Trying not to get ahead of myself, I sat on the edge of Cyrus’s recliner and stared at the batteries. I felt like I’d gone to sleep and awakened in an episode of MacGyver. Only I didn’t have MacGyver’s knowledge of all things mechanical. I had, however, spent a summer working in this plant. On the loading dock, it’s true, but I’d talked to a lot of people in other jobs. Something tickled the back of my brain. What? Batteries could be dangerous, of course. Everyone who worked at Triton Battery knew that. But it wasn’t the acid that was dangerous, as most people thought. Acid could burn you, but it couldn’t explode. It wasn’t even flammable. No, the explosive danger came from… hydrogen.

Every rechargeable battery in the world produces hydrogen gas. Usually it’s produced in small amounts that remain sealed in the battery case. But because of its light molecular weight, hydrogen is more prone to leak than any other gas. Hydrogen is what kills people who get careless when jumping off the dead battery in their car. If they connect the negative jumper cable to the dead battery rather than elsewhere on their car, they create a spark above the battery. And if hydrogen is present- boom-it’s lead plates through the skull and a corrosive acid bath.

There were warning signs all over the Triton plant when I worked here.BEWARE! HYDROGEN GAS IS INVISIBLE. I remember a safety guy walking slowly through the loading dock with a straw broom, trying to detect a hydrogen fire. In open air, hydrogen burns almost invisibly, giving off only a faint blue light. The old black guys on the dock called that straw broom the Witches’ Broom.

As I stared at the batteries, the excitement in my chest grew swiftly, but with it came fear. I’d wanted a weapon, and I’d found one. But that weapon was not controllable. It was the kind of weapon that could only be used by someone with nothing to lose. Someone who was going to die anyway. As I searched for some other way out of the lab, a realization hit me with nauseating certainty: You have no alternative. You can wait to die here, or you can kill yourself trying to get out.

That was twelve hours ago.

For the past eleven hours, I’ve lain on my sleeping bag in a worsening state of heroin withdrawal. Cyrus and Blue left the works for me this time-substituting a book of matches for the blowtorch-a merciful gesture in their minds, a salve for the burgeoning junkie. But I can’t use that white powder to ease the aching hunger in my jaw muscles and back. The blood pounding like a second heart in my abdomen tells me that. If my veins continue to become inflamed, I could stroke out or go into cardiac arrest. A more immediate risk might be kidney failure. That’s a common cause of death in people with malignant high blood pressure, which is what my condition resembles.

My plan is simple-simple and insanely dangerous. It was Cyrus’s TV sitting on the cabinets that inspired it. I perched on Cyrus’s recliner and worked it out in my head. The heavy battery array could remain inside the cabinet. I would take the trickle charger from the cart and put it inside the cabinet with the batteries, then connect it to the first battery in the series. Then I would remove the cell caps from the batteries. As the batteries charged, hydrogen gas released by the lead plates would bubble steadily upward through the acid in the cells. The closed cabinet would serve to confine the gas. And confined hydrogen gas is basically a bomb.

All I needed was a fuse.

I found my fuse in less than a minute. Near the back of the soapstone countertop was a hole for electrical cords to pass through. Farther down the counter, above the next cabinet, was another hole. Both were sealed with rubber gaskets, but the gaskets popped out easily. The hole nearest the TV would be my fuse. Lighting it at the proper time would be the hard part, but I resolved to deal with one problem at a time.

In my weakened physical state, it took me half an hour to manhandle the charger off its cart and into the cabinet. I shivered as I connected the leads to the first battery, fearing that the cabinet might already contain free hydrogen. When the leads were connected successfully, I popped the caps off the battery cells and shut the cabinet doors.

The last step was to prep the TV for Cyrus. This trick I learned in seventh grade, by watching a friend of mine blow the school’s fuses from our study hall. His technique was simple. He’d take a paper clip, straighten it out, then wrap the wire around both prongs of the electrical plug on the box fan at the back of the classroom. Then he’d shut his eyes and jam the plug into the socket. Blue sparks would shoot from the wall, and the lights would go out all over St. Stephen’s.

If I’m lucky, Cyrus will do the same thing for me.

I’ve spent eleven hours pondering everything that could possibly go wrong. Hydrogen is invisible, as the Triton signs warned me long ago. If Cyrus stays gone too long, the gas will build to a lethal concentration, and I’ll suffocate in here. For that reason, I can’t let myself fall asleep. Then there’s the paper clip. I found a whole box of them in one of the lab drawers. They looked like they were made of metal, but what if they’re made of some nonconducting material? A research lab might use something like that.

And then of course there’s Cyrus himself: an unpredictable factor if ever there was one. The moment I hear him unlocking the dead bolts, I’ll have to jump up and pull the rubber gasket out of the hole in the countertop. That will allow the trapped hydrogen to vent through the hole. But to ignite that gas, Cyrus will have to insert the jerry-rigged TV plug into the outlet above the countertop. What if he finds the unplugged TV cord suspicious? What if he simply gives me a once-over and leaves again, as he’s done a couple of times before? What if, what if, what if?

The wait is killing me. Literally.

Time is a big fucking razor blade scraping across the universe,Cyrus told me. No past or future-just now. Maybe he’s right-I think I actually read something like that somewhere. But right now I feel like he’s wrong. Time is a river, and I can swim backward in it as effortlessly as I please. Sometimes, even when I don’t want to think about the past, it floods over me anyway, a liquid wall of memory and emotion that sweeps away everything in its path. Lying on this sleeping bag, my skin itching, my muscles aching, my mouth dry as sand, I try not to let sadness overwhelm me as pictures of my wife float through my head, my wife before the cancer got her. I see her giving birth to Annie, screaming in agony and then smiling in exhaustion. Sarah is gone now, of course, but Annie remains. For a while I wonder if Sarah has appeared to me because I will soon join her. That’s just fear, I conclude. Think about Annie. Annie’s still alive. Annie still needs you…

As I repeat this mantra over and over, a new emotion is born within me-strangely enough, for the first time. It’s hatred. Not a generalized hatred, but a highly specific animus directed at one man: Cyrus White. Because of Cyrus, I lie helpless in a locked room, drifting slowly but steadily toward death. Because of Cyrus, my daughter might have to grow up without her father. And she has already done without her mother for too long.

Up until now, I have excused Cyrus in my head. He hasn’t tortured me as he has supposedly done to others; he has promised me life. Did Cyrus create himself? No, said my guilt. Cyrus is a product of the town we created. But lying here now, I reject that idea utterly. Cyrus had choices-more than a lot of people less fortunate than he. He made it out of this town. He served in the military. Yet despite this chance to rise above his disadvantages, he chose evil over good. And not once, but again and again. Images of the dead and injured fill my mind. Kate Townsend. Sonny Cross. Chris Vogel. The Catholic kid in the hospital, Mike Pinella. Paul and Janet Wilson.Cyrus may not be directly responsible for all of them, but he happily feeds the beast that took their lives. And the next time he walks through that door, I will devote every atom of my being to killing him.