• • •
Ajax hunts. He creeps through the woods, squinting at shadows, ready to rip apart anything that moves. But he finds nothing. Only trees. The trees are familiar. They remind him of something. Something long ago.
He remembers. A house, with trees in the back. Ajax likes to climb the trees. He’s safe in the trees. Safe from the man and the woman. They’re mean to him. Hate him. Because he’s fucking stupid. They call him fucking stupid all the time. Yell at him for being fucking stupid. Because he’s fucking stupid he has to go to a special school. The other kids pick on him. He’s small and can’t fight back. They chase him. Hurt him. When he tells the man and the woman, they hurt him, too. Everyone hurts him.
Ajax gets a lot of practice blocking out the hurt. He may be fucking stupid, but he learns how to control the pain. The kids hit him. The woman uses a belt on him. The man breaks his teeth with a beer bottle. But Ajax doesn’t cry. This makes everyone afraid.
Ajax likes making people afraid.
Ajax remembers going into the man and woman’s bedroom. They drank beer and hit him for a long time, but now they are sleeping. He has a knife, the one that plugs into the wall that the man uses to cut turkey on turkey day. Ajax is never allowed to have turkey, because he’s fucking stupid. But he is smart enough to plug the knife in the outlet, and press the big red button, and cut them cut them cut them while they scream scream scream.
Then Ajax met Doctor. Doctor never called him fucking stupid. Doctor helped Ajax. He gave him special shots, to make him big and strong. He put something in Ajax’s head to make him smart.
Ajax likes Doctor.
And Ajax still likes making people afraid.
He remembers going somewhere strange where people talked funny. They finished the mission, and it was Fun Time. Taylor and Bernie were cooking someone, eating parts. Logan and Santiago had a man tied to a tree and were cutting off parts and betting which cut would kill him. Ajax was playing with a woman. He would break her leg, then watch her try to crawl away, then bring her back and break her leg in another spot.
She was very afraid.
Then Taylor showed Ajax how to make her even more afraid. He took off her clothes, used his private part.
Ajax tried it, too.
He liked it.
Ajax wants to try it with the woman from the car. He wants to break her arms and legs and make her afraid and then take off all her clothes and …
The giant twitches, the Chip in his head reloading the current objective.
Find Warren Streng.
Ajax searches the woods. Hunting. He wants to find Warren Streng. Wants to find him very bad.
Then he can have Fun Time with the woman.
• • •
The junior high was two blocks away. They ran. For a plump dog Woof kept up easily, even going on ahead and marking his territory on assorted curbs and trees. The school parking lot was full, and, surprisingly, the lights were on. Josh turned the Maglite off but kept it in his hand; its weight reassured him.
The front door was locked. He tried the back entrance, by the gym, and froze. His fire truck was parked alongside the building.
Josh hurried to it, looked in the cab for the keys. Gone. He jogged back to the gymnasium entrance. If the Red-ops had been the ones who stole the tanker, they could be inside the school. People might be in danger.
The door was unlocked. When he yanked it open, Josh witnessed a scene from a nightmare.
“Woof, sit,” Josh said. He left the dog and the pillowcase outside and went in.
Dead. Hundreds dead. On the bleachers. On the floor. On each other. Josh had to climb over a small mountain of bodies to get through. He checked a pulse. And another. And another. The bodies were cool to the touch, and there were no sounds other than the ones Josh made.
These were people he knew. His friends. He saw Mrs. Simmons, his next-door neighbor, still sitting down, her eyes wide and her mouth caked with dried puke. Adam Pepper, a part-time volunteer at the firehouse, curled up fetal on the floor. Janie Richter, her face bright pink, her arms wrapped protectively around her son, a boy no more than Duncan’s age.
Josh kept checking for pulses, kept finding none. A lump in his throat made it hard to swallow. He followed some bloody footprints to the boys’ locker room and saw even more atrocities. Corpses piled to the ceiling, recalling ghastly newsreel footage of the death camps from World War II.
Erwin’s fiancée, Jessie Lee Sloan, had her neck cut so badly it was almost turned 180 degrees. And under her—
Erwin.
Josh began to cry. Just tears at first, then a few small sounds. Those bastards had killed his town. They’d killed it and mutilated it and discarded it. Josh felt the gorge rising in his stomach. He kept it down, but he had to get out of the locker room, had to get out of the school.
He stumbled back into the gym, knowing he needed a car, hating himself for what he had to do. Josh decided on Adam, because he knew Adam drove a yellow Ford Bronco, which would be easy to find in the parking lot. He patted down his dead friend’s pockets, located the keys, and a horrible thought appeared, fully formed, in Josh’s head.
The people in the locker room were sliced up. But what killed the people out here?
He surveyed the grisly tableau once again and couldn’t believe he didn’t put it all together sooner. The bodily fluids. The quick onset of death.
These people were poisoned.
Josh looked at his hands. What had he touched? Had he contaminated himself somehow?
Jesus, is it still in the air?
He stood up, and a wave of dizziness hit him. Josh rushed to the door, kicked something metal. He tracked it down and saw it was a black canister with HCN written on the side.
Hydrogen cyanide.
Josh blinked. The dizziness led to a headache. He tried to remember the EMT class he took last year, the class on poisons. Cyanide was supposed to have an almond odor. Josh took a shallow sniff but smelled only death. Then he recalled that forty percent of people couldn’t detect cyanide by scent. He touched the back of his hand to his forehead and had no idea if he was running a temperature or not.
Continuing on to the exit, Josh felt his chest get tight. He was sure of it now; he had cyanide poisoning. It was in his blood, coursing through his circulatory system. Cyanide inhibited an enzyme that allowed cells to produce energy. His tissue would die, and rapidly.
Josh tripped over a body, landed alongside some poor guy whose face indicated he died screaming—a glimpse at Josh’s immediate future. He got up and scrambled for the door, wracking his brain for the treatment used in cyanide poisoning. Diazepam and activated charcoal? No, that was strychnine. Naloxone? That was for opioids.
Amyl nitrite. It induced the formation of methemoglobin, which combined with cyanide and made it nontoxic.
There was amyl nitrite in the Charge capsules.
Josh picked himself up and climbed over several corpses to get to the door. Woof tried to jump up and lick him, but Josh kept him back, worried he’d transfer the poison. He rummaged through the pillowcase, found the case of Charge, and put one beneath his nostrils.
Ready or not …
The capsule broke between Josh’s fingers and he snorted hard. His sinuses flooded with a hot chemical odor not unlike kerosene, and Josh’s face flushed and his eyes stung and his tongue tasted metal. This was accompanied by a massive head rush that felt like his brain liquefied and sloshed out of his ears.