He didn’t care. It didn’t matter anymore. Nothing mattered except making certain that Amanda would be alright. If he heard her pleas for him to stop, he didn’t react to them.
Rutherford was trying to back out the doorway while keeping the old man in sight. Pickett seemed to be in considerable pain. The Chairman’s foot slid on something; a damp, viscous blob of jelly. He looked down at what had once been half of his personal bodyguard. A partially disintegrated skull grinned whitely up at him. There was only a jellied smear where the right eye had been. The left one hadn’t slipt, had just fallen out of the socket. Now it dangled loosely by an organic thread, hanging against half a cheekbone. Rutherford found he was shaking badly.
“I’m sorry…. We can work it out. I’m going, see? I’ll leave you alone. Nobody will bother you anymore, I swear it. Just stop….” He reached out a hand, trying to protect himself from something unseen. “Please don’t….”
He never finished the sentence. It dissolved in his throat, along with everything else.
Rutherford didn’t scream as he slipt. None of them had screamed. Maybe that meant it wasn’t painful. That made Jake feel a little better. No, the Chairman of CCM didn’t appear to be in any pain as his face slowly melted off his skull, as the hands that reached out became skeleton hands, as the flesh melted and ran down the white bone.
Slowly Rutherford slipt, sliding into his clothes, his body running like pudding out through the legs of his expensive pants. Something moved behind him and Jake half-turned his head. Powder stung his cheeks and he blinked as a few grains caught his eyes. The powdered bullet didn’t have enough force to break the skin, however.
In the far doorway the receptionist-guard who’d first encountered Jake outside the elevators stared in terror as the gun slipt in her hands. It wasn’t like the other times, not like in Benson or Abilene when cylinders had fallen away from their mounts and triggers and barrels had come apart. This time the handgun simply turned to dust along with the bullets, sifting through the woman’s clutching fingers. Jake had spotted her just in time.
Then she noticed the mounds of ooze on the floor which had once been human beings, living creatures. Her hand went to her mouth and she disappeared down the hall. Soon the paralyzing hysteria would give way to screaming.
Jake wasn’t sure why he didn’t make her slipt. A lifetime of being courteous to the opposite sex, perhaps. Speaking of which…. He turned to regard the last of his tormentors.
Ruth Somerset was sitting on the floor on the far side of the room, her back against the wall. She was alternately laughing and crying. Then she noticed Jake staring at her. She didn’t scream, didn’t beg or plead, but there was a naked, helpless terror in her eyes which made Jake cringe. He was responsible for that, he knew, and he didn’t want to be. All he wanted was to get along. That’s all he’d ever wanted out of life.
He took a step toward her, planning to reassure her. It had an entirely different effect. Those widened eyes rolled up and she fell over sideways in a dead faint.
Alarms began to sound, hooting loudly through the building, penetrating the soundproofing via the gaping hallway door. It sounded as if they were blaring all over the plant.
The receptionist-guard was responsible for that, Jake knew. Maybe he should have made her slipt anyway. Too late for that now. The important thing was to get Amanda to safety. He turned to the bed, and bent over as something ripped through his chest.
“Uncle Jake?” Amanda was sitting on the side of the bed, still cleaning herself. He fought to regain control of his body.
“It’s okay, princess. It’s okay. Come on. I’m taking you out of here.”
She put her hands around his neck as he reached under her, one hand across the small of her back, the other beneath her thighs. He gritted his teeth and lifted. She came up easily, lighter than she looked because of the thinness of her legs. She wasn’t a big girl to begin with, but that didn’t matter. Suddenly he had a surge of real energy, felt some strength return to his arms and legs. This was Amanda he was carrying, and he’d die before he dropped her.
No one confronted them as they emerged into the hall. There was no sign of the receptionist. Her desk was deserted and so was the opposite hallway. The elevator responded to Jake’s call and when the car arrived it was empty.
On the ground floor, however, a couple of security guards espied them as they exited the elevator. The sight of an old man carrying a nearly naked young woman piqued their interest immediately.
“Hey, who are you?” one of them said sharply. They both started forward.
Jake hesitated before reacting, remembering the goo that covered the bedroom floor upstairs. The memory of it made him queasy. His stomach was no stronger than anyone else’s. So instead of disassembling the two guards he turned his attention to the ceiling, a part of which turned into a shower of wood and plaster. The two men were laid out on the floor, still wearing their bodies.
What am I going to do? he thought worriedly as he tried to hurry toward the entrance. Amanda clung tightly to him, her strong arms locked around his neck. I’ve killed so many people. Self-defense, sure, but those deaths were still on his hands, and literally on his mind. How was he going to be able to live with that?
Outside the Administration Building now, running back down a half-familiar path with his delicate burden. Alarms echoing in his ears. Out through the last gate, onto the paved walk which bordered the bright waters of the Gulf. Another spasm of pain burst behind his sternum. He found himself running while leaning to his left.
The little inboard was waiting for him. He set Amanda inside, wrestled with the rope binding the boat to the dock. A shout sounded behind him and he turned to look landward.
Ruth Somerset was standing by the plant exit, her expression wild with hate and fear. Sophistication had deserted her. It was more than that. The events she’d witnessed during the past half hour had rendered her slightly deranged. Armed security personnel clustered around her.
“There he is!” she screamed, pointing toward the dock. “There he is! Kill him. For God’s sake, kill him!”
Jake climbed into the boat and sat down in the pilot’s seat. The engine turned over immediately, but it took several precious seconds for the boat to pull free of the sand and back out into the bay. As he swung around and gunned it he looked back over his shoulder.
Somerset was still standing by the gate above the beach walk, but the men accompanying her were running down the path and piling into the two other small boats which had been tied up to the dock. A few were firing at the retreating inboard, which was just out of range.
They’d chase him all the way back to Port Lavaca, he thought exhaustedly, maybe all the way to Wendy and Arriaga’s house. Maybe into the house. They might not even make it that far. He didn’t know how fast their boats might be, and there was always the chance of a stray shot hitting him or Amanda. They’d chase him until they both died.
Tired. He was so tired.
So he reached out with the ability he didn’t understand, would never have a chance to understand. Reached out for one of the last times with something he’d wanted to use only to amuse little kids, something which people he despised had forced him to develop to a frightening degree. It was less disciplined, less controlled than anything he’d ever done; the desperate strike of a man in the last stages of hopeless exhaustion. If he’d had more practice, more time, he might have managed it better. Certainly he didn’t mean to produce such a violent sliptage.
Inside the vast storage tanks bordering the refinery, inside the cracking facilities of the refinery itself, certain molecular bonds were snapped. Perhaps a dozen new compounds were formed as a result. The subsequent creation brought forth destruction, for several of those new compounds were volatile and unstable. Within the airless confines of a few huge tanks, the result was explosive.
The big globe which squatted near the Administration Building, the one beneath which Jake had encountered the troublesome worker, was the first to go. Painted steel, catwalks and piping erupted skyward, propelled by expanding gases and accompanied by black-orange flame. Jake tried to stop it when he realized what he’d done, tried to reverse it. Even if he’d had the training and experience in the use of his ability, he couldn’t have prevented what had already been set in motion.
Pipes began to disintegrate, spewing unfamiliar corrosive compounds across pavement and other structures. Cracks appeared not only in the walkways but in the earth beneath the plant. Jake had touched much more than a few liquids.
“Uncle Jake!” Someone was shaking him. “Uncle Jake, that’s enough!” He blinked, looked to his right. Amanda was yelling and shaking him with both hands, pleading with him. “That’s enough, Uncle Jake!”
Dazedly he turned to look back at the refinery. It was disappearing, coming apart as explosion after explosion ripped through it. The concussions were felt as far north as Galveston. As he stared, one particularly violent eruption temporarily deafened man and grandniece. A gigantic red-orange fireball rose from the center of the petrochemical complex as fragments of metal and plastic and people were blown a mile from the middle of the plant. None of them struck the fleeing boat, though plenty struck all around it. A fine powder sifted down to the water in the inboard’s wake.
A serious, no-nonsense invisible fire struck his heart. He went forward, then backward in the seat, both arms wrapped around his chest. Somehow Amanda shoved him aside, gaining enough of an edge to sit on as she fought to regain control of the momentarily gyrating boat. She was crying steadily, cold with only the thin nightgown to cover her. She brought their speed down to a crawl and pointed the boat southward as she bent to her uncle.
His mouth gaped wide and a rasping, sodden sound came from his throat. She put an ear against his chest, heard his heart going mad. It would pause for an instant, then resume beating wildly.
Finally it steadied. Jake squinted at her until his vision cleared. He’d been asleep, or something. Distant, faint explosions continued to shake the shoreline behind the boat and interspersed among them, the first weak cries of approaching sirens. Lots of sirens.
Jake saw his grandniece gazing into his eyes, saw the tears straggling down her cheeks. Weakly, he began fumbling at his shirt for the bottles. Then he knew something had broken inside him. He shook his head at nothing. It was growing dark out, evening advancing in midday, the ominous evening he’d dreaded and been expecting for a long time.
“Too late,” he whispered at her. She had to lean closer to understand him. “Too late for nitro now. Too late for anything. I didn’t mean, didn’t mean to do all that.” His neck muscles didn’t seem to be working, so he had to indicate what he meant by gesturing backward with his eyes.
