by Ted Kosmatka
THE AIRPORT was enormous in both its sheer physical size and in the volume of humanity that coursed along its many arteries, internal and external. Its roads were clogged with taxis, trams, buses, and cars. The sky above was thick with circling flashing lights. All told, hundreds of thousands of people revolved around it like an extended solar system. It was a good place in which to get lost.
“If you’re thinking of getting on a plane, then you have lost your mind. They check ID, or have you forgotten?”
“I know,” Silas said. “We’re here to get some new wheels. They’ll be looking for this one.”
Vidonia laughed. “What do you want to do, steal a car?”
“I wouldn’t know how. We’re going to do the next best thing, rent one.”
Silas explained to her what to do, and when he finally pulled his car into the drop-off lane, he asked, “Do you have a credit card?”
“Yeah.”
“We’re going to need to use it. My card is probably already flagged.”
“You think mine isn’t?”
“Probably not yet. They’ll eventually catch on, but at least this way, the transaction won’t jump out at them. It might give us a little more time. We don’t need much.”
She nodded. “What kind of car?”
“Something small and inconspicuous.”
“The opposite of you, you mean.”
“Something like that.”
The door clicked closed. He watched her disappear into the crowd.
Ten minutes passed.
Even through the closed window, the rattle of chaos around him agitated his nerves, the sounds of people and cars and planes and slamming doors all dissolving into a single edgeless din that the human ear couldn’t separate. Everywhere he looked, there was movement. He searched the throng for Vidonia’s face, trying to stay levelheaded. These things take time. There were lines to stand in, and papers to sign. Ten minutes was nothing. It could take her that long just to find the right person to talk to.
Twenty minutes more passed. But the crowd hadn’t changed one bit. It was still coming and going, a roiling mass—carrying suitcases, and purses, and babies, and accents. A hundred different types of people. The cars looked the same, though, midsize sedans, mostly. Hybrid electrics, mostly. Inconspicuous, mostly.
He imagined how his sports car must stick out among all its peers that sat idling along the broad drop-off walkway.
Ten minutes more passed, but he didn’t start to really worry until the police car pulled up behind him. No, he didn’t start to worry until then.
The cop didn’t get out right away. He just sat there behind the shine of windshield. Checking the plate? Picking his nose? Waiting for his mother to come walking through the doors after a long flight from Des Moines? The spinning lights aren’t on, he reassured himself. But then the cop opened the door and stepped out, erasing all likelihood that he was waiting for his mother. He was wearing his blue leathers; the guy was on duty.
He walked toward Silas’s car. It was only ten steps, but Silas had time to run ten different scenarios through his head. He should run. He should fight. He should play dumb. Maybe the guy just wanted him to move his car. He’d been parked in the same spot for a while now.
Silas heard the click of the cop’s boots, a sound peeling away like a paint chip from the massive generalized noise of his surroundings, becoming specific. A bus rumbled past. Bored faces in the windows.
Two gloved knuckles rapped on his window. Silas rolled the window down.
“Yeah?”
“You’ve been parked here for too long.” In Silas’s experience, by mid-career, cops came in two varieties, hard and soft. This one was big, youngish, already tending toward the doughy stereotype. Eyes like dark circles in a pale, puffy face. “This is for drop-off only.”
“Sorry, officer, I’m waiting on my wife. In and out, she told me. The agency screwed up our return tickets, and she’s getting it straightened out before we leave. But I’ll keep circling.” Silas put a hand on his gearshift, but the cop’s voice stopped him.
“I’ve seen your face somewhere.”
Silas didn’t say anything. The cop bent, looking hard in his face, then up and down at the car.
“Yeah,” the cop said. “TV, I think.”
Silas could see the wheels turning just beneath the man’s dark eyes.
“Did you used to play for the Heat?”
Silas didn’t even hesitate. “No, the Wizards. Can hardly call it playing, though. I rode the bench, mostly, but it’s nice to know there’s a few people who still recognize me.”
“I never really followed the Wizards.”
“Well, must have been an away game you saw.”
“Yeah, that must be it. What position?”
“Power forward, mostly, but like I said, I was a bench jockey.”
“Been retired long?”
“A good ten years.”
“Funny, I could have sworn I saw you recently. Like just a few weeks ago.”
Those wheels were turning faster now.
“What’s your name?”
“Jay Brown. Want an autograph?”
“Naw, that’s okay.” He straightened up. “You can stay here a few more minutes, but after that, move it along. I don’t care if your wife’s here or not. A lot of people could use this space.”
“Yes, officer.”
The cop gave him a long parting look before he turned.
He’s not sure if he believes me.
The gritty sounds of his footfalls faded into the background noise again.
He’ll check my plate when he’s back in his car. No doubt about it.
Then the passenger door of Silas’s car burst open, and Vidonia sank into the seat.
Silas had the car in drive almost before the door was closed. He groped his way into deep traffic, thankful for it for the first time in his life.
“What was that about?” Vidonia asked.
“About ten years off my life, I’d say.”
“I saw him standing there, so I waited.”
“Did you get it?”
“Yeah.”
“What took so long?”
“Look at this place. There are a million people here, and nobody knows where anything is. I had to walk about two miles inside the terminal.”
“What should I be looking for?”
“Lot C-forty-three.”
As Silas drove, he kept checking his rearview for police lights. None followed.
Eighteen minutes later, he pulled to a stop at a booth. He showed the paperwork to the bored attendant and slid through. They stopped halfway down the long bank of cars.
Silas eyed her incredulously. “This is it?”
“Yeah.”
“A subcompact?”
“You wanted inconspicuous.”
Vidonia climbed out of Silas’s vehicle and stepped around to the squat, navy blue Quarto. A stylish sports car it was not. It had the aerodynamic properties of a diaper. She keyed open the door and climbed in. Moments later came the soft whir of an electric motor.
He pulled his car forward, and she followed him out of the rental lot, circling back toward the heart of the airport. At the long-term parking lot, he bought an extended pass and parked midway down a middle aisle. He stood, and as he looked around at the sea of cars, he couldn’t help but smile. A vehicle—even one like his—could go unnoticed for a very long time in a place like this.
When he climbed into the cramped Quarto, Vidonia smiled at his attempts to get comfortable. Even with the seat pushed all the way back, his knees almost touched the dashboard.
She pulled away, headed back toward the highway.
“How long till they catch on?” she asked.
“Long enough. We don’t need a lot of time, one way or the other.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
Tears flowed freely down Evan’s face. He wasn’t blubbering, wasn’t making any sound at all. But the tears still slid quietly down his cheeks
and dripped from his quivering chin, making a dark spot on his shirt. The sheer beauty of what he was looking at was too much for him to take in at one time. His senses were overloaded.
“You’re right, Pea,” he said, and his voice was a cracked whisper.
The boy loomed larger in the screen now, older by years than he had been just a few hours earlier. His chest was broadening, taking on a new muscular topography. The legs had lengthened. Arms thickened. The boy-face now annealed into something more. And Evan could feel the energy still growing. He was overwhelmed with a sense that Pea was … becoming.
The lighting panels in the ceiling surged suddenly, brightening the room. Then they darkened, almost going out. A moment later, the light surged again, brighter, and this time Evan heard a bulb pop somewhere.
Pea smiled, and Evan knew that if he looked too long, he would go mad. He would go out of his mind, losing himself in the image before him, with no hope of ever finding his way back.
You can look a god in the face, he’d discovered. But only briefly. And looking changes you.
The world behind Pea came into focus. The grayness was gone, replaced by sea and sand, and a golden sun in a blue sky. Pea raised his arms and closed his eyes. The arms were too long, abstractions of what arms could be. They reached for miles into the sky, curling into claws.
The lights surged again, and this time, it was like a camera flash. The glowing ceiling panels exploded one by one, showering Evan in sparks and bits of broken glass and melted plastic.
The room went dark except for the glowing screen.
Pea smiled.
Outside the window, the streetlight popped, sending little runnels of blue flame arcing into the night. The air was greasy with the tang of smoldering electronics. In the distance behind him, Evan heard a fire alarm sounding, warbling higher and higher until it screeched itself silent.
The only sound now was the crashing of waves. Pea’s sun the only light.
THREE HUNDRED fifty miles away, at that exact moment, on a console on the second floor of the Western Nuclear Control Hub, a small red indicator bulb began to flash. Years ago, when the monitoring system was first being designed, some engineer had decided that the importance of this particular indicator justified it being given its own flashy red bulb rather than a mere screen icon. No sound accompanied the pulsing indicator; and precisely because it was small and because the technician wasn’t accustomed to looking for it, a few moments passed before the technician noticed.
When he did notice, he sat up straighter in his chair. His brow furrowed, and he looked around for a supervisor, unsure of what exactly was expected of him. He’d never seen that bulb flash before. Or any bulb, come to think of it. The screen icons occasionally lit up, but never the bulbs on the console.
Then another bulb began to flash. And another.
Around the room now, other systems analysts had begun to take notice. Their bulbs flashed, too. Their screen icons blinked. Understanding rolled across the room like a tsunami. “The grid is crashing,” someone shouted.
A supervisor moved quickly to the bank of consoles, looking over shoulders as he strode between the rows.
“Son of a bitch.”
The supervisor ran to the wall, picked up the red phone, and punched the buttons. After a moment’s pause, he said, “This is Phoenix. We’ve got a crisis.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Silas fell asleep for a while as the car hummed beneath him. His dream was dark and filled with sharp things that moved too quickly, and when he awoke, it was with a dawning sense of dread.
“How long was I out?”
“About two hours,” she said.
“What time is it?”
“After midnight.”
Silas looked out the window and was met with near-complete darkness. Only the glare of headlights illuminated the night.
“What happened?”
“I’m not sure. It’s a power outage. It’s been going on for miles and miles.”
“How far are we?”
“We’re just outside of Banning.”
“Pull over. You need some sleep. I’ll drive the rest of the way.”
“I thought you’d never ask.”
The car drifted to the side of the highway, coming to rest just beside the green Morgan Street sign. Cars whizzed by, following their headlights into the unusual darkness. When Silas stepped out of the car, his feet crunched on a scatter of broken glass that shone in the sweep of oncoming headlights. He turned his face upward, and directly above them was a streetlight leaning out into space. Its bulb housing was shattered, leaving only a burned-out socket that reminded Silas of a missing front tooth.
The mountains had retreated into the distance. They were a dark undulation on the horizon. The sky itself was a lighter shade of black, twinkling with stars.
He walked around the back of the car and slid behind the opened door. He adjusted the seat as far back as it would go, adjusted the rearview, pushed the stick into drive, and then accelerated back onto the highway.
Thirty more miles. He’d driven this particular stretch of highway several times before. Once at night. It had been a different world then, spilling over with light and neon signs. He knew where the billboards should be, but they were dark now. What the hell had happened?
As the miles slipped by and the size of the blackout became apparent, a cool fear seeped into his stomach.
Vidonia leaned her seat back and was asleep almost instantly. Silas felt soothed by her deep, easy breathing. It was something that was normal on this crazy night. As he listened to her even respiration, he could almost believe that things would be okay after all. He wanted to grab on to that one fragment of normalcy and let it guide him back to a saner reality. The reality where he was a respected geneticist, where the car he was driving didn’t put a crick in his neck, where fans hadn’t died, where a strange creature didn’t stalk the night, where unexplained blackouts didn’t grip entire cities. That reality.
The dashed white lines rolled by. He drove. For miles, that was enough.
He flipped on his turn signal and descended the off-ramp. Vidonia felt the change and woke, turning her face away from the glass. She opened her eyes.
“Still dark,” she observed.
“Yeah.”
“Are we almost there?”
“Yeah, just a few more minutes.”
“Do we expect trouble?”
“Yeah.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“We’ll find out when we get there.”
“Well, that’s good. That’s fine. I thought we might be, you know, unprepared or something.”
They rode in silence for a few miles.
“What exactly do you plan on doing?” Vidonia asked.
“I’m not sure. I just know that if there’s something I can do, it starts there. Otherwise, I’m at a loss.”
Passage through the corporate district was complicated, even on the best of days. Silas had often wondered if the road layout was intentionally designed that way. But today was not the best of days. The stoplights dangled blindly in the breeze, and the street signs were barely readable in the darkness. Silas turned left, trusting his memory to guide him. There usually weren’t many cars on these roads at night, but tonight the streets were absolutely deserted. Anybody working late had left when the power went out. Silas slowed through an intersection, then turned down a long drive. His high beams swung past a neatly sculpted sign: Brannin Institute.
He followed the winding asphalt around a series of low berms designed to obstruct the line of sight to the institute itself. Whether this was for security or effect he had no idea, but as he rounded a final bend, the building loomed ahead, large already, and strangely ominous without its usual shroud of illumination. It was a simple rectangular silhouette set against a backdrop of stars. However, unlike the other buildings he’d seen in the last dozen miles, the Brannin was not completely dark. A single window glowed on the fifth floor. The knot
in his stomach cranked tight. Unless he was mistaken, the fifth floor housed Chandler’s computer.
Silas stopped in the circular entranceway, blocking the lane.
“How are we going to get in?” she asked.
“We’ll just have to knock.”
He climbed out of the car, and Vidonia followed him beneath the long overhang of the entranceway.
Silas looked around for any sign of a guard. There was none. Good. The Brannin Institute depended on its electronic defenses.
He knew the doors would be locked tight, but he tried them anyway, giving each of the four glass doors a firm tug. They held fast against their frames. He’d heard once of a group of cat burglars who were caught after spending three hours trying to crack a safe that turned out not to have been locked in the first place. Nobody had bothered to try the handle.
Now he pushed his face against the glass doors, peering inside. Only blackness.
“Any ideas?” she asked.
Silas didn’t answer her. He took a step back, reared his leg, and gave the glass a solid kick with the toe of his shoe. His foot bounced off harmlessly. Well, harmless to the glass, anyway.
“I thought you said you were going to knock.”
“That was a knock. A hard knock.”
“You’re going to cut your leg open.”
“Not likely. I think it’s shatterproof.” Silas limped in a slow circle, thinking of a new plan. “Stay here.”
He walked back to the car and climbed behind the wheel. He slipped on his seatbelt. The motor clicked, then puttered to life. The arc of headlights turned Vidonia’s face into a mask of disbelief as he slowly approached across the sidewalk. The car fit easily between the arch supports.
“You’ve got to be crazy,” he heard her shout, as she stepped out of the way.
He didn’t disagree. The headlights shone through the glass and into the entrance hall now, illuminating the portraiture of various institute administrators that hung on the far back wall. He eased to a stop a dozen feet from the doors. Silas rolled the side window shut, then, after a deep breath, hit the accelerator.