Fire and Ice (3 page)

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 clichés.

“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.

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.

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.