Metro (19 page)

But he can't think about it now.

He pushes the bloody pieces of Dictator Ken off him and stands to his feet near the top of the stairs, checking the clip in his gun—four goddamn shots left, one in the chamber.
How did this happen?
Who is the bad guy here?
All of these thoughts come crashing in at the same time, kickstarting a series of really fast info-blip answers, which all basically amount to the same plan he had a few seconds ago—get to the window, get down there, kill the enemy, protect Jollie and Andy—but the shots are all still ringing in his head, the smells of blood and gunpowder are fighting in his nostrils, the whole world is exploded and spinning in some berserk freeform mega-miasma . . .

And here comes Tex, charging up the stairs.

“Ready or not, here I come, kids!”

Mark hears the voice and it snaps him back to reality. He fires at the guy as he reaches the second-floor landing—misses by a country mile when Tex dives into the room and hits the floor. Freezes as Tex locks him up from a low crouch.

“Howdy,” says Tex.

And that's the last thing the guy ever says.

• • •

B
ecause that's right when Reggie Cates gets the trunk of the Lexus open. What Reggie sees inside the trunk is not six million dollars' worth of pure ecstasy. It's a pile of fragmentation grenades and a big anti-fucking-infantry mine.

And fifteen pounds of C-4.

I'm rich, bitch
, he thinks, just before the whole world explodes.

F
ifteen pounds of plastic explosives is really bad news.

There's enough killpower in just a few pounds to blow up someone's house—not to mention his car, his kids, half the neighbor's yard—but
fifteen pounds
is straight-up nuts. Apocalypse in a can. They teach you stuff like that in METRO. They teach you about sneaky tricks and backup plans, contingencies that will deal with the enemy in a pinch and bring down a whole city block in the bargain—and they give you the tools to make it happen, of course, but you have to know how to use them right. A bomb is only as smart as the means by which its maker chooses to detonate the son of a bitch. Even a tactical nuclear warhead won't do its job without proper orders.

A lot of people don't know that it's impossible to turn C-4 into wholesale destruction without a very specific series of chemical reactions—for example, you can light a match and it won't blow up, you can drop this shit on the floor and stomp on it with everything you've got and nothing will happen. Even firing a high-velocity round right into the package at close range won't make fireworks. Without the means of delivering a high-temperature kinetic charge—something hot and fast and sparkly, like a phosphorous strike—you could hand it to your kids and they'd never know the difference between this stuff and Play-Doh, except that it smells really bad. Mark Jones would have reminded us that the entire plot of the movie
Die Hard
is built on a search for detonators so that the bad guys can blow up a building with plastic explosives. Without a detonator, your basic terrorist is basically screwed. Mark Jones knows that too. He rigged up his contingency plan earlier this morning, just before his first meeting with Maggie Ortega/Penelope Cranston.

So when Reggie Cates opens the trunk of Mark's car, he's learning a very important lesson, and that lesson is this:

Don't mess with METRO.

• • •

F
irst, a primary fuse igniter is severed—which creates a half-second chemical reaction that fires a tiny explosive charge into the first five-pound block, and when that first block goes, it becomes an explosion more powerful than the car bombs that first tried to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993. That explosion erases Reggie Cates from the face of the earth in one hot second, as it detonates the other ten pounds of C-4 in the trunk, which are also wired to the fragmentation grenades and the anti-infantry mine.

Which turns the whole car into a two-kiloton explosive device.

Which turns the next four seconds into doomsday for everyone.

It's such a large explosion, in fact, that even the brief flash-fire created from the small amount of gas left in the tank of the car (it was a fairly long drive out here from Austin) is extinguished almost instantly, snuffed out and replaced by a series of deep thunder hits that shake the lawn, blow the front porch into kindling, and launch the engine block straight through the house like an oversize cannonball.

The concussive shock wave—moving faster than the speed of sound—kicks Maggie/Penelope's beat-to-hell Fiat into the air (it also has a damn near empty gas tank) and tumbles the thing backward in space, two tons of heavy metal and superheated glass wheel-kicking like a fan blade, not stopping for nearly a quarter mile until it plunges into the lake on the other side of the property. The Fiat actually absorbs most of the forward push of the main blast when it's launched into the air, which has the odd final effect of only blowing up about a third of the house in a series of smaller progressive ripples that last for exactly one more second.

The main wave expands in the other direction and rips the flesh off the six men on the lawn, shaking every tree within twenty yards, and even shattering four of them—and it picks up Reggie's big black truck and sails it a quarter mile through the woods, destroying more trees. The top floor of the house collapses in a lopsided implosion, the roof blowing off at a bizarre angle and showering debris all across the estate, as the pier and the boathouse and the barn burst apart like matchstick models. The truck parked inside the barn is thrown into the lake, but somehow, miraculously, remains intact. There's a series of smaller explosions clustered together in rapid succession that sound like a city blowing up. Bullet-fast projectiles that used to be shingles and wood struts tear what's left of the men on the lawn limb from limb, and everyone turns into a child again, blinded and bleeding and broken, punched through with deadly shrapnel—and no one even has time to scream much. The final moment of their lives are filled with nothing but the instantaneous white-hot horror of being grated and diced.

By the fourth second, the house is only half-there, collapsing inward on its own wasted skeleton, the sturdy steel-reinforced frame holding just barely, but not for long. Fuel lines are ripped apart and electrical wiring goes south in a hurry. The gas leaks will start to be a bigger problem in about thirty more seconds—when one of those nasty sparks turns into a secondary detonator—but for now there's not as much flame as there is property damage and human casualty. That's another movie myth: that C-4 lights everything on fire like a big gas bomb. The reason for the myth is simple: In movies,
that's what they use
—gas bombs. Looks prettier that way.

In real life, this is the invisible fist of God, punching your lights out.

The only people relatively unaffected by what happens in these four seconds are Jollie and Andy. They are still in the basement when everything blows. They don't get obliterated like everybody else.

But that won't last long.

• • •

J
ollie is thrown to the concrete floor as the room shakes up and down, the hard raw
punch
of the initial blast grabbing her heart in her chest and shaking it like a tambourine—and then she hears the house shatter and implode above them. Andy lands on the floor next to her, but she doesn't notice him until he screams something intelligent:

“
WHAT'S HAPPENING?!
”

The blast wave subsides, but the floor still shakes, just above the sound of bursting lumber and twisted steel coming down all around them—and then the doorway at the top of the stairs cracks open, separating halfway off its hinges as a dead man comes tumbling through the splintered wood. It's one of their bodyguards, shot several times in the chest, half-crushed and bloody, going head over asshole until he slams into the concrete at the foot of the steps. Jollie almost doesn't hear his skull shatter on the hard floor because the first ruptured gas line up top blows in the same moment, and that cancels out pretty much everything else. A support that helps to hold up the stairs almost snaps as the whole house tilts again on its upper foundation, dust and smoke reaching down after them in dragon tendrils. The hanging light fixture over the stairs swings wildly, the room spinning in a crazy series of shadow patterns, and then the bulb finally bursts apart into the snapped support, leaving them both in near-darkness.

Jollie panics and then catches her snap—then panics again.

“Andy!
The house is
 . . .”

Another explosion kicks up, and she forgets whatever she was going to say.

• • •

T
he smell of natural gas burning and the faraway heat of it reaches Andy's nose as he looks up to see the door rip all the way off the hinges and tumble down the stairs, showering the dead man next to them with rough debris. The next explosion lights the hallway above them in a red/yellow pulse-glow, and he can see part of the roof collapse up there. His instincts seem to be almost inhumanly fast—faster than Jollie would have imagined. He grabs her with his good hand and yells words that might be
Come on let's get out of here this place is coming down hurry fuck fuck FUCK
—and she might be screaming back,
We can't go up there everybody's dead oh God Mark Mark MARK
—and he's still grabbing her and they're both still screaming and he's yanking her up the shuddering staircase—
Come on, Jollie, COME ON COME ON COME ON!
And it all thunders past her senses in slow motion, as more explosions start to happen in the house, the wood buckling and nearly collapsing under them. They get to the top of the stairs a million fast-forwarded lifetimes later and he's looking down the main hallway of the house, which isn't really a hallway anymore—it's a smoldering maze of falling chunks and glass, like a shifting junkyard, shaking and glowing at the edges, tiny flames bursting out in rough little flashes. Andy yanks her into the maze . . . and everything is burning and blowing up all around them, but he manages to pick his way through the debris, holding up his wounded arm, using the cast as some pathetic shield as he pulls her with him . . . and she sees her whole life flash in front of her eyes, just like everybody always said it would at the end of everything, the flames and the rubble falling on all sides in epic split-second blasts between the flashes that define her life and sum up the whole goddamn experience so far . . .
her mother, making out with some new guy on the couch
. . . and Andy, grabbing her hand as she cries and says
It's no use, we're trapped in here
, but
NO
, he says,
NO WE CAN MAKE IT . . . and here comes the realization when she was twelve that nothing is sacred and everything a lie, the explosion of her mother's skull and the pink spray of brains on the carpet
 . . . and something hard and hot lands on her from above, sending her to the floor and keeping her there, and she thinks
This is it, this is the end, this is how I finally die
 . . . but Andy is pulling at her again, and she's saying
I can't move, can't MOVE, DAMMIT
and he's screaming
NO GODDAMMIT I WON'T LET US DIE . . .
and Andy is pulling the door off her, using both hands, even his bad hand now, and she is scrabbling upward on her hands and knees, and he's asking her if she can move and she says yes and she moves forward with him . . . and he is her rescuer . . .
and she feels the warmth of his touch for the first time in the living room, that moment when all the teasing is done and they sigh into one another's throats . . .
and he is her champion, her rescuer, her shining knight in a very bad place
 . . . and this is forbidden, but she loves him anyway, loves her beautiful Boy Prince . . .
and the world rumbles and collapses
. . . and they are together and it is her shame . . .
and
 . . . it is her folly . . .
and
 . . .
everything she shouldn't want and yet wants so much
. . . AND . . .
ANNNDYYY
. . .

• • •

T
hey are almost to freedom when the main gas line finally blows.

Half the house goes up in an instant fireball, knocking down Andy as he shoves Jollie toward what's left of the foyer and the pile of kindling that used to be the front porch. Every bit of glass and chemically treated wood that surrounds them erupts in a magnum flash. Jollie doesn't look back to see what happens to her Boy Prince. Doesn't see a burning wood strut fall on him and pin him mercilessly. She's still clawing her way through the smoke and the terrible flashes of her life, all flooding in so damn fast, so damn relentlessly, so damn true and final . . . and her shirt catches fire and she doesn't notice that either. She throws herself on the lawn, just beyond the burning house—and she hears Andy start to scream back there as someone grabs her and rolls her across the grass. She smells smoke. Smells her own hair burning.

Andy
 . . . w
here are you, Andy . . .

• • •

S
he sucks in air and finds that she's breathing smoke. Her lungs seem to collapse, and she loses everything, loses the memories, loses the fire, loses her whole damn mind as the whole damn world shorts out and crashes backward. And then she's looking up, gasping. Air coming in now, just little bits of it. Someone hovering over her, a strange black-and-white shape, shimmering in a bizarre fog of heat waves and smoke, a powerful voice commanding everything around him:

“Get in there! The boy is still in there! Don't let him burn!”

The fire, pulsing in her eyes now, just feet away. Men in suits scrambling, pounding the ground with their feet, going back the way she came.

She looks up at the strange shape, her eyes wild, her voice shot:

“
Who are you? WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?
”

And then she collapses on the lawn, giving into unconsciousness as the shape leans closer, smiling at her. The last thing she sees is the shape's face, that
smile
—and it terrifies her like nothing she has ever known. He is a man split in half. Yet serene.

Like a doctor.

“Darian, sweet child. My name is Darian.”