Fire and ice

11:34 a.m

K-Rad was on his way back inside when an old Pontiac GTO screeched to a stop at the sidewalk. A man got out of the car and limped toward him. The man looked like a nightmare, his clothes black with soot and his face and left shoe crusted with blood.

K-Rad assessed the filthy man. “What the-”

As K-Rad was saying the, the man clouted him with an uppercut to the chin. The impact caused K-Rad to bite his tongue, his incisors slicing down hard and completely severing the tip of the highly vascular and highly innervated organ. Blood gushed from his mouth, and he started dancing around trying to stop the flow with his hand. The pain radiated through his jaw and to the bones in his ears.

“Fuck!” he said. “You made me bite my fucking tongue off.” Uck! Ew ade ee ite i ucking ung off.

The man came forward with his fist cocked. Who the fuck was this idiot? K-Rad knew it wasn’t someone from the plant, because everyone there was dead now. Anyone who had avoided being shot had surely died from the explosion. Nobody could have survived that.

The man punched swift and hard, but K-Rad somehow managed to dodge the blow.

Matt could see boils on K-Rad’s face oozing with thick pus the color and consistency of custard, and slimy brown earthworms crawled in and out of his eye sockets like living strands of lo mein. K-Rad ran out into the parking lot, bright red blood dripping down his rotting chin. Matt followed, limping as fast as he could, but K-Rad darted behind a minivan and Matt lost sight of him. Sirens wailed in the distance as more firefighters and rescue personnel headed to Nitko. Matt hobbled forward a few steps, looked between some cars for K-Rad, but didn’t see him anywhere.

A muffled gunshot crackled, and a bullet whistled past Matt’s left ear. K-Rad stood forty feet away with his elbows propped on the roof of a light blue compact automobile, a Camry or a Sentra or one of the other generic sedans from overseas. He fired a second time and a third, and both those rounds missed their mark, but the fourth time K-Rad pulled the trigger Matt felt a sizzling-hot bolus of lead burrow deep into his left shoulder. The shock and pain from the bullet’s impact, along with everything else that had happened over the past few hours, caused Matt to have a momentary lapse of consciousness. He fell dizzily to the pavement and lay flat on his back, clutching the fresh wound with his right hand.

K-Rad walked over with the pistol and aimed it straight at Matt’s face. “I don’t know who you are, but you just fucked with the wrong motherfucker, motherfucker.”

Matt stared Radowski down, resigned to his fate now but unwilling to beg or whimper or flinch, unwilling to give this poor excuse for a human being the satisfaction of seeing him sweat.

“Fuck you,” Matt said.

K-Rad laughed. He pulled the trigger, but the gun did not fire. While he was reaching into his backpack and pulling a second identical pistol out and jacking a round into the chamber, Matt felt something uncomfortable pressing against his right buttocks.

Then he remembered.

He reached into the back pocket of his jeans. An instant before K-Rad took aim again, Matt sprayed the entire contents of the Mace canister at his unprotected face. Radowski squealed and cussed and clawed at his eyes. Matt scissored his legs with K-Rad’s and sent the gunman tumbling facedown onto the pavement.

Matt rose to a sitting position, grabbed K-Rad by the hair, and smashed his face into the hot blacktop. He picked up the pistol, rose and steadied himself, and limped toward the entrance.