8:25 a.m
Kent Dillard, the maintenance man on duty, never knew what hit him. K-Rad had shot him in the back of the head while he was changing one of the steel-mesh filters in the main power closet. K-Rad had then pulled his night-vision goggles out of his backpack and put them on and had thrown the big red breaker switch that cut the power to the entire plant. He had taken the key ring from Kent’s belt and had tried seven different keys before finding the one that fit the emergency lockdown panel. He’d disabled the backup generators earlier, so now the plant was dark and everyone was trapped inside. Perfect.
K-Rad walked to the lab, where Fire and Ice and the other solvents Nitko produced were tested before shipping. There were four people on duty there, a chemist and three technicians. The chemist’s name was Ashley Knotts. He didn’t know the technicians’ names, but he knew they were all men. Ashley was attractive, in a librarian sort of way, with wire-rimmed glasses and hair pulled back in a bun.
When K-Rad opened the door to the laboratory, Ashley and the others were huddled together at one of the counters with a flashlight. They were looking at a trade magazine and laughing about something. Undoubtedly, they were thinking the lights would come back on any minute and the emergency lockdown would be released and everything would go back to normal. K-Rad picked them off one by one, like ducks at a shooting gallery. He worked left to right, Ashley being the last in line. Before shooting her, he said, “Would you mind taking your hair down for me?”
“Please don’t kill me,” she sobbed. “I have children at home. I’ll do anything you want.”
“I want you to take your hair down.”
She reached behind her head and pulled out the pins holding her hair up, and the long, silky blond locks fell to her shoulders. Her hands were trembling. K-Rad could see everything with the night-vision goggles on.
Tears rolled down her cheeks. “Please, I don’t want to die.”
“Maybe we can work something out,” K-Rad said. “Take your glasses off.”
She took her glasses off. She was a very beautiful woman. K-Rad guessed her to be in her early thirties. He aimed and fired and the top of her skull exploded. She fell to the floor, landing on top of one of the techs.
That took care of the front offices. Everyone was dead now. The production area would be trickier, but K-Rad felt up to the challenge. He felt good. He felt strong.
He had picked this day because he knew all the vice presidents were at a convention in Miami and the head honcho was cutting the ribbon at the site for a new toll road. He had worked for Nitko for twelve years, and this was the first time he knew of when all the brass was missing in action on the same day. Boneheads. He had no interest in killing them. By the end of the day, their lives would be ruined. Thinking about it made him smile.
One of the lab techs, the one Ashley Knotts had fallen on top of, started stirring and moaning. K-Rad walked over and finished him off with one to the head.
8:31 a.m
Matt had to get to Shipping and Receiving and warn Shelly, and everybody else, that there was a killer on the loose. He felt his way down the staircase. When he reached the bottom, he took a right. With one hand touching the wall and the other out in front of him, he blindly made his way to the walkway door. He felt the push-button lock and punched in the code.
Then he heard footsteps.
And keys jingling.
Someone was coming his way-fast.
Matt wanted to enter the walkway and make a dash for the production area, but the footsteps were approaching too quickly. He got on his hands and knees and backtracked until he felt the hallway that led to the Human Resources office. He turned the corner and backed in a few feet, and he heard the footsteps coming and the keys jingling but he didn’t see any light. How was the killer walking so fast without a flashlight?
He hunkered down and held his breath. If the killer looked to his right as he walked past the hallway leading to HR, Matt was as good as dead.
8:33 a.m.
Shelly switched the flashlight off to save battery power. She and Fred Philips and Hal Miller sat in complete darkness.
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.
