What Comes Next by John Katzenbach

the Garden of Eden.
    In the years they had been together since, they had not thought twice about how they met. It had not taken them long to discover in each other passions that went far beyond sex and that, if dark, were also electric.
    The stench of gasoline filled his nostrils.
    He nearly gagged, turning his head, trying to steal a breath of fresh air. The smell made him momentarily dizzy, and he coughed as he splashed more and more of the liquid about. When the corrugated floor glistened with the rainbow colors of the gas, he pushed himself out the door and frantically tore at the air beyond, drinking in darkness.
    As his head cleared he returned to the task. He dripped more gas on the exterior, went around to the front of the van, made sure the front seats were soaked.
    Finally satisfied, he tossed the red container into the passenger seat. He also threw a pair of surgical gloves inside. He had prepared a plastic gallon jug with detergent and soaked a cotton fuse, making a modest napalm-type bomb. He reached into his pocket for a lighter.
    Michael looked around. He was deep in an abandoned place, behind an old, shuttered, and long-empty paper mill. Once it had provided a livelihood for many in the small streamside town. Now it sat sullen as a reminder of times and jobs long lost, its windows broken and shattered from years of passing kids tossing rocks. He had taken care to park the van well away from the building; he did not want to start a fire that would attract too much attention too rapidly. He merely wanted to destroy the stolen van utterly. He had developed some expertise in this. It was not all that difficult.
    He made a final check, making sure he had left nothing behind. It took only a few seconds for him to unscrew the license plates. These he intended to toss in a nearby pond. Then he stripped off all his clothes. He bundled them up, made sure they, too, were soaked in flammable fuel, and tossed them into the panel van. He shivered as the cold crept over him. Then he lit his homemade bomb and tossed it into the open van door. He quickly turned away and started running, his feet crunching against the gravel and packed dirt, hoping that he wouldn’t hit a piece of stray glass and slice up the sole of his foot. Behind him there was a thump as the makeshift bomb went off. He slowed, took a single glance over his shoulder to make sure that the stolen van was engulfed in flame. Yellow-red streaks of fire curled through the windows and the first billowing clouds of gray and black smoke streamed skyward. Satisfied, Michael hurried, picking up his pace. He wanted to laugh out loud—the sight of a naked man running through the darkness away from an exploding panel truck was something he would have liked hearing some shocked and tongue-tied passerby explain to a skeptical policeman.
    He could still catch the scent of the fire with its intoxicating subtext of incendiary smells on the light night breeze. Who was it in the movie? he asked himself suddenly. Colonel Kilgore: I love the smell of napalm in the morning . Well, he thought, in the evening it was just as seductive and it meant the same thing: victory.
    His clothes were waiting on the driver’s seat of his old, beat-up pickup truck. The keys were underneath the seat, where he’d left them. A small package of disinfectant wipes—he favored the sort used by old people with hemorrhoids—were right on top. They had less of a perfumy smell than others, but they eradicated the leftover gasoline scent rapidly. He pulled open the door and within a few seconds had rubbed himself all over with the soaked tissues. It took only a minute to pull on jeans, sweatshirt, and baseball cap. He took a last look around. No one. This was as he expected. A hundred yards away, concealed behind the building, he could see a spiral of smoke like a lighter shade of night curling into the sky, a fire glow burning beneath. He shoved himself behind the wheel and started up the truck. He