Fire and ice

9:42 a.m

Matt looked over at Shelly. She sat on one of the folding chairs, staring into space, unaware of the man in the tuxedo.

Mr. Dark.

“When I go to a show, Matthew, I expect to be entertained,” he said. “If I didn’t have this martini, I’d be asleep already.”

It wasn’t just that Shelly didn’t notice Mr. Dark.

She was totally still, her eyes frozen in midblink.

Time had stopped.

Mr. Dark turned his back to Matt and stepped in front of Shelly, blocking her from view. “Let’s liven things up, shall we?”

And now Matt knew, with horrifying certainty, what was coming next.

Matt tried to shout leave her alone, but the words came out sounding as though they had been uttered from the bottom of a swimming pool. The cheap plastic clock on the wall stopped ticking. Matt closed his fists and tried to launch a series of punches to Mr. Dark’s kidneys, but it seemed someone had strapped something heavy and cumbersome to his hands. It was like trying to box using bowling balls for gloves. He moved in super-slow motion, grabbing for Mr. Dark’s shoulders, but then he was gone, and time suddenly started up again as if the world had been trapped in a cosmic freeze-frame.

The flashlight fell from Shelly’s hands.

When she reached to pick it up, her ball cap fell from her head and Matt saw a cluster of festering wounds crawling with maggots on her scalp, rancid flesh dripping from her exposed skull to the floor in sickening, wet glops.

Mr. Dark had touched her.

9:47 a.m.

Just as K-Rad had expected, the floor in Petrol was littered with dead bodies. They say suffocation is a rough way to go, and from the expressions on their faces, it looked like they had all died horrible and agonizing deaths. Some of them looked as though they were straining to take a shit, their eyes shut tight and their neck ligaments stressfully flexed. Others seemed to have witnessed some sort of ghastly revelation. Their eyes bulged and their faces were puffy and swollen, as though someone had inflated them with a bicycle pump. It was funny. It made K-Rad laugh. He was about to leave the area when he heard a tiny voice say, “Help me.”

He followed the sound to a young woman who had collapsed near a stack of wooden crates. How had she survived when all the others had perished? Interesting. Very interesting. She had beaten the odds with the fumes in Petrol, and it seemed a shame to just shoot her. Maybe he could think of something a little more fun.

He walked over to her and crouched down like a baseball catcher.

“What’s your name?” he said. The gas mask muffled his voice, and she looked at him uncomprehendingly. “What’s your name?” he said again, louder this time.

“Terri. My name’s Terri. Are you going to rescue me?”

“Yes. Everything’s going to be all right.”

“Really? You promise? Oh, thank you. I thought I was going to die in here.”

“I hate to tell you this, but none of your coworkers made it. How were you able to survive?”

“Please. I need air. Please help me get out of here.”

“Okay.”

K-Rad holstered the Beretta, lifted the petite young woman, and carried her out of the Petrol room. He carried her all the way to Waterbase and gently set her down on a bed of ammonium nitrate bags behind the big tanks.

“Stay here,” he said. “The paramedics will come for you shortly.”

“Okay.”

She closed her eyes and breathed peacefully. Her face had regained a healthier color on the trip from Petrol to Waterbase, and K-Rad wanted to make sure she didn’t get up and go anywhere. He opened his backpack and pulled out a roll of duct tape.

10:02 a.m.

Matt’s stomach lurched and he staggered back in horror.

Mr. Dark’s touch had transformed Shelly from a beautiful young lady to a smiling, rotting jack-o’-lantern from hell.

Whatever darkness Shelly had festering deep inside before, Mr. Dark’s touch had brought it raging to the surface.

The evil was eating her alive.

And it was Matt’s fault.

Because if he had never gotten involved with her and brought Mr. Dark into her life… she wouldn’t be about to do something very, very bad.

More people were going to die.

And that, too, would be Matt’s fault.

He had to stop her. Fast. And he had to stop K-Rad.

The easy way would be to kill her right now.

He thought about it for an instant but knew he couldn’t do it, not in cold blood, not when there still might be a chance to save her from her demons.

That split second of hesitation was a mistake.

Shelly sat up and slammed her fist deep into his groin.

It was a sucker punch, pure and simple, to the most vulnerable part of his body, and it landed with full impact before he had a chance to react. When he doubled over, Shelly kneed him in the face. Droplets of bright red blood dripped from his nose and splattered on the tile floor. The world was spinning now, and Matt felt like he was going to vomit. He leaned on the desk, trying to steady himself, and felt something very hard smash into the back of his skull.

10:15 a.m.

Hal Miller had been fooling around with one of the forklifts when K-Rad blew his left kneecap off. K-Rad knew Hal and had even considered him a friend for a while. They drank beer and shot pool together at the Retro sometimes. He almost regretted the fact that he was going to have to kill him now. Almost. But Hal had been working nights with K-Rad a few months ago, and Hal was the one who’d fucked up the loading-dock door with his forks raised. If Hal had confessed, K-Rad would have never gotten fired. In essence, it was Hal’s fault that all this was even happening. He lay on the concrete floor in the fetal position, holding his ruined knee with his hands and moaning in agony.

“Who are you?” Hal asked, his voice cracking with fear. “Why are you doing this?”

K-Rad was still wearing the gas mask and the drop-down night-vision binoculars. He didn’t need the apparatus now that he was out of Petrol, but he thought it looked cool and menacing. He wanted to be wearing it when his picture was broadcast globally on TV and the Internet. He wanted to look like the killing machine that he was. He walked over, sat on the floor, and pressed the barrel of his pistol against Hal’s forehead.

“It’s me. Kevin Radowski. K-Rad, your old drinking buddy.”

“Look, I’m really sorry about-”

“It’s a little late for apologies, don’t you think? You should have come forward the day you wrecked that door.”

“I have a family to support, K. Come on, man. Give me a break.”

“I gave you a break by not snitching you out. You repaid me by sitting back and watching me get canned for something I didn’t do.”

“Let’s go to Hubbs’s office right now,” Hal said. “I’ll tell him everything. I swear.”

“Oh, I’m going to Hubbs’s office all right. Soon as I blow your fucking brains out.”

“Please. Please don’t kill me. I’ll tell him I wrecked the door. You can get your job back and I’ll be the one to get fired.”

“I’ve already killed a bunch of people, Hal. Call it a hunch, but I doubt they’re going to hire me back.”

“Oh my God. Who did you kill?”

“Lots of people. Including you.”

K-Rad pulled the trigger. The bullet entered through Hal’s forehead, tore through his brain, and exited through the back of his skull. It ricocheted off the concrete floor, then the steel plating on the electric forklift, and hit K-Rad dead center in the sternum.

Good thing he was wearing his Kevlar vest.

“Ouch,” he said, and proceeded toward Mr. Hubbs’s office.

10:17 a.m.

Matt was high in a tree house, and something invisible had pushed his wife, Janey, out the door. She was on the way down, plummeting headfirst like a human missile, arms stretched toward the ground in a futile attempt to lessen the impact.

“Janey!” Matt cried.

He pursed his lips and concentrated, and his physical surroundings blurred to a tunnel of swirling colors. He saw only Janey, sinking slowly now, as if through an enormous vat of molasses, teeth clenched and eyes bulging. A silver ring outlined the tunnel, constricting more and more, like an aperture, until Matt’s entire world flashed to a stark and blinding white.

Against this white background came a galloping horse with a knight in full armor, the rider and his mount as black and dull as axle grease. The knight gripped the reins with one hand and a spiked metal ball on a chain with the other. The weapon was a brutal-looking thing, a skull-busting apparatus of the highest caliber, and the knight wielded it like an extra appendage, like something he’d been born with. The knight’s name was Pain, and his steed Death, and Matt knew he could not defeat them, no matter how hard he tried. He knew that the only way to save Janey was to make a pact with them, to bow down to them and give them what they wanted.

The horse stopped and reared, chomping at the bit, an expression of extreme agony on its face. The tortured animal snorted and sneezed and bucked and stomped, stirring a sandy white storm in Matt’s throbbing head.

When the dust finally settled, Sir Pain raised his flail and spoke: “I will give you the power to save your wife, but with the power comes a responsibility-and a debt.”

“I’ll do anything,” Matt said.

“You must become a soldier in the Dark Army, and you must-”

Another gunshot rang out, and Matt woke with a start. He had the worst headache of his life, and his testicles felt as though someone had parked a truck on them.

“Shelly?” he said.

No reply. She and the flashlight were gone, unless she was hiding in the darkness, but he doubted it.

Another employee had just been murdered, maybe Fred or Shelly, and Matt knew what he had to do. He rose and staggered to the door, exited the Shipping and Receiving office, and headed for Waterbase.

He was still a little dizzy from the blow to the head, and the heat and chemical fumes only made matters worse. He crept behind the massive stainless-steel Fire and Ice tanks, peeked through the eighteen-inch space between them, and in the dim light filtering through the ventilation fans saw the silhouette of a figure walking toward the foreman’s office. The man wore a heavy vest and a backpack and a helmet. He walked slowly, legs stiff, almost shambling along, like some sort of zombie astronaut. He carried a pistol in his left hand.

All Matt could do was try to ambush the man and take him down without getting shot in the process. He had started to creep along the wall toward the office when he heard a childlike moan. He stopped, crouched down, and duckwalked back behind the tanks. He followed the mewling sounds to an area where bags of dry chemicals were stored and saw a petite young woman squirming on top of one of the stacks. He gently peeled away the duct tape covering her mouth.

“What’s your name?” Matt said.

“Terri Bonach. I work in Petrol. The guy who put me here said everything was going to be all right, but then I woke up and I couldn’t move or talk. Who are you?”

“Matt Cahill. I’m a temp.”

“What’s going on? We went into lockdown, and I think everyone in Petrol is dead now. Oh my God. What the hell’s going on?”

“Someone came in and started shooting people this morning. The man who left you here was not a rescuer. He was the bad guy. Kevin Radowski. Do you know him?”

“No, but I heard about him. He works in Waterbase. They call him K-Rad. You know, like A-Rod. Makes sense that it’s him. I heard he’s kind of crazy, and I heard he got fired last week.”

“Yeah, that’s him.”

K-Rad.

An anagram immediately formed in Matt’s mind.

K-Rad was Dark spelled backward.

“So why didn’t he kill me? I mean, I’m happy he didn’t, but-”

“I don’t know,” Matt said. “But he didn’t, and this is probably the safest place for you to be right now.”

“Screw that. Get me out of here!”

“Shh. He’s going to hear you, and then we’ll be dead for sure. I’m going after him now.”

“Help!” Terri screamed. She was hysterical. Matt put the duct tape back over her mouth. She would be all right where she was until help arrived. He only hoped that K-Rad-and Shelly-had not heard the shouts.

Because Shelly was around somewhere, and she was every bit as dangerous as K-Rad was.