Crisis Event: Black Feast (9 page)

By the time Sadie could see clearly again the textbooks and lab manuals beneath the form had caught fire.

She laughed.

The strange irony of chemistry textbooks becoming part of a chemical reaction—turning plant cellulose into carbon, heat, and light in an exothermic reaction—was too much.

She watched the fire burn, enjoying the heat against her face and hands—despite it being just a little too hot in the room. Cold wet sludge awaited her return to the outside world, and she’d wish she was back here when that time came.

After a few more minutes the crackling inside the form subsided and the white flames disappeared. All that was left was the glowing red metal inside the form.

Sadie picked up the iron rod and her hatchet and kicked the chair over. She stomped out the flaming chemistry books, then shoved the end of the iron rod against the steel hasp and pinned it against the metal cabinet behind it.

The metal rings through which the lock was secured had softened and began to give way beneath the iron rod. Sadie tapped the other end of the rod with her hatchet, using short hard strokes so she didn’t miss the target and smash her fingers.

She winced every time the metal clanged.

The sound was deafening, as if someone was repeatedly kicking an old locker in the hallway of a high school. But the metal rings were giving way, and when she smacked the rod with a final hard shot the rings separated from the rest of the locker and the lock fell to the floor with a dull thump.

“Jackpot” Sadie said as the metal doors swung open and her flashlight illuminated the contents of the cabinet.

Chapter 7

It wasn’t a money jackpot, but for Sadie, it was a gold mine. She snatched her backpack off the table and unzipped the top. She folded and stuffed her hatchet back inside, then tossed in the electronic scale. Next she grabbed her flashlight and started snatching bottles of chemicals off the cabinet shelves.

She pulled out a small bottle of arsenic, its death’s head label warning her not to eat it, and a bottle of acetonitrile and another of diethyl ether. To these she added three small jars containing sodium, lithium, and potassium in mineral oil—after sealing each inside heavy duty Ziploc bags she carried in her pack.

She was stunned that all the chemicals had been stored together. It gave her a hint of what must have happened here: when the Crisis hit the last professor or graduate student standing had hidden a bunch of chemicals in this room, storing them together in a manner they would have been fined for in the days before everything went crazy. They’d known there’d never be any repercussions for doing so because of how bad things had gotten.

Maybe they’d thought they’d be able to come back and retrieve the chemicals, but the cannibal freaks showed up and killed them. Or maybe they’d just been hoping someone like Sadie would come along and find them—and know what to do with them.

When she checked the highest shelf in the cabinet she got the biggest surprise of her day, month, and year. Possibly even her life.

It wasn’t the iodine Benzaldehyde or the MDMA that surprised her, though those were huge finds in and of themselves. But the dimethylmercury...now that was something.

The container holding it was a thick hardened glass vial that wouldn’t break if you hurled it against a brick wall. That was because the chemical inside was so dangerous that one drop on your latex glove would go right through and kill you.

    When her class had been learning about the chemical, Dr. Willis told Sadie’s class the story of Dr. Wetterhahn.

About how she had worked with dangerous chemicals for years but one day spilled a drop of dimethylmercury from a pipette onto her glove.

She didn’t get the glove off quickly enough.

“The mercury drove her insane,” Willis said. “After it destroyed her kidneys and lungs and turned her hands and feet and face pink and she lost so much weight she slipped into a coma.”

Sadie almost left the little bottle where it was. But then the smell of vinegar intruded into the room, overpowering the molten metal stench, and she considered the possibility that in this new world—a world that sent former police officers charging at you with murder, rape, and cannibalism on their minds—maybe she would need a deadly poison.

She would certainly need the silver foil she found, and the box of fifty dust masks, and the latex gloves. Without hesitation Sadie took the box of a hundred she found on the bottom shelf of the cabinet.

Sadie smiled, remembering how latex gloves had a tendency to disappear from laboratories when they were full of undergraduate students. Dr. Willis used to scream himself hoarse about it.

One day, after seeing yet another empty box, he yelled, “You guys go through these gloves like condoms!”

Sadie drank from her canteen before tucking it inside her backpack. She zipped the pack closed and slid it across the table so she could leave. She looked back and played the flashlight’s beam over the shelves one more time.

When she was satisfied she’d taken everything she needed, she closed the door and hung the periodic table—just in case someone else came looking for chemicals and knew the value of what she’d left behind.

Sadie returned the way she’d come in, passing by the meth cooking set-up, retracing her path back to the stairwell, and descending to the first floor. She turned off her flashlight and stood outside the stairwell door until her eyes had adjusted to the dim light.

Less than ten seconds later she was to the building exit, ready to push out into the storm and run for the relative safety of the creekbed.

Then she heard the scream.

“No!” a woman’s voice shrieked. “No! No! No!”

There was laughter and the sound of a fist smacking into flesh just as a fork of lightning came down and struck the top of the library building a hundred feet away. The laughter was drowned out by a crack of thunder.

“Mind your own business, Sadie,” she told herself.

She wrapped her fingers around the latch bar and got ready to go, almost convinced that she could mind her own business if she tried hard enough.

But then she heard a man’s “Haw haw haw!” come booming down the hallway toward her.

Then she couldn’t mind her own business.

Something about the sick glee in the man’s voice made her turn and creep down to the hallway where she’d found the slaughter room.

“Please!” a woman wailed.

“Oh, you gonna please Big Jim all right,” the man said, “In more ways than one.”

He began to whistle.

So this is Big Jim.

Sadie remembered what the cop had said about roasting her heart, and though she was shaking and nauseous and just as terrified as she’d been an hour earlier, she made herself pull the sawed-off shotgun out of the holster and step around the corner.

She crept to the open door and stood in the shadows next to the yellow lightspill. She listened to the low hiss of the propane torches, the boiling water, and the woman whimpering. The stench of vinegar became so strong her eyes began to water again.

When she got to the door she glanced inside. The dead woman was still on the table, her head lolling and her eyes still open and staring. Only now both arms and legs were completely gone and her belly had been sliced open.

The giant had begun removing organs from her.

Sadie couldn’t see Big Jim, so she leaned over farther. The room was much brighter now, and Sadie saw that the big man had lit a dozen or more candles and waxed them onto the Ball jar table. Still she saw no one. She cradled the shotgun with both hands, slipping her fingers into the trigger guard and resting them against the triggers.

“Please don’t kill me!” the woman whimpered again.

“Give me a reason not to,” the man said.

“What do you want?”

Sadie slid her foot even with the door frame and when she leaned sideways to look she finally saw him. The big wooden cabinet was open now, and Sadie realized that the girl had been inside it the whole time.

The girl stood naked, with her hands tied to a metal eyebolt above her head. Her feet had been chained to manacles attached to the bottom of the cabinet. A loop of cloth—obviously a gag—had been pulled down around her neck so that the man could enjoy her screams. Her dirty blond hair, tangled and soaked with sweat, lay flat against her head. Tears and snot streamed down her face.

Sadie felt sick as she watched the man tease and taunt the girl. His back was to Sadie and he held a long butcher knife in his right hand. He waved the blade back and forth in front of the girl’s face, and slapped the flat of the blade against her skin.

The girl closed her eyes and began to pray wordlessly.

Sadie stepped away from the door, pressing her back against the wall and trying to breathe calmly.

She didn’t know what to do. The man was too close to the girl for Sadie to step out and fire. The blast might go through and kill her. She could try to run in and get a better angle, but he might turn and fire with a hidden gun.

She considered retreating and tossing something down the hall to try to draw him out, but he might send the girl out in front of him.

She was spared the trouble of coming up with a way of getting a clean shot at the man when she heard him say: “You want to pray, little girl, you gonna have to get on your knees.”

Sadie heard the sound of rope being cut, then the sound of a rattling chain.

She smiled grimly.

Her grandfather had warned her that all guys were the same.

“Every last one of ‘em think with their peckers,” he’d said more than once, but Sadie was always surprised when the guys she met or knew or heard about proved her grandfather so profoundly correct.

As quietly as she could, Sadie clicked back each of the shotgun’s hammers. Then she moved to the edge of the doorway.

The girl was on her knees in front of the big man. Sadie couldn’t see much of her face, but the important thing was that she was out of the line of fire.

“You know what to do,” the man said, and Sadie heard the sound of a zipper and saw the big man’s hand jerk downward. “Sluts like you always know what to do.”

As the girl leaned forward, Sadie stepped out and pointed the gun at an imaginary spot between the giant’s shoulder blades. When neither the big man nor the girl noticed Sadie, she slid closer.

As she crossed the floor, a sick nausea filled her belly, and a chill ran up her back to stand her hair up. She wanted the big guy dead for what he was making the girl do—and for what he was doing to the body of the girl on the table. But she remembered how awful she felt when she’d shot the cop.

Then she saw the tanning frames. Six or seven of them, leaning against the back of the cabinet next to where the girl had been tied.

The frame in front held the skin of a dead human—a child from its size. Sadie swallowed several times, and asked herself why she hadn’t just left the building. She wondered even now if it wasn’t too late to back out of the room before either the big man or the girl realized she was there.

But then the big man turned his head and said: “You gonna have to wait your turn, Bryce.”

“I’ll pass this time,” she said.

“What the—?” the man said as he shoved the blonde girl away and spun toward Sadie.

Instantly, the hand with the butcher knife went up over his head. His other hand fumbled at his crotch as he tried to tuck himself back inside his fly.

“Don’t move,” Sadie said, and she thrust the shotgun forward.

The big man froze. Then he looked at the shotgun.

His eyes narrowed and he grinned when he saw the way her hands were shaking.

“Calm down, girl,” he said.  “There’s enough of Big Jim to go around.”

“You don’t look so big,” she said, and gave a glance at his crotch. “Pretty small, actually.”

“Fuck you,” he said, and stepped forward—much faster than a guy his size should’ve been able to do. He covered most of the distance between them with one big step. His giant boot slammed down on the floor as he swung his knife toward Sadie’s throat.

The smile on his face turned to a snarl.

“Haaaaaaaa!” he screamed suddenly.

Without thinking Sadie pulled both triggers.

The shotgun boomed and her hands were jammed backward by the force. The gun grip smacked into her belly, doubling her over and knocking her back.

She gasped, and her stunned solar plexus refused to fill her lungs with air.

The blonde girl screamed as the paraffin load hit the big man in his chest at the sternum. The waxy slug tore through his coveralls and blasted into his breast bone and chest cavity, holding together long enough to penetrate his chest.

When the wax and BBs and wadding came tearing out of his back they took part of his spine and most of his internal organs with them. A mist of aerosolized blood was left hanging in the air and ropes of bloody intestine splattered over the floor.