by Cleek, Caleb
Meagan punched him in the arm. “That’s not what I meant. I’m just glad to have an occasional reminder of the finer things in life.”
“A bed that doesn’t even have a blanket qualifies as one of the finer things in life? If you’re that easy to keep happy, I should marry you right now.”
“Sorry to burst you bubble, but I’m only twenty-two and since I was about five years old, my dad has told me I’m not even allowed to date until I’m thirty-five. You’re gonna have to wait for thirteen years.” As soon as she said it, her head dropped, her infectious smile vanished, and tears began welling up in her eyes.
Zeke cautiously wrapped his arm around her shoulder in an awkward attempt to comfort her. Accepting his half-hearted embrace, Meagan wrapped both of her arms around him and for the second time in two days, buried her head in his chest and wept.
Chapter 26
In less than a minute, Meagan was wiping the tears from her eyes and apologizing. “I’m sorry for losing it again. I keep forgetting my parents are gone,” she said, sniffling. “My dad and I were really close. Talking about him reminded me that he’s gone.” She inhaled again, the loose mucus in her nose gurgling as air passed through it and sucked it further up into her sinus passages.
“Don’t worry about it. I understand,” Zeke said, trying to comfort her and surprisingly not minding her exhibitions of emotion. “I’ll give you two more outbursts and then you’re going to have to keep it together.”
Meagan laughed and said, “Thanks. That’s really generous of you.” Tears continued draining from her eyes and into her sinuses and nose, resulting in the formation of more snot than she could contain. Embarrassed, she turned away from Zeke, pulled the front of the shirt up to her face and blew her nose on the fabric.
“That has to be the most repulsive thing I have ever seen. And in light of what I have experienced during the last day, that’s saying a lot,” Zeke asserted, feigning disgust as she turned around.
Zeke’s response caused the capillaries in her face to open up, raising the temperature of her skin and turning it a rosy hue of red. “I’m sorry. I can’t believe I just did that in front of you,” she uttered in humiliation.
“This definitely takes our relationship to a new level. I think this means I can fart in front of you now,” Zeke teased with a twinkle in his eye.
“Uhh, no! You will never be allowed to fart in my presence,” she said as her face once again lit up and the excess blood drained away, removing the previous sign of embarrassment. She grabbed onto the bend in his arm and pulled him to the last door. “Let’s see if there’s anything worthwhile behind lucky door number thirteen.” Slipping the blade of her knife between the latch and the door, she quickly circumvented the lock.
“I’d say this one is worthwhile,” Zeke exclaimed excitedly. The last door opened into the maintenance shop. Sitting in one of the bays was a red pickup truck. He loped across the shop and pulled the door open. The interior of the truck dinged, indicating the keys were in the ignition. Sliding into the seat, he twisted the key forward. The engine growled to life without hesitation.
Zeke looked over the gauges and stuck his head out the open door, happily proclaiming, “It has a full tank of gas! We’re in business.”
“That’s great. Now why don’t you turn it off before you poison us with carbon monoxide?”
“Fair enough. I want to check on your admirer’s outside and see if they’re losing interest anyway,” he answered.
Encouraged by the presence of a vehicle, especially one with a full tank of fuel, Zeke quickly traversed the length of the hallway and peered out the window. The area in front of the building was still full of infected, standing room only.
Meagan stood beside him and looked out the window in the opposite door. “There are just as many as an hour ago. Why aren’t they leaving?”
“Who knows? Maybe they don’t have a reason to go anywhere else. Right here is probably just as good as wherever they were before. This does present an interesting opportunity, though.”
“How can this be an opportunity?” she asked dubiously.
“With all the noise we made up there, I suspect we attracted most of the free infected in town and now they’re all huddled in a tight group right outside the front door. We have an opportunity to help out the town by killing them all with a single BANG!” he said enthusiastically as he clapped his hands together. “We have everything we need right behind you in the chemistry lab.”
“Do you know anything about chemistry?” she asked doubtfully.
“I should,” he answered excitedly. “When I was in college, I doubled majored. Chemistry was my second major. I have just the thing in mind. Have you ever heard of TATP?”
“No, I can’t say that I have. What is it?”
“Triacetone Triperoxide, or TATP, is a high order explosive that’s made from chemicals found in every basic chemistry storeroom. It’s unusual among explosives because it doesn’t contain any nitrogenous compounds. The other thing that makes it unusual is that its decomposition isn’t exothermic or heat producing. The instability of the molecule comes from weak bonds between oxygen atoms within the molecule. When these bonds are stressed by shock or heat, they catastrophically break apart. A single molecule of TATP rapidly breaks down into a molecule of ozone and three molecules of acetone in its gaseous state. The four new gas molecules take up a lot more space than the original molecule which was in the solid state. The decomposition creates a shockwave as the new molecules are forced outward. The force of one molecule decomposing into four gaseous molecules is enough to cause all the other TATP molecules to explosively break down at the same time. All of the molecules coming apart at once create a huge blast. The explosion is eighty-three percent as strong as an equal amount of TNT, so it’s pretty powerful stuff.” Zeke paused as he transitioned from instructor mode back to conversation mode. “Unless you have something more pressing to do, I was thinking of whipping up a batch this evening.”
“Do you even know how to make it?” she asked with notable skepticism in her voice.
“Does the pope wear a funny hat?” he asked.
Meagan stared at him blankly.
“Yes, I know how to make it. I probably made fifty batches of it in college. It was our Saturday night study break ritual. As long as the weather was good, we would make a couple ounces in the lab and then go set it off somewhere out in the countryside.”
With her eyebrows raised questioningly, she asked, “What are we going to do with it?”
“We’re going to blow it up,” he said, unable to restrain the glee in his voice.
“Are we going to need blasting caps to set it off?” The more she heard, the more uncomfortable she was becoming.
“Blasting caps?” he laughed. “No way. This stuff is super unstable. The first time I made it, I was a TA for the high school chemistry teacher. I started it after school one day. The next day I went in to finish it while Mr. Robertson was at lunch. I was just about to pour the beaker through a filter to separate out the crystals when the door opened. I thought it was the teacher and spilled half the beaker on the counter. It turned out it wasn’t the teacher, but I got spooked. Instead of doing a proper cleanup, I wiped it up with paper towels and tossed them in the garbage can. I didn’t think about it at the time, but the paper towels picked up all the crystals from the countertop as well as the acid solution.
“Back then I didn’t know anything about chemistry. I made it using an internet recipe I downloaded in the Anarchist Cookbook. It turns out the recipe was no good and the stuff was way too unstable. I was lucky I didn’t blow my fingers off.
“Anyway, the trash can didn’t get emptied over the weekend and the crystals dried out and decomposed. Monday morning, Mr. Robertson came into class and tossed an old printer ribbon cartridge into the trash can from across the room. The crystals were so unstable they only required a small vibration to set them off. The three point ribbon shot was more than enough. The explo
sion split the trash can in half and blew out the closest window. Luckily, Mr. Robertson was across the room and didn’t get hurt. I heard about it later that day and didn’t make any more TATP until I was in college and had the knowledge to do it safely, or at least relatively safely.”
Zeke was all grins by the time he was finished with the story. The memories it brought back greatly improved what had been a dreary outlook minutes before.
“What do you need me to do?” Meagan questioned, not really sure she even wanted to be part of the science experiment Zeke was proposing.
“That door over there has to be the chemical store room. Go do your thing on the lock so I can get the chemicals I need to get started.”
“I wish I could, but my magic won’t work on that door. It has a latch guard. Apparently word of your high school chemistry exploits must have made it all the way across the country.”
“That figures. The educational system is hard at work to prevent imaginative boys from fully appreciating the wonders of what you can do with chemistry. It looks like we’re going have to do this the old fashioned way. I’ll be right back.” Zeke disappeared from the classroom, his running footfalls echoing down the hall way only to slap their way back moments later. When he entered the chemistry room, he had a hammer in one hand and a chisel in the other.
“Are you going to chisel the latch out of the door?” she asked suspiciously.
“No, nothing so draconian as that,” he answered ruefully as he used the hammer and chisel to first knock the lower hinge pin out of the door, and then the upper pin. The door teetered as its weight rested precariously on the latch and the unsecured hinges.
“Step aside, if you don’t mind.”
As Meagan moved to the left, Zeke placed the chisel behind the hinge and leveraged it outward until the door tilted slightly in the frame. The door hung, momentarily seesawing. Then Newton and his apples took over and the whole thing came crashing down, nearly crushing Zeke’s toes into a pulpy mess as the weight of the solid oak door took a gouge from the floor a mere quarter inch from the end of his shoe.
Zeke smiled at the metal shelf lined with large, brown glass bottles. He ran his finger over the labels, examining each as he went. Grabbing three from various locations on the shelf, he enthusiastically roared, “This should get us started,” as he set them down on the counter. “Hydrochloric acid, peroxide, and acetone: just what the doctor ordered.”
“You’re into this way too much. Should I be calling the FBI right now?” Meagan warily asked.
“If the FBI were to show up, we could skip this whole process. Why don’t you see if they can come on over and rescue us?” Zeke said as he poured a clear liquid into a large graduated cylinder, carefully eyeing the level as it slowly climbed past line after line, making its way up the glass sides of the container. “That ought to do,” he said, bending down so his eye was level with the meniscus, making sure it was exactly where he wanted it.
He poured the liquid into a larger beaker and set it aside and repeated the process with the other two bottles. With the measuring done, he took the beakers into the teacher’s room and placed them in the freezer. As the liquids were cooling, he returned to the classroom and brought a cart full of supplies from the chemistry lab into the teacher’s room.
“Why are you bringing the lab into the teacher’s room?” Meagan questioned.
“I figured I could work on the bomb while I cook up a couple steaks for dinner. Personally, I’ve always found it a lot easier to cook dinner on the stove than over a Bunsen burner. Besides, the atmosphere is way better in here than in the lab. Half of a good steak dinner is the atmosphere in which you eat it.”
Ten minutes later, with the aid of a spatula, Zeke scooped two sizzling steaks from the pan and flopped each one onto a plate beside the salad Meagan had prepared. “I don’t know about you, but I’m starved,” he said, sliding Meagan’s plate in front of where she sat at the table.
After dinner, Zeke combined the chemicals and put them in an ice bath which he placed in one of the refrigerators. “That should do it for the bomb until tomorrow.”
The next afternoon, he dumped the contents of the large beakers into coffee filters which collected white crystals as the liquid drained through. “We’ll let these dry over night and by tomorrow, they should be ready to go -- or maybe I should say, ready to blow.”
Chapter 27
That evening, Zeke and Meagan sat down to another dinner, each with one of G. Howe’s steaks, salad, and a soda in front of them. There hadn’t been a lot of food to cook, but a half pound steak was more than enough to fill the hollow feeling in their stomachs that candy bars hadn’t satisfied during the day.
“You would think that G. Howe would at least have a decent steak knife to cut these prime pieces of meat,” Meagan said in frustration as she struggled to cut her three-quarter inch steak with a butter knife.
“Try this,” Zeke said, handing her his multi-tool which he had been using to cut his own meat.
“That’s more like,” she said as the blade sliced through the meat, blood seeping from the pink center. “It’s hard to believe we’re sitting here eating steak while the world is falling apart around us. I hardly ever ate steak when the world was going along the way it was supposed to.”
After dinner, Meagan suggested turning on the news to see what was happening. Zeke picked up the remote and mashed the power button down with his finger. The TV clicked as the circuitry activated. The screen remained dark for several seconds while it warmed up. Eventually, an arrangement of colored bars appeared, replacing the black screen. A high pitched tone convinced Zeke to push the mute button. A message scrolled across the bottom of the screen, indicating to viewers that the station was off the air.
Zeke hit the recall button to switch to CNN. It was the same. He rapidly scrolled through the channels, searching for something with news. A handful of channels were broadcasting, but they were merely playing programs that had been locked into a computer days, or even weeks, before. There was nothing live on any of the stations.
“This isn’t a good sign,” Meagan said flatly. “If all the big news stations are down, it’s truly falling apart out there. It has to be even worse than we’ve imagined.”
Zeke nodded his head in silent agreement as he flipped through the channels one more time to make sure he hadn’t missed anything. He hadn’t. They still showed the same screen with colored bars and some type of no transmission message.
Meagan stood up suddenly, nearly knocking her chair over in her haste. “I saw a radio in one of the offices. Maybe there’s a radio station that’s still broadcasting.” Zeke followed her down the hall into the office. It was an antiquated unit with analogue controls. She took it off the wall, placed it on the desk, and sat in the principal’s plush leather chair. Zeke sat across the desk from her in the chair reserved for troubled youth in need of guidance. Suspecting he was probably well acquainted with the chair opposite the principal, she made a joking comment about his seeming familiarity with where he sat.
“Hmm,” Zeke smiled. “It’s been a long time, but I guess I do feel at home in this seat. It brings back a lot of memories, but most of them aren’t good.”
Meagan laughed as she flicked the power switch past the detent marked cassette and aligned it with the radio demarcation. The single speaker emitted a harsh static buzz. “Unless he had it tuned to static for white noise, whatever station it was set to is no longer broadcasting.” She quickly spun the tuning knob and the orange indicator rapidly traveled down the frequency numbers to eighty-seven. She slowly drew her finger across the frequency selector again, this time in the opposite direction. The indicator climbed up the frequencies. The speaker weakly emitted the familiar tune of a top forty hit. The sound clarified and she stopped. “Here’s one that’s still broadcasting.”
“No, that’s an iPod station out of Atlanta.”
“An iPod station?” she asked, arching her eyebrows.
“Th
at’s what I call them. It’s a station where they have a big playlist on a computer and put it on random. The computer just plays songs. It doesn’t have to have anybody there to keep it going.”
“Got it,” she said as she continued through the frequency range. She stopped at several more stations long enough to see if there was a DJ. They all seemed to be pre-recorded or playing from a random playlist.
“It was a good idea anyway,” Zeke said. “I guess we’re not going to be getting any information after all.”
“Not so fast, we still have the AM stations.” She flicked a selector from FM to AM and started backwards through the range. “We have a better chance of finding something here than on FM,” she said, the hope in her voice being contagious.
“Nobody listens to AM radio. Why would we have a better chance?” Zeke questioned.
“Two reasons. First, AM stations tend to be more of the small mom and pop type of operation. They fill in unique niches. I would imagine that type of operation would be more likely to keep broadcasting. If you’re working for a big corporation when all this breaks loose, you’re not going to stick around. If you’re working at the station you have poured your life into, you won’t be so quick to abandon it.
“Secondly, AM radio waves are lower frequency transmissions. They bounce off the ionosphere and are reflected back down to earth long distances from where they were broadcast: in effect, they can get around the curvature of the earth. FM signals are higher frequency. They pass right through the ionosphere without being reflected. They’re good for line of sight only.”
“How in the world do you know about that?” Zeke asked.
“Same as you, Chemistry Boy. I have a physics minor. I learned it in college.” Halfway through the frequencies, a voice came in through loud static. Meagan moved the antenna around and it disappeared.
“I would undo whatever you just did,” Zeke advised.
“Thank you, Captain Obvious,” she retorted quickly as she moved the antenna back to its initial orientation. The signal returned. It wasn’t clear, but it was understandable. More importantly, it was a live broadcast. They listened for an hour straight to what was mostly old news, rumor, and hearsay. A phone rang in the studio and the commentator apologized, stating he was expecting a call from his son and had to take it, but would continue with more information after the call.