Fires of Midnight

by Jon Land

  “On the right, Indian!” Blaine called to him. “Lasers coming up!”

  Wareagle swung that way, adjusting the firing nozzle in the process. As expected, he was able to widen the stream to cover more of the lasers with a single burst, at the sacrifice of distance. An unexpected bonus came when a glance through the sight showed him its field had widened to the same extent as the aerosol stream. He fired and the burst knocked out a whole nest of lasers that had barely missed the RV. As that unit of blue beams of deadly light ceased abruptly, Johnny turned his weapon on another grouping that had just popped up.

  A single blind-fired laser managed to pierce a wheel well and tire. The RV bucked and rattled but kept going. Wareagle used the rest of the first can to disable the grouping that laser was a part of and quickly inserted a fresh canister.

  “Front, Indian!” Blaine signaled. “Both sides!”

  Lasers had begun firing in erratic, crisscrossing beams fifteen yards from them on both the left and right. McCracken braked hard to stop from crossing their path and give Wareagle more time. Johnny fired to the left first and gray smoke from the suddenly corroding, brittle metal replaced the flashes of blue light on that side. He swung the other way just as a trio of beams hit the RV dead on in the front. Another tire blew out and the engine sputtered.

  “Come on!” Blaine urged. “Come on!”

  The RV responded, but it was badly hampered now. A lesser vehicle with normally thin steel and rubber would never have made it this far. But the RV’s reinforced armor sheeting had kept the engine intact. The fence was in sight, and Blaine drove the RV on straight for one of the sections of steel link.

  Another series of lasers opened fire directly before him and McCracken ducked an instant before a pair of slashing beams cut a neat slice right through the windshield. Fuses must have blown, because the RV’s cab went totally dark. But Johnny was up to the task yet again, calmly capturing the required grid through his sight and spraying the aerosol with calculated aim. Once again, the mushroomlike devices smoked, hissed and gave up.

  McCracken pushed the RV on, picking up as much speed as possible en route to the fence. The remaining lasers were still firing, out of Johnny’s range now. Blaine could only hope they wouldn’t pierce anything vital, such as the gas tank, and cause an instant explosion. Instead the beams that found them only damaged the rear of the vehicle, blowing out the back window and showering Josh and Susan with glass. Susan tried to shield him as best she could with her own body, and felt the shards pricking and digging into her back and arms.

  “We’re out of their range, Blainey.”

  “Then get yourself back inside, Indian, and hold on.”

  The nonnuclear electromagnetic pulse packs Johnny had used had not affected the cameras mounted atop the fence. In the Group Six command and communications center, the three working screens showed their own updated RV bearing down on one of the sections of fence. Fuchs watched helplessly as the fence simply caved in and vanished under the RVs charge.

  “Sinclair!” Fuchs called through the intercom system.

  “Here, sir.”

  “They’re out. All security systems disabled. Take up pursuit.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  With that, the four chase vehicles Sinclair had loaded with men hurtled toward the open garage bays. Suddenly their surges slowed to bucking skips. Then the engines died.

  “What the fuck … Colonel Fuchs!” Sinclair called into his communicator.

  “We can’t see you. Where are you?”

  “We’re stalled, sir. They must have done something to the engines, sabotaged them. We’re not going anywhere in these.”

  “Damn!” Fuchs blared, realizing McCracken’s cohort, whoever he was, must have also found and utilized the compounds Group Six had developed that turned diesel fuel and gasoline into jelly. But he was certain there weren’t enough samples stockpiled to cover all the vehicles in the motor pool. “Listen to me, Sinclair. Check all the cars. Some of them will still be functional.”

  “Tires on the others are cut, sir.”

  “Take eight men around to the rear visitors’ bay. There are two cars inside they couldn’t have gotten to. I’ll send down reinforcements to change those tires.”

  “Acknowledged, sir.”

  “Move!”

  Fuchs punched up a fresh line on the phone next to him. “Brookhaven Security, come in.”

  “Brookhaven Security.”

  “This is Colonel Fuchs at Group Six. One of our vehicles has been stolen by intruders and is heading your way. Seal off the gate, but do not approach. Repeat, do not approach!”

  The RV thumped and hunkered its way toward the gate at Brookhaven’s main entrance.

  “Here we go. Hang on!” Blaine called back to his passengers.

  The RV slammed into the gate and shattered it, sending it swinging wildly sideways. McCracken managed to right the RV, even though it had taken on a leftward list. He bypassed the more heavily traveled William Floyd Parkway for a residential thoroughfare called Longwood Road.

  “Two vehicles following, Blainey,” Johnny Wareagle called from the rear of the RV

  “No way we can outrun them. This thing’s gonna die on us any second.” He stole a quick glance behind him at Susan, who was still working on the inert form of Joshua Wolfe. “Doesn’t look like getting away on foot is an option, either.”

  The RV had begun to waver from side to side and he was powerless to keep it steady.

  “That means we must make a stand, Blainey.”

  “Tough odds to beat without—” McCracken stopped when he saw the sign on the side of the road. “What do you think, Indian?”

  “We could hope for no more, under the circumstances.” McCracken managed to swing the RV to the right toward a long, rectangular building, shiny letters rising into the night from the front of its roof: LONGWOOD CENTRAL MIDDLE SCHOOL.

  Fuchs stared at the image of a bearded man caught by the security cameras and then digitized for clarity by one of Group Six’s computers.

  “His name is Blaine McCracken,” Haslanger said from behind him. “Krill had a run-in with him yesterday. I think you’ll find his file most interesting.”

  It took a few seconds to bring up and Fuchs had just started reading when the call came from Sinclair.

  “They did what?” he demanded.

  “They’ve pulled around behind the school building out of sight,” Sinclair reported.

  “The vehicle?”

  “Disabled. I’m certain.”

  Fuchs would have felt triumphant if not for the contents of the file running down the screen before him. “Sinclair, I’m ordering the bulk of our security force into the field to join you, to make sure there are no surprises this time. Forty men.”

  “I hardly think I’ll need that many, sir.”

  Fuchs was still reading. “You will. Believe me.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Johnny Wareagle laid Joshua Wolfe across a lab table in one of the classrooms in the vacant school’s science wing. They had passed the nurse’s office, locked up for the night, on the way. Blaine had shot his way through the door and emerged with a first-aid kit in hand.

  “Here,” he said, offering it to Susan.

  She didn’t so much as look up from Josh’s inert body. “Unless there’s a portable defibrillating machine in there, don’t bother.”

  She was compressing the boy’s chest again as Blaine positioned himself to take over the breathing portion of the CPR.

  “This is no good,” she said, her breathing growing labored. “We’re going to lose him.”

  “No defibrillator. Sorry.”

  “Not yet,” Susan said, looking around the room before fixing her stare on Johnny Wareagle. “Take over for me. Please.”

  Johnny slid into place without missing a beat, his motions surprisingly gentle considering the power he was capable of exerting.

  Susan disappeared briefly into an adjacent storage room located between this
and another science lab. She reemerged holding what looked like a long, thin black box. Blaine recognized it as a simple voltage capacitor, a staple in every school science lab for use in any experiment dealing with electricity. He watched as she stripped the wires free of its back, revealing two pairs identical in all ways but color. She left the capacitor on another table near the closest electrical outlet and then strung the red and blue wires toward Josh. Johnny Wareagle suspended his rhythmic pumping long enough to allow her to strip open the boy’s shirt and place the ends of the wires on either side of his pale chest.

  Blaine couldn’t believe his eyes. “You’re not going to …”

  “He’ll die if I don’t try.”

  Johnny went back to pumping, Blaine to breathing. Susan returned to the capacitor and lowered the white and black wires toward the electrical outlet.

  “Stand clear on my signal. Ready … now!”

  A brief sizzling sound followed and the lights dimmed momentarily as Josh’s body lurched upward. Blaine started administering CPR again while Johnny felt the boy’s heart. He looked at Susan and shook his head.

  “Get ready to stand clear again. Ready … now!”

  And again she jabbed the black and white wires into the wall socket, pulling them out after a single count.

  Josh’s body jumped again, back arching as the current jolted his body. Johnny Wareagle gave a great sigh and nodded.

  “He’s breathing!” Blaine proclaimed as Susan rushed back to the boy.

  “Normal cardiac rhythm,” she announced happily, raising the ear she had lowered to his chest.

  Watching her making use of whatever she could find to save the boy’s life was eerily familiar to McCracken. In Vietnam he had seen plenty of medics at work in the field, poorly equipped and under intolerable conditions, men who could save kids who’d lost a chunk of their stomachs or skulls with no more than what they could carry in their backpacks. Holding them tight, soothing them with words while they waited for the drugs to take effect. Miracle workers in every sense of the word. It was easy to rip flesh apart. The real heroes were the ones who put it back together.

  Watching Susan now, that was what he thought of. She moved with the same refined urgency the Nam medics did; she had the same eyes. Professional and unyielding. They could look into the gristle of a grunt’s shrapnel or bullet-scorched wound and tie the ruptured arteries off with a shoelace, if that’s what it took.

  “He’s not out of the woods yet,” she reported. “Far from it.”

  “It won’t matter unless the Indian and I can work our kind of magic,” McCracken told her.

  “In here, Blainey,” Johnny said from the entrance to the storage room. McCracken joined him inside and saw the chemicals lined up in jars and containers filling shelves from floor to ceiling.

  “Charcoal … sulphur … and … saltpeter,” he said as he pulled each from the shelves. “Everything we need, Indian.”

  “Just about, Blainey.”

  McCracken was nodding, his thoughts mirroring Wareagle’s. “Some one-inch PVC pipes—foot-long connectors, preferably—and seals to go atop them.”

  “Heavy-duty twine, too, for fuses,” Johnny added.

  “All likely to be available in the wood or metal shop,” McCracken suggested.

  Johnny hurried off, leaving Blaine to his part of the work. He had no idea how long they had before the school would come under siege by Group Six troops. It would take a certain amount of time to gather and equip Fuchs’s men as well as transport them to the school. Say half an hour maybe, twenty minutes at the very least.

  He cleared off a table in the center of the storage room and placed on it the three jars he had pulled from the shelves.

  “Gunpowder,” Susan said, reading their labels from the doorway.

  “How’s the kid?”

  “His vital signs are normal. He’s stable for now.”

  “Good, because I need you. There are some candles there on the right.” And, after Susan quickly located them, “Break them into small pieces while I start mixing these powders up. Then melt them. You’ll find the Bunsen burners over—”

  “I see them.”

  He half watched her pile the resulting fragments of wax into a dish over a Bunsen burner he had found on another shelf. The hiss of its blue flame splashed heat upward and the wax began to melt almost instantly.

  Satisfied, he turned his attention to emptying the proper amounts of sulphur, saltpeter and charcoal into a plastic bowl and swirled them together. That done, he located a tray containing a dozen large test tubes and rested it on the table next to the bowl half filled with what was now gunpowder. The tubes jangled together in their slots. He stuck a funnel in the first and held it in place while Susan filled it. They repeated the process with the other tubes, enough gunpowder to fill ten in all.

  When they were finished, Blaine searched the shelves until he found a glass jar containing potassium nitrate.

  “What’s that for?” Susan asked him.

  “Turning our twine into fuses once the Indian gets back with it.”

  He had just poured the potassium nitrate into a steel bowl when Johnny Wareagle returned and set a box down on the counter adjacent to the table Susan and Blaine been working on.

  “Eight pieces of PVC piping,” he said to both of them, displaying one of the sections. It was a foot long by an inch and a half in diameter. McCracken laid the pipes out in a neat row before him while Wareagle began the process of sealing their bottoms with hard rubber stoppers. Susan, meanwhile, got ready to pour in the contents of the test tubes they had filled.

  “Not yet,” Blaine told her, his eyes sweeping about the shelves again. “One more thing we’ve got to add …”

  By the time Wareagle finished sealing the bottom ends of the PVC pipes, McCracken had found what he was looking for: ajar of phosphorus. He took the first finished pipe and filled it almost to the one-quarter point with the shiny gray powder. He repeated that process with the remaining seven while Wareagle poured a bit of water atop the evened-off powder and Susan funneled the melted wax into a narrow beaker. Then she poured a small measure atop the water in each of the eight plastic pipes.

  While Susan poured the wax, Blaine turned his attention to the twine Johnny had brought with him from the shop. Working in tandem, they cut off eight foot-long strands and laid them in the bowl of potassium nitrate to soak, turning them flammable.

  Turning them into fuses.

  By that time the wax had hardened, trapping the water and phosphorus inside the pipes and assuring separation from the gunpowder they poured in through funnels. Susan managed to locate eight hard rubber test tube stoppers of the proper diameter to fit the top of the pipes, each equipped with a hole which would save them the trouble of drilling one to accommodate the makeshift fuses. Blaine twisted the stoppers into the open tops of the pipes and squeezed them in as far as they would go.

  Johnny had already removed the foot-long strips of twine from the bowl of potassium nitrate and laid them across some paper towels on the table.

  “Five minutes to dry, Indian.”

  “Leaving us time for other projects.”

  “Other projects?”

  “The spirits were kind to us tonight, Blainey. I found something else in the shop area we can use.”

  “Not bad, Indian,” Blaine said when he saw what Johnny had waiting for him in the lobby.

  The logistics of the school’s sprawling layout made enacting an elaborate defense difficult at best. The two-story main wing of the building, which contained the science labs and lobby, ran north and south, while a pair of parallel one-story wings connected to it here and next to the nurse’s office ran east and west. The main wing was closer to the woods lying on the outer rim of the playing fields which extended the length of the parallel corridors, all the way to the street beyond where the enemy was undoubtedly amassing. Primary points of access, then, were three: the main entrance, and the two hallways accessible via a second school e
ntrance too far away—and close to the street—to be defensible. Clearly they could not stop the enemy from entering; their strategy turning toward cutting off their approach to the main wing. And the twin tanks Johnny Wareagle had hauled up from the school’s shop would certainly prove beneficial here.

  “Acetylene,” Blaine said, gazing at them.

  Johnny had placed the tanks at the head of the hallway on the school’s right side where it joined with the lobby They would be visible from atop the stairwell leading to the second floor directly behind them but, more importantly, not from the main entry doors on the right past the main office.

  Blaine watched Wareagle produce a hammer from his back pocket and carefully begin tapping the valves on each of the twin tanks. Too soft would have too slow an effect. Too hard might pop them off prematurely. Johnny fell into an easy rhythm, the chink-chink sound no louder than a clock’s ticking.

  “One more hard knock will do it, Blainey,” he said when McCracken returned from the nearby school library with a pair of huge dictionaries.

  Blaine gazed down the hall that led to the library and the other wing of the building. A pair of double doors stood at the foot of a slight decline sixty feet away. Anyone entering from the opposite end of the building and taking this corridor would have to pass through those doors to get to the main wing.

  Johnny followed his eyes and his thoughts. “They open to the outside, Blainey.”

  “Meaning someone coming toward us from the other end of the building would have to pull them … .”

  They looked at each other, no need for further discussion. Together they centered the tanks directly in front of those doors at the very start of the hall’s decline. While Johnny held the tanks in place, Blaine positioned the books so the loosened valves would strike them if toppled. Then he fastened one end of the heavy twine they had used to make fuses for the pipe bombs to the top of the acetylene tanks at the same time Wareagle ran the remainder out all the way to the closed double doors. He looped the twine through both handles and pulled until it stretched taut while McCracken held fast to the tanks so they would do no more than wobble from the strain.