by SP Durnin
Then the nearby homes started exploding.
Flames licking into yards and up driveways ignited the pockets of Natural Gas which had slowly built up inside. The same gas Pecos volunteers and Close’s’ marines had created by entering houses, and then opening lines behind water heaters and gas-fed ranges. The exploding structures set nearby buildings to burn and the fires grew larger. They began joining into bigger blazes too, as anything combustible between two of them went up in flames.
O’Connor and his pretty companion hadn’t been sitting on their thumbs, watching the show. By the time the first houses blew, the heat was nearly unbearable at their position, and they were back in their Hummer, heading west and away at a moderate speed. He would have gone much, much faster, but Kat was kneeling in her seat, eyes glued to their rear, Ooo-ing and Aah-ing at the building firestorm. She actually cheered after a rather large explosion, and —considering they were three blocks out now, and the zombies weren’t even close—he slowed, came to a stop, and shifted into neutral. Whatever was going on, Kat seemed to be enjoying herself immensely looking it. Her behind wiggled appealingly as she bounced there on her knees, and she was flipping whatever was back there “The Bird” with a happy grin, so he turned in his seat to see.
For the rest of his life, Jake wished he hadn’t.
If there had ever been a mythical place that started off as “Hell” it was surely right there in their wake. The maelstrom was a slice cut straight from the most brutal and terrible corner of perdition. Everything burned. Houses, toolsheds, lawns, shrubbery, even the streets. Fuel tanks on long-abandoned machinery ruptured, blowing cars, trucks, and even lawnmowers into the air, only to have the come crashing down in charred wrecks. A growing column of smoke filled the afternoon sky, threatening to blot out the sun if the breeze died even a little. The very atmosphere was being super-heated too. Air coming through the window at Jake felt like someone stood outside, blowing a space heater into the Humvee’s cab. But the worst part about what he saw was the dead.
They all were burning. Some didn’t even notice the flames and continued stumping after them with single minded purpose. Those were awful enough. Worse, were the ones that seemed to realize something wasn’t right as their outer layers turned black and they cooked in the heat. Clothing and flesh became carbon, eyeballs swelled and burst in their sockets, entire faces fell away to reveal horridly grinning visages that had to be the envy of whole legions of demons. Others danced sickly about during their immolation, but eventually fell to become more charcoal for the blaze as they lost their already tenuous control over their own dead bodies and their brains boiled.
“We should go now.” Jake didn’t want to see any more.
“Yeah, let’s do that.” Kat turned away too. She wasn’t sickened as O’Connor was, but didn’t feel like wasting time since it seemed their plan had gone off without a hitch. “Let’s go meet the others and get some dinner. I’m feeling kind of peckish.”
He turned them right and accelerated up Oleander. “I don’t think I’m going to be eating anytime soon after seeing that. I’m pretty sure I saw Lucifer back there dancing a jig on one of those roofs… Fuck me. We just burned up a town.”
“Half a town.” She corrected, raising one toned leg to put her boot on the dash. “Good thing the enclave has that barrier, huh? Even if the wind shifts, there’s no way those containers will burn. Two layers of steel, with eight feet full of dirt and rock, thirty-six feet high? And the zombies are too busy becoming piles of ash now to bother trying to get inside Pecos proper, so I call that a good day’s work on our part.”
He nodded and glanced at her. “We’ll still have clean up to do. I doubt they’ll all burn. There’ll still be stragglers here and there, so the next few weeks should be pretty interesting.”
“You’ve got a strange definition of the word ‘interesting,’ you know.” Kat toyed with the frayed bottom of her belly shirt. She cut the bottom half off of every one she wore because she liked showing off the slim lines of her stomach.
“Well, got a better one?”
“Sure do.” She moved one hand up to her left breast, rumpling her tank-top with the red Kamikaze symbol drawn on the front in Sharpie marker, as the fingertips of her other just barely slipped under the waistline of her leathers. Jake watched as they appeared again, holding the top edge of some very lacy purple underwear. “Wanna hear it?”
“Hell yes, I do. But let’s get to the Mimi first. There are sure to be some maggot-heads about, I’m trying to drive, and what you’re doing over there is really—”
“STOP!”
O’Connor nearly stood on the brake pedal, and their tires screeched as they locked up. The Hummer’s tail slid a bit to the left, so when the vehicle finally halted—sans flipping or hitting anything solid—it sat sideways in the road.
“…distracting.” Jake gripped the wheel as looked through the driver’s side window.
As far as they could see in either direction, the entire width of the east/west running 6th street was on fire.
Kat leaned over to stare at the blaze with him. “What the shit?”
“One of the trucks didn’t close up on their last trip to the airport. That’s the only explanation!” He slammed a fist into the steering wheel. “We can’t drive through that. Our tires would all pop and we’d be sitting next to all this, waiting to burn up.”
“How about we call George?”
Jake bit his lip. “Same thing. Its new tires are just like the old ones: Bulletproof, but not fireproof. We’re on our own.”
“Oh no. Not just no, hell no! No way! I can name this tune in two notes, Johnny!” Cho was shaking her head emphatically. “We’re not getting crapped on by the petty sky-beasts again! Not when I’m finally getting my ashes hauled on a regular basis!”
Jake squeezed the bridge of his nose. “Kat! Relax, okay? We’ll just double back and cut over around the fire.”
“Well, whatever we’re going to do, I suggest we do it quickly. Those things are coming ’round the corner behind us.”
He began charging the glow plug. “We’re driving the zombie apocalypse version of the Batmobile here. We’ll be fine.”
“Allow me to rephrase. Those things are coming ’round the corner behind us,” Kat took hold of his chin, turned his face towards her window, and pointed, “And they’re on fire.”
Jake restarted the Hummer and jammed it into gear. “Okay, yeah. Getting the hell out of here quickly, right now.”
They tore south again towards the nearest cross-street. Jake got them there, hitting only a few of the flaming corpses in the process, and put the pedal down after looking in the mirror behind them. In his rear-view, the opposite side of the intersection was positively full of the burning dead
“Those fuel trucks went back after dousing streets with the JP-8, so they’d be almost empty on the return leg.” He tried to reassure Cho. “It can’t stretch all the way to the airport.”
She was staring out the rear window. “Wanna bet?”
* * *
“Who the hell was driving that truck? Hellen Keller? I think I’m going to have a very pointed conversation with Garth once we get back. He needs to require people pass an aptitude test to be on his salvage teams or something.”
Jake couldn’t believe one of the volunteers could’ve been such a monumental dip-stick, as to drive a tanker spewing jet fuel from the back, for over a mile, through the streets. Sure enough, the entire length of Texas Street was an inferno. They’d followed it all the way down to the Interstate 20 service road running east/west, and there was no way around it.
“First thing on the list when we see him.” Cho had one hand pressed over her eyes. “Oh, wait! No, it won’t be. Because we’re going to die out here! We’re either going to burn up in the fire, or the zombies with eat us because we’ve got so little ammunition along and won’t be able to hold them off. Who’s dumb idea was that anyway!”
“Yours. Something about not carrying lo
ts of gunpowder-based things that go ‘Bang’ in a big, armored box, that’s going to be around a fire, remember?” he reminded her gently.
“Well, why did you listen to me?!?” Kat gripped her head with both hands. “Oh lord, I can feel one of my funny turns coming on…”
O’Connor looked around swiftly. Nope. Still no zombies. “Okay. Let’s brainstorm here. East is out. Fire, zombies, death, the usual. Thanks to Stevie Wonder’s driving we can’t go north or west either, unless we want to cross four lanes of what amounts to napalm, wipe our tires out, and end up on foot. That’s if this thing’s fuel tank doesn’t blow up because of how hot the road is first.”
“You’re not giving me options I can work with here. Think of something.”
Still plotting revenge against the vehicularly impaired, he studied the flaming road. If the two of them could just figure out a way over the-
“Over!” he exclaimed. “We zip-line over the fire!”
Kat’s head tilted. “From what? Those single story ranch homes? Those single story metal buildings? Those single—”
“Okay, bad idea. I get it.” Jake grumbled.
She leaned over and looked at the freeway. “What’s on the other side of that?”
“Um. A pair of hotels, a vehicle shop, the airport…?”
“The airport!” Kat exclaimed. “It has an air traffic control tower!”
“No, it doesn’t.”
They sat staring at each other.
“What?”
Jake shrugged. “No control tower. It’s just a municipal airport behind the golf course.”
“Well… poop!”
“But, that gives me an idea.” He made a three point turn and took them wrong-way up the highway off-ramp. The roaring flames were creeping their way south as the wind picked up. Soon enough it would hit the freeway and either burn out, or turn due west. If that happened the blaze would use the divider as access westward, burning its way as far as Hermosa.
“Where are we going?” Cho gripped the ‘Oh Shit!’ bar above her door as O’Connor jumped the median. “Is that a Best Western?”
“Yes, but it’s not our destination. And right there is why!”
Seeing what Jake nodded at in the middle of the road, Kat frowned. “There’s a pipeline in the middle of the freeway? Is that even legal?”
“Who knows!” He raced them for the next on-ramp. “At the moment, I’m more worried about that!”
‘That’ was the wall of flames licking over the highway one street past the on-ramp.
“So what? I mean, pipelines are underground, right?”
“See those white and orange pipes sticking up out of the ground? Yes? Good.” Jake veered left down the freeway entrance and slid them sideways beneath the overpass. “Did you happen to notice the other series of pipes, the ones thicker around than George’s waist, stretching eastward behind them about two feet off the ground?”
“What kind of idiots put a fifty-meter section of pipeline full of natural freaking gas, above ground, in the center of a freeway??” She almost jumped into his lap to get a look at them as their Humvee sped out the other side of the overpass. “They’re right in the fire’s path!”
“I know that! That’s why we’re heading away from it!”
“Must go faster! Must go faster!” Kat was pounding on the side of his seat with one hand. “Floor it!”
“We’re already doing eighty-five!” He shot across the service road into the hotel parking lot. “Any faster, and we’ll travel back in time!”
“Great! We could do today again with different choices then! Like say, take a trip to up to the nature preserve at Pine Springs until all this is over!”
“Pretty sure time-space doesn’t work that way! Changing history would cause a paradox that could wipe out the universe!” Jake plowed them through the chain-link fence behind the hotel.
“Would not!” She clung to him as they bounced along over the field. “Some events can be changed without destroying the timeline! The Traveling Doctor says so!”
O’Connor swerved left onto a golf course. “What are—”
That was when a section of the pipeline blew. The blistering heat finally weakened one of the aboveground seals, cracking the joint wide and allowing natural gas to spew into the air, where it promptly ignited. The resulting plume lasted only a second before the pipe exploded, taking most of road on both sides out, and tossing tons of debris up with the flaming cloud. The concussion tore up the three other adjacent pipes, releasing yet more flammable gas into the atmosphere. Then both adjoining sections to the east and west blew. The resulting fireball that roared into the heavens dwarfed the blaze working its way south through the blackened remains of west Pecos. While nearly half a mile away, the defenders along the southern walls dropped flat, huddling with each-other as a pressure wave rocked the top-most containers. Thankfully, the barrier remained but—distant as they were from the blast-—they could feel the increase in temperature, even with the conflagration to the west. The heat was incredible.
The first detonation had shattered every window on the hotel behind them, but the blast wave produced by the second carried so much force it knocked the rear of their Hummer into the air. Jake attempted to compensate, but its crash bumper dug into the earth and the vehicle rolled twice before coming to rest on the eleventh hole.
* * *
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! Did you see that?”
Mark was wrapped protectively over Gwen, eyes a bit wild as he called out to Henry Sampson and the shaking Charles Mooney.
“Did we know that was going to happen?” Mooney demanded.
“I didn’t!” Sampson got to his feet and passed grim eyes over the wildfire. “But I guarantee you one thing. Jake and Kat are somewhere in that direction.”
“Oh, crap. He’s right.” Gwen’s reply was a bit muffled. Mark was still sheltering her with his own body, after all.
“How do you know?” Charles looked skeptical.
Sampson nodded. “Something goes that wrong? Those two are usually right in the middle of it.”
* * *
Jake regained consciousness with a start.
His seatbelt was cutting into his groin, his left eye was blurry, and the same side of his skull hurt like hell, but he felt basically unharmed. The messy-haired man was getting light-headed from hanging there, so he fumbled his tanto free from it’s hard-sheath on his combat harness, stuck the blade beneath the restraining belt, and sliced it cleanly.
He fell face first to the roof of the Hummer.
Moron! His brain screamed at him. Stop screwing around, get your stupid ass up, and get to your woman!
“Honey?” He shook his head, trying to clear his vision as he searched by feel for her. The seat next to him was empty. “Kat!”
“Out here.”
Glass and bits of metal cut at his arms and thighs as O’Connor fought his way from Humvee. Getting out through the shattered windshield was especially painful. The ribs he’d injured—both in their fight with the Purifiers, and his leap from Pensacola Dam—felt tender again. He might have re-broken a couple, but he ignored the sharp pain in his torso and levered himself to his knees. His head spun, but he began crawling slowly around to the passenger side anyway.
Kat sat on the green, her back leaning against the Hummer’s dented surface. She was a bit dirty and—like Jake—had a few cuts and abrasions, but also didn’t seem injured in major ways.
That was, at least, until Jake got a better look.
His vision had begun to clear, and he stared in horror at the slim, needle of steel protruding from the meat of her trapezius muscle, between Cho’s neck and her shoulder.
“The pipeline blew again. After we flipped, I’d just got out and was about to cut you down and then ‘Wham!’, I couldn’t get up.”
“Don’t try!” He moved close and peered around her bloody shoulder. “God. It went right through. The other end punctured the doorframe.”
She winced.
“Thought so. The whole ‘couldn’t get up’ part kind of clued me in.”
Jake’s lips pressed together into a thin line. He looked back at Pecos and saw the pipeline set the southern side of the highway burning. “We have to move. That fire is on its way here. Just a second.”
He made his way unsteadily to the back of the Humvee. Their trunk had popped over as the vehicle had rolled, but he saw his Alice pack nearby. Grabbing it, he did a quick search about, retrieving his crowbar, the vehicle’s small tool set, and the pair of large bolt cutters. Jake returned to where Cho sat and dropped everything to pull his med-bag from the pack. He took out a small bottle of Betadine, a roll of adhesive bandage, to antibacterial gauze pads, and a pair of blunt-nosed nursing scissors.
He cut her shirt off and slid Kat’s bra strap down her arm. Then he took up the bolt cutters. “I have to ship the piece behind you. If I don’t we can’t get you off the Hummer. This shouldn’t be too bad.”
“You just wanted to get my shirt off.” She gave him a pained smile.
The steel parted easily to the cutters, and Kat only flinched a little. After dousing both sides with of her neck with Betadine, O’Connor opened their Hummer’s tool set and picked out a pair of channel locks, then put his arm around her. “Okay. Let’s get that out, and I’ll bandage you up. I won’t lie; this is going to hurt”
Kat leaned against him and readied herself. “Do it. Just don’t stop, okay?”
He felt her nervousness and gave her a squeeze, then carefully used the channel locks to grip the shard. Cho took a grip on the fabric of his pants and kept her eyes on Jake’s
“Here we go.” He pulled steadily on the steel. Her hand bunched the fabric of his pants and she gritted her teeth. The piece hadn’t budged, so Jake increased the strength of his pull.
The shard began sliding through her flesh and Kat couldn’t keep from screaming. It hurt a lot. Then, O’Connor was bathing her wound again, and slapping on the pads before he wrapped gauze diagonally around the puncture. Once finished he cradled her over his lap until she caught her breath.