“Yeah.”
“Come on. It’s bullshit. Nothing’s going to make you live longer. When your time’s up, it’s up.”
“I just heard it makes you feel better. That’s all.”
“I think I’ll stick with alcohol. Can you change the channel for me?”
Tami picked up the remote and switched the channel. “Wouldn’t you want to live forever if you could, though?” she said.
“Immortality isn’t about how long you’re here,” K-Rad said. “It’s about what you do while you’re here.”
“Wow. That’s deep. I still might try the Zark-O. Just to see what it’s like.”
K-Rad didn’t say anything. He looked up at the television, wondering why he hadn’t heard the explosion or at least felt the earth shake. Maybe the Retro was too far away from the plant. Anyway, he was sure there would be some breaking news soon.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “Are those sirens I hear?”
Tami lowered the volume on the television. “Yep. Must be a fire somewhere.”
K-Rad got up and walked outside. In the distance he saw plumes of black smoke rising from Nitko’s direction. Yes! Mission accomplished. He smiled and went back inside to finish his beer.
11:03 a.m
There had been a deafening boom, followed by a wall of fire rising from behind the tanks. Matt had stood there helplessly, waiting for the flames to consume him, but he and Terri were miraculously still alive. One of the detonators had gone off, and the fuel can it was attached to had exploded, but apparently the blast hadn’t been powerful enough to ignite the ammonium nitrate. Matt’s plan had worked, at least partially. The Fire and Ice solution had prevented the big bang, but the plastic bags containing the ammonium nitrate were burning now and filling Waterbase with greasy black smoke.
Matt held the one-inch hose and sprayed the Fire and Ice mixture toward the inferno, but the liquid wasn’t coming out fast enough or forcefully enough to extinguish the flames. It wasn’t coming out fast enough or forcefully enough, and then it stopped coming out completely.
It took Matt a second to figure out what had happened. There was no electricity to power the compressor, so once the pressure in the reserve tank dropped to a certain level, there was no air to drive the pump.
“Let’s get out of here,” Matt shouted.
He climbed onto the forklift and motioned for Terri to sit on the pallet.
“What are we going to do? How the hell are we going to get out?” she said, coughing and wheezing between sentences.
“I don’t know, but we have to get away from this smoke before we die of inhalation. Come on!”
Terri climbed onto the pallet, and Matt did a one-eighty and headed toward the time clock. His eyes were stinging, and his lungs felt as though someone had stuffed oily cotton balls into them. He wished he had thought to grab some respirators from the safety office when he’d been in the front building. At the time it hadn’t even crossed his mind, but they sure would have come in handy now. He drove on, trying to take shallow breaths, one hand guiding the forklift and the other pressing the tail of his shirt against his mouth and aching nose.
He slowed down and carefully turned a corner, intending to take a shortcut between the floor-to-ceiling industrial shelves loaded with Nitko products, and when he turned Terri went limp, fell to her side, and tumbled off the pallet like a rag doll. The smoke had gotten to her.
Matt stopped the forklift, got off, and knelt beside her. She wasn’t breathing.
He felt her neck for a pulse. Nothing.
Matt put his mouth on Terri’s, gave her two quick rescue breaths, laced his hands together, and started chest compressions. He performed two full cycles of CPR. As he started a third, she coughed and turned her head to the side and vomited. Terri was alive, but she wasn’t going to last long. Matt stood, dizzy and nauseated from the smoke, the heat, the exertion, and the pain in his leg, picked Terri up and cradled her in his arms, and forced himself to put one foot in front of the other.
11:10 a.m
Shelly held Matt’s ax with both hands and stared out at the road leading to Nitko’s gate. Before she had left the parking lot, she’d broken a window on Hal’s pickup truck and had taken the sawed-off shotgun he kept behind the seat. It was a twelve-gauge pump, a very nice gun, and Hal, being dead and all, certainly wasn’t going to need it anymore. After taking the gun and the box of shells in the glove compartment, she’d left Nitko’s property and had backed her car into a patch of woods, out of sight, thinking she would ambush Matt when he tried to come after her.
She’d shoot his ass and then cut his head off with his own ax.
Because she had a feeling he was the one guy who might be able to stop her from what she had to do.
And she couldn’t have that, could she?
Thinking about it made her giggle.
K-Rad had the right idea. He was the Man Who Stood Up. The Man Who Would Not Take It Anymore. Shelly had let the pricks steal her life away, day by day, dollar by dollar. She was going to take it back. Screw dying fast versus dying slowly. If she had to go, she was going to take a bunch of those fuckers with her.
She watched the smoke rising from the production building and wondered if Matt was even still alive. She would give him a few more minutes, and then she would go have some fun elsewhere.
But where? A fragment of song from her childhood popped into her mind, something about starting at the very beginning, a very good place to start.
Good idea, she thought. Get them young before they can turn into the kind of miserable fucks who’d stolen her life away.
In her mind she mapped out the route to the daycare center down the road.
11:12 a.m
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.
Matt was no longer worried about getting shot. He figured K-Rad had already left the building.
Of course he was gone. Why would he have stuck around to get blown up?
Matt carried Terri through the walkway to the office suite. The air was better up there, but only slightly. Smoke and fumes had started to seep through from the production area, and with no ventilation and all the doors sealed tight, it was like trying to breathe mud.
There were dead bodies everywhere.
Matt opened the door to the safety office, set Terri on the floor, and found respirators for them both. He put Terri’s on first, and then donned his own. It was an immediate improvement, and after a couple of minutes Terri sat up and said, “Now what?”
“Follow me,” Matt said.
He could have taken car keys from any of the corpses, but he knew what kind of car Officer McCray drove. It was a 1966 GTO convertible, maroon with patches of gray primer and a white top. Matt had noticed it in the parking lot his first day on the job, and Shelly had told him whom it belonged to.
Matt led Terri to the security office, reached into McCray’s pocket, and snatched the keys.
“How are we going to get out of the building?” Terri said.
“There has to be a way out. Firefighters and rescue personnel and hazmat teams are able to gain access
