But last Friday, a few minutes before K-Rad’s shift was over, a coworker named Shelly Potts tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Mr. Hubbs wants to see you in his office.”
K-Rad finished what he was doing, parked his forklift, and plugged it into the charger. He hosed the Dicalite off his boots, wiped the sweat from his face with some paper towels, and clomped to the glassed-in foreman’s office in Waterbase. Hubbs was sitting at his desk sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup. An armed security guard-Officer McCray-stood at parade rest a few feet to his right.
“Shelly said you wanted to see me,” K-Rad said.
“Sit down, my friend. Can I get you a cup of coffee?”
Friend my ass, K-Rad thought. “No, thanks. What’s the guard for?”
“Listen, I’m going to get right to the point. We’ve decided to let you go.”
K-Rad felt a chill wash through him. He wanted to make sure he’d heard correctly.
“You’re firing me?” he said.
“I’m sorry. The decision came down from the main office. There’s nothing-”
“I’ve been here twelve years. You’re going to can my ass, just like that? Why?”
Officer McCray shifted his stance.
“I think you know why,” Mr. Hubbs said.
“I don’t have a clue.”
“When you were on nights a couple of months ago, one of the loading-dock doors was damaged. Someone obviously forgot to lower the forks on their forklift, but nobody ever came forward and confessed. It cost the company a lot of money to fix that door.”
“I didn’t do that.”
“But you were in charge that night.”
“So?”
“The bigwigs upstairs figure you either did it yourself or you know who did it. I’m sure you remember the meeting we had about that.”
K-Rad felt like jumping across the desk and twisting Mr. Hubbs’s head off like a bottle cap. “I didn’t wreck the door,” he said. “You can’t blame me for somebody else’s actions.”
“Again, the decision came from upstairs. Officer McCray here is going to escort you to your locker, and then to the parking lot.”
Officer McCray escorted Kevin Radowski to his locker, and then to the parking lot. He told K-Rad to have a nice day.
Now everyone’s going to have a nice fucking day, K-Rad thought. He sipped his Mountain Dew and walked toward the fallen Drew Long.
Drew was still alive, but his breathing was rapid and shallow. He was on the way out. K-Rad pointed the gun at his skull and cocked the hammer back.
“Why are you doing this?” Drew said.
K-Rad smiled. “A stitch in time saves nine,” he said.
He pulled the trigger, and Drew stopped breathing.
9:04 a.m.
A minute or so after the initial burst, there was a single gunshot and then silence. Matt felt his way around the dark office until he found a chair. He sat down, and Shelly sat beside him.
“Oh my God,” Shelly said.
“What are we going to do now?” Fred said. “We should have gotten the fuck out of here when we had the chance.”
Matt stood up and found the doorknob. He twisted the little brass dial to the locked position. “Well, we can’t leave the office now. Stepping to the other side of this door would be suicide at this point. Is there a desk in here?”
“I’m sitting at it,” Fred said.
“Let’s push it up against the door as a barricade. If he can’t get in here, he can’t shoot us.”
Matt felt his way to the desk, and he and Fred pushed it flush against the door.
“We’re going to run out of air pretty fast,” Shelly said. “The fumes are going to choke us to death.”
“All we can do is hope some help comes before that happens,” Matt said. “Unless-”
Shelly switched the flashlight on. “Help’s not going to come. Help never comes. Unless what, Matt?”
“Unless one of us goes out there and tries to rush the guy.”
“You said yourself it would be suicide to step on the other side of that door.”
“I know, but it might be our only chance.”
“I’ll do it,” Fred said. “I’ll go out there and take the motherfucker down.”
“No way. If anybody goes, it’s going to be me,” Matt said.
“I’ve only been here a few weeks, Matt, but you’ve only been here two days. I know the plant better than you do. Way better. I can find my way around in the dark and ambush the guy. Let’s move the desk and I’ll get on with it.”
“You might know the plant better, but I’m stronger. If it comes down to a hand-to-hand combat situation-”
“Look, we can stand here and argue about it all day, or we can do this.” Fred reached into his pocket and pulled out a quarter. He flipped it in the air, caught it, and slapped it on the back of his hand. “Heads or tails. Loser has to go to battle.”
“Heads,” Matt said.
Shelly pointed the flashlight at the coin on the back of Fred’s hand. The quarter had landed on heads.
“That settles it,” Fred said. “I lost fair and square. Help me move the desk.”
Matt sighed. “You sure you want to do this?”
“I’m sure.”
“You’ll need a weapon. Something…”
“There’s a toolbox over by the scales. I’ll grab a drum wrench.”
“Any idea where to start looking?”
“Not really.”
Who would just waltz into the plant and start shooting people? Matt wondered. What could the killer possibly want? What was his plan? He thought about the first questions a police detective might ask.
“Do y’all know of anyone in particular who might have a grudge against Nitko?”
“Could be anybody,” Fred said. “There’s been days-”
“I think I know who the shooter is,” Shelly said.
Matt turned to her. “Who?”
“Last Friday a guy named Kevin Radowski got fired. He’d been here a long time, like, twelve years or something. He worked in Waterbase, and they blamed him for one of the loading-dock doors getting messed up. It was almost quitting time, and the foreman told me to find him and send him to the Waterbase office. He was escorted off the premises. Those fuckers wouldn’t even let him finish out the week.”
Matt considered that. “If it is Radowski, he’ll probably go after Hubbs, the guy who probably fired him.”
“I’ll go hide somewhere by the Waterbase office, then,” Fred said. “Hopefully I’ll come back and give y’all some good news in just a little while.”
Matt and Fred scooted the desk away from the door, and Fred exited the Shipping and Receiving office. Shelly told him to be careful out there.
As Fred was leaving, a man wearing a tuxedo and holding a martini came in.
9:27 a.m
K-Rad figured everyone in Petrol was dead by now, but he wanted to make sure. He opened his backpack and pulled out a gas mask and a helmet equipped with drop-down night-vision binoculars. He removed his regular night-vision goggles, put them in the backpack, and strapped on the cumbersome apparatus. As soon as he got it situated exactly the way he wanted it, he felt the overwhelming urge to take a piss. Figures, he thought.
He walked to the locker room. His kidneys were floating from all the Mountain Dew he’d drunk. When he finished urinating, he caught his own reflection in the mirror by the sink. With all the high-tech gadgetry on his head and the flak jacket on his chest, he looked like some sort of machine. That’s what he was. A machine. A killing machine. By the end of the day, he would be famous. Everyone in the world would know the name Kevin Radowski. Everyone in the world would know K-Rad.
The door to the Petrol room was protected by a pushbutton lock, but K-Rad knew the code. He’d worked at Nitko for twelve years. He knew all the codes to all the doors, even the ones he wasn’t supposed to have access to.
When the emergency lockdown had been initiated, the employees in Petrol had essentially been trapped in a toxic tomb. Of course, emergency lockdown was never supposed to happen with people still in the plant. Even if it did, and even if the power went out for some reason, emergency generators were supposed to kick in and keep the ventilation fans in Petrol pumping in fresh air.