“Yes, I can,” Lucas answered in his most serious tone as dozens of other vehicles closed in on his position. Several of them slid sideways, nearly hitting each other, as the dew-laden grass lessened the tire traction when they tried to stop. One by one, police cruisers and emergency transports took position, surrounding Lucas on three sides, with the Student Union behind him.
The officer took out a pad and pen and began to write. “Let’s start with your name.”
“Lucas Ramsay.”
“Okay, son, what did you see?”
“I was walking across the mall when suddenly a bright light exploded out of nowhere in front of the Student Union and nearly blinded me.”
The officer glanced at theater. “How long did the light last?”
“Maybe two seconds.”
“Where were you at the time?”
“I’d guess about a hundred feet from the Union’s steps. Close to where those girls are standing over there,” Lucas said, pointing to three people, probably in their twenties, standing on the grass.
“Where would you say the light originated from?”
“Well, it was really intense and only lasted a second, but I think it was near the center of the crater.”
The sergeant looked at the hollow crater for a few seconds before turning his eyes back to Lucas. “Was there an explosion?”
“No, the only sound I heard was this high-pitched squeal. It started right after the flash happened.”
The officer hesitated, scratching his temple with the pen. “A squeal you say?”
“Yeah, it was like being trapped inside a room with a thousand kids screaming at the top of their lungs. The pain was so intense I fell to my knees. When I looked around, there was a bunch of other people lying on the ground, too. Luckily, I didn’t pass out, but almost everyone else did.”
Cherekos nodded his head while wearing a slight smirk on his face, scribbling more notes into his incident report.
Fire and rescue personnel ran past the two of them carrying hoses, stretchers, ladders, and medical equipment. News reporters were now on the scene, too, jogging across the mall with their cameras and microphones in tow.
Some were out of breath, which Lucas assumed was due to them having to park several blocks away. The mall was a pedestrian-only zone; civilian vehicles didn’t have access.
“How large would you estimate the light to be?” the officer asked after watching a trio of EMTs race by.
“That I’m not sure. It was so bright, I couldn’t look at it directly,” Lucas replied, turning his neck to stare back at the theater while thinking about it for a few moments. He brought his eyes back to the officer’s. “But I’d say about the same size as the area that’s missing. Maybe a bit smaller?”
“Did you see anything unusual before the flash? Like someone who didn’t belong? Someone acting suspicious, perhaps?”
Lucas shook his head. “All I remember seeing was all the students lining up for the movie.”
Helicopters buzzed in overhead, flooding the scene with swirling spotlights. Lucas knew he’d have a difficult time hearing the cop over the deafening rotors now chopping through the cool desert air.
“How many students were in line?” Cherekos yelled.
Lucas shouted back, “Best guess? Maybe two hundred. The line was fairly long.”
Cherekos seemed to be making a visual count of the human remains along the steps. Then he said, “What happened to the rest of the students?”
“They vanished into thin air, just like the building.”
Cherekos shook his head slightly and mouthed the words “vanished into thin air” as he wrote a few more notes. Two additional officers joined Cherekos and stood to his left. Based on their body language, Lucas thought they were waiting for instructions.
“What happened next?” Cherekos asked.
“I felt a breeze pull me toward the Student Union.”
“Pull you? Do you mean push, like in wind?”
“No, it was more like I was being sucked into the crater. It pulled at me, from the front. I’m guessing when the building and steps vanished, the resulting spatial vacuum created a negative air pressure event. If I’m right, then not only did the physical matter disappear, but the surrounding air mass did as well.”
The officer stopped writing and looked at Lucas with his left eyebrow raised. “Sir, I need to know, have you been drinking tonight?”
“No, Sergeant, I don’t drink. Ever.”
Cherekos clicked his pen, put it into his shirt pocket, and closed his incident report with more force than necessary.
“I know it sounds crazy, but I’m telling you the truth.”
“Okay, sir, I think we have all we need.”
“Do you want me to stay here?” Lucas asked, wondering why the cop didn’t ask him for more information in case he needed to get in touch with him later. He assumed the man was a little traumatized by what he was seeing and wasn’t thinking clearly. Or he thought Lucas was totally and completely nuts.
“Hold on,” Cherekos said, stepping away and beginning a private discussion with his officers. Lucas saw him reach for the radio transmitter clinging to his upper chest.
Lucas scanned the area and noticed that the police had erected a series of sawhorse-style barricades around the scene, and they were in the process of linking them together with bright yellow police tape with DO NOT CROSS written on it in black block letters. He felt like he was being hemmed in, making his feet want to take off running. But he held his position, not letting his guilt take over.
Stay cool, he thought. Now was no time to panic.
After a minute, Cherekos and his fellow officers broke their huddle to escort Lucas and the ever-growing number of paparazzi to the other side of barricades. Lucas waited there for fifteen minutes as thousands of civilians filtered into the mall area and congregated on his side of the barricades. Many of them snapped photos and shot video of the scene with their smart phones.
Lucas yawned, barely able to keep his eyes open. It had been a long and stressful day. His legs were tired and his feet were hurting. He decided it was time to walk the mile and a half home before he fell asleep standing up by the police barrier. There wasn’t any more he could he here. Plus, he needed to check on Drew. He turned and headed for their apartment.
* * *
When Lucas arrived at his apartment complex, he didn’t feel like waiting for the elevator, so he climbed the three flights of switchback stairs and went down the hall to his place. He unlocked the door, removed his shoes, and walked through the central room with an adjoining kitchenette. The door to the lone bedroom was sitting ajar a few inches. He pushed it open and went inside, slipping past his brother’s bed. Drew was snoring as he lay on his left side, his back to the center of the room.
Lucas sat at the study desk and turned on his computer. While he waited for the sign-on screen to appear, he pulled the flash drive out of his pocket and put it on the desk, being careful not to damage it. Once he logged onto his laptop computer, he connected the flash drive with one of the two dozen electronic cables he kept stuffed inside the bottom drawer. He turned down the computer’s speaker system and began to play back the video footage on the screen. The audio was just loud enough for him to hear if he leaned forward with his ear near the tiny built-in speaker.
The video camera’s operator had been waiting in the movie line with his three friends—two young women and one older guy who wore a baseball cap with a two-inch, block, blue-and-red-letter “A” on the front. The camera captured them laughing and joking around about the movie they were about to see.
It was hard to watch the events unfold without feelings of guilt and responsibility trying to find a home inside his heart. He needed to push them aside like he’d done before. It took a few seconds of intense concentration, but his mind was able to overcome the distress and flush them back into the waiting darkness.
He began to put the pieces together, hoping—no, scratch that—prayi
ng they wouldn’t fit. But deep down, he knew better.
What had started with a single email—an impulse to make things right for himself and his family—had somehow ended in this. It began with his online paper submission, which led to Dr. Green’s scathing criticism, which led to the attorney named Larson getting involved and having their lab project suspended. That was bad enough, but then it got worse with Drew’s subsequent pleas of desperation to run the E-121 experiment again. That, of course, led to his total cave and a second run at full power after changing the specs back to their original equations, which made the E-121 module vanish into thin air. And with his luck, it probably landed somewhere it shouldn’t have, somehow kick-starting . . . this. A bloodless massacre on the steps of the Student Union. All from a single email. It was too insane to believe, but he decided to run it through his mind anyway.
A sphere of E-121 missing—his fault.
The Student Union in shambles—his fault.
Dozens of innocent college kids dead—his fault.
Jasmine cut in half—his fault.
Abby dead or missing—his fault.
Drew in emotional panic—his fault.
All because he’d pressed the send button.
How did he let this happen? Whatever this was.
Then his mind shifted gears, possibly out of self-preservation—or maybe it was denial. He couldn’t be sure. Not that it mattered. There was work to be done and since sleep wasn’t going to be an option right now, he decided to let the facts take center stage. After all, maybe he was jumping to conclusions. Maybe he wasn’t responsible. Maybe he was drawing lines and connecting facts incorrectly. Scientists don’t assume, and they never guess. They quantify the data and correlate the facts, then suggest a theory. That’s what he needed to do. Run it by the numbers to be sure.
To do that, he needed to study every last detail in the video data. Perhaps there was something hiding between the frames. Something he couldn’t see with his naked eye when the flash happened. Something that might prove this event wasn’t related to the E-121 experiment. That it was something completely new and different and all just a sick, twisted coincidence.
Lucas fast-forwarded the recording to a frame just before the flash appeared. The camera’s time stamp read 11:52 p.m. He reviewed the incident in super slow motion, playing the recording frame by frame, until he came to the first appearance of blinding light. It started as a microscopic point of light, just to the left of the Student Union’s entrance door, before stretching vertically and then horizontally until the camera’s lens was inundated with light.
His suspicions were confirmed: the theater flash, though more powerful and larger, was a near-perfect copy of the one they’d seen inside their reactor’s core. He’d realized it back at the Student Union, but the video evidence confirmed it. Combine that with the black powder he’d found both inside the crater and in the reactor’s core, and there was no way around it. The evidence was as clear as the scent of oranges.
They were related.
It was all his fault.
Fuck!
He went to his brother’s bed and shook Drew’s arm several times. “Drew, you need to wake up. This can’t wait. We have to talk.”
NINE
Sunday, December 23
Lucas woke up Sunday morning after a lousy night spent drifting in and out of light sleep, mentally replaying the previous night’s horror show repeatedly until he finally drifted off somewhere around 4:30 a.m. He wasn’t ready to get out of bed yet, so he slid deeper under the covers and curled up in a ball, squeezing a second pillow between his arms. A few seconds later, he realized the room was dead quiet—too quiet. He wasn’t hearing his brother’s snoring or any other sounds in the room.
He sat up in a flash and looked at Drew’s bed. The covers were pulled back and it was empty. He scanned the room quickly, but didn’t see any sign of Drew or his wheelchair.
Shit. Where’d he go?
Lucas hopped up, got dressed, and checked the top drawer in Drew’s nightstand, but his brother’s wallet, keys, and shuttle pass were all missing. It wasn’t like Drew to venture off without informing him first. Something was wrong. He could feel it deep in his bones.
In the main room, he found the TV on but the sound had been muted. He swung his eyes around and saw the remote control on the kitchen table, next to a small plate with two slices of toast. One of the pieces had a bite missing. Plus, there was a nearly full glass of milk sitting next to a open tub of margarine and a used butter knife.
Lucas thought about the facts for a moment and realized Drew had gotten up to eat something. He must have sat the table with his plate of toast and turned on the TV with the sound off. Just after adding the butter and taking the first bite, something must have caught Drew’s eye on the tube. That’s when he took off. But to where?
The front blinds were closed and so was the front door, though Lucas found its two-sided deadbolt unlocked. He opened the door, went outside, and wandered barefoot along the catwalk to the elevator. He could see dozens of people out front, loading their vehicles with belongings.
From his view, it looked like everyone was leaving town. He couldn’t blame them. He would’ve joined them if he could after what had happened to the front of the Student Union. He was sure the news was claiming it was a terrorist attack or some other localized threat by now, sending the Tucson residents into a fleeing frenzy.
He checked the laundry room on the first floor—no sign of Drew. He knocked on the manager’s door, but no one answered. He asked several of his departing neighbors if they had seen Drew, but none had.
Lucas went out front where he ran into little Cindy Mack. He waved at her while she stood beside her father as he packed the trunk of their car. In a flash, she came running up to Lucas, wrapping her arms around his waist. He bent down to give her a hug.
She started crying. “Lucas, I don’t want to leave. But my dad says we have to go.”
“It’ll be okay, Cindy. Your dad’s right, it’s not safe for you to stay here.”
“But I’ll never see you again.”
“Sure you will,” he said, looking her in the eyes. “When this is all over, I’ll be right here waiting for you by the swing set. Okay?”
She smiled at him, sniffed, wiped off her tears, and then ran back to her dad.
Cindy was one of four kids in Kleezebee’s apartment complex, and the only one Lucas liked. Maybe it was because she was the only one who liked him, despite his nasty cheek scars. Her parents both worked during the day, leaving her to play by herself on the swing set in the back of the apartment after school. He’d gotten to know her a few months earlier when she’d fallen off the swing and scraped one of her knees. He was on his way out to the dumpster with a bag of trash when he found her sitting on the ground, crying. He used the complex’s garden hose to clean out the dirt and gravel from her wound, and then found a bandage to cover the scrape.
She took a shine to him and they’d talked at least once a week ever since, usually by the swing set on trash day. She was a quiet but cheerful girl in the fourth grade, who carried an empty white purse with her everywhere she went. He worried for her safety since she was left alone for two hours each day after school, until her parents came home from work. He often looked out the bedroom window to check on her while she played on the swings.
He went back upstairs to the apartment to change clothes, still thinking of Cindy’s arms wrapped tightly around him. He already felt bad enough about all the death and destruction, but if something happened to her because of his actions, he’d never forgive himself.
No more deaths, he told himself, grabbing a pair of socks and his shoes from the bedroom. Once he had his shoes and socks on, he changed clothes, then went to the main room and stood in front of the TV. He turned on the sound and hit the remote control to scan through several channels. Every station was broadcasting live from a different location around the Student Union. He stopped on the fourth channel, which fe
atured a cameraman in a helicopter circling above the devastation. The feed from overhead allowed him to take in a wide angle view of the damage.
“Shit, it looks much worse from the air,” he said, feeling a stinging pain in his belly again. His heart tightened in his chest, making breathing a chore. He realized there were no body fragments littering the theater’s steps like before. CSI must have collected the evidence and taken it back to their lab, he decided.
Lucas settled in to watch, taking a seat on the edge of their saggy old couch. News correspondents were interviewing campus officials and law enforcement. He sat back and put his arms up on the sofa’s back cushion, catching a whiff of his left forearm. Even after last night’s hot shower, he could still smell the stench of burnt hair and severed flesh on his skin. He wondered how many scrubbings it would take to get rid of the stink.
Most of the network’s reporters and a few of their interviewees offered opinions on what had happened. Some believed last night’s event was merely an accident, like a gas explosion, but most thought it was a terrorist attack, with some form of incendiary device as the weapon.
He was flabbergasted when no one mentioned the lack of building rubble or the bloodless body parts. He wondered if anyone was actually paying attention, or just running their mouths without thinking. The missing evidence was just as important as the tangible facts, and he couldn’t believe none of them were discussing it.
When law enforcement officials were asked for a cause, they declined to comment, giving the police department’s typical response: “I can’t comment right now. The investigation is still ongoing.”
Lucas could see the Tucson Bomb Squad in the background, milling about, working their detection equipment, scanning inch-by-inch for chemical and radiological evidence.
The local police were straining to hold back the crowd of thousands surrounding the scene. Many observers were snapping photos and recording their own video footage. Firefighters were keeping watch on the theater’s exterior, equipment at the ready, while smoke still billowed out from the sides of the damaged structure.
Linkage (The Narrows of Time Series Book 1) Page 12