As soon as Kurt and Joe passed Jase, he lit a small, weighted rag and tossed it onto the gasoline-soaked bridge. Fire erupted down the line, forming a wall of flames across the western end of the bridge. Jase ran back toward us and was back up on the HEMTT in a couple seconds flat.
Even though they weren’t smart, zeds tended to step back from fire. That was, if they weren’t preoccupied with trying to get to us. These zeds stepped right into the flame, like we were counting on. As each gas-soaked zed touched fire, it went up in a whoosh.
Garbled hisses came from deep within the flames. Human-like shapes writhed and moved in a macabre dance in the fire. The zeds that passed through the flames made it several feet, sometimes even more, before they finally collapsed into abstract, angled shapes as their bodies cooked and brains melted. Zeds smelled horrible, but barbequed zeds smelled even worse. Burning rot and flesh made my eyes water, and I swallowed back bile to keep from throwing up.
Clutch put a hand on my back. “Don’t look.”
I hadn’t realized I’d been staring.
Clutch and the others climbed down to dig up the ground to prevent the fire from spreading. As they frantically worked, I forced myself to scan for zeds coming at us from other directions. But my gaze kept going back to the charred zeds burning at the edges of the flames. Another memory to haunt my sleep.
We couldn’t see the flames spread from behind the wall of fire, but it didn’t take them long to reach the gas truck. A massive explosion blasted us and rocked the HEMTT. I clenched my eyes closed, but the heat nearly cooked us. My eyes watered and my cheeks felt seared, and I leaned my face against the cooler metal of the HEMTT. Once my tears slowed, I looked back up to the fire. Heat still tingled against my skin though we were a couple hundred feet away. Even when we were confident the zeds were all dead, we still had to wait until the flames died down before we could return to the Aurora. Not that we had any way of putting out the fire. We could grab buckets of water from the river, but it wouldn’t make a dent on the searing flames that hadn’t yet died down.
An hour passed, and the flames still didn’t die down, even though the bridge was made of steel and concrete. Dread filled my gut, and looking at each of the men up there with me, they were thinking the same thing. I didn’t understand all the science behind fire, but my lack of knowledge didn’t change the fact that the bridge was burning.
A screeching sound of bending metal made me jump to my feet. My mouth opened. I pointed, and yelled out, “Did you see that?”
Clutch’s jaw clenched. “I see it. The bridge is going to collapse.”
Chapter XXVI
There was nothing we could do as fire-tortured steel made horrendous cries. The northern edge of the bridge gave way first. When the arch’s cables snapped, the pavement curved before setting off a chain reaction of concrete and rebar porpoising down the bridge. An avalanche of fire, steel, and dusty concrete plummeted into the Mississippi with a sonic sizzle. Much of the bridge sunk, sending up waves down the river. Many huge chunks of debris still littered the surface and burned while the current grabbed at it.
“Oh, shit.” I could no longer watch for zeds. I stood and helplessly stared as the burning debris floated directly toward the Aurora. My hand flew to my heart and I clutched my shirt. My stomach churned as people ran out on the deck, screaming and shouting. When the first debris slammed into the towboat, I gasped. Someone fell off the edge and screamed the ten short feet down to the water, where the sound was abruptly cut off. As debris piled up against the boat, both it and its barges rocked.
The two barges that had been barely hanging onto the rest of the group broke away with a drawn-out metallic screech. Embers on the grain in barge Number Eight erupted into dark clouds of smoke.
I jumped off the back of the HEMTT before remembering to take a cursory scan for zeds. I stopped, found none, and ran up to Clutch, whom everyone had been gathering around. “What do we do?”