Chapter 8

The trip to the construction site was nerve wracking. None of them knew exactly where they were going. Of course, they had the address and a map that Joseph printed from the computer, but none of them had any experience reading a map. Fortunately, there were no encounters or other distractions along the way, so they eventually got to the construction site.

There were no guards. After all, what woman would want to get dirty mucking around a construction site if she was not getting paid a lot of money for her efforts. There was a high fence topped with barb wire, but that was to keep in the slave workers who might otherwise wander away. They found the explosives shack, and it wasn't even locked. What person, woman or slave, was going to mess with explosives. They got in easily, but then the job got hard.

Joseph knew what he wanted, but he didn't know where to find it, so he had to putter around all over the place to find the stuff. The easiest thing to find was the dynamite, and the fuse was not much more difficult, but the caps were another story. He must have looked in very nearly every box on very nearly every shelf without finding what he needed.

All of a sudden, there was the blast of a siren, and there was the sound of slaves talking as they shuffled into the site from their barracks close by. That's when the trio discovered that they were in serious trouble—they had stayed much too long. They had little concept of time in the abstract, so for someone to say that so-and-so was to happen at 6:30 AM had little concrete meaning. Unless they had a digital clock if front of them, they paid no attention to time passing. Thus, they were caught at the construction site and had no way to escape. All they could do was to hide in the explosives shack and hope that nobody would find them.

They had their guns, but they didn't want to shoot slaves. They had no qualms about shooting the women supervisors, but they had rather not draw attention to the fact that they were after explosives. Anyway, they hunkered down in the shack and waited for dark. At least, they did have some food and plenty of water, so they did not suffer from the lack of those things.

They were doing fine until sometime in the mid-afternoon. The door to the shack was pulled open and a slave walked in. Otto pulled his pistol and pointed it at the slave, but the pistol was ignored. The slave had never seen one, so that he did not know that he was in any danger.

Instead, he said, "What the hell are you doing in my storage shack? Hey, you don't work here! What's going on, dammit?"

George reacted immediately by saying, "We are escaped slaves. We have been killing cops and a few female civilians, but we need help. We came here to steal some dynamite and stuff to blow up city hall. Can you help us?"

"Shit, you're not kidding me, are you? Why do you want to blow up city hall?"

"We are trying to break the hold that the women have over us by killing off the leaders and their obvious supporters, like the cops. So far, we have killed 11 cops and five other women slave holders. We think that blowing up city hall will help to make a big change in society."

"OK, I can support that. But why do you want dynamite? There are much more powerful explosives than dynamite, and I have some of them here that you can have for that job. For example, this putty-like stuff called USA-10 is about eight times more powerful than dynamite, and a hell of a lot easier to work with. Dynamite is OK for small bombs for killing people in crowds, but the USA-10 is a lot better for demolition work."

"That sounds great! Will you show us how to use it?"

"Yeah, but I can't right now. I have some charges to set. I'll be back in an hour or so and show you enough to get you by." The slave took something from a shelf and left. About 40 minutes later, there was a muffled explosion, and the slave showed up about 20 minutes later.

"OK, I'll make you a bomb that will do so much damage to city hall that it will have to be torn down and replaced. You can't possibly carry enough explosives by hand to do a complete demolition. You'd need a truck to do that." The man worked for about 15 minutes with stuff he pulled from various places on the shelves. "OK, now all you have to do is set this timer and the explosive will go off when the clock counts down to zero. Here's how you set the timer." Joseph was the explosives "expert," so he paid close attention to what their new friend was showing them. "All you have to do is to put this bomb hard against a back corner of the building and trip the timer. The rest is automatic."

Otto asked, "You said that dynamite was good for killing people in a crowd. How do we do that?"

"If you put a cap and fuse into a dynamite stick and tape six sticks tight around it, you have the basics of a people killer. Just put anything hard and sharp up against the dynamite and you will have killer chunks of stuff flying all over the place. Actually, you would be better off if you used an electrical cap and another one of these timers to set it off. I can give you enough dynamite and stuff for four bombs that you can make yourselves. I doubt that you can carry more stuff than that back to town."

George said, "We have this wagon and those police things to take us and pull that wagon. We had planned to load the wagon with dynamite to take back to our hiding place in town."

"Good, then I can give you enough stuff for seven dynamite bombs. Any more than that, and I would be called out for losing stuff. There's the dynamite, the electrical caps, and the timers. Good luck, and don't come back here for at least four months because I won't get more explosives and stuff in until then."

"Thank you. If we are successful, we'll be back in about five months for more supplies. You have been a great help. What's your name?"

"I'm called Explosives Slave. I don't have any other name."

"Thank you and goodbye. You have been a great help."

Explosives Slave walked out the door, and they never saw him for the rest of the day. They stayed quiet in the explosives shack, except for repacking their wagon to make it more stable for the trip. They especially wanted to take care of the USA-10 bomb on the trip back.

The siren went off at dark, and the slaves were marched back to the barracks. The trio in the explosives shack waited for an estimated two hours before they broke out of the construction site and headed home. On the way, they realized that they all needed watches. They would go liberate some tomorrow night.

The trip back was a lot quicker because they now had seen the route and understood better how to read the map. It took them less than two hours to get home.

They carefully unpacked the bomb materials and stowed them until needed. Afterward, George said, "We need to make at least one practice run with a people bomb before we go for the big one. There may be problems that we don't know about that could screw us up when we go for city hall."

Otto suggested, "How about putting a people bomb in one of those night clubs that are so common in the entertainment district? We could sneak in after the place closes and hide the bomb someplace where it wouldn't be seen, yet would cause a lot of damage and kill some people when it went off."

Joseph said, "Let's get a bunch of nails and pack them around the bomb. That way we can injure a lot more people than we can with just the explosion, itself." They agreed that was a good idea. They could go after the watches and the nails tomorrow night.

The next night, they set out for the nearest Walmart store. They could get their watches there, and they might also find the nails they wanted. The way in was obvious for them. There was a regular door next to the loading dock, and it was easy to pop the lock. They went inside, and could easily see what they needed to by the light of the emergency lights that were left on for firefighters, etc.

What they didn't know was that the store was guarded by dogs trained to kill anybody not their immediate handlers. The dogs had been trained by killing surplus slaves. They were busy walking up and down the aisles looking at all of the marvels, many of which they didn't even know existed. They passed the computer area, and Joseph had a brainstorm. "Hey, guys, I just realized that we could get a computer here that would let me connect to the internet without having to go to the library. In fact, we could each get a computer, and we could get books off the web without having to go to the library at all."