by Bobby Adair
Five minutes to kill.
All of the misting heads mounted under the pergola, emptied of water, started to cough and spurt as air was driven from their lines.
The contraption seemed to be working.
While I waited, a television commercial played through my memory, one that I’d seen as a kid. I had no recollection of what was being advertised, but for some reason, a masculine fellow with a gravelly voice held up a measuring cup with a quarter cup of gasoline inside and told me that it had the explosive equivalent of one stick of dynamite. Pretty impressive stuff to hear as a little kid, when every cartoon and old western movie I’d seen that had a demolition problem to be solved did so with a bundle of dynamite that would fit in your hand. Need to blow up a bridge? A bundle of six sticks of dynamite would do it. Need a safe blown up? A bundle of six sticks would do it. Need the Road Runner blown up? Well, in the absence of some Acme TNT, a bundle of six sticks would do it.
The misters had stopped coughing and were spewing a fog of gasoline vapor.
Twenty gallons of gas measured to three hundred and twenty cups. That converted to one thousand, two hundred and eighty quarter cups, which, if the gravelly-voiced television commercial pitchman was correct, converted to one thousand, two hundred and eighty sticks of dynamite. Sarah Mansfield’s house, formerly an architectural highlight of green construction in central Texas, had just been converted to a platform for a totally awesome gasoline vapor bomb.
My eyes were burning from the fumes in the air. I was starting to cough and there was a disturbing, light oiliness on my skin stinging in the open sores on my head where my hair had so recently been. Gasoline! If nothing else, I’d just succeeded in turning myself into a holiday sparkler. The clock on the microwave told me that five minutes had passed.
I checked the weight on the cooler and did some quick math. I had twenty-five minutes before all of the gasoline in the cooler would be misted out into the air above the house.
I made for the elevator to get my flammable Tarzan ass back down to the video room. Time was short. From the computer in the video room, I needed to set the timer on the pergola lights to switch on in twenty minutes. The broken incandescent bulbs would spark the gasoline vapor, and I needed to be pretty far up the river when that happened, lest I participate in the coming conflagration more than I’d want to.
Chapter 26
“Kill the him. Kill the her. Kill the all!”
Wiping putrescent spittle off my ear for the last time, I glanced at my cooperative female and then over at her annoying counterpart. We stood on the deck inside the boathouse with nothing but water between us and the open exterior door. I was empty-handed except for my knife. But on the way out of the video room, I took a chance and waded through Specialist Harris’ remains, then put the MOLLE vest into the girl’s hands and the M16 in the guy’s. They were both outwardly agitated once the rifle was in play, but they complied anyway and subsequently followed me into the elevator and then down to the dock.
Getting the items back was a different story. When I reached out to take the MOLLE vest, the girl wouldn’t let go. I whispered to her in her peculiar vernacular, “The Joel ass head.” She spent a moment having what passed for a thought in her brain and concluded that I needed to have the vest.
Trying the same lie to circumvent the male’s reluctance to let me have the M16 proved fruitless. There was only one quick way to resolve the issue. I put a hand on the rifle’s handle, right beside his, held tight, and fell backwards, letting gravity carry me into the water. Unfortunately for the guy, he didn’t quite figure out that he was at risk of getting wet until it was too late to recover.
We splashed in together.
The girl shrieked. The male howled and panicked, but he let go of the rifle. I pushed myself away from his flailing arms and legs and ignored them. They’d just become a non-factor as I waded into deepening water.
Paying a heavy toll in stubbed toes and bruised shins, I moved quickly out of the boathouse and through the water toward my canoe, dunking myself a few times along the way to wash off as much of the gasoline on my skin as I could. I’d probably burned off five minutes since setting the light timer in the video room. Only fifteen minutes remained until detonation.
As expected—or maybe hoped—the canoe was where I left it, and with each step closer, the water got shallower and I moved faster. Once there, I dropped my knife, new rifle, and vest on top of the clothes that I’d left in the bottom of the canoe and quickly pushed it out into the water. A few hard paddle strokes put me out into the current, and I chose to go down rather than upriver. My destination was upriver—the direction that Murphy, Steph, and the others had gone—but I needed to maximize the distance between me and my bomb. Paddling downriver with the current would give me more distance than paddling against it.
When I floated past the boathouse entrance, the female saw me and renewed her shrieking. To my surprise, the male was out of the water and pushing his dripping self up off of the deck.
Well, how about that?
I wondered how that experience would affect his fear of the water, but at about that same time, I realized that it didn’t matter. In fifteen minutes, he’d be dead.
It was time to paddle like my life depended on it, because it did. It took just a few minutes to get my heart rate up to a pounding, rapid rhythm. I gasped for breath as I neared my physical limit, slicing the canoe through the water at a good pace.
Mr. Mays’ house passed on the far bank, and it occurred to me that my gasoline vapor bomb could be a danger to both him and Nico. Fortunately or not, I had the detached presence of mind to know that those dice were already rolling. If they both were in the house and away from the windows when the bomb exploded, they were far enough away that they might be okay. My pulling the boat up to the bank and running up to the house with a warning on my lips wasn’t likely to change the outcome for them. By the time I got up there and explained the situation completely enough that they’d be willing to do something about it, the bomb would have detonated. So I pressed on down the river.
Labored distance grew between my canoe and Sarah Mansfield’s mountaintop compound. Questions nagged my idle mind as I paddled. Would the bomb detonate at all? Had I screwed something up? I reviewed all of the steps I’d taken, all of the things I’d checked along the way. It had to work. How big would the explosion be? Was I far enough away? Did I have any hope of getting far enough away? Should I stop and watch the fire rip the sky and blow the top of Mt. Bonnell into the river?
Paddle on and let those questions answer themselves, dumbass!
There was only one variable left in the equation that I had any control over, and that was the distance that I’d be from my bomb when it exploded. No matter what else happened, the likelihood of my being alive afterwards was dependent on how far downriver I was when the bomb went off.
Paddle!
More gasoline trivia bubbled to the surface of my brain. There was a conversion factor I’d heard once. No, I think I read it. I couldn’t recall the source, but the conversion was for TNT to gasoline in terms of explosive power. The ratio was ten to one. One ounce of gasoline held something like ten times more explosive power than TNT. Yes, that was it. Was it true?
How much gasoline had I used? Um, twenty gallons or so…
Keep up the paddling pace.
I didn’t know what a gallon of gasoline weighed, but I did know that water weighed something like eight pounds per gallon and that gasoline was lighter. So, maybe six pounds per gallon. Twenty gallons, then, would weigh about a hundred and twenty pounds—it sure felt like it when I was hauling it up to the top of the pergola—and that implied the equivalent of an explosion with the power of twelve hundred pounds of TNT.
But that’s half a kiloton!
I just made a half-kiloton bomb?
There’s no fuckin’ way!
They measure nuclear devices in kilotons.
I could barely breathe in enough air to sustain my effort after that.
I picked up my pace, going as hard as I possibly could, rerunning the calculations in my head. Surely that answer couldn’t be right. Could it?
Paddle, dumbass, paddle!
I remembered hearing once that a gasoline vapor bomb was the most powerful non-nuclear device in the military arsenal. Confirmation? Under the strain of trying to pull in enough air to support my effort, I couldn’t come up with where I’d heard all of that crap. Was it TV, hence bullshit, or was it books? Oh, where was the internet when you needed it?
More crap.
It was the sound of somebody punching a giant marshmallow that announced the detonation.
I snapped my head around to see. The glow from an enormous disembodied flame burned in the sky above the peak of Mt. Bonnell. More sound. More flame. Then, in what seemed like slow motion, the fire spread and nearly died, then spread again with a hundred marshmallow punches as it crossed the mountain and spread down toward the river, an Aurora Borealis dying as it sank to the earth, torching a few trees as it settled over a mile-span along the north bank, then down onto the river. Flames danced across the water toward me.
I smelled gasoline in the air.
Fuck!
I pushed all my weight to the right and the canoe capsized with me as I fell into the water. Immersed in inky, cold blackness, the water around me lit up as though the sun had just gone supernova in the sky. As that light faded, I watched my purloined M16 sink into the darkness below. The blade of my knife twinkled as it sank, ten feet below, followed by my boots. Even my clothes drifted out of their place in the bottom of the canoe, semi-clad ghosts, searching in greenish water for souls to torment.
When it was done, my night vision was shot and I was out of breath, but I was still alive.
Alive and disappointed.
Coming up underneath the canoe, I took a few deep breaths, pushed myself under and scissor-kicked hard back up to right the canoe, which readily turned over. Hanging on the edge, I looked in. Nothing but water was inside, and too much of it.
Looking up at Mt. Bonnell, I saw the crenelated rows of houses along the crest, their geometrically precise silhouettes intact. They hadn’t exploded. Nothing had blown up but air and gasoline, too far above the ground and too dissipated to damage any property or kill any of the naked infected. The only result was some small, spotty fires in the trees.
It was all a spectacular fizzle. King Monkey Fucker Joel and Mark were probably sitting in Sarah Mansfield’s house, not even aware that I’d just tried to kill them and succeeded only in nearly barbecuing myself.
“Shit!”
“Shit! Shit! Shit!”
Chapter 27
It was late. The fireworks show was over. A few small fires glowed dimly up on the mountain.
I’d pushed the canoe in near the shore where I could stand, empty the water, and get back in. Except for the paddle, everything I had was lost in the dark river. The only reason I had the paddle was that it was in my hand when I capsized the canoe. Had I waited another four or five seconds before capsizing the canoe, it would have been burned when the gasoline vapor flashed. Maybe that had happened to many of the naked horde up on the mountain. It was something to hope for as the disappointment over my failure weighed heavily on me.
I’d been paddling back upriver for over an hour when I pulled the paddle out of the water and drifted, feeling in my muscles the toll I was paying for so many days without food and with little good sleep. Sure, I’d drunk at least a quart of cola from the soda fountain on the roof, but those calories were gone, burned off on exertion and fear.
Mr. Mays’ house was far back downriver behind me by the time I started drifting. I realized that I should have stopped on my second time past, knocked on the door, and asked for a safe spot to spend the night. Well, if they had a door to knock on.
The canoe floated slowly into a spin, caught in the current flowing one way while the wind blew me in the other.
I supposed I could drift back down to Mr. Mays’ house and see if they’d let me in, but that bitter thought smacked of quitting. In the mood that was on me, one step onto that slippery slope would send me down a dark hole out of which I might not be able to climb back. To continue upriver was to endeavor toward the goal, to try and find my friends. Seeing Murphy get up off of that recliner and wobble his way down to the ski boat was troubling, but it did bring hope that I’d find them all alive. And that hope was something real.
But I was so tired. I was naked, crusted in dry blood and scabs. I was hungry, really hungry, and dehydrated again. Steph, Murphy, and the rest could be in any of a thousand places upriver and I had no idea where.
Or they could be dead.
Such a likely possibility now.
Zero. That was the depressing word emblazoned on the flag that had planted itself on the sad mound of my thoughts. I was back at zero again. No weapons. No food. No friends and no clothes.
Don’t lie down.
Don’t quit.
Paddle.
Just paddle.
So I paddled. Persistence for its own sake.
Upriver again. Slowly, against the current, but I was moving.
Houses along the shore passed by. I spotted a ski boat lifted on a hoist up out of the water, I guessed to protect the hull from the algae. I really wanted that boat. Motorized transportation was another of modern society’s underappreciated luxuries. Pulling my paddle across my lap, I gave the boat a long hard look and thought about what I could do to acquire it. I’d have to search the house for keys and then, assuming I lived through that, having only fingernails and fists to protect myself, I’d have to figure out how to manually lower the boat back into the water. The process of stealing the boat was that of unknown dangers and potentially unsolvable problems. The risk-to-reward ratio just wasn’t high enough.
Paddle on.
As housing development on the banks thinned, leaving mostly trees and few dark houses, the miles slowly dissolved behind me. It was all black water, bends in the wide river, and old trees. Frogs chirped like fat crickets in the wet shadows and the buzz of cicadas modulated in and out of obnoxiousness. Mosquitoes occasionally found me and had a meal on my bare skin before buzzing off to hide among the leaves on the banks.
Up ahead, I spied a familiar shape on the north bank, and my hopes sank a little. It was the pontoon boat that Murphy had almost acquired a week or so prior. It was tied next to the dock in front of the house that he and I had raided and prepped as a safe house. The ski boat, however, was nowhere to be seen.
The absence of the ski boat led to three possibilities: Freitag had killed them all and dumped the bodies in the river, they’d taken the food and moved on to someplace else because this house had become unsafe, or this house was unsafe again when they arrived. I went with the odds and decided that going into the house was a bad idea.
At least the pontoon boat was still there. That had been ready to go when Murphy and I had left it. I needed only to hop on, untie the ropes, start the engine, and head upriver with internal combustion assistance —which is exactly what I did.
Ten minutes after seeing the pontoon boat come out of the darkness on the north bank, I was motoring up the river with the canoe on a rope skimming along in my wake and feeling ever-so slightly better about my situation.
The tourist boat with the three girls was my next stop. With any luck, they could give me some idea what had happened to my friends.
It didn’t take long for the riverboat to come into view anchored just where I’d last seen it.
Careful to keep a distance of thirty feet or so between our two hulls, I came up alongside, looking for the silhouette of a girl’s head or a hunting rifle sticking above the upper rail. Of course, I didn’t see one. It was such a minor thing, not seeing at least one of the girls immediately, but I was starting to shade toward pessimism on every uncertainty I stumbled on. I called across the water. “Hey.”
I waited.
“Hey, this is Zed.” They were a timid, cautious b
unch. “Amy, Brittany…ah…Megan, are you there?”
There were still three ski boats tethered off the stern of the faux paddle wheeler. The girls had to be on the big boat.
“Hey.”
Nothing.
Along the top rail, I thought I saw the barrel of a rifle peek over. Three shadowy head silhouettes popped up as well.
“Amy? I’m Zed. I came by a week or so ago with a couple of other guys and left you some food and a gun.”
“Why do you look like that? Where are your clothes? What happened to you?”
“That’s a long story.”
The girls whispered amongst themselves for a minute.
“Trust me,” I called up. “It’s really me. How else would I know your names and my name if it wasn’t me.” It seemed like a silly argument, but it was the only one I could come up with.
“We thought you were dead.”
“Why?”
“A couple of days ago, a girl came by in what looked like your boat.”
“A girl? Was she alone?”
“I asked about the boat when she came by. I said it looked like your boat.”
“And?”
Amy’s tone turned to disgust and anger. “She said you raped her.”
“What?”
“Did you?”
“No!” Feeling like I needed to add more to my defense than just a denial, I said, “She’s a crazy bitch. She tried to kill me.” It occurred to me then that I should have said nothing else. The crazy-bitch addendum made me sound guilty even to me. I slumped down in my seat. “Did she say anything about my friends, about where they were, if they were okay?”
“No.”
Could she have really killed them all? Was she that wicked? Or had she abandoned them somewhere? “Did you think that was kind of weird? Her being all alone in my boat and not with Murphy or Russell or anybody?”
“Murphy, he was the one that tried to get on our boat the first night we met you?”
“Yeah.”
The girls conferred for a minute. “It did seem a little weird. We didn’t trust her, so we didn’t let her come aboard.”
