The Return of the Incredible Exploding Man

by Dave Hutchinson

  The buildings were weathered and dirty, the grass waist-high, despite regular helicopter inundations of herbicides, and it was starting to encroach on the cracked asphalt of the roadways. A few years before, the inner perimeter around the main Facility building had been moved about a thousand yards further out, and reinforced with a second fence. Soldiers in black combat gear repeated the security checks performed by the Green Berets.

  Alex drove until they were a few hundred feet from the building, directly under the slowly twisting spiral cloud. The government, even after all this time, was sticking to the story that it was caused by some electromagnetic effect, but the truth was that nobody knew, although if they’d told everyone that it was caused by aliens more people would have believed them.

  Fenwick looked up at the white helix and curled his lips. He was a man of many attributes, very few of them admirable, but he was not a coward. He had been told that there was no danger in him coming this close to Point Zero, and he believed that. It had never occurred to him that a significant fraction of the Defence budget was devoted to stopping animals getting this close to the building.

  There had been much discussion about what to do about him after Alex appeared out of thin air in front of him. A quick look at his file suggested that appealing to his patriotic instincts would be pointless, and that giving him large amounts of money would be counterproductive and fruitless. A working group of thirty very very bright men and women had been convened simply to study the problem of What To Do About Airman Robert E Lee Fenwick, who one night while out on patrol at Fort Bragg had seen a screaming Scotsman appear from a direction that no one in the universe had ever seen before.

  Their solution was elegant and, Alex thought, unusually humane. Airman Fenwick was a simple organism, geared mainly to self-gratification, and his loyalty—and his silence—had been bought by the simple expedient of promoting him to the rank of four-star general. What fascinated Alex was that Fenwick never showed the slightest gratitude for this. It was as if the alternative never even occurred to him. He seemed totally oblivious to the concept that it would have been simpler, and far more cost-effective, to simply kill him.

  “Here we are, then,” Fenwick said.

  “Yes,” Alex said. “Here we are. I cannot argue with that.” Alex looked at the cloud, looked at the building. Fenwick had surprised everyone by taking to his new rank like a duck to water. He was still in the Air Force, but he was no longer of the Air Force. He had no duties to speak of, apart from the duties that involved Alex. His general’s pay had been backdated for a decade, and he had bought his parents a new house in West Virginia and his brother a new car, and he lived with his child bride Roselynne and their half-dozen squalling brats in a magnificent mansion in Alexandria, Virginia. The kids went to the best schools, and in moments of despair Alex hung onto that. The eldest girl, Bobbi-Sue, was starting at Princeton next year. Because of what had happened to Alex the Fenwick boys would not work all their lives in the local coal mines; the Fenwick girls would not marry the high school jock only to see him become a drunken wife-beater. They would be lawyers and doctors and Congressional Representatives and Senators, and maybe even Presidents. In his darkest moments Alex looked at Former Airman Fenwick, and he almost thought this was all worth it. Almost.

  “How long do we have?” Fenwick asked. He always asked that.

  Alex shrugged. “Minutes?” He always said that, too. “Days?” He opened the door and got out of the Hummer. Fenwick got out too, and together they unloaded the transport cases. They carried them around to the ruined moke garage, and emptied them of their telephone books. Then they put them back into the Humvee and dumped Alex’s gear on the ground beside the vehicle.

  Fenwick checked his watch. “Better be getting back,” he said.

  Alex nodded. In a couple of hours there would be an overflight. An unmarked black helicopter without an ID transponder would pass overhead, ignoring local traffic control until the last moment, when it would transmit a brief and curt series of digits that identified it as belonging to the NSA. It would dip down below the radar cover, hover for a few moments, and then lift up and fly off again. And that would be the civilian specialist leaving. “This is stupid. Someone’s going to work it out one day,” he said. He had no idea who had come up with this ridiculous charade. It would have been a lot simpler, and a great deal more covert, for him just to step directly into the building from wherever he happened to be at the time, but someone somewhere had overdosed on bad spy novels and liked the idea of having him infiltrate the site, with Former Airman Fenwick in his general’s guise to lend authority.

  Fenwick shrugged. “Nobody ever made any money trying to figure out why the government does what it does.” He put out his hand and Alex shook it. When they had first met Fenwick had been rangy and fidgety. Now he was calm and plump and sleek, and in Alex’s heart he couldn’t grudge him that. “Happy trails, Alex,” he said.

  “You too, Bobby Lee. See you soon.”

  “Let’s fucking hope, right?”

  Alex smiled. “Yes. Let’s.”

  Fenwick got back into the Hummer, gave a wave, and drove off back towards the gate, where he would tell the Special Forces and the Green Berets and eventually Colonel Kettering that the civilian specialist had arranged a separate means of departure. Which would, in its own way, be the only true thing about the whole operation.

  Alex watched the Humvee disappear into the distance. When it was gone, he picked up his stuff and carried it into the lobby of the building. A pretty good job had been made of cleaning it up and making it habitable again. Alex dumped his gear on the floor, unrolled his sleeping bag, pulled an armchair over to the window, and sat down.

  THE LONGEST HE had waited, so far, was two weeks. There was no way to predict it, but that had been an unusually long time. Food and water were no problem—he could conjure those up out of thin air, he barely even thought about it now—but the waiting produced a sort of nervy tedium that he didn’t like.

  He wasn’t entirely sure who was running things now. They had lost Flynn early, a massive heart attack a couple of years into the operation. Dom had been hit by a car while crossing the road in DC. Alex felt bad about that; he had liked both men and he could have prevented their deaths if he’d had some forewarning. Professor Sierpińska was still working hard, lost in a research team that was now almost as large as the one that had worked on the Manhattan Project but had produced little more hard science than it had back in the early days when they were all still floundering around. He saw less and less of Wendy; she was at CERN at the moment, having extremely classified discussions with some of the scientists at the LHC. At one point, the government had wanted to deploy him as a weapon, their very own caped crusader, but he had refused, and now, really, he only had the one purpose. Without it, he would have left years ago. They were never going to find a way to make him normal again.

  He finished his dinner and sat by the window drinking coffee and smoking a small cigar. The cigar was from a tin he’d found in his rucksack—a little gift from Fenwick. He’d heard the helicopter fly over while he was eating; it had dipped down momentarily a few hundred metres from Point Zero—which was actually an act of insane bravery on the part of its pilot in order to maintain what Alex considered the fatuous and transparent fiction of his ‘departure’—and then lifted away again to the West. Now everything was quiet and night was falling.

  He remembered when this whole place had been busy and bustling. He thought about Delahaye and all the others who had been with him in the control room on the day of the accident. Rob Chen, who was out of the room at the time, looking for Security, had survived, which was a small blessing. At least he’d saved one of them, even if he hadn’t known it at the time.

  He looked down at his arm. As he watched, the hairs on his forearm began to stir slowly and stand up.

  HE WENT OUTSIDE and stood in front of the building with his hands in his pockets. About seven hours ago, he had been sitting
in a briefing room in a White House basement with the president and about a dozen NSA and CIA staffers, watching a video.

  The video had been taken by a Predator drone flying over Afghanistan. It was the spearpoint of a long-running operation to kill a Taliban warlord codenamed WATERSHED, who had been tracked down to a compound in Helmand. It was the usual combat video, not black and white but that weird mixture of shades of grey. The landscape tipped and dipped as the Predator’s operator, thousands of miles away in the continental United States, steered the drone in on its target. Then a scatter of buildings popped up over a hill and the drone launched its missile, and as it did a human figure came walking around the corner of one of the buildings. The cross-hairs of the drone’s camera danced around the centre of the screen for a few moments, then the building puffed smoke in all directions and disappeared.

  And moments later, unaffected, seemingly not even having noticed the explosion, the figure calmly walked out of the smoke and carried on its way.

  “Well,” said the president when the video was over, “either the war in Afghanistan just took a very strange turn, or we’re going to need your services, Mr Dolan.”

  Alex looked into the sky. The moon was low down on the horizon and everything was bathed in a strange directionless silvery light that cast strange shadows. There was an electrical expectancy in the air, a smell of ozone and burnt sugar, a breeze that blew from nowhere, and then he was there, standing a few yards away, looking about him and making strange noises. Alex sighed.

  “Larry,” he called.

  Larry looked round, saw him, and said, “Jesus, Alex. What the hell happened?”

  It was always the same. He always manifested as a suspended cloud of meat and body parts and if the techs had a theory about this, no one had bothered to tell Alex. For Larry, every time was the first time, everything was new. He didn’t remember the accident, which was good, and he didn’t remember what came later, which was even better, but he was ferociously smart and Alex couldn’t afford to relax, even for a moment.

  “There was an accident,” Alex said. “Something happened during the last shot, we still don’t know exactly what.”

  Larry’s awful voice said, “What happened to your hair, Alex?”

  Alex ran a hand over his head. “It’s been a while, Larry. I got old.”

  “How long?”

  “Nearly fifteen years.”

  Larry looked around him and made those strange noises again. “Delahaye…”

  “All dead,” Alex said. “Delahaye, Warren, Bright, Morley. The whole team. You and I are the only survivors.”

  Larry looked at his hands; it was impossible to read the expression on what passed for his face. “I don’t seem to have survived very well, Alex. You seem to be doing all right, though.”

  Alex shrugged. “As I said, we still don’t know exactly what happened. You need help.”

  Larry laughed. “Oh? You think? Jesus, Alex.” He started to pace back and forth. Then he stopped. “Where was I? Before?”

  “Afghanistan. We think you were just trying to find your way back here.”

  Larry shook his head, which was an awful thing to watch. “No. Before that. There was… everything was the wrong… shape…”

  Alex took a step forward and said, “Larry…”

  “And before that… I was here, and we were having this conversation…”

  “It’s just déjà vu,” Alex told him. “It’s hardly the worst of your worries.”

  Larry straightened up and his body seemed to gain coherence. “Alex,” he said, “how many times have we done this before?”

  Alex shook his head. “Too fucking many,” he said, and he plunged his hands into the seething exploding mass of Larry Day’s body and pulled them both back into Hell.

  HE WALKED AN unimaginable distance. It took him an impossible length of time. Nothing here meant anything or made any sense, but he passed the structures representing Professor Delahaye and his scientists, and the SEAL team, all of them still in a dreamless half-death, colossal things that were almost too small to see.

  And here, somewhere, was Larry Day, returned to his Schrödinger state until the next time.

  Existing in the Manifold, being able to step between dimensions, being able to use that insight to manipulate the ‘real’ world, really was like being a god. Unfortunately, it was like being one of the gods HP Lovecraft used to write about, immense and unfathomable and entirely without human scruple. So far, the human race had been lucky that Larry seemed unable to quite get the knack of godhood. No one could work out why Alex had acclimatised to it so easily, or why it remained so difficult for Larry, why returning him there screwed him up all over again while Alex could cross back and forth at will, without harm.

  The only thing Alex could be certain of was that every time they met—and they had played out this absurd little pantomime twelve times so far—Larry seemed to recover more quickly. One day he was going to come out of it bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and Alex wouldn’t be able to drag him into the Manifold. He would have to fight him here, and it would be like nothing Stan Lee ever imagined. Either/Or. Either the world would survive, or it wouldn’t.

  And the wonderful, extravagant cosmic joke of it was that Larry was not even the Nightmare Scenario. The Nightmare Scenario was that Delahaye and the SCS scientists and the SEAL team somehow all dropped into a rest state at once and found their way into the real world. If that happened, it would make the Twilight of the Gods look like a quiet morning in a roadside diner. Alex planned to be somewhere else on that day. He was happy enough to present the appearance of humanity for the moment, but he didn’t owe these people anything.

  Eventually, he came across a room. Although this wasn’t a room in the sense that anyone here would recognise. It was all distributed planes of stress and knots of mass, open on all sides, too huge to measure. He stepped into the room and sat down in a comfortable chair.

  Nobody screamed. Nobody ran away. They were expecting him, of course, and he had learned long ago how to clothe himself before he came here. People hated it when naked men appeared out of nowhere in the Situation Room at the White House. Someone brought him coffee. The coffee here was always excellent.

  “Mr Dolan,” said the president.

  “Madam President,” he said. He sipped his coffee. “He’s recovering more quickly.”

  “We noticed,” said Professor Sierpińska. “The others?”

  “I saw some of them. They’re still aestivating. I couldn’t see any changes. We got away with it again.”

  “You look tired,” said the president.

  “I look how I want to look,” Alex snapped, and regretted it. The president was not an unkind person, and unlike her predecessor, the one who sent the SEALs into the Manifold, she was not an asshole. And he was tired. And anyway, it was ridiculous. Why would a godlike transdimensional superhero want to look like a tubby balding middle-aged man? If he wanted, he could look like Lady Gaga or Robert Downey, Jr., or an enormous crystal eagle, but what he really wanted was to be ordinary again, and that, of all things, he could not do.

  He looked up at the expectant faces, all of them waiting to hear how he had saved the world again.

  “Do you think I could have a sandwich?” he asked.

  About The Author

  Dave Hutchison is the multi-award winning author of the critically acclaimed Fractured Europe series for Solaris: Europe at Autumn, Europe in Winter, Europe at Midnight and Europe at Dawn.

  NOMINATED FOR THE 2015 ARTHUR C. CLARKE AND JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARDS

  Rudi is a cook in a Kraków restaurant, but when his boss asks Rudi to help a cousin escape from the country he’s trapped in, a new career – part spy, part people-smuggler – begins. Following multiple economic crises and a devastating flu pandemic, Europe has fractured into countless tiny nations, duchies, polities and republics. Recruited by the shadowy organisation Les Coureurs des Bois, Rudi is schooled in espionage, but when a training mission
to The Line, a sovereign nation consisting of a trans-Europe railway line, goes wrong, he is arrested and beaten, and Coureur Central must attempt a rescue.

  With so many nations to work in, and identities to assume, Rudi is kept busy travelling across Europe. But when he is sent to smuggle someone out of Berlin and finds a severed head inside a locker instead, a conspiracy begins to wind itself around him. With kidnapping, double-crosses and a map that constantly re-draws itself, Europe in Autumn is a science fiction thriller like no other.

  ‘One of the best novels I’ve read in a long time.’

  Adam Roberts, The Guardian

  ‘Europe in Autumn is the work of a consummate storyteller and combines great characters, a cracking central idea, and a plot that will keep you on the edge of your seat. Excellent.’

  Eric Brown

  www.solarisbooks.com

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