feet from the ground. All that work fighting to get to the top—and all for nothing. Now, we were surely dead. We didn’t have the time or energy to make another climb, and minor explosions continued to ignite above us.
Feeling defeated, I let go, hit the ground in a roll, and moved away quickly. Nash dropped down, landed on one foot, and rolled a few times to soften the blow. Even so, his bad foot must have impacted somewhere, because I heard him groan in pain.
The air was a bit more clear down here, since the smoke and vapors wafted upward away from us . . . and since there was a giant hole in the wall where one of the explosions had blown the doors right off their hinges, safety glass and all. I could feel a draft as fresh oxygen swept in through that door, fueling the fires above.
Nash and I saw the door at the same time. I rushed to help him up, and he leaned on me for support as we hobbled out.
We limped around corner after corner, looking for an exit.
Behind us, we heard another loud ka-BOOM and the shrieking of metal on metal as the refinery infrastructure began to buckle in on itself. We didn’t stop to look back.
Acrid smoke billowed into the hallway and a cloud enveloped us.
Nash and I held our breath as we turned the corner again and came upon a door blocked by a chair. A very familiar-looking door blocked by a chair.
I could barely see Nash through the smoke, but I knew we needed to get into the supply closet and get some respirators, pronto—never mind that Dorian was probably still in there and armed.
I moved the chair away from the door and tried to open it as Nash covered me. The door wouldn’t budge. The explosions and subsequent shaking of the building had warped the door frame and the thing was stuck.
In desperation, Nash handed the gun to me as he tugged on the door.
In one violent motion, the door wrenched free, and as expected, I found myself staring down the wrong end of the barrel of Dorian’s gun.
I aimed my own gun straight back at him. I didn’t even know how to use a gun before yesterday, and I certainly hadn’t become a crack shot overnight. What was I supposed to do? Duck? Shoot first? Run?
Nash and I edged into the supply room as Dorian inched backwards. We circled each other, Dorian making for the door, Nash and I making for the safety equipment.
I watched Dorian’s trigger finger tense as the smoky, toxic air around us seemed to grow even thicker. Walls shook and the floor rolled beneath me as another explosion thundered through the building. The PetroPlex flagship oil refinery was fast on its way to becoming nothing but a memory.
The doorframe buckled before my eyes—our only means of escape. Sharp orange tongues of flame lapped at me from above, sending down a rain of fiery particles as acoustic ceiling tiles disintegrated overhead.
That’s when I knew that gun or no gun, I was going to die.
I tossed my useless weapon on the floor. Dorian did the same.
Nash grabbed a couple of respirators from the floor, put one on himself, and tossed the other one to me. I put it on, not for one moment believing it could save me.
“Help me,” Nash said, motioning toward a freestanding metal shelf.
Dorian and I both understood. We rushed to the shelf and emptied it of its contents so that we could knock it over and use it as a battering ram.
The roar of the burning refinery around us was so loud we barely heard the crash of the shelf when it hit the floor.
All three of us hoisted it and aimed at a section of wall that wasn’t yet on fire.
“On the count of three, put all your weight into it, okay?” Nash yelled.
Dorian and I nodded.
Nash counted, and we rushed the wall.
The impact jarred me so hard I thought my joints might never be the same, but the shelf punctured a hole in the wall, and air rushed into the room.
Dorian was through the hole and gone before I could even regain my balance.
Nash and I moved more slowly, limping along at a wounded turtle’s pace. Nash never complained about his foot, but I could tell it pained him more after the drop to the ground from the slick pipe.
I could hear rafters falling and the building creaking all