He wore a carefully chosen costume: jeans, a shirt with the logo of a railway freight line. No jacket because he wanted the railway’s logo visible. He walked along the railroad with a cell phone in his hand, pressed to his ear, laughing as though someone on the other end had told a joke. The duffel bag was fashioned from camouflaged fabric, painted to match the gray puzzle of stones along the rails. He set the bag down close to the rail as he walked, in view of the train station, but no one saw him. He put a foot on the rail and waited until he felt the barest vibration of the approaching train. He walked across the grassy slide down to the road where his car was parked, closing the phone that he wasn’t looking at, and glancing at his watch. Three minutes, he guessed.
Mouser got in the car. No one had seen him, no one had noticed him. A pickup truck drove past him, loud country music spilling from the windows. Two young men, laughing, on their way to an evening shift at the railway. Mouser liked the song they were playing; he started to hum it under his breath. He used to sing, back in church when he was a kid, and he had a fine tenor.
He drove away from Ripley, the farm-to-market road that led back to the highway. The pavement threaded alongside the rail track. A pickup truck, with a bunch of young Mexican workers in the bed, shot past him. Then another car, a minivan, a harried mother at the wheel. He could see she was yelling at the kids bouncing in the back.
You should take the time to tell them you love ’em, lady, Mouser thought, instead of yelling at them.
He heard the approaching train before he saw it; a long low whistle of approach. Ripley was a scheduled stop – a water treatment plant was nearby that served much of the northern stretches of suburban Houston.
He pulled his cell phone back out, dialed a number, poised his finger over the button. Snow had given him a choice on the bomb: timer or detonation through calling the phone. He’d picked calling.
The train wasn’t impressively long, just a stretch of old, weathered rail cars, each carrying 90,000 tons of chlorine gas.
He pushed the car up to a hundred miles an hour, counted down another minute, and pressed SEND.
Ashley Barton drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. The kids were wearing on her last nerve but the morning was nearly done. Thank God. She’d had her two boys and her sister’s girl and they’d zoomed like little rockets. She was exhausted. As it was she would get home from the shopping trip to Houston just in time to get a lunch of hot dogs and carrot sticks and an ice-cream sandwich in each kid. Park them in front of Cartoon Network while she could catch up on laundry and have a glass of iced tea and a moment’s delicious peace and quiet.
She aimed the air conditioning vent toward her face; the day had grown warm and she felt sticky. She’d taken the kids to one of the big Houston malls to get clothes, where the kids begged her to buy toys for them. She knew she was an easy mark. She’d let them pick out a toy each, nothing too expensive, though. They were still paying for Christmas.
‘Give it back!’ Her seven-year-old, Kevin, yelled behind her, and she heard the familiar sound of a boy-fist hitting a boy-shoulder.
‘Kevin’s hitting Brandon,’ her niece Megan announced in a tired voice. ‘Over those stupid trading cards.’ Megan’s tone made it clear what she thought of trading cards.
‘Kevin,’ she said, glancing back at him. ‘We don’t hit.’
‘You don’t but I do,’ Kevin said. ‘He’s gonna tear my card, Mom!’
‘Brandon, give him his card back. Kevin, do not hit your brother. If I have to get on y’all again, no dessert.’ She drove past the Ripley rail yard; her own house was only two minutes away.
In the rearview mirror she saw Kevin had his face pressed to the window glass, watching the long freight train lumber into Ripley. Kevin and trains. He’d been fascinated with them from when he was a toddler. God, that was only a few years ago. They were getting so big so fast.
Suddenly a roar pounded her ears, the minivan bucked on the road, and at first Ashley thought she’d blown a tire. The sound of the derailment was deafening, steel hammering onto steel, metal tearing in a horrific screech she felt in her bones.
‘Jesus!’ she screamed. Then Kevin was hollering and she braked to see that the windows were broken, one of the back ones blown in, glass dusting the kids. The noise had been so loud she hadn’t heard the shattering. All three of the children screamed. She stood on the brakes, wrenched around in the seat.
‘The train derailed!’ Kevin screamed. ‘Mom, I saw it, I saw it!’ His forehead trickled blood from a cut, Megan kept shrieking, Brandon covered his face with his hands, still clutching his brother’s Japanese game card. Ashley only had eyes for the children and she did not see the men in the rail yard – some of them men she had gone to high school with, to church with – staggering, dropping as they hurried toward the accordion of derailed tanks, as though slapped down by an unseen fist.
‘Mom! It hurts!’ Kevin started to cough, started to rub at his eyes.
‘What?’
‘Throat… my throat,’ Kevin moaned and then Ashley felt it too, a terrible burning in the back of her throat, her eyes. Her eyes, her throat, burned like matches had been jabbed into the skin. A heavy smell, like an ocean of bleach, swamped her. The children clawed at their eyes, their mouths.
Get out of here, Ashley thought. Something awful had been freed from the broken jumble of rail cars. A haze blanketed the ground, coiling, the green-yellow of a snake’s scales.
Oh my God. Not my kids, no, she thought. She managed to shift gears, her eyes and nose and throat aflame. Nausea gutted her stomach. Her upper airway constricted like a fist closing. She jammed the accelerator to the floor. Blinking and gasping through the agony Ashley saw the turn to her house, half a block away. Best sight in the world. Get home, call 9-1-1, wash the kids in the tub, everything would be okay, it would have to be okay.
She was dimly aware of people running on the streets, running from the rail yard. Collapsing as she roared past them.
Just get away, get away, get the kids inside, this can’t happen to us.
Ashley Barton took the turn too soon and far too fast, fueled by her blind panic. She missed the street and plowed through the front of a small liquor store. She went through the windshield and she thought not happening not happening and then the pain was gone, the screams were silent.
The explosion wasn’t as loud as he thought it would be; but then the bomb had to be calculated to precision. Big enough to rupture the chlorine tanks, but not so powerful for extreme heat to oxidize the chlorine, rendering most of the gas non-toxic or to burn up much of it. The shape of Snow’s charge was designed to puncture the tanks. Derailment was a given.
He could imagine the chaos in his mind’s eye: everything within a thousand feet of the derailment site would be enveloped in a choking cloud of chlorine. The cloud could expand, if lucky, to a mile and a half in width, and with the boost from the wind, carry close to eighteen miles.
Twenty thousand people would be within the cloud’s path.
The Beast would of course order evacuations, fight like the wounded giant that it was, but the death toll could easily be in the hundreds or even the thousands. He smiled.
He hoped, as a first shot, this would prove a great success.
He drove fast on the empty road, heading toward Houston. He had a gas mask but he didn’t feel he needed it; Ripley was far enough behind and he was driving into the prevailing wind.
He drove south back to Houston, to Snow’s house without calling, because he thought the Beast, with its thousands of eyes, would be tracking every cellular call made near Ripley as part of the town’s postmortem. He listened to the radio, the music interrupted by a news bulletin, the increasingly frantic coverage, and the order for immediate evacuation.