“Did you happen to see anyone go in?”
“I saw you go in twice, but nobody else.”
“Really?”
“Yes, why?”
“There was this guy in there, Arab weird looking kind, he …”
“What?”
“Forget it. What about after that, when we came back down after the evacuation? Any sight of Samuel?”
“Yes, I’ve seen him on several cameras with you actually.”
“Yeah, training and stuff.”
“Yep, well anyway after that he’s not to be seen again. He returns to his office and never comes out again.”
“That’s not possible, I searched everywhere in the facility.”
“Well, the cameras are heat and motion activated, so I don’t know what to tell you.”
“Right, well I’ve scoured the office and I didn’t find anything in there.”
“Anyway, Ma’am on the other hand …”
“Yes?”
“Well just before the incident I traced her steps. She can be seen here with us, remember?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, when we were doing our training she went upstairs in a hurry to see Samuel, she goes into his office, as you can see. Then less than a minute later she comes back out and heads for Station Eight.”
Catlin was recalling this from the previous day’s events and didn’t think anything unusual about it. “So what are …”
“Just hold on. Wait for it.”
“For?”
“See the red flashing?”
“That was the evac signal.”
“Yep and this is where we watch Ma’am disappear.”
Catlin watched the video footage with mild amusement as the lady known as Ma’am stood by waiting for all the personnel to evacuate the premises before she made her way back to the thread room.
“And then what?”
“And that’s it, never to be seen again!”
“Huh? I don’t get it, I thought you said you found a way out?”
“And I thought you were smarter than that.”
“Huh?” Catlin shook her head.
“Why silly, that’s our way out of course.” Ursula replied, with a big smile on her face.
“How?”
“That’s the last time she shows up on any of the surveillance cameras inside the facility, going into the thread room. I have checked and checked, but I cannot find her anywhere in the building after she goes in there.”
“Do we have a camera in the thread room?”
“No, never have.”
“Why not?”
“I dunno, ask mum.”
Catlin looked over at Marion but she was immersed in her computer screen.
“So ... Ma’am goes in …” She still couldn’t think to call her by another name, “… doesn’t come out, what am I missing Ursula.”
Crack, crack, crack, crack ... the din of small explosions rang out from above, several of them in a uniformed series of sharp cracks.
The girls covered their ears instinctively until it ceased.
“We don’t have long,” Ursula said. “They just blew some blast holes in a formation around the shaft.”
“And exactly how the hell would you know that, you some kind of explosive expert?” Catlin could hardly believe the sarcasm her words had, she covered her mouth ashamedly.
Ursula didn’t see any issue and instead was pointing with her finger to the computer screen. On screen, she’d brought up a camera that had been housed outside the facility, looking down from the trees at the entrance to the outhouse.
“I am the best! That is how.”
“Smartass!” Catlin hissed as she realised Ursula was watching it live, via CCTV on her computer.
Ursula laughed, and so did Catlin. The two of them giggling like a couple of girls
“The two of you quite ok are you?” Marion leaned over in her chair, observing their behaviour.
They both looked at each other again, which only made it worse and they started laughing again. A quick stern look shot across the way from Marion forced them back to reality.
“So, she went in and didn’t come out?” Catlin asked.
“Yes.”
“And so?”
“And so, don’t you get it! She must have got out from there.”
“Oh, that kinda makes sense now.”
“Well …”
“Well, what?”
“Well let’s go have a look then.”
Catlin thought of going back upstairs to get her axe but was pulled along by an over exuberant Ursula towards the thread room.
Marion meanwhile was busy looking through the last entry which took place in the registry for the thread. This was the last entry in the system before the event had taken place, as the thread had literally stopped feeding information into the system after it.
The thread alteration was showing as an unknown entity, Marion figured it had something to do with what the girls had said, but another thought gnawed at her unconscious.
She brought up the details but couldn’t quite make sense of it, or she wasn’t sure what she was looking at. The description field was showing something that looked like a normal entry. The part describing where the energy had been taken from was in an unrecognisable format and the section showing where the energy had been sent to was just registering as a numerical value of one.
This was very strange, as normally it registered a person’s digital signature in this section. She escaped and went into her host screen to backtrack through the raw data but was quickly turned away when millions upon millions of digital signatures flooded her screen.
She backed up to the profile screen and tried to fathom the reason for the corrupted entry and opened a section that listed the trade numerically.
Normally this segment always showed 1:1. It represented that one life had been substituted for another, except the registry was showing a strange number, 178,325,665.
Marion was perplexed, that would mean that a hundred and seventy plus million lives had been transferred into one, surely such a thing was not possible. Before she could think any further though she was interrupted by her daughter. “We found a way out!”
“Already?”
“Catlin found it right away!”
“I’ll be there in a minute, make sure you get our equipment ready.”
“Ok.”
Marion sat there frowning at her screen, she leaned back in her chair and folded her arms together, troubled by the information she’d observed. As her head wandered, so too did her gaze, until it fell upon a copy of a newspaper that lay strewn across the pile of papers on Ursula’s desk.
Marion stared at it for a good few seconds before it registered in her mind, she jumped up quickly from her chair and raced over to grab at the pile of papers. In her haste, she began to shake and her heart began beating faster as she shuffled through the clutter, finally drawing out a newspaper.
And with a look of complete amazement on her face, she stared down at the front page which had detailed information on the culprit of a city bank robbery, his image spread across the front page. Marion recognised the man and sat there with a shock look on her face.
“Well I never …”
Seeing no other reason to remain at Destiny, Marion picked up the paper from where it lay and joined the two ladies in the thread room. When she got there the two of them had big smiles on their faces, Ursula pointing to the place where the thread had been.
Sure enough, behind where the thread was housed, was an opening. She went in for a closer look and could see a shaft had somehow been made through the earth in a forty-five-degree angle, towards the surface in the opposite direction.
“Wow that looks like a tunnel.” Marion said looking up its length. �
�Shall we leave then?”
“Mum, aren’t you still checking the logs?”
Marion masked her reply. “No, I’ve finished.”
“Did you find anything?”
“Hmmm,” Marion replied, not sure of what to reply with, her hands shaking visibly.
“What does that mean?” Catlin turned to Ursula.
“Don’t ask.”
“Mum, are you ok?” Ursula noticed the hands shaking.
“I’m fine.”
“Your hands are shaking.”
“I said I’m fine, ok!”
“Okay.”
“So, what now then?” Catlin asked.
“Now we leave children,” Marion said, turning in the room and quickly retrieving the device, which she stored in a backpack hastily.
“But wait ...” Catlin fretted, a little unsure of what was happening. One minute they were stuck and now suddenly they were leaving.
“I thought we were going to solve all of this, fix the thread and save the world?”
“Destiny is over dear, there is nothing more we can do here. No thread, no Samuel … nothing.”
“Over?”
“It’s done, we’re done here, our story takes us elsewhere.”
“It can’t be!” she protested. “I wanted to find out who was responsible, track down Ma’am and try and fix all this mess. My parents, I don’t even know what’s happened to them.”
“Dear,” Marion consoled her. “This place is a shell now, without the thread it’s useless, without any technology we can’t do anything.”
“So why did you lock the doors and stay with me?”
“Well, there’s no need to let the government get a hold of us is there?”
“Is that why you stayed?”
“No, I stayed because there’s more to this story than you know and if you want to do something about it then you are going to need my help. But we’re not going to achieve anything by staying here, which means we are leaving this place.”
“But Samuel told me to stay, to protect this place.” She continued her objections.
“And where is he now?” Marion asked. “If it was so important to protect why did he disappear?”
“True,” Catlin agreed, admitting she was well out of her depth here. “So, what now?” she asked almost helplessly.
Marion replied by handing over the copy of the newspaper she’d taken from the desk previously, she offered it to Catlin and said, “now my dear … we go and see a man about a dog.”
- -
Truck
It’d been a relatively easy getaway once they left the Viper on the floor of lobby the day earlier. Smith and Truck had exited the apartment complex, hotwired an S.U.V and driven away from the scene. Being that the streets were now relatively unoccupied, they found no difficulty in getting a car, or making their way through the city.
They did notice the impact of the event on the city for the first time though, fires still burning in several places, big patches of land now smouldering ruins. Of course, bodies littered the pavements everywhere as people had fallen as they went about their day, in other places cars lay strewn all over the road, sometimes blocking their path.
Then, in other area’s, the roads were completely clear, as if the army had rolled in through that stretch of road and cleared it of all the bodies. Truck remained silent during the journey, trying to ignore the ghastly landscape they were navigating.
They came across few other people in their travel, the odd military convoy and a car with a small group of scared looking people, but that was it, a virtually desolate city.
They fled the city, doubling back as they went to ensure nobody was following them. By the end of the day they made camp on the outskirts of the city and managed to pillage supplies needed for their next leg.
Before sunrise next morning they made their way south towards Geelong, headed for Avalon airport.
Barely much was said between the two since their encounter in the lobby, it was as if a shift had occurred between the two men. Smith looked out for Truck, he’d somehow known he would be in danger and had come to his aide. His actions saved Truck’s life and Truck now felt he had some sort of an allegiance to Smith, that he was indebted to him for a life.
Regardless of the questions he had, he still owed him that.
Truck had very quickly understood that Smith, whatever he was, had a strange way about him. He wasn’t a normal person, he was something else. But not even Smith seemed to be able to answer that question, he struggled with the most basic of queries into himself.
Throughout their short trip together, because conversation was at a minimum, Truck had plenty of time to reflect on what had taken place in the past week or two. There were a series of questions Truck now had on events surrounding Smith, he tried piecing them together in the silence.
Why had he disappeared? Was it him who had sent the parcel back? The Viper claimed to have killed Smith. Truck still remembered when he first encountered Smith, swearing he was dead on the side of the road. And then how had he survived the fall between the two apartments and three shots to the back? And how in the hell did he manage to seemingly plan everything only to completely forget about it the next moment? How had he healed the two gunshot wounds Truck had received? And did he have something to do with Harrison’s recovery.
Truck knew he wasn’t smart enough to be able to figure it out, but he did know Smith was different, even Suni had mentioned he was special. Whatever that entailed didn’t really concern him anymore, he knew there was a bigger picture to all of this, that he was truly insignificant in the grand scheme of things.
He resolved that whatever was going on, it was far above him and he was just a passenger on the journey.
They both get out of the car, Truck stretches and yawns as he does so before looking over to Smith for their next move. Smith eyes Truck but doesn’t give any indications he knows what he’s doing, so Truck scouts the area around them, looking for signs of the others.
Smith looks around inquisitively as well, searching for something in amongst the area.
“Where?” he asks Truck.
They were in fact at Avalon Airport, early in the morning. This had originally been the rendezvous point Suni planned, Truck decided to come here in the hope they would stick to the plan.
The airport, by all appearances, seems to be completely deserted though, with not a living soul in view. All that dons the area are abandoned planes of various shapes and sizes, cargo holds and bodies, lots of dead bodies.
Truck worries about his family, and whether they made it out of the city.
Like the streets, here too, the ground is littered with human remains that must have dropped that fateful day over a week ago. The stench here is not as bad though, the sea breeze helping to alleviate the stench of rotting flesh.
The two men get back into the car and proceed to drive around the entire airport, trying in vain to locate Suni, Harrison and Doc. But they find nobody and so pull the car to a stop close by the entrance, where they can be easily spotted. Both men exit the vehicle and wait atop the cars bonnet.
Truck turns, smelling something odd, and is a little perplexed at seeing Smith with a cigarette in his mouth. “You smoke?”
Smith shrugs his shoulders. “Memories,” he smiles at Truck.
“I used to smoke you know. Still get the cravings sometimes.”
“See as seen, feel as feel.”
“You gotta be kidding me champ ... Do you know that stuff’s bad for ya?”
Again Smith shrugs, but instead of replying he takes a puff, blows out the smoke and inclines his head with a nod in the opposite direction.
Truck turns, nonchalantly, to look in the direction Smith indicates, squinting straight away as the rising sun blazes brightly into his eyes. He raises a hand to his
forehead to shield his eyes from the sun and looks into the distance.
He can make out a shadow, approaching.
Truck figures he knows who it is straight away and leaps to his feet, turning to Smith for some sort of confirmation. Smith smiles and nods his head.
“Is it them? I can’t even hear an engine running?”
“Yes.”
The shadow gets closer and soon comes into view, Truck understands why he can’t hear the car as it gets closer. He identifies the approaching shadow as a Toyota Prius and thus realises its engine runs on battery, hence the quiet approach.
Truck’s eyes are transfixed on the front windscreen until the car comes into view, he skips a little where he stands as he spots a familiar figure in the front seat.
As the car pulls up, Truck rushes over to the passenger’s side, opens the door and pulls the passenger out. With a yelp, he pulls Harrison from the car and embraces him emphatically.
“You’re safe, it’s so good to see you Harry. I thought after I left you back at the apartment that it was it, I thought it was goodbye.”
“Truck, you got out! Are you ok?” he replies, less enthusiastically as Truck.
“I’m good.” he puts Harrison back down, wondering where his enthusiasm’s gone.
“I thought you might have gone too, Truck. Back in the apartment, you? … the explosion?”
“It’s ok buddy, I had a little help.” Truck motions over towards Smith, still perched on the hood of the car, smoking his cigarette.
“I told you he wasn’t dead!” Life comes back to his face as he spots Smith.
“And I shoulda believed ya champ.” He punches him playfully on the chest.
“So where are the others, Suni and Doc?” Truck asks, looking about the car.
Harrison lowers his head at the mention of their names, “Truck ...?”
Harrison begins to well up at the mention of their names, “I couldn’t do anything, there were these guys everywhere shooting at us as we tried to get away, they were army guys I think and ...”
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