Moving back to his truck, he studied the sides of the road. No storm drain. His stomach lurched. He knew things had been going too well. Holding the Benelli in one hand, he marched down the length of the road, eyeing the thawing forest on either side. At one point he stopped and regarded his pickup, about fifty feet away. Feeling exasperated for not checking on such an important part of his plan, he jogged back to the truck. Fuel oozed out along the concrete, moving away from the tanks and toward the gate where it would go… nowhere.
“Goddamnit.” Gus started the truck and made a three point turn, turning it around and driving slowly down the road.
What’s wrong?
the captain asked.
Gus didn’t answer. He searched carefully, hoping to Christ he hadn’t just wasted all that fuel.
Then, he spotted it.
Stopping the pickup, he slapped the machine into reverse and backed up to the iron grate set into the curb. Only one opening, but it was all he needed. He jumped out of the truck and sized up the storm drain. He looked back toward the Western Oil facility and figured he was perhaps three or four hundred feet away from the nearest tank, away from all that glorious flammable goodness.
“Oh, man,” he muttered, reaching up and clasping his hands together over his helmet. “Oh, man. Oh, man.”
He glanced at the captain still sitting in the passenger seat. “Not sure it’s goin’ to get here.”
The captain swore a particularly surprising oath coming from a bottle.
“Yeah.” Gus watched the road, hoping to see a tide of gas heading his way. “Shit, what can I do?”
The captain had no advice on the matter. In the ensuing silence, Gus reached inside the pickup, unscrewed the top from the bottle of rum, and took that very long drink he needed. Standing in the middle of the street with a bottle in his hand, he shook his head and felt his anxiety rise.
“Shit.” He replaced the cap on the bottle. He got aboard the truck and turned it around, heading back to the tanks. Parking the truck outside the gate, he got out and found a huge pool of gas flowing almost to the gatehouse, but it was headed away from the road, following the barest of inclines.
Gus looked toward the office and saw the answer just lying there. The sandbags. He splashed through the widening pool and got to the stack of sandbags. If he could build a low wall and divert the flow to the road outside, the curbs would channel the gas to the storm drain. Filled with new purpose, he grabbed one large sack, perhaps weighing ten kilograms, and lugged it over to where the dike wall stopped. He dropped the back, pushed it firm against the wall, and watched as the gas lapped against it, flowed along its length, and around.
More sandbags
.
He spent the next two hours building a low wall of sandbags which channelled the gas past the gatehouse and into the road. With the sandbags in place and stacked two layers high, the gas bled steadily into the street and followed the curb, heading towards the drain. Gus walked unsteadily on the long line of sandbags until he reached the gatehouse. Exhausted, he sat in the back of the truck, watching the gas flow by. He opened a can of beef stew, ate it with a spoon, and washed it down with equal sips of water and dark rum. The gas streamed by the truck tires, and Gus had an image of all four catching on fire. He didn’t get up to move the truck, however. The only thing moving his ass for the next little while would be deadheads, and he wouldn’t mind their company in the least.
An hour later, Gus started the truck. He drove slowly and stopped when he reached the drain on the right. Gas disappeared into its depths. On the left side of the road, the stream continued unabated. He drove on until he came to a second storm drain on that side, further down the road. He’d missed that one completely, but the gas trickled into it, too.
Gus drove a hundred feet before stopping and gazing back. The gas kept moving down the road and funneling into the storm drains. That sight filled Gus with a sense of hope and awe. He’d have to be very careful on that section of road right up until he finally dropped a match. He had no idea how long it would take for the fuel tanks to empty, or how long the flow of gas would take to reach the inner parts of town, and he wasn’t going to stick around to watch.
He had other things to do.
15
He pulled into a shopping mall parking lot spotted with deserted cars and melting snow. Backing up to a set of glass double doors, Gus killed the engine. He got out and breathed deeply of the moist cold air. Fresh air, he thought, couldn’t be beat. The zombies he’d put down a few days before were gone.
Gus looked for a handle on the doors and realized they were the automated kind. The main entrance had regular doors, but the set he stood in front of gave direct access into the E-Mart store. He had no intention of wandering in through the main doors and then walking the hundred meters or so through a dark shopping mall to get to E-Mart. But after lifting sandbags for a good chunk of the morning, he didn’t feel like smashing in the door with his bat, so he got back into the truck, slapped it into reverse, and slammed the rear through the doors with a resounding crash of glass and metal. A minute later, Gus stepped through the wrecked opening, with the Benelli loaded and ready. Fragments of debris dropped from above, tinkling as they landed on the floor.
“Anybody in here?” After a moment, he returned to the truck and got out a flashlight, sheathed the shotgun, and pulled out the Ruger. Crossing his wrists as he had seen cops and FBI agents do in movies so they could point the weapon in the same direction as the light beam, he stepped back into the mall store and flicked on the flashlight.
Moving quickly, Gus walked into the dark interior of the massive shopping store. He moved past checkout counters and empty display racks and headed down an aisle filled with gaming consoles locked behind glass display cases. He stopped at a junction and looked up to read the department signs—
Household
, followed by an arrow. Once he got his bearings, he stalked off in a straight line. He found the bedding section and took an armful of packaged cotton sheets. After a brief struggle to balance the sheets, gun, and flashlight, he retraced his steps.
When he emerged from the entrance, he tossed the three packages of sheets into the rear of the pickup. The image of the boy being consumed by a flood of corpses crossed his mind. He reached into the truck and found the bottle of rum. Taking a healthy shot, he stared at the parking lot. The booze made him forget about the boy.
He got aboard his truck and returned to the storm drains. Gus got out and inspected the steady stream of gas flowing underground. The sight of it, like a shallow summertime brook, made him smile. He climbed up into the back of the pickup and pulled out the Bowie knife. He cut open the first package and opened up the sheet. Yellow summer flowers in a swirly pattern covered the material. Gus sawed the knife downward and cut a narrow strip from one end of the sheet to the other. Tying the strips together, he made one long fuse which he rolled up like an extension cord. Once done with the first, he got to work on the other sheets and made ten long lengths.
Once the fuses were all cut and rolled, he got down from the truck and unceremoniously dropped them into the combined flow of gas and ethanol, saturating the material. He tossed the soaked wads of cotton into the back of the truck. He wasn’t sure if dipping the lengths in the mixture of flammable goodness was a good idea or not, but he was willing to chance it. What was the worst could happen? He’d be blown to hell and probably not even know it. When faced with that or being feasted upon by something that should rightfully be dead, the choice was pretty clear to him.
An hour later, the back of his truck was filled with the soaking masses of the cotton sheet fuses. Puddles of the fuel mixture seeped onto the metal floor. Gus got aboard the truck and drove away. He wanted to start blowing things up
right then
.
Driving back into town, Gus thought his nerves were becoming a little twitchy. The sky turned red as he stopped the truck perhaps fifty feet away from the first gas station. He pulled over on the opposite side of the road, with his truck pointed away from the station and ready for a fast escape. He got out, took a deep mind-clarifying breath, and readied the shotgun.
Was he really about to blow up a gas station? Eight stations, all chosen because of their locations. Once destroyed, the blasts would corral the rats to the center of the city, right where the drainage system converged.
There were other buildings nearby the first station. One was a windshield-repair place; another was a mom-and-pop take-out restaurant. A few houses stood beyond those. Bare trees leaned in between, as the valley was ever so blessed with the huge elms and a few stalks of spruce and pine. Gus thought they would all would burn like afterburners once lit.
The streets were devoid of gimps. He walked across the pavement and reached the overhead canopy displaying,
Frank’s Gas Stop and Service Station,
in bold-faced red lettering. One of the doors to the garage bay stood open, and Gus momentarily stopped and pondered. He looked around and saw that the streets were still clear.
He went around to the left of the station and searched the ground. He didn’t find what he wanted there, so he headed for the other side. Passing in front of the open bay door, he saw something that immediately captured his attention.
A sledgehammer on a workbench.
For some reason he couldn’t explain, he wanted that sledgehammer. Images of bashing in the skulls of deadheads flashed through his mind, then the zombie faces morphed into the face of the boy. He shoved that image away and stepped warily into the shadowy bay. Several tools hung from the wall, but he wasn’t interested in any of those. He placed the Benelli on the bench and gripped the handle of the sledgehammer, grunting when he hefted the thing. Heavy and unwieldy, the reality of the tool dismissed any notion of actually using it in combat.
Still, it was going with him.
He hurried back to the truck, glancing up and down the streets for zombies. The sledgehammer went into the back, and he returned to his search, finding what he wanted only minutes later––the manhole cover to the underground tanks. With his crowbar, he wrestled the cover off and gazed down at a gaping hole big enough to plug with a two-liter pop bottle, used when tankers brought in their loads to refill the tanks. A telltale wisp of gasoline tantalized him. Staring down that black eye caused a shiver to shoot through him, and he balked, thinking of the ramifications of what he intended to do. Only for a few seconds, however.
He retrieved one of his dripping fuses from the back of his truck. Getting down on his knees, he found it was difficult to stuff the strip any distance down the opening, but another quick search of the garage produced a sixty centimeter dipstick made of wood, no wider than his thumb. He jammed the fuse into the hole, pushing it as far down as he could with the dipstick. Once that was done, he paused and waited for a few seconds. When he realized he was still alive, he stood and backed away from the hole, unravelling the fuse all the way back to the truck.
He had perhaps a sixty foot length of fuse which ended right at the pickup’s driver’s side. He dropped the sheet once its limit was reached and took a lighter from the truck. He lit the end of the fuse and watched the flame lick up the gas soaked cloth. It moved quickly, and Gus suddenly realized where he was standing. Cursing, he jumped into the pickup and started it. He looked over his shoulder and saw that the fuse had already burned halfway to the hole. Slamming his foot down on the accelerator, he peeled away.
He got four truck lengths down the street when the fuel container ignited and exploded. The crash of sound and flash of flame made him hunch down in the seat. He divided his attention between the road ahead and the image in his rear view mirror as he kept driving.
Reaching the hundred meter mark, Gus slowed to a stop and got half way out of the truck to look back.
“Whoa,” was all he could say, facing the burning station. Black smoke curled and flowered into the air, obscuring the road and everything around it.
Chunks of debris began peppering the road and houses, trailing wild streamers of smoke as if they were dying meteors. He heard glass shatter somewhere, a splintery smashing of wood, then a slab of smouldering pavement the size of his foot landed ten feet away from the rear of the pickup.
Gus remembered the remaining fuses, exposed and soaking fuel. He jumped inside the truck and got going, cringing and waiting for that one superheated rock or fiery piece of debris to end it all. In his mirrors, he saw chunks, both big and small, sizzling down from the heavens, while black smoke continued billowing from the station.
Another blast startled him, distracting him from the road, but he wouldn’t slow the truck. A glance in a mirror showed a fireball, partially obscured by a wall of smoke, rising into the air, before dissipating in glorious fashion.
Gus made a turn, and the scene left his mirrors. He kept his foot on the gas until the fear of being hit by something eased. He finally pulled over in a dark section of town and looked back in the direction of the explosion. Sounds of smaller blasts perforated the stillness like distant fire crackers, and the bank of black smoke hung in the air like something from hell, unleashed and hungry.
“Christ almighty.” Gus was just beginning to fully understand the destructive energy he’d set off. “Christ on a stick.”
He couldn’t imagine what the station looked like, but he knew from the periodical stabs of flame in the distance that other things had caught fire. A soft rumbling rolled over the rooftops, as if the earth itself had taken a sabot round in the ass and was none too pleased about it. He got out of the truck and stood beside it, gawking at the distant area, half-ready to get the hell further away if needed. The smoke continued to rise as whatever combustible material near the site ignited and burned. The sky became darker, and the sun was nowhere to be seen.