"I'll bet."
Christopher opened his door and sighed loudly. "Are you two finished with this little bonding moment? In case you forget, Arnold, we've got a schedule to keep."
"How could I forget about 'the schedule'? That's all you talk about half the time, gotta stick to 'the schedule,' 'the schedule's' gotta be stuck to, God forbid we should fall behind 'the schedule,' world might come to an end if we screw up 'the schedule'—damn, Sam, write a new verse, will you?"
Christopher blinked. "Got it all out of your system?"
"Not yet—oh, my gosh, look at the time! According to 'the schedule,' it's time for me to talk about 'the schedule', just in case you've forgotten about 'the schedule.' There. Now I'm done."
"You're sure?"
"Give me a couple of seconds and I might come up with another one."
Christopher looked at me. "See what I have to put up with?"
"Poor widdle baby," said Arnold.
I laughed, then climbed out. Christopher ignited one of the flares and set it near the back of the trailer; the second one went near the front of the bus. They seemed incredibly bright. It had to be close to four-thirty in the morning; the highway was practically deserted, save for the occasional semi that passed by, its driver giving us not so much as a glance.
"Here," said Christopher, tossing something toward me. "You hold this, I'll do the deed."
I turned on the flashlight and followed him around; the flat was on the driver's-side rear tire, so we were going to be sticking our butts half into the road; the sooner we got this fixed, the better. Christopher threw open the hatch in back of the bus and pulled out the jack and tire iron. It was only as we headed to the back of the trailer—where the spare tires were attached—that I noticed for the first time that the all the windows of the trailer had been sealed around the edges with wax.
"What gives with the wax?" I asked.
Christopher glanced at where I was pointing the flashlight beam. "Huh? Oh—that's to try and keep the stink sealed in. Bodies tend to swell up and burst a lot faster in this weather."
I nodded my head. "Right. Did you say 'bodies,' as in plural?"
"Told you—he's got five distributors. You think that guy back there was the first one?"
"Actually, yes."
"Could we not talk about this right now?"
"Fine by me."
Good God; I was standing by the side of the road at four-thirty in the morning casually discussing the best way to seal in the stench of dead bodies piled up inside a trailer: was my life working out, or what?
"A little help here?"
I looked up. "Huh?—oh, yeah, sorry."
Christopher was having trouble getting the brace mechanism loosened; between the two of us and the tire iron, we got it opened, but then the tire decided it didn't want to come down just yet. Christopher told me to stand on the bumper and press down-and-out on the top of the tire. It took some graceful balancing on my part—at one point I almost did a spill to make Buster Keaton proud—but I managed. It was as the two of us worked the tire that I happened to glance down at the back window of the trailer.
The cardboard that had been duct-taped over the inside of the window had come loose on one side; nothing you could see from a passing car, but at this angle I got a fairly good look at what set directly beneath the window.
An aluminum barrel strapped to a dolly; around the barrel were buckets of ice—both the wet and dry variety (though the wet ice had mostly long since melted); the outer rim of the barrel was covered in something that looked like foam; interspersed at even intervals around the foam were a series of plastic-looking plugs (or maybe fuses, it was hard to tell); out of each plug snaked what I first thought was thin copper tubing (they had a still? Grendel did a little bootlegging on the side?) but on closer examination I saw was actually electrical wire; these wires merged above the center of the barrel where they connected into what appeared to be a modified computer motherboard; the motherboard, in turn, had two thicker wires dangling from its underside; one went directly into a hole that had been drilled, poked, or pounded into the barrel; the other wire just hung in the air, end exposed.
I continued working the tire as Christopher pulled on it, not once looking up at me.
A half-emptied bag of fertilizer lay crumpled near the ice buckets, along with dozens of empty fireworks boxes.
"Ammonium-nitrate," I said aloud before realizing I'd done so.
Christopher stopped pulling at the tire and stood up straight. "What was that?"
Lying to him would have been futile. I nodded in the direction of the window. "The fertilizer. Ammonium-nitrate?"
"What if it is?"
"I'm assuming the barrel is filled with fuel oil?"
"I'll ask again, what if it is?"
"Gelatin and gasoline makes a handy napalm recipe."
He stared. Even in this darkness, I could see the anger surfacing behind his gaze. "I might've read that somewhere, maybe."
"The stuff around the lid—C4?"
"Chalk up another one for the college man."
"How did you get your hands on some C4?"
"I didn't. Grendel did. He was planning to blast out a section of hillside on his property and build a Frank Lloyd Wright-style guest house for some of the… 'visitors'—for their private sessions. That's also how I got the dynamite and blasting caps. He had plans for all three floors, where the cameras and sound equipment would be installed. It was going to be really spiffy."
"Uh-huh. What the fuck are you doing with a bomb?"
"Don't sweat it, Pretty Boy; I haven't made the last few connections or activated the timer."
"And that's supposed to make me feel better?"
"Ask Arnold—or wake up Rebecca and ask her. They helped me build it. Have you seen either of them getting skittish about things? It's not going to blow by accident. I was hoping you wouldn't find out about it, but since you have—yeah, we got a big old bomb that's going to make a big old boom and bring the walls a-tumbling down. So. What?"
"So what the hell are you, planning to do with it, anyway?" Images of Oklahoma City and the first World Trade Center explosions kept presenting themselves to me with loud and bloody fanfare. "Christopher, I will do everything I can to help you guys get back home, but I will not go one more mile if you're planning to kill innocent—"
"Oh, put the paranoia in park, pal. No one's going to blow up a church or preschool or soulless financial institution. We just want to make sure that when this is over, there's nothing left of this bus and trailer or the garbage inside of them. I already know the spot where I'm going to blow it up; nobody's lived there for twenty years—hell, probably nobody but me has even been near it for that long. Do we seem like terrorists to you?"
"That may not be a good question to ask me, all things considered."
"Fine. If you don't believe me, go ask Arnold and Rebecca. I promised them that when this was all over and done with, I'd take a shit in both these things and then blow 'em to hell ten different ways. Can you give me one good reason why things like these should be allowed to continue to exist? Knowing what's been done inside them, what they've been used for, the pain that's been inflicted on their floors and in their seats—knowing whose bodies are inside and what those sick bastards did while they were alive… can you give me one good goddamn reason why I shouldn't bomb the living fuck out of all of it?"
I stared at him, then blinked, swallowed, found my voice. "No. No, I can't."
"So?"
"So… nothing. I'm sorry I doubted you. C'mon, let's get this tire off."