by Jude Hardin
Ever.
And if his hunch about the wiring configuration was correct, the odds of disabling the circuit and getting out of the building in one piece were astronomical. He would have to guess correctly four times in a row, cutting everything except the hotwire to the collapsing circuit. The likelihood of a successful outcome was practically nil, so the only logical choice was to get out while there was still time.
Another urgent message flashed red on the holographic display, indicating that he and the computer in his brain had reached the same conclusion: RUN.
Mike rose, lost his balance, fell to one knee. His oxygen saturation level had fallen again, all the way to eighty percent this time. If he didn’t get out of the lab soon, he was going to suffocate. Never mind the explosion. The methane would kill him first.
5:22…5:21…5:20…
He got down and started belly-crawling toward the door. The air was better at ground level, and his lungs had begun the slow and arduous task of cleansing themselves by the time he exited the lab. He stood and staggered down the hallway to the first intersection.
Left, right, or straight?
He couldn’t remember. He was disoriented, his sense of direction fouled by the gas molecules in his blood.
He decided to turn right, realizing it was a mistake when the first door he came to said ANIMAL RESEARCH LABORATORY.
The animals. How could he have forgotten about the animals? Had he ever known about them? He couldn’t remember.
He opened the door and walked into a cacophony of laughing monkeys and moaning cats. Large stainless steel shelves lined the walls, and a variety of cages housed the seemingly frantic critters. It smelled like a pet store in there, one that hadn’t been properly tended to in a while.
4:49…4:48…4:47…
It was a large rectangular space, about the size of a hotel conference room, but luckily most of the cages were already empty. Mike figured the animal trials were winding down, soon to be phased out completely and replaced with human volunteers such as himself. That had been the plan, anyway. With Dr. Aggerson dead now, the future of the program seemed doubtful.
Mike was feeling better. His head had started to clear. His own thought processes, along with those augmented by the MK-2, were almost back to normal.
He did a quick count. There were sixteen cats and eight monkeys, each in its own separate cage. If he worked fast, it would take approximately twelve minutes to carry the cages out one at a time.
But he didn’t have twelve minutes. He had four minutes and thirty-two seconds. Even if he consolidated some of the animals and carried them out together, there wasn’t going to be nearly enough time for a complete evacuation.
The only reasonable alternative was to open all the cages and let the animals fend for themselves. It was the best he could do. He unlatched the steel wire doors one at a time, careful to keep his fingers clear of scratching claws and biting teeth.
The animals seemed to sense the gravity of the situation, the imminent danger in the air. One by one, they jumped from the shelves and darted toward the open door.
3:52…3:51…3:50…
A single cat remained. Shiny black fur, bright green eyes.
Mike rattled the cage. “Go on,” he said. “Get out of here.”
“Meow.”
“You don’t understand. You’re going to get blown to bits in a few minutes if you don’t run for it. Go! Now!”
“Meow.”
Mike reached in and hooked his hand under the cat’s thorax, just behind its front legs. He lifted the animal from the cage and cradled it in his arms.
“Stupid cat,” he said.
But maybe it was the smartest animal of the bunch. It certainly seemed content to be getting a complimentary ride to safety.
Mike ran for the door and backtracked to the intersection where he’d gone the wrong direction, choosing the opposite hallway this time, knowing it would lead where he wanted to go.
There were felines milling around nervously, primates jumping and dancing and yawping as if they were already on fire. About halfway to the rear exit, Mike glanced back and saw that some of them—maybe all of them—had started following him, cats and monkeys trotting along together in a mad dash for freedom.
“Meow,” the black cat in his arms said.
“Yeah, you’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”
“Meow.”
Mike turned the corner, and there it was.
The back door.
And there lay Jefferson, the dead CIA operative, Mike’s ticket back to the outside world.
“I’m going to have to put you down for a minute,” he said to the black cat.
The other animals gathered around, some of them scratching at the steel door, monkeys screaming and cats yowling, all of them anxious to exit.
Mike used the wire cutters to chew through the tissue surrounding the second knuckle of Jefferson’s right thumb, and then he squeezed the handles hard and snipped through the bone. It was tougher than he’d thought it would be. The cutters really weren’t the right tool for the job, but he finally managed to liberate the appendage completely.
Jefferson’s circulatory system had come to a grinding halt quite some time ago, so there wasn’t much blood to speak of, just a shiny blob of red on the severed end that looked like some sort of horrific meat Jell-O.
1:20…1:19…1:18…
Mike swiped Jefferson’s ID card and pressed the gooey slippery thumb against the scanner.
The deadbolt snicked open.
Mike grabbed the black cat and pushed through the door and sprinted toward the little two-lane access road at the other end of the parking lot.
All of the other animals followed.
Seconds before the blast…
A bright orange ball of fire streaked across the night sky. Still running as fast as he could, galloping toward the area where he’d left Kelly Williams, Mike looked up and zoomed in on the fiery spectacle, the crippled husk of a commercial airliner, descending rapidly, whistling through the crisp October night like a gigantic flaming arrow. It arced over the research facility and crashed into the woods several miles away.
Mike kept running. He still had the black cat in his arms, but all the other animals had scattered safely into the woods. At least he hoped they were safe. It all depended on the percussive impact from the CIA’s makeshift bomb, which was due explode in
10…
9…
8…
Mike veered off to the gravel shoulder and into the grass, finally making his way to the edge of the woods. He stomped through the brush, holding the cat with one arm and shielding his own face from tree branches with the other.
“Kelly,” he shouted. “Where are you?”
Mike had switched on the infrared, but the forest was thick with mature hardwoods and old-growth pines and he couldn’t see through them. He needed x-ray vision. He planned to drop a note in the suggestion box the next time he volunteered for a revolutionary prototype brain implant.
He was about to call out again when Kelly said, “Over here, man. Just follow the sound of my voice.”
As Mike turned in that direction, a blinding whiteness seared the night sky, like a flash from a billion synchronized strobes, and an earsplitting, chest-thumping, earth-fracturing wall of sound swept through the woods, an apocalyptic tidal wave of thunder loud enough to rattle your teeth loose.
The heat from the blast was enough to singe the hairs on Mike’s eyebrows, even from half a mile away. He felt lucky that he’d made it to the woods in time. If he hadn’t, his body would probably be one big blister by now.
The cat dug its claws into Mike’s chest, then bounded forward and scurried away.
“Kelly! Talk to me, man!”
“Over here!”
Partially deaf and shaken to the core, Mike trudged through the heavy brush, finally making his way to the fence line. Kelly was sitting on the ground with his head between his knees, rocking back and forth, obvio
usly in great distress.
“You all right?” Mike said.
“It hurts. I need a doctor.”
“Where does it hurt?”
“My ear. Inside my head.”
“All right. Let’s get out of here.”
As Mike started to part the chain link where Kelly had cut it, the black cat ran from behind a bush and jumped back into his arms.
“Where’d that thing come from?” Kelly said, grabbing the fence and pulling himself to a standing position.
“He was one of the lab animals. I let them all go before I left the building, and this one—”
“Surely you’re not thinking about bringing him along.”
“Why not?”
“He’s not getting in my car, man. I don’t want cat pee on my upholstery.”
“Don’t worry,” Mike said, nodding toward the right sleeve of his windbreaker. “He already went.”
“Great. I thought I smelled something.”
Mike slipped through the hole in the fence, and Kelly followed. They jogged away from the property, following the service road toward the highway, staying in the shadows off to the side.
“Let’s pick it up,” Mike said. “We need to get out of here ASAP.”
Kelly was huffing and puffing, but he managed to maintain the pace Mike had set.
“You’re killing me,” he said. “You know that, right?”
“We’re just lucky the explosion didn’t kill us both.”
“No kidding. Hey, some kind of missile whizzed through the sky right before the big boom. You see that?”
“It was an airplane,” Mike said. “It crashed a few miles away.”
“An airplane. This just keeps getting weirder.”
“Yeah.”
Mike started running a little faster, increasing his speed gradually, hoping they could make it to the car before the cops and the fire trucks started rolling in.
“Does your kitty cat have a name?” Kelly said, so winded now he was barely able to speak.
“A name? No. Haven’t really thought about it.”
“I think you should call him Slick.”
“Slick?”
“Yeah. He’s so black and shiny, he almost looks wet.”
“Okay. Slick it is.”
Kelly laughed. “I think it’s fitting, you know, in more ways than one.”
They rounded the corner, stayed close to the edge of the woods. Mike could see the car now. It was less than a hundred feet away.
A pair of headlights loomed in the distance. Mike telescoped in on the vehicle, saw the light bar on top and the Tennessee State Police markings on the side.
“Trouble coming our way,” he said. “Follow me.”
They veered off to the right, slowed to a stop a few feet inside the tree line.
“What is it?” Kelly said.
“Cop.”
As the word left Mike’s mouth, the officer switched on his blue flashers and made a U-turn. He pulled to the shoulder and parked behind the getaway car.
“How did you know?” Kelly said.
“I can’t tell you that. But after everything that has happened tonight, you’re certainly welcome to draw your own conclusions.”
“All I can figure is that you’re from another planet or something. Is that it? Are you an alien? Is that why they blew that place up? To get rid of you and your spaceship and all your alien friends?”
“You watch too much TV,” Mike said.
“Well, something ain’t right about you.”
“Here, hold the cat.”
“Where you going?”
“I’m going to go talk to the nice officer up there.”
Mike handed Slick over to Kelly, treaded out of the woods and climbed the grassy bank to the highway. He sprinted along the shoulder at full speed toward the cruiser, hoping to get there before the officer had a chance to run the tags. Mike figured he would check his mirrors at some point, and he did.
The trooper switched on a spotlight, slung his door open, climbed out with his pistol drawn.
“Stop right there!” he shouted.
Mike stopped, his chest approximately forty feet from the .40 caliber barrel. He knew now that he was capable of dodging the bullet if the officer fired, and he knew that he could pull his own pistol and send the young man to an early grave before he had time to blink. But that’s not what he wanted.
“I can explain everything,” he said.
“On the ground! Now!”
In a gesture of compliance, and also hoping the policeman wouldn’t get a good look at his face, Mike lay flat on his stomach and laced his fingers together behind his head. The trooper advanced slowly, the soles of his spit-shined boots crunching the greasy roadside gravel.
“I don’t want any trouble, officer,” Mike said.
“I don’t want any trouble either. Is that your car?”
“It belongs to a friend of mine. The engine stalled, and—”
“You got some ID on you?”
“No sir, I don’t.”
The trooper was only a few feet away now. Mike heard the jingle of his handcuffs as he detached them from the back of his belt.
The MK-2 allowed Mike to tap his own strength to the max, but there would be no way for him to break the steel chains connecting the cuffs. It wasn’t humanly impossible.
Therefore, he couldn’t allow them to be placed on his wrists.
When Mike heard the .40 caliber semi-automatic service pistol slide back into its holster, he spun and jumped to his feet and wrapped the trooper in a headlock and jammed his thumb into a pressure point behind his left ear. All this in one swift motion, finding the anatomical landmark effortlessly, rendering the officer unconscious and lowering him to the pavement before he had a chance to grab his club or his gun or his pepper spray or his Taser. And most importantly, before he had a chance to key the microphone on his collar.
Mike cuffed the officer’s hands behind his back and left him there on the shoulder of the highway. He would be all right, assuming a passing motorist didn’t swerve off the road and run him over. Not likely with the spotlight on and the blue strobes flashing.
Mike trotted up to Kelly’s car, slammed the hood shut, checked the driver’s side door. It wasn’t locked, but Mike didn’t have the keys to start it with, and of course he still didn’t know how to drive a standard transmission anyway. He slid the shifter into neutral and turned the vehicle around and started pushing it in the other direction. Ninety feet later, he saw Kelly running up the bank to the shoulder.
Mike let the car roll to a stop, ran around and climbed into the passenger’s seat. Kelly lowered Slick to the back floorboard, slid in behind the wheel and started the engine. He put the car in gear, eased over to the right side of the highway, gradually accelerated to the speed limit.
Nobody said anything for a couple of miles.
A lot of things had gone wrong tonight, Mike thought. Dr. Skellar being shot to pieces, the helicopter crash, the total destruction of the CereCirc research facility. And even with all his enhanced abilities, he’d been powerless to prevent most of it. He thought about Nika, how her life had been forever changed by this insanity, by this bizarre series of events.
Of course Cara Skellar had started the whole thing when she killed Clive Aggerson. She murdered Aggerson, and then she abducted Mike from the monitor room. If that had never happened, none of the rest of it would have, either. Someone had to push that first domino.
Mike wasn’t sure where to turn at this point. The evidence against the CIA was gone now. He couldn’t go to the police, and he certainly couldn’t trust anyone from the federal government. He needed to get this thing out of his brain and try to get his life back, but how? The surgeon who’d put it there, the only person in the world who really knew how it worked, was dead.
Surely there was a way. He needed to get in touch with the admiral, the second and final link in his chain of command. Maybe the admiral would know what to do. Maybe Dr. Agg
erson had left some instructions.
Mike switched off the infrared, stared into the blackness beyond his window, hoping Nika had gotten started on the research he asked her to do, hoping she would know the admiral’s identity by seven o’clock Friday evening when she called the Shell station.
He thought about all those things, and then he just sat there and reflected on how much he didn’t know about himself. He knew nothing. That’s what it boiled down to. He was a man with no past, no history.
And the future wasn’t looking real bright either.
Kelly finally broke the silence.
“Did you kill that cop?”
“No. I just knocked him out. He’ll be all right.”
“So what’s going to happen now? You want me to drop you somewhere?”
“I need a place to stay tonight,” Mike said. “Think you could help me out?”
“I’d like to, but—”
“Please.”
“I’ve been staying in a motel, man. It’s not much, but I can throw you a blanket and a pillow if you want to crash on the floor.”
“Okay. Can we stop somewhere and get some cat food?”
Kelly grunted affirmatively, and then they were silent again for a while.
Motel 1
It was almost 2:00 a.m. by the time Kelly steered the car into the motel’s parking lot. The red neon sign out front said Fred Johnson’s Motor Lodge.
Howard’s less successful brother, Mike thought.
Free color TV, wireless Internet, and continental breakfast. All for less than forty dollars a night. Two blocks off Kirby Parkway, it was an easy commute to Jock World, and from there just a stone’s throw to Nika’s residence. Her former residence, Mike thought. He had a feeling she would never be able to go back there.
“You owe me one,” Kelly said. “I had to stand in line for an hour to get this stuff.”
On the way to the motel, they’d stopped at a twenty-four hour discount superstore, where Mike had given Kelly some money and a list of things he wanted him to buy. The store had been busy, and there was only one cashier on duty.
“You’re right,” Mike said. “I owe you one.”
He grabbed the cat and the bags from the store, climbed out and followed Kelly up the stairs to room 208.