by Jude Hardin
“Why are you doing this?” Drew said.
K-Rad smiled. “A stitch in time saves nine,” he said.
He pulled the trigger, and Drew stopped breathing.
9:04 a.m.
A minute or so after the initial burst, there was a single gunshot and then silence. Matt felt his way around the dark office until he found a chair. He sat down, and Shelly sat beside him.
“Oh my God,” Shelly said.
“What are we going to do now?” Fred said. “We should have gotten the fuck out of here when we had the chance.”
Matt stood up and found the doorknob. He twisted the little brass dial to the locked position. “Well, we can’t leave the office now. Stepping to the other side of this door would be suicide at this point. Is there a desk in here?”
“I’m sitting at it,” Fred said.
“Let’s push it up against the door as a barricade. If he can’t get in here, he can’t shoot us.”
Matt felt his way to the desk, and he and Fred pushed it flush against the door.
“We’re going to run out of air pretty fast,” Shelly said. “The fumes are going to choke us to death.”
“All we can do is hope some help comes before that happens,” Matt said. “Unless—”
Shelly switched the flashlight on. “Help’s not going to come. Help never comes. Unless what, Matt?”
“Unless one of us goes out there and tries to rush the guy.”
“You said yourself it would be suicide to step on the other side of that door.”
“I know, but it might be our only chance.”
“I’ll do it,” Fred said. “I’ll go out there and take the motherfucker down.”
“No way. If anybody goes, it’s going to be me,” Matt said.
“I’ve only been here a few weeks, Matt, but you’ve only been here two days. I know the plant better than you do. Way better. I can find my way around in the dark and ambush the guy. Let’s move the desk and I’ll get on with it.”
“You might know the plant better, but I’m stronger. If it comes down to a hand-to-hand combat situation—”
“Look, we can stand here and argue about it all day, or we can do this.” Fred reached into his pocket and pulled out a quarter. He flipped it in the air, caught it, and slapped it on the back of his hand. “Heads or tails. Loser has to go to battle.”
“Heads,” Matt said.
Shelly pointed the flashlight at the coin on the back of Fred’s hand. The quarter had landed on heads.
“That settles it,” Fred said. “I lost fair and square. Help me move the desk.”
Matt sighed. “You sure you want to do this?”
“I’m sure.”
“You’ll need a weapon. Something …”
“There’s a toolbox over by the scales. I’ll grab a drum wrench.”
“Any idea where to start looking?”
“Not really.”
Who would just waltz into the plant and start shooting people? Matt wondered. What could the killer possibly want? What was his plan? He thought about the first questions a police detective might ask.
“Do y’all know of anyone in particular who might have a grudge against Nitko?”
“Could be anybody,” Fred said. “There’s been days—”
“I think I know who the shooter is,” Shelly said.
Matt turned to her. “Who?”
“Last Friday a guy named Kevin Radowski got fired. He’d been here a long time, like, twelve years or something. He worked in Waterbase, and they blamed him for one of the loading-dock doors getting messed up. It was almost quitting time, and the foreman told me to find him and send him to the Waterbase office. He was escorted off the premises. Those fuckers wouldn’t even let him finish out the week.”
Matt considered that. “If it is Radowski, he’ll probably go after Hubbs, the guy who probably fired him.”
“I’ll go hide somewhere by the Waterbase office, then,” Fred said. “Hopefully I’ll come back and give y’all some good news in just a little while.”
Matt and Fred scooted the desk away from the door, and Fred exited the Shipping and Receiving office. Shelly told him to be careful out there.
As Fred was leaving, a man wearing a tuxedo and holding a martini came in.
9:27 a.m.
K-Rad figured everyone in Petrol was dead by now, but he wanted to make sure. He opened his backpack and pulled out a gas mask and a helmet equipped with drop-down night-vision binoculars. He removed his regular night-vision goggles, put them in the backpack, and strapped on the cumbersome apparatus. As soon as he got it situated exactly the way he wanted it, he felt the overwhelming urge to take a piss. Figures, he thought.
He walked to the locker room. His kidneys were floating from all the Mountain Dew he’d drunk. When he finished urinating, he caught his own reflection in the mirror by the sink. With all the high-tech gadgetry on his head and the flak jacket on his chest, he looked like some sort of machine. That’s what he was. A machine. A killing machine. By the end of the day, he would be famous. Everyone in the world would know the name Kevin Radowski. Everyone in the world would know K-Rad.
The door to the Petrol room was protected by a pushbutton lock, but K-Rad knew the code. He’d worked at Nitko for twelve years. He knew all the codes to all the doors, even the ones he wasn’t supposed to have access to.
When the emergency lockdown had been initiated, the employees in Petrol had essentially been trapped in a toxic tomb. Of course, emergency lockdown was never supposed to happen with people still in the plant. Even if it did, and even if the power went out for some reason, emergency generators were supposed to kick in and keep the ventilation fans in Petrol pumping in fresh air.
But K-Rad had disabled the generators at a little after three o’clock that morning.
On the north side of Nitko’s property, nearly a quarter mile from the main building, stood an above-ground diesel tank the size of a boxcar. Nitko stored the fuel for use in the emergency generators, outdoor forklifts, and delivery trucks. The tank created a blind spot, and K-Rad had easily sliced his way through the fence with his bolt cutters. He knew from experience that the night shift took a long break at three a.m., and he knew from experience that the lame-ass roving security guard could always be found snoozing in his pickup at that time. At approximately 3:05, he filled two five-gallon cans with diesel fuel and then walked to the generators and cut the battery cables. Perfect. Oh, yes. By the end of the day, everyone in the world would know the name K-Rad.
He looked at his watch: 9:41. Still plenty of time for more fun. He punched in the code and opened the door to Petrol and walked in like he owned the place.
9:42 a.m.
Matt looked over at Shelly. She sat on one of the folding chairs, staring into space, unaware of the man in the tuxedo.
Mr. Dark.
“When I go to a show, Matthew, I expect to be entertained,” he said. “If I didn’t have this martini, I’d be asleep already.”
It wasn’t just that Shelly didn’t notice Mr. Dark.
She was totally still, her eyes frozen in midblink.
Time had stopped.
Mr. Dark turned his back to Matt and stepped in front of Shelly, blocking her from view. “Let’s liven things up, shall we?”
And now Matt knew, with horrifying certainty, what was coming next.
Matt tried to shout leave her alone, but the words came out sounding as though they had been uttered from the bottom of a swimming pool. The cheap plastic clock on the wall stopped ticking. Matt closed his fists and tried to launch a series of punches to Mr. Dark’s kidneys, but it seemed someone had strapped something heavy and cumbersome to his hands. It was like trying to box using bowling balls for gloves. He moved in super-slow motion, grabbing for Mr. Dark’s shoulders, but then he was gone, and time suddenly started up again as if the world had been trapped in a cosmic freeze-frame.
The flashlight fell from Shelly’s hands.
When she reached
to pick it up, her ball cap fell from her head and Matt saw a cluster of festering wounds crawling with maggots on her scalp, rancid flesh dripping from her exposed skull to the floor in sickening, wet glops.
Mr. Dark had touched her.
9:47 a.m.
Just as K-Rad had expected, the floor in Petrol was littered with dead bodies. They say suffocation is a rough way to go, and from the expressions on their faces, it looked like they had all died horrible and agonizing deaths. Some of them looked as though they were straining to take a shit, their eyes shut tight and their neck ligaments stressfully flexed. Others seemed to have witnessed some sort of ghastly revelation. Their eyes bulged and their faces were puffy and swollen, as though someone had inflated them with a bicycle pump. It was funny. It made K-Rad laugh. He was about to leave the area when he heard a tiny voice say, “Help me.”
He followed the sound to a young woman who had collapsed near a stack of wooden crates. How had she survived when all the others had perished? Interesting. Very interesting. She had beaten the odds with the fumes in Petrol, and it seemed a shame to just shoot her. Maybe he could think of something a little more fun.
He walked over to her and crouched down like a baseball catcher.
“What’s your name?” he said. The gas mask muffled his voice, and she looked at him uncomprehendingly. “What’s your name?” he said again, louder this time.
“Terri. My name’s Terri. Are you going to rescue me?”
“Yes. Everything’s going to be all right.”
“Really? You promise? Oh, thank you. I thought I was going to die in here.”
“I hate to tell you this, but none of your coworkers made it. How were you able to survive?”
“Please. I need air. Please help me get out of here.”
“Okay.”
K-Rad holstered the Beretta, lifted the petite young woman, and carried her out of the Petrol room. He carried her all the way to Waterbase and gently set her down on a bed of ammonium nitrate bags behind the big tanks.
“Stay here,” he said. “The paramedics will come for you shortly.”
“Okay.”
She closed her eyes and breathed peacefully. Her face had regained a healthier color on the trip from Petrol to Waterbase, and K-Rad wanted to make sure she didn’t get up and go anywhere. He opened his backpack and pulled out a roll of duct tape.
10:02 a.m.
Matt’s stomach lurched and he staggered back in horror.
Mr. Dark’s touch had transformed Shelly from a beautiful young lady to a smiling, rotting jack-o’-lantern from hell.
Whatever darkness Shelly had festering deep inside before, Mr. Dark’s touch had brought it raging to the surface.
The evil was eating her alive.
And it was Matt’s fault.
Because if he had never gotten involved with her and brought Mr. Dark into her life … she wouldn’t be about to do something very, very bad.
More people were going to die.
And that, too, would be Matt’s fault.
He had to stop her. Fast. And he had to stop K-Rad.
The easy way would be to kill her right now.
He thought about it for an instant but knew he couldn’t do it, not in cold blood, not when there still might be a chance to save her from her demons.
That split second of hesitation was a mistake.
Shelly sat up and slammed her fist deep into his groin.
It was a sucker punch, pure and simple, to the most vulnerable part of his body, and it landed with full impact before he had a chance to react. When he doubled over, Shelly kneed him in the face. Droplets of bright red blood dripped from his nose and splattered on the tile floor. The world was spinning now, and Matt felt like he was going to vomit. He leaned on the desk, trying to steady himself, and felt something very hard smash into the back of his skull.
10:15 a.m.
Hal Miller had been fooling around with one of the forklifts when K-Rad blew his left kneecap off. K-Rad knew Hal and had even considered him a friend for a while. They drank beer and shot pool together at the Retro sometimes. He almost regretted the fact that he was going to have to kill him now. Almost. But Hal had been working nights with K-Rad a few months ago, and Hal was the one who’d fucked up the loading-dock door with his forks raised. If Hal had confessed, K-Rad would have never gotten fired. In essence, it was Hal’s fault that all this was even happening. He lay on the concrete floor in the fetal position, holding his ruined knee with his hands and moaning in agony.
“Who are you?” Hal asked, his voice cracking with fear. “Why are you doing this?”
K-Rad was still wearing the gas mask and the drop-down night-vision binoculars. He didn’t need the apparatus now that he was out of Petrol, but he thought it looked cool and menacing. He wanted to be wearing it when his picture was broadcast globally on TV and the Internet. He wanted to look like the killing machine that he was. He walked over, sat on the floor, and pressed the barrel of his pistol against Hal’s forehead.
“It’s me. Kevin Radowski. K-Rad, your old drinking buddy.”
“Look, I’m really sorry about—”
“It’s a little late for apologies, don’t you think? You should have come forward the day you wrecked that door.”
“I have a family to support, K. Come on, man. Give me a break.”
“I gave you a break by not snitching you out. You repaid me by sitting back and watching me get canned for something I didn’t do.”
“Let’s go to Hubbs’s office right now,” Hal said. “I’ll tell him everything. I swear.”
“Oh, I’m going to Hubbs’s office all right. Soon as I blow your fucking brains out.”
“Please. Please don’t kill me. I’ll tell him I wrecked the door. You can get your job back and I’ll be the one to get fired.”
“I’ve already killed a bunch of people, Hal. Call it a hunch, but I doubt they’re going to hire me back.”
“Oh my God. Who did you kill?”
“Lots of people. Including you.”
K-Rad pulled the trigger. The bullet entered through Hal’s forehead, tore through his brain, and exited through the back of his skull. It ricocheted off the concrete floor, then the steel plating on the electric forklift, and hit K-Rad dead center in the sternum.
Good thing he was wearing his Kevlar vest.
“Ouch,” he said, and proceeded toward Mr. Hubbs’s office.
10:17 a.m.
Matt was high in a tree house, and something invisible had pushed his wife, Janey, out the door. She was on the way down, plummeting headfirst like a human missile, arms stretched toward the ground in a futile attempt to lessen the impact.
“Janey!” Matt cried.
He pursed his lips and concentrated, and his physical surroundings blurred to a tunnel of swirling colors. He saw only Janey, sinking slowly now, as if through an enormous vat of molasses, teeth clenched and eyes bulging. A silver ring outlined the tunnel, constricting more and more, like an aperture, until Matt’s entire world flashed to a stark and blinding white.
Against this white background came a galloping horse with a knight in full armor, the rider and his mount as black and dull as axle grease. The knight gripped the reins with one hand and a spiked metal ball on a chain with the other. The weapon was a brutal-looking thing, a skull-busting apparatus of the highest caliber, and the knight wielded it like an extra appendage, like something he’d been born with. The knight’s name was Pain, and his steed Death, and Matt knew he could not defeat them, no matter how hard he tried. He knew that the only way to save Janey was to make a pact with them, to bow down to them and give them what they wanted.
The horse stopped and reared, chomping at the bit, an expression of extreme agony on its face. The tortured animal snorted and sneezed and bucked and stomped, stirring a sandy white storm in Matt’s throbbing head.
When the dust finally settled, Sir Pain raised his flail and spoke: “I will give you the power to save your wife, but with
the power comes a responsibility—and a debt.”
“I’ll do anything,” Matt said.
“You must become a soldier in the Dark Army, and you must—”
Another gunshot rang out, and Matt woke with a start. He had the worst headache of his life, and his testicles felt as though someone had parked a truck on them.
“Shelly?” he said.
No reply. She and the flashlight were gone, unless she was hiding in the darkness, but he doubted it.
Another employee had just been murdered, maybe Fred or Shelly, and Matt knew what he had to do. He rose and staggered to the door, exited the Shipping and Receiving office, and headed for Waterbase.
He was still a little dizzy from the blow to the head, and the heat and chemical fumes only made matters worse. He crept behind the massive stainless-steel Fire and Ice tanks, peeked through the eighteen-inch space between them, and in the dim light filtering through the ventilation fans saw the silhouette of a figure walking toward the foreman’s office. The man wore a heavy vest and a backpack and a helmet. He walked slowly, legs stiff, almost shambling along, like some sort of zombie astronaut. He carried a pistol in his left hand.
All Matt could do was try to ambush the man and take him down without getting shot in the process. He had started to creep along the wall toward the office when he heard a childlike moan. He stopped, crouched down, and duckwalked back behind the tanks. He followed the mewling sounds to an area where bags of dry chemicals were stored and saw a petite young woman squirming on top of one of the stacks. He gently peeled away the duct tape covering her mouth.
“What’s your name?” Matt said.
“Terri Bonach. I work in Petrol. The guy who put me here said everything was going to be all right, but then I woke up and I couldn’t move or talk. Who are you?”