The Glass Factory (29 page)

“What are you doing?” he asks.

“Going home.”

“Why?”

“What do you think? I’m going to ram the gate?”

“Aww,
man—”

“Sorry. That’s life, Billy.”

On the way back he asks, “What does ‘scruplessly’ mean?” I try to explain.

I park the car in the street. There’s some excitement up ahead. The EPA’s Environmental Response Team has arrived, and a dozen trained experts are arming themselves in shiny moonsuits. They don’t do much for your figure, but even at this distance I think I spot a female form among them. The hottest thing in steel-toed boots. Gina.

I run up to her. “You’re the on-scene coordinator? Took you long enough.”

“I had to wait for my nails to dry.”

“Got any more moonsuits?”

“No, but I’ve got some spare Tyveks and booties.”

“Booties? Now, don’t try to tell me your leathernecked male colleagues call these things ‘booties’?”

“You want them or not?”

“Sure. Two pairs. One for him.”

Billy says, “Hi.”

“We’ve met,” says Gina. “Here, these zoot suits are unisex.”

A Tyvek is a plastic body coverall that feels like a mottled garbage bag. And it’s pure white.

“Gee,” I say, “you couldn’t get these in Day-Glo orange?”

“The idea is to be seen.”

“Yeah, well, I’ll fix that.”

Fully suited up, Gina commands her crew to head in, and the local cops try to stop them.

Gina says, “This is an
emergency
response, you idiots!”

“Gee, you have a knack for words,” I tell her.

“And who are you?” says the cop.

“She’s with me. Now move.”

“I got orders—”

“And I’ve got federal authority, photographic and chemical evidence of PCBs and other toxics on this site. That fire ignites them and we’ll all die a little sooner. Now you going to let us through or do I have to start taking down badge numbers?”

The guy hesitates, then submits. What the hell is going on here? We hang on to the back of the EPA’s Emergency Response vehicle and Billy lets out a “Yahoooo!” like he’s riding shotgun on a stagecoach in a John Ford movie. Okay, I’ll admit my blood’s rushing a bit, too. We get there and the fire has quadrupled in size, half of it over on Morse’s side. For a moment I feel almost alive, like my presence matters, like I can
do
something.

At her command, they weaken the steel mesh with boltcutters, then one of Gina’s boys commandeers a pump truck and drives it through the fence. The others follow, trying to re-establish a perimeter and contain the blaze.

It’s hot as hell and we’re in spill suits, which afford zero protection from flames while keeping in all the heat so you sweat like a pig. There’s a tremendous explosion behind us as a fifty-five-gallon drum of something goes for it. I dive face down into a puddle of mud. Shrapnel’s flying. Everyone scatters like mad. Gina regroups her forces, directing them to a pile of barrels that is about to be engulfed.

“Now’s our chance!” I tell Billy. “Follow me.”

“Follow you?” he asks.

I’m rolling over in the mud, covering myself from head to toe. He gets the idea and jumps in, camouflaging the fluorescent white with good old-fashioned earth tones. We circle around the searing wall of flames with Gina’s troops, step through the fence and take off into the woods. There’s another tremendous explosion that sends some tall trees crashing to the ground in flames. We put that shit behind us.

But I’m blind in the dark after the flames. For a moment I panic. I’ve lost my bearings and we could be heading for a toxic sump, but when I see the red signs with bright white letters reading:
RESTRICTED
AREA,
DO
NOT
ENTER WITHOUT
PERMISSION
, I know we’re heading in the right direction. Not that I get a lot of comfort out of
that.

A couple of hundred yards of trudging through the trees and we finally make out the silhouette of the big Morse plant. They’ve only got it illuminated from the front, and an eerie nimbus of cold tungsten arc glows around its edges. I tell Billy to slow down. The pain is returning to my chest. He asks me where we’re headed. I get him to stop for a moment. We kneel down behind some barrels and I describe what I’m looking for. I tell him we’re heading for the Billing Office, which is over the shop floor, which has a back entrance, but I only know how to get there from the front of the building.

Billy says half the football team’s dads worked here, he knows the layout of the shop floor and which stairway to use. My, my. Good thing I brought him. I actually allow myself to relax and regroup for a second, thinking maybe we really do have a shot at this, that long shot I’ve been hoping for. I lean my head on a barrel before a line of trees goes up in flames, lighting up the night and I read the label on the barrel:
DANGER:
PROPELLANT
STORAGE.

“Oh, shit!” I say, in as nice a way as possible, and we stumble to our feet and get away from there. Billy reaches out and stops me from braining myself on a rusty iron railing. We follow it to a long, narrow runway over the cooling pits to a ladder. It takes us up to another runway about fifty yards long over a low rooftop to the back wall of the plant.

Just then a dark bank of lights unexpectedly bursts into life, searing my eyes, lighting up the back of the plant and the surrounding acres. And as if that isn’t enough, a big iron door opens about twenty feet to the right of where the runway butts the plant and three security guards carrying shotguns come out and take up positions along the outer wall.

This time I wait a few seconds before saying, “Oh, shit.” For variety.

Billy looks at me and whispers: “Now what?”

“Forget it. We’ve gone as far as we can. Time to go back.”

And he says, “No, it’s not! If you get those guys down off of there, I’ll handle the rest.”

“You will?”

“Yes, dammit!”

“What the hell.” I retreat down the ladder, across the runway over a pit of something I’d much rather not think about. Even covered in mud, I’m pretty easy to spot with these air raid beacons on me, and I draw their attention before I dive behind the barrels. Hmm. I haven’t got any of those exploding bullets James Bond used in
Live and Let Die
that would come in so handy right now so I regress to the early bronze age, strip off the top half of my sweaty armor and start throwing stones. Two of the guards climb down a vertical ladder, drop to the ground and spread out. They’ve lost me, but they know where I should be, and the stone-throwing only fools them for a minute. So I find a length of rusty scrap metal and start pounding on the fifty-five-gallon drums of propellant. It makes a hell of a racket, and the two of them converge on me. I see Billy start for the runway, but that’s all I see because two guys with guns and the criminal trespassing laws on their side are after me. They radio for backup. Have I said “Oh, shit” yet?

A year ago I would have run back to the fence, but my lungs are constricting around a dozen venomous sea urchins, and besides, I can’t leave Billy in there. I figure maybe I can pass for an EPA Investigator come to warn them about the fire—if they catch me. But I’d prefer to avoid that, so I do the unexpected and slip the top of my camouflaged Tyvek back on and head away from the barrels
towards
the building, on the other side of the cooling pits and the low outbuilding. I hear a lot of movement coming towards me from the front of the structure. With no other thought in the world I grab the railing, climb over it and hang off the inside edge over the cooling pit. They run by above me in the direction of the barrels. I lift myself up—and I nearly fall in. I’m getting weak. Dizzy. Old. Yet some spontaneous irrational effort of mine gets a grip and I pull myself out. I duck under a ladder, drop to the ground, run the length of the low building, go in close to the loading dock and climb up. There’s a line of drums outside a steel-shuttered entryway, and I realize I’m standing at the gate to the shop floor, about twenty feet from where I want to be: the Billing Office. Of course there is the matter of the steel-shuttered door.

But I’m actually looking up at the second-floor window, contemplating how to climb up there on the barrels when a red pinpoint of light pierces the wall two feet in front of me. It swivels right into my face as I duck down and a high-powered bullet shatters the concrete, spattering me with splinters. If the material had been brick it would have cut my face open.

I dive down behind the barrels. The fuckers have goddamn laser sights and hollow-point magnums, judging from the damage. But I have something they don’t count on: The will to live for another fifteen minutes. I slide down to the far end of the line of barrels, keeping low. My heart is pounding. I’m sweating buckets. I zip the Tyvek back up. I don’t know why.

Ten feet back where I was standing some instants before a barrel ruptures as a high-powered bullet shatters through it, blowing a hole eight inches wide and loosing a gurgling of thick, viscous fluid. It’s only now that it occurs to me how insane it is that they’re shooting at me. Is this normal business practice on Long Island? Are these standard security procedures? But there is no time to analyze. Eight feet away a second barrel goes out with a blast of shrapnel and chemicals. They pause for dramatic effect. Then a third six feet away. They know I’m here, and they’re systematically searching and destroying.
Shit
that makes me mad. To cheat death for so long and to die like this? A fourth barrel four feet away dies a glorious death. No, this is not the moment for anger. Think, Filomena, think. They’re being systematic—God, that irks me!—but life and death are not systematic, they’re chaotic. I wait. I figure. No. I don’t figure. I abandon myself to the void. I cover my face and head for protection. A fifth barrel explodes two feet away. Razor-sharp fangs dig into my arms and elsewhere in a dozen places. Now. I dive back towards the first barrel into a puddle of ooze as the barrel I was pressed up against shatters into infinity.

I’m face down in a pool of something that could be toxic waste. But I’m alive. And I’m pissed. Not that that’ll be any protection against what they’ve got, but who cares? I’m going to die anyway. I lie there, and listen. My ears are ringing with the silence. I can’t hear their footsteps. But I see movement, and it sure isn’t me so it must be the goddess Athena who springs to her feet with a roar that fells flaming trees half a mile away. I must be quite a sight, a half-mad furious female dripping with toxic waste, arms outstretched towards them like Frankenstein’s monster: Unstoppable.

I curse them ’til the end of infinite and eternal time or at least for a solid minute until I realize I’m doing it in Spanish and switch to English. They step back, holding their guns up. I keep them at bay for longer than seems humanly possible before pain from a thousand shards of flame begins to eat at my body, and they realize that I’m only a woman.

One small woman.

They stop retreating. Their guns lower. They cock them. This is it.

Then Billy charges like a fullback right through them, knocking three of them to the ground. He spins around, kicks one of them in the head and pushes him off the loading dock. I grab the other’s shotgun and try to slam the butt across his face, but it slips out of my hand. He tries to shoot me, but the viscous waste won’t let either of us get a grip. Fuck this. I lunge for him, tackle him in the belly, and push him, skidding on a sheen of toxic chemicals to the edge of the dock, where a horizontal iron railing delivers a solid shock to the middle of his back. He’s down, in pain.

Somehow, Billy’s next to me, his arms full of papers. We drop to the ground together and run. The reinforcements close in but they can’t shoot because they’re surrounding us, facing each other. We don’t stop running. Billy dodges one, two, fakes to the left then plows into a third, clipping him low, and we’re running back towards the fire. Now I know I’m crazy.

“What’d you do to that first guy?” I ask, between painful wheezes.

“Him? Oh, he was easy.”

But the other pricks start shooting at us again. Billy picks up speed, zigzagging among the trees like a seventeen-year-old football player. But me, I’m getting the feeling I’ve swallowed a bottle of hydrochloric acid. Every cell is burning, every organ, every atom is dissolving away from my body on its own separate course. Everything’s bright hot fire, but fuzzy. I think a tree falls on me and I go down on one knee. Billy turns back and makes the play, picks me up with his one good arm and runs with me for a good seventy-five yards as the crowd roars before I slip from his grasp and fall to the forest floor. I hear shots. I feel prodding. It’s Billy, urging me to move. I try. He helps me to my feet but every way we turn the alleyway of trees leads to a slime-covered security guard wielding a shotgun. All angles are closed. Fence and flame, trapped between hell and safety. The pile of transformers has ignited; a wall of flaming PCBs blocks our path through the jagged, molten fence.

Another gunman. Red light blinds me. Another pellet of energy from God knows where falls into my reactor and I re-seize the initiative.