Knockdown

Book 4: Rig Warrior

by William W. Johnstone, J.A. Johnstone

Genres: General Fiction; Spy Thrillers; Terrorism & Assassination Thrillers

Synopsis

They call him "The Rig Warrior." Name: Barry Rivers. Occupation: Long haul trucker. Special skills: Defender of freedom. Patriot. Government sanctioned killer. America's secret weapon.



A NATION OFF THE RAILS



No one saw the first attack coming. A perfectly orchestrated assault on a mass-transit railroad line that left countless Americans dead. Intelligence experts are convinced this is no ordinary terrorist attack. To pull off something like this, it would take a deep-state traitor with dark foreign connections. And to stop them, it will take someone who isn't afraid to shed blood.



A HERO OFF THE GRID



Enter Barry Rivers, the Rig Warrior. An urban legend in the intelligence community, Rivers has been living off the radar for years. But when he sees his country under attack, he reaches out to his nephew Jake, an FBI agent, to track down the enemies in our own government. To these high-ranking traitors, Rivers is a threat to their global agenda. When Rivers revs up his tricked-out eighteen-wheeler and goes after a runaway train on a collision course with disaster, all bets are off. The war is on. And with Barry Rivers at the wheel, it's going to be the ultimate knockdown, drag-out fight for America's future . . .

Release date: August 25, 2020

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 400

Sample

The fat man ran the keen edge of the blade across the ball of his thumb, studied the bead of dark red blood that was the result, and then licked it off.

“You see, my machete is very sharp, gringo. You will barely feel a thing when I cut your head off with it.”

“Yeah, well, I guarantee you’ll feel it when I shove that pigsticker up your culo and start twisting it, Pancho.”

The man sitting at the table in the corner of the little cantina slurred his words. The mostly empty bottle of tequila in front of him explained why. The fiery liquor he had guzzled down also explained the boldness of his response.

The fat man scowled and stepped closer to the table.

The three men who had been at the bar with him started in that direction as well, as if they sensed that the situation had just become more serious. They couldn’t have actually heard the words—not with Tejano music blaring in the cantina, mixing with the breathless drone of the announcer calling the soccer game on the TV mounted above the bar and trying to make it more exciting than it really was. No, it was far too loud.

Maybe they smelled the blood.

A big man sitting at the bar turned his head to watch the three amigos headed for the table in the corner. He swiveled on the chair and stood up. He towered over everybody else in here, and his shoulders were as wide as an axe handle. Thick slabs of muscle on his arms and shoulders bulged in the fabric of his black T-shirt.

“Señor,” the bartender said behind him. The big man looked around. The bartender shook his head worriedly and went on in English, “You should not interfere, señor. Those men, they are . . . Zaragosa.”

The big man frowned.

The bartender lowered his voice even more. The big man could barely hear him as he half-whispered, “Cartel. Comprende? Look around.”

The big man looked and got what the bartender was talking about. Everybody else in the cantina was doing their best not to even glance in the direction of the looming confrontation in the corner. Nobody wanted to get involved and risk offending the cartel.

“That guy’s an American,” the big man said. “I’m not gonna just stand by and let him get hurt.”

An eloquent shrug from the bartender. He had tried to prevent trouble. No one could blame him now for what might happen.

Over in the corner, the fat man with the machete said, “What did you call me?”

“Are you deaf as well as stupid, Pancho?”

The man at the table reached for the bottle. He had lean, weathered features under close-cropped gray hair. It was difficult to tell how old he was. Anywhere from fifty to seventy would be a good guess.

His hand trembled a little as it closed around the neck of the bottle. Whether the tremor was from age, a neurological condition, or too much to drink was also impossible to say.

The fat man spat a few curses in Spanish, lifted the machete, and slammed it down on the table in front of the gringo. The blade bit deeply into the old, scarred wood. The fat man’s lips drew back from his teeth in a snarl as he leaned forward.

“I will not cut off your head,” he said. “The next time, my blade will cleave your skull down to your shoulders, viejo!”

“Ain’t gonna be no next time. You really are stupid. Your little knife’s stuck, gordo!”

At the same time, the big man moved up behind the fat man’s three compadres and said in a loud voice, “Hey! What’re you doing to that old geezer?”

The fat man wrenched at the machete. The old man was right. The blade had embedded itself so deeply in the tabletop that it was stuck.

The old man came up out of his chair like a rattlesnake uncoiling and swung the tequila bottle he held by the neck.

The fat man tried to jerk back out of the way. The old man was too fast. The bottle smacked hard against the side of the fat man’s head but didn’t break. The impact made the fat man take a quick step to his right, but he caught himself and grinned.

“I’m gonna mess you up, viejo.”

The old man said, “Oh, crap.”

The fat man’s three buddies turned toward the big hombre who had challenged them. He didn’t give them a chance to set themselves. Throwing his arms out wide, he charged them, grabbing the two on the flanks and bulling his shoulder right into the one in the middle. That bull rush swept them all backward into the fat man, who was trying to wrench the machete loose from the table.

It was like a tidal wave of flesh washing over the fat man and knocking him forward into the table. The old man hopped out of the way with a nimbleness that belied his age.

The weight of all four men came down on the table. Its spindly legs snapped, and the whole thing crashed to the floor. The fat man and his amigos sprawled on the wreckage. One of the men howled in pain as he got pushed against the edge of the machete and the blade sliced into his leg.

With an athletic grace uncommon in a man of his size, the big hombre had caught his balance before he could fall on top of the others. He took a step back and looked at the old man. “We’d better get out of here.”

“Not yet,” the old man said with a gleam in his eyes. “Pancho and me still got to settle up.”

The big man rolled his eyes and then swung around to face the rest of the customers in the dim, smoke-hazed cantina. They were watching with a mixture of keen interest and trepidation, but none of them seemed eager to mix in.

According to the bartender, the fat man and his friends worked for the Zaragosa drug cartel, and nobody wanted to mess in cartel business.

The old man leaned over, caught hold of the fat man’s dirty shirtfront with his left hand, pulled him up a little, and used his right hand to slap him hard, back and forth. Before that, the fat man had appeared a little stunned from being knocked down, but the sharp blows knocked his wits back into him.

He roared in anger and used a foot to hook one of the old man’s legs out from under him. The two of them grappled together and rolled across the filthy floor.

Two of the other three tried to get up and rejoin the fight. The third man was still yelling as he clamped both hands around his leg, which was bleeding heavily from the machete wound. It looked like he might have nicked an artery.

As the two cartel members scrambled to their feet, the big hombre caught them by the neck from behind. The muscles in his arms and shoulders bunched as he slammed the two men together. Their heads clunked loudly. Both men came unhinged at the knees and crumpled to the floor again.

The big man gestured toward the bleeder and addressed the room at large in decent Spanish: “Somebody better help him before he bleeds to death.”

When he turned his head, he saw that the old man somehow was getting the best of his overweight opponent. The wiry old codger knelt on the fat man’s chest and punched him in the face again and again. Blood blurred the fat man’s features. The big hombre stepped up behind the old man and hooked his hands under his arms.

“Come on,” he said. “He’s out of it. And we need to be out of here.”

The old man was breathing hard. He glared down at the fat man. But after a few seconds, he said, “Yeah, you’re right.” He shook free of the big man’s grip. “Let’s go.”

With the four cartel members out of action, no one else in the cantina made a move to stop the two gringos as they headed for the door. They stepped out into the hot night air. Gravel crunched under their feet as they crossed the parking lot.

The door of the squalid cinder-block building slammed open behind them. The big hombre looked back and muttered, “Oh, crap.”

The fat man stumbled out of the cantina and waved his hand, which was holding a pistol. It spurted flame and thundered in the night. The big man sprinted toward the pickup he had driven across the international bridge from Texas earlier in the evening. The old man followed him.

“Where’s your car?” the big hombre flung over his shoulder.

“Don’t have one! I walked across the bridge!”

That could actually be smarter than driving in Mexico, but wandering around a border town at night wasn’t a very bright thing to do these days. Such places had always been hotbeds of crime, but now, with the so-called authorities virtually powerless when compared to the cartels, norteamericanos risked their lives being anywhere near the border, let alone across it.

At the moment, however, the big hombre was glad he had transportation out of here. The fat man was shooting wild, but there was no telling when he might get the range.

“Come with me!” the big man yelled to his newfound companion. He hoped nobody had stolen or slashed his tires while he was in the cantina, or damaged the engine in some way.

The big man unlocked both doors of the pickup with the remote key as they ran toward it. The old man yanked the passenger door open and piled in while the big hombre threw himself behind the wheel.

Gravel kicked up not far from the pickup as the bullets came closer. The engine cranked, caught. The big man slammed the truck into gear and peeled out, spraying gravel behind him. A wild turn onto the potholed highway, and he was speeding toward the cluster of high-intensity lights that marked the international bridge a quarter of a mile away.

The big man watched the rearview mirror. No headlights popped into view. That was good. Even if the bridge wasn’t busy, crossing would take long enough that the fat man and his friends could catch up if they wanted to. Maybe they were back there attending to the guy who’d sliced his leg open.

“Well, that was a mite exciting,” the old man said. He didn’t sound drunk anymore.

The big man just glanced over at him and didn’t say anything. At the bridge, he guided the pickup into the Ready Lane line behind two other vehicles. The American border guards passed those through fairly quickly. Still no headlights coming up behind the pickup. The old man handed the big hombre his driver’s license. He put it with his own and handed them to the guard as he pulled up to the now-lowered barrier.

The guard scanned the RFID chips on the licenses and then nodded at the results that came up on his scanner. He asked the usual customs questions about regulated goods they might have with them.

The big man said, “Nope, not a thing.”

The guard handed the licenses back, then nodded at his cohort in the control booth, who pushed buttons and started the barrier lifting. The big man waited for it to clear and drove through at an unhurried pace, back onto Texas soil.

He drove through the border city, a garish oasis of lights in the vast darkness of the border country, and pulled into the parking lot of a nondescript motel on the north side of town, away from the border.

He brought the pickup to a stop beside an eighteen-wheeler parked at the edge of the lot, a Kenworth long-hood conventional with an extra-large sleeper behind the cab.

The big hombre killed the lights and engine, then sat there in the darkness for a long moment before he turned to the old man and said, “All right, Barry, what the hell was all that about?”

“Take it easy, Jake. It was all under control.”

“It didn’t look under control to me,” Jake Rivers said. “Especially when blood started spurting out of that guy’s leg. He may have bled out by now.”

Barry Rivers shrugged. “That wasn’t supposed to happen. Just bad luck the guy fell on the machete and cut himself. But I imagine Pancho got the bleeding stopped in time. If he didn’t . . . well, that’s one more Zaragosa foot soldier the good guys won’t have to worry about in the future.”

He paused, then added dryly, “Anyway, what happens on the other side of the river isn’t your worry. You were a little outside of your jurisdiction, after all.”

Jake leaned back against the pickup seat and sighed. “So were you.”

“Nope, not really.” Barry shook his head. “I don’t have any jurisdiction. I just go where I need to go and do what needs to be done.”

Jake might have argued with him out of habit, but deep down, he knew his uncle was right. Sometimes the good guys had to bend the rules a little.

The trick was to not bend them so much that you became one of the bad guys.

Unfortunately, that distinction was a pretty murky one sometimes.

He pushed that thought aside and said, “What I want to know is what we were doing there in the first place. Why’d you ask me to meet you there? And why, in the name of all that’s holy, would you pretend to be drunk and pick a fight with a bunch of cartel enforcers?”

“How do you know I wasn’t really drunk?”

Jake made a skeptical noise. “You wouldn’t have sobered up this fast if you were. Anyway, in the five years I’ve known you, I’ve never seen you drunk. I doubt if you’d start now.”

Barry chuckled. “You don’t know everything about me, kid. I’ve done some things I’m not proud of. I was pretty close to being a drunk for a while. But that was a long time ago.” Barry shook his head. “A whole other life, it seems like sometimes.”

Silence lay between them for several moments. It was true that quite a bit of Barry’s shadowy existence was still shrouded in mystery to Jake. Up until a few years earlier, Jake had believed that his uncle was long dead, killed in an explosion when Jake was just a child.

Barry had survived that murder attempt, though. Plastic surgery had turned him into the top-secret operative code-named Dog.

He had worked for those at the highest levels of government. Sometimes, he had worked against those at the highest level of government when they didn’t have the best interests of the country and its citizens at heart.

Over time, Dog, or the Rig Warrior, as he was sometimes called, had become part legend, part boogeyman in the intelligence community. Some people didn’t believe he even existed, or at least professed not to believe. There was a good chance they just didn’t want to draw his attention to them.

Because where Dog went, death often followed.

Jake might not ever have known any of that if a gang of vicious criminals and terrorists hadn’t taken over the university campus where he was taking postgraduate courses and trying to figure out what to do with his life.

A decorated veteran, deadly with fists, blades, and guns, Jake hadn’t taken that atrocity lying down. He had fought back with everything he had, and along the way he had gotten some vital help from a mysterious figure who had turned out to be his long-lost uncle.

Discovering the truth about Barry had led Jake to take up a similar mission of his own to right the wrongs in the world, only these days Jake was doing it through more established channels. With the backing of a special agent named Walt Graham he had met during that crisis at the university, Jake had joined the FBI, graduating at the top of his training class at Quantico.

So far, it had been the best decision of his life. He enjoyed the work, liked the idea of taking down lowlife scum in all walks of life. The power struggles and manipulation in the upper echelons of the bureau sometimes bothered him, but he ignored that aspect as much as he could and focused on catching the bad guys.

He was good at catching them, too. He could have risen in the bureau’s hierarchy—if he had wanted to. But that would have meant playing those political games, and Jake was having no part of that.

He had stayed in touch with Barry, though, and even helped him out now and then, when he could without straying too far from FBI protocols. He was a straight arrow, to use an old-fashioned, out-of-fashion term. He knew it. Couldn’t help it.

So he hadn’t been surprised when Barry had contacted him through the usual back channels and requested a meet in that cantina on the Mexican side of the border.

Jake, who was working out of the Dallas field office these days, had been able to take a few personal days to make the trip down here. Barry had told Jake to pretend not to know him, at least until Barry gave him a sign that it was all right, so that was what Jake had done.

“You could have gotten us killed, you know,” he said now, not liking how irritable he sounded but unable to do anything about that, either. “Those cartel guys aren’t known for their tender mercy. That fat one wanted to cut your head off.”

“Nah, I don’t think he really did. He was just fooling, showing off for his amigos.”

“Are you crazy? After that he tried to shoot us.”

“Believe me, Jake,” Barry said, “if Pancho really wanted to shoot us, we’d be dead now.”

“You can’t know—” Jake stopped abruptly. He looked over at his uncle. The light from the motel’s neon sign painted Barry’s lean face in green, red, and yellow shades.

“You do know, don’t you?” Jake went on. “You know what kind of shot that cartel enforcer is.”

“Pancho gets top marks on the range,” Barry said. “He’s one of the best shots in the DEA.”

Jake closed his eyes, shook his head, and muttered something under his breath. Then he asked, “Is Pancho his real name?”

Barry nodded. “Pancho Gonzalez Gutierrez. Named after an old tennis player you’ve probably never heard of. Pretty clichéd, isn’t it? But I’ve known more than one guy whose real name was John Smith.”

“And he’s an agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration?”

“Yeah. Known him for years. We worked on a few ops together, a long time ago.”

“And here I thought you were just being politically incorrect, as usual, when you called him Pancho.”

“That’s what his friends thought, too. I don’t think anything that happened tonight will give them any cause to suspect him, do you?”

Jake didn’t answer that. Instead he asked, “How long has he been undercover?”

“I’m not sure. Two years, at least.”

“Did he get hold of you and request a meet?”

“That’s right. He said he had some intel for me. He passed it along while we were rolling around the floor, fighting.”

“Why you and not his bosses at the DEA?”

Barry’s voice took on a slightly more serious note as he said, “Now that, I can’t tell you. Unless . . . and I’m just shooting from the hip here . . . he has some reason not to trust them completely.”

Jake leaned back against the pickup seat again. “That’s a pretty serious accusation.”

“I’m not accusing anybody. I’m just saying that would explain why Pancho reached out to me. He knows I’d always have his back.”

Jake thought that over and nodded. “So what did he tell you?”

“The Zaragosa cartel doesn’t just smuggle drugs into this country. I already knew that. They’ll bring in anything as long as the price is right, including people.”

“Human trafficking,” Jake said. The revulsion and anger in his voice made it clear what he thought of that. “The bureau is aware of it.”

“No, I’m not talking about coyotes running truckloads of illegals across the border.”

“You mean undocumented immigrants.”

“No, I mean illegals, blast it,” Barry said. “They’re criminals. Don’t think the fact that I recognize that means I don’t have any compassion for them. I do . . . most of them. Not for the drug addicts and thieves and rapists and murderers, though.”

He slashed the air with his hand. “We’re getting off the subject here. What I’m talking about is how the Zaragosa cartel will also bring in high-profile clients who are willing to pay a lot of money to ensure that they get into this country without anybody knowing. Pancho’s heard rumors that a job like that is in the works.”

“Who’s the client?”

“He hasn’t been able to find out yet. Whoever it is, though, must be somebody with plenty of financial backing who doesn’t mean well. Otherwise, he wouldn’t hire the Zaragosas to get him across the border.”

Jake cocked his head to the side and said, “Your friend was able to tell you all this while you were rolling around on the floor, pretending to be trying to kill each other?”

“He’s pretty good at boiling things down to their essentials.”

“Wait a minute. If the whole thing was a ruse so he could pass on that intel to you, why’d you beat him up so bad? He had blood all over his face.”

“Had to make it look good,” Barry said. “Pancho understood that. Shoot, if I hadn’t roughed him up, that would have looked suspicious. As deep cover as he is, he couldn’t afford that.”

He laughed and went on, “Of course, now his amigos are going to give him trouble about getting his butt kicked by an old gringo. Speaking of which . . . Don’t think I didn’t hear you call me an old geezer back there. You should be showing more respect to your elders, boy.”

“Maybe I would have if I’d known what was going on. As far as I could tell, you’d gone loco.” Jake shrugged. “But I guess I understand now. What’s the next step?”

“Pancho’s going to keep trying to turn up more intel on his side. We’ll work the case from this side.”

“We?” Jake repeated. “I’m on my own time here, not the bureau’s.”

“Well, you’ve got more personal time coming, don’t you?”

“And cases of my own to work!”

Barry waved that away. “Nothing as big as this is going to turn out to be.”

“How can you possibly know that?”

“That’s what my gut tells me, and I’ve learned to trust my gut. I wouldn’t still be alive without it.”

For a moment, Jake didn’t say anything, then, “You’re going to get me kicked out of the bureau, that’s what you’re going to do. You know that, don’t you?”

Barry grinned in the neon glare. “What’s more important, being a bureaucrat . . . or saving the world?”

“Your gut says this case is that big?”

Barry sniffed. “Says it could be.”

Jake drew in a deep breath, blew it out. “I guess you’ve got yourself a partner . . . for now. I’ll work it out. On one condition. I don’t go into any more situations blind. You tell me what’s going on ahead of time . . . you old geezer.”

“I’ve killed men for less than that.”

The bad part was, Jake wasn’t sure if his uncle was joking or not.

Western Nevada

The train was a short one, only six tank cars behind a huge GE AC6000CW locomotive with six thousand horses—very overpowered for the current job. It was available, though, and the bosses wanted to get that goop to the containment site as soon as possible, so Rudy Hendrickson wasn’t going to complain.

He wasn’t going to ask too many questions about what was in the tank cars back there behind the short-hood puller, either. He knew it was hazardous. The train’s destination was a hazardous waste containment facility in middle-of-nowhere Nevada, and places didn’t get any more middle of nowhere than that. He and his fireman, Daryl Marshall, would get there and stay out of the way while guys in protective suits hooked up thick hoses and drained the tankers into underground containment trenches. Then they’d decontaminate the tankers, inside and out, and once that was done, Rudy and Daryl would be on their way back to Reno. They had made this run before, so it was nothing new to them.

The train was making good speed south toward the containment facility. Rudy sat on the right-hand side of the cab and checked all the display screens and gauges and dials on the control stand spread out in front of him in an abbreviated U-shape. He performed those checks diligently, because he was a professional engineer and that was his job.

At the same time, he’d been at this long enough that he could tell by the sound and feel of the train that it was moving along just as it was supposed to. The big engine was in good shape and didn’t miss a beat.

From the fireman’s seat on the left side of the cab, Daryl pointed through the windshield and said, “Look up yonder. Is that a roadrunner goin’ across the tracks?”

“No, and we’re not gonna find any tunnel mouths painted on the sides of cliffs, either,” Rudy replied. “You’re such a kid. Grow up, Daryl.”

“Hey, there’s nothin’ wrong with likin’ them cartoons. I read some article online that said they was masterpieces of animated cinema.”

“Yeah, they are pretty funny, I suppose,” Rudy admitted. “But they’re still kid stuff.”

The tracks ran straight and mostly level through this area. A few slight rises, but nothing you could even remotely call a hill. To the left, about five miles east of the rail line, a range of small mountains jutted up abruptly without any foothills. To the west were sandy flats dotted with scrub brush stretching as far as the eye could see.

Rudy knew every foot of the route. Three miles ahead, the tracks descended into a broad, shallow valley known as Rattlesnake Wash. In that valley was the Rattlesnake Wash Industrial Containment Facility, owned by Sherman Global Enterprises. Rudy knew that because he’d seen the name on the sign attached to the outer fence. He didn’t know anything else about the place and didn’t care. One destination was pretty much like any other, as far as he was concerned.

Daryl leaned forward in the fireman’s chair and squinted against the sun glare coming through the windshield.

“What’s that?” he asked, pointing down the tracks.

“Don’t go tellin’ me you’ve spotted a coyote now.”

“No, it’s something flying above the tracks.”

“A bird?” Rudy leaned forward to peer through the glass, too. “Maybe a big buzzard?”

“Naw, not flyin’ like that. I know! It’s a drone.”

Rudy had spotted the thing by now, swooping and flitting back and forth through the air not far above the tracks a couple hundred yards in front of the train.

“That doesn’t make any sense! Those things are radio controlled and have a fairly short range, and there’s nobody around here to be guiding it.”

Or maybe there was, he realized as he spotted a reflection off something to the right of the tracks. He looked closer and saw the front end of a van parked behind a sandy swell. Somebody in the van could be controlling the drone.

Rudy started to curse under his breath as he reached quickly for the brake.

“It’s landing on the tracks!” Daryl said excitedly. “Dang, somebody’s about to lose their drone! Little thing’s no match for a big ol’ locomo—”

The drone disintegrated in a ball of flame. The explosion filled the air with smoke and dust, making it impossible to see how much damage it had done to the rails. The engine lurched as the brakes caught hold and the sand nozzles sprayed sand in front of the drivers to increase traction.

But it wasn’t enough, not nearly enough, and Rudy knew it. At the speed they’d been making, he would have needed close to a mile to come to a complete stop.

He flung himself out of his seat and yanked up the latch on the cab door. “Come on!” he shouted to Daryl. The two of them were the only crew. They still had a slim chance of getting off the train before it derailed. That window was only a couple of seconds, though.

The two men rushed onto the platform at the front of the locomotive. Rudy was closer to the steps. He went down them and dived, throwing himself as far away from the rails as he could. He hit the ground hard and rolled. Out here, the rumble of the train only a few yards away was deafening. He didn’t know if Daryl had made it or not, but as he came to a stop on his belly, he raised his head and looked around for his friend and coworker.

Daryl lay about twenty yards ahead of him. The fireman pushed himself to hands and knees but stayed there like that, shaking his head groggily. Rudy struggled against the sand as he clambered to his feet.

“Daryl!” he screamed, trying to be heard. “Daryl, come—”

The front end of the locomotive disappeared into the cloud of dust and smoke. Rudy had just been thinking the racket was loud before. Now, as the massive engine derailed, the roar seemed loud enough to shake a man’s teeth right out of his head, pulp his bones, and turn his brain to jelly. As the tank cars began to tip, Rudy turned and ran.

From the corner of his eye, he saw Daryl finally leap to his feet, but it was too late. Daryl ran a couple of steps, tripped, fell, and rolled over to stare up in horror at the tank car toppling right toward him. His mouth was wide open, but nobody ever heard his scream. He probably couldn’t even hear it himself.

Then the overturning car obliterated him.

Rudy had nothing in front of him except open ground, so he squeezed his eyes shut, put his head down, pumped his arms at his sides, and ran like the devil himself was after him.

Which was a pretty apt comparison, because a couple of the tank cars ruptured, and whatever the noxious stuff inside them was flooded out and encountered sparks flying from the wheels as they skidded along the tracks, causing another explosion. The shock wave from the blast slapped Rudy off his feet like a giant hand.

He yelled instinctively as he flew through the air before his face plowing into the sandy ground shut him up. Dirt went down his throat and choked him. He came up coughing and shuddering.

It felt like the hair was singed off the back of his neck and the skin was blistered, but he was alive, and it didn’t seem like anything was broken. He forced himself to his feet and stumbled onward.

If the stuff in the tankers was bad enough that it had to be sealed away in underground trenches, he sure didn’t want to be breathing any of the smoke from it as it burned.

He looked back, though. All the cars were off the rails now, lying on their sides. Huge cl