Jude Hardin - Fire and ice

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.