The Dead

Up ahead Gary was waving to him; they were past the gas-truck now, nearing the pipeline. Max stretched his legs in tremendous strides, sprinting across the lot, praying he’d judged the length of the fuse correctly.

He glanced back. The corpses were already between the tanks.

Flame mushroomed, and there was a loud whoosh-but no explosion. Max cursed, guessing there’d been some weakness in the tape he’d used to seal the bomb.

He dashed around the gas truck, toward the pipeline. The others were waiting for him on the catwalk. He clambered up the fifteen-foot high ladder, paused on the steel platform, turned.

Several of the corpses had been set on fire, and had fallen in the passage between the tanks. The others, perhaps fearing the flames might torch the containers, were retreating-for the moment.

Max eyed his companions. All were panting, plainly near exhaustion. Father Chuck looked half-dead, his skin a translucent grayish-white. The catwalk around him was printed with red heel marks.

“I have another bomb,” Max said. “I’ll try to blow the pipeline. Maybe this one’ll work. Get going.”

“Jesus, Max…” Gary began.

“Go on. I’ll be along.”

Gary nodded. They set off.

Max watched them for a moment. Father Chuck was going to slow them badly, he could tell.

Should’ve left him, he told himself-and instantly shunted the idea aside.

“No,” he growled under his breath, and forced himself to think of the task at hand.

How could he light the bridge off? Taking the bomb out and shouldering his pack once more, he looked over the side of the catwalk, trying to see if the steel was thin enough for the charge to rip through to the pipeline. But the walk alone was an inch and a half thick. And then there was the beam the walk was attached to. The problem was compounded by the fact that there was no way to fix the bomb to the bridge, wedge it in somewhere, so that the span would absorb the full force of the blast.

He went back down the ladder, thinking he might be able to blast through the concrete support enclosing the pipeline between ground and catwalk. Reaching the bottom and giving the support a quick look, he decided it was far too strong.

He looked back at the fuel tanks. Bodies were still burning where he’d set off the first bomb. How much longer would the fires hold the rest?

Off to the left, a torrent of corpses swept out from behind a great diesel tank. They were simply going around.

He knew now there was only one way to stave them off: the tanker truck. At the very least, blasting a sea of flames across the parking lot would canalize them, slow them down. And some hot shrapnel might just go flying into those damn tanks on the far side. Brandishing the bomb, he rushed toward the truck, hoping the very sight of the explosive would give them pause.

They retreated like a wave backwashing from a beach.

“Yeah!” he cried.

But out from their ranks the bone wolves came speeding.

His H and K hung muzzle-down by its strap. Grabbing the barrel, he flipped the gun up from under his shoulder, taking the pistol grip in his right hand.

The bone wolves beat him to the truck. Never slackening his speed, he continued toward them, screaming at the top of his lungs, firing from the hip.

They charged straight on into the barrage, the one on the right pulling ahead, taking the brunt of it. Bones and bone fragments bursting from its body, it reminded Max briefly, crazily of a string of exploding firecrackers. Then it was nothing but pieces rolling across the asphalt.

The second leaped high into the air, jaws yawning. Max ducked, but the thing’s mouth still caught the shoulder of his jacket, locking in the cloth. The creature flipped over, toppling him backward; fabric gave, and the thing went sailing past him, upside down.

Dropping the bomb, he flung himself onto his belly. The bone wolf was already clattering back toward him.

Max thrust the H and K’s barrel into its mouth and pulled the trigger. A hail of slugs bored it clean out through the middle. The hollowed shell continued up the rifle barrel on momentum, disintegrating over him in a rattling wave.

Shaking free of the remains, Max took up the bomb again and started back toward the truck. Looking past the cab, he saw that the cairn was coming now, pounding forward on its elephantine legs.

He eyed the tank trailer. A cylindrical hose container ran along its side. He flipped the cap open. The container was empty. He shoved the bomb in and lit the fuse. Turning, he pelted back for the bridge, thinking to take cover behind the support.

Please, Jesus, let this one work…

He noticed something sweeping toward him on the edge of sight. He glanced aside to see that it was a long braided cable of bones. It seemed to be lengthening rather than merely moving, reconfiguring itself to catch him, pieces racing along it and locking together out near the tip. The sight was so mesmerizingly strange that his wits momentarily failed him. The tentacle fastened about him with an arthritic crackling noise. Points of bone dug cloth into flesh.

Finally he reacted, twisting violently, firing into the appendage several feet from his body, shearing it through with the last bullets in his gun. Cut off from the cairn, the section around his waist instantly fell apart.

Yet hardly had the skeletal belt crumbled when a second appendage looped in. Whirling him around, it dragged him back toward the truck.

He could see the cairn looming up behind the vehicle. It had flung a web of smaller tentacles out over the cab and trailer, as though searching for the bomb. One snaked down toward the hose-container, opened the cap. Smoke leaked out. The tentacle snaked inside.

“Now,” Max cried. “Oh God, now!”

With a flash of red, the nozzle tube split open, the blast punching upward into the fuel trailer.

The tentacle let Max go, almost as if the cairn had been startled by the explosion. Burning fuel gushed from a yard-wide diamond-shaped hole in the tanker’s side.

But the truck didn’t blow.

Max turned and ran, reloading. What could he do now? Could the cairn narrow itself to cross the bridge? Even if it couldn’t, there were always those thrusting arms. He couldn’t possibly hold the span against them…

A wicked thundercrack clapped his eardrums. The tanker had gone.

A massive push of hot air struck him in the back, lifted him off his feet, flung him forward several yards before dropping him to the asphalt. Bones and burning gas drops rained around him. Curved fragments of tanker hull clanged down.

Palms and knees skinned, he scrambled onto the strip of grass by the bridge. Jumping to his feet, he looked back across the parking lot. The top of the truck’s cab had been sheared off. Tank gone, the trailer was enveloped in flame.

As for the cairn, all Max could see was pieces. A vast fan of them had been blasted back into the corpses waiting by the fuel tanks, and many of the cadavers appeared to have been cut down by the brittle shrapnel. Most of the blast seemed to have spewed out that way.

Why the truck hadn’t exploded immediately, he didn’t know. But trailer tanks were compartmentalized. Hoping to tear into a section full of gas vapor, he’d hit liquid instead, much less explosive. Perhaps it had taken a few seconds for the heat to detonate the vapor in a compartment alongside.

Time to leave, Max, he thought. Up the ladder he went. Expecting Gary and the rest to be long gone, he got a nasty surprise at the top; they’d paused near the other end of the bridge. Father Chuck was propped against the rail. Max stamped in rage.

Nothing, he told himself. You did it all for nothing.

Metal glinted. Steve was lifting his pistol toward the priest’s head.

“You piece of shit,” Max said.

There came a flat report. It sounded almost like a firecracker at that distance, with nothing nearby to contain the sound. But it wasn’t Father Chuck who fell.

It was Steve.

Max wondered who’d shot him, hoped it was Gary. He already knew that Linda had the stuff.