Free Fire by Alan Rodgers

as big and as dangerous as the nuclear missiles that the President kept threatening to fire off — even if he was right, was it really worth hurting a friend? It wasn’t as though Luke wasn’t concerned. Maybe he was working too hard to be easy about the situation, and maybe that easiness was something that scared the hell out of Ron, but it wasn’t like Luke was ignoring the problem. If there was anything else Luke could have done, Ron couldn’t imagine it.
    Still. It was scary stuff, grave stuff that you had to take seriously, not try to laugh off. Yeah, Ron thought. That’s the way I feel about it. But what business do I have forcing that on my friends?
    And besides — maybe Luke’s germs wouldn’t work on anything but trilobites.
    Maybe.
    He frowned and shook his head and pushed the cart away from Phil Johnson’s office, toward the freight elevator. There was too damned much to do for him to waste any more time ruminating than he already had.
    Or so he told himself. It didn’t stop him from brooding all the way down the elevator, out the service door, across the parking lot to the incinerator.
    Which was roaring — the fire inside it was so hot and fierce that Ron could hear it from half-way across the parking lot. So loud that Ralph Hernandez didn’t even hear him coming, even though the cart usually made a rattle loud enough to wake the dead. The supervisor didn’t even notice when Ron parked the cart and started stacking bags of trash beside his feet.
    “Be careful, Ralph. I’m stacking bags here down by your feet. If you try to take a step in that direction you’re going to break —”
    “What the fuck —” Ralph Hernandez, finally, realized that he had company, and the fact frightened him half out of his skin. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
    “Whatever the fuck I’m supposed to be doing, I guess. Taking out the trash.”
    It was about then that Ron noticed the wild, guilty-scared look in Ralph’s eyes. And noticed that the bags on the other side of Ralph weren’t red, but translucent brown plastic — and filled, by the look of them, with files. The man wasn’t out at the incinerator burning infected waste. And whatever it was that he was doing reeked worse than the waste shack behind them.
    “You haven’t got any goddamned business here. Get yourself the fuck away from me, and get yourself back to work. And stay the hell out of my way, understand me? I don’t want to see you again tonight.” As he spoke his voice went from crazy-scared to crazy-violent, threatening. Which struck Ron as one of the strangest moments in a week that was strange altogether; he’d known Ralph for years, and in all that time he’d never have described him as a threat.
    Ron stooped down, took the last bag of trash out of his cart, set it by Ralph’s feet. “Sure. I understand. Don’t have to tell me twice.” He turned and started rolling the cart back in the direction of the institute’s main building.
    “And if you saw something — if you know something you shouldn’t — you keep it to yourself, you hear?”
    “Sure, Ralph.”
    He probably ought to have wondered exactly what Ralph was up to. Certainly he ought to: the man’s behavior was genuinely suspicious. It would have been good for Ron’s health if he had wondered. But the man’s hostility threw him off balance; it didn’t even occur to Ron that he was in any danger. Not until it was already too late for him to do anything at all about it.
    There were two other strange things that happened before that night came to an end for Ron. The first happened as he was filling his cart with the last of the mound of trash from Phil Johnson’s office. (He hadn’t quite decided what he was going to do with it if Ralph was still out at the incinerator; park the cart outside the loading dock, come back and take care of it later, maybe. Or maybe he’d go ahead and take it out anyway; he wasn’t all that thrilled about letting Ralph intimidate