The Poison Sky (29 page)

He knew he was close to GreenWorld. He recognized the big offset printing plant where he and Faye had waited to follow the chemical truck. A small ambulance had rammed the chain-link fence in front of the printing plant and the driver sat slumped over the wheel. Two people who had apparently tried to reach the ambulance lay in the street.

Jack Liffey drove carefully around the bodies in the long block until he came to the parking lot in front of GreenWorld. It was eerie—a scene that was familiar but utterly transformed by the threat that was everywhere. The big black BMW was in the lot. Good, he thought. At least Nick Giarre was hoist by his own petard, and he hoped the bounty hunters were there, too. He parked beside the guard shack. No one was visible inside, and the gate to the plant stood open.

The boy took out his mouthpiece for a moment. “Mr. Liffey, I'm scared to death,” he said.

He nodded in reply and shut off the car to create a profound silence, broken only by a faint hiss from the boy's air tank. I'm always scared, he thought, but I'm trying to lose the knack.

18

PROUD OF HIMSELF

N
OT FAR AWAY A SIREN WAS HOOTING ON AND OFF, ON
and off. It was like a finger pressing again and again on a sore spot.

A black man in a security-guard uniform lay on the floor of the kiosk with a telephone handset clutched to his breast like a prized possession. He looked quite dead, with his mouth wide open and his chest arched up impossibly as if trying to break his own back. A row of clipboards hung from nails on the back wall of the guard shack, and there was one empty nail under a piece of adhesive tape with
Milo
scribbled on it, so Jack Liffey surmised he had taken his clipboard and gone out on his rounds. Over the clipboards there was a foot-square slab of Masonite printed with a dashed red line that traced a looping route through a series of rectangles and circles that seemed to represent what he knew of the geography of the tanks and buildings of the compound. Spaced out evenly along the route there were little red stars. Jack Liffey ripped the square of Masonite off the wall.

The siren was still hooting, but he noticed another sound on the air, a powerful vibration, like some piece of heavy machinery turning over deep in the earth. He wriggled the air tank comfortable on his shoulders as he stepped out of the guardhouse into the fouled air. From the moment he had clambered out of the car, the air had prickled his cheeks and neck and forearms like fine needles tormenting a sunburn.

He looked around to orient himself to the map and then gestured so the boy would follow. The yellow fog swirled around them in slow filmy eddies, but for some reason he found that he could actually see a little better here than on the streets outside the compound, like being in the eye of a great storm.

The first building along the route was a low corrugated iron structure with wired glass windows. The corner of the building corresponded with the first red star on the map and he found a little cast-iron shelf with a lid on it that was screwed waist-high on the wall. He flicked idly at the lid and a big black key on a chain tumbled out and dangled, the first check-in point for the security guards.

Jimmy Mardesich gripped his shoulder and pointed at a wooden cabinet fixed to the side of the building a few feet away. It said
EMERGENCY RESPIRATOR
on a metal plaque, and showed a line drawing of a man wearing some kind of breathing mask. He tore a breakaway plastic tab off the latch and wrenched the cabinet door open to reveal an empty Pepsi bottle and a yellowing tabloid newspaper. It might as well have had a big note saying
Ha-Ha.

As they skirted the side of the building, the throbbing became much louder, an ominous roaring of some kind. The map led them to a flat bundle of pipes of many colors that ran overhead like some modernist interpretation of a rose bower. They followed along under the pipe arbor that led deeper into the compound. Here and there a single pipe, silver or red or yellow, made an abrupt loop upward and then back down, or several of them would drop down into panels of pressure gauges and valves. He was tempted to start turning off everything in sight, but he had no idea what that would do. The noise grew louder and louder as they advanced until he could no longer hear the hooting siren, only a furious roar like standing behind an old prop airliner cranking up for takeoff.

A steel ladder tracked up to a high node in the progress of several of the pipes, and thirty feet overhead a man in overalls hung upside down from a safety belt attached to a small platform at the top of the ladder. His mouth was wide open as he swung lightly and a tool kit lay spilled on the ground at the foot of the ladder.

The red line on the map led them to another key station on a big panel of gauges and then out into the plant's central driveway. Parked along the roadway he saw a black tank truck just like the one he had followed up into Santa Clarita, maybe the very one. A driver in a red flannel shirt was slumped forward with his arm out the window. In front of it was another tank truck, and then another. One of the drivers had got out and now lay in a heap beside the road. He followed the roadway past two more trucks that stood with their cab doors open and the cabs empty, then a much longer truck in stainless steel. All the while the eerie roaring grew louder until it was a steady explosion going off in his ears, just passing into the pain register.

Ahead of him the curving shape of a large chemical tank took on substance out of the yellow fog. It had the number “104” on the side, and he wondered if this was Big Bertha. The roar was so loud now it had no direction at all but seemed to emanate from the center of his head. Beside the tank there was a vertical cauldron, like an upended Winnebago, with a tall chimney rising out of it that was guyed in place by heavy cables. When he looked up he found himself awestruck. Far overhead, a bright yellow column of gas shot straight up out of the chimney like a rocket exhaust. The plume went up another fifty feet before billowing out into the cloud and rolling outward. He had never seen any massive physical process so urgent and angry, and so obviously out of control. Now and again, there was a flash of light inside the relentless exhaust, just above the chimney. It was the flare tower, he guessed, desperately trying to burn off a hundred or a thousand times more gas than it was built to control.

The boy prodded his shoulder and tugged him out into the roadway, pointing upward. Following the finger, he could see a second jet of the yellow gas that was venting directly from a crack in the big tank itself. The metal had torn open near the top and a plume of enraged gas shot sideways into the air. As the furious jet slowed, it billowed into a fatter column that swelled and then crested, rolled back on itself, mutated into animal shapes, and finally disappeared horizontally into the fog. Where the gas was escaping the tank, a fold of metal had been torn back like aluminum foil and a thick brown liquid dripped down the side of the tank, like wax down a candle. He could see that nothing was going to turn off this disaster until every ounce of the toxics stored in Big Bertha had boiled off into the air of the Valley.

At the foot of the flare tower, a red tank truck was hooked up to a hose that came off the cauldron. He wondered if some act involved in plugging in this truck had touched off the disaster, and then all of a sudden, with a chill that shot up to his shoulders, he knew why all the tank trucks were waiting up the lane. His late-night visit to Nick Giarre had spooked the man after all, and he had set to work to dump the evidence. And that meant there was a good chance that he, Jack Liffey, had unknowingly set the catastrophe in motion. The disorienting roar and the terrible realization left him dazed and inert, staring vacuously off into the burning fog.

The boy jostled him to life again and pointed to the far side of the road, then hurried across to retrieve a clipboard that lay there. Jack Liffey finally came alive and trotted after him. Under the spring clip was a pad with a preprinted grid that said
Traffic Log
and the boy pointed to
M. Mardesich
typed onto the form at the top right. He saw that the boy's hand looked badly burned against the paper and he noticed that his face, too, was cherry red where it was unprotected. Jack Liffey checked his map, trying hard not to look at his own hands, and saw that if they carried on in that direction, past the discarded clipboard, it led to the office building.

He gestured and they took off in that direction. One of the truck drivers had made it this far, and he was stretched out now along a dashed chartreuse line on the pavement like an additional indicator pointing the way.

As they trotted away from the thundering flare tower, he started to hear the siren again, over and over, like a submarine forever announcing its dive, and he wasn't sure which sound was more deeply terrifying. Then he noticed that on each inhale he was getting a little less of a forced breath and he caught up to the boy to check the gauge on his tank. There wasn't much air left, probably even less than his own. Their fear and exertion was drawing down the supply too fast.

They shortcut through a farm of smaller chemical tanks and around a fenced-off equipment yard full of hoists and rusting pipe. He saw the small stucco office block ahead and figured if they could get inside, they might be able to seal themselves into an interior room and wait for the fire department. Which might be exactly what Milo had done, after all his research on Bhopal.

Jimmy went straight for a steel door at the corner of the office building that had a push-button digital lock. He tugged and yanked and stabbed random buttons with an angry desperation, but it wouldn't budge. To the left a four-foot-high concrete-block wall defined a little private patio enclosing green awnings off the back of the building. When Jack Liffey boosted himself up the wall, he saw a sight so strange he couldn't take it in for a moment. In the middle of the patio, Nick Giarre sat calmly in his dark pin-striped suit in a high-back leather office chair with a grim look on his bright red face as his chin jutted forward. An inch-wide row had been shaved in his hair from front to back, and his forearms were duct-taped to the arms of the chair.

All the other chairs on the patio were the usual molded resin buckets from the Home Depot. Nick Giarre wasn't moving, and he stayed just as still when Jack Liffey leaped off the wall and winced at the smack he got in his back from the air tank. The high chair had casters and he guessed Giarre had been dealt with indoors and then pushed out there by someone with a macabre sense of justice—so his own chemical spill would deliver the
coup de grâce.
No, not
someone,
he thought. The shaved track in his hair and the duct tape meant that Quinn hadn't hauled the redhead off to jail, after all. He wondered if the man was still hanging around, or if he'd found some way to escape.

While Jack Liffey was busy studying Giarre, Jimmy came over the wall. He wrenched open the sliding-glass door and tugged Jack Liffey quickly into a small lunchroom, lined with sandwich and Coke machines. They were hit by a blast of immensely hot stale air. When Jimmy slid the door shut, the glass mercifully muted the siren and the roar of the gas flares. The boy yanked out his mouthpiece and went down on his knees, gasping in a breath. His tank had apparently drained to zero, and he breathed deeply several times, rocking on his knees.

“Oh, thank God, thank God,” he sputtered after a moment. “The air stinks in here but you can still breathe it.”

Jack Liffey shut his valve off to save the last few minutes of precious air. He kept the gear on his back, though, if only for a sense of security.

“That was scary,” the boy said. “The thing's been fighting me for a minute or two. Toward the end, it was like trying to suck a Ping-Pong ball up a garden hose.” He took off the mask, too, and took in a large breath through his nose.

Sweat was already prickling on Jack Liffey's burned skin. “Somebody had the sense to turn off the air-conditioning,” he said softly.

He opened the lunchroom door quietly and saw a drab corridor with several other doors, mostly open, and a lot of yellow light from the far end, which was probably the reception area that you could see from out front. The hair on his neck went stiff when he heard a rattle and scrape along the hall—like a sound that shouldn't have been there except in a nightmare. He looked back and saw that the boy had heard it, too. They tiptoed slowly down the bare hallway. The first door opened into a tiny Xerox room, with a rack of paper, a fax machine, and a big calendar with information scribbled all over it in grease pencil. No one was there.

The next was a double office with desks on opposite walls and a library of black ledgers haphazardly racked in head-high industrial shelving, and no one was there, either. There was another scraping sound ahead and his hackles rose and stayed up. He heard a file cabinet come open and someone going through folders hastily, then a muffled wail, like an angry complaint from a deaf-mute. He thought he smelled marijuana but it must have been some trick of the gas spill.

“Look, asshole, if you don't shut the fuck up, I'll push you outside right now.”

It was the redhead's voice, and Jack Liffey's eyes went to an ashtray stand along the hall that would make a passable weapon. He might have had a chance with it, but the redhead barreled straight out of the room into them and startled all three of them so much that Jack Liffey yelped, the boy gave a squeak, and the redhead dropped the burning joint out of his mouth.

“Kee-rist, you guys gave me the jim-jams!”

Unfortunately the redhead had a Browning automatic pistol in his hand, and he showed it off with an eyebrows-raised look to back them up while he retrieved his joint. He brushed the little cigarette off on his sleeve before popping it back into the corner of his mouth. “That's more like it. Mmmm. I don't know what the hell you two are doing here.” His eye caught on Jack Liffey's air tank. “What have we got
here
?
An
air
supply. Right, right, right. Just what the doc ordered.
Breathing
is still in fashion, and another few years of living for the Idaho Kid. Hand it over. Second thought, set it down right there.”