It looked like the helium tanks they used to fill novelty balloons in grocery stores. Tall, cylindrical, a valve on top. Only this one was yellow and had a nozzle and a warning label: CAUTION—HYDROGEN
And below that, in red: Contents under pressure…highly flammable.
Demetrius whistled soundlessly.
Hydrogen, he thought, running his fingers over the cool tank, as in hydrogen bomb. Quite a step up from scissors and a laser pointer.
But how could he weaponize it? He didn’t know. And if he did figure out how to make it go boom, how could he avoid blowing himself up with the rest of the chemistry building?
It was a fairly simple tank. Spin valve, nozzle, that was it. Mounted on a little cart for ease of movement. His guess was when the tank emptied, they carted it to a filling station, then brought it back to the lab, where students…what? Filled balloons?
Actually…hadn’t he heard something about chem students blowing up hydrogen balloons?
Yes. He remembered a blond-haired kid on the campus bus showing a girl a video he’d taken on his cell phone. The scene came back to him now, the kid happy, the girl laughing, the kid wearing a funny shirt, something about Gregor Mendel giving "peas a chance" since whatever year he’d been around. Demetrius had seen the shirt but he hadn’t seen the video. He’d heard it, though, the loud pop and the muffle of voices of the students who’d been there, and he’d seen the girl’s reaction. Genuine surprise, bordering amazement. Must have been quite an explosion.
And that from a single balloon.
A tank like this, even half full, might blow the roof off the place. And that’s just what Demetrius hoped to do.
He was left with the problem of weaponizing the tank. Open the nozzle and light a fuse? Would that get the job done? He doubted it. Despite their warning labels, these tanks probably had all sorts of safe guards in place.
Something else…didn’t the hydrogen need oxygen to burn? He wasn’t sure about this.
Shit. Maybe this big tank wasn’t such a great thing after all.
The best thing to do would probably be to open the tank up in some small space, maybe a closet or a bathroom, and start a fire nearby.
He glanced around the room, eyes sliding over shelves of bottled chemicals. One thing was for sure: if he set this tank off, all those chemicals, along with whatever these chemists had stored away, would make one hell of a fire.
What about that? What about just starting a fire and counting on all this shit to take care of the rest? Explosions, fumes, flames…something was sure to get that asshole on the roof.
Especially if I was waiting for him on the ground level. Wait, are you out of your mind? Wait for a guy with a gun? Why not just peel the fuck out of here and live to fight another day?
Because the asshole had tried to kill him, that was why. Beyond that, the guy knew something about all this, the larger event. Also—and this was the big reason—Demetrius needed to carry on because, by extension if not directly, that asshole on the roof was responsible for all this death, and Demetrius figured it was his duty to do whatever he could to make the guy pay. He pictured Brian, back in the library. Yeah, it was worth some risk to kill this bastard.
He thought about the fire. What about the other stairwell? What if the sniper ran out the other side of the building, and Demetrius missed him altogether?
Well, he would just have to make sure the fire was raging in that stairwell. If the shooter wanted to use it then, no problem. By all means. Embrace the flames.
The plan began to form. Start a good fire, maybe pile some shit in the opposite stairwell and light that first, open up the nozzles of this hydrogen tank and any other tank he could find, and get the hell out. Set up shop just outside the stairwell and put the scissors to this asshole as soon as he hauled his smoking ass out the door. Maybe Demetrius would even get lucky, and the guy would be caught inside, fricasseed.
Or maybe the place would blow up and fricassee Demetrius, too.
That was a chance he’d have to take. So be it.
Then, scanning the whole room for incendiaries, he spotted what might be a problem. The ceiling was spangled in sprinklers.
Shit.
They wouldn’t stop a good chemical fire, he was sure of that, but they would fuck up any paper-and-flame fire he used as a catalyst.
He wished he had a few white phosphorus grenades or some napalm.
Wish in one hand, shit in the other; see which one fills up first. Demetrius rubbed his temples. Think, goddamn it. Think!
What if he could get the asshole to shoot one of these tanks? He pictured the scene: the guy shooting, the tank going off in something like a small mushroom cloud, nuking the whole rooftop, and then promptly wiped the image from his mind, knowing it to be purely speculative bullshit. Purely speculative bullshit was a dangerous thing, especially when one was desperate. Purely speculative bullshit would get you killed.
And besides, how would he arrange it? Dress the tank up in clothing, lift it onto the roof, call out like a ventriloquist? He pictured the tank standing in the shadows wearing a hat. Bullshit.
He needed to think. What was that old line about improvising? Necessity is the mother of improvisation? He might be a little off from the real quote, but it didn’t matter. He believed this one.
Mother was in. He needed a solution.
Bang!
Overhead, the shooter fired again. One more life thrown away.
At least I know where he is.
If only he had time, he could slip into one of the offices and have at the books in there. Figure out what was what with chemicals. Or run some tests and …
Oh fuck it. Enough spinning wheels, trooper.
It was time to drive on, time to do something. Anything.
He hurried through the room, scanning shelves and searching cabinets to little avail. The most he could hope for was that all this shit would go up fast and hard once he got the fire started.
Then, in an alcove at the rear of the room, he found the other tanks. Smiling tightened the swelling around his eye.
The red tank was labeled OXYGEN. Next to it stood a blue tank, this one labeled NITROGEN. Fire loved oxygen, and nitrogen was definitely explosive under certain conditions. He’d just have to hope that those "certain conditions" included the application of open flame.
Next, further along the back wall, he spotted a door covered in warning labels. NMR ROOM, the door read. No metal objects. Magnetic field. Beneath these labels, there was a picture of a wristwatch in a red circle with a line through it.
He pushed through the door and released another low whistle. Now this looked dangerous. A big, metal cylinder on three legs, the NMR looked like a rocket ready to blast off. The top bristled with interrelated pipes and hoses. Beside it stood a short ladder. But what interested Demetrius were the labels affixed to the NMR itself. The word BRUKER—Demetrius assumed this to be the brand name, the manufacturer—sat within an atomic symbol, paired ellipses each with a dot frozen in its course. Below this: 600 Ultrashield TM. Below this: another pictograph, a triangle containing an exclamation point, and, further down, a horseshoe, squiggly lines showing force, and what Demetrius thought was meant to represent a wrench. Something about magnetism.
He didn’t give a shit about the magnetism. What interested him was that atomic symbol.
NMR.
Nuclear Magnetic…something?
Could be.
The trouble, once again, was how to weaponize the thing. And here he had absolutely no idea. What was he supposed to do, run downtown, buy a watch, and hope it made the NMR blow its top?
Shit.
All this was getting him nowhere. All these tanks and chemicals, and he was still left holding scissors and a laser pointer.
He was in the wrong room. He got moving again, headed out the double doors, and checked the rest of the floor. Nothing but offices, labs, and a heavily secured station labeled Stockroom. The big guns were in there, he reasoned, but whoever des
igned the place had the brains to safeguard against intrusion. Since he’d left his crane and wrecking ball at home, there was no way he was getting through the metal door between him and the goods.
Upstairs, then.
He cracked the door to the stairwell, listened. Nothing. He moved into the stairwell as silently as possible. At the second floor, he peered through the small window square into relative darkness, the only source of illumination the red exit signs at either end of the corridor. He went through the door.
The second floor was much the same as the first. Classrooms, offices. No NMR, though. A room labeled "Instrument Room" gave him momentary hope, but it ended up holding nothing more than computers, odd-looking squared-off ovens, some analytical equipment, and a poster of Amelia Earhart, none of it useful to him now.
Bang! Another shot fired, another corpse in the quad.
Move, Demetrius told himself.
He tried the third floor. It was all classrooms, no offices, no instrument room, an NMR at the back, similar to the one he’d found on the first floor. Excitement kicked in when he found not one, but two, hydrogen tanks. There had been only one on the first floor and none on the second. Could he take this as a sign?
No. Reading signs into random events was even more pointless than relying on purely speculative bullshit. It was recklessly pure, ultra speculative, total and complete bullshit. For some people, necessity was the mother not of invention but of gullibility, and Demetrius had no intention of joining the ranks of the gullible.
It was the further discovery of two nitrogen tanks and an oxygen tank—discoveries, he recognized uncomfortably, that would have been viewed as signs, had he been gullible—that finally convinced him.
Detonating the third floor tanks meant a longer dash downstairs for Demetrius, there was that to think about, but it also meant that if something did blow, it would have an even better chance of going straight through the roof. And that sounded perfect.
He thought about checking the fourth floor. Fuck that. It was too close to the sniper, and it wasn’t like he was going to find a rack of M-16’s up there.
So he’d use the tanks on the third floor. That was that.
Each sat atop a cart, and once he’d disengaged the brakes, they moved smoothly. He needed some small space in which to drain them, a closet perhaps, or maybe a bathroom, or…
He wheeled the tanks into the NMR room. So much for leaving metal outside. After a moment’s consideration, he wheeled the carts to opposite corners. He didn’t know if this was necessary, or even wise, but it seemed like a good idea. He didn’t want one blowing stream of gas to cancel out another.
Next, he went back to a closet he’d searched and retrieved a box of kitchen-sized garbage bags, hoping to hell the things were reasonably airtight. The words "colorless" and "odorless" rose like bad moons in his mind. He didn’t know the effects of breathing pure hydrogen in an enclosed space and didn’t care to find out.
He fitted the end of one bag well up the hydrogen tank’s hose, held it tight, and opened the valve. He heard a faint hissing, cranked the thing a bit wider, and gas rushed out, inflating the bag. Demetrius feathered the wheel, filling the bag still faster, and cut the flow it once the bag was mostly full. No need to push it.
Then, keeping his thumb and forefinger pinched against the bag and hose, he slid the bag free, twisted its top, and tied it off. What remained was what he hoped for, a pillow-sized sack of gas that he wouldn’t have to worry about dissipating, probably enough for one hell of an explosion. He kept this up, bag after bag, until the first hydrogen tank emptied, and Demetrius found himself in what looked like a Chuck E. Cheese special attraction: a room bobbling with giant, floating marshmallows.
This would do. Or at least he hoped it would. He’d use a fuse to set off the bags, which would, hopefully, set off the opened tanks. And if he got really lucky, the resulting explosion would set off the NMR itself, whatever that meant.
Making a fuse was the only problem left. Well, that and clearing those stairs a flight at a time.
What could he use? Considering what he assumed to be the volatility of the gasses, he probably could have used a relatively slow fuse of strewn paper…if it weren’t for those goddamned sprinklers. He didn’t think they would kick off in time to kill his fuse, but he wasn’t certain enough to risk it. He needed something faster.
Remembering the first floor, he went to the glass work stations. At the first one he came to—the glass shield of this one crawled with undecipherable equations written in blue Sharpie marker—he squatted, opened the cabinet at the base, and pulled out another large bottle labeled "Solvent: Flammable".
Flammable. Yeah.
He pulled the stopper from the jug and poured a line of solvent across the desktop. It smelled like nail polish remover. Demetrius was careful to keep the line thin; setting off the smoke alarm now would be disastrous.
Setting the bottle a good distance away, he flicked open his Zippo, spun the spark wheel, and touched the flame to one end of the solvent. Fire flashed across it like gasoline.
Demetrius smiled. This stuff would do the trick. Definitely.
He gathered paper towels and as many bottles of solvent as he could carry and crossed the room. Reaching the opposite stairwell, he listened at the door, cracked it, listened, and, satisfied that no one was posted there, opened the door far enough to un-spool a roll of paper towels onto the stairs. Then he drained four bottles of solvent, soaking down the pile and the stairs both above and below it.
He wedged the door open with an empty bottle and poured a heavy line of solvent from the stairwell into the room. Angling sharply, he next laid a tributary of solvent to the NMR room. Inside, the bags jostled like blimps in a jam. He soaked down the floor, and then poured his way back out the line and across the room to the far stairwell.
Bang! Bang!
A pair of rapid-fire shots rang out from the rooftop, making Demetrius jump.
Almost there.. Drive on, trooper.
Finished with his liquid fuse, he returned to the NMR room, moving fast since he didn’t know how long it took solvent to evaporate, and opened the valves atop the hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen tanks. Then, with nozzles hissing like snakes behind him, he left the room, shut its door, and hurried to the opposite stairwell.
Once he was in the stairwell, he positioned himself a few steps below the open third floor door, and pulled a wad of paper towels he’d earlier stuffed in his pocket.
Things would move quickly now.
So be it.
First, he tore away the corners of a towel and stuffed them into his ears. Then he sparked his Zippo, held its flame to the wad, and tossed the flaming ball at the solvent pooled above him.
Not waiting to see if the fuse caught, he sprinted downstairs.
Chapter 30
While Herbert sniped a few more targets, Joel followed orders, "policing brass", which he learned was Herbert-ese for "picking up empty shell casings". The cuffs made this difficult. Once he’d filled his hands with casings, he dumped them into a pile that Herbert then stashed away in the backpack.
With the laptop, Joel thought. Shit, he hoped Herbert forgot all about the goddamned camera and the laptop. The type of scenes Herbert would upload, Joel could be ruined.
For the moment, however, Herbert seemed to have forgotten about ruining Joel’s business. He said, "Want to see the list I’ve been putting together?"
"Sure," Joel said, doing his best to pretend mild interest. Behind all that wacky bullshit, Herbert was a shrewd judge. Any overtly feigned enthusiasm might cost Joel dearly.
He pulled from his pocket an oblong paper cramped with writing. Even from this distance, Joel could see it was covered in notes, some sections crossed out, others highlighted. Herbert stepped closer and extended the list. His other hand, of course, still held that fucking pistol.
It was an envelope, and it was absolutely crammed with writing. In a glance, Joel saw names, addresses, what looked like a cou
ple of phone numbers. The first thirty or so entries were numbered and fairly legible. Many were highlighted. A few, including two highlighted names—Garrett Fiske and Alan Thiesen—had been crossed out. Bad news for Garrett and Alan, Joel figured. After the initial thirty entries, the list fell to chaos, less legible writing spreading out in all directions to cover the paper. Names appeared singly, at all angles, and in short stacks, tilted on the page. Some of these haphazard entries weren’t names at all: The asshole who always stares at me at the Uni-Mart, one read, and another said, Hollywood Fuckface at the Laundromat. Mostly, though, they were names, many, Joel noticed, prefixed with "Dr." or "Professor".
"My wish list,” Herbert said. “These assholes all have a visit coming. They thought they could just shit on me whenever they liked and nothing would ever happen, but tonight’s the night. There’s magic in the air, Joel, old bean, and these motherfuckers are going to pay for underestimating Herbert Weston."
He wants to kill all of these people, Joel realized. The crazy bastard’s been keeping a list. Then he thought, So how do I make this work for me?
"Mess with best, and die like a pest," Herbert said. He pulled a pen from his pocket and seemed to study the list. "I need to add a couple of names, but I can’t seem to find the space." Then he turned it over, and as Joel read the single word on the flipside, Herbert burst into his awful braying laughter.
EVERYONE!
"Call me redundant," Herbert said, and Joel watched him write Steve the Liar and then My Old Buddy Joel?
"Hey," Joel said, "there’s no need for that."
"Chill, Holmes. Note the question mark. We’re still partners. You keep up your end of the deal, no worries. But as the old saying goes, fuck around, lay around."
"Just so I’m certain," Joel said, "what is my end of the deal? I mean, I know about the girls and the website and selling stuff…"
You’re saying too much, he cautioned himself. You’re acting nervous, asking for too much specific information. Guys like Herbert picked up on nervousness, and it goaded them on. He knew this, yet he was nervous, damn nervous, and he couldn’t stop himself from taking things a step further.
Brew Page 22