A Deeper Blue pos-5

by John Ringo

  “Hey, you’re not supposed to be back here,” Justin Stockton said.

  Justin was twenty-three years old and recently had come to wonder if sales was his career. He had dropped out of University of Central Florida in his sophomore year and lived with three friends in a small apartment on Silver Star Road. The foursome existed on chips and cheese with an occasional “healthy” meal of McDonalds or Dominos pizza. When they weren’t working their various nearly minimum wage jobs they played video games. While they sometimes had trouble making the rent or their car payments, they never missed a bill from their ISP.

  Justin was also, unfortunately for him, a smoker. And since it was unlawful to smoke inside of a public building in Florida, he had stepped outside. Specifically he had stepped out the back door to the loading docks. His Marlboro was in one hand and lighter in the other when he saw the four men in gas suits loading a spray truck off the dock.

  “That shit’s got to be bad for you,” Justin continued, maneuvering to stay upwind and reconsidering the cigarette; it might also be flammable.

  “We are having trouble with truck,” one of the men said in a thick accent. “We are needing to refuel it.” He had stepped away from the other four and now approached Justin, his hand out. “I am Gabrel.”

  “Justin,” Justin said, sliding on his salesman grin and holding out his own. “But that’s not fuel…” The stuff was weird and oily but definitely not gas or diesel. He’d gotten some on his hand when they’d shaken.

  “Yes it is,” the man insisted, lifting the hand and thrusting it at Justin’s nose. “Smell…”

  It smelled like…

  * * *

  Gabrel grinned as the man twitched on the ground. It worked.

  “We are finished, Gabrel,” Mahmoud said, rolling the last of the barrels away.

  “God is Great.”

  Petra Smith was nineteen and had a bit of a crush on Justin Stockton. She’d only been working the computer section of the store for a few weeks, possibly the reason she still found Justin attractive. But she saw potential under that slacker façade. Justin was smart, he knew everything there was to know about configuring computer hardware to get the max performance for a video game — and if he’d just apply himself he could be really successful, maybe even a store manager.

  So Petra had followed Justin outside “on break.” Just to talk. Sure, he smoked and kissing a guy who smoked was like licking a dirty ash-tray but…

  When she saw him lying on the ground, though, she screamed and ran over, not even noticing the two barrels dripping clear liquid onto the dock.

  “Justin?” she screamed, trying to roll him over. He was twisted up in a really strange position, like he’d cramped up or something. She couldn’t move him so she darted back into the store, feeling dizzy. It was probably shock. “Help! Somebody help!” she screamed, stumbling through the stock room. She caromed off one of the shelves and realized she could barely see through the tears. It was getting so black…

  “Kildar,” Greznya said. “Report of a Hazardous Materials incident at the Circuit City on Universal Boulevard.”

  “That’s about three blocks from here,” Mike said, accelerating. The traffic on Sand Lake, as always, was solid tourists. And it was moving slow. He seriously reconsidered his decision to turn onto it.

  He cut in front of a minivan from Michigan then back past an SUV from New York. But it was bumper to bumper in front of him. And going really slow.

  “Fuck this,” he said. A driveway on the right led to the Popeye’s and that he knew from reconning the area wouldn’t get him anywhere. But there weren’t any cars on the sidewalk.

  He turned into the driveway and then onto the sidewalk, hitting his horn in a solid blast as he drove sedately down the concrete walk, tourists scattering in front of him.

  Up ahead, at the head of the line of cars, he could see a spray truck in the right-hand lane. What was stopping traffic on the left he had no idea.

  Mabel Zermenfuster Wassenester was seventy-nine. She had been born and raised on a farm near the small town of Blue Earth, Minnesota. Her first driving experience had been subsequent to her marriage, the lesson administered by her mother who had originally learned to drive a horse-drawn wagon. Mabel always remembered her mother’s various admonitions. Never turn so fast that a bottle of pop on the floor will fall over. Brakes are only for emergencies. And if, God forbid, you find yourself on a multilane road, the left-hand lane is the safest and it’s there that you should drive. You stay in the left-hand lane until it’s time to turn right, change lanes, then turn. Slowly.

  Mabel’s problem was that there was a line of cars, and a spray truck, in the right-hand lane when it came time for her to turn onto International Drive. She’d never seen a spray truck out during the day and only occasionally when she couldn’t sleep at night and one of the loud, smelly trucks drove by. She was heading over to her friend Margaret’s house. Margaret lived in an apartment on Kirkman Road and the only way Mabel knew to get there was down International Drive. She sorely hated the road — there were simply too many fast drivers on it — but it was the only route she knew. She had never noticed that she actually passed Kirkman to take I-Drive. This was the route she’d learned the first time and she stuck to it.

  When she reached the intersection, the light had turned green and she took a great dare. The spray truck should stay in the right-hand lane as it turned. She had seen that it had its blinker on and now the yellow lights were going. It was clearly going to spray down International Drive. Maybe that would slow some of those young tarts in their tank-tops and skimpy little bikinis down!

  So she decided that the only choice was to turn with the truck.

  “Fuck, would you look at that?” Mike snarled. There was an old lady in a powered wheelchair in front of him, going along at a fixed rate of one mile per hour. He fucking knew what was in that truck and what it was about to do. He had a binary solution set…

  “Wait!” Britney yelled, getting out of the car and running to the chair. She grabbed the controls, turned the chair and drove it off the sidewalk. “Go!” she yelled as Mike pulled past.

  “Yeah, you stay here,” Mike said, dropping the car into second.

  “What?” Britney screamed. “Wait! No!”

  “Young lady!” the old woman shouted, her wheelchair mired in a holly bush. “Just what do you think—”

  He sped up, horn blaring and reached the intersection just as the two cars, side by side, completed a perfect turn. He could hear sirens behind and in front of him but none of the cops would reach the truck in time to stop anything, even if they had a shoot order.

  “Let us get just a bit down the road,” Gabrel said. “Then we will begin.”

  “Yes,” Mahmoud replied. “The spray will drift behind us, though, and strike all of the cars.”

  “Yes,” Gabrel said, speeding the truck up slightly. “Allah is with us.”

  * * *

  Mike skidded through the turn of the sidewalk and jumped the curb just in front of the truck. He punched the accelerator and, as the car jumped forward under full torque, hit the brakes at the same time and turned the wheel to the side. The car did a one-eighty in a cloud of blue smoke from the rear tires. As soon as he was pointed at the truck he released the accelerator and popped open his door.

  “Prophet’s Ghost,” Gabrel snarled. “Now! Hit the release now!”

  “STOP!” Britney screamed, running into the intersection and holding up her hands. A rental Lincoln Navigator driven by a Brazilian driven nearly to fury by the two idiots in front of him ignored her and she jumped to the side. But the two cars behind him both stopped.

  “What the fuck is going—” the driver of the right-hand minivan, a perfect male specimen of Americanus Arcticus started to say.

  “POISON GAS!”

  The passenger had ducked down but Mike put four rounds into the windshield on the driver’s side, splattering the driver all over the interior. The truck continued to ro
ll forward, though, a smoky haze spewing out of the rear. Mike considered that for a moment. He really didn’t want to die from VX and if he just ran into a cloud of it he wasn’t going to do anyone any good.

  But the wind was from the north. It was spreading the cloud backwards. Of course, that was right into a major intersection, but if he could get it cut off…

  He ran forward just as a blue sedan, the driver a white-haired old woman, cruised sedately to the north. She gave him a look of absolute exasperation, clearly placing him with the car in the way.

  Mike could give a shit about her opinion. The truck, now out of control but only doing about five miles per hour, was drifting towards the left-hand lane. He darted to the side and yanked open the door.

  Two shots went past him just about at head height and he responded by pumping six into the passenger. There was a lever there that wasn’t one Mike recognized and while hitting the brakes he pushed it up. The hissing from the rear stopped.

  Putting the truck in park he bailed out and ran for his car, which the truck had just about hit. If that truck had hit his GT he was going to be sorely pissed.

  There was a lot of screaming from up towards the intersection, but there was only one person he was worried about up there.

  Britney glanced over her shoulder and blanched as the rear of the truck started to spew vapor. And, worse, the wind was carrying it right for the intersection.

  She didn’t have much time to decide but she also wasn’t interested in dying today. And standing here was going to mean dying.

  “Get back in your cars and go that way!” she shouted, pointing west down Sand Lake. “Get out of here!”

  She ran down the sidewalk, paused to extricate the old lady, then took control of the wheelchair and started driving it east down the sidewalk, screaming at people to turn back.

  “What is going…”

  “Oh shut up you old bat!” Britney screamed, hitting the woman on the head. “There’s poison gas back there! Keep going east,” she added, jumping off the wheelchair and pointing down the road. “Don’t stop until you reach a cop!”

  She ran out into the traffic again and stood in the road, arms spread. Cars maneuvered around her until a minivan filled with a family stopped.

  “What the hell is going on?” the man asked. “I’m a police officer.”

  “HAZMAT!” Britney screamed. “Now park it and HELP!”

  Behind her she heard a crash and turned to look: the cars that had entered the intersection were now completely out of control. Probably everyone in them was dead. The cloud was now invisible but that just made it worse.

  “Fuck,” the policeman from Chicago said. “Honey,” he said to his wife, “get the kids and start walking east…”

  “But…” the woman protested. Then she saw the out of control cars ahead of her. Every car that had been in front of them was now scattering randomly across the intersection and even into oncoming traffic. As she watched an SUV that had formerly held a family from Ohio met a late model Honda head on, killing a female college student on her way to her job at Hooters. The policeman’s-wife side immediately took over. She stopped protesting and just started unstrapping and grabbing kids.

  Britney managed to get the left-hand lane stopped — the cop’s minivan effectively blocked the right — and after getting through to the lead driver that he’d die if he drove forward, started getting people out of the cars and headed down the road.

  The crashes in the intersection had traffic pretty effectively stopped in all directions but she wasn’t sure how far the cloud had spread. So she went from car to car as fast as she could, just saying “POISON GAS! GET OUT!”

  After the fifth car she saw a police car coming west down the mostly empty eastbound lanes and decided she’d done all an intel specialist should do. She was standing about three hundred yards from the intersection, head down and breathing hard because she’d been trying really hard to hold her breath as much as possible, when she heard a distinctive horn.

  “Figured you were a goner,” Mike said, grinning at her. “But we’ve got other fish to fry.”

  “We going to Disney now?” Britney yelled as the GT made another bootlegger’s turn.

  “Disney’s that way,” Mike said, gesturing over his shoulder. “So, no. We’re going to Wet and Wild.”

  “Why?” Britney asked. “Besides girls in bikinis.”

  “What do people do when they think there’s poison gas in the air?” Mike asked, making a screaming turn onto Universal and jerking into the oncoming lane to avoid a rolling roadblock. An oncoming SUV jerked to the side, broadsiding another and before you could say “Suburban” there was a beached pod of the things.

  “Run for shelter,” Britney said, bracing herself as Mike slid through a three-lane sweep between four cars, missing them all by a whisker.

  “And if you’re at Wet and Wild?” Mike asked. “There’s not much shelter.”

  “Ripple attack,” she said, blanching. “First hit I-Drive with the gas, then they get in the water. They try to get under and hold their breath as long as possible…”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Heather Parker was blue-eyed, 5’4” tall, with her hair colored blonde and brown in layers. Her favorite song in the world was “Breakaway” by Kelly Clarkson. She had just turned fourteen two weeks before and, as her grandmother put it, she was “blossoming.” The bathing suit that she’d bought just six months ago that fit fine up top then was, well, way too small. But while certain parts hurt, she generally didn’t mind the stares. In fact the day before, her mother had dressed her down right solid for, as Mama put it, “preening.” What Heather was paying attention to through most of the dressing down, though, was a red and white Ford GT. She wasn’t sure what exactly she’d give up to take a ride in that GT, but it was a lot.

  Heather’s family was down on midwinter break from Soddy Daisy, a small town outside of Chattanooga, Tennessee. She, her parents and her two brothers had driven down all of Friday, fighting the traffic, and yesterday was the first day they’d had in Orlando. The parents had decided that they wanted to go to Wet and Wild so was it her fault if the only bathing suit she had didn’t fit?

  Heather enjoyed the stares but she enjoyed swimming just as much. She wanted to be an Olympic swimmer when she grew up but since the only pool she ever had access to was the county pool in Redbank, there wasn’t much chance of that. But she loved to swim, which was why she did it every chance she got.

  She’d done all the rides at this point and was just enjoying the wave pool. The water got pulled in through grates, then pumped back out, making the wave action. It caused a huge splash up against the wall, but you could dive down, get pushed out and back and just generally enjoy the water there.

  It was also the main source of processed water for the entire park.

  Massoud Faroud also could not be called a sleeper agent. In fact, jihadist was pushing it. “Dupe” would probably be the best word. While he, too, stood with his fellows at the end of services and shouted “Death to the Infidel,” deep down he wasn’t sure about this whole jihad thing. Yes, the Prophet had declared the will of Allah, that the whole world must submit to the shariah.

  But Massoud had lived under shariah law in Afghanistan. And, given the choice, he much preferred working as a maintenance man at Wet and Wild. Yes, the Prophet had decreed that women should be decently covered but… The Prophet, blessings be upon him, had never been to Wet and Wild. If he had, he’d probably have written something like “women should always wear bikinis. Preferably ones one or two sizes too small on top.”

  But Massoud was a maintenance “engineer” at Wet and Wild. And he had lived under the Taliban. So when the imam cornered him and introduced him to some rather unpleasant gentlemen, one of whom spoke Pashtun as his native tongue, he had known he was, as his American boss would have put it, screwed. It was “Death to the Infidel” or “Death to Massoud.” Looked at that way, well…

  On the other han
d, they’d also promised that it wasn’t, in fact, “Death” to the infidel. The material was supposedly a caustic agent. All it was supposed to do was sting and possibly hurt the eyes, thus showing that the Movement could strike anywhere and any time. Prophet’s Beard, peace be upon it, they put that in the water all the time. In fact, Massoud had tried to point out that even high molar acid in the quantities they were inserting wouldn’t do much more than make people pissed. The unpleasant gentlemen had told him to mind his own business.

  But he’d gotten the two blue barrels into the injection facility easily enough; it was part of his job after all. And, using all appropriate hazardous material handling techniques, he had gotten the two barrels, which had to be mixed in transfer, set up to inject. All sorts of stuff got added to the water all the time. Chlorine, of course, but also bases, stabilizers, softeners, hardeners for when the softeners were too soft and even materials to make the water more “slippery.” One or two more blue barrels in the large room was nothing to notice.

  “You’re sure about this?” Massoud asked, taking the lock off of the lock-out/tag-out switch. “It’s not going to do much. It might not even be noticed. If it’s a base, I’d need to reduce the chlorine input—”

  “Just turn it on,” the man snarled in Pashtun.

  “Right,” Massoud said, flipping the switch up. The material started dumping but it wasn’t going at full flow. The suction from the injector was pulling some up, but just a trickle was getting into the water which for sure wouldn’t be noticed. He’d have to start the pump to get it all dumped. And he suddenly realized that the Pathan asshole probably didn’t know that. He might not notice the material was barely draining out for a while. Possibly never if he left soon enough.

  There was no such thing as soon enough to Massoud.