A Deeper Blue

Chapter Twenty-Four

Mike stood in front of the glass doors of his room, sipping a cup of coffee and watching the sun come up. It was going to be another glorious Central Florida winter day: fleecy clouds were spotted hither and yon and the sky was otherwise clear. It was supposed to get to nearly eighty today, which was a bit much even for Orlando in winter.

He didn’t turn as the door opened, just took another sip of coffee.

“You want the update on Anastasia?” Britney asked.

“I hope you weren’t watching any of that,” Mike said seriously.

“A bit,” Britney admitted. “And, yeah, it was hard. You know the question that gets me? How many of the girls in the bunker… ?”

“About twelve at a guess,” Mike said, still not turning around. “Sort of. If they knew it was a game, twelve would enjoy it. And, hell, probably one was ready to hit the table knowing it wasn’t a game; there are some masochists who can’t wait to die under the blade. But Stasia’s not that far gone. On the other hand, she knows that at a certain level it’s a game. She knows there’s a strike team ready to go if it looks as if she’s going to be killed. Intentionally, mind you. You play at that level and it’s not real safe.”

“Do you guys ever…” Britney asked, trailing off.

“Pretty close,” Mike said, taking another sip. “The real bitch about it is that he’s going to scar hell out of her. Bastard. No matter what you do you can’t get rid of them entirely. How’s she doing?”

“Oh, she’s spilling all sorts of stuff,” Britney said. “All total bullshit. He’s a lousy interrogator. She started in on DEA and he started naming names of people he suspected were agents. She ‘burned’ about half of them. I checked the DEA database. None of them are agents and a bunch of them are people close to him. It’s going to nuke his network if he tries to off all of them.”

“She’s very good,” Mike admitted. “But getting her to actually break? That’s tough.”

“Do you…”

“It’s her favorite game,” Mike said. “She has a secret and she won’t share it. I… encourage her to share. The last time it was a cookie recipe. Never did get it out of her.”

“With whips and… ?”

“I told you in the bunker I’m not a nice guy,” Mike said, turning around. “And you didn’t believe me.”

“I kinda figured that out after the freighter crew,” Britney said, frowning. “You know, most of those guys were…”

“Innocent?” Mike asked, taking another sip. “Define innocent. Sure, they were just sailors doing their job. In this case, supporting the mujahideen. You think the crew didn’t dance when the Towers fell? You think they don’t want you wearing a burkha, honey? Maybe there were one or two who weren’t complete jackals. Let God sort them out. I don’t have the time or the interest.”

“You really are a bastard, aren’t you?” Britney asked unhappily.

“Glad you finally got that through your pretty little head,” Mike said. “Ready to go drive around in a hot car with a complete bastard?”

“Any particular reason?” Britney asked.

“It’s today,” Mike replied. “I can feel it in the wind, in the water. I can feel it in the depths of my bastardness. It’s gonna be a hot one.”

“Great security,” Mike said as they cruised past Wet and Wild again. An Orange County deputy’s car was parked on the concrete expanse in front of the attraction. The deputy was chatting with two striking brunettes in bikinis.

As he turned onto Universal Boulevard Mike looked over at the tourists. Despite the increasing temperatures, the water was clearly freezing. But the northerners were playing in it for all they were worth.

“Americanus Arcticus,” Mike muttered.

“Say again?” Britney asked.

“Americanus Arcticus,” Mike said, pointing at one little girl who was climbing out of the pool and shivering nearly to death. “Pseudo-human beings from north of the Mason-Dixon line. They’re evolutionarily adjusted to arctic temperatures. The young are more poorly adjusted but by the time they reach adulthood they are impervious to cold.” He pointed to an immensely hirsute man with a gigantic beer belly and beard wearing only a Speedo. The sasquatchoid was jumping off a diving board in a “cannonball” position and when he hit the water the spray reached nearly as high as the rides. “It’s the layers of subdural adipose tissue. Year by year, layer by layer, they build up their resistance even as the rings of trees. As the walrus developed whiskers to find clams in the Stygian depths, and tusks with which to dig them, even thus doth the Yankee evolve blubber.”

Britney was giggling so hard she nearly didn’t notice her cell phone was going off. She pulled it out of her back pocket and listened for a moment.

“Mike, Orange County Services is missing a spray truck,” she said, sobering instantly.

“It’s going down.”

Gabrel Amani had been an employee of Orange County Services for four years. He had started cutting lawns with Mexicans but had managed, over time, to work his way into the sprayer trucks. The hours were bad but the pay was much better and it was sitting-down work.

Gabrel could not be called a sleeper agent because he had not entered the U.S. with the intent of performing acts of terrorism, sabotage or espionage. On the other hand, he had entered the U.S. as a good Muslim who supported the Great Jihad. It was the will of Allah that all the earth be in submission to Allah and the duty of every Muslim to support that goal. If that meant that infidels must die, then infidels would die. If they would simply realize that it was their destiny to be in submission to Allah, they would not have to die. It was their own fault that they had to be killed. The will of Allah was paramount.

Frankly, though, while he didn’t want to kill infidels per se — some of them were quite nice if misguided people — this mission gave him no qualms. The actions of the people in the area they were going to hit, especially the way that women dressed, were simply sinful. There was no other way to describe it. Wiping these sluts from the face of the earth would be a glorious sacrifice unto God. And if he was lucky, he wouldn’t die himself.

He backed the truck up to the loading dock of the Circuit City on Universal Boulevard and parked it. Two fedayeen were already rolling blue barrels up the slope of the dock. It should take no more than ten minutes to load the truck. And then he could go kill infidels and show them that Allah was too magnificent to be defeated…

“Dunn.”

Bob Dunn was having a bad week. Among a billion other things, convincing the FBI to act like adults, making sure that the Guardsmen didn’t go power-mad and “coordinating transportation” for a group of congressmen, and their families, who had decided that they needed to “check out the nature of the threat” at Disney, he’d had to explain to his bosses that there was a group of heavily armed mercenaries running around Central Florida and that, no, they could not be arrested.

So the one fucking person he did not want to talk to was the fucking Kildar.

“Jenkins. You heard about the spray truck?”

“I heard,” Dunn said, sighing. “What about it?”

“It’s, like, missing? And it’s one of the best distribution systems they could use.”

“It was being transferred by its driver to the maintenance facility,” Dunn said. “It’s just overdue. The maintenance manager panicked; they’d gotten the word, too. But it was driven by its regular driver. It’s probably just broken down somewhere. It’s only been missing thirty minutes.”

“Tell me you don’t really believe that? We’re talking about a Pakistani who is a known worshipper at one of the most fundamentalist mosques in your area. He goes missing with a spray truck when we’ve got VX in play and you’re… what? You’re sitting on it?”

“We put out a general call,” Dunn said. “What the fuck else do you want us to do?”

“I saw the call. It was a very low priority, no possible terrorism code, no threat code at all, in fact. It’s fucking nuts! One of your deputies pulls the thing over and he’s fucking dead, you know that?”

“You telling me my job?” Dunn asked, snarling. “Okay, no, I don’t believe that. Yeah, I think that we have a serious situation here. My boss doesn’t. The fucking No-Go colonel we got saddled with couldn’t lift his nose out of day before yesterday’s reports to even notice. Why? Because it’s just the regular driver. The fact that the guy is from Pakistan doesn’t fucking matter, okay? That is not part of the decision-making process, okay? Nor is his house of worship, okay?”

“God, sucks to be you, doesn’t it?”

The guy actually sounded sympathetic and Dunn sighed again.

“Yeah, sometimes it does,” Dunn said. “But my point is that we can’t use profiling to upgrade the status. It’s the normal driver taking the thing over for maintenance and currently it’s simply ‘missing.’ If we see it, a deputy will check it out. Until something else happens…”

“The first warning you’re going to get is screaming.”

“Hey, you’re not supposed to be back here,” Justin Stockton said.

Justin was twenty-three years old and recently had come to wonder if sales was his career. He had dropped out of University of Central Florida in his sophomore year and lived with three friends in a small apartment on Silver Star Road. The foursome existed on chips and cheese with an occasional “healthy” meal of McDonalds or Dominos pizza. When they weren’t working their various nearly minimum wage jobs they played video games. While they sometimes had trouble making the rent or their car payments, they never missed a bill from their ISP.

Justin was also, unfortunately for him, a smoker. And since it was unlawful to smoke inside of a public building in Florida, he had stepped outside. Specifically he had stepped out the back door to the loading docks. His Marlboro was in one hand and lighter in the other when he saw the four men in gas suits loading a spray truck off the dock.

“That shit’s got to be bad for you,” Justin continued, maneuvering to stay upwind and reconsidering the cigarette; it might also be flammable.

“We are having trouble with truck,” one of the men said in a thick accent. “We are needing to refuel it.” He had stepped away from the other four and now approached Justin, his hand out. “I am Gabrel.”

“Justin,” Justin said, sliding on his salesman grin and holding out his own. “But that’s not fuel…” The stuff was weird and oily but definitely not gas or diesel. He’d gotten some on his hand when they’d shaken.

“Yes it is,” the man insisted, lifting the hand and thrusting it at Justin’s nose. “Smell…”

It smelled like…

Gabrel grinned as the man twitched on the ground. It worked.

“We are finished, Gabrel,” Mahmoud said, rolling the last of the barrels away.

“God is Great.”

Petra Smith was nineteen and had a bit of a crush on Justin Stockton. She’d only been working the computer section of the store for a few weeks, possibly the reason she still found Justin attractive. But she saw potential under that slacker façade. Justin was smart, he knew everything there was to know about configuring computer hardware to get the max performance for a video game — and if he’d just apply himself he could be really successful, maybe even a store manager.

So Petra had followed Justin outside “on break.” Just to talk. Sure, he smoked and kissing a guy who smoked was like licking a dirty ash-tray but…

When she saw him lying on the ground, though, she screamed and ran over, not even noticing the two barrels dripping clear liquid onto the dock.

“Justin?” she screamed, trying to roll him over. He was twisted up in a really strange position, like he’d cramped up or something. She couldn’t move him so she darted back into the store, feeling dizzy. It was probably shock. “Help! Somebody help!” she screamed, stumbling through the stock room. She caromed off one of the shelves and realized she could barely see through the tears. It was getting so black…

“Kildar,” Greznya said. “Report of a Hazardous Materials incident at the Circuit City on Universal Boulevard.”

“That’s about three blocks from here,” Mike said, accelerating. The traffic on Sand Lake, as always, was solid tourists. And it was moving slow. He seriously reconsidered his decision to turn onto it.

He cut in front of a minivan from Michigan then back past an SUV from New York. But it was bumper to bumper in front of him. And going really slow.

“Fuck this,” he said. A driveway on the right led to the Popeye’s and that he knew from reconning the area wouldn’t get him anywhere. But there weren’t any cars on the sidewalk.

He turned into the driveway and then onto the sidewalk, hitting his horn in a solid blast as he drove sedately down the concrete walk, tourists scattering in front of him.

Up ahead, at the head of the line of cars, he could see a spray truck in the right-hand lane. What was stopping traffic on the left he had no idea.

Mabel Zermenfuster Wassenester was seventy-nine. She had been born and raised on a farm near the small town of Blue Earth, Minnesota. Her first driving experience had been subsequent to her marriage, the lesson administered by her mother who had originally learned to drive a horse-drawn wagon. Mabel always remembered her mother’s various admonitions. Never turn so fast that a bottle of pop on the floor will fall over. Brakes are only for emergencies. And if, God forbid, you find yourself on a multilane road, the left-hand lane is the safest and it’s there that you should drive. You stay in the left-hand lane until it’s time to turn right, change lanes, then turn. Slowly.

Mabel’s problem was that there was a line of cars, and a spray truck, in the right-hand lane when it came time for her to turn onto International Drive. She’d never seen a spray truck out during the day and only occasionally when she couldn’t sleep at night and one of the loud, smelly trucks drove by. She was heading over to her friend Margaret’s house. Margaret lived in an apartment on Kirkman Road and the only way Mabel knew to get there was down International Drive. She sorely hated the road — there were simply too many fast drivers on it — but it was the only route she knew. She had never noticed that she actually passed Kirkman to take I-Drive. This was the route she’d learned the first time and she stuck to it.

When she reached the intersection, the light had turned green and she took a great dare. The spray truck should stay in the right-hand lane as it turned. She had seen that it had its blinker on and now the yellow lights were going. It was clearly going to spray down International Drive. Maybe that would slow some of those young tarts in their tank-tops and skimpy little bikinis down!

So she decided that the only choice was to turn with the truck.

“Fuck, would you look at that?” Mike snarled. There was an old lady in a powered wheelchair in front of him, going along at a fixed rate of one mile per hour. He fucking knew what was in that truck and what it was about to do. He had a binary solution set…

“Wait!” Britney yelled, getting out of the car and running to the chair. She grabbed the controls, turned the chair and drove it off the sidewalk. “Go!” she yelled as Mike pulled past.

“Yeah, you stay here,” Mike said, dropping the car into second.

“What?” Britney screamed. “Wait! No!”

“Young lady!” the old woman shouted, her wheelchair mired in a holly bush. “Just what do you think—”

He sped up, horn blaring and reached the intersection just as the two cars, side by side, completed a perfect turn. He could hear sirens behind and in front of him but none of the cops would reach the truck in time to stop anything, even if they had a shoot order.

“Let us get just a bit down the road,” Gabrel said. “Then we will begin.”

“Yes,” Mahmoud replied. “The spray will drift behind us, though, and strike all of the cars.”

“Yes,” Gabrel said, speeding the truck up slightly. “Allah is with us.”

Mike skidded through the turn of the sidewalk and jumped the curb just in front of the truck. He punched the accelerator and, as the car jumped forward under full torque, hit the brakes at the same time and turned the wheel to the side. The car did a one-eighty in a cloud of blue smoke from the rear tires. As soon as he was pointed at the truck he released the accelerator and popped open his door.

“Prophet’s Ghost,” Gabrel snarled. “Now! Hit the release now!”

“STOP!” Britney screamed, running into the intersection and holding up her hands. A rental Lincoln Navigator driven by a Brazilian driven nearly to fury by the two idiots in front of him ignored her and she jumped to the side. But the two cars behind him both stopped.

“What the fuck is going—” the driver of the right-hand minivan, a perfect male specimen of Americanus Arcticus started to say.

“POISON GAS!”

The passenger had ducked down but Mike put four rounds into the windshield on the driver’s side, splattering the driver all over the interior. The truck continued to roll forward, though, a smoky haze spewing out of the rear. Mike considered that for a moment. He really didn’t want to die from VX and if he just ran into a cloud of it he wasn’t going to do anyone any good.

But the wind was from the north. It was spreading the cloud backwards. Of course, that was right into a major intersection, but if he could get it cut off…

He ran forward just as a blue sedan, the driver a white-haired old woman, cruised sedately to the north. She gave him a look of absolute exasperation, clearly placing him with the car in the way.

Mike could give a shit about her opinion. The truck, now out of control but only doing about five miles per hour, was drifting towards the left-hand lane. He darted to the side and yanked open the door.

Two shots went past him just about at head height and he responded by pumping six into the passenger. There was a lever there that wasn’t one Mike recognized and while hitting the brakes he pushed it up. The hissing from the rear stopped.

Putting the truck in park he bailed out and ran for his car, which the truck had just about hit. If that truck had hit his GT he was going to be sorely pissed.

There was a lot of screaming from up towards the intersection, but there was only one person he was worried about up there.

Britney glanced over her shoulder and blanched as the rear of the truck started to spew vapor. And, worse, the wind was carrying it right for the intersection.

She didn’t have much time to decide but she also wasn’t interested in dying today. And standing here was going to mean dying.

“Get back in your cars and go that way!” she shouted, pointing west down Sand Lake. “Get out of here!”

She ran down the sidewalk, paused to extricate the old lady, then took control of the wheelchair and started driving it east down the sidewalk, screaming at people to turn back.

“What is going…”

“Oh shut up you old bat!” Britney screamed, hitting the woman on the head. “There’s poison gas back there! Keep going east,” she added, jumping off the wheelchair and pointing down the road. “Don’t stop until you reach a cop!”

She ran out into the traffic again and stood in the road, arms spread. Cars maneuvered around her until a minivan filled with a family stopped.

“What the hell is going on?” the man asked. “I’m a police officer.”

“HAZMAT!” Britney screamed. “Now park it and HELP!”

Behind her she heard a crash and turned to look: the cars that had entered the intersection were now completely out of control. Probably everyone in them was dead. The cloud was now invisible but that just made it worse.

“Fuck,” the policeman from Chicago said. “Honey,” he said to his wife, “get the kids and start walking east…”

“But…” the woman protested. Then she saw the out of control cars ahead of her. Every car that had been in front of them was now scattering randomly across the intersection and even into oncoming traffic. As she watched an SUV that had formerly held a family from Ohio met a late model Honda head on, killing a female college student on her way to her job at Hooters. The policeman’s-wife side immediately took over. She stopped protesting and just started unstrapping and grabbing kids.

Britney managed to get the left-hand lane stopped — the cop’s minivan effectively blocked the right — and after getting through to the lead driver that he’d die if he drove forward, started getting people out of the cars and headed down the road.

The crashes in the intersection had traffic pretty effectively stopped in all directions but she wasn’t sure how far the cloud had spread. So she went from car to car as fast as she could, just saying “POISON GAS! GET OUT!”

After the fifth car she saw a police car coming west down the mostly empty eastbound lanes and decided she’d done all an intel specialist should do. She was standing about three hundred yards from the intersection, head down and breathing hard because she’d been trying really hard to hold her breath as much as possible, when she heard a distinctive horn.

“Figured you were a goner,” Mike said, grinning at her. “But we’ve got other fish to fry.”

“We going to Disney now?” Britney yelled as the GT made another bootlegger’s turn.

“Disney’s that way,” Mike said, gesturing over his shoulder. “So, no. We’re going to Wet and Wild.”

“Why?” Britney asked. “Besides girls in bikinis.”

“What do people do when they think there’s poison gas in the air?” Mike asked, making a screaming turn onto Universal and jerking into the oncoming lane to avoid a rolling roadblock. An oncoming SUV jerked to the side, broadsiding another and before you could say “Suburban” there was a beached pod of the things.

“Run for shelter,” Britney said, bracing herself as Mike slid through a three-lane sweep between four cars, missing them all by a whisker.

“And if you’re at Wet and Wild?” Mike asked. “There’s not much shelter.”

“Ripple attack,” she said, blanching. “First hit I-Drive with the gas, then they get in the water. They try to get under and hold their breath as long as possible…”