Sector C (33 page)

“You go with him,” Mike told Sylvia, selfishly not wanting to be separated from Donna. The woman shot him a thankful look.

Dr. Volkov nodded through the glass door toward the parking lot where only his van was left. Mike’s SUV had apparently already been disposed of or had been enlisted to help evacuate supplies. “Get in the passenger seat and stay there,” he told Sylvia. “If anyone looks this way and you’re outside, they will not mistake those designer clothes for any of the staff. I’ll finish loading and we’ll get out of here.” He turned back to Mike and Donna. “Good luck.”

Donna gave him a grim smile. “Thanks.”

Mike watched Sylvia duck out the door and hurry to the van as Dr. Volkov followed with his cartload of drenched equipment. Hoping everyone else was already well away, he looked at Donna. “Ready?”

She nodded, and they trotted off together for the maintenance shed as the first ceiling tiles in the hallway crashed to the floor behind them.

Locked in the supply room, Mike had thought the fire was only confined to the research building. The thick smoke roiling over the compound and forcing its way into his lungs showed him otherwise and made it clear why the staff was evacuating. Glimpses of flames between buildings also told him the fire was advancing.

Three bays with rollup doors constituted the bulk of the maintenance shed. Two of the bays were open — and empty. Sweating in the early afternoon heat, they slipped into one of the open bays, looking toward the third. Weak daylight illuminated its contents: a riding lawn mower and some gas cans along with an assortment of weedeaters and blowers. Whatever vehicles had been housed there were long gone.

“Shit.”

Mike couldn’t have summed it up better. “There’s still the parking garage. Maybe something’s been left there.
Any idea how to hotwire a car?”

“No. But I’ve always been a fan of trial and error.”

They were at the bay door when Mike heard frantic shouts over the roar of the coming fire. Two people standing between the burning research building and the parking garage pointed toward a large white tank near the back fence. A third person stood perilously close to the tank holding a garden hose spewing water in a sporadic, rather impotent manner, obviously trying to keep it wet in advance of the wall of flames heading for it.

For a moment Mike stared stupidly at the scene, knowing there was something vitally wrong but unable to think what it was.

Donna’s cry spurred him.
“Propane!”

Rooted, unable to turn away, they watched in horror as the first of the flames caressed the tank. The man holding the hose dropped it and ran for the protection of the garage.

He made it halfway to the people still shouting encouragement to him over their shoulders as they raced for cover.

The explosion rocked the compound. It sucked the oxygen away and snuffed the fire for a hundred yards around it. Like a massive bomb, the tank blew apart, sending flaming shrapnel in all directions. The concussive force knocked Mike and Donna to the ground. Bits of flying metal rattled against the steel shed and a large shard buried itself in a work table along the far wall, setting the dry pine on fire.

Outside, the sound of a human shriek was abruptly cut off as chunks of shrapnel arrowed toward the garage, raining down on the three people caught in the open.

Donna scrambled to her feet in emergency mode. She’d only taken two steps, though, when a second explosion tore through the parking garage. The Triple E fuel depot vomited black smoke and flames, and it was only a moment before the handful of vehicles parked in the concrete bunker caught fire one by one, their gas tanks
pop, pop, popping
in the chaos.

The rolling fireball swept over the three bodies, no longer moving or shouting. Donna could feel her skin reddening from the heat of the firestreak that erupted in front of her not 30 yards away. The fire at her back along the workbench was quickly spreading, too, chewing through wood and rubber and heading relentlessly for the lawn equipment and gas cans.

With no other options left
them
, she and Mike ran.

UPWIND.

Instinctively, that was the direction Mike and Donna went. The trees and bushes that had been planted around the compound for privacy served well to keep two small humans hidden as they put as much distance between themselves and Triple E as fast as they could.

They struck out north toward the distant buttes, staying away from the roadway, knowing with sinking hearts they had miles to go before they could hope to find help.

Once beyond the corporate plantings they slowed, gasping for breath, their skin glistening with sweat not just from the run but from being sucked out by the warm July sun. Donna staggered and Mike caught her elbow with a worried glance. With her, heat stroke wasn’t the only thing they had to worry about.

Recovering her footing, she shrugged him off with a small cry. At first he thought she was in pain until he saw that she was pointing eastward, to something in the distance.
A vehicle?
Had they been spotted? He twisted around and saw the handful of large heavy shapes lumbering across the prairie.
Moving north, away from the fire, just as they were doing.

“Mammoths!”
Mike’s inner editor snickered insanely at the paradox: how ludicrous yet matter-of-fact that sounded. One day he lived in a world without mammoths; the next he was watching them walk across the plains of North Dakota, casually identifying them by their bulk and humps and topknots. And if mammoths were outside the compound … “Do you think other animals escaped?” Mike was remembering the barn with the tigers and wolves and bears.

Donna looked at him with a hint of alarm on her face. “Let’s hope not.” But there was little in the way of conviction in her voice.

“No weapon, no phone … if we aren’t alone —” Mike peered about, half-expecting to see some mega-predator crouching in the grass.

“We’ve got to keep moving.” With more determination showing outside than she felt inside, Donna struck out parallel to the path the mammoths took.

A couple of miles on, sweating profusely in the afternoon heat, they veered across the plain toward a cluster of native elms that offered shade and concealment where they could pause a moment and catch a breath away from the glaring sun. But it was an uneasy rest. “We aren’t the only animals that are going to find this place attractive,” Donna pointed out. On a day as hot as this, neither predator not prey would be far from water or shade.

Warily, they made their way through the copse of trees, lingering in the relative coolness. Even small sounds made them jumpy — a twig falling to the ground, a squirrel chattering an alarm. It didn’t matter that the odds of running across any animal in daylight more interested in them than in smaller, easier game would normally be zero. With the smell of smoke and fear in the air, any animal could be provoked into unnatural behavior. Especially animals as unnatural as the ones loose in this unfamiliar terrain.

As they emerged on the other side of the copse of trees back into the glare of the sun, Mike suddenly threw up a protective arm, pinning Donna behind him.

A deep groan to her right set off internal alarms. The muscles in Donna’s stomach tightened in panic. Half-hidden behind a canopy of leaves and branches something big moved. A giant head dipped up and down, scenting the air then tasting the ground. Frozen in place, they listened to the cadence of its growl.

For a heart-stopping moment they knew they had been found. Donna had seen bulls charge for the unlikeliest of reasons. And it wasn’t likely a mammoth or rhino would be any more reasonable under the circumstances.

She held her breath, trying to make herself as small as possible behind the tree at the edge of the plain.

The low rumble cycled into a mechanical hum that rose and fell, and when they dared at last to peer around the tree trunk the oscillating shape resolved itself behind the spreading elm.

A nervous laugh escaped Donna as she and Mike stepped around the tree. The steel horse head of the pump jack nodded in unbroken rhythm, its up-and-down action powering the piston drawing oil from a rich underground basin.  A second machine nodded in the distance.

“Who’s afraid of a herd of stampeding oil pumps?” Mike shouted at the machines.

Donna sagged against the elm tree, her muscles unclenching in profound relief, allowing her to take a deep, steadying breath. It was easy now to chide herself for her irrational, foolish fear. The consolation was that she and Mike were feeling foolish together.

Putting the menacing pump jacks behind them, they struck off north once again, looking for help.

IT WAS THE BARBED WIRE FENCE they ran across late in the afternoon that took Donna and Mike by surprise. Cross-fencing was common enough out here, but a few hundred feet of this fence had been torn from the ground. Snapped wires curled into the air and rusted T-posts lay on the land like dead soldiers.

Mike fingered the points on one of the barbs.
“Probably even less annoying than thorns if your hide’s as thick as an elephant’s.”

Donna nodded distractedly, but she wasn’t looking at the wire. “I think there’s a house up there.” She pointed to the top of a rise.

“God, about time.
I was beginning to think we’d have to walk all the way to Watford City before we found someone.” In comparison, walking a few hundred yards uphill didn’t seem so bad.

The house, once they got to it, appeared to be completely off-grid. No road around that Mike or Donna could see. Not even a driveway. Just a bit of bare ground on which was parked an older-model Chevy pickup with mismatched quarter panels and a John Deere tractor with its trademark green and yellow paint faded into pastels. The house itself had started off as a mobile home, but weathered boards and plywood slapped up around it showed the owner’s efforts to expand the domicile. As shelter it didn’t look too substantial. As a home it looked even less so. As they got closer it was clear upkeep wasn’t top of mind with this owner, and Mike began to worry they might not even have a phone.

“Hello!” he called while they were still a good distance away, realizing these could be the sort of people who might not appreciate unexpected visitors.

The man who stepped out onto the leaning porch was bearded and wiry. His shirtless chest sported a colorful array of tattoos that spilled down his arms and disappeared beneath his belt. It was the shotgun, though, that drew Mike’s attention. Double barrels aimed squarely at him.

“Just looking for a phone or a way into town,” Mike said, spreading his hands upward to show they were empty.

“Don’t
got
either.” The man didn’t relax his hold on the shotgun. “Go on outta here.”

“But your truck —”

“It
don’t
run.”

“Surely you have a way to get to town, get supplies,” Donna said.

“Don’t matter none whether we do or not. Disease and pestilence took our babies. There’s fire in the air.” He jerked his chin, pointing over their heads to the smoke on the horizon behind them. “And today I’ve seen God’s messengers laying waste to the land. It’s the apocalypse come. Go and make your peace with the Creator.”

“That’s what we’re trying to do. But we have to get to town.”

“His messengers will find you wherever you are. If they could find us here, they’ll find you, too.”

Mike decided maybe he could get somewhere by humoring the man. “These messengers — can you tell us what they look like? So we’ll recognize them if we see them.”

A shadow passed over the man’s face, though the shotgun didn’t budge an inch.
“Bigger than any beast on this earth.
Trumpeting like Gabriel’s horn. You’ll see them soon enough.
But not here.
Not on my land. Go. Leave us to our salvation.”

Donna took a step forward. “Sir, look, if you’ll just —”