“He’s dead, isn’t he?” Reagan called out as Zig approached. She was asking about Seabass.
Zig didn’t reply. As he got closer, a pungent smell of cleaning products hit him in the face.
“I need to know if he’s dead!” she demanded, still not facing him.
Zig had presided over enough funerals to know silence was an easier answer.
“We were supposed to be in Brussels next week. For some reason, he thought Brussels would be nice,” Reagan explained, the fan still churning. Vmm vmm vmm. “I told him we’d go after this.”
Zig could only see her from behind, her body shaking, quivering. He couldn’t tell if it was from the cold or her wound. Puffs of clouds left her lips. The way her body was curled, down on her knees, it looked like she was praying or crying. She wasn’t doing either.
“Reagan, put your hands in the air,” Zig said, his gun out, pointed straight at her.
She didn’t reply. Hunched over, she was still hugging the thickest of the blue pipes that squiggled toward the industrial fan—the freezer’s cooling system.
“Reagan, I need to see your hands.”
She was panting now, her body moving side to side, like she was rocking an imaginary baby, matching the rhythm of the fan. Vmm vmm vmm. It was so loud, the cleaning smell so bad, Zig could barely think.
“It’s over, Reagan. I know you know that.”
Vmm vmm vmm.
“The fact you’re still breathing—that means it didn’t nick your carotid,” Zig added, only a few feet away. “They’ll stitch up your neck and—”
Zig froze, finally placing the smell.
Reagan’s back was still to him, her body still moving—but not from the cold or her wound. Her hands moved side to side, faster and faster, like she was panning for gold. She was gripping her thin metal camping tool, its rings around each of her middle fingers. As she sawed back and forth—zzzt zzzt zzzt—its sharp teeth sliced into the length of the blue pipe.
Zig glanced upward, following the maze of pipes toward the humming fan, where a yellow-and-black triangle with a skull and crossbones confirmed the smell:
Danger—Ammonia
Mothertrucker.
Back at Dover, the morgue had the same industrial cooling system. In storage facilities all across the country, ammonia was favored as a cheap and environmentally friendly refrigerant with excellent heat-transferring properties. But as every business was warned, when a big enough leak combined with oxygen in the air, it’d create a chemical reaction—an explosive ammonia blast—capable of leveling an entire building.
It reminded Zig of a few years back, when an ammonia leak at a U.S. base in Kuwait ignited and took out the equivalent of a city block. Temperatures got so hot it melted soldiers’ skin from their bones, killing anyone who was close enough t—
“Reagan, if that ignites—”
Reagan looked over her shoulder, her gaze locked on Zig, with more than just larceny in her eyes. She glanced at the opposite end of the aisle, where Seabass’s crooked legs hadn’t moved in minutes. Zig . . . Roddy . . . they had no idea what they took from her.
She started to speak. A leak of air crawled from her throat. “I will be your death,” she told him, tugging the saw faster, the leak growing larger.
“Reagan, don’t—”
She continued sawing the pipe. Zzzt zzzt zzzt, in perfect sync with the fan. The cylinder was already slit—ammonia gas filling the freezer. Zig thought about shooting her, but it was no different from the metal saw on the metal pipe—all she needed was a spark.
“Roddy! We need to get out of here!” Zig shouted, already running.