If by chance, you are trapped, I have set up a final solution. My beach house is rigged with explosives. As a diversion, or to take out the enemy if they are in the house, or if you just want to blow it up so that no one can have access to its secrets, you’ll find a button right inside the passage way. When you press this, you will have exactly five minutes to close the passageway door, exit to the beach warehouse, and lock the warehouse door. You must be on the opposite side of that beach warehouse door to be safely protected from the blast that will come.
Note: The warehouse will be fine, because the explosives are focused inward and toward the ocean. However, I wouldn’t suggest that you stand in the street when it goes off.
Remember, 5 minutes is all you have. Make it count.
44.
Fireball
“Así, perfecto,” El Diablo praised his men as they set the charges around the outside of the door. They all proceeded to the kitchen, so that the door and its blast would be pointed away from them toward the ocean.
Most, including El Diablo, were ducking behind the kitchen’s island; his explosives man was in front of him, twisting the wires onto the battery-operated switch. Once that was done, he held the knob that, when twisted, would send current to the blasting caps in the C-4, causing the chain reaction. He looked at El Diablo awaiting the order.
From outside came a couple of AK-47 bursts. Perhaps his men had found the other crazy Americans.
Satisfied, El Diablo gave the signal.
Clyde had just taken out two of the druggies on post, waiting near the back door. It was easy since they were not paying attention.
He tossed the smoking rifle down beside the pool where he stood. Hoisting the RPG on his shoulder, staring down the sight, he focused it into the open patio door. He had never shot one of these things, but figured there couldn’t be much to it if crazy terrorists used them all the time.
Taking a breath, smirking at the hellish monster he was about to unleash, he squeezed the trigger and heard exactly what he expected. The rocket took off with a whoosh, as if directly from his ear, trailing fiery smoke into the patio door opening, where a fireball erupted almost instantly out from both that door and the dining room window, its hot breath pushed against him.
Only seconds later, another explosion, this one larger, rocked the house and blew out part of the back wall where the patio door once was and the remaining beach-side windows. The blast’s percussion and a mass of debris knocked him flat to the ground.
“Wha da …,” he said, dazed, as pain shot through his other arm, the one not burnt, and his face in answer to his rhetorical question. Looking down, he was shocked to find a large piece of wood had pierced his bicep.
“Wha now?” This was an inconvenience, like a mosquito bite and not a serious injury; his crazed anger, pumped by adrenalin and mixed with alcohol, masked any sense of reality he would have normally felt.
Ignoring the pain, he dropped the empty launcher, picked up the AK, and walked to the patio door intending to finish off the job and remove these pests from his dominion. Flames framed the patio door, with a jagged side that was once a wall ripped out farther, as if someone had engaged in a little home-grown demolition. He stepped through ignoring this as well. The feeble movement of a man and his murmurs of pain drew Clyde’s attention immediately. His entire body, face, and hands were blackened by the blasts, and he scratched slowly toward the door, like a bug attempting to flee from the boot of the exterminator. Clyde walked past the vermin, pointing the AK and spraying a few rounds, silencing his whimpers. He then continued toward a doorway into a dark void of the house, a secret passage he didn’t know existed, but had suspected Thompson of having.
“You sneaky little shit,” Clyde thought he said, but it came out as “yahh sekaah liaah shhhh” because his jaw was broken. Clyde didn’t care. He was about to receive his ultimate bounty, one he expected. He stepped through the perfect metal opening, framed in broken, blackened pieces of wood and plaster board, still smoldering. It was like a portal into some other dimension, away from this madness. The hallway, or whatever it was, was dark. He squinted. His eyes fought to dilate after coming out of the extreme brightness of the sun. After a few moments, his eyes adjusted, even with the minimal light that spilled through the gaping holes in the beach-side wall behind him.
He hobbled into the large room, unaware of the bloody trail he created, and saw what looked like computers, crates with guns and ammo, and many other supplies. It was hard to make out any of it, but he knew he had found what he was looking for.
A flashing electric light alerted his attention. He shuffled toward it, like a moth drawn to a bug-zapper. He couldn’t see what it was, but knew it was a digital readout, and it said, 09 — 08 — 07… It was counting down.
“Shiiiii—”
The two families, Ana secure in her mother’s arms, exited a door that would have opened up to the kitchen from a kitchen pantry in any other house but this one. The pantry and kitchen, like the whole house, were facades. Immediately on their left was the back door exit, and on their right the doorway to the faux living room. They walked in with trepidation, waiting for the explosion.
Lisa asked the question on their minds, “Hasn’t it been five min-“
The earth shook once more, but only in their little portion of the world. Like a volcano, Max’s house erupted in a spectacular fireball, so bright they had to cover their eyes as they watched from the empty kitchen out the living room window. The beach warehouse shook, like an invisible hand pushed at it, trying to wrestle it from its foundation. They all shrank down, turning away from the blast and the shower of glass they expected but never came.
“Wow, that was amazing.” Sally sounded appropriately awestruck. “Why didn’t the glass break?”
“Everything in this house was built for protection, from spying perverts like Judas to a full-scale assault by automatic gunfire. It’s built as strong as a bomb shelter, but it’s just a warehouse. It was, in fact, to be our storehouse of food and supplies.” Bill considered his next words, and then just let them out. “Max built all of this for us.”
45.
The Sparks Started to Fly
Melanie scrambled around wondering how to fix what an earthquake had just ruined. A third of the buildings along Grand had collapsed to some extent, some completely. It was a miracle that their capacitor bank, resting on the vacant lot at 3rd and Grand, sustained no damage, and neither did its cables. However, the metal plates they had so carefully arranged were tossed about like a discarded deck of cards, the rails strewn around like a giant-sized pick-up sticks game. There was no time to fix this, as now she could see the other group of men, unabated, turning onto Grand from 1st Street.
Many of the townspeople congregated out on Grand and 3rd around them. Even Tex wandered out with the dazed crowds to view the destruction, seemingly unaware of the far greater threat only minutes away.
Melanie heard Frank running down 3rd Street behind her, yelling “Flip the switch! Flip the damn switch!” When he reached Melanie, he stopped, dumbfounded, shoulders wilting like a flower in the heat of day.