STARSCAPE BOOKS(62)

“This place remind you of anything?” Martin asked.

“Yeah. Edgeview.” The lights were on, but I didn’t see anyone inside. There were windows all along the walls, about four feet off the ground. I figured there was no way they’d put alarms on every window. I unlatched one and raised it, then waited. After fifteen minutes, I decided it would be safe to go in.

I slipped through the opening. Martin followed me in. The place was mostly one big open space, two stories high, with a couple offices in the back on the second level. Machinery and worktables filled part of the floor. Stacked boxes and barrels filled the rest. There was a second room with a big boiler. A large Psibertronix device was sitting on the floor in one corner.

“Let’s see what we can do with this.” I noticed a valve at the top of the boiler with a gauge next to it. I shut off that valve, then a couple others. The gauge started to move. The side of the boiler made a creaking, groaning sound.

“Maybe we should get out fast,” Martin said.

“I agree.”

We went back outside and waited. Five minutes passed. Then ten.

“Man,” Martin said. “This reminds me of a dud firecracker. You want to check it, but you don’t really want to stick your face too close.”

“I know. But I guess the boiler had some sort of safety mechanism. Come on, let’s take a look.”

I was still twenty feet away from the building when the windows in the boiler room blew out. It wasn’t much of an explosion.

“That’s it?” Martin asked.

“I guess.”

“Uh oh …” he said.

“What?”

“They make ammunition, right?”

The sight of all those boxes and barrels flashed through my mind. “Run!”

Before I could even turn around, the whole side wall exploded with a blast so loud I didn’t even hear the second half of it.

I barely had time to close my eyes before the debris smacked my face. Martin and I both got knocked flat. As we were falling, I gave him a shove, to try to get him as far away from the building as possible.

There was a series of smaller explosions that I felt more than heard. I stayed down until I was sure it was over.

“You okay?” Martin asked. He brushed bits of glass and wood off his forehead as he walked back over to me.

At least, I think that’s what he said. My ears were ringing. I nodded. “You?”

He nodded back, then pointed to the car.

That seemed like a very good idea.

“Wow …” I said as Martin started to turn the car around. “That was big.”

“Yeah.” He stopped to swear as he hit the curb with the left front tire. After backing into the other curb with the right rear tire, he finally got us headed toward the highway. “That was definitely big. Someone is going to pay attention”

“For sure. I think that’s enough for one night. We should bring the car back to where we got it.” I didn’t want to leave evidence that this was anything other than a bunch of experiments going bad. “If you drop me off where I can get a cab, I’ll come pick you up in the parking lot.”

“Yeah.” Martin glanced over his shoulder toward the building we’d just destroyed. “We might be saboteurs, but we aren’t thieves.”

“Speaking of which, I wonder how Torchie and Flinch are doing?”





meanwhile …


“POT IT OUT!” Flinch shouted.

“I’m trying.” Torchie clenched his teeth and gave the fire all his attention. The first part had been easy enough. From the hill behind the warehouse, they’d been able to spot a room with the equipment Trash had described. Torchie had set the room on fire and kept the flames from spreading. But he hadn’t been able to put out the fire. It was all over the room. Worse, he heard fire engines in the distance.

“Concentrate,” Flinch said.

“I can’t concentrate when you’re telling me to concentrate. And I’ve never done this through binoculars before.”

“Just work on one part at a time.”

Torchie squinted his eyes and focused on one wall. The fire dimmed and died. He turned his attention to the floor, but the wall burst into flame again, kindled by the heat in the room. Then the eye pieces of the binoculars fogged up.

Three fire engines raced to the building. Firemen leaped out and started pulling equipment off their trucks.

“Try doing the whole room at once,” Flinch said.

“That won’t work,” Torchie said. “There are too many parts.”

“You put out a bunch of fires at Edgeview,” Flinch said.

“Those were all little ones.” Torchie wiped sweat from his forehead. “These are big.”