by Brian Cody
“Okay”, David replied, “how long will it take to get through that one?”
“Well, if I read correctly when I heard about these force-fields, the polarity on the outside is reversed from the interior current.”
“Yeah, that sounds about right”, Erik yelled.
“Okay, then give me about four minutes!”
“We have three-and-a-half”, Turrisi remarked as he walked to David.
David locked eyes with Turrisi, then looked to the bomb, inhaled, and blustered, “Crap!”
“Oh shoot, oh shoot!” Shawn repeated as he stumbled to the edge of the den and jumped into the hallway, “dude, we’re frickin’ trapped with that thing!”
“Nope, I refuse; I fricken’ refuse to die like this!” Nate exclaimed as he stepped to the bomb and knelt over the containers, while Erik and Turrisi ran to the opposite side. “There’s got to be a keypad or some way to access the motherboard commanding this thing!”
“No keypad!” Erik called as he tapped the timer.
“Stop poking the timer!” Turrisi growled as he swatted Erik’s hand, jumped up, and looked to the wires. “The red wire!” Turrisi proclaimed to David, “it’s always the frickin’ red wire!”
“Turrisi, are you blind!?” Nate asked, while David and Shawn ran up to him, “they’re all red!”
“Well”, Shawn began as he pointed towards one of the lines leading to the second container, “that one could be burnt orange.”
“Okay, bull crap!” David proclaimed as he shook his head.
“No, Piekarsky, I could see that being a burnt orange”, Erik replied.
“No, not that”, David scoffed. “Guys, don’t you see?” he began as he stepped back. “The bomb-maker is toying with our heads!”
“Yeah, with all of the wires being red and one burnt orange, I figured that”, Nate remarked.
“Shut up, Klinge!” David retorted. “It all makes sense!” he stated as he squeezed past the two front containers to stand in the center of the three objects, “we’re supposed to pull all of the wires at once!”
“Okay, Piekarsky”, Turrisi began as he stepped away, “that doesn’t_”—he silenced as David knelt, clasped the wires where the main bundle forked into two, and then stood.
“Dave”, Erik grunted as he stepped back.
“Piekarsky, wait”, Nate called as he lifted his arms.
“Dave, put the wires down”, Shawn muttered as he stumbled towards the corner of the room.
“Well, we all gotta die sometime”, David began with a nod as he inhaled and leaned.
“Dave!” Erik yelped.
“Piekarsky, I’m not joking, bud”, Shawn squealed.
“Here we go!” David roared as he reared back, the slack of those wires being lost in the first instant, and their ends tearing from the containers in the next.
“Oh f*_!” Nate screeched as he lunged back, with sporadic bolts jouncing from his hands in a hurried attempt to shield himself. At the same moment, the wires were loosed in a burst of sparks. David grinned and closed his eyes; Erik and Turrisi turned and jumped; Shawn collapsed; and Nate stumbled upon the stairs. In the next moment, a chirp sounded as the timer vanished.
It took a minute for David to open his eyes and find himself unscathed and to find the bomb unmoved and the house intact. With his grin widened, he dropped the wires and spun. Shawn was stumbling to his feet, his arms seizing and his face covered in sweat; Turrisi was resting on his knees and looking at the floor; Erik was attempting to stand, his hands twitching and his eyes jolting; and Nate was resting on his back at the beginning of the living room, his eyes covered in tears as he stared with arms outstretched.
“I seriously…I seriously have to pee now”, Shawn wheezed as he pulled himself to his knees.
“I do… too…” Turrisi began as he grabbed the wall and dragged himself up, “nope…nope, never mind, I don’t have to anymore.”
“Wow, you guys have no faith in me. I know what I’m freakin’ doing!” David exclaimed as he stepped out from the bomb cluster.
“Do you really?” Nate asked as he flung his arms.
“Shut up, Klinge! And I heard your little swear; consider that your one-a-day allowance!”
“Another two or three minutes!” Bryen called. The group looked towards the hall, taking in the reply and understanding that their working comrade had gone without the fear of atomization.
“B-money, you take your time. We’re good in here!” Shawn called as he looked to the group and nodded.
“Uh…okay”, Bryen replied. As Bryen finished, a beep sounded behind David and across from Turrisi. Turrisi looked to the bomb cluster without notifying his teammates, suggesting that his frenzied mind had fabricated the resonance; however, as he watched Shawn, Erik, Nate, and then David look to the bomb, his jaw fell, and, as he looked to that timer and watched three more numbers flash into view, his knees unbuckled; however, he kept from falling as the countdown recommenced.
“Three minutes”, Turrisi hummed, “and eight, seven, six, five seconds.”
“Huh”, David grunted as he crossed his arms.
“B-MONEY!” Shawn, Nate, and Erik shrieked as they jumped to their feet and stomped towards the hall.
“Crap!” David coughed as he jogged after his teammates. “Bryen, you have one minute!”
“What!?” Bryen yelled back.
“We’re all screwed if you don’t pull off a miracle!” David yelped.
“Well, I’m almost through”, Bryen replied as he knelt in front of the door, glanced back, and shrugged.
***
Beyond the reach of those six’s wails, the nocturne continued its immutable course, with the sun hours off and the moon and the stars providing the ruling luminescence. Above that house, the field surrounding it, and the city which it occupied, a continuing utterance broke through the arid and glacial silence of the upper atmosphere. A shriek, persisting and squealing, increased in volume as an invisible shape—discernible only by the contrails streaking behind it—spiraled through the stratosphere. The shape then levelled at fifty thousand feet, moved eastward, dove towards the Roanoke border, and towards the city’s outskirts, where it levelled off once more at one thousand feet. The invisible shape then rushed into level flight and tore across the sky at several hundred miles per hour. It dove, to five hundred feet, and further accelerated as it moved on a beeline for the gleaming, metal-encapsulated home.
A bang then sounded from that unseen shape as it shifted, tilted, and dropped a visible object from the underside of its frame. That object—an elongated, conical tube, just shorter than three yards and colored reflective platinum—dove and then writhed. A crease formed down its equator that caused its two hemispheres to spin in opposite directions. The frontward portion condensed and then extracted three rearward-facing prongs from the tip. The rearward portion extracted four larger and wider tailfins, while the back spiraled open to reveal a piceous hollow, from which sounded a strengthening growl. A second from plunging through the treetops, the two ends halted their gyrations, while the hollow erupted with deep-blue flames. The missile then bolted for the armored house from one mile off, half of a mile in the next second, and then a quarter of a mile, where it dove and accelerated towards the back door.
***
“All right, I’m through the second field!” Bryen proclaimed, the sensation of cooler air moving through the intangible spot brushing past his sudorific face. He looked back as he held his arms outstretched, expecting the group to respond or to jog into view, but neither occurred. He shrugged and looked to the door before spreading his arms. The action caused his permeating shadow to expand, and the effort caused Bryen to grunt as he felt resistance from the pulsing field. After a few seconds, he increased the ethereal gape to two feet in diameter. With a few more seconds of groaning effort, as he supposed, he could expand it enough to encompass the majority of the door’s face. He insufflated to exert more driving force. However, his arms locked in place and
his eyes dilated as he perceived unnatural tones—the bellow of expelled flames and the screech of subsonic flight. Those cacophonous and simultaneous blasts only rose in volume, then intensity, ringing in Bryen’s ears with almost painful resonance, and heightening still.
Bryen stomped as he repositioned his legs in the first moment, and, with arms still outstretched, he lunged from the door and to the right in the next. I need to remove the opening in the shield, but if I do that, we’re still trapped! blared in his mind as he reached his zenith. He blinked as he slackened his arms and fell, and, as the thundering wail drew near, he opened his eyes.
The rocket gored through the intangible gap, while its exhaust frayed Bryen’s formation. Bryen slammed onto the floor from the exhaust’s trailing gust as the rocket bulleted down the hall, through the right wall, a connecting wall, and into the floor.
By that strident invasion, the remainder of the group lunged from the opposite hall and sprinted for the back door. “B-money!” David called as they lunged into the kitchen and stood over the burned floor. David turned to his right and found Bryen dragging himself to his knees along a small indent. Bryen’s face was scuffed and his glasses slanted as they hung over his eyes, but he appeared unscathed as he stood.
“Dude, what happened? Where’s the opening?” Shawn asked as he looked to the doorway.
“Something broke through”, Bryen coughed as he wiped his forehead and readjusted his glasses.
“Wait, broke through?” Turrisi asked.
“Down the hall!” Bryen replied as he pointed past them. They turned, followed the extended gape on the wall, and found a continuing hole. Erik rushed after it, bolting into the corresponding hall before leaping through a second, more circular fissure. He rolled along the still-smoking floor of that space and stood to look to the rocket, its inactive exhaust chute rising from the floor on a forty-five degree angle, and its arrowhead-front goring into the foundation.
“Garcia!” Turrisi called as the door to Erik’s right shot off of its hinges from Nate’s kick. Turrisi followed Nate before both examined that projectile and hopped back to the door.
“What is it?” David asked as he stood outside of the room and looked through the aperture behind Erik.
“Rocket”, Erik spoke. “Someone shot a rocket through the one place in the shield where it would’ve been able to penetrate”, he replied as he spun to Turrisi, Nate, and then to David. “And that’s how you compound problems.”
“What do we do?” David asked.
“I don’t know.” Erik spun to the rocket. “If anything, I’m surprised we’re not dead now. Rockets have this tendency to detonate upon impact.” The rocket chirped as Erik finished. He tensed, and both Nate and Turrisi jumped towards the room’s entrance. Erik then dragged his hands through his black hair as he found the rocket intact. With a skittish, unbalanced step, he inched towards the rocket and jolted as he found, on its side, a three-digit countdown. “Are you frickin’ kidding me!?” he roared as he spun around.
“What?” Shawn asked as he pushed by David and looked through that hole, only to find the room vacant. Shawn looked to his right as Erik, Turrisi, and Nate bolted for the main hallway. “What is it?”
“It has a timer counting down, in-sync, with the bomb!” Turrisi roared as they ran past a gaping and unmoving David.
“What!?” Shawn wailed as he scurried after them and David followed. “B-money!” Shawn called as he looked towards the back door and towards a nearing Bryen, while Erik, Turrisi, and Nate looked to the right, towards the house’s front. “We need another hole, and we need one now!” Shawn exclaimed.
“Not with a minute-thirty! B-money doesn’t have that kind of time!” Turrisi exclaimed.
“Well, what are we supposed to do, then!?” Shawn blasted to Turrisi, with both of their faces pale, gasping, and sudoric. Nate was almost identical in countenance, but he concealed his horror by a slight degree, his fists squeezed to restrain his tremors as he stood and, with Turrisi and Erik, kept mental count of their nearing demise. Erik turned and spun as he clasped the tops of his hair and searched his mind for some understanding or piece of training that would guarantee their safety. Bryen’s expression was dulled; his empty gaze bordering along the lines of accepting the inevitable—an understanding that bemoaning his shortened existence would do nothing to preserve him.
“Far side of the house!” Erik, Bryen, Nate, Turrisi, and Shawn spun to David walking up to them.
“What?” Erik coughed.
“Far side of the house, away from this bomb and the first one; by the office. Let’s go there!” David replied. There was a momentary pause as the other five concluded that there were no better plans. They sprinted down the main hall, into the last of the branching halls on the right, and along the lane that would take them to Arthur Grant’s study.
“What now?” Shawn asked as they stopped in front of the office, “do we go in?”
“No, too cramped”, David replied as he looked back, “time!?”
“Less than a minute!” Nate replied.
“All right; Shawn, use the papers in the office, around the house, and whatever you have to make a doming shield around us!”
“Got ya!” Shawn replied as he outstretched his arms and the group took a few steps from him. Within a matter of seconds, scores of papers fluttered from Shawn’s sleeves. Joining them after another second were tentacular currents of hundreds of documents that poured out of the office and whistled past openings, out of crevices, and down stairways before rushing towards that corner to spiral around the group. Then, from the bottom-up, that blizzard of multicolored documents connected, overlapped, and formed into a semicircular bastion four sheets thick, twelve feet in diameter at its base, and seven feet in height.
“Are you secure?” David asked as he pointed to Shawn, whose arms were outstretched towards the shield’s wall.
“Yeah”, Shawn replied, “but I don’t know_”
“Good”, David interjected, “B-money, I want you to create an inner shield that’s hugging Shawn’s.”
“Yep”, Bryen replied on Shawn’s right. He looked groundward and expanded his shadow in a slithering eruption that moved around his teammates’ legs, then latched onto the bottom of the dome and marched up its interior before eclipsing the paper formation. “Done”, Bryen finished, his right arm outstretched and pointed towards his silhouette.
“Good”, David replied. “Garcia, do you think you’d be able to deflect some of the flames? These guys might need a hand”, he continued while pointing to Erik on the other side of that dome.
“Five–ton-yield explosive plus one rocket of unknown strength?” Erik replied. “I can maybe give a millisecond of delay before the force overwhelms my concentration.”
“That’s all we’ll need”, David replied with a nod, while Shawn and Bryen glanced to one another.
“If it helps, I have a shield”, Nate called as he raised his hand while standing behind Erik, who collapsed onto one knee and outstretched his arms.
“That uses electricity—which hurts, no thanks”, Turrisi replied as he stood on David’s right.
“And explosions; I create a counteracting shockwave. A dumpster blew up once, and I was standing next to it and_”
“Nate, this is no time for anecdotes or exploding shields!” Shawn yelped.
“Fine then; if your shields fail and we die, I’m blaming you before we get into heaven”, Nate remarked as he lifted his hands, “also, in about five seconds, we’re going to want to cover our_”
A resounding peal interjected over Nate’s words as the three explosive containers and the invasive rocket detonated in synchrony. In the first instant, the house was scorched, then pulverized, then devoured in a deluge of orange and red flames. In the next instant, the invisible palisade flared into a yellow wave that was pressed against and then overtaken, while the flames shot out from the house’s walls. The remainders of the explosion thundered into the open air, bolted across the
ground, and rammed through the countryside. As the shockwave diminished, and as the flames weakened, an ebon plume billowed skyward, coiled upon itself, and folded into a sprouted mushroom before dissipating.
Chapter Seventeen: Monday, 3 May [Part One]
An undulant tremor pulsed through the heap of smoking debris at the crater’s nadir. A second tremor pulsed through the ground and the overlapping portions of wood, cement, and metal, jolting the columns of smoke rising from that mass, and jostling smaller particles. With a third tremor, a geyser of metal and wood shot along the crater’s northern corner. In place of those masses appeared a gape several yards in depth and shrinking, at its nadir, into a yard-wide chasm.
“Did we hit the surface?” David asked as he thrust his hand through the hole and waved.
“I can’t tell; it doesn’t seem much cooler, and since we’re pretty far from sunrise, it’s hard to tell any difference in brightness”, Erik replied.
“Yeah”, Bryen called, “I hear sirens clearer than I did before.”
“All right.” David pulled back his arm, jumped from the small cavern and landed alongside of the crater containing it. Behind him, Erik followed in a short leap, then Nate in a heaving pull, Turrisi in a scurrying drag, and Bryen in a sideward lunge. “Albert, you’re good; you can come out now”, David called.
With arms outstretched behind him, Shawn hovered after his teammates and touched down alongside of them. He then lowered his hands to his hips, allowing the remainder of the paper cocoon to implode, with a short cough of ash rising after it. Unharmed, the six stood at the edge of the crater, their bodies weakening from a shared lethargy but their minds burning through a surge of energy brought on by the explosion some thirty minutes prior.
“You know what?” Shawn began as he dragged his mask from his head. “I wasn’t sure that my shield would hold up; not against that”, he remarked as he looked around and covered his mouth from passing smoke.
“There’s your millisecond”, Erik replied as he rested his hands on his knees and looked groundward.