Manx- Bing's Blown Up

Then she visualized the warning on the side of the tank of sevoflurane: FLAMMABLE. This was followed by a simple thought, not an image but a decision. Take him with me. Kill this little t**d.

  The lighter—she thought—was in her right-hand pocket. She went to dig it out, but it was like reaching into Maggie’s bottomless Scrabble bag; it went on forever and forever and forever.

  The Gasmask Man stood at her feet, pointing the valve down at her, holding the tank in both arms. She could hear the tank whispering to her, a long, deadly command to be silent: Shhh.

  Her fingers touched a slab of metal, closed around it. She yanked her hand out of her pocket and held the lighter up between her and the Gasmask Man, as if it were a cross to ward off a vampire.

  “Don’t make me,” she gasped, and tasted another mouthful of poison gingerbread smoke.

  “Don’t make you what?” he said.

  She flipped back the top of the lighter. The Gasmask Man heard it click, saw it for the first time, drew back a step.

  “Hey,” he said, a note of warning in his voice. He took another step back, cradling the tank in his arms like a child. “Don’t! That isn’t safe! Are you crazy?”

  Vic thumbed the steel gear. It made a harsh, scraping noise and spit a burst of white sparks, and for one miraculous moment it lit a ribbon of blue fire in the air. The flame unwound like a snake, the air burning, racing straight back at the tank. That faint white vapor, spraying from the valve, became a savage tongue of fire.

  The sevoflurane tank was, briefly, a flamethrower with a short range, spraying flame from side to side as the Gasmask Man reeled away from Vic. He stumbled backward three more steps—inadvertently saving her life in the process. In the flaring light, Vic could read what it said on the side of the lighter:

  KABLOOEY.

  It was as if the Gasmask Man were pointing a rocket launcher at his chest and triggered it at point-blank range. It exploded through the bottom, a cannonade of white burning gas and shrapnel that lifted him off his feet and punched him back into the door. Three hundred liters of pressurized sevoflurane exploded all at once, turning the tank into a jumbo stick of TNT. Vic had no frame of reference for the sound it made, a great slam that felt like sewing needles stabbed into her eardrums.

  The Gasmask Man struck the iron door almost hard enough to tear it off its track. Vic saw him crash into it through a blast of what seemed like pure light, the air glowing with a gassy brilliance that made half the room disappear for an instant in a blinding white flash. She instinctively lifted her hands to protect her face and saw the fine gold hairs on her bare arms crinkling and shriveling from the heat.

  In the aftermath of the explosion, the world was changed. The room beat like a heart. Objects throbbed in time to the slamming of her pulse. The air was filled with a whirling golden smoke.

- Search Engine: The House of Sleep