, and a molten chunk of red-hot hell seared its way into Matt’s left leg above the ankle. It felt like someone had driven an acid-dipped railroad spike through the fleshy area between his shinbone and Achilles tendon. He rolled onto his back, gripped the wound, felt the viscous warmth of raw flesh. He wanted to shout out in agony, but he knew doing so would be a death sentence. He wiped the stinging sweat from his eyes, peeked around the edge of the forklift, and saw the dark zombie astronaut figure known as K-Rad stagger out of Mr. Hubbs’s office and disappear from sight.
Matt tried to stand. He could barely put any weight on the leg now, let alone walk or run. He would have to use the forklift to get around, and the whining noise of the electric motor would allow K-Rad to know his location. Fortunately, K-Rad had headed toward the time clock, and Matt planned on going in the opposite direction, toward the Fire and Ice tanks. He felt around for the switchblade but couldn’t find it anywhere. He’d dropped it when the grenade went off, and now it was gone. He belly-crawled into the office and felt around on the floor. He’d heard K-Rad dumping the contents of the desk drawers and thought there might be something among the debris to use as a weapon. He felt a stapler and a box of paperclips and some pens and pencils and Post-it pads and a bunch of other crap you’d expect to find in any well-stocked office. What he wanted, but did not find, was a letter opener or a whiskey bottle or something. He was thinking a gun would be nice when he felt the cold metallic cylinder and for a split second thought he’d actually lucked into finding one. He picked it up. It wasn’t a gun but a small steel flashlight. He switched it on for a second to make sure it worked, and then crawled back out of the office. He climbed onto the forklift, pointed it toward the big tanks, and pegged the throttle.
10:40 a.m
K-Rad made it to the water fountain, took the mask and helmet and binoculars off, and stood there slurping for more than a minute. The air was unpleasantly thick with fumes from the warehouse area and the Fire and Ice tanks, and the water from the fountain wasn’t very cold. It wasn’t very cold, but it was still good. It was what he needed. He drank until he could drink no more, and then he put the mask back on and took the walkway to the office building.
There was a way out, of course. Most Nitko employees didn’t know about it, but there was a way out. How else could a hazmat team come and go in the case of a catastrophic spill? Of course there was a way out. How could there not be?
He opened the door to the main power closet and used a step stool to reach the steel panel in the ceiling. He loosened the four thumbscrews securing the panel to its frame, pulled it forward until its four tabs were aligned with their corresponding slots, lowered it with his hands, and threw it on the floor. He undid the Velcro straps holding the drop-down ladder in place, lowered the ladder, and climbed through the ceiling to the hatch in the roof. The hatch was wheel operated, like the watertight doors on a ship. K-Rad turned the wheel counterclockwise until the seal broke and the hatch swung open. He climbed out onto the roof. The sun was shockingly bright. He took the half-broken night-vision binoculars off and whizzed them like a Frisbee. He didn’t need them anymore. He kept the gas mask, just in case. He shinnied down a drainpipe, ran to his hole in the fence behind the diesel tank, got i
n his car, and drove away.
10:45 a.m
Matt drove the forklift as fast as it would go. He’d covered about half the distance to Waterbase when the battery died. The lift rolled to a stop, and Matt got off and started limping toward the tanks. Every step shot blue spears of electric pain up his leg and into his spine. When he got close enough, he saw Shelly forty feet in the air, dangling from one of the water pipes near the ceiling. She was making her way, arm-over-arm, to one of the ventilation fans.
There was enough light shining through the opening for Matt to see her face, which looked like something exhumed from a graveyard.
Matt hobbled to one of the forklifts plugged in by the wall, unplugged the charging cable, put the lift in reverse, swung around, and knocked four empty drums off an oak pallet with the forks. He picked up the pallet, positioned the lift under where Shelly was hanging, and raised the platform. He wanted to knock her off the pipe and onto the pallet. Then he would lower the fork and deal with her on the ground. He had to stop her from leaving the plant. If she made it outside, there was no telling what she might do.
Except that people would die.
Shelly looked down and saw the pallet rising toward her. She was only a few feet from the fan now, and she sped up her actions.
“You’re too late,” she said.
The pallet was about two feet from her when she made it to the fan. She held on to the pipe with one hand and yanked the grate off with the other. The grate fell to the floor, and Shelly climbed into the opening. Matt rammed the wooden platform toward the fan, but Shelly was inside the cylindrical housing now and the pallet was too fat to reach her.
“Shelly, I want you to-”
“You want to fuck me as long as it’s convenient for you-then you want me to smile and wave good-bye when you’re tired of me,” Shelly said. “Too bad I don’t give a shit what you want. I’m going to do what I want for once.”
“And what’s that?”
“Your ax is in my car,” she said. “Maybe I’ll try chopping wood. Chopping something, anyway.”
She started laughing, an insane cackle Matt hadn’t heard before, and then she was gone.
But then he saw Mr. Dark sitting on one of the pipes, his feet dangling over the side, sipping his martini.
“Oh, yes, this is much more fun,” Mr. Dark said.
10:48 a.m
K-Rad drove by his childhood home on the dirt road behind the plant. He stopped and put the car in park. He just wanted to look at his old house for a minute, to see it one last time. School hadn’t started yet, and there were three boys in the front yard running gleefully through a sprinkler. They were probably second graders, about seven years old. K-Rad remembered doing the same thing when he was that age. Such a simple thing, but such fun.
The house hadn’t changed much since K-Rad was a kid. White clapboard siding, red shingle roof, swing on the front porch. It really wasn’t such a bad little house after all. Lots of fond memories there. Too bad it still belonged to the greedy motherfuckers at Nitko.
“Hey, mister. Take a picture-it’ll last longer,” one of the boys shouted. The others laughed.
K-Rad put the car in gear and drove on. Brats. If they only knew what was going to happen to them at eleven. If they only knew.
10:49 a.m
Matt thought about trying to navigate the water pipe, as Shelly had, and following her out that way, but the pipe had bowed under her weight and he was fairly certain it would break under his. Mr. Dark smiled down at him.
“You should have killed her when you had the chance.”
For a moment, Matt feared that the son of a bitch could read his mind.
Because the thought had occurred to him.
Matt had killed before, but only when there was no other choice. When not killing would have meant more deaths. He wasn’t a murderer.
Not yet.
The voice in his head was his own… but it sounded eerily close to Mr. Dark’s.
Matt got off the forklift, limped behind the tanks, found Terri, and once again removed the duct tape from her mouth.
“Why did you leave me here like this?” she said.
“I didn’t want you to walk around with me and maybe get your head blown off.”
“Oh. Well, thanks. I guess.”
Matt switched on the flashlight from Hubbs’s office, put it in his mouth, and started unwrapping the tape binding Terri’s hands. He wanted her to raise him to the vent fan with the forklift so he could go after Shelly.
Then he saw the red glare.
He stopped what he was doing and scooted one of the bags of chemicals out of the way. A cavity had been created underneath it, and in the center of the cavity was a red metal gas can, the kind people use to fill lawn tractors. But this was no ordinary gas can. Two holes had been drilled through the lid, and a pair of electrical wires snaked from the holes to a black metal box the size of a deck of cards. The box was secured to the top of the can with duct tape.
Matt looked at the bags of chemicals stacked from one end of the tanks to the other. He shined the light on one of the bags and saw the words ammonium nitrate printed in bold black letters.
He didn’t know much about chemistry, but he knew that ammonium nitrate was one of the ingredients terrorists used to make bombs. Timothy McVeigh had used 108 fifty-pound bags of the stuff to blow up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
There were easily ten times that many stacked behind the Fire and Ice tanks.
Matt figured the explosion would not only destroy the plant-it would wipe out a couple of square blocks of nearby residences and businesses as well.
You know, I’m tempted to let you stick around until eleven and see the show. It’s going to be fabulous.
Matt had wondered what K-Rad was talking about, and now he knew.
“What are you doing?” Terri said. “Untie me!”
Matt frantically unwound the tape from her wrists and then started on her ankles. “I don’t want to scare you,” he said, “but if we don’t move really, really fast, we’re going to be blown to smithereens.”
“What are you talking about?”
“There’s a bomb about eighteen inches to your right.”
Terri jumped to her feet and almost fell back down. “Oh my God. What are we going to do?”
“I have an idea, but my leg’s messed up. So you’re going to have to do most of the work.”
“Just tell me what to do.”
They hurried to the front of the tanks.
“Grab some two-and-a-half-inch hoses off that rack over there,” Matt said. “Get three of the twelve-footers. We’re going to need a three-way connector and a reducer and a twenty-foot section of one-inch hose.”
While Terri ran for the hose rack, Matt positioned a pneumatic pump a few feet from the valves in front of the tanks. By the time he ran an air hose from its reel on the wall and secured it close to the base of the pump, Terri had gathered the supplies and it was
10:56 a.m
Matt instructed Terri to connect one of the fat hoses to the valve on the Fire tank and another to the valve on the Ice tank. The loose ends of those two hoses then went to the cross on the three-way connector. One end of the third two-and-a-half-inch hose was connected to the stem of the three-way, and the other to the pump’s input port. The reducer and the long one-inch hose were connected to the pump’s output. Matt fed the smaller hose between the tanks and let it rest on top of the ammonium nitrate bags.
“I want you to open the valves to the tanks when I give the word,” Matt said.
The exact formulas for Fire and Ice were a tightly kept corporate secret, but Matt knew the pH of Fire was 1 and that of Ice was 14. Shelly had told him that much before his first day on the job. Fire was an acid, and Ice a base. The solutions were highly caustic, and the blenders and packagers were required to wear special suits and gloves and respirators and goggles while performing their duties. A drop of either on bare skin would cause an
instant blister, a splash in the face lifelong disfigurement or even death.
But what would happen if the two skin-scalding liquids were mixed together? If Matt remembered correctly from high school chemistry, they would neutralize each other and essentially become water. That’s what he wanted to happen.
Matt looked at his watch. It was thirty-four seconds to the top of the hour-thirty-four seconds until a ball of fire consumed the entire neighborhood.
… 33… 32… 31…
The valves on the tanks were positioned at an angle, and Terri was able to stand between them and reach both levers. Matt jammed the end of the air hose onto the pneumatic pump and said, “Do it!”
Terri opened the valves simultaneously, and within seconds the mixture of Fire and Ice came spewing from the one-inch hose and started flooding the area behind the tanks.
5… 4… 3… 2…
11:00 a.m
K-Rad walked into the Retro and took a stool at the bar. The place had just opened, and the lunch crowd hadn’t started sifting in yet. K-Rad was the only customer. He’d stuffed his gas mask and other goodies into his backpack, and he’d left the Kevlar vest and the Berettas in his car. The bartender, a chick named Tami with full-sleeve tats on her arms and quarter-inch gauges in her earlobes, slapped a napkin in front of him and said, “What’s up, K?”
“Not much. Let me get a Shiner Bock, okay?”
“Sure.”
She brought the longneck brown bottle and popped the top with an opener. The television was tuned to an infomercial about an herbal supplement called Zark-O. It was supposed to make you live to be around two hundred years old or something.
“Can you turn it on Channel Four?” K-Rad said. Channel 4 was one of the local network affiliates, and K-Rad knew the boneheads on the news team there would have the big story before it went national. Those motherfuckers thrived on human misery. They went after it like vultures went after roadkill.
