by John Freitas
He stared down at the boy in the tub. The kid stared back with eyes wide and his hands up at Sean. Sean wondered, Am I already dead? Am I losing my mind?
He had taken Oxy enough to hallucinate before. In rehab, the hallucinations had gotten really bad enough during withdrawals that they almost sent him to the hospital. Sean had pretended everything was fine, so that he wouldn’t be found out as an addict outside the facility.
The kitchen table and burning sofa were doing tricks in the apartment too. The yellow tablecloth spread out along the top of the floating table like wings ready to fly away.
Sean swallowed and muttered. “Foster isn’t the only one hitting the ceiling today.”
He shook his head inside his helmet and mask. He reached out and grabbed a piece of wood sticking up from where the wall had broken. The board snapped in his hand and the piece floated away. He clawed at the air more until he caught a section of drywall. It crumbled into dozens of tiny asteroids that cut through the smoke in trails, but finally he got enough of a grip to pull himself forward.
Sean soared forward and down to the tub. He grabbed the beam and yanked with his feet up in the air behind him. It didn’t budge. The boy was unconscious now.
Sean braced his feet against the tub and pulled with little hope that he could move the beam. It popped loose from where it was wedged in the tub and floated up like the kitchen table.
The boy floated up with his arms and legs out and Sean caught him. The ceiling came loose above them from the shifted beam. Sean watched the debris come down, but then pause and spread out in the air above them.
Sean kicked off the tub and floated through the air with the boy in his arms. He kicked off another section of wall in the hall. His boot went through, but he changed his direction and floated out through the wall of burning objects across the room. Sean swept them out of his path to avoid burning the boy.
He saw the cup still spinning and Sean whispered. “What now?”
It suddenly fell to the floor at full speed. The rest of the debris crashed down as well washing flame out across the carpet with the impact. Sean felt his own weight return and he shifted the boy’s body to keep from landing on him. He slammed to his knees.
The entire building rumbled around him in its violent return to reality. Sean charged into one of the bedrooms as the apartment above came crashing completely in.
As the entire building shook, Sean kicked out the glass from the window. He clicked his radio and said, “This is Grayson. I’m at the window. Second floor. East side. I need an exit.”
“We see you,” Carter said over the radio. “I’m putting a portable ladder up now.”
The top rung hit the window frame and Sean looked out to see Carter climbing. He took the boy from Sean and Sean climbed out too.
As they passed the boy off to paramedics, the ground rumbled again and Sean grabbed a lamppost to keep from floating away. The interior floors collapsed inside the brick shell with flame torching up through the windows. The companies blasted water into the ruined building to try to finish it off.
Sean turned and saw Carter staring at him. Sean realized he was still clutching the lamppost.
Carter tilted his head. “You okay, man?”
Sean let go of the post and pulled off his mask. “Yeah, I’m fine.”
There was no chance that Sean was going to confess to hallucinating that he was flying.
They loaded up after the fire was doused and returned to the house. Back when Sean was married, he never talked to Tabby about the tough days. Now that he was dating Jenny, he tried not be closed off. She encouraged him to share and even vent when he needed. He wasn’t sure he was ready to share this experience – whatever it was. He sensed beginning to lie now was a mistake, but he felt pulled by his fear.
Sean glanced at Carter who nodded at him and Sean looked away again.
As they entered the firehouse and unloaded, someone shouted. “What happened here?”
The other guys walked up and stared. Their trunks were overturned and busted open. Two bunks were tilted against the walls. Cabinets were open and the plates spilled on the floor. The skillet was across the room and the cold noodles ran down the wall in a greasy mess.
Lt. Foster came up last and said, “It wasn’t like this when we left, right?”
“No, sir,” Carter said. “Looks like that quake we felt wasn’t from the building collapsing.”
Foster said, “I told you Stroganoff for breakfast was a mistake, Grayson.”
Sean swallowed and thought about the experience of flying through the fire. “Yes, sir.”
The alarm sounded again and all the men groaned.
Foster shouted. “Replace oxygen tanks in a hurry and suit up. If you aren’t broken, get ready to go.”
5
Dr. Paulo Restrepo – Marlo-Pitts Observatory, Colombia
Dr. Paulo Restrepo leaned closer to the computer screen and scrolled between the images from the Australian observatory. He shook his head. He identified five in the middle of the sequence that were not even from the right year much less the correct time of year. Paulo wondered if they were testing him or were actively trying to sabotage his research. If it was a mistake, it was a spectacular one and he did not want to believe he was coordinating with people that were that incompetent.
He sent the message pointing out the slides that were mistakenly included and asked to be given the correct images for those time stamps.
Paulo was stopped in his tracks until he had the complete data. He leaned back in his chair and scratched at the gray in his beard. He stood and walked to the office window. The array for the telescope spread in a massive, reflective valley at the hollowed out top of the mountain several meters above him. Below he could see the outskirts of the village.
The university and larger sections of the city were around the highway on the far side of the mountain. Too much light over there, Paulo thought. On this side, the village was on a strict blackout order from the government at night. Just the other night, a floodlight had been installed by one of the villagers. An entire night of data was lost from a team of visiting German scientists. The month’s schedule was completely off. One more delay and Dr. Restrepo’s session would be cut short next. His grant would be at risk.
Paulo knew the spot where the light had been erected. He could see the tin roof and the bare pole where troops had cut down the light and detained the man. The Marlo-Pitts Observatory Array was big funding for the university and the Colombian government. They all took their funding seriously.
Likewise, they took success and failure seriously and Paulo needed his data.
He turned away from the window and scanned through public journal databases. He skipped past the abstract and even the data references to the raw data files. Most of it would be uncompiled and unusable for his purposes, but he was desperate. If he could imply some level of potential embarrassment for the Australians by simply appearing to be cross-referencing their findings, then maybe he could speed their reply with the information he really needed.
He leaned on his hand and his eyes drooped as he scanned through mountains of information that was largely unpublishable.
Paulo spotted some key image files from the reference points he needed uploaded from an observatory in Hawaii. He did a quick render to simply mark the points he needed in order to highlight the Australian mistake on the five frames of misplaced data.
The images came up rough and he narrowed his eyes. Paula actually put his fingers on the screen to trace out the points. He chewed at the inside of his mouth as he rough rendered them again. The rendering came up a second time identical to before. The data was being read correctly; it was just that the data couldn’t be right.
Paulo initiated a more detailed imaging of the data. This couldn’t be right. If anything, the Hawaiian numbers were further off than Australia. It was as if he was looking at an image of the sky from weeks, months, or years earlier. It wasn’t the whole sky though.
Dr. Restrepo leaned in closer. He put his finger on the screen again. He zoomed in twice. There were afterimages. Along a certain line he was seeing two images of the same stars in two different positions. He would attribute it to a fault in their lens, but he had already found the anomaly from two different observatories without even truly looking for it.
Paulo stopped the data download and widened the data pull to include the sections of space outside the visual range of the distortion.
He searched through the databases and pulled every image from the time references from the key sectors of the sky that were available. It was not a lot of data, but it was a lot to fully image. He would need to contact the observatories to request all the data.
Paulo needed more hard drive space.
He dialed the director and waited. “Yes, sir, sorry to bother you. I need longer for my session this week. I desperately need that data … Yes, sir, I understand, but I wouldn’t ask, if it wasn’t vital. I do a lot for this observatory and I feel I’ve earned a little leeway … Yes, sir … Can I at least be granted more drive space between now and my session, so I can make the most of that time? … Yes, sir, right away, please … Thank you.”
Dr. Paulo Restrepo smiled as he hung up. It was a dirty trick to play on the director under his current level of stress, but it got him what he needed. He would also now be less likely to bump Paulo’s time.
Paulo opened up a wider allotment for his downloads and imaging and the process started moving faster. He licked his lips and realized if he found the distortions in the images from more sources, he was going to need to redirect his session toward a different section of sky.
He decided that he couldn’t possibly have been the only one that identified a distortion in space that changed the visual references of the stars to their relative positions at a different point in time. He didn’t even know of an anomaly that could do that.
Paulo opened his browser to search for news that would give him clues or show a pattern in occurrences. A particular one got his attention.
“New pill is created in Switzerland. European webnews article extract.”
After retiring from a Chemical Engineering position in a company in Switzerland, Julien thought he should try to come up with one or two inventions that would help humankind. He also wanted to be remembered for his good deed after he was gone.
Julien and his three other retired and happy friends liked to meet once a month and talk about the old days and sports, followed by lots of laughing and lots of beer. They met in a small, charming restaurant on 8th Avenue in Geneva. The restaurant offered a delicious aged cheese as dessert and no one could say no to it. The only adverse effect was the flatulence it caused on the hosts.
Julien and his friends had so much flatulence at the end of the meal, it always ended up irritating guests on the tables nearby and the restaurant smelled noxious for some time.
So Julien had this novel idea - why not invent a pill that makes flatulence smells like chocolate?
Julien went back to his lab at home and worked hard on his new invention. The pill was ready after one week. He tried a couple of times and it worked perfectly on him. Now it was time to try it with his friends.
Julien arrived at the restaurant with a little box containing the pills. He explained to his friends how wonderful the pills were and each friend swallowed one.
After eating the cheese they waited. But little did they know the cheese chemistry combined with the pill started making them have uncontrollable, strong short bouts of flatulence.
To everyone's surprise, the gravity started to wane and the restaurant guests began to float gently, except for Julien and his friends, which were being propelled uncontrollably across the room at every burst from their bottoms, leaving in the air a fragrance of the finest chocolate.”
Paulo chuckled.
As he searched online, most of the news was about earthquakes at various points on the Earth. A story about one in Arkansas and Tennessee in the United States caught his attention.
He gave up his search immediately and pulled out his cell phone. He got a “cell towers are busy” message. Paulo dialed a local number and let it ring once before he hung up.
He pulled up his e-mail and typed out a quick message to his daughter to see if she was alright.
6
Sean Grayson and Jenny Restrepo – West Memphis, Arkansas
Jenny Restrepo took out her phone and scrolled through her e-mail in the passenger’s seat. Sean glanced over at her for a moment and turned his attention back on the road. Traffic inched forward. A spray of water blasted into the air from a busted water main. Sean could see the lights from the truck, but couldn’t tell which company was handling the break while the city workers tried to repair it. They were outside his firehouse’s territory, but with the quakes, they had been pulled all over the city.
Water rained down onto his windshield in a heavy wash as traffic pulled him forward and stopped him under the water. Sean turned his wipers on high and flipped on his headlights. He took off his sunglasses and stuck them in the center console as he squinted to see the taillights of the car in front of him.
“I’m going to get called back in on short rest,” Sean said. “The city is a mess.”
“They told you that already?” Jenny bent over her phone and thumbed in a message with expert speed.
“No, but I’m sure of it. They have every company out dealing with accidents and breaks all over. They are going to burn through every shift before my off time is up.”
“That’s too bad. Do you still want to plan on getting away?”
“I don’t know,” Sean said. He inched forward again and water thundered on the roof. “I might ought to hang close.”
“Whatever you want, baby. We can go another time. I’ll take off during the week in your next break, if I have to. We’ll find something fun to do close by when we pick up your boys.”
Sean smiled and put his hand on her knee just below the end of her shorts. Her skin was warm and smooth. He glanced at her and forward again. “Who are you texting?”
“E-mailing,” She said. She shook her head still looking down at her phone. Her dark ponytail whipped back and forth over her neck and Sean swallowed. She was almost too beautiful to look at for too long. Sean thought, she could do better; I couldn’t, but she could. She said, “My dad read about the earthquake on the Internet and is freaking out. The cell towers are out in Colombia or something, so he had to e-mail instead of call.”
“Did they have any trouble down there?” Sean asked.
Jenny squinted at him and laughed. “Why would they have trouble all the way down there from a little quake in Arkansas?”
Sean shrugged. He rolled forward out of the spray far enough to see the flares in his lane ahead. He turned the wheel to follow traffic toward the far shoulder. “I don’t know. You said the cell towers were out.”
“Oh, right.” She shrugged and stuffed her phone back into the pocket of her shorts. He moved his hand off her knee as she rose up in the seat to get to her pocket. He watched how her body moved before looking back at the cars ahead. She said, “I don’t know. He’s up on that mountain out in the jungle, so that they are away from the lights. There is no telling what reception problems he’s having. I told him I was just fine with a big, strong, redneck firefighter to protect me.”
“Stop.” He laughed. “I told you that is not a compliment and that word doesn’t mean just anyone from the South.”
She winked at him and blew a kiss. When she smiled, he shivered and looked back at the road. They edged past the firetruck on the shoulder, but Sean didn’t bother to look to see which company it was.
Jenny said, “I went to school here for business admin. I know what a redneck is.”
“A lot of rednecks in business administration?”
“A lot of them own the businesses.”
Sean nodded. “You should have just told your dad that everything was fine or it wasn�
�t as bad as the news made it look. That would comfort him more than telling him your boyfriend was protecting you from earthquakes.”
Jenny laughed. “Maybe so, but it was kind of bad, wasn’t it? I don’t want to lie to him. That fire in the apartment sounded awful. I saw the pictures. I’m terrified thinking you were in there before it fell down.”
Sean sighed. “Yeah, it got hairy. I had to get a little boy out that tried to hide in a tub. We almost missed him and then I had to get a beam off of him once we found him.”
“How many did it take to lift it off?”
Sean cleared his throat. “Just me, I guess.”
“Oh?” She made a show of fanning herself with her hand. “My big, strong, superhero redneck boyfriend. He is so powerful.”
Sean poked her in the ribs with one of his fingers. She squirmed and giggled. Sean watched her for a moment and looked back forward blinking.
After a few seconds of creeping forward past the water main repair, she said, “It sounds like it was very scary. Are you okay?”
He nodded and swallowed without looking away from the road. “Yeah. It was burning before the quake. Then, the tremor must have brought the whole thing down. Me and the boy were the last ones out. They still don’t know how many were still inside.”
“That’s terrible.” Jenny covered her mouth. “Did you feel it when it started? What was it like being in there during an earthquake?”
Sean thought about the objects floating, him lifting the beam like it had no weight, and kicking down the hallway in the air through floating fire like he was moving through space. He opened his mouth to tell her, but then closed it again. He wanted to, but he did not trust himself. He did not want her to see him as in trouble or in need of saving. He swallowed and took a deep breath. Even as he felt that it was a mistake to do so, he pushed the truth back down away from his mouth and left it unsaid.