by David Walton
Once I was locked into my cell, I waited until several more groups of five had come and gone, to make sure I had the rhythm down.
Elena.
I blinked, suddenly distracted, certain I had seen her. Was I going mad? There was no one here, just me and, outside my cell, the guards and the other prisoners. The sensation had been strong, not so much a visual cue, as if I had actually seen her in the flesh, but a mental one, as if I knew I had seen her. I shook it off. I couldn’t be distracted by such things right now. When the guards left the next time to get another group of prisoners, I popped the lock on my cell, slipped through, walked out the back of the modular prison . . . and nearly collided with a guard.
They had placed one of the guards on the back door. I liked the man, too; his name was Jerry, and he had a steady, calming manner with the prisoners instead of keeping control with curses and insults. I didn’t have time to do anything with the Higgs projector, so I took care of the problem the old-fashioned way. In the half-second of surprise before he could reach for his gun, I punched Jerry in the face as hard as I could. He dropped without a sound. I took his gun from his holster and kept running.
I wondered how long it would take them to notice. If not for Jerry, they probably wouldn’t have detected my absence until they had all the other prisoners secured, and possibly not even then. Hopefully, no one would try to call Jerry soon. I still had a lot of other problems—my orange prison jumpsuit, for one—but for the moment, I was free.
I broke into a run, since no one seeing me walking would mistake me for anything but a prisoner anyway. I was nearly off the prison grounds when the electric shock knocked me off my feet.
It came straight out of nowhere. As my head cleared, I saw my daughter Alessandra crying out in pain, and then just as quickly the vision was gone. I thought I had run afoul of some new prison security measure, but no prison guards came running. They were still focused on the prisoner transfer, and seemed unaware—so far—of my escape.
I got up again, wary now, but no new shock came. I was outside the prison walls, but not off the grounds. A razor-wire fence circled the prison and the visitor parking lots, with a vehicle check center. There was a maintenance pickup truck in sight that I could conceivably steal, but I didn’t know how to hotwire a vehicle, and even assuming I could find some clothes to replace my jumpsuit, I didn’t know the protocol at the gate. That meant I had to go over the fence.
It wasn’t electrified, and I reached the top easily. It was a barrier meant more for keeping the public out than keeping prisoners in. I was in the shadow of a large maple tree, mostly blocked from sight from the prison itself, but I still had to hurry. I didn’t know how much time I had before my absence was discovered.
I had often looked at the tops of such fences and wondered how hard it really was to avoid the sharp parts. Now I found out. This was the kind with large loops of steel, cut to create many sharp points, rather than twisted wire. I found it was a lot more difficult than it looked, and by the time I made my way down the other side, my arms were bleeding from a dozen places, I had several cuts on my legs, and there was one deep gash along my ribs.
The cuts burned, and I was starting to wonder if this had been a good idea. I didn’t think I was bleeding enough to worry about, but I had certainly left some blood on the fence, which meant they would know exactly which way I’d gone once they realized I was missing. I had to get a vehicle, and I had to get some clothes, and I had to do it fast.
As I ran down the hill leading away from the prison, I heard the sirens begin to blare.
CHAPTER 33
UP-SPIN
I didn’t know if she was real; I didn’t know if she was my Elena or some other version; I didn’t know if this were some quantum heaven or hell where we were already dead, but it didn’t matter. I had spent so long missing her, wishing for this moment, and fearing it would never come. I had imagined it a hundred times, how we would run together and collide in an embrace. I jumped to my feet and ran toward her.
I made it about two steps before I remembered how the wires in the bunker had become electrified when the power was on and we saw the varcolac for the first time. I stopped, windmilling my arms, as the hairs stood up on the back of my neck.
“You can’t cross the wires,” a voice said from behind me. “They’re electrified.”
I turned to see Jean, in her own space, only she was awake and interacting with the Higgs projector in her lap.
“Are they all asleep?” I asked.
“Sort of,” Jean said, not looking up from what she was doing. “I just brought you out of it, and I’m working on the others. He has each of you in a kind of bubble where time stops, or at least slows way, way down.”
“I was like that, too?”
“Yes. As I said, I brought you out of it. I’ll have the others out soon.”
I looked around in astonishment. “It’s as if the varcolac is putting us on ice for later experimentation.” I remembered how the varcolac had assimilated Brian after killing him, incorporating his knowledge into its own. “Or for something worse,” I added.
Marek stirred and opened his eyes. I warned him about the wires and filled him in on where we were. The others woke one by one, and I told them the same thing. I greeted Elena, Claire, and Sean with tears in my eyes.
“You’re alive!” I said. “I can hardly believe it. I’ve been so worried for you.”
“Where are we?” Elena asked. “Do you know what this place is?” I could see she was rattled, but she kept her voice steady.
“I think we’re in some part of the accelerator’s electrical backbone, where the electrical system connects with the grid,” I said. “It’s way out along the circle, miles away from the Feynman center.”
“How long have we been here?”
“It’s March,” I said. “You’ve been down here for four months.”
Elena got to her feet, angry, astonished. “What are you talking about?”
“What’s the last thing you remember?” I asked.
“I remember walking toward Brian’s office to find you. We asked a girl from the front desk, and she was leading us to the right spot. Halfway there, this man arrived. He just appeared out of nowhere.”
“He’s not a man, really. It’s hard to explain,” I said.
“And you’re saying it’s been months? We’ve just been asleep down here all that time?”
“Not exactly.” Jean spoke up for the first time. “You were in a kind of slow time bubble. You weren’t asleep; you’ve barely aged at all.”
“I was falsely accused of murdering Brian,” I said. “There was a trial. We’ve been looking for you all this time.”
Silence. It was already too much information, and I’d only begun to scratch the surface. Claire and Alessandra and Sean were still sitting on the floor, looking stunned. Elena’s eyes darted from place to place.
“Are we trapped?” she asked.
“We’re prisoners of that man who kidnapped you,” I said. I looked from one frightened face to another, seeing their panic rise. I wasn’t doing this right. I was scaring them instead of reassuring them. I took a deep breath and stood up.
For the moment, convincing them that several months had passed wasn’t important. In fact, considering the alternative—spending several months awake in a varcolac prison—the fact that they had somehow lost the time seemed like a blessing.
I looked at Sean, noting that this living version of my son had his short arm on the left side, just like I remembered. This was my Sean. I tried to put a confident tone in my voice. “How are you doing, Sean?” I asked. “Are you holding up?”
He gave me a brave smile. “I’m okay, Dad.”
“Claire? How are you? Did those creatures hurt you?”
Claire started to cry. “I’m fine, Daddy,” she said. “Just scared.”
“I’m here, too,” Alex said. I turned my attention to her, surprised by the bitterness in her tone.
“Of
course, you are,” I said, and then I realized that this was Alessandra, not the Alex I’d spent the last few months with. This was the Alessandra I’d always dismissed as a lost cause, preferring her more stable, smarter, and prettier older sister. I realized now that the alienation in that relationship had been mostly my doing. I looked at Alex, who Jean was just now bringing out of unconsciousness.
Alex pulled herself to her feet and saw the rest of us. “The wires are electrified,” I said quickly, before she could find out the hard way. “Don’t try to step over them.”
Alessandra looked Alex up and down. “Who on Earth is that?” she asked.
It was tough to explain, but Alessandra took it better than I expected. Of course she did—she was Alex, too, only I hadn’t taken the time to really know her. Once introductions were made, the two girls couldn’t stop talking, both with a kind of awe that they were talking to someone who was, in essence, themselves.
They seemed to be able to forget, for the moment, that we were trapped underground as the prisoners of a monster. It wasn’t so easy for Elena. She looked at me, horrified. “Which one is the real her?”
“Both of them are real. Both of them are Alessandra.”
“How is that possible?”
“It’s what Alessandra would have been if she’d been kidnapped, and what Alessandra would have been if she hadn’t been kidnapped. Either one could have happened, only in this case, they both did.” I prayed she wouldn’t ask why there was no second Claire or Sean. We would have to cover that eventually, but I didn’t want to have to tell her now.
“But . . . they can’t both just keep on being Alessandra, can they?”
I shook my head. “No, they can’t. Eventually they’ll converge back into one person again.”
The fear in Elena’s eyes sparked into anger. “Did Brian do this?”
“Indirectly.”
“The man who kidnapped us, then?”
I sighed. “It’s actually not a man. It’s a quantum intelligence, a member of another intelligent race that we’ve been calling varcolacs.”
“An alien?”
“Of sorts.”
“What does it want?”
“I don’t know. It has a vastly different experience of life than we have. I don’t know what it understands or thinks of us, and I have no idea what it wants.”
There was a disturbance in the air. We all felt it. Claire cringed and covered her face. A moment later, the varcolac stood over Alex, regarding her with its sightless face. Alex froze, staring up at it, her body rigid. It smiled. It was the first time it had made a facial expression of any kind, and it was hideous, stretching back its lips and showing far too much of its teeth.
“We don’t have anything you want,” I said. “Please let us go.”
The varcolac didn’t reply. It reached down, lifted Alex by her upper arm, and twisted. The move was casual, but Alex screamed, and we heard bone snapping.
“Leave her alone!” I shouted. I hurled myself toward her, thinking that with enough momentum I might break through the electrical fence and reach them, but it exploded in sparks and threw me back again. I tried to get up again, but my muscles twitched with the pain, and I slipped back down. I cast about for something to throw, anything that could get past the wires, but there was nothing.
“Please let her go,” Elena said. She stood at the edge of the wires, pleading with the varcolac. “What do you want from us?” she asked. “This is my daughter. Please.”
“Jean!” I said. “Do something.”
“I’m sorry,” Jean said. “I was just trying to help you. I didn’t mean for it to end this way.”
“It doesn’t have to end,” I said. “You can fight it, can’t you? Hurry!”
Jean shook her head sadly. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I never meant to hurt you. But I have to think of my own family, too.”
This wasn’t making sense. “What are you talking about?”
“I have to think of my daughter,” she said. She gripped the smartpaper, turned just like the varcolacs had done, and disappeared.
I stared after Jean in open-mouthed astonishment, but I didn’t have time to think about it. The varcolac dropped Alex on the floor and walked across the wires toward Elena.
“No!” I shouted at it. “Come on, fight me! I’m right here!”
Elena cowered away, but the varcolac advanced on her with inhuman speed and grabbed her by the throat. It lifted her as if she weighed nothing and thrust her in range of the bundle of wires separating my square from hers. An arc of lightning shot up from the wires into her body. She screamed and arched her back, her arms and legs jerking uncontrollably while the lightning danced and crackled. She kept screaming and screaming, the sound wrenched out of her body with barely a chance for her to take a breath.
I shouted, too, a bellow of helpless rage, as I tried to reach her, casting about for some weapon, desperate to find a way through, although I knew that even if I could get through, there was nothing I could do against such an enemy. Finally, I dropped to my knees, crying, begging the varcolac to let her go. Why was it doing this? What did it want?
The varcolac opened its hand. Elena’s scream died and she fell motionless to the floor. I shouted her name, but I could see her chest rise and fall. She wasn’t dead.
The varcolac was intelligent; I knew that. It must have a motive, though it was possible we would all die without ever knowing what it was. Was it experimenting with matter-based life forms just to see what would happen? Was it punishing us for destroying its time bubbles? Was it looking for the Higgs projector? Maybe such a surge of power would be beneficial for one of its kind and it was trying to help Elena by giving her more energy instead of trying to kill her.
I couldn’t think straight. I felt dizzy, perhaps from the electric shock, and I thought I might fall over. For a brief moment, I had a vision of driving through a pine forest in a tiny car that was not my own. Where did that come from? Was I succumbing to fear and exhaustion? I shook my head. I couldn’t check out now; my family needed me. I didn’t know what to do, but I couldn’t just do nothing.
Elena still didn’t move. Alex rocked back and forth slightly, her eyes unfocused. The others huddled in their squares, frozen or crying softly.
As suddenly as it had come, the varcolac disappeared.
CHAPTER 34
DOWN-SPIN
My house was more than twelve miles away from the prison, and Swarthmore College, where I worked, a few miles beyond that. It was too far. I needed somewhere I could go quickly to change my clothes, somewhere that wouldn’t be the first place the police would look for me.
The Granite Run Health and Fitness Club was located on Pennell Road in Lima, about five miles from the prison in Thornton. It was close enough. Before my arrest, I had run two and a half miles every morning—the distance from my home to the college—and I frequently ran in the five kilometer races that local municipalities held. I wasn’t built for speed, but I could cover five miles in a little more than half an hour. I decided that I was better off racing the police than sneaking around trying to avoid them, so I took off running as fast as I could.
While I ran, I unzipped my jumpsuit halfway down, pulled my arms out, and then tied the sleeves around my waist. I hoped that a guy running in orange pants and a white T-shirt would be less conspicuous than a guy in an orange jumpsuit. I steered clear of Baltimore Pike, figuring it would be swarming with cops, but there was an old line of train tracks that hugged Chester Creek, and I aimed for that instead. It was mostly in the woods, where I was less likely to encounter any people, and it was easy to run along it without twisting an ankle. Best of all, it would lead me nearly to the fitness club’s back door.
I repeatedly heard sirens, and once I saw the flashing lights of a police car, but if they were creating a perimeter, they either missed the train tracks or underestimated my speed. I reached the club without incident and slipped inside. There were only three cars in the parking lot, and I av
oided being seen as I made my way through the halls.
I had a locker here with a change of clothes. I was breathing pretty hard—prison life had not been good for staying in shape—but I shoved the jumpsuit into the trashcan and put on the sweats and T-shirt from my locker. Now all I needed was transportation.
I checked the showers. One of them was running, and based on the little Nissan Flash in the parking lot, I was pretty sure I knew who was inside. It was Frank Reed, a guy I knew slightly from working out together, whose locker wasn’t far from mine. The lockers had combinations, of course, but a lot of people didn’t bother spinning them. I found Frank’s, checked inside, and found some business clothes, a wallet, and a ring of keys.
I hated to steal, but I was beyond such considerations. I needed a car, and I didn’t have time to quibble. I scribbled a quick note that said, “Frank, I’m sorry. I’ll return it unharmed and with interest, if I can.” I left it in the locker and took the keys.
The Flash was a tiny car—electric and made of lightweight materials. I thought I might even be able to pick it up if I had to. Frank was a small guy and fit easily. I wasn’t and didn’t. But it was a car, and once I wedged myself inside, I was on my way down the road, heading for New Jersey.
As I crossed the bridge, I had a sudden vision of the varcolac standing over me. Every muscle in my body tensed—I could see the varcolac almost as clearly as I could see the road in front of me. It wasn’t like a dream or a vision; it was more like I had a second pair of eyes in a completely different place, feeding images to my brain.
I knew what was happening. Jacob and I were becoming one person again. The electric shock must have been from him; maybe it was even the reason the probability waveform had started to collapse. I could tell that he was underground right now, probably in the accelerator tunnels, and that the varcolac was there. I couldn’t see everything that was happening; only the occasional glimpse.
I stepped on the gas. I didn’t know how much time I had left.