Chapter Twenty-Nine

Trader and Ryan saw the explosion from five miles away: the ball of flame streaking straight up, then the shock blast stretching sideways like a dinner plate.

A dinner plate miles wide.

The concussion wave was so powerful that it sent the MCP veering off the road. The rest of the column was likewise diverted by the wall of hurricane-force wind. All of the wags came safely to a stop, and once the winds and dust storm abated, their crews piled out to watch the show.

An enormous column of black smoke rose from the plain. At its mile-wide base, orange fires danced and swayed. Based on how far away they still were from the ville, the flames had to be hundreds of feet high.

“Dark night!” J.B. exclaimed. “How much of my C-4 did you use?!”

“Hair too much,” Ryan said, squinting his one good eye at the holocaust.

“Looks like the whole goddamn refinery blew up,” Trader said. Then he craned his head back. “Man, look at that smoke! It’s got to be a mile high already.”

“Are we going on, now?” Hun asked, after a minute or two.

“No,” Trader told her as he took the binoculars one of the crew handed him. He raised them to his eyes. “We’d better wait here until some of the smoke clears off. Look, there’s still stuff exploding. Did you see that fuel drum? Looked like a goddamned rocket.”

They sat by the side of the road for better than an hour before Trader gave the go ahead. His mood had sombered considerably during that time. Through the binoculars, he could see no refugees fleeing out over the dry lake bed. No one and nothing moved, except the leaping flames where the refinery had once stood and the steadily uncoiling column of black smoke.

On his order, they approached the ville at a crawl down the main road that wound around the lakeshore. Thick smoke was still rising from the ville’s epicenter; the wind at their backs kept it away from them.

“I don’t see anything alive,” Hun said as she looked out the copilot’s hatch. “I mean, nothing.”

“I see bodies,” Ryan said, “on the other side of the gate.”

Trader used the wag-to-wag intercom and called for the convoy to halt, then he got out of War Wag One. With Ryan, Hun and Poet behind him, he walked over to the wire part of the barricade.

There was a pile of sec men on the ground on the other side. They hadn’t been chilled by the blast at the refinery; Trader could see that right off. For one thing, the corpses were intact. Their heads, arms, legs were all still connected to torsos; and there were no great bloody wounds from being hit by flying objects. For another thing, and this was the big giveaway, there was green froth caked all over their mouths, chins and noses. Their faces were black and swollen, tongues sticking out of their gaping jaws like hard salamis. Under their armor vests, their bellies were already starting to bloat.

Hun recognized the symptoms, too. “Nerve gas,” she said. “It’s fucking nerve gas.”

“Shabazz must’ve had it stored somewhere handy to the refinery,” Poet said, looking up from the bodies and past them, to the ruined ville. The war captain grimaced and ran the flat of his hand over the top of his head.

“Is it safe to go on, J.B.?” Trader asked.

“Mebbe. Question is, what good can we do if we do go in there?”

“Gotta see,” Trader said. “I gotta see.” With that, he opened the gate. As he stepped inside, he turned and said, “Keep the wags out.”

Ryan, Hun, Poet and most of the crew followed their leader around the maze of berms and into Virtue Lake.

The shantytown had been blasted flat. Scattered bonfires raged among the heaps of rubbish. Human bodies lay mixed in with the smoking refuse. There was an eerie stillness, except for the crackle of the fires and the whistle of the wind. Trader realized what was missing. It was the steady, grinding noise of the refinery. In the distance, there was no sign of the plant that had once dominated the landscape.

As he scanned the fields of trash that had once been human dwellings, he asked himself how many people were half-buried out there. Hundreds, surely. Maybe even a thousand. And they were all dead.

Men. Women. Children.

To pull them out of the trash and properly bury them would’ve taken weeks.

As they walked past the devastation, Trader could hear Hun behind him, muttering to herself. She was saying, “Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck

“

“Hey, Ryan!” Abe called out. He was stopped a little way back, staring at a body on the ground. “This here looks mighty like your blade.”

Ryan trotted over to where the little man stood, and Trader and the others followed.

“It does look like your panga,” Poet said.

The handle of the big blade was sticking up out of the chest of a man in pinstriped overalls. The point had been shoved up under his sternum.

“That one sure didn’t die of the gas,” Hun said.

They could all see that. There was no green froth at the lips, no blackening of the pockmarked cheeks. He had stopped breathing before the blast.

“Boy got his venging in,” Poet said.

“Looks like,” Ryan replied as he put his boot sole on the dead man’s face and pried the knife free. He cleaned it on the crew boss’s shirt before he slid it back into its leg sheath.

Ryan looked at Trader and said, “Might be a boy named Guy-ito laying around here close. He was a help to us. Like to have a look-see, if we’ve got the time.”

“We’ve got time,” Trader said.

Ryan and Poet searched intently, without speaking, looking for the boy’s corpse in a widening circle around the dead man. They lifted the corners of corrugated metal sheets that had flown off roofs and turned back scorched sheet-plastic walls. They found no child’s body in the debris. After a few minutes, they gave up. Neither of the warriors speculated aloud that the boy Guy-ito might have somehow escaped the disaster; under the circumstances, it seemed like too much of a long shot.

As Trader led them closer to the blast’s ground zero, the bodies started showing signs of death by explosion. Violent, instantaneous death. Trader felt an odd kind of relief at the sight of people with large pieces of metal driven through their torsos, with heads missing. He knew firsthand what it was like to taste the nerve gas, to feel it at work in his body. He knew getting your head blown off was a mercy.

When they came to the warehouse where the looted cargo had been stored, it was obvious that nothing salvageable was left. The roof and walls were gone. The expanding fireball had melted the rest into a vast, still-smoking gob.

A few blocks farther on was the refinery site. It was as if the plant had never existed. In its place was a crater several hundred yards across. And from the center of the crater, plumes of fire still jetted skyward. At the bottom of the pit, partially visible as the flames licked and danced, there was some metal debris, possibly a storage tank. It gave off a squealing sound, like high-pressure steam escaping through a pinhole. Trader stared at the flames, his cigar butt clenched in his teeth.

“This wasn’t your fault,” Poet said as he stepped up beside him. “It was Shabazz’s. If he hadn’t stored his infernal gas grens here, these people would all still be alive.”

Trader turned and looked at his war captain in silence for a moment, then he took his cigar butt out of the corner of his mouth and spit on the ground. “Such a waste,” he said. “Such a goddamned waste. But it’ll stand as a lesson for anyone who ever plots to stand against me.”