Free Trust Me by Jeff Abbott Page B

seven-year-old, Kevin, yelled behind her, and she heard the familiar sound of a boy-fist hitting a boy-shoulder.
    ‘Kevin’s hitting Brandon,’ her niece Megan announced in a tired voice. ‘Over those stupid trading cards.’ Megan’s tone made it clear what she thought of trading cards.
    ‘Kevin,’ she said, glancing back at him. ‘We don’t hit.’
    ‘You don’t but I do,’ Kevin said. ‘He’s gonna tear my card, Mom!’
    ‘Brandon, give him his card back. Kevin, do not hit your brother. If I have to get on y’all again, no dessert.’ She drove past the Ripley rail yard; her own house was only two minutes away.
    In the rearview mirror she saw Kevin had his face pressed to the window glass, watching the long freight train lumber into Ripley. Kevin and trains. He’d been fascinated with them from when he was a toddler. God, that was only a few years ago. They were getting so big so fast.
    Suddenly a roar pounded her ears, the minivan bucked on the road, and at first Ashley thought she’d blown a tire. The sound of the derailment was deafening, steel hammering onto steel, metal tearing in a horrific screech she felt in her bones.
    ‘Jesus!’ she screamed. Then Kevin was hollering and she braked to see that the windows were broken, one of the back ones blown in, glass dusting the kids. The noise had been so loud she hadn’t heard the shattering. All three of the children screamed. She stood on the brakes, wrenched around in the seat.
    ‘The train derailed!’ Kevin screamed. ‘Mom, I saw it, I saw it!’ His forehead trickled blood from a cut, Megan kept shrieking, Brandon covered his face with his hands, still clutching his brother’s Japanese game card. Ashley only had eyes for the children and she did not see the men in the rail yard - some of them men she had gone to high school with, to church with - staggering, dropping as they hurried toward the accordion of derailed tanks, as though slapped down by an unseen fist.
     
    ‘Mom! It hurts!’ Kevin started to cough, started to rub at his eyes.
    ‘What?’
    ‘Throat … my throat,’ Kevin moaned and then Ashley felt it too, a terrible burning in the back of her throat, her eyes. Her eyes, her throat, burned like matches had been jabbed into the skin. A heavy smell, like an ocean of bleach, swamped her. The children clawed at their eyes, their mouths.
    Get out of here, Ashley thought. Something awful had been freed from the broken jumble of rail cars. A haze blanketed the ground, coiling, the green-yellow of a snake’s scales.
    Oh my God. Not my kids, no, she thought. She managed to shift gears, her eyes and nose and throat aflame. Nausea gutted her stomach. Her upper airway constricted like a fist closing. She jammed the accelerator to the floor. Blinking and gasping through the agony Ashley saw the turn to her house, half a block away. Best sight in the world. Get home, call 9-1-1, wash the kids in the tub, everything would be okay, it would have to be okay.
    She was dimly aware of people running on the streets, running from the rail yard. Collapsing as she roared past them.
    Just get away, get away, get the kids inside, this can’t happen to us.
    Ashley Barton took the turn too soon and far too fast, fueled by her blind panic. She missed the street and plowed through the front of a small liquor store. She went through the windshield and she thought not happening not happening and then the pain was gone, the screams were silent.
    The explosion wasn’t as loud as he thought it would be; but then the bomb had to be calculated to precision. Big enough to rupture the chlorine tanks, but not so powerful for extreme heat to oxidize the chlorine, rendering most of the gas non-toxic or to burn up much of it. The shape of Snow’s charge was designed to puncture the tanks. Derailment was a given.
    He could imagine the chaos in his mind’s eye: everything within a thousand feet of the derailment site would be enveloped in a choking cloud of chlorine.