He pulled the trigger and held it down until the clip was empty. Then he dropped that clip without a word and inserted another, plunging the barrel inside its torn chest and he pulled the trigger again, emptying another clip. And, last, Roy shouted over his shoulder to whoever was crawling through the debris, “Fire in the hole!”
Isaiah ducked behind rubble but not before he saw Roy shove his hand inside the beast’s chest and ever so strangely in that superhuman acuity that only comes in a life-and-death situation, Isaiah also saw the pin from the grenade spinning like silver through the dusty white air. Then he saw Roy turn and dive behind a thick sheet of titanium as the grenade exploded inside the beast’s chest.
The blast was not deafening because Isaiah was already deafened from the explosions and gunfire. Afterward, with difficulty, he rose from his prone position, first to gain balance, then to reflexively check the status of his weapon, and finally to raise his face to see nothing but an ocean of gore on the far side of the vault. He did note Tony’s motionless body and knew he was dead but that was all the strength he possessed to realize anything at all.
Isaiah inhaled deeply, taking his time, blinking sweat and blood from his eyes, and then swiped a forearm across his face. He only barely paid attention to Roy as he rose and stared down at what remained of the creature.
Yeah, it was dead. Or whatever molecular blueprint it had used to construct this monstrous image was dead.
Roy muttered some indistinct curse that Isaiah couldn’t have heard if he were standing beside him. Then Roy changed clips like a machine—the perfect soldier reacting by instinct, skill, reflex, training, and base courage—and turned back to Isaiah. He helped to lift the three remaining guards to their feet and ushered them forward as he made his way to Isaiah. And when Roy reached him, he didn’t even lift his face.
“Looks like demons ain’t bulletproof,” he said.
***
After they reached the Observation Room there was no joy or relief expressed by survivors. They simply drank water or poured it over their heads and sat. They were emotionless on the exterior although expletives were gasped.
The three surviving guards were stunned but not severely injured.
Only Isaiah and Roy were bleeding badly.
Isaiah discovered that his wound was the most extensive and required immediate attention, which Amanda and Margaret were quick to apply. Roy’s injury was a long cut down his face to his neck that he tended himself with a Swiss bandage. After pressing it to his cut, Roy pulled it off and stared down.
“Sulfur?” he gaped. “They haven’t used sulfur since World War II.” He paused. “The Swiss didn’t even fight in World War II.”
“Well,” said Margaret as she used scissors to cut open Isaiah’s pants leg, “it seems like the maniacs who built this place raided an old Swiss bunker to stock their secondary medical units because they have enough food and water and medical supplies for a dozen world wars. The Swiss must have felt left out during the big one.”
“This is the big one,” said Roy, placing the bandage back on his face.
Janet tightly grasped a shard of titanium and fiercely ripped it from Isaiah’s thigh as Isaiah’s jaw clamped tight. Then they stuffed and clotted the wound with dressing and wrapped his leg in bandages and tape; the bandages did nothing to leaven the pain, but pain was the last thing Isaiah was concerned about. He reached out to Janet, gasping, “Give me the radio! I have to talk to the general!”
She immediately handed it over and Isaiah spoke, “General! Are you there?”
A pause.
“Is that you, major?”
“It’s Isaiah. The major is wounded, but he’ll be all right. Have you loaded the bomb into the ATLAS?”
“We’re doing it.”
“Remember what I told you,” Isaiah continued. “Be careful not to touch any of the magnets. I’ll be down in a minute.”
“Roger that. Did you get both tangos?”
“No,” Isaiah responded wearily. “We got the small one. The big one is still running around.” He paused. “And be advised. The one we killed was wearing armor. I repeat; they are wearing armor. It’ll take all the ordinance you’ve got to put down the second one but they are vulnerable. If you engage it, just fire everything you’ve got. It will go down.”
“Roger that. Over.”
“Over.” Isaiah dropped the microphone as he mumbled through mashed lips, “And this ain’t even the hard part …”
Margaret sharply lifted her face from bandaging, “You’re right. Your fight hasn’t even started, chief. You still have to execute your suicide plan. And if your plan doesn’t work, which it probably won’t, then you have to blow the bomb. And God only knows what will happen when you do that. I don’t even know what will happen when I start the collider. That thing could detonate when I flick the switch. That would solve our problems.”
Isaiah managed, “What’s the power level?”
“Janet used Francois’s personal ID to bypass the electrical shutdown for the collider so it’s close enough.”
“Close enough for what?”
Margaret stood, smoothing out the last piece of tape. “To be precise, it’s at ninety percent. If I open up one more substation, it jumps to one hundred percent and you’re going to see particle collision heaven. And I won’t tell you again that this has never been tried. It’s never even been contemplated, so this is where science ends and God begins.”
Isaiah somehow managed to reject horrific doomsday images as he asked, “Have you calculated a collision between these opposing dimensions so they’ll simultaneously collide with our dimension?”
“Yes, yes, yes, Hell yes.”
Isaiah leaned close. “Are you sure?”
Margaret extended both arms before she let them fall. “Isaiah?” Her eyes were wide and searching. “Are you seriously asking me if I’m absolutely certain whether I’ve coordinated a needle fired from a cannon in the Antarctic, a needle fired from Jupiter, and another needle fired from Saturn to collide in the same one-thousandth of a second inside a one-inch crater on the moon? How the hell can I be sure? It’s never been done! You’re asking me to calculate the speed and trajectory for a Mars landing with my cell phone! I can promise you that you’ll end up somewhere if this works at all!” She gasped faintly. “If it doesn’t work, then we’re all going to end up in another dimension.”
“Just give me a yes or no, please.”
“Yes,” Margaret nodded. “Yes, I think I’ve got the math right. Numbers are just numbers, no matter how crazy everything else in the world gets. Like this. In fact, math is the only thing I am certain of anymore. But do you have any idea what kind of nightmare dimensions you could be smashing together? With you in the center of it?” She briefly raised a hand at Amanda. “And with Amanda, God bless her heart, right beside you? God, I can’t believe she’s going with you just so she can leap back—if she can—and tell us that you’ve engaged the most powerful being in the universe in some kind of godawful final conflict. Which is exactly what this is going to be.”
“If I don’t shut this portal from the other side,” Isaiah said, “somebody in Japan, or Russia, or China will open it again. And I believe the next time will be the last time. Whoever opens this door again will leave it open. And that’ll be the end for all of us. And when I say for all of us, I mean—”
“Yes, I know what you mean,” said Margaret. “You think I don’t know all this? You think I’m not intimately familiar with the Many-Worlds Interpretation? The String Theory? The Quantum Theory? Or how the Acting-World Theory can predict the behavior of nanoscopic objects? Do you think I don’t know the sheer, unbelievable power it takes to generate forty Tera-Electron-Volts inside this machine? Do you think I’m not aware of every conceivable risk involved in this experiment?” She stood, arms at her side. “Do you know that the K’iche’ Maya called
Hell, ‘Xibalba’? Do you know what that means?”
Isaiah shook his head.
“It means ‘place of fear.’” Margaret stared. “Even the bloody Mayan Empire—and we’re talking about base savages who cut the hearts out of living people just for the hell of it!—were terrified of this place. So don’t get me wrong. I’m not worried about whether I can send you to Hell, Isaiah. I’m worried about whether you won’t go insane once you get there and not do your job! And to imagine you going head-to-head with Satan or Lucifer or Shiva or whatever the hell it calls itself is way beyond human comprehension. It’s not that I don’t have faith in you. I do. I’ve seen you in action. You’ve got guts and you’ve got brains. But even angels won’t take a stand against this guy.”
“He’s just another creature,” said Isaiah.
“He’s probably the first creature!” Margaret replied fiercely. “And he’s probably the most powerful creature!” She blinked slowly, bent forward, and spoke more quietly, “I have read the Bible, Isaiah. I’m not a complete heathen. Have you ever read the book of Jude? Because there’s a scene in it where Satan is confronted by Michael—one of the most powerful of all angels—and even Michael wouldn’t fight Satan. The only thing Michael does is say, ‘The Lord rebukes you.’ And that’s it. Even Michael, as powerful as he has to be because Michael is ‘Commander of the Armies of God,’ wouldn’t lock horns with Satan over who would claim the body of Moses, so we’re talking about one tough son of a bitch! This guy probably wiped out the dinosaurs!”
She turned and walked away.
Isaiah was having trouble concentrating. He took a series of sharp breaths as rhythmic as the second hand on a clock, trying to recover, before he cast a narrow glance at Amanda; she was standing, arms folded. He didn’t need to see more.
She was scared to death.
About like him.
***
It was only a few minutes before Roy and Isaiah joined General Jackman on the altar-like stand outside the ATLAS as they loaded the one-hundred-megaton bomb into the cylinder. The contorting effort required them to carry it an inch at a time and, when it was done, they fell back against the walls or to their knees, breathless.
“How can …” Tanto gasped, “something so small … weigh so much? I mean … I thought that welder was heavy! But this thing weighs a ton!”
Roy wiped away sweat. “Again, buddy, it’s a new mix of fuel. They haven’t even found a safe way to test it, but they say it works. And I don’t think they can even measure its yield. Saying that it has a one hundred megaton yield is just a wild-ass guess. As far as they know, this damn thing could yield a thousand megatons. They have no idea how big this is gonna blow.”
“It’s gonna blow big,” groaned Tanto.
Slowly Roy straightened and arched his back before leaning forward again. “Man alive, I’m getting too old for this.” He gently laid a hand on the bomb. “Give ’em hell.”
Isaiah walked toward the exit.
“Let’s do this,” he said, suddenly hesitating. “And don’t forget that we’ve still got one of these things running around. If we don’t kill it in a standup fight, you’ll have to blow this collider, anyway, and destroy everything down here.”
“What are the odds of you pulling this off?” asked Roy. “I mean, you’re gonna try to capture Satan in a place outside of space and time and then drop a nuke on his head? What are the odds?”
Isaiah revealed nothing.
“I wouldn’t bet the farm.”
***
Isaiah was too beat up to immediately enter the ATLAS. He needed a few minutes to collect himself, tend his wounds, and rehydrate. He didn’t know what he would be facing on the other side and he didn’t need to be in a weakened condition when he did.
It didn’t matter who had the idea they should eat and drink before they began, but when they got to the Observation Room there were a dozen MREs prepared and Susan had broken out a new case of bottled water.
They had sent the rest of the Observation Room physicists with plenty of food and water to the elevator where they had, with admirable ingenuity, set up a makeshift MASH unit. They had collected everything even remotely related to survival from every storage room and were, from all appearances, making themselves comfortable. And Roy had ordered the surviving crew and guards to the elevator but left Francois chained to his chair in the Observation Room; it was if Roy didn’t want Francois out of his sight.
The only other people remaining in the Observation Room were those critical to the last two stages of this gambit.
By reflex Isaiah searched the computer screens, but the remaining vaults were in place. And there was nothing moving on the monitors but, of course, that meant nothing. He vaguely noticed how Janet wasn’t eating, and her expression was beyond worried.
It was alarming.
“You okay?” asked Isaiah.
“Huh?” Janet glanced toward him. “Uh, no, I’m still worried about your plan. I’m scared about going all the way back to the Big Bang and changing history. I just don’t think it’s a good idea. That’s all. I can’t get over it.”
Jackman grunted, “Why not?”
“Because you’re changing the timeline, general. I told you once before. The butterfly effect.”
General Jackman took a moment, gazing about, before adding, “But didn’t one of you say time is like the Mississippi River? And throwing a rock in the Mississippi River ain’t gonna change the course of the river, right? So the consequences of changing that dimension should just stick with that dimension.” He stared. “Have I got that right?”
“I was referring to ‘minor’ changes,” answered Janet. “This is not a minor change. This is a move to trigger the Big Bang in a new way. And even the Mississippi River begins somewhere. If you go all the way back to its source and drop a nuclear bomb, who knows what would happen to the river? I mean, I do hate to repeat myself but this is no ‘minor’ butterfly effect. This is, forgive me, the father of the mother of all butterfly effects.”
Margaret stated, “But it only involves two dimensions, Janet. Our dimension won’t be involved. It will be outside the space and time of our dimension. There’s a fair chance there will be no consequences in this dimension at all.”
“That’s impossible to know,” said Janet. “But I guess it doesn’t matter. It’s the only plan we’ve got. It’s like Roy says. We’re all going to die, anyway, if we don’t do something radical. And this is radical by all that is holy.”
Jackman resumed eating. “To tell the truth, I don’t give a damn no more. We gotta do something and this is all we’ve got, so let’s do it. We sure won’t be any worse off if it don’t work, that’s for sure. And, by the way, have you figured out yet why we can’t see these things on camera?”
Janet sighed, brushed back her hair, and said, “Once again, general, we can’t see them because there’s a very large light spectrum and this thing’s composition isn’t in the spectrum that we can read with these electronics.” She paused, then added, “A satellite station might have something for it, but not this place.”
“Can’t you see a ghost on infrared?” asked Tanto.
Janet groaned, “I’ve heard that question a thousand times, Tanto, and the answer is always ‘no.’” She shook her head. “TV shows have been lying to people for years telling them they can see paranormal activity with an infrared camera. That is pure rubbish. Infrared just reads heat and it often gives you a false-positive of something that was there an hour ago. Like, a raccoon might have crawled across a tree and left a silhouette that looks like a ghost. So infrared is the least reliable means of seeing something paranormal or from another dimension although people make millions telling people that it can.”
Tanto glanced around the table before asking, “So what’s the best way to detect something supernatural?”
“Tanto, these creatures aren’t
supernatural any more than we are. They’re perfectly natural. They’re just from another place and made of different stuff. In many ways, we’re superior to them. In other ways, we’re inferior. But, to answer your question, the best way to see something from their dimension is to get our hands on a machine that can read the light common to their dimension.”
Everyone had begun staring at her.
Gesturing with a fork, Janet added, “Everyone thinks the absence of any color is white, right? Well, the opposite is true. The absence of any color is black. Isaac Newton proved that before his manuscript on light got burned up. And it’s the same with antimatter. The reason we can’t see it is not the absence of light. It’s the presence of too much light.”
Janet waited. No one spoke.
Finally she set down her fork and said more slowly, “Okay. Listen. Have you guys ever looked up at night to see all those billions and billions of stars? Yeah? Okay, then imagine all those billions of stars smashed together into a space as small as a grain of sand. That’s what antimatter is. Imagine how condensed, how complex, how mysterious that is. And now try to imagine all the power of the electromagnetic spectrum of light that would be thrown out of such a concentration of antimatter. It would be invisible to us because that fantastic spectrum of light would simply be off the chart.
“Now, these creatures obviously have the power to alter their physical forms and they have absorbed the neutrinos of this dimension to produce themselves in the physical shape of monsters, but they’re still a hybrid mix of matter and neutrally charged antimatter.” She waved vaguely. “Yeah, yeah, I know. You guys have watched Star Trek. You know that matter and antimatter don’t mix. And, usually, they don’t. But that only means that these things know how to neutralize the electrons comprising their original substance to join the positively charged electrons of our universe on a subatomic level.”
“I don’t follow that,” said Jackman. “If they can look like whatever they want to on some kind of subatomic level, then why don’t they look like angels? Why don’t they look like God or something? If they can look like anything, why look like a damn gorilla?”
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