Chris and Owen both stood and looked out at the beacon in the distance. Chris suddenly couldn't take his eyes off of it. Even behind his dark goggles, the light was the most intense he'd ever seen, and he wondered what lay at its core. He stared at it for a long time, pondering its mysteries, before a new thought came to him.
"More specifically," Trisha spoke up, "Chris, the beacon's coming from the stadium."
Chris glanced at Owen, an unspoken conversation passing between them. The giant, seventy-thousand-seat football arena known as Rice Stadium was steeped in history, a very unique and important history.
"How about that ..." Chris muttered.
"Trish has this funny look on her face," Terry reported. "Will somebody please tell me what the deal is with that stadium?"
"You should know, Terry. It's part of your past," Chris replied. "Rice Stadium is the exact spot where JFK gave his famous speech challenging NASA to send a man to the moon. The thing you're looking at right now is the place where it all began."
Silence was the response.
"Can you see what's inside the beacon, at the base?" Chris asked, pressing on.
"Can't make out any shapes or anything, but it's so bright, it's hard to say," Trish replied.
"It's like the stadium's sitting on top of the world's biggest flashlight," added Terry.
"Can you get a bead on its circumference?" Owen asked.
"It's got about the same footprint as the interior of the stadium," said Trisha. "But, Chris-Roston's here, and in a big way."
"How big?" asked Chris.
"The entire parking lot west of the stadium has been converted into a military outpost. Wire perimeter fence, a huge cluster of army tents inside, I count more than fifty jeeps. It's basically a military base. Whatever he's up to, Chris, he's here for the duration. And he's ready for war."
"But wait -I don't understand something," said Terry. "Why go to the trouble of establishing an elaborate base right at the foot of the beacon? His people must have to wear these protective goggles twenty-four seven. They'd even have to sleep with them on, wouldn't they? Doesn't that seem counterintuitive?"
"Roston must have a reason that justifies the nuisance," Chris replied.
Owen nodded in agreement. "There's something inside that light. Something terribly valuable."
Silence overwhelmed the tiny shed where Chris and Owen stood. What could be inside that beacon, causing it to blast such intense light straight upward? An army stood between them and the answers.
"We goin' in there?" Chris heard Mae's voice in the background.
"We most certainly are," said Chris.
"How?" asked Trisha.
"Still working on that," Chris replied.
"Shh! Did you hear that?" Terry's voice said into his earpiece.
Chris stood up straighter and put his hand over his ear, covering the earpiece and blocking all other sounds. He heard shuffling sounds and panting. A door opened and closed. More panting.
"Trisha, report," he said. "What is it?"
"They know we're here!" Trisha whispered urgently. "They found us!"
No...!
"Get out of there, head for ground level!" Chris barked. "We'll meet you on the street!"
He and Owen darted from the shed at a full charge.
"I don't know if we can, there's so many of them ... !" Trisha whispered back, her voice barely audible. `And Main Street is crawling with soldiers, you'll never make it!"
"We'll make it. You just get there in one piece!"
Heavy footfalls stormed down the adjacent corridor. Trisha estimated six, maybe eight soldiers. When the sounds faded, she turned to face her companions.
Trisha, Mae, and Terry huddled together, kneeling on the boardroom floor on the building's top floor. They'd contacted Chris and surveyed the college and the stadium from an elegant office three doors down. Here, the bright light from the beacon blazed through a series of tall, narrow windows on the outside wall to their far right, but otherwise the whole place was dark.
"The only way out is the stairs, so that has to be our target," Trisha whispered. Terry nodded, clutching his gun as if preparing to storm Normandy. Mae simply watched and waited, ready to move when they were.
Trisha stood to her feet and put her hand on the doorknob, preparing to peek out into the hall. She stopped when a husky male voice began to shout, just a few feet outside the door.
"This is Major Griffin!" he bellowed, and Trisha assumed he was speaking into a radio. "I want the building locked down! No one gets in or out! Then I want a room by room search! Roston wants them alive, but if that doesn't work out, he'll get over it. Remember, they killed seven of our people."
Trisha recognized this man Griffin's voice. It was the same voice she'd heard over a loudspeaker ordering her and Chris out of the minivan atop the bridge in Lake Charles, right before Owen came to their rescue. That would be the "seven" Griffin was referring to-the ones Owen had killed on that bridge with the eighteen-wheeler.
This Major Gr ffin must be Roston 'c second in command.
She turned back to her friends and saw Terry visibly swallow.
When Griffin's footsteps had receded down the hall, Terry whispered, "These guys are hardcore. We'll never make it to the stairwellthey'll have it covered."
"Yeah, okay," Trisha conceded.
"What about the elevator shaft?" asked Terry.
"It's right across the hall from the stairwell. They'd see us."
They were silent for a moment, thinking, but could still hear the soldiers moving about. Trisha thought she heard a door open and close in the distance. Griffin's door-to-door sweep had begun, from the sound of it.
"No way down .. " said Mae softly to herself.
She was staring at the windows, and Trisha followed her gaze.
"Up," Trisha whispered. The roof. Come on."
Her rifle was slung over one shoulder, but she pulled the strap around so that the gun came into her hands. She felt stronger just holding it.
She cracked open the door and peeked out. Another door was slightly open just across the hall. With a glance down the corridor in both directions, she darted across the hall, Terry and Mae right behind.
The small office they were in had another door to their right, which Trisha guessed probably led to a connecting office or utility room. She pointed to it, and Terry led the way while she quietly closed the door behind.
`Anybody else hear that?" called out a voice.
The office door had latched when Trisha closed it.
"They're here! Move in!" shouted another voice. It was Griffin this time.
Heavy footsteps closed in from several directions, and Trisha followed the others through the next door. She found Terry already standing on a desk chair and fiddling with the air-conditioning grate in the ceiling.
Yeah, the ducts ... Let's hope they haven't rusted so much they won't hold our weight... .
Trisha caught a glimpse of Terry giving Mae a leg up into the duct when the world blinked and she was somewhere else. She couldn't move much, then quickly realized her entire body was sinking inside something with a thick and syrupy consistency, yet it was coarse to the touch, like quicksand.
There was no air to breathe in this place, and no light to see. Slowly, very slowly, she sank deeper and deeper, trying to claw her way up and out but only descending further.
When she could hold her breath no longer, she tried to breathe through her nose, and got two nostrils full of sand-or something similar to sand. She needed to cough, to clear whatever was suffocating her, but had no reservoir of air to draw from-
Everything blinked again and she was standing in the tiny office, still flailing her arms and legs, trying to escape the quicksand. She couldn't hold in her coughing and gagging, and Terry and Mae-who were both sprawled on the floor-did likewise.
Griffin and his men out in the hall didn't hear them, because they were coughing and gagging as well.
"Hurry!" Trisha whispered betwe
en hacks. "Go!"
In the hall she heard one of Griffin's men swear loudly. When he'd collected himself, he shouted, "Sir! Over here!"
Terry's hand extended down from the duct, and Trisha jumped up and grabbed it. The office door was kicked in from outside with lots of angry shouting. Trisha snapped the trigger of her rifle, firing blind and mad in the general direction of the door as Terry pulled her up.
Main Street stood cluttered with black jeeps and dozens of soldiers.
Still Owen crept his way down its far side, hiding and clinging to an endless row of hedges and trees for cover.
Owen kept himself low and agile; he'd even left his rifle behind, as he stopped two blocks short of the big white office building where Trisha and the others had called from. Directly across the road from his position waited a line of three jeeps parked right in the middle of the street. But the soldiers were everywhere. He could see them grouped in clusters, moving in every direction, or pacing back and forth at their posts.
Just two blocks down to his right, a company of more than ten marched together, two by two, heading south and away from him. They were outfitted in the usual gray camouflage, weaponry, and goggles. He was fortunate that none of them looked in his direction as they passed by, or the infrared vision in their goggles would have easily spotted him hiding in the bushes. But they were still within earshot, so he remained still and quiet. Another, smaller group walked down a cross street headed west, and he didn't dare move until they had passed. A lone soldier paced in front of a bank about a block to the south. A group of three soldiers caught his attention, approaching from the west, talking as they marched in formation yet hefting their powerful rifles in two hands and ready to shoot. Owen was too far away to make out what they were saying, but it looked like they were on their way back to the jeeps.
As the trio walked behind a big tree, Owen sprinted across the road and ducked behind the jeep nearest to the three soldiers, praying he was lucky enough that the lone soldier in front of the bank had been facing the other direction as he ran. When the soldiers passed by the first jeep, Owen snatched the man pulling up the rear of their formation, yanking him to the right without a sound. The other two men were at their respective vehicles before realizing their compatriot was not at his.
They turned and doubled back, regrouping to find him unconscious on the ground between two jeeps. As they knelt to inspect his prone form, Owen rendered one unconscious with a powerful blow to the back of the head while nearly simultaneously slipping behind the third solder and slapping a hand over his mouth, preventing him from calling out.
The soldier managed to snatch a long and deadly looking knife and arced it up, trying to jab Owen in the ear with it, but Owen caught the man's hand and held it at bay, the tip barely an inch from touching his head.
Owen twisted the wrist holding the knife and brought it up into the small of the soldier's back. Once it was in place, he gave it a brutal tug, snapping the soldier's elbow. The man tried to scream into Owen's hand, but only a muffled howl emerged, too low for anyone but Owen to hear.
Owen turned loose of the man and spun him around in the same motion, chancing a quick extension to his full height. The man's mouth was now free to yell, but in that split second he was too preoccupied with the forearm that hung limp at his side. Owen grabbed the man around the neck and pulled down while bringing one knee up to collide with the man's nose.
The man had barely hit the ground when Owen heard a voice from just inches over his right shoulder.
"Don't move," said the newcomer.
Owen spun, grabbing the soldier's gun by the barrel with one hand and pointing it up at the sky, while using his other hand to grab the man's ear. He continued the motion, slamming the soldier's head down onto the hood of the nearest jeep. The soldier joined the pile of unconscious men on the ground, making four of them in one tidy little spot, while Owen crouched beside them and took a proper hold of the rifle he'd removed from the newcomer's hands.
They're going to know what were doing, and they're going to be coming. Any minute ... !
Trisha wedged her rifle into the handle of the one door that led from the building below to the roof. Finished, she looked around, surveying the landscape.
Getting up here had been the easy part. Getting down would be impossible.
There were no ladders, no escape chutes, no convenient fire escapes. There was nothing. Just a straight drop over the side to the street, more than ten stories down.
"Get down!" Terry screamed at the same moment gunshots were fired at them. The sniper across the street, whom they'd eluded earlier, had climbed to a higher vantage point and was now firing on them.
Trisha and Mae scrambled behind the rooftop access doorway, while Terry ducked below the edging of the roof, chancing a wild shot now and then but having no luck hitting the sniper.
Trisha clutched at her abdomen, her stomach cramping. She forced herself to ignore the sensation. There was no time to think about it now.
Someone banged on the door from the inside and shouted at them to open it immediately. It sounded like Major Griffin again. She'd known of him less than fifteen minutes and she was already sick of his voice.
"Where's my air support?!" barked Griffin from just inside the door. "Corporal, I want this door wired to blow right now!"
"We are so exceedingly dead," Terry said under his breath.
"Need to go," whispered Mae.
Trisha had almost forgotten that Mae was with them, she'd said so little since the soldiers showed up. But even now, in the midst of all this, she was calm and levelheaded. Trisha was stunned to find herself thinking that under different circumstances, this girl could've made a good astronaut.
"Right," Trisha agreed. "There, move!"
She pointed at a large air-conditioning unit attached to the roof, twenty feet away on the north corner of the building. The three of them ran; Terry shot in the general direction of the sniper to cover their steps, but it didn't stop the sniper from firing at them. The white cement roof popped and crackled, bits of powder rising from the impact points.
All three of them crashed against the far side of the air-conditioning unit, crouching there for cover.
"Trisha, do you read?" said Chris' voice in her ear. She took heart at the sound, a tiny sprout of hope taking root.
"Yeah, we hear you," she replied, panting.
"We have a pair of jeeps standing by. Where are you?"
"Rooftop, same building, ten stories up. Chris, we're taking fireanother rooftop, clue east! We sealed off access from the stairway, but they're going to break through any minute!"
She heard him exhale a terse breath. `All right, all right, don't panic. Uhh ... I can see your building. There's another building to your immediate south; can you get over to that roof?"
Terry spun to look. "Negative, negative!" he said. "The gap's at least twenty feet!"
All right, listen," Chris said, slowing down. "Beech is working on a solution, but we need a few minutes to get into position. This idea he has-it's pretty wild, it's a last resort, but ... listen, we can do this, you'll just need to-"
"Chris, give me a hand," said Owen in the background. Apparently he'd removed his earpiece.
"Okay, stand by, Trish...."
"Copy that," Trisha replied with false bravery.
The pounding on the rooftop door stopped, which they knew could only mean one thing: it was being rigged to blow. The sniper fire had stopped, but only because they were behind cover. She knew the sniper had to be waiting for them to make a move, his finger poised on the trigger.
Terry removed his earpiece, and leaned in closer. "Are you okay?"
Trisha glanced at Mae, who also looked on her with something like concern in those eerie eyes of hers. "Yeah," she said.
"Really?"
The way he was looking at her, he knew she wasn't okay. But she lied anyway, long years of silence keeping her from coming clean. "Yes, I'll he fine."
She wished
Chris and Owen would hurry up.
He wouldn't stop staring at her, and neither would Mae. "Really. I'm okay."
"No, you're not!" he persisted, but Trisha struggled to pay attention to his words while thinking that the roof access door would be blown out any minute now, that Griffin's air support could be flying over them already, that Chris would be calling to tell them to move any second ...
"I can see it in the circles under your eyes," said Terry. "I see the way you carry yourself, the little winces of pain you try to hide. I can't imagine . . .
His voice trailed off as he must have noticed that her eyes were burning, her vision blurred. She was about to say something, thank him or ... something. But Chris' voice in her earpiece cut her off.
"Okay, we're ready here."
Trisha pointed at Terry's hand to let him know to put his earpiece back in.
"Listen carefully," said Chris. "These jeeps come equipped with winch cables. Beech found a-well, it's some kind of spear gun or rocket launcher or something in between, I don't know what. Some of Roston's men were carrying it. He's rigged a cable to it, and when I drive the jeep up to your building, he's going to shoot the cable up in your direction. It'll latch onto the building, and you'll have to slide down it to the ground."
Trisha could hear something in his voice. "What's the catch?"
"We're coming at you the wrong way; you'll have to run across the entire roof to reach the cable. And ... we're pretty sure the cable won't make it all the way to the roof. Beech says it's not long enough. So you're going to have to climb yourselves down to ... to wherever this thing lodges in the side of that building."
Trisha didn't know what to say. She wasn't normally afraid of anything. She'd traveled to the moon and to Mars! But the world was deserted, people were trying to kill them, now they were going to pull some kind of crazy stunt to get out of this alive, and she was sore and tired. She just couldn't come up with any words.
"How long, Chris?" asked Terry.
"We're less than a minute out. I'll give you a signal about five to ten seconds before Beech shoots the cable. We'll move the jeep out to stretch the cable taut enough that you'll have a good sixty-degree angle or so to slide down."
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