Copyright
Blink
Copyright © 2016 Will Swardstrom & Paul K. Swardstrom
All rights reserved Pew! Pew! Pew! Publishing
Edited by Ellen Campbell
Formatting by Knite and Day Design
Cover by Adam Hall
Also by Will Swardstrom
NOVELS
Dead Sleep
Dead Sight
SHORT STORIES/NOVELLAS
A Whimper (in Baking With Swords)
Ant Apocalypse
Contact Window
Jam Night
Perfect Game
Razor (in Terrible Cherubs)
The Control (in The Immortality Chronicles)
The Return: A Contact Window Story (with Lyndon Perry)
The Sheriff’s Son (in WOOL Gathering)
To Sacrifice A King (in The Powers That Be)
Uncle Allen (in The Alien Chronicles)
Z Ball (in The Z Chronicles)
SILO STORIES
The Veil
Behind The Veil
Also by Will Swardstrom & Paul K. Swardstrom
Plain Jane vs Super City
Agent Smith and the Naughty Elf (A Utility Company Story)
Also by Paul K. Swardstrom
The Price of Greatness (in Baking With Swords)
Upgrade Complete (in The Cyborg Chronicles)
Thursday October 12, 2000
The setting sun reflected off the water from the pool outside the classroom wing close to the campus commons. Dr. Bridges paused in his tidying for a moment to admire the view. He was almost ready to go home for the day. A television the next office over was blaring loudly, “...into the Cole, and blew up, resulting in a twenty to forty foot hole…” Bridges dropped the box of paper clips he’d been holding, scattering two hundred and fifty tiny metal pieces across the floor.
Irritated with himself, he bent down to pick them up. This wasn’t the first time he had heard the news today. Dr. Effinghouse next door liked to catch up on the news at the end of the workday, so whether Bridges had heard it before or not, he was hearing it again.
Dr. Lleyton Bridges’ corner office on the third floor above the classroom wing was in desperate need of a cleanup. Bridges normally worked in such a way that things like organization were a distraction, until the environment around him became a too much to bear. That meant that about once every two weeks, he needed to catch up on cleaning around the office before he could face it the next day. He’d almost finished before he dropped that box of paper clips.
Bridges spied a couple of paper clips resting around the left corner of the desk in the gap between the desk and the window. He bent down to pick them up when there was a rap on the door.
“Yes!” he called out while chasing the last couple of clips in the back corner on his hands and knees under the pile that overlapped the edge of the desk.
“Dr. Bridges?” a voice asked. The voice did not sound like a typical college-age student. It was too…experienced.
He grabbed the last one and craned his head to get a look at his visitor. A thin man, clad in a clean black suit with jet black tie stood in the doorway, waiting. A shock of white streaked through the temples of his wavy brown hair. Behind the man in the suit was another man who vaguely resembled one of the agents from the Matrix, looking out away from the door, seemingly in a protective way.
“My name is Street,” the man said. “I’m here to offer you a research position.”
Research. All day in a lab away from his students. He put too much care and devotion into each and every student at this school to just walk away for some man from the government. He couldn’t just walk away from them. “I’m a teacher, Mr. Street. I like it here.”
Street held up a paper. A thesis paper. Dr. Bridges recognized it right away—it was from his first doctorate. He wrote it a very long time ago. A chill went down his spine.
“You’ve heard today’s news, Dr. Bridges?” he paused and nodded his head next door, where the news broadcast continued, “...high penetration of extremist anti-American terrorists…”
Bridges swallowed and nodded. “Yes, I, um…and what does this have to do…”
Street frowned, just a little. “Dr. Bridges, I’m sure with just a little imagination you could understand how effective this could be for the right party if it worked.”
Dr. Bridges sat down in his office chair. He was hooked. This was his baby, after all.
Street continued, “We want you to run with this, Dr. Bridges. We believe in your research. We’re not quite sure where to go next, but we need you.”
“Next? You mean you’ve already begun work on it?” Bridges asked.
“We have. No sense in denying that. We work in a very...specialized department of the government. Your thesis came across the desk of some of our top men. We had our docs take a look at it, but they’re stumped. Fresh eyes...your eyes in fact, are what we need. We believe we can make this work. We’ve got everything all set up,” Street said.
That thesis was a long time ago, but he’d poured everything into it. He’d said goodbye to a number of friends because of his devotion, his obsession with the ideas he posited in the paper. He knew at that moment the students he cared so much for would have to do without him. He had a project to lead.
Dr. Bridges looked out at the reflected sunset again, as if to say goodbye. “All right, I’m in.”
_____
September 11, 2001 11:52 p.m.
“Shut it down! Shut it down!” The agent pounded on the window outside the sealed lab. Dr. Bridges looked up and waved with a bit of a sad smile. If anything convinced him of the necessity of his project, it was the events of the day.
Baldwin had run into his office earlier in the day exclaiming, “Dr. Bridges! You’ll never believe it. You’ve got to turn on the TV!” That was the moment that everything changed.
Dr. Bridges and his staff sat stupefied for the next two hours, watching in horror as the tower smoked, a second plane hit, and reports from the Pentagon and Pennsylvania filtered in. They couldn’t believe what they were seeing. One by one, members of the staff begged off to go to see their families. Who could blame them? Dr. Bridges let them go, one by one, until it was just him and his youngest lab assistant Frankie. The kid was only nineteen, but brilliant. He also had the ability to filter out the events of the day and stay focused on the job.
Dr. Bridges had just made the announcement for everyone to pack it in and go home when Frankie came in, holding some papers.
“Doc, something weird happened today.”
Bridges would have said that was an understatement, but knowing Frankie, he was probably talking about something else entirely. He walked over to the side worktable and invited Frankie to sit down with him.
“Okay, show me,” he said.
“I was going over the data from today, and some of the wave oscillations went off the charts a few times.” Frankie pointed out the blips on the readout, and sure enough, they were something that was definitely out of the norm.
“When did you notice these?” Dr. Bridges asked.
“Just a few minutes ago. I wanted to compile the results for the last week or so to study for later and I came across those as I did. Do you know what it is?”
“I think the secondary coils have been acting up,” Bridges replied. “Let’s take a look tomorrow.”
“I can do it right now, sir.” The kid didn’t seem fazed by the events of the day at all. He was far too perky for Dr. Bridges to handle at the moment.
“No,” Bridges replied, “I need a break after today. I’m going to head home in a bit. I want to you go, t
oo. That’s an order. Everyone out of the lab.”
Frankie didn’t look like he agreed, but he could follow orders. “Yes, sir. Have a good night.”
Dr. Bridges watched him leave and then looked down at the data sheet in his hand. The six oscillations were time stamped. All from this morning. 8:46, 9:03, 9:37, 9:59, 10:03, 10:28. It was a bit after 11 a.m. at this point, but those time stamps were already locked into Bridges’ brain. Most of America, in fact, was fully aware of what those times correlated with: four plane crashes and two tower collapses.
The phone on his desk rang before he could really study the data too much. It was Tricia, his wife. She was concerned about him and wanting to know if he was okay. He decided to go home, but packed the readout in his briefcase before he did.
At home, he couldn’t get his mind off the papers in the briefcase. Tricia needed him there and he tried his best to get his mind off of it as much as he could, but it was difficult. When the phone lines cleared a bit, they had a phone conversation with their daughter who was away at college.
After dinner, Tricia wanted to go to bed early. The day’s events had exhausted her emotionally. Lleyton couldn’t let the lab results go. It was going to bother him until he had some answers. As Tricia was lying down he came in, kissed her, and then left to go back to the lab.
Something about the odd oscillation cycles didn’t make sense. He felt an almost primal need to get to the bottom of things.
Once there, he flipped on the lights and powered up the lab. Then he sat down with a calculator and a simulator and started sorting through the data. How on earth did some plane crashes affect this laboratory? Objectively, there wasn’t anything that would seem to correlate other than the times of the oscillations.
Calculation after calculation, simulation after simulation showed events one through four growing in magnitude until some sort of harmonic resonance showed up from an unknown source in event five. Then, event six appeared as barely a blip on the screen.
Could the resonance from event five be duplicated? Bridges began setting up the equipment and a knock came from the outside door.
He went to get it and found Agent Street. The two had developed a relationship of mutual respect over the last several months, if not necessarily trust. Street always seemed to show up at just the wrong—or was it the right?—times. Bridges didn’t know if he was being watched, but he also realized long ago that it didn’t matter. Street’s agency was sponsoring the research and he didn’t have anything to hide.
“Good evening, Agent Street,” Bridges said, “Would you care to come in?”
“Just for a little bit, Dr. Bridges. I’m pretty busy today, as I’m sure you can imagine. I just wondered why you would be here of all places today. You should be home with your family.”
Well, that just about confirmed it. There must be some way that Street could monitor the lab. Bridges took him over to the worktable to show him the project he was working on.
“There was an anomaly today, and I’m trying to sort it out is all. This kind of thing could mess up the project and I just want to be careful.”
Street nodded as he looked through the data. Nothing appeared to be jumping out at the agent, and Bridges didn’t volunteer his insight with the event correlation.
A buzz came from Street’s pocket and he pulled out his flip-phone. He listened for half a minute and excused himself.
Lleyton checked on the equipment he had set up. It was almost ready. He looked back toward the doorway. On a whim, he got up and locked the glass door to the hallway.
The computer screen read, “Press [Enter] to begin.” There was no time like the present. He looked back at the door and Agent Street was still outside so he pressed [Enter] and then it began.
The Corn Avenger
“Call me Smith.”
The farmer looked over Smith’s shoulder at the rest of the team of federal agents. The farmer’s wife called him Jim, but most of his buddies called him Jimmy. Ever since he made that shot in high school to win the basketball game against his school’s hated rival Thornwood, everybody in town called him Jimmy, after Jimmy Chitwood, from the movie Hoosiers. Of course, Smith knew all that before he even approached the man. He and the rest of his team stood out like a sore thumb in the small Iowa town. Jimmy cocked his head to the side, opening and closing his mouth a few times before finally asking his question.
“Okay, Mr. Smith, tell me again what you’re wanting to do, because I lost my train of thought somewhere,” Jimmy muttered.
“What I need to do, Jimmy, is take my team of federal inspectors inside the grain elevator over there. There are safety concerns,” Smith said. He looked over his shoulder briefly, and gave a slight nod. Agent Wesson caught his drift, and flashed the screen of the tablet computer he had been using, as if to signify to the man they had important business to investigate inside.
“Okay, but I think I’m gonna have to call my boss. Ike said no one gets into the facility on the weekends. I don’t even really work here, you know. Ike just gives me a six-pack at the end of my shift for watching the elevator when no one is around.”
Smith took out a small pad of paper, and pretended to jot some thoughts down. “That doesn’t sound very legal, Jimmy. I would suggest you don’t call your boss until after we’re wrapped up here. I’d hate to get him in trouble for what we all might call an honest mistake,” Smith said.
Jimmy’s eyes widened. Smith was amazed by some of the people he came into contact with. He watched as awareness dawned on Jimmy and the effect it had on his pupils.
“Okay, I’m thinking I need to head to the gas station for some fried chicken. I haven’t had lunch yet,” Jimmy said. With a speed that he hadn’t shown in understanding the situation, Jimmy grabbed his jacket and took off down the street.
Smith turned back to the task at hand, and reached for the gate.
“Hey boss, what are we really doing here? Protecting the Midwest against some agricultural vigilante?” Agent Barney asked from the back of the pack.
“I hope so, or else this was a wasted trip,” Agent Tinker chimed in. Smith looked back. His eyes found Agent Black, who just shrugged. That was what he liked about Black. A total team player. Quiet and efficient.
“We’ve had this guy on our radar for a little while now, and Dr. Anna says this is the site of his next attack. Right, Anna?” Smith replied. He kept walking towards the main tower of the grain elevator.
Dr. Anna wasn’t even on site with them. Wall had allowed her to stay behind to work a few other cases of concern at the Utility Company headquarters, so she was currently sitting at a desk in D.C., watching the team’s action thanks to a live feed from Agent Wesson’s sunglasses. Smith would have preferred to have her next to him, but having her on speakerphone was the next best thing.
“Absolutely. All of his attacks so far have been anonymous, or mostly anonymous. His last one just outside the Quad Cities was supposed to be his ‘coming out party’, but we were able to intercept his message to the local media. All the indications are that this is his next target,” Dr. Anna said from thousands of miles away.
“What’s this guy call himself again? The Kernel?” Wesson asked.
“The Corn Avenger,” Smith and Anna voiced at the same time. Out of the corner of Smith’s eye he saw Tinker and Barney’s mouths twitch. He couldn’t blame them. The vigilante certainly could have picked a more fear-inducing moniker.
Right as he was wondering about the sanity of a man who would name himself the Corn Avenger, a corncob flew across the empty lot towards the group of agents. It landed with a soft thud on the gravel path. The men just stared at it for a moment. Smith’s eyes narrowed, noticing a flicker of a flame at one end.
“Run!”
Even before the corn popped, the five men scattered. Seconds later, the corncob exploded, sending small bits of organic shrapnel in the air along with bits of gravel. Smith afforded himself a look around as he dove to find shelter behind a ru
sty pickup truck. Immediately, Tinker unstrapped his long-range rifle and ran for the nearest building—high ground and a spot of safety. Wesson, Barney, and Black each ran off in different directions. Even if they’d been hit by some of the remnants of the blast, Smith knew his team. He knew they would begin the work they needed to do.
The Corn Avenger was here, all right.
“Smith? Smith, are you okay?” Dr. Anna’s voice came over the speakerphone still attached to his belt. He quickly unclipped it and transferred the signal to a Bluetooth earpiece.
“Yeah, Anna. I’m fine. Looks like everyone else is as well, but I’m pinned down behind a truck. The others are spread out around the complex. I assume you have them mapped on a satellite feed right now?” Smith said. He realized his voice came out with more intensity than he had intended.
“Yeah. You were the only one not moving, so I was concerned,” Anna replied. Anna was one of the best analysts working for The Agency, sometimes referred to as the Utility Company. At least, that was the line item appropriation title on the Federal Spending Bills.
Smith mentally cursed himself for not only taking this mission, but also taking it too lightly. He wanted his men to stay razor sharp and they hadn’t had meaningful action in months. Not since the trouble with the semi-sentient trees in Central Park, that is.
Smith’s team was the top squad at the U.C., normally sitting out missions dealing with petty vigilantes who only harmed the nation’s food supply. This time, though, the so-called Corn Avenger had been upping his game at each location. Smith’s boss, Director Wall, knew the life of one man would be nothing to the criminal before long. So here he was, dodging corn bombs in the middle of Iowa.
“Thanks Anna. Got a location for this Avenger guy?”
Utility Company (Book 1): Blink Page 1