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Joseph had to think for a moment. "The fat boy? Elephant?"
"Oh, God, they didn't!" said Del Ray.
"Yes. Shot him in the head and burned his building." Sellars was speaking briskly now, as though a timer inside him was ticking loudly. "And they will kill you, too, as blithely as swatting a fly, if it suits them . . . and I suspect that it will."
In his mind's eye, Joseph could see the cluttered storage depot burning. His initial horrified fascination began to curdle into something else as he remembered Elephant's cheerfulness, his pride in his top-of-the-line equipment.
Not right. That is not right. He just helped us because Del Ray ask him.
"What will we do, then?" asked Jeremiah. "Wait tor them to break through and murder us?"
"He said about police." Joseph felt anger building, a different kind of anger. "Why don't we just call someone—the army? Tell them some men are trying to kill us right here in their base?"
"Because you are yourselves wanted by the police," Sellars said, his voice flattened by the electronic distortion. "The Brotherhood has seen to that. Do you not remember what happened when Mr. Dako tried to use one of his cards?"
"How do you know about all this?" Jeremiah demanded. "I didn't tell you any of that when we talked before."
"Never mind." Their invisible companion seemed frustrated. "I told you, I have little time and much to do elsewhere. If you call the authorities it will take hours for any suitable force to respond—you are far up in the mountains. Then, even if they drive away or capture Klekker and his thugs, what will happen to you? More importantly, what will happen to Renie and !Xabbu? After you three are arrested, they will either be left alone and untended here, with the place empty and perhaps the power shut off, or, if you tell the authorities, they will be disco
The idea of the electricity failing and Renie waking in the darkness of the tank, struggling to get out, thrashing in that strange jelly, was even more horrible than imagining her lying in some hospital, as unresponsive as her brother. Joseph slapped his hand down on the table. "It will not happen. I don't leave my girl here."
"Then we have to think of another solution," Sellers said. "And quickly—I have my hands full just now trying to put out fires, and for every one I control, two more seem to flare up." A moment of silence was filled with the looping hum of the mystery man's voice-distortion gear. "Hang on. That may be it."
"What? That may be what?" Jeremiah asked.
"Let me look at the plans," Sellars told him. "If I'm right, we'll have to work fast—you'll all have lots to do. And it's risky."
"Just a small pile at first," Sellars told them. "Concentrate on the things you know will burn—paper, cloth."
Joseph looked down at the huge heap of trash they had spent the last hour and a half collecting under Sellars' guidance. The paper and kitchen rags he could understand, the dusty military-issue sheets from the supply depot they had dragged down in the first days of their occupation, but what on earth were they going to do with the wheels off all the office chairs? Plastic floor mats? Rugs?
"Let me test it one more time before we commit ourselves," Sellars said. "Unlike your enemies, you don't have access to outside air." As if a ghost had flicked a switch, a rattling noise sprang up behind the wall vent. It mounted higher, until it was a high-pitched whine, then eased down again. "Good. Someone please start the fire."
Del Ray, who had dragged himself from his convalescent bed to help, looked first at Jeremiah, then at Joseph. "Start it? How?"
Something like weariness was in Sellars' voice. "Isn't there anything you can use? The base is old—surely someone left behind a lighter, something?"
Joseph and the others looked around, as though such an object might magically appear.
"There's a little petrol in the emergency starter for the generator," Jeremiah said. "Only a spark would do it. We can make a spark, can't we?"
"I suppose you can cut into the wires in the monitor console," Sellars said. "Those are the only ones you can get to easily. . . ."
"Hold on!" Joseph stood up straight. "I know. Long Joseph will fix this problem." He turned and hurried toward the room where he slept.
He had put Renie's clothes in a box, knowing she would want them when she came out of the tank. He felt in the pockets, and to his great joy discovered her cigarettes, but could find no trace of a lighter no matter how he looked. His moment of pride turned sour.
"Shit," he said, letting the clothes fall back into the box. He stared at the cigarettes, wondering dully how Renie was coping without them. Could you smoke in the computer-place she was?
She must be crazy if she can't, he thought. 'Course, I am in the real world and I can't get any wine, so who has got it worse?
"Good thinking!" someone said from the doorway.
Joseph looked up at Del Ray. "No lighter, no matches." The younger man seemed puzzled for a moment, then smiled. "Don't need any of that. Those are self-lighting."
Joseph stared at the packet of cigarettes, relief mixed with a certain angry regret at having to be told something important by someone his daughter's age. He took a breath, then swallowed what he had been about to say. He tossed Del Ray the cigarettes and followed him back to the makeshift bonfire.
The tab pulled, the end of the cigarette smoldered alight. Del Ray dropped it on the knee-high pile of paper and rags. Little tongues of yellow flame scalloped the top of the pile; within half a minute it was burning well. As Joseph and the others heaped more of the most flammable objects on top of it, smoke began to drift upward in a visible cloud. The whine of the air intake deepened and the smoke was drawn toward the wall vent.
"Slowly." Sellars' disembodied voice was hard to hear above the noises the fire was making. "It has to be burning very hot before you can put any of the plastic or rubber on it."
Joseph wandered over to the monitors. The men in the hole beside the elevator well upstairs were working just as hard as ever, nearly waist-deep now. The white one watching their progress had a cigar in the corner of his mouth,
"You will get your smoke, ugly man," Joseph said, then went back to help the others.
Within twenty minutes the flames were as high as Long Joseph himself, the blaze several meters across, and only the air-intake, which now roared like a small plane taking off, kept them from being choked by the clouds of gray smoke.
"Push in the pans of oil," Sellars said. "And start throwing on the rubber mats."
Jeremiah and Joseph used a pair of broom handles to slide the kitchen baking pans full of machine oil into the heart of the blaze. Del Ray threw much of the material they had been saving onto the top of the pile. The smoke, and even the flames themselves, began to change color: the cloud billowing out now and being drawn into the vent was stormy black, and even through the wet rag wrapped around his nose and mouth the smell was making Joseph woozy. His eyes were burning too: the safety goggles they'd found in a cabinet were ancient and fit badly. He stepped away to watch Jeremiah and Del Ray throw the last boxes of plastic and rubber onto the top of the burning pile. The flames beat out so fiercely the three of them were forced back across the wide area they'd cleared on the cement floor, coughing all the way.
Weren't for that getting sucked out, Joseph thought as the inky clouds disappeared into the vent, so thick they almost folded rather than flowed, we all be dead. He suddenly realized what Sellars had meant when he said "risky." If the power failed, if something in the burning, black cloud choked the intake system, that black mass would come flowing back on them. Then their choice would be to suffocate or open the armored elevator doors and stumble out into the gunsights of the killers.