by Black, Chuck
“So how’s this going to work?” Sydney looked at a bench full of strange equipment and gadgets.
“Uh-oh.” Drew sat down. “You’d better ask for the short version.” He started perusing one of Ben’s notebooks and did not pay much attention to the physics lesson Sydney was about to receive.
Ben didn’t look up from his work as he talked. “The concept is simple, but the implementation is extremely complex. Basically, we take light and pass it through a series of electrically excited lenses to accelerate it.”
Sydney frowned. “Why?”
Ben made a final adjustment on his oscilloscope. “So we can see into another dimensio—” Ben’s eyes widened as he realized what he’d just said.
Drew looked up. The silence that followed was as loud as an exploding bomb.
Sydney raised an eyebrow and looked toward Drew.
“Ben’s pulling your leg, Syd.” Drew gave her a quick smile. “The ramifications for accelerating light in the physics world are huge. It would rock the scientific community in a way that hasn’t happened since Einstein proposed the theory of relativity.”
“Yeah.” Ben became preoccupied with another piece of equipment at the far end of the bench.
“I see,” Sydney said, but Drew knew she didn’t buy the cover.
Sydney was very quiet after that except for when she tried to ask Ben a few more questions, but he did everything he could to avoid her. When they left, she walked to the car in silence. Drew closed the door and dreaded getting in with her. There was nothing he could say that was going to appease her or convince her. If she suspected that he had been lying to her, there would be no telling what might happen.
He walked around the car and got in the driver’s seat. He put the keys in the ignition but didn’t turn the engine on. He turned to look at her at the same time that she turned to look at him. Her arms were crossed, and there was a seething anger boiling in her eyes that he had never seen before. It actually scared him.
“Ben wasn’t kidding, was he? He really believes he’s building a machine that can see into another dimension, doesn’t he?” She didn’t wait for Drew to respond. She knew the answer. “Is he crazy?”
Drew didn’t respond. There was no way to respond. Once she realized he believed it too, everything would come tumbling down. And if he lost her trust, she’d have no reason not to call the FBI. With them involved …
The only light he would see would be through a small window in a prison cell.
27
FUGITIVE
Sydney held Drew’s gaze. “In high school I heard stories about Berg but never believed them … not until now.” She eyed Drew. “Has he messed you up too? How much of all this is some big science fiction fantasy that the two of you are living? Tell me, Drew, are you crazy too?”
“No, Sydney.” He reached over to touch her arm.
“Don’t touch me! I drove by Ben’s old apartment after I dropped you off that night that you said somebody died.”
Drew was stunned. Had she been suspicious of him that long?
“There were no police cars, no emergency vehicles, nothing in the paper about a man dying. Nothing, Drew … nothing!” She started to break down.
“I … I …”
“The only thing I know for certain, Drew, is that the FBI is looking for you, and I could go to prison for not telling them where you are.” Tears fell down her cheeks, and Drew’s heart broke.
“I risked everything, and you lied to me. How long have you been lying to me, Drew? How long?”
“I haven’t lied to you, Sydney.”
Anger and sorrow mixed with tears poured out of her soul. She reached for the door handle to get out of the car, but Drew grabbed her arm.
“Let me go!”
“Please, Sydney, just listen and I’ll explain. Please.”
“Let go of my arm!”
“Okay, I’m going to let go, but before I do, I want you to remember the day I stepped in front of a crazy man with a gun at Drayle to save your life. And I want you to remember the day I fought three gang members to keep you from being kidnapped and very possibly murdered.”
Drew relaxed his grip on her arm and hoped she wouldn’t bolt from the car. She remained still, with her head bowed. When she looked over at him, he felt like he had ripped her heart in two and betrayed the one and only girl in the world that he loved.
“Sydney, I am not crazy, and I did not lie to you. Everything I told you was absolutely true. I promise. But there are things I didn’t tell you, for your own protection.”
Sydney sat perfectly still … waiting. How long would she listen? He had to choose his words carefully.
“Everything I told you—Dr. Waseem’s death, somebody sabotaging the lab, Ben being targeted—it’s all true. What I didn’t tell you is what else happened in the lab that night.”
Drew tried to read Sydney’s expression, but all he saw were drying tears and a broken heart. He took a deep breath. There was no way around this except with the complete truth.
“The LASOK experiment worked. I saw it work. I was the one who was looking through the lens when the light was accelerated.” Drew rubbed his mouth and jaw as he remembered that fateful night. “I did see someone … someone who wasn’t supposed to be there. I saw him as plain as I am seeing you. But when I looked at the exact spot with my own eyes, he wasn’t there. I looked again through the LASOK, and he came at us. That’s when the lab exploded.”
Drew rubbed his eyes, then turned in his seat to face Sydney better. “Please believe me, Sydney. I know it sounds crazy, but I know what I saw. You can imagine why I didn’t dare tell you or anyone else. Later, after the accident, I tried to tell Jake, and he and my mother nearly put me in the nut house.”
Drew lowered his head. He was tired. Tired of being chased … tired of hiding … tired of being afraid to tell people the truth.
“I know what I saw. And it’s not over, because when my eyesight came back, I could still see them. That lab experiment changed me forever, and now I live with this curse. Whoever these beings are”—Drew looked at the lab through the front window—“they don’t want this experiment to work, and they will kill Ben, me, and anyone else who gets in their way.”
Drew looked at Sydney, and she averted her gaze, lowering her head to stare at the floorboard.
It was over—there was no reason not to say everything now.
“I know I’m not supposed to love you, but I do … I can’t help it. The last thing I ever wanted to do was to hurt you, Sydney. I’ve protected you and begged you to go away because I didn’t want you to get hurt. If you don’t believe anything else I’ve said, I hope you will at least believe that.”
They sat in silence a long while.
“Please take me home.” Sydney spoke without looking up.
Drew started the car and drove toward UIC. Nothing else was said, and when she got out of the car, Drew let her go without saying a word.
THAT NIGHT WHILE DREW was sleeping, the FBI broke into his apartment, handcuffed him, and hauled him away in a black car with smoked windows. Just before they started interrogating him, he woke up to discover he was still lying in his own bed back in his apartment. The blue LED of his clock glowed a 5:23, and he knew his sleep was done.
Why hadn’t they come for him? He went to the window and looked out at the street below. The lone lamppost in front of his apartment building fought to push back the darkness that surrounded it on all sides. He felt like a lone lamppost, trying to hang on until morning.
Drew dressed, walked down the stairs, and exited the building. He stood underneath the lamppost and stared up at the light. He didn’t want to try to disappear again. He didn’t want to start over again.
He walked back toward his old neighborhood and found himself standing before the doors of Reverend Ray’s church. Why had he come here? He went to the corner and looked toward Ray’s home. A soft white glow emanated from one of the windows, and he went toward it. He stood for
five minutes at the door before he gently knocked. After a minute, the door opened.
“Ryan, come in. I was just praying for you. Is everything okay?”
Drew forced a weak smile. “I’m sorry to bother you at this hour, but I saw a light on and, well …”
Ray grabbed his arm and pulled him inside. “Come in here, son. I thought God woke me up to prepare a few more notes for my sermon this morning, but I can see it was for more than that.”
Amazing the way Christians could take the simplest of coincidences and try to wrap them with God. This morning he didn’t care though. Ray brought him into the kitchen, where the smell of fresh coffee triggered memories and emotions that took him back home with his mom. He ached to see her again.
Ray poured them each a cup of coffee and sat down opposite Drew. Drew held the warm cup in his hands, watching the swirling black liquid settle.
“What’s on your mind, Ryan?” Ray set his glasses on the brim of his nose. He crossed his hands in front of him and waited.
“That’s not my name.”
Ray smiled. “I know.”
Drew looked up from his coffee cup into Reverend Ray’s warm gaze. He knew? “My name is Drew … Drew Carter. I didn’t want to lie to you, Reverend, but … there are … people after me, and I don’t want you or your family to get hurt because of me.”
“What did you do, son?”
Drew shook his head. “It’s a long story, and that’s not why I’m here. I don’t have anybody to talk to and—” Maybe he shouldn’t have knocked on the door, but he’d gone too far now to stop. “And I don’t know what to do. Sydney thinks I’ve betrayed her. I think I’ve lost her. I guess I didn’t realize just how much she meant to me.”
Ray looked down at his hands and then back up at Drew. “Sydney is an amazing girl, Drew. Besides whatever it is that just happened between you two, do you understand why she can’t have a close relationship with you?”
Drew nodded. “Yeah, she’s told me. Without Jesus, I’ll never be good enough.”
Ray smiled and shook his head. “You’re right, but not in the way you’re thinking. Listen, I can’t begin to imagine what it is you are running from, but I do know this: you are a good man with a good heart. If even half the stories I’ve heard are only half true, about how the Guardian has helped the people in this neighborhood, then you are as good a man as I have ever known.”
Drew shook his head. “I just try to help people, that’s all.”
“I know it. Here’s the thing, Drew. As good a man as you are, and as good as the things are that you’ve done, you still aren’t good enough. But I’m not talking about for Sydney. I’m talking about for God.”
Drew didn’t know how to respond to that.
“The Lord will judge you not on your good works, Drew, but on your faith in Him. If you don’t believe in Him, all the good works in the world won’t get you into heaven, because the Bible says that all have sinned and fall short of His glory. That includes you. Jesus was the only man who ever lived who was ‘good enough,’ and that’s because He was without sin. When He died on the cross, He died for all of us. He sacrificed Himself for you, Drew. And because you don’t yet belong to God, Sydney can’t belong to you. Does that make sense?”
Drew looked at Ray in silence. This sounded a lot like the John 3:16 verse that Sydney had written on his hand so long ago. He remembered searching for the verse on the Internet and reading something about God loving the world so much that he gave His Son so people would not perish. Ray made sense, but there was still a mountain of logic, reasoning, and scientific evidence that Drew could not ignore. And yet …
In that mountain, Drew realized for the first time in his life that scientific evidence and logic could not explain good and evil. In the last two years, he’d seen people, and invaders for that matter, do a lot of good and bad things. And if seeing into the invader realm convinced him of anything, it was that evil was real.
So what made the leader of the Dragons want to kill, molest, and steal, and what made Sydney want to feed and help the homeless? What made Kurgan want to destroy all that was good, and what made Wallace and the other light invaders fight and even sacrifice themselves to save others? There was indeed a dark and a light in the souls of people, and scientific evidence and evolution could not explain it.
The questions and new understanding gnawed at his mind, but he suppressed them to think about later.
“Ray, I know you mean well, and I have come to love you and your family. But I see the world in a way that no one else does, and the Bible just doesn’t explain what I see.”
Ray smiled warmly. “Are you sure, Drew? How do you know if you haven’t read it? What do you see that the Bible can’t explain?”
Drew hung his head. He couldn’t bear having another friend think he had gone crazy. He had confided in those closest to him, and they didn’t believe him. It was clear no one would ever believe him. Ben had to succeed, that was all there was to it. He looked up at Ray.
“Please tell Sydney that I … I’m sorry and that I hope her life is everything she hopes it will be.”
Ray’s smile faded and his eyes saddened. “You can’t keep running, Drew. There was a man in the Bible who tried to run from God, and it didn’t turn out well for him. Why don’t you stop and look up. That’s what Sydney is hoping for … praying for.”
“You’ve been good to me, Reverend. I must move on or I’m afraid I will bring danger to you too.”
Ray looked at Drew, then nodded. The two men stood and walked to the door. Ray stopped and put a hand on Drew’s shoulder.
“I need to tell you something. Jeremiah told me he heard that the Dragons have targeted you. Evidently you’ve interfered with their operation and territory too much, and they plan to take you out. It’s probably a good time for you to move on anyway. Be careful, son.”
“I will. I promise. You be careful too, Reverend. This neighborhood is still a tough one.”
Ray opened the door, and the chilly morning air rushed at them. “I’ll be praying for you, Drew. Always.”
Drew smiled and gave Ray a hug. “Say good-bye to Micah and Shana for me, okay?”
“Of course.”
DREW LEFT EMMANUEL CHURCH and drove to the lab to talk to Ben. He entered, and his senses kicked in—the lab was unusually quiet and dark. He drew his .45 from his concealed holster and began searching the area.
“What are you doing here?”
At the voice from the dark corner near the back, Drew jumped. “Ben? What’s going on?” Drew clicked on the lights.
“I do get to sleep a couple hours each day, don’t I?” Ben squinted and covered his eyes. “What are you doing here?”
Drew relaxed and took a deep breath, holstering his .45. He pulled up a chair next to Ben’s bed in the corner. “We’ve got problems, Mr. Genius.”
Ben rubbed his eyes and face, then ran his hands through his bed-head hair. “More than you know.”
“Why? What’s going on?”
Ben looked at Drew and huffed. “Dr. Waseem’s final calculation, the one that enabled the LASOK to accelerate light, I can’t resolve it.”
“What does that mean?”
“Apparently he never entered that last calculation in his notes onto the computer. It was only in his notebook.”
“And that was destroyed in the lab fire.”
Ben pointed at Drew. “Bingo.”
“You’re smart, Ben, you’ll figure it out.”
Ben shook his head. “It might take months … years … I may never figure it out. It’s the final missing mathematical piece. Without that final calculation, when the electron microscope comes in, it might as well be a huge paperweight.”
Drew scanned, then frowned. Might as well dump all the bad news at once. “Sydney knows everything, and she doesn’t believe me. I think we’re in big trouble.”
Ben sat up. “What kind of trouble?”
“FBI trouble.”
Ben’s gaze
went across the entire lab and back to Drew. “I told you she would be a problem!” Ben’s voice raised. “Why didn’t you abide by your own rules?”
“You were the one who told her we were trying to see into another dimension. Why didn’t you watch your mouth?”
Ben’s eyes glared. He stood up and began pacing. He rubbed the back of his neck with his right hand. “Come on, Drew … what are we supposed to do now? This is your fault. I told you she was going to be a problem from the very beginning!”
Drew stood up too and walked away, his anger rising. He came back and pointed a finger at Ben’s chest.
“Just remember that without Sydney, you’d be dead and we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now!”
Ben and Drew stared at each other, anger spewing out of their eyes. Then Drew remembered the younger Ben, who sat silently next to him on cold fall days eating a sack lunch when the world was scorning him. Drew dropped his gaze.
“I’m sorry, Ben. You’re right. I should have been more careful. I think she suspected me long before you even said anything.”
Ben’s shoulders slumped. He shook his head. “I’m sorry too. Sometimes my mouth just disconnects from my brain and things come out before I know what I’m saying.”
“Well, I guess we both could have been a little more careful.” Drew walked to the coffee maker and began making a pot of coffee.
“The FBI is after you, not me. Why don’t you just disappear again and I’ll press on with the LASOK?”
“Because if Sydney does turn me in to the FBI, they will at least come and talk to you. If they come here, so will the dark invaders. If the dark invaders come, you’re done.”
Ben just shook his head. “Do you know how long it will take to move this stuff? How many weeks we will lose?”
“It’s worse than that, my friend. We may not have time to move this equipment. In fact, we shouldn’t even be here right now. The FBI could show up at any minute. Taking time to move this isn’t an option.”
At that, Ben hung his head. They had come so far … done so much. This was indeed a major setback.