Biohazard

23

“There’s a discharge valve at the rear of the tank,” he said. “It’s where you hook up the hose for unloading. Manual. Strictly gravity feed.”

As the girls and I watched the Clansmen picking their way toward us, our hands sweaty on our guns, Carl and Texas went at it. I didn’t watch what they did. I heard the doors to the truck cab open and shut a few times. I heard them argue. I heard the clanking of a dropped wrench. I couldn’t seem to take my eyes off what I was seeing below: the Hatchet Clans. I wondered how many there were in Gary. What I was seeing was not only horrendous but amazing. They were literally everywhere-creeping amongst the vehicles, crawling over the tops, massing like a swarm of hornets. There were so many that it was absolutely ridiculous to pick a target. It reminded me of when I was a kid and I stomped an ant hill and the ants, black and angry, literally boiled out.

There were that many.

Mickey was next to me and she was trembling. “C’mon, Nash…Jesus Christ, we have to get out of here!”

Janie didn’t say a word. Oh, she was scared, too, but she wasn’t saying a thing. She was just waiting as death moved towards us, either with absolute faith in what the boys were doing or maybe accepting her end. You could never be sure with her.

I smelled gas.

“Okay,” Texas said, tapping me on the shoulder. “Time for a very hasty retreat…”

We pulled back and I had him take the girls and get moving while I stood off to the side. Carl looked at me. Gas was dripping from the discharge valve. It smelled very sharp, very pungent. I gave him the thumbs up and he opened the valve. The gas didn’t just run from the outlet, it sprayed. It came out in a gushing, high-pressure stream that shot forward a good five feet before striking the bridge. It hit with such force that it washed away the corpses of the dead Clansmen, catching them in a rolling stream and pushing them beneath cars. The smell of raw gasoline was so overwhelming, I started to get dizzy from the fumes.

“Let’s go,” Carl said.

We retreated with the others. I told them to keep going until they were off the other end of the bridge. They didn’t like it, but it had to be. I didn’t know what was going to happen when Carl put a bullet in the spilled river of gas. His plan was fairly simple: he’d shoot into the gas. The bridge was metal. The slug from my Savage would kick up some sparks when it hit and that’s all it would take. The gas should ignite, but the truck would, too, and when that happened it might be like ground zero on the bridge.

Carl and I climbed up atop the cab of a flatbed truck loaded with lumber. We had a good view of the tanker and the gas flooding down through the vehicles. The Clansmen stopped when it hit them, several were washed right off their feet, more falling as the gas rushed past them. Some retreated. Others came forward. Most were just confused, mulling around, wondering maybe what it all meant.

The gas had been running for over five minutes at that point.

It had flooded right down the bridge and I could see the swirling lake of it on the road where you drove up. Carl raised the Savage. His face was glistening with sweat. He sighted in and fired. Nothing. Swearing, he did it again, aiming down farther in-between two cars right into the gas. He squeezed the trigger. The shot rang out and this time I saw the sparks fly as the round chewed into the steel plating. I saw the spark and then a wall of flames was rushing towards the truck and right through the legions of the Hatchet Clans. They screamed and threw themselves around as the fire enveloped them. There was no escape from it.

We jumped off the cab, landed on the hood, found the bridge and started running. We made it maybe twenty feet when the world exploded into daylight and the aftershock threw us to the bridge. Behind us, it was an absolute inferno. The explosion had tossed the tanker into the air about forty feet and then it came back down, a flaming mass that erupted on impact in an ocean of fire that engulfed the bridge, ran right up the farthest arch, and flooded everything in a blinding blaze. Twin fire balls about the size of two-story houses went rolling up into the sky. A wave of heat hit Carl and I, singing our eyebrows. The Hatchet Clans were incinerated, I was guessing, because nothing could have lived through that cremating firestorm. From the first arch right down to the road below was nothing but a rampart of fire that rose twenty feet into the air. I saw burning Clansman leaping off the bridge or blown right off it. I heard their death cries as they roasted in hell.

We were quite a distance from it, yet the consuming heat was like standing before an open oven door. We got to our feet and ran, gasping for breath. The air was foul with smoke and fumes and it was hard to breathe as if the explosion itself had sucked all the oxygen from the air.

When we reached the others, we were dizzy, out of breath. We fell to our knees and they pulled us to our feet, got us off the bridge.

Lying on the grassy riverbank, I watched the bridge burn. It was so bright you could have seen it for miles, just blazing away as Dresden must have after it was fire-bombed. As we sat there, watching the pyrotechnics, all those cars and trucks started going up as their gas tanks caught fire. I saw a propane truck shoot straight up like a burning missile before coming down into the river below, a huge puddle of flames spreading over the surface of the water. It expanded right to the far bank and started the grass and trees on fire.

It was quite a show.