Pete McCray was in Nitko’s security office dumping sugar into a cup of coffee when Kevin Radowski marched in and shot him five times in the chest. McCray dropped to the tile floor facedown, knocking his ceramic coffee mug and the glass sugar dispenser off the table in the process. The blood oozing from his body mingled with the hot coffee and the sugar granules, creating a ghastly stew that, remarkably, smelled like grape jelly. Kevin finished him off with a shot to the back of the head.

“Have a nice day,” Kevin said, tipping his Nitko cap to the fallen officer.

Kevin had grown up in one of the shitty little company houses on the dirt road behind the plant. He’d had a happy childhood, mostly, but on a shelf somewhere in the deepest, darkest recesses of his subconscious cellar stood a row of Mason jars marked Bathtime with Mama. All of these jars were filled with splish-splash warmth and joy, with Mr. Bubble and toy boats and a rubber dinosaur named Roscoe.

All of them, that is, except one.

In this one particularly cloudy sample, two-year-old Kevin did something horrible, something vile and disgusting and practically unforgivable.

But he was only two, after all. He thought massaging Mama’s back with poo-poo was a good thing. He did it while she rinsed her hair, and she told him it felt oh so good. But when she looked in the mirror and discovered what Kevin had actually done to her, she cursed and shouted and violently beat his tender little ass raw with the palm of her hand.

It was the last time he ever took a bath with Mama, and the painful memory was repressed almost immediately.

Despite the nightmares and frequent bouts of constipation related to his grave mistake as a toddler, Kevin Radowski did well in school and managed to project an appearance of normalcy. In tenth grade he even tried out and made the baseball team. Some of the guys started calling him K-Rad that year, using the great major league infielder Alex Rodriguez-A-Rod-as inspiration.

The nickname stuck.

K-Rad graduated from high school with a B average, but he lacked focus and discipline and flunked out of college after two semesters. That’s when he started working for Nitko. That was twelve years ago.

K-Rad had never been arrested, had never been in any trouble with the law, and had obtained a Florida concealed-weapons permit with no problem. He owned a pair of Berettas, the M9 model used by the U.S. military and scores of police agencies, and he owned two twenty-round magazines and a silencer and a LaserMax for each pistol. He went to the firing range every chance he got. It was his hobby. It excited him in ways that a woman couldn’t.

He grabbed Officer McCray’s pistol and cell phone and shoved the items into his backpack. He knew the silenced gunshots from his Berettas would attract very little attention. Nitko was a noisy place, even in the offices. Booms and clanks and whistles and horns, electric motors blending product and pneumatic pumps sucking it through the presses and into packaging machines, forklifts whining and ventilation fans humming and every other kind of noise pollution imaginable filtered in from the production area all day every day. And on top of all that, many of the front-office employees listened to music through earbuds while they worked at their computers. An army tank could blast through the front door and they wouldn’t know it.

K-Rad closed the security office door, poured himself a cup of coffee, and waited. In a little over an hour, the real fun would begin.

Matthew Cahill rose with the sun, grabbed his ax from his backpack, and walked outside. Behind the double-wide mobile home there were pieces of oak branches and sections of trunk cut into eighteen-inch lengths with a chainsaw. The wood appeared to have been thrown haphazardly from the back of a truck, and someone with a log splitter could have come over and turned it all into stackable firewood in a few hours. The job would take Matt a lot longer, but if he came out early for a while every morning, he should be able to finish in a week. That was the plan.

He positioned the largest piece of trunk roughly in the center of the mess and used it for a chopping block. He hefted a log onto the block, came down hard with his grandfather’s razor-sharp axhead, and split the formidable chunk of hardwood into two pieces with a single swing. He split those two pieces in half, grabbed another log, and repeated the process.

It was a hazy, humid, late-summer dawn, and Matt soon worked up a thick lather of sweat. He peeled his shirt off, wiped his face with it, and kept chopping. How Janey had loved to watch him swing that ax. She would stand on the deck with a cup of coffee and watch the splinters and sweat droplets fly, and when he finished she would often attack him in the bedroom before he had a chance to shower. She would drop to her knees and lick the salty skin on his inner thighs. She drove him crazy when she did that, and what she did next could only be described as magic. Matt would never love another woman the way he loved Janey. He knew in his heart that he would not.

He looked over and saw her standing there with a white ceramic coffee mug, and for an instant he was back in Deerpark, Washington, and his beloved was still alive. He shook his head, squinted, and focused. It was Shelly Potts, of course, standing there in her pink bathrobe, and this was Copperhead Springs, Florida.

Copperhead Springs had a Wal-Mart and a community college and a single-screen movie theater built in the twenties. The U.S. Army had housed troops there during World War II, and some of the barracks along the river had since been torn down and others converted to condos. There was a tattoo parlor and a barbershop and a two-story motor lodge painted flamingo pink.

Matt had struck up a conversation with Shelly a few nights ago in a bar and grill called the Retro. Matt said he needed work, Shelly said she knew of a temporary opening, and one thing led to another. Shelly seemed to enjoy his company, in and out of bed, knowing he would eventually be moving on. The temporary job she helped him get was at her own place of employment, a hundred-degree metal oven disguised as a chemical plant called Nitko. Today would be his third and final day.

Shelly had a towel wrapped around her head, and her face looked freshly scrubbed.

“Hey, sexy. Come on in and I’ll fix you some breakfast.”

“Sounds good,” Matt said. “I’ll just grab a quick shower first.”

Shelly laughed. “I was going to suggest that.”

Matt bathed and put on a fresh pair of Wranglers and a clean white T-shirt. He walked to the kitchen. A glass of orange juice, six strips of bacon, and a stack of pancakes waited for him at the table.

“Looks great,” Matt said. He sat down and slathered the pancakes with butter and squeezed some syrup on them from a plastic bottle. Shelly brought him a hot cup of coffee.

Matt had ridden into Florida on a Greyhound and had seen a billboard advertising Nitko Chemicals just south of Palm Coast on Interstate 95. The smiling man on the sign had ulcers the size of quarters all over his face, shiny rotten boils oozing with green pus. Matt could see it. Others could not.

Not so long ago, a ski slope avalanche had buried Matt alive, and he spent three months in an icy grave. When he started thawing in the morgue, the doctor performing the autopsy discovered he had a pulse. Everyone called it a miracle. He made a full recovery, but soon after the accident a mysterious entity named Mr. Dark started frequenting his nightmares and waking moments alike. Everything this ghastly doctor of doom touched turned to rancid decay, and Matt had somehow acquired the ability to see it. Mr. Dark had obviously set up shop in Copperhead Springs-at Nitko, specifically-and Matt wanted to know why.

So far, he didn’t have a clue.

“Eat up,” Shelly said. “We need to get going in a few minutes.”

Matt took a bite from the pancake stack and washed it down with some coffee. There was something very satisfying about being here with Shelly, yet something disturbing as well. She projected a genuine warmth Matt hadn’t experienced in a long time, but occasionally she would stare into the distance as though entranced by some faraway vision. Matt wanted to know what it was she saw, but every time he brought it up she changed the subject.

She brewed another pot of coffee and filled a thermos with it. She wore jeans and steel-toed boots and a chambray work shirt. Her dark brown ponytail dangled from the back of a red Nitko ball cap. She sat at the table across from Matt.

“I can’t believe it’s Wednesday already,” she said. “So what are your plans, Mr. Matthew Cahill? You just going to wander around aimlessly forever?”

Matt had been traveling around the country for a while now. For the last few weeks, he’d been sleeping under the stars, bathing at filling-station restrooms, and dining on beans and Spam and bologna sandwiches.

“What makes you think my wandering is aimless?” he said.

“Ah. Let me guess. You’re searching for your soul. You’re trying to find the true meaning of life.”

“Or the true meaning of death,” Matt said. He took a bite of bacon.

“Ever think about settling down?”

“Sometimes.”

“You might be able to get on permanent at the plant. I know for a fact there’s an opening in Waterbase. One of the guys there got fired last week. It’s hard work, but the pay sucks.”

Matt grinned at Shelly’s joke, but the thought of signing on full-time at Nitko made his stomach tighten. Shelly had driven him there Monday morning and had led him up a set of concrete stairs and in through one of the loading-dock doors. Sweat beaded on his forehead almost immediately. Huge electric ventilation fans hummed high on the corrugated steel walls, but they didn’t move enough air to cool the building much and they didn’t adequately lift the blanket of chemical fumes. Shelly guided him through a labyrinth of industrial shelving stacked twenty feet high with cardboard boxes, five-gallon jugs, and fifty-five-gallon drums. Some of the containers were marked with labels that said, “Fire,” others with labels that said, “Ice.” Fire and Ice were Nitko’s flagship fountain solutions, Shelly had told him. They were top-of-the-line cleaning products for the printing industry, considered to be the gold standard worldwide since the mid-sixties. Fire was acidic and the color and clarity of orange soda, while Ice was alkaline and a shade or two darker than Windex.

In the distance electric motors whirred and pneumatic pumps pulsed and human beings shouted instructions at one another. Forklifts darted to and fro like confused squirrels, picking up pallets of product here and dropping them off there.

Matt and Shelly made it through the maze to the north side of the building, where there was an employee break room and men’s and women’s locker rooms and a Kronos electronic time clock. Shelly swiped her badge, and from there she took Matt to Human Resources and then to the main production area to talk to the foreman. The air was even hotter there, the fumes thicker and the din exponentially louder. The workers’ grim expressions spoke volumes. Stories of missed opportunities and unfulfilled dreams, of being stuck in a long and arduous never-ending journey to nowhere.

The conditions were horrible, the pay obscene. Matt felt sorry for Shelly and everyone else who depended on Nitko for a paycheck. Anyone unlucky enough to be born in Copperhead Springs stood a good chance of ending up in that hellhole, and it just wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair at all. No, Matt had no intention of working there permanently, but he did want to extend his job as a temp. He needed to find the reason behind that rotting face on the billboard.

He sipped his juice. “I like you a lot,” he said, “but I have to be honest with you. I’m just not ready to settle down yet.”

Matt saw Shelly’s hand tighten around her coffee cup. The muscles flared in her wrist and then relaxed, some battle surrendered without a fight.

“Typical man,” Shelly said. “Unable to commit. Come on. Let’s go to work.”

An administrative assistant who worked in Human Resources stood at the cluster of vending machines outside the security office, trying to decide which brand of soda to buy.

K-Rad stood behind her.

The woman’s name was Kelsey Froman. K-Rad had known her since elementary school. She’d been a homely little girl-thick glasses, metal braces that made her breath smell like the lid of a sardine can, hair the color of dirt. Cruel little monsters that they were, the other children nicknamed poor Kelsey Froman Frog Man, and they bullied her and teased her and reduced her to tears almost every day of fifth grade. She had blossomed at some point, though, and had morphed from an ugly duckling into a beautiful swan. Now she had a great body and a killer smile and contact lenses that brought out the blue in her eyes. Her long brown hair was expensively styled and streaked with highlights the color of bourbon. K-Rad had asked her out for a drink one time, and she had stifled a laugh and made up a lame story about her cousin being in town. Her loss.

Pepsi or Mountain Dew? Which one would it be? Kelsey Froman chose Mountain Dew. K-Rad’s favorite! She pressed the button, and her selection clattered to the receiving tray. When she bent over to retrieve it, K-Rad blasted a hole the size of silver dollar through the left cheek of her shapely ass. She fell to her hands and knees and retched, like a cat trying to cough up a hair ball. K-Rad lifted the back of her skirt, positioned the Beretta’s muzzle between her legs, and fired twice. She fell to the floor and stared blankly at the bottom of the drink machine. K-Rad opened the Mountain Dew and chugged it.

“Have a nice day, Frog Man,” he said, and walked on.

A six-foot chain-link fence topped with barbed wire and razor ribbon guarded the perimeter of Nitko’s property. Employees were required to scan their badges and enter a password into an electronic keypad to open the double set of gates to the parking area. There was one way in and one way out. It reminded Matt of a prison.

Shelly tooled around the parking lot in her 1995 Ford Taurus station wagon, ignoring the five-miles-per-hour speed limit, her head bobbing to the beat of an AC/DC song on the radio. She finally whipped into an open slot and braked to a stop with an abrupt jerk.

“I have a question,” she said. “Why do you bring that ax to work with you?”

Matt had stowed the tool on the floorboard between the front and back seats. He didn’t take it inside the plant with him, of course, but he liked having it nearby. “It’s my talisman,” he said. “My good-luck charm. I don’t go anywhere without my ax.”

“That’s not much of an answer,” Shelly said. She went into one of her spells then, staring through the windshield at something beyond the horizon.

Matt had to tell people something when they asked, but the ax was really much more to him than a good-luck charm. It was an heirloom, for one thing, and the only remaining connection to his former life in Washington. His grandfather had wielded it, and his father, and he hoped to pass it along to his own son or daughter someday. And there was something else about it, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. It was the only worldly possession he cared anything about, and he felt extremely uncomfortable when it wasn’t with him. Or at least within walking distance.

After a few seconds, Shelly snapped out of it and looked at her watch and said, “Come on, we’re going to be late.”

The way she drove, Matt thought, it was a wonder they weren’t late in more ways than one. He followed her to the loading dock at a trot, and then through the maze of shelving to the time clock. Shelly swiped her badge.

“Made it!” she said. “Hot damn, that was close. I’m already on probation for clocking in late too many times. One more this year and I’ll get a three-day suspension.”

“Maybe you could use a little vacation,” Matt said.

“A little vacation,” she repeated.

“You know, get away from here for a couple of days,” Matt said. “Remind yourself what the rest of the world looks like.”

“You going to come with me?”

“Let’s do it,” he said.

For a moment, her eyes took on that empty, dreamy look and the hint of a smile appeared on her face. Then a horn blew from somewhere inside the plant and she snapped back to attention.

“That’s three days without pay. Can’t afford it.”

Can’t rhymed with paint. Matt liked Shelly’s southern accent. He thought it was sexy. But as he got to know Shelly better, he was beginning to hear what lay behind that honey accent. She came across as laid-back and easygoing, but there was a sadness underneath. And why not? He could tell she must have been a knockout as a teenager. She’d probably thought she’d own the world. Now she had a no-future job in a chemical hell and the only good thing in her life was a guy who’d announced he wasn’t going to stick around more than a couple of days.

They walked into the break room and put their lunch sacks in the refrigerator.

“I’m going to head on over to the foreman’s office,” Matt said. “See what he has in store for me today.”

“All right, sweetie. See you at lunch.”

Shelly headed toward Shipping and Receiving, and Matt toward the area of the plant called Waterbase. It was already at least ninety-five degrees inside the building. By noon it would be a hundred and ten.

Sweat trickled down Matt’s back as he made his way to the foreman’s office, a portable enclosure the size of a large closet with windows in front that overlooked the production area. From the office you could see the twin fifty-five-hundred-gallon stainless-steel mixing tanks where Fire and Ice were blended, Fire in the left tank and Ice in the right, and a press the size of a ’57 Cadillac where they were filtered. You could see the forklift charging stations and the scaffolds and hoses and the pneumatic pumps. Matt knocked on the door, and a voice from within said, “Enter.” Matt entered. The air-conditioned space felt like an oasis after a long trek in the desert.

Mr. Hubbs sat at his desk sipping a cup of coffee and reading a memo. Hubbs was middle management, just a tiny notch above the laborers he commanded. He wore jeans and steel-toed shoes and occasionally ventured out to the production area to help the blenders dump bags of chemicals into the tanks. Unlike a lot of the supervisors Matt had worked for, he wasn’t afraid to jump into the fray with his subordinates.

Hubbs looked up from his memo. “Good morning, Cahill.”

“Good morning, Mr. Hubbs. Just wondering what you wanted me to do today.”

“Have a seat. There’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about.”

Matt sat in the steel and vinyl chair beside the desk. “What is it, sir?”

“You’re a good worker, Cahill. I pulled some strings with the guys upstairs, and I’d like to offer you full-time employment right here in Waterbase. The starting pay isn’t the greatest, but you’ll get a raise after your three-month probation period and another one after six months. You’ll get health and dental, and all the other benefits Nitko has to offer.”

Matt thought about it. He had been making three times as much money at the lumber mill back in Washington, and it didn’t involve working in an oven full of noxious fumes. The only future at Nitko was a bleak one. If he worked real hard and kissed plenty of ass, someday he might be able to afford a single-wide trailer and a ten-year-old vehicle from the buy-here/pay-here lot. If, that is, the heat and the chemicals didn’t kill him first. No, thanks. He had no intentions of working at Nitko forever, but he did need some time to investigate whatever it was that had brought Mr. Dark there. And signing on full-time would allow him to stay in Copperhead Springs a while longer and get to know Shelly better, maybe get to the bottom of her focal episodes.

“What other benefits?” Matt said.

“Are you accepting my offer for full-time employment?”

“Yes.”

Matt didn’t plan on staying, but he wasn’t out to dupe anybody, either. He would give Nitko an honest day’s work for the duration and then would give them proper notice when the time came to leave.

“Great!” Hubbs said. “Welcome aboard. I want you to go over to Human Resources, and they’ll explain the pay and benefits package in detail.”

“Thank you for the opportunity, sir. I’m looking forward to working with you.”

Hubbs rose and smiled and shook Matt’s hand. Matt left the Waterbase office and headed for Human Resources.

Shelly wrestled a fifty-five-gallon drum full of Fire onto an oak pallet. The guys in production usually palletized the drums, but this one was a stray that had come from the end of a batch, and it had come up a little light on the scales. It would have to be sent back and either topped off to the proper weight or repackaged into smaller containers. She climbed onto her forklift and guided the forks under the load. She had backed up and started to turn around when a voice behind her said, “Hey!”

It was Drew Long, the Shipping and Receiving supervisor. “Meeting in my office in two minutes.”

“Okay,” Shelly said. “You want me to take this drum back over to-”

“Just leave it there. You can get it after the meeting.”

Shelly eased the pallet to the concrete floor, switched off the electric forklift, and walked to the water fountain. She slurped and swallowed and slurped and swallowed and thought about Matt and the great time they’d had in bed last night. Matt was kind and gentle and attentive to her needs, and he didn’t gripe that she insisted on total darkness. Why couldn’t she have met someone like him fifteen years ago? Instead she pissed her youth away with a string of bad boys whose sole good feature was that they pissed off her mother. That seemed fun at the time, less so now that life kept insisting on teaching her that Mom had been right all along.

“What are you, part camel or something?” Drew said. “We have a meeting, remember?”

She wiped her mouth with her hand and followed him to the office. She was wet from sweat, and the sudden drop in temperature gave her a chill. She hoped the meeting wouldn’t last long. Drew held them only once a month, but he tended to talk a lot. That’s where he got his nickname. Drew Long-winded. People called him that to his face sometimes. It was good-natured teasing, and he didn’t seem to mind. Drew was a nice guy. He was the kind of guy who would say things like don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, or one in the hand is worth two in the bush, or a hundred other corny cliches. Even so, Shelly liked him a lot.

If you counted Drew, there were four full-time employees who worked the first shift in Shipping and Receiving. On very busy days, HR would sometimes send them a temp, but today was not one of those days. Shelly, Hal Miller, and Fred Philips sat on steel folding chairs as Drew wrote topic points on his dry-erase board. There were six topics to be covered. Looked like it was going to be a long one.

She thought again about what Matt had said. A vacation. She hadn’t taken a vacation in so long. When she’d just started at the plant, she and a couple of girlfriends used to take long weekends every couple of months and trek off to find some beach where there was nothing but white sand, warm water, and cold margaritas. When she came back, she’d feel fresh and happy and relaxed for weeks.

But her girlfriends got married and then they got pregnant and they couldn’t get away anymore. Then Shelly bought the double-wide and then the bastards who ran the plant slashed her pay when the market tanked, and now she couldn’t even pay her bills on what she made. Staying here was killing her slowly, but taking even a day off would kill her quickly. Someday that might seem like the better option, but that day wasn’t here yet.

A short and narrow enclosed walkway connected the production plant to a two-story office suite. From the road, people saw the orange and blue Nitko sign and another sign with a smiling guy wearing a hard hat and the shiny mirrored-glass building and the electric gates on wheels. From the road, Nitko looked like a nice, clean, safe, happy place.

Matt punched the code into the push-button lock, opened the door to the walkway, and strolled toward the office suite. When he got to the end of the walkway, he punched the same code into an identical lock and took a left toward Human Resources. Noise from the plant filtered over, and Matt wondered why the building hadn’t been better insulated. It all boiled down to money, of course. Why pay more when you can get away with paying less? He figured the execs’ offices upstairs had top-notch soundproofing, though. He figured those offices were as quiet as a church.

When he turned the corner by the drink machine, he saw Kelsey Froman lying on the floor with a fat hole in her left buttocks and a gallon of bright red blood between her legs.

The sight hit him like a gut punch.

He’d seen a lot of death since his own, and it was always a shock.

This was brutal, violent, and…

Evil.

It was what he came here to stop. He looked around. The sign on the door to his left said SECURITY. He banged on it, but nobody answered. He turned the knob and opened the door and saw a man in uniform splayed facedown in a puddle of brown goop.

It was Officer McCray, the day-shift security guard.

Matt’s pulse pounded in his eardrums. He stepped over the corpse and thought back over the last few days. Why hadn’t he seen this coming? What clues had he missed?

He grabbed the phone on the desk. Dead. The shooter, or shooters, must have cut the phone lines. Nitko had a strict policy against bringing cell phones onto the property, something about stray signals having the potential to ignite some of the volatile oils used in the Petrol area. Any employee caught with a mobile phone was subject to immediate termination. Any employee, that is, except the security guards. They carried one in case of emergency. This certainly qualified, Matt thought.

He checked Officer McCray’s gun belt and his pockets and found nothing but a can of Mace and a wallet and a set of keys. No phone. He stuffed the Mace into the back pocket of his jeans. He needed to call 911, and he needed to call Shipping and Receiving to warn Shelly. He had no way to do either. He thought about climbing the stairs to the executives’ offices. Surely those guys carried cell phones. Then he remembered that all the VPs were at a convention in Miami and the CEO was at a groundbreaking ceremony for a new toll road. The offices upstairs were empty for the day, but maybe the landlines up there were on a different circuit. It was worth a try.

Matt stuck his head out the security office door, looked both ways, and darted for the stairs. He climbed as quietly as he could in the heavy work boots. He bypassed all the vice presidents’ doors and went straight for the big guy’s.

Matt had done some research on Lester Simmonds, the chief executive officer at Nitko, one night on Shelly’s home computer, and Shelly had told him some other things generally unknown to the public. Simmonds had graduated from the University of Florida with a degree in chemical engineering and then with a master’s in business administration. His resume included stints with DuPont, International Paper, and Fuller Glue. He had worked for some lesser-known companies, all of which he had ruthlessly whipped into the Fortune 500. Nitko wasn’t quite there yet, but Simmonds had been with them for only two years. He’d frozen cost-of-living raises and merit raises, and he’d lowered the shift differentials by thirty percent. The company used to match 401(k) contributions dollar for dollar, and now it did only half that, fifty cents for every dollar.

The production employees quietly referred to Simmonds as the Old Bastard. They hated him. He was as tight as a tightwad could be, but he was also extremely paranoid. He knew the workers hated him, and for that reason he kept a personal bodyguard nearby whenever he was out and about. Maybe he was paranoid enough to have a version of the Batphone in his office, a direct line to the police. Matt hoped so.

He tried the knob, but the door was locked. Hell with it. He reared back and kicked the Old Bastard’s door right the fuck in. The jamb splintered and pieces of the brass lockset tinkled to the marble floor. Matt hoped the killer wasn’t close enough to hear the noise he’d made.

The office was huge and windowless. There was a bank of television screens in front of a cherry desk you could have done the tango on. The screens were black. Matt figured the Old Bastard could monitor every inch of Nitko, inside and out, right here from his office. If Simmonds had been here, the authorities would have been alerted at the first sign of trouble. Simmonds, of course, wouldn’t have stuck around to see the outcome. His private helicopter would have taken him from the roof to a place of safety. No way the Old Bastard would have gone down with the ship. He loved himself too much.

Matt searched for a switch to turn on the monitors. There was an electronic keypad mounted on the right side of the desk, and Matt figured the pad controlled everything. He pushed the button that said MONITORS, but nothing happened. The keypad must have been password protected, and Matt had no idea what the password was. So much for that.

There was a multiline telephone next to the keypad. Matt lifted the receiver from its cradle and put it to his ear. He tried every line but couldn’t get a dial tone. He was about to try another office, hoping one of the VPs had left a cell phone on a charger or something, when the lights went out.

Drew Long was on topic number five when everything went black. Shelly stayed glued to her chair, thinking the backup generators would kick in any second. They did not, which was very strange. Even stranger was the sound of the loading-dock doors closing and locking automatically, as if a ghost had thrown the switch.

“What the hell’s going on?” Hal Miller said.

“Everybody stay calm,” Drew said. “I’m sure it’s just a glitch.”

In the event of a catastrophic spill-say, one of the fifty-five-hundred-gallon tanks rupturing or something-all the doors in the plant could be closed by a central switch in the main power closet. The doors had strips of rubber on their bottoms that created an airtight seal, thereby containing the spill until a hazardous-materials crew could come in and clean it up. In theory, everyone in the production area was to be evacuated before the doors went down. Once the doors were closed, there was no way in or out until the hazmat team declared an all clear.

Shelly heard Drew fumbling around at his desk. He pulled a flashlight out of a drawer and switched it on. He picked up the telephone receiver and started punching in numbers and then said, “Shit.”

“The phone’s not working?” Shelly said.

“It’s not,” Drew said. “Listen, I want you all to stay here while I go up front to see what’s going on.”

“How about we all go up front to see what’s going on?” Fred Philips said.

“No, there’s no point in all of us stumbling around in the dark. I’ll be back in two shakes. Promise. I only have the one flashlight, but I’ll leave it here with you guys. Try not to use up the batteries.”

“How are you going to find your way?” Hal asked.

“I know this plant like the back of my hand. Plus, there’s a little bit of light filtering in through the ventilation fans. I’ll be all right.”

Back in two shakes…

Like the back of my hand…

Drew and his cliches.

“We’ll be here,” Shelly said.

Drew handed her the flashlight. “Shelly’s in charge while I’m gone.”

“Gee, thanks,” Shelly said.

Drew opened the office door and disappeared into the blackness.

Kent Dillard, the maintenance man on duty, never knew what hit him. K-Rad had shot him in the back of the head while he was changing one of the steel-mesh filters in the main power closet. K-Rad had then pulled his night-vision goggles out of his backpack and put them on and had thrown the big red breaker switch that cut the power to the entire plant. He had taken the key ring from Kent’s belt and had tried seven different keys before finding the one that fit the emergency lockdown panel. He’d disabled the backup generators earlier, so now the plant was dark and everyone was trapped inside. Perfect.

K-Rad walked to the lab, where Fire and Ice and the other solvents Nitko produced were tested before shipping. There were four people on duty there, a chemist and three technicians. The chemist’s name was Ashley Knotts. He didn’t know the technicians’ names, but he knew they were all men. Ashley was attractive, in a librarian sort of way, with wire-rimmed glasses and hair pulled back in a bun.

When K-Rad opened the door to the laboratory, Ashley and the others were huddled together at one of the counters with a flashlight. They were looking at a trade magazine and laughing about something. Undoubtedly, they were thinking the lights would come back on any minute and the emergency lockdown would be released and everything would go back to normal. K-Rad picked them off one by one, like ducks at a shooting gallery. He worked left to right, Ashley being the last in line. Before shooting her, he said, “Would you mind taking your hair down for me?”

“Please don’t kill me,” she sobbed. “I have children at home. I’ll do anything you want.”

“I want you to take your hair down.”

She reached behind her head and pulled out the pins holding her hair up, and the long, silky blond locks fell to her shoulders. Her hands were trembling. K-Rad could see everything with the night-vision goggles on.

Tears rolled down her cheeks. “Please, I don’t want to die.”

“Maybe we can work something out,” K-Rad said. “Take your glasses off.”

She took her glasses off. She was a very beautiful woman. K-Rad guessed her to be in her early thirties. He aimed and fired and the top of her skull exploded. She fell to the floor, landing on top of one of the techs.

That took care of the front offices. Everyone was dead now. The production area would be trickier, but K-Rad felt up to the challenge. He felt good. He felt strong.

He had picked this day because he knew all the vice presidents were at a convention in Miami and the head honcho was cutting the ribbon at the site for a new toll road. He had worked for Nitko for twelve years, and this was the first time he knew of when all the brass was missing in action on the same day. Boneheads. He had no interest in killing them. By the end of the day, their lives would be ruined. Thinking about it made him smile.

One of the lab techs, the one Ashley Knotts had fallen on top of, started stirring and moaning. K-Rad walked over and finished him off with one to the head.

Matt had to get to Shipping and Receiving and warn Shelly, and everybody else, that there was a killer on the loose. He felt his way down the staircase. When he reached the bottom, he took a right. With one hand touching the wall and the other out in front of him, he blindly made his way to the walkway door. He felt the push-button lock and punched in the code.

Then he heard footsteps.

And keys jingling.

Someone was coming his way-fast.

Matt wanted to enter the walkway and make a dash for the production area, but the footsteps were approaching too quickly. He got on his hands and knees and backtracked until he felt the hallway that led to the Human Resources office. He turned the corner and backed in a few feet, and he heard the footsteps coming and the keys jingling but he didn’t see any light. How was the killer walking so fast without a flashlight?

He hunkered down and held his breath. If the killer looked to his right as he walked past the hallway leading to HR, Matt was as good as dead.

8:33 a.m.

Shelly switched the flashlight off to save battery power. She and Fred Philips and Hal Miller sat in complete darkness.

Fred was the junior member of the troupe and had been with Nitko for only a few weeks. “Anything like this ever happen before?” he said.

Like what? Shelly thought. Like thinking you’ve hit bottom and then everything goes to shit? Only every day of my life.

“We have drills sometimes,” Shelly said. “But the procedure is to get everyone out of the plant before initiating emergency lockdown. I’m sure you saw the safety videos when you were on orientation.”

“I kinda slept through some of those videos,” Fred said. “So you think this is a drill?”

“I don’t know what it is. I think-”

“It’s some sort of test,” Hal said. “The Old Bastard is testing us, trying to see who freaks out under pressure. I guarantee you Drew and all the other supervisors are in on it. The best thing we can do is sit here and calmly wait it out.”

“I ain’t sitting here forever,” Fred said. “If Drew ain’t back soon, I’m bailing.”

“Where you going to go? The whole damn place is sealed up like a Mason jar.”

“I’ll find my way out of this place somehow.”

“We’re the Old Bastard’s playthings,” Hal said. “Can’t you see that? He makes over a million dollars a year while we struggle to make ends meet, and now he’s going to toy with us like a kid catching fireflies. I guarantee you that’s all this is. Think about it. The suits are having a good laugh about now, thinking about us peons sitting around in the dark. I guarantee you-”

“Shh,” Shelly said. “Did you guys hear that?”

“Hear what?” Fred said.

“I thought I heard something. Like a door slamming or something. Listen.”

Everyone shut up and listened for a minute, but the only sound they heard was the battery-operated clock hanging on Drew Long’s office wall. The plant was as void of sound now as it was of light, and a disturbing thought streaked across Shelly’s consciousness like a lightning bolt.

The ventilation fans.

With the power off, the fans were off, and that meant the chemical fumes would accumulate unchecked. Eventually the fumes would displace the oxygen, and everyone trapped in the plant would suffocate. Shelly had no idea how long that would take, but her guess was a few hours tops. And even before the fresh air ran out completely, the fumes would start making people sick. They would become weak and vomit and have seizures and suffer agonizing head-to-toe pain. Just thinking about it put a knot in her stomach.

So much for dying slowly instead of dying quickly, she thought. One last fucking brilliant choice to cap off the life list.

“I don’t hear nothing,” Fred said.

“Maybe it was just my imagination. Fred, I think you’re right. We can’t just sit here and wait forever. If Drew isn’t back in a few minutes, I say we try to escape.”

“And just how do you suggest we do that?” Hal said.

“The ventilation fans.”

“Huh?”

“We could climb up there somehow and take the grates off and then crawl through. Maybe one of you guys could raise me up with a forklift.”

“Sounds like a damn good idea to me,” Fred said.

“It’s forty feet up, and then forty feet down on the other side,” Hal said. “What are you going to do, take a parachute with you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe we can make a rope out of stretch wrap or something.”

“Even if all that works, there’s still a problem with the idea. Two of us might be able to get out, but the third would be stuck with nobody to operate the forklift. The third wouldn’t have any way to get up to the fans.”

“Only one of us needs to get out,” Shelly said. “Then whoever it is can find a telephone and call for help.”

“Hell yeah,” Fred said. “There’s all kinds of houses and businesses around here. I say we go for it. I’ll even volunteer to be the one to crawl through and rappel down the other side.”

“What if the power comes back on while you’re crawling through?” Hal said. “The fan blades will cut you in half.”

“What’s the likelihood of that happening? A million to one? Fuck it. I’ll take the chance.”

“Hal has a point,” Shelly said. “I never even thought about the power coming back on. And even if that doesn’t happen, which it probably won’t, it’s still going to be a risky operation. Maybe we better just wait a while and think it over. Maybe there’s another way.”

“Y’all can sit here and wait if you want to,” Fred said. “I’m getting out.”

“Just stay put for a few minutes. You can’t get up to the fans by yourself anyway. Drew will probably be back any second. Then we’ll see what he thinks.”

“Turn that flashlight on for a second,” Hal said. “We got trucks coming in later. I want to see what time it is.”

Shelly switched the flashlight on and pointed it at the clock. It was

All this killing had made K-Rad thirsty. He stopped at the drink machine for another Mountain Dew, but of course the machine didn’t work with the power off. He thought about trying to break into it, but he didn’t have the right tools. He’d brought a pair of bolt cutters in his backpack and in the wee hours had used them to cut through the fence, but he needed a pry bar to break into the drink machine and he hadn’t thought to bring one. He hadn’t anticipated the need for one. Fuck. He really wanted another Dew, and he wanted it now, and there was only one way to get it.

8:43 a.m.

The overhead fluorescents blinked to life.

“Ha!” Hal said. “I told you it was just a test. Now let’s get back to work.”

Shelly squinted against the sudden brightness. “We’ll get back to work when Drew comes back and tells us to get back to work,” she said.

Drew was happy, Shelly thought. He’d married his high school sweetheart and saved all his money until he could afford that adorable three-bedroom house and plastic flamingos for the lawn. So what if he was boring and people made fun of him? He’d made all the right choices in his life. So let him make this one-God knows his track record is better than mine.

Fred opened the office door and looked out. “The lights and the fans are on, but the loading-dock doors are still shut. Looks like we’re still in lockdown. I’m with Shelly. We should wait for Drew.”

“We got two semis coming in at four o’clock and we need to stage the product before they get here. If we don’t get a move on-”

“Chill out, Hal,” Shelly said. “If they’ve got us locked down, they can’t blame us for not doing the job.”

“Bullshit they can’t,” Hal said.

Shelly let out a bark of a laugh. “Yeah,” she said, “but they can blame us for violating protocol if we don’t follow safety procedures. So since they’re going to fuck us whatever choice we make, let’s go with the one that doesn’t have us out there breathing fumes.”

Hal stood up and walked toward the door. “Go ahead and write me up if you want to. I’m going back to work.”

“I will write your ass up,” Shelly shouted, but Hal had already slammed the door and walked away.

“What’s with him?” Fred said.

“I don’t know. Maybe the heat and the fumes got to him.”

“Are you really going to write him up?”

“Yeah, because what I really want out of life is to give management an excuse to dock Hal’s pay so they can shovel a little more money to the Old Bastard,” Shelly said.

She sat down and folded her arms over her chest and stared at the wall. She didn’t know how much time had elapsed when Fred said, “Earth to Shelly. Hey, you think Drew’s ever coming back?”

She popped out of her trance. “Damn. Since the lights are back on, maybe the phone’s working, too.”

She picked up the receiver, and the room went black again.

While the lights were on, Matt had taken the opportunity to dash through the walkway to the production area. From his position by the Human Resources office, he’d heard the footsteps and jingling keys fade off in another direction and figured it might be his only chance to make a run for it. Now he was out in the warehouse and the power was off again, but a small amount of light seeped in through the ventilation fans. He couldn’t have read the biggest letters on an eye chart from two feet away, but it was enough light to keep him from busting his head on a steel shelf or something as he made his way toward Shipping and Receiving.

He passed through the oily fumes emanating from the Petrol area and wondered if anyone back there was still alive. The chemicals in Waterbase were bad enough, but the ones in Petrol could knock you flat on your ass. They had special vents in that area, and with the power off the fumes were probably building to explosive levels. Matt hoped the employees had gotten out of there before succumbing to the noxious vapors.

He made it to the Fire and Ice tanks and took a right at the big press. From there it was only a short distance to the Shipping and Receiving office. He tried the knob, but the door was locked. He banged on it twice with his fist.

“Drew?”

Matt recognized Shelly’s voice.

“It’s me,” he said. “Let me in.”

The door opened and Matt walked into the Shipping and Receiving office. Shelly wrapped her arms around him and said, “Damn, am I glad to see you.”

“Listen, we’ve got a serious situation here. There’s a guy with a gun shooting people up in the front offices. Kelsey Froman in HR and McCray in the security office are dead. There may be more.”

“Oh my God,” Shelly said. “We thought it was just a drill or something. Drew’s out there somewhere, and so is Hal.”

Matt could feel her trembling in his arms now. “Just try to stay calm. We’ll figure a way out of this.”

“I don’t know about y’all,” Fred said, “but I’m getting the fuck out of here.”

Matt hadn’t known there was someone else in the room. “Who’s that?”

“That’s Fred,” Shelly said. “He’s only been working here a month or so. Fred, you just stay put, now. If you go out there you’re liable to get your head blown off.”

“You think I’m just going to sit here and wait for the motherfucker? Screw that. Let’s do what we talked about earlier, raise a forklift up by the vent fans and take the grates off and climb out.”

“That’s not a bad idea,” Matt said. “One of us could climb out, find a phone, and call for help.”

He was about to suggest they proceed with the plan when a series of muffled gunshots erupted.

9:01 a.m.

K-Rad had turned the power back on just long enough to buy a can of Mountain Dew. With the lights off again, he’d donned his night-vision goggles and traversed the walkway from the office building to the production area carrying the soda in one hand and a 9-mm Beretta in the other. When he rounded the corner by the big tanks, he saw Drew Long, the Shipping and Receiving supervisor, heading toward his office.

K-Rad fired three times.

The plant was like a huge, eerily quiet cathedral now, and the Beretta’s silencer muffled the shots but did not squelch them completely. Drew’s knees buckled on the third shot, and he dropped to the concrete floor like a sack of wet Dicalite.

Dicalite. Ha! At least K-Rad would never have to mess with that shit again.

Dicalite was a white powder added to batches of Fire and Ice. It came in thirty-pound bags. When wet, the powder formed a sort of putty that gathered on the press panels and aided in filtering the product as it was pumped into fifty-five-gallon drums or five-gallon pails or one-gallon jugs. Once all the product was packaged, the press had to be disassembled and all that moist Dicalite putty had to be scraped off the panels and stuffed into plastic bags for disposal. Up until last Friday, scraping the presses had been part of K-Rad’s job.

But last Friday, a few minutes before K-Rad’s shift was over, a coworker named Shelly Potts tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Mr. Hubbs wants to see you in his office.”

K-Rad finished what he was doing, parked his forklift, and plugged it into the charger. He hosed the Dicalite off his boots, wiped the sweat from his face with some paper towels, and clomped to the glassed-in foreman’s office in Waterbase. Hubbs was sitting at his desk sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup. An armed security guard-Officer McCray-stood at parade rest a few feet to his right.

“Shelly said you wanted to see me,” K-Rad said.

“Sit down, my friend. Can I get you a cup of coffee?”

Friend my ass, K-Rad thought. “No, thanks. What’s the guard for?”

“Listen, I’m going to get right to the point. We’ve decided to let you go.”

K-Rad felt a chill wash through him. He wanted to make sure he’d heard correctly.

“You’re firing me?” he said.

“I’m sorry. The decision came down from the main office. There’s nothing-”

“I’ve been here twelve years. You’re going to can my ass, just like that? Why?”

Officer McCray shifted his stance.

“I think you know why,” Mr. Hubbs said.

“I don’t have a clue.”

“When you were on nights a couple of months ago, one of the loading-dock doors was damaged. Someone obviously forgot to lower the forks on their forklift, but nobody ever came forward and confessed. It cost the company a lot of money to fix that door.”

“I didn’t do that.”

“But you were in charge that night.”

“So?”

“The bigwigs upstairs figure you either did it yourself or you know who did it. I’m sure you remember the meeting we had about that.”

K-Rad felt like jumping across the desk and twisting Mr. Hubbs’s head off like a bottle cap. “I didn’t wreck the door,” he said. “You can’t blame me for somebody else’s actions.”

“Again, the decision came from upstairs. Officer McCray here is going to escort you to your locker, and then to the parking lot.”

Officer McCray escorted Kevin Radowski to his locker, and then to the parking lot. He told K-Rad to have a nice day.

Now everyone’s going to have a nice fucking day, K-Rad thought. He sipped his Mountain Dew and walked toward the fallen Drew Long.

Drew was still alive, but his breathing was rapid and shallow. He was on the way out. K-Rad pointed the gun at his skull and cocked the hammer back.

“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.

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.

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?”

“Matt Cahill. I’m a temp.”

“What’s going on? We went into lockdown, and I think everyone in Petrol is dead now. Oh my God. What the hell’s going on?”

“Someone came in and started shooting people this morning. The man who left you here was not a rescuer. He was the bad guy. Kevin Radowski. Do you know him?”

“No, but I heard about him. He works in Waterbase. They call him K-Rad. You know, like A-Rod. Makes sense that it’s him. I heard he’s kind of crazy, and I heard he got fired last week.”

“Yeah, that’s him.”

K-Rad.

An anagram immediately formed in Matt’s mind.

K-Rad was Dark spelled backward.

“So why didn’t he kill me? I mean, I’m happy he didn’t, but-”

“I don’t know,” Matt said. “But he didn’t, and this is probably the safest place for you to be right now.”

“Screw that. Get me out of here!”

“Shh. He’s going to hear you, and then we’ll be dead for sure. I’m going after him now.”

“Help!” Terri screamed. She was hysterical. Matt put the duct tape back over her mouth. She would be all right where she was until help arrived. He only hoped that K-Rad-and Shelly-had not heard the shouts.

Because Shelly was around somewhere, and she was every bit as dangerous as K-Rad was.

How in the fuck did that bitch get the tape off her mouth?

K-Rad thought about going back to the tanks and blowing her away. He should have done it before, but the idea of blasting her to mincemeat had been too appealing. He thought about going back, but he was only a few feet from Hubbs’s office now. Plus, his legs were hurting like a motherfucker. It was at least a hundred degrees in the production area, and the bulletproof vest and the gas mask and the heavy backpack had K-Rad sweating profusely. He was getting dehydrated. He could feel it. He was lightheaded and his legs were cramping. The two Mountain Dews hadn’t been enough. He needed more fluids. After he killed Hubbs, he would go to the fountain by the time clock and fill his belly with water. Then he would go to the Retro and fill his belly with beer.

K-Rad was about to kick the office door in when he was blindsided and knocked to the floor. The pistol in his hand skittered away, and a man straddled him and hit him in the face with a drum wrench. K-Rad recognized the man. It was Fred Philips from Shipping and Receiving. Fool. The initial blow smashed the right side of the night-vision binoculars, and Fred was about to come down with a second when K-Rad reached into the pocket of his fatigue pants and pulled out a switchblade. Before Fred knew what had happened, K-Rad buried all five inches of the blade in his windpipe. Fred gurgled and spat blood and fell sideways clutching his throat. It took him about thirty seconds to die.

K-Rad crawled to his pistol a few feet away, picked it up, and checked it for damage. It looked all right. The altercation had given him a surge of adrenaline. His legs didn’t hurt anymore. He couldn’t see as well with one side of the night-vision binoculars broken, but he could see well enough. He got up and kicked Hubbs’s door in. It flew open and showered the office interior with splinters and lock parts. Hubbs was alone, crouched down in a corner like a mouse in a snake’s cage.

“Kevin, it was the guys upstairs. I had no choice. I swear, I tried to talk them out of firing you. You were always one of my best workers.”

“Hal fucked up the loading-dock door. Just so you know.”

“Hal did it?”

“Yeah. When we were working nights together.”

“Then he’ll be dealt with, and you’re off the hook.”

“He’s already been dealt with,” K-Rad said. “As for me being off the hook, it’s way too late for that.”

“We can work something out.”

“No, we can’t.”

“I have some money. I have about twenty thousand dollars in a savings account. I’ll give it to you. All of it. We can go to the bank right now.”

“What am I going to do with twenty thousand dollars?”

“You could leave the country. You could go to South America. Anywhere. I’ve heard you can live like a king in the Philippines for five dollars a day.”

“Really?”

“Sure. So is it a deal? We can leave right now, and you can have the money in your hands in ten minutes. You can book a flight and-”

10:27 a.m.

“There’s only one problem,” K-Rad said. “That would involve letting you live.”

Matt was outside the office, standing to the side of the broken doorway. Fred was lying on the floor a few feet away with a knife handle sticking out of his throat, and the drum wrench he’d taken for a weapon lay a few inches from his lifeless hand. Surrounded by what seemed like gallons of inky black blood, he looked like a fallen character in a horror movie.

Matt picked up the drum wrench, pulled the knife from Fred’s throat, and stood by the broken door to the Waterbase office, listening.

“I want you to just think about my offer for a minute, Kevin. With twenty thousand dollars, you could fly anywhere in the world and start a new life.”

“I would be a fugitive. Living in the shadows. Who wants that? I want the spotlight for once. I want the world to remember the name Kevin Radowski for a long, long time. Forever would be nice. I want to be immortal. I’m not going to hide in South America. In a little while, after you’re good and dead, I’ll be sipping on a cold one at the Retro and thinking about how famous I’m going to be.”

“I’m begging you. Please don’t do this. You don’t have to do this. I have a family.”

“All you motherfuckers say the same thing. I have a family, blah, blah, blah. You think your family really gives a shit about you? They’ll shed a few tears at the funeral, and a few weeks later they’ll cash the life insurance check and fly to Maui and sit on the beach with tall blue drinks in their hands. They’ll guzzle twenty-dollar cocktails with the money you busted your balls for. You know, I’m tempted to let you stick around until eleven and see the show. It’s going to be fabulous.”

“What are you talking about?”

There was a pause, and Matt knew that K-Rad was about to shoot Hubbs.

Matt wanted to rush in and try to do something, to save Hubbs from his doom.

But he knew it would be suicide.

And he needed to stay alive, to beat K-Rad… and stop Shelly from whatever she was going to do.

One life-Hubbs’s-would be sacrificed for the many Matt could possibly save later.

It sickened Matt… but it seemed that he had no choice but to let Hubbs die.

Then again, maybe there was another way. Maybe a diversion would do the trick.

He hurled the steel drum wrench as far as he could, and it landed on the concrete floor with a series of loud clanks.

What the fuck?

K-Rad shouted through the demolished door. “Who’s out there? Identify yourself, or I’ll blow your fucking head off.”

He knew the sound. He’d heard it a million times before. It was the unmistakable clank of a drum wrench hitting the concrete. Someone was out there. Someone was fucking with him.

He turned and shot Hubbs four times in the chest. “Sorry, boss.”

K-Rad’s legs were cramping again, his head swimming. He should have thought to put some Gatorade or something in his backpack. How stupid of him not to. How utterly fucking stupid. He rooted through the drawers of Hubbs’s desk, found nothing but junk, pulled the drawers out in anger, and dumped everything on the floor. There was a coffeepot on a little table in the corner, but it was empty. He’d planned to walk to the water fountain after killing Hubbs, but now he was going to be forced to deal with whoever it was outside the office.

There wasn’t any Gatorade in his backpack, but there was something that could possibly help him out of this little jam. It was a hand grenade he’d bought from a guy he’d met at a gun show. It had cost him two thousand dollars. Two thousand for one grenade. He’d been saving it for a special occasion, and he reckoned being on the verge of collapse from dehydration was special enough.

It was a Vietnam-era Mk 2, commonly referred to as a pineapple grenade because of the grooves in the cast-iron shell, and it was capable of sending deadly shrapnel in all directions up to two hundred meters. You had to take cover after throwing it or you were likely to get hit yourself. K-Rad pulled the pin and tossed it out the door, toward the area the clanking sounds had come from.

Something flew out of the Waterbase office and clattered across the concrete floor. Matt didn’t know what it was, but his instincts told him he needed to get away from it. As he was diving behind the forklift by Fred’s corpse, there was a bright flash and an earsplitting boom. Sparks rocketed in all directions, and a molten chunk of red-hot hell seared its way into Matt’s left leg above the ankle. It felt like someone had driven an acid-dipped railroad spike through the fleshy area between his shinbone and Achilles tendon. He rolled onto his back, gripped the wound, felt the viscous warmth of raw flesh. He wanted to shout out in agony, but he knew doing so would be a death sentence. He wiped the stinging sweat from his eyes, peeked around the edge of the forklift, and saw the dark zombie astronaut figure known as K-Rad stagger out of Mr. Hubbs’s office and disappear from sight.

Matt tried to stand. He could barely put any weight on the leg now, let alone walk or run. He would have to use the forklift to get around, and the whining noise of the electric motor would allow K-Rad to know his location. Fortunately, K-Rad had headed toward the time clock, and Matt planned on going in the opposite direction, toward the Fire and Ice tanks. He felt around for the switchblade but couldn’t find it anywhere. He’d dropped it when the grenade went off, and now it was gone. He belly-crawled into the office and felt around on the floor. He’d heard K-Rad dumping the contents of the desk drawers and thought there might be something among the debris to use as a weapon. He felt a stapler and a box of paperclips and some pens and pencils and Post-it pads and a bunch of other crap you’d expect to find in any well-stocked office. What he wanted, but did not find, was a letter opener or a whiskey bottle or something. He was thinking a gun would be nice when he felt the cold metallic cylinder and for a split second thought he’d actually lucked into finding one. He picked it up. It wasn’t a gun but a small steel flashlight. He switched it on for a second to make sure it worked, and then crawled back out of the office. He climbed onto the forklift, pointed it toward the big tanks, and pegged the throttle.

K-Rad made it to the water fountain, took the mask and helmet and binoculars off, and stood there slurping for more than a minute. The air was unpleasantly thick with fumes from the warehouse area and the Fire and Ice tanks, and the water from the fountain wasn’t very cold. It wasn’t very cold, but it was still good. It was what he needed. He drank until he could drink no more, and then he put the mask back on and took the walkway to the office building.

There was a way out, of course. Most Nitko employees didn’t know about it, but there was a way out. How else could a hazmat team come and go in the case of a catastrophic spill? Of course there was a way out. How could there not be?

He opened the door to the main power closet and used a step stool to reach the steel panel in the ceiling. He loosened the four thumbscrews securing the panel to its frame, pulled it forward until its four tabs were aligned with their corresponding slots, lowered it with his hands, and threw it on the floor. He undid the Velcro straps holding the drop-down ladder in place, lowered the ladder, and climbed through the ceiling to the hatch in the roof. The hatch was wheel operated, like the watertight doors on a ship. K-Rad turned the wheel counterclockwise until the seal broke and the hatch swung open. He climbed out onto the roof. The sun was shockingly bright. He took the half-broken night-vision binoculars off and whizzed them like a Frisbee. He didn’t need them anymore. He kept the gas mask, just in case. He shinnied down a drainpipe, ran to his hole in the fence behind the diesel tank, got in his car, and drove away.

Matt drove the forklift as fast as it would go. He’d covered about half the distance to Waterbase when the battery died. The lift rolled to a stop, and Matt got off and started limping toward the tanks. Every step shot blue spears of electric pain up his leg and into his spine. When he got close enough, he saw Shelly forty feet in the air, dangling from one of the water pipes near the ceiling. She was making her way, arm-over-arm, to one of the ventilation fans.

There was enough light shining through the opening for Matt to see her face, which looked like something exhumed from a graveyard.

Matt hobbled to one of the forklifts plugged in by the wall, unplugged the charging cable, put the lift in reverse, swung around, and knocked four empty drums off an oak pallet with the forks. He picked up the pallet, positioned the lift under where Shelly was hanging, and raised the platform. He wanted to knock her off the pipe and onto the pallet. Then he would lower the fork and deal with her on the ground. He had to stop her from leaving the plant. If she made it outside, there was no telling what she might do.

Except that people would die.

Shelly looked down and saw the pallet rising toward her. She was only a few feet from the fan now, and she sped up her actions.

“You’re too late,” she said.

The pallet was about two feet from her when she made it to the fan. She held on to the pipe with one hand and yanked the grate off with the other. The grate fell to the floor, and Shelly climbed into the opening. Matt rammed the wooden platform toward the fan, but Shelly was inside the cylindrical housing now and the pallet was too fat to reach her.

“Shelly, I want you to-”

“You want to fuck me as long as it’s convenient for you-then you want me to smile and wave good-bye when you’re tired of me,” Shelly said. “Too bad I don’t give a shit what you want. I’m going to do what I want for once.”

“And what’s that?”

“Your ax is in my car,” she said. “Maybe I’ll try chopping wood. Chopping something, anyway.”

She started laughing, an insane cackle Matt hadn’t heard before, and then she was gone.

But then he saw Mr. Dark sitting on one of the pipes, his feet dangling over the side, sipping his martini.

“Oh, yes, this is much more fun,” Mr. Dark said.

K-Rad drove by his childhood home on the dirt road behind the plant. He stopped and put the car in park. He just wanted to look at his old house for a minute, to see it one last time. School hadn’t started yet, and there were three boys in the front yard running gleefully through a sprinkler. They were probably second graders, about seven years old. K-Rad remembered doing the same thing when he was that age. Such a simple thing, but such fun.

The house hadn’t changed much since K-Rad was a kid. White clapboard siding, red shingle roof, swing on the front porch. It really wasn’t such a bad little house after all. Lots of fond memories there. Too bad it still belonged to the greedy motherfuckers at Nitko.

“Hey, mister. Take a picture-it’ll last longer,” one of the boys shouted. The others laughed.

K-Rad put the car in gear and drove on. Brats. If they only knew what was going to happen to them at eleven. If they only knew.

Matt thought about trying to navigate the water pipe, as Shelly had, and following her out that way, but the pipe had bowed under her weight and he was fairly certain it would break under his. Mr. Dark smiled down at him.

“You should have killed her when you had the chance.”

For a moment, Matt feared that the son of a bitch could read his mind.

Because the thought had occurred to him.

Matt had killed before, but only when there was no other choice. When not killing would have meant more deaths. He wasn’t a murderer.

Not yet.

The voice in his head was his own… but it sounded eerily close to Mr. Dark’s.

Matt got off the forklift, limped behind the tanks, found Terri, and once again removed the duct tape from her mouth.

“Why did you leave me here like this?” she said.

“I didn’t want you to walk around with me and maybe get your head blown off.”

“Oh. Well, thanks. I guess.”

Matt switched on the flashlight from Hubbs’s office, put it in his mouth, and started unwrapping the tape binding Terri’s hands. He wanted her to raise him to the vent fan with the forklift so he could go after Shelly.

Then he saw the red glare.

He stopped what he was doing and scooted one of the bags of chemicals out of the way. A cavity had been created underneath it, and in the center of the cavity was a red metal gas can, the kind people use to fill lawn tractors. But this was no ordinary gas can. Two holes had been drilled through the lid, and a pair of electrical wires snaked from the holes to a black metal box the size of a deck of cards. The box was secured to the top of the can with duct tape.

Matt looked at the bags of chemicals stacked from one end of the tanks to the other. He shined the light on one of the bags and saw the words ammonium nitrate printed in bold black letters.

He didn’t know much about chemistry, but he knew that ammonium nitrate was one of the ingredients terrorists used to make bombs. Timothy McVeigh had used 108 fifty-pound bags of the stuff to blow up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

There were easily ten times that many stacked behind the Fire and Ice tanks.

Matt figured the explosion would not only destroy the plant-it would wipe out a couple of square blocks of nearby residences and businesses as well.

You know, I’m tempted to let you stick around until eleven and see the show. It’s going to be fabulous.

Matt had wondered what K-Rad was talking about, and now he knew.

“What are you doing?” Terri said. “Untie me!”

Matt frantically unwound the tape from her wrists and then started on her ankles. “I don’t want to scare you,” he said, “but if we don’t move really, really fast, we’re going to be blown to smithereens.”

“What are you talking about?”

“There’s a bomb about eighteen inches to your right.”

Terri jumped to her feet and almost fell back down. “Oh my God. What are we going to do?”

“I have an idea, but my leg’s messed up. So you’re going to have to do most of the work.”

“Just tell me what to do.”

They hurried to the front of the tanks.

“Grab some two-and-a-half-inch hoses off that rack over there,” Matt said. “Get three of the twelve-footers. We’re going to need a three-way connector and a reducer and a twenty-foot section of one-inch hose.”

While Terri ran for the hose rack, Matt positioned a pneumatic pump a few feet from the valves in front of the tanks. By the time he ran an air hose from its reel on the wall and secured it close to the base of the pump, Terri had gathered the supplies and it was

Matt instructed Terri to connect one of the fat hoses to the valve on the Fire tank and another to the valve on the Ice tank. The loose ends of those two hoses then went to the cross on the three-way connector. One end of the third two-and-a-half-inch hose was connected to the stem of the three-way, and the other to the pump’s input port. The reducer and the long one-inch hose were connected to the pump’s output. Matt fed the smaller hose between the tanks and let it rest on top of the ammonium nitrate bags.

“I want you to open the valves to the tanks when I give the word,” Matt said.

The exact formulas for Fire and Ice were a tightly kept corporate secret, but Matt knew the pH of Fire was 1 and that of Ice was 14. Shelly had told him that much before his first day on the job. Fire was an acid, and Ice a base. The solutions were highly caustic, and the blenders and packagers were required to wear special suits and gloves and respirators and goggles while performing their duties. A drop of either on bare skin would cause an instant blister, a splash in the face lifelong disfigurement or even death.

But what would happen if the two skin-scalding liquids were mixed together? If Matt remembered correctly from high school chemistry, they would neutralize each other and essentially become water. That’s what he wanted to happen.

Matt looked at his watch. It was thirty-four seconds to the top of the hour-thirty-four seconds until a ball of fire consumed the entire neighborhood.

… 33… 32… 31…

The valves on the tanks were positioned at an angle, and Terri was able to stand between them and reach both levers. Matt jammed the end of the air hose onto the pneumatic pump and said, “Do it!”

Terri opened the valves simultaneously, and within seconds the mixture of Fire and Ice came spewing from the one-inch hose and started flooding the area behind the tanks.

5… 4… 3… 2…

K-Rad walked into the Retro and took a stool at the bar. The place had just opened, and the lunch crowd hadn’t started sifting in yet. K-Rad was the only customer. He’d stuffed his gas mask and other goodies into his backpack, and he’d left the Kevlar vest and the Berettas in his car. The bartender, a chick named Tami with full-sleeve tats on her arms and quarter-inch gauges in her earlobes, slapped a napkin in front of him and said, “What’s up, K?”

“Not much. Let me get a Shiner Bock, okay?”

“Sure.”

She brought the longneck brown bottle and popped the top with an opener. The television was tuned to an infomercial about an herbal supplement called Zark-O. It was supposed to make you live to be around two hundred years old or something.

“Can you turn it on Channel Four?” K-Rad said. Channel 4 was one of the local network affiliates, and K-Rad knew the boneheads on the news team there would have the big story before it went national. Those motherfuckers thrived on human misery. They went after it like vultures went after roadkill.

Tami wiped her hands with a towel. “I heard that stuff really works.”

“Zark-O?”

“Yeah.”

“Come on. It’s bullshit. Nothing’s going to make you live longer. When your time’s up, it’s up.”

“I just heard it makes you feel better. That’s all.”

“I think I’ll stick with alcohol. Can you change the channel for me?”

Tami picked up the remote and switched the channel. “Wouldn’t you want to live forever if you could, though?” she said.

“Immortality isn’t about how long you’re here,” K-Rad said. “It’s about what you do while you’re here.”

“Wow. That’s deep. I still might try the Zark-O. Just to see what it’s like.”

K-Rad didn’t say anything. He looked up at the television, wondering why he hadn’t heard the explosion or at least felt the earth shake. Maybe the Retro was too far away from the plant. Anyway, he was sure there would be some breaking news soon.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “Are those sirens I hear?”

Tami lowered the volume on the television. “Yep. Must be a fire somewhere.”

K-Rad got up and walked outside. In the distance he saw plumes of black smoke rising from Nitko’s direction. Yes! Mission accomplished. He smiled and went back inside to finish his beer.

There had been a deafening boom, followed by a wall of fire rising from behind the tanks. Matt had stood there helplessly, waiting for the flames to consume him, but he and Terri were miraculously still alive. One of the detonators had gone off, and the fuel can it was attached to had exploded, but apparently the blast hadn’t been powerful enough to ignite the ammonium nitrate. Matt’s plan had worked, at least partially. The Fire and Ice solution had prevented the big bang, but the plastic bags containing the ammonium nitrate were burning now and filling Waterbase with greasy black smoke.

Matt held the one-inch hose and sprayed the Fire and Ice mixture toward the inferno, but the liquid wasn’t coming out fast enough or forcefully enough to extinguish the flames. It wasn’t coming out fast enough or forcefully enough, and then it stopped coming out completely.

It took Matt a second to figure out what had happened. There was no electricity to power the compressor, so once the pressure in the reserve tank dropped to a certain level, there was no air to drive the pump.

“Let’s get out of here,” Matt shouted.

He climbed onto the forklift and motioned for Terri to sit on the pallet.

“What are we going to do? How the hell are we going to get out?” she said, coughing and wheezing between sentences.

“I don’t know, but we have to get away from this smoke before we die of inhalation. Come on!”

Terri climbed onto the pallet, and Matt did a one-eighty and headed toward the time clock. His eyes were stinging, and his lungs felt as though someone had stuffed oily cotton balls into them. He wished he had thought to grab some respirators from the safety office when he’d been in the front building. At the time it hadn’t even crossed his mind, but they sure would have come in handy now. He drove on, trying to take shallow breaths, one hand guiding the forklift and the other pressing the tail of his shirt against his mouth and aching nose.

He slowed down and carefully turned a corner, intending to take a shortcut between the floor-to-ceiling industrial shelves loaded with Nitko products, and when he turned Terri went limp, fell to her side, and tumbled off the pallet like a rag doll. The smoke had gotten to her.

Matt stopped the forklift, got off, and knelt beside her. She wasn’t breathing.

He felt her neck for a pulse. Nothing.

Matt put his mouth on Terri’s, gave her two quick rescue breaths, laced his hands together, and started chest compressions. He performed two full cycles of CPR. As he started a third, she coughed and turned her head to the side and vomited. Terri was alive, but she wasn’t going to last long. Matt stood, dizzy and nauseated from the smoke, the heat, the exertion, and the pain in his leg, picked Terri up and cradled her in his arms, and forced himself to put one foot in front of the other.

Shelly held Matt’s ax with both hands and stared out at the road leading to Nitko’s gate. Before she had left the parking lot, she’d broken a window on Hal’s pickup truck and had taken the sawed-off shotgun he kept behind the seat. It was a twelve-gauge pump, a very nice gun, and Hal, being dead and all, certainly wasn’t going to need it anymore. After taking the gun and the box of shells in the glove compartment, she’d left Nitko’s property and had backed her car into a patch of woods, out of sight, thinking she would ambush Matt when he tried to come after her.

She’d shoot his ass and then cut his head off with his own ax.

Because she had a feeling he was the one guy who might be able to stop her from what she had to do.

And she couldn’t have that, could she?

Thinking about it made her giggle.

K-Rad had the right idea. He was the Man Who Stood Up. The Man Who Would Not Take It Anymore. Shelly had let the pricks steal her life away, day by day, dollar by dollar. She was going to take it back. Screw dying fast versus dying slowly. If she had to go, she was going to take a bunch of those fuckers with her.

She watched the smoke rising from the production building and wondered if Matt was even still alive. She would give him a few more minutes, and then she would go have some fun elsewhere.

But where? A fragment of song from her childhood popped into her mind, something about starting at the very beginning, a very good place to start.

Good idea, she thought. Get them young before they can turn into the kind of miserable fucks who’d stolen her life away.

In her mind she mapped out the route to the daycare center down the road.

In a little while, after you’re good and dead, I’ll be sipping on a cold one at the Retro and thinking about how famous I’m going to be.

Matt was no longer worried about getting shot. He figured K-Rad had already left the building.

Of course he was gone. Why would he have stuck around to get blown up?

Matt carried Terri through the walkway to the office suite. The air was better up there, but only slightly. Smoke and fumes had started to seep through from the production area, and with no ventilation and all the doors sealed tight, it was like trying to breathe mud.

There were dead bodies everywhere.

Matt opened the door to the safety office, set Terri on the floor, and found respirators for them both. He put Terri’s on first, and then donned his own. It was an immediate improvement, and after a couple of minutes Terri sat up and said, “Now what?”

“Follow me,” Matt said.

He could have taken car keys from any of the corpses, but he knew what kind of car Officer McCray drove. It was a 1966 GTO convertible, maroon with patches of gray primer and a white top. Matt had noticed it in the parking lot his first day on the job, and Shelly had told him whom it belonged to.

Matt led Terri to the security office, reached into McCray’s pocket, and snatched the keys.

“How are we going to get out of the building?” Terri said.

“There has to be a way out. Firefighters and rescue personnel and hazmat teams are able to gain access during lockdown situations, so there has to be a way. I would imagine it’s wherever the breaker box and all that kind of stuff is.”

“The main power closet,” Terri said. “I know where it is. I used to date a guy in Maintenance.”

“Let’s go.”

They made it to the power closet, saw the drop-down ladder and the hatch, and two minutes later were on the roof. They took the respirators off and tossed them aside.

“Amazing how you take things like fresh air and sunshine for granted,” Terri said.

“Yeah.” Matt walked to the edge of the flat roof. His leg still hurt, but the pain wasn’t nearly as bad as it had been previously. The wound had already started to heal, another part of the enigma his life had become since the avalanche. “You think you’re able to climb down this drainpipe?”

“I’ll give it a shot.”

Matt went first, so if Terri fell while climbing down he could catch her. He used his powerful arms to shinny down the pipe, guarding the bum leg the best he could. Terri did fine, and in a couple of minutes they were in the GTO, heading for the gate.

“Where are we going?” Terri said.

“The Retro. I want you to climb in back and get on the floorboard. I have a feeling K-Rad’s killing spree isn’t over.”

Terri started sobbing. “I just want to go home.”

“I’ll get you home,” Matt said. “I promise.”

He urgently needed to find Shelly, too, but he had no idea where to start looking.

Worse came to worst, he’d have to wait… and follow the trail of bodies.

11:15 a.m.

Shelly watched McCray’s ’66 GTO take a right out of Nitko’s driveway.

Matt was driving, and some bitch was riding shotgun.

Was he fucking her, too?

Had he been all along?

Fuck it. The daycare could wait.

Shelly started her car and followed the GTO.

Tami had left an ice pick on the bar near the garnish tray. K-Rad picked it up and put it in his pocket. He sucked the last few foamy ounces from his Shiner Bock longneck and walked outside to once again admire his handiwork. He looked southeast, and the horizon in that direction was now completely shrouded in a haze the color of pencil lead. What fun! Thousands of people were dead now, all because of K-Rad and his perfect plan. This was just too cool, and there was even more amusement yet to come.

K-Rad wanted to be arrested, the sooner the better, so why wait for the authorities to put two and two together and figure out he was the one responsible for the Nitko explosion? Why not just open fire on the lunch patrons at the Retro and expedite the whole process?

The idea had come to him halfway into his second beer. The Berettas were in the car, and he still had plenty of ammunition. No point in all those bullets going to waste. He would drink another beer or two, until the joint was good and crowded, and then he would go at it with a pistol in each hand. He would jump behind the bar and kill Tami first, and from that position would start picking off customers. Someone would use a cell phone to call the police, and when the cops got there K-Rad would walk out with his hands in the air and surrender peacefully. Perfect.

On their way to the Retro’s entrance, a young couple stopped where K-Rad was standing. College students, K-Rad thought, taking a break between classes. The guy had a goatee and diamond studs in both ears.

“Hear anything about the fire?” the young man said, gesturing toward the smoke with his thumb. He was sucking on a cigarette, trying to consume as much of it as he could before going inside. His girlfriend stood beside him with her arms folded, obviously impatient with his vice.

“Nothing yet,” K-Rad said. “I’ve been sitting at the bar watching the news. I’m sure they’ll get to it eventually.”

“Tyler, can we please go in now? I’m starving.” The college chick had a tight knit shirt on and very short cutoff jeans. Daisy Dukes, they called them, after a character in a largely forgotten television show from a largely forgotten decade. She had a pretty face and a nice body.

“Let me finish my cigarette, babe,” Tyler said.

“You need to quit that vile habit. You smoke and then you want to kiss on me. It’s like kissing an ashtray.”

“A sexy ashtray.”

“That makes no sense at all.”

“Go on in and get us a table. I’ll be along in a minute.”

She stalked away without saying another word. Once she was safely inside, Tyler turned to K-Rad and said, “Women.”

“She’s very attractive,” K-Rad said.

“Yeah, and she’s right. I really do need to quit smoking.”

“You guys in college?”

“Yeah, CH State, but I’m planning on transferring to the University of Florida when I get my associate’s degree.”

“Sounds like a good plan.”

Tyler dropped his cigarette on the pavement and crushed it with the toe of his sandal. “I better get on in there before she starts freaking,” he said.

K-Rad pulled the ice pick from his pocket, gripped it tightly, and jammed it into the side of Tyler’s throat. Blood pulsed skyward, as though being shot from a squirt gun. Must have punctured an artery, K-Rad thought. Tyler fell to the sidewalk, twitched a few times, and then lay still.

“Now she’s really going to start freaking,” K-Rad said. He dragged Tyler’s limp body behind a stand of ornamental shrubs and walked toward his car to get the Berettas.

Terri climbed into the back of the GTO and got down on the floorboard, as Matt had instructed. Matt switched on the radio and turned it to the news channel, just in case Shelly was unleashing whatever hell she had in mind. If a bulletin came on about an ax murderer loose in a school or a department store or something, at least Matt would know where to go.

And what he had to do.

Because every person she hurt… or killed… was on him.

For bringing Mr. Dark into her life.

And for letting her walk out of the factory.

Matt listened to the radio program, but the only story being broadcast at the moment was from an economist, something about the possibility of interest rates going up. The usual boring crap.

“I need to pee,” Terri said.

“What?”

“I gotta go. Really bad.”

They were currently on a stretch of two-lane blacktop lined with pine trees on both sides. The closest bathroom was at the Retro, still several miles away, and Matt wanted Terri to stay in the car when they got there.

“There’s nowhere to go,” Matt said. “You’re just going to have to hold it. Or pee your pants.”

“I can’t hold it much longer, and I’m not going to pee my pants. Pull over to the side of the road and let me out. It’ll only take a minute.”

Matt cursed under his breath. He eased to the shoulder, braked to a stop, and put the car in neutral.

11:22 a.m.

Why the hell are they stopping here? Shelly wondered. Then she saw the petite young woman climbing out of the passenger’s side door. He’s going to do it to her right there in the trees. Can’t even wait to get back to her place. She should have known he was just like all the rest of the assholes she’d been with.

Matt had his eyes on the bitch and paid no attention as Shelly sped by. No worries about him seeing and recognizing her car. Shelly knew where Matt and his little chickadee were headed.

The only thing out this way was the Retro.

The Retro. Hmm. The day care could wait. She’d take out the parents first-then there would be no one to get in her way. It was close to lunchtime, and they’d all be heading to the Retro.

Heads will roll!

She laughed out loud.

Matt didn’t see the driver of the car as it passed… but he recognized it from the Nitko parking lot.

And there was nobody alive at Nitko to drive it.

Except one person.

Matt jammed the transmission into first gear and burned rubber back onto the highway. Terri was safer here than where he was going.

Shelly pulled into the Retro’s lot, found a parking place, and killed the engine. She popped the hatch and reached into the cargo area and removed the long and slender nylon pouch from one of the two tailgating chairs she kept back there. She slid Matt’s ax and the sawed-off shotgun into the pouch, walked inside, and made a beeline to the ladies’ room. It was a large restroom, very nice, with eight stalls and a triple granite-top vanity. There was a young woman, college age, standing at the mirror touching up her makeup.

“How’s it going?” Shelly said.

“Great, except my stupid boyfriend would rather stand outside and smoke cigarettes than come in here with me.”

“Men.”

“Yeah, tell me about it. Hey, what’s in the pouch?”

Shelly pulled the ax out, and in a single swift motion buried the blade in the young woman’s skull. The sound of the sharpened steel breaking through bone and tearing into brain tissue made Shelly burst into laughter. Or maybe she was crying-she couldn’t really tell. She dragged the body across the marble floor to the stall farthest from the door, positioned it on the toilet, and closed the door.

There were still seven stalls to go!

K-Rad was on his way back inside when an old Pontiac GTO screeched to a stop at the sidewalk. A man got out of the car and limped toward him. The man looked like a nightmare, his clothes black with soot and his face and left shoe crusted with blood.

K-Rad assessed the filthy man. “What the-”

As K-Rad was saying the, the man clouted him with an uppercut to the chin. The impact caused K-Rad to bite his tongue, his incisors slicing down hard and completely severing the tip of the highly vascular and highly innervated organ. Blood gushed from his mouth, and he started dancing around trying to stop the flow with his hand. The pain radiated through his jaw and to the bones in his ears.

“Fuck!” he said. “You made me bite my fucking tongue off.” Uck! Ew ade ee ite i ucking ung off.

The man came forward with his fist cocked. Who the fuck was this idiot? K-Rad knew it wasn’t someone from the plant, because everyone there was dead now. Anyone who had avoided being shot had surely died from the explosion. Nobody could have survived that.

The man punched swift and hard, but K-Rad somehow managed to dodge the blow.

Matt could see boils on K-Rad’s face oozing with thick pus the color and consistency of custard, and slimy brown earthworms crawled in and out of his eye sockets like living strands of lo mein. K-Rad ran out into the parking lot, bright red blood dripping down his rotting chin. Matt followed, limping as fast as he could, but K-Rad darted behind a minivan and Matt lost sight of him. Sirens wailed in the distance as more firefighters and rescue personnel headed to Nitko. Matt hobbled forward a few steps, looked between some cars for K-Rad, but didn’t see him anywhere.

A muffled gunshot crackled, and a bullet whistled past Matt’s left ear. K-Rad stood forty feet away with his elbows propped on the roof of a light blue compact automobile, a Camry or a Sentra or one of the other generic sedans from overseas. He fired a second time and a third, and both those rounds missed their mark, but the fourth time K-Rad pulled the trigger Matt felt a sizzling-hot bolus of lead burrow deep into his left shoulder. The shock and pain from the bullet’s impact, along with everything else that had happened over the past few hours, caused Matt to have a momentary lapse of consciousness. He fell dizzily to the pavement and lay flat on his back, clutching the fresh wound with his right hand.

K-Rad walked over with the pistol and aimed it straight at Matt’s face. “I don’t know who you are, but you just fucked with the wrong motherfucker, motherfucker.”

Matt stared Radowski down, resigned to his fate now but unwilling to beg or whimper or flinch, unwilling to give this poor excuse for a human being the satisfaction of seeing him sweat.

“Fuck you,” Matt said.

K-Rad laughed. He pulled the trigger, but the gun did not fire. While he was reaching into his backpack and pulling a second identical pistol out and jacking a round into the chamber, Matt felt something uncomfortable pressing against his right buttocks.

Then he remembered.

He reached into the back pocket of his jeans. An instant before K-Rad took aim again, Matt sprayed the entire contents of the Mace canister at his unprotected face. Radowski squealed and cussed and clawed at his eyes. Matt scissored his legs with K-Rad’s and sent the gunman tumbling facedown onto the pavement.

Matt rose to a sitting position, grabbed K-Rad by the hair, and smashed his face into the hot blacktop. He picked up the pistol, rose and steadied himself, and limped toward the entrance.

From the ladies’ restroom Shelly heard women screaming and dishes breaking and pieces of silverware clanging metallically to the floor. A man shouted, “Oh my God, he’s got a gun.”

Shelly didn’t know what the hell was going on, but she was missing all the excitement and that wasn’t cool. Fuck a bunch of waiting around for these bitches to come in and potty. Time to kick things up a notch.

She pulled the Remington twelve-gauge pump from the pouch and stuffed some extra shells into her pockets. She pumped one into the chamber and walked out with the barrel leading the way.

The worst table in a restaurant is always the one nearest the restrooms. There are people constantly walking by, on their way to piss or shit or hock a loogie, and in the worst establishments you can even hear the toilets flushing. Not very appetizing. Plus, the hallway to the restroom is usually near the door to the kitchen, so you have servers and busboys scurrying back and forth with trays of hot food or plastic bins of dirty dishes, and the chef is always shouting at someone for screwing something up. The worst table in a restaurant is always the one nearest the restrooms, and at the Retro it was a four-top nestled between the lobster tank and a life-sized statue of Elvis. Shelly turned the corner and saw the unlucky party, an elderly couple on one side of the table and a much younger couple on the other. Next to the younger woman there was a little girl, probably between the ages of one and two, strapped into a wooden high chair. The baby was screaming for all she was worth, and all four of the adults had their elbows on the table and their hands laced together and their eyes closed. They were praying. Shelly aimed the gun and pulled the trigger, and chunks of Grandma and Grandpa splattered all over Elvis’s chubby face. It looked like someone had thrown a plate of spaghetti and meatballs at him. The young couple’s expressions had quickly turned from worry to terror, and they backed toward the wall and held their palms out in a defensive gesture as Shelly turned the gun on them and their baby.

“Stop!”

Shelly looked toward the front entrance. It was Matt Cahill, and he was pointing a pistol right at her.

Decaying flesh hung from Shelly’s face in strips, as though someone had fed rotten liver through a paper shredder. Her teeth were thick and yellow, her inflamed eyeballs bobbing around in their sockets like hardboiled eggs in some sort of ghastly stew. Matt had seen her car in the parking lot when he drove in, so he’d known she was here at the Retro, but he had no clue as to how she’d managed to get hold of a gun. A sawed-off shotgun, no less, a goddamn portable cannon. She had already slaughtered an elderly man and woman, and she was about to do the same to a young couple and their toddler.

“Let them go, Shelly,” Matt shouted. “They never did anything to you.”

Matt was still dizzy. Sweat trickled down his face in streams, and his heart raced, but jacked on adrenaline, he felt no pain from the shrapnel wound in his left leg or the slug embedded in his left shoulder. He felt nothing but an intense rage at all the bloodshed this horrible day had brought, and an intense sorrow for what he was going to have to do now.

He lined the pistol’s sites at Shelly’s chest, trying his best to focus.

“Drop your gun,” she said, pointing the shotgun directly at the baby’s head. “Or I shoot the baby.”

It was a stalemate. If Matt pulled the trigger, Shelly would die, but so would the baby.

“Why the baby?” Matt asked.

“Why not?” she said. “Aren’t they adorable? That’s all the bitches at the plant ever talk about. Let them talk about this.”

Matt saw her finger tense on the trigger. “What’s the baby’s name?” He turned to the terrified mother. “Tell me.”

In a quivering voice, the young woman said, “Kylie. Her name is Kylie.”

“You hear that, Shelly? Her name is Kylie. Why would you possibly-”

“Shut up,” Shelly said. “Or shoot me. I’d be doing this kid a favor.”

“A favor?”

Shelly gestured to the horrified mother. “Look at her, sopping up the beer. A couple years from now she’ll be too drunk to notice when her man starts feeling up little Kylie. Or she’ll notice and not even give a shit. Hell, maybe she’ll even pimp her out for drug money.”

“Or maybe her mother will love her and she’ll grow up to live a happy life,” Matt said.

“No such thing,” Shelly said.

Suddenly, blue lights started flashing against the restaurant’s window shades. Shelly saw them, too.

The cops had arrived, but Matt knew they wouldn’t storm in right away. They would secure the area, try to negotiate a surrender, and eventually send in a SWAT team. By that time, little Kylie and no telling how many others would perish.

One way or another, it would be over soon.

“I know you drift off sometimes,” Matt said. “When the pain becomes too much. Where do you go?”

Shelly turned and faced Matt. The expression on her gruesome face seemed to soften, and her voice sounded like it belonged to a little girl.

“High school. Isn’t that fucking pathetic? Everybody in the world hated high school, and it’s all I’ve got to look back on… I was almost head cheerleader, you know. I was…” She paused and then shouted, “Fuck you!”

She gritted her teeth and scrunched her brow, and as she started to turn back toward the child in the high chair, Matt squeezed the trigger three times in quick succession. Shelly spun and fell backward, and the shotgun blasted a hole in the ceiling as she crashed into the lobster tank. The glass shattered, and a hundred gallons of murky green water flooded the floor.

The liberated creatures did not crawl on Shelly, or even toward her. They crawled away from her, as though she and they were opposite poles of a magnet.

The restaurant patrons, many of whom had climbed under tables or had taken other defensive positions, seemed to breathe a collective sigh of relief.

Someone began clapping.

It was Mr. Dark, sitting at a table, wearing a lobster bib, waiting for his meal.

“Nicely done,” Mr. Dark said. “Shame you couldn’t do it before.”

“I’m not a murderer,” Matt said.

“No, no, you’re not,” the baby’s mother said, clutching her baby now and sobbing. “You saved us. Thank God, you saved us.”

Matt looked at her, wanting to believe she was right. But the bodies on the floor said otherwise.

When he turned back around, Mr. Dark was gone.

A pair of police detectives grilled Matt as he lay on a gurney in the emergency room awaiting treatment. He told them everything he knew about the slayings at Nitko and at the Retro.

But he didn’t really have to convince them.

By the time he got to the hospital, they’d found Terri Bonach, and she backed up his story. And there was the mother, who credited him with saving her child.

And Kevin Radowski was still alive, somewhere in the same hospital, under heavy guard.

They said that Matt had probably saved thousands of lives.

But it was the few that he didn’t… and especially Shelly… that he couldn’t stop thinking about.

If only he’d killed her the instant Mr. Dark had touched her…

But he hadn’t had the guts.

Or the heart.

Shelly was broken long before he’d met her, but no more than millions of other people who were living lives they hated. The anger and bitterness were just small parts of her. There was joy in her, too. He’d seen it. He’d felt it. Maybe if she’d lived long enough she could have figured out how to let the good feelings overwhelm the bad. Or maybe not. But that was just life.

Then Mr. Dark had touched her and the bitterness and anger were all that were left.

Matt had kept hoping until the last minute that he could save her from what Mr. Dark had done with his touch. But he could never save her from what her life had done to her-and what she had done to herself. The seeds had been planted long ago. Mr. Dark just showed up for the harvest.

So now Radowski was alive and Shelly was in a body bag.

Matt figured the prosecution would seek the death penalty, but even if they were successful, no telling how many years K-Rad would spend on death row filing appeals. Books would be written, movies would be made, and curious women would make him their pen pal. Three hots and a cot, and worldwide fame. That was probably what he had wanted all along, and that was probably what he was going to get.

It wasn’t fair that K-Rad survived and Shelly did not.

Score one for Mr. Dark.

The plant may not have blown up, but K-Rad was still alive, someone other psychopaths could look to for bloody inspiration.

Matt asked the detectives about his ax.

The cops told him it had been used to kill a woman in the bathroom.

Matt asked for it back, which shocked the cops.

“It belonged to my grandfather,” he told them. “It’s very important to me.”

The cops figured that since the perp was dead and there wouldn’t be a trial, they wouldn’t have to hold on to it.

They were going against department regulations big-time, but they owed him something for stopping the bomb.

So they washed the blood off of the ax and gave it to him in a gym bag so nobody would see it.

He asked for one more thing.

He wanted his name out of the papers. He wanted no credit whatsoever for what he had done.

Or not done.

They were okay with that, too.

Matt spent several hours in the emergency room but refused to be admitted to the hospital. Hospitals were not good places for him. He healed too fast, which inevitably raised questions he didn’t want raised.

An on-call surgeon removed the bullet from Matt’s shoulder and the shrapnel from his leg. Once he was sewn up, cleaned, and bandaged, Matt dressed in a set of surgical scrubs he found on a linen cart, took the staff-only elevator to the basement, and walked out of the service entrance of the hospital before the media arrived.

Gym bag in hand, he slipped through the parking lot and up the ramp to the highway. A mile or so later he came to a sign that said 95 South to St. Augustine. He stuck his thumb out.

He didn’t know where he was going, but he was in no hurry to get there.

Because he knew one thing for certain.

Death would be waiting.

About the Author

Photograph by Pete Helow

Jude Hardin holds a BA in English from the University of Louisville and currently works as a registered nurse in a major urban medical center in North Florida. When he’s not pounding away at the computer keyboard, Hardin can be found pounding away on his drums, playing tennis, reading, or down at the pond fishing with his son.