‘He’s right,’ Umbebe’s voice boomed. ‘The codes have been inputted, and there is no time left. It’s all over. Embrace it, Ms Durham. It is our destiny.’
‘It doesn’t have to be,’ she said, her eyes still fixed on Jack, her mind made up. It was the only thing left that she could do. ‘Please don’t try and stop me.’
‘No!’ Jack said as she turned and raised her gun towards Umbebe.
Alyssa saw the look of surprise on Umbebe’s face as the barrel tracked towards his face.
‘Damn it, Alyssa, don’t do it!’ Jack shouted.
Umbebe’s hands came up in front of him in an instinctive gesture of protection, but Alyssa didn’t hesitate. Her finger depressed the trigger of Tomkin’s gun, and three shots hit Umbebe in the stomach, shaking him violently in his chair. His eyes went wide with shock and pain and, even more terribly, the fear of defeat and failure – before closing in death.
But Alyssa never saw the eyes close, and would never know what would happen to the world, as Jack unloaded his pistol into the back of her head, his anguished cries the last thing she ever heard.
8
JACK SAGGED, THE impact of the last thirty seconds overwhelming him. He stared at Alyssa’s dead body on the floor, blood spilling across the tiles.
The truth was, he really had loved her, the first time he had genuinely felt the emotion for another human being; at least since his father, who had first taught him about the nature and purpose of life and death.
But he loved the planet more, and in his heart of hearts he knew Umbebe was right. The maths, the science, it was all perfect; the earth was due to be cleansed according to the great cosmic programme, and only human technology stood in its way. Flood warning systems, early earthquake detection, weapons which could knock incoming meteorites out of their trajectory with the earth – what chance did nature have? And so it was right, so absolutely right, to have the earth’s ritual cleansing brought about by the same technology that was protecting it from natural destruction.
Umbebe’s plan had been perfect. It was just a shame Alyssa had had to become involved, a shame he had let his feelings develop the way they had.
Jack walked forward, stepping over Alyssa’s body. He bent towards Umbebe and pulled him out of his chair, toppling him to the floor next to Alyssa.
His mentor had wanted to initiate the destruction of the earth, but his chance had gone.
Jack sat down in the chair and cracked his fingers. He would just have to do it himself.
9
JAMES RUSHTON FELT the ground shaking beneath him.
For hours now, he had heard the constant blare of car engines, horns and sirens in the streets outside. He had seen the people who worked in this building fleeing across the plaza, though nobody ever came to unlock his cell door.
And so he felt the tremors, and watched through his cell window as buildings started to fall, and the entire plaza disappeared into a giant crater as the earth ate it up whole.
He had only seconds to register the fact that he was witnessing one of the most powerful earthquakes the world had ever seen, titanic forces of nature wreaking utter destruction.
And he watched in mute fascination as the walls of his own cell collapsed, the floor giving way just as the ceiling above him disintegrated and his body was lost forever amidst three million tons of rubble.
It was what he deserved, John Jeffries realized as he stared out across the wide city boulevard. He and his colleagues had meddled with powers they shouldn’t have, and this was the result.
The President and most other members of the cabinet had been moved to secure bunkers, but Jeffries had refused. He knew the futility of such a gesture, because he knew the power of the weapon.
It was over for him almost before it began. The colossal wall of water from the tsunami moved towards him down the avenue, swallowing building after building, carrying cars, people and broken brickwork in its titanic wall.
And then it hit him, and for a glorious moment he was a part of that wall. And then he was gone, and the tidal wave continued on its unconscious mission to destroy every single thing in its path.
The snowstorm was increasing in intensity. General David Tomkin shivered as he backed away into the small cave.
He had fled the camp area with food, weapons and supplies, wandering the forest for as long as he could before he had to find shelter, somewhere to hole up until this whole damn thing was over.
But as he retreated into the cave, he realized it was already over. Snow simply didn’t fall like this naturally, and he had to respect whoever was controlling the device, for they must know that by covering the area with such a deep, impenetrable layer of snow, they would be ultimately killing themselves too.
He looked on in dismay as the snow drifted up past the entrance to his cave, so unnaturally thick and cloying that he knew he would never escape, never again set foot outside, never again breathe fresh air.
He shook his head sadly and sat down on the bags of supplies he had dragged through the forest.
Humming a tune to himself, he started to load the shotgun he had brought with him from the camp, knowing now that there would be no chance to hunt with it like he had intended. Not in this life, at any rate.
And then, saying a prayer for the salvation of his soul, he put the shotgun’s double barrels in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
10
JACK SIGHED AS he sat back in the chair, eyes dark, his body collapsing. He had been sitting alone in the small room for two days now, controlling the end of the world from his computer station. It had been too much for the other technicians down there, and they had all fled eventually, ultimately unwilling to commit to the final responsibility.
And now it was all over.
Across the world, devastation was raging. Earthquakes, tidal waves, volcanic eruptions; all had been sent to destroy the earth, by his own hand.
The base itself lay under a field of snow some twenty metres deep.
So much destruction, in so short a time. But, he thought with satisfaction, the world would endure. It would be reborn to start anew, afresh. He wondered what sort of world it would be.
He had read somewhere once that such wide-scale disasters might even cause a so-called ‘polar shift’, the entire crust of the earth shifting round the molten lava of the magma layer beneath like the skin of an orange pulled round the fruit.
What would the world look like when it was finished? He shook his head, dazed from his vigil at the computer. He would never know.
He looked across the blood-slick floor at Oswald Umbebe, his father figure for so many years.
And next to him, the body of Alyssa Durham, so lovely even in death. She was such a driven woman, surely she would have understood his own single-minded determination.
A tear came to his eye as he realized he would never know.
The days dragged on and Jack’s food and water supplies finally ran out; he was also struggling to breathe. The pressure of the snow, or some other, unknown force – he had long ago lost contact with the outside world – had caused the internal air-conditioning system to malfunction.
With a feeling he could only identify as relief, he understood that he would asphyxiate before he died of starvation or thirst.
As the last of the oxygen left the control room and the lights started to dim, Jack thought again of what the new world would be like.
He looked at the body of Alyssa, dead by his own hand. Would there be love in this new world, as she had displayed?
He hoped so.
And then the lights went out completely, and Jack’s last painful breaths took place in the pitch black of space; the same, he told himself, as eternal creation.
And then . . . nothing.
EPILOGUE
THE MACHINERY HUMMED beneath Egypt’s unforgiving desert sun, operated by a specialist team called in by Clive Burnett.
Indeed, Burnett had been forced to call all manner of people in to help him
with his find in the Valley of the Kings. He had even had to inform Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, who had – for the first time in Burnett’s long experience – agreed that they needed outside help.
And so an international team had descended on the fabled valley – computer technicians, biologists, metallurgists, experts in all manner of different dating techniques, radar communications specialists, anthropologists, and even linguists. Every science which could be represented was there, waiting for their turn to explore the treasures hidden beneath the sand.
This morning’s visiting party, Burnett noted as he waited at the bottom of the access tunnel, were the linguists. It would be interesting to find out if they could decipher anything. But first, there was the tour.
‘Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,’ he said brightly, excited as always by what he was going to show them. ‘If you’d like to step this way, we’ll enter what we’ve established is some sort of reinforced control room for the radar field that’s being revealed by our archaeologists back on the surface.’
As the linguists entered the room, they looked around with excitement. The room was a mass of incredibly complex machinery, reaching from one wall to another. The visitors were struck by how similar the computer systems looked to what they were familiar with themselves. But their amazement soon turned to horror as they saw the bloodstains that covered the floor.
‘What happened here?’ one of the visitors asked.
‘There appears to have been some sort of shoot-out,’ Burnett said. ‘This room hadn’t been disturbed since the incident happened, it was a completely closed environment. When we realized this, we pulled out immediately and waited until we could secure the bodies, knowing that the oxygen could destroy the organic matter. But we managed to save the bodies – which share almost one hundred per cent of our own DNA, by the way – and figure out what happened.
‘There were three bodies, two men and a woman. As far as we can make out, the woman shot one of the men, who sat in this chair here,’ he indicated with his finger. ‘Someone, most likely the second man, then shot the woman in the head from behind, pulled the man out of his chair and took his place behind the console, where he later died of a combination of starvation and lack of oxygen.’
‘But what happened here?’ another of the linguists asked, while some of the others tried to read the strange words inscribed on some of the machines around the room.
‘As far as we have been able to ascertain, this whole room was the command centre for some sort of sonic weapon. These computers are full of files, full of information, and our specialists have managed to get them operational again, with power from the generators back up top. But we’re going to need your help to decipher what we have.’
‘Is it true?’ a woman asked. ‘About what happened?’
Burnett nodded, knowing that the story was already working its way out from the enclosed research site, and would probably soon be hitting the world media anyway.
‘We believe so, yes. But let me show you,’ he said, heading towards one of the computers. He switched it on, and the visitors again marvelled at how similar it was to what they themselves used.
‘Although we can’t yet read their language, we can still learn a lot from their maps.’ He pulled one of the maps up on to the screen as he spoke, showing a world which looked familiar, yet somehow different.
‘It’s shifted,’ one of the scientists commented eventually.
‘Yes,’ Burnett confirmed. ‘A catastrophic string of disasters – possibly caused by the technology in this room – produced a polar shift, resulting in cataclysmic climate change and mass extinction. The map of the world was changed irreversibly.’
He gestured around the room. ‘This chamber, indeed Egypt itself, used to lie within the Arctic Circle. And what appears to have been the major civilization of the time had its main cities further down the eastern coast of modern-day Africa. The capital appears to have been located somewhere around present-day Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, with another major city a few hundred miles below, in what we now know as Mozambique.’
‘Like Washington and New York,’ one of the linguists said, struggling to take it all in.
‘But when did all this happen?’ the woman asked, clearly shaken.
‘From our initial investigations, we have reason to believe that the people in this room died just over two point four million years ago.’
The shock hit the linguists like a physical body blow, writ clear across every one of their faces. Burnett didn’t blame them; he could scarcely believe it himself.
‘But that means. . .’ one of the men stammered.
‘Yes,’ Burnett answered the unfinished question. ‘It means we are not the first.’
And if that’s true, Burnett did not add, then it also means we probably won’t be the last.
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