Better Lucky than Good (Records of the Resistance) by Shaun Meehan Page B

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    Clay's thoughts were quickly spinning out of his control. Was Brooke dead? Had she not tried to communicate with him because she wasn't aware that she could? Was she suffering? What if he had chosen to head straight home, instead of helping these people? Would she still be alive, then? Clay began to lose all sense of time.

    "Clay?" Melanie asked, having returned with a shopping cart containing the items he had requested.

    Clay continued to stare at his phone, providing her with no response.

    "Clay? ... You okay?" Melanie asked again.

    Melanie saw the cell phone and couldn't resist the urge to wonder who Clay was hoping to get in contact with. The two had never revealed much about their lives before the outbreak to one another.

    "Hello? Earth to Clay..." she prodded.

    "Oh, sorry Mel. Yeah, I'm still here." he chuckled falsely, while finding her with his eyes.

    Clay stuffed his phone back into his dry bag and rose to his feet. Wandering towards Melanie, while suddenly becoming eager to inspect the contents of her shopping cart.

    "Nice work. That'll do just fine." Clay said after glancing at the inventory.  

    He picked up one of the pipe nipples and began examining it more closely while holding it in his hand.

    "Clay, what are you making?" Melanie asked, as Kevin pulled up with a drill press standing upright on a flatbed cart.

    "Hand grenades. Well... Hand grenades circa the eighteenth century. But it's the best I can do in a hurry." Clay answered, looking over at the drill press Kevin had brought along.  

    "How the hell do you plan on making hand grenades?" Kevin asked.

    "Mel, in my dry bag is a square red can. Can you grab it?" Clay asked.

    Melanie nodded and began her search while Clay and Kevin moved the drill press to a support column close by. The press was the sort that you would see in the garage of a handy man, or do-it-yourselfer. It wasn't industrial grade, but it would certainly get the job done.  

    Melanie had retrieved the red can from Clay's pack and handed it over to him.

    "That's the one. Thanks." Clay said, taking the tin from Mel.

    "Okay. Now what?" Kevin asked, a little out of breath from moving the heavy drill press into position.

    "This contains roughly one pound of black powder. It's a primitive gun powder. There were boxes of these at the outfitter's shop that Melanie and I had checked out. It's pretty awkward to carry, so I only grabbed a single can." Clay began.

    "Now... It doesn't burn nearly as fast as modern gun powder, but if you can contain it long enough, it will generate enough pressure to explode." He continued.

    "How are you going to set it off?" Kevin asked.

    "That's actually not that difficult to do. In fact, it's probably one of the easiest explosives to ignite. Black powder, considering what it is, can be used for all kinds of things. In this case, we're going to use the cotton twine that Mel grabbed as a fuse. All we need to do is soak the cotton twine in black powder mixed with water and bake it dry. It'll burn like one of those fuses that you've probably seen in old cartoons." Clay explained.

    "Are you serious? This sounds like a load of bullshit to me, man." Kevin said in disbelief.  

    "It'll work just fine. We'll drill a hole in the top of half of the pipe caps and insert the fuses into them. After that we cap one end of the pipe nipple and fill each of them with powder. We just have to leave enough room to give the powder some oxygen to burn. Then we finish it off by putting the fused cap on the nipples and we're ready to make some noise." Clay said, sounding deathly confident in his design.

    Melanie and Kevin were both a little amused and impressed by Clay's ingenuity. It was no surprise to either of them that someone like Clay would begin to thrive during a global crises like the one they were now facing.

    "And how are you planning to use them?" Mel asked.

    "Besides lighting the fuse, tossing them and watching them go boom?" Clay asked