Connie didn’t seem convinced. “Maybe he’s lost communication with other countries.”
He expressed his doubt. “He’s the President. I’m sure his comms are better than mine, and despite the mixed messages, I’ve mostly been able to communicate with Garth on the other side of the country. I think there is something more going on.”
Now he was scaring himself. More cars and trucks came in behind them, adding to the pressure.
“Do you have any idea what it might be?” she asked.
“The Marine in me says we better be prepared to be crapped on. If the worst happens, we don’t want to be anywhere near big cities. If we can meet Garth in the middle of Nebraska or Iowa, we might be far enough away.”
“Far enough from what?”
He thought about it for a second, unsure if he should say it, but with her, he wasn’t going to lie, or even water down the truth. She deserved to know what he was worried about.
“The real-life end of the world.”
Basel, Switzerland
“Speak English?” Lieutenant Colonel Ethan Knight asked the Swiss guard at the border checkpoint.
“Yes,” the guard replied.
Ethan handed the other man a packet of orders. “This has the authorization of your government. We are to proceed across the border and check on the status of an international operation in Geneva. Specifically, at CERN.
“I’ll check on this and be back. One moment, please.” The guard walked into a small building. Three additional guards stood nearby, carefully studying Phil and Task Force Blue 7. They had to get out of the German Fox and stand behind it.
“Are they going to let us through?” Phil whispered to Ethan.
It was a little after 10pm.
“They have to. The OpOrd laid all this out. We’re good.”
Phil could tell by his tone of voice Ethan was full of doubt. They were dependent on bureaucratic paperwork during a time when the chain of command was inconsistent at best. NATO. CENTCOM. JSOC—all just letters, now.
But he was hopeful that one last order had managed to get through.
“Here we go.” Ethan stood a bit stiffer as the Swiss border guard came out of his shack.
“Your orders have been confirmed. The Swiss Army recognizes your right of passage. Good luck.”
Ethan glanced at Phil as if to say, “That was easy.” Before he got back in the German armored personnel carrier, he looked at the guard again.
“Can you tell us if you know of any trouble up in Geneva? We’re heading there, as I said, and it would help to know if your security services have reported anything unusual.”
The guard had been serious for the whole encounter, but now he seemed to relax. “Who is to say what is unusual? I’ve met six Jews fleeing Nazi Germany today. We also picked up a family fleeing from Franco’s Spanish Civil War. Those are unusual.”
“But nothing in Geneva? No big explosions reported? Maybe a missing super collider?”
The guard shook his head. “I’ve heard of nothing. It is quiet.”
“Thank you,” Ethan replied.
As they got back in the Fox, Ethan pulled him aside and whispered, “Be on the lookout, now that we’re in Switzerland. I believe what the man told me, but there’s a reason we’re being sent on this mission. Let’s assume there are terrorists inside our target, so we don’t let ourselves walk into a trap simply because some guard says we have nothing to worry about.”
Phil nodded. “I’ve been on high alert since I almost died on the metal highway back in Bagram.”
They sealed the back door, and Ethan spoke to them all.
“My route shows two hours, thirty minutes, people. Get some rest. After we reach the target, who knows when you’ll next get a chance to sleep?”
CHAPTER 15
Search for Nuclear, Astrophysical, and Kronometric Extremes (SNAKE). Red Mesa, Colorado
Faith invited the leadership team to look at her data in the comfort of one of the conference rooms. Despite his protests, she brought Donald in a wheelchair because she needed all the sharpest minds to review the information. She wanted their support. In that regard, she realized she wasn’t much different from General Smith. He relied on his own scientists to back up his plan too.
Unfortunately, as soon as they were all together, they wanted to talk about the President’s speech.
“Do you think we’re going to war?” one of the computer guys asked the group.
“He didn’t exactly exude confidence,” a woman in the back added. “I thought he was certain another country was going to launch, and he was begging them not to.”
Bob replied to his team members. “No one would launch now. There’s no point to it. We’ve seen the effects of what our experiment did, and it’s clear how time and magnetic fields are bending all over the planet. They might launch the missiles and end up hitting themselves in the face. It’s a huge risk.”
If they were going to talk about the speech, Faith had to admit something about the past that troubled her. “What if Hiroshima’s nuclear bomb comes through time and appears over Denver?”
The twelve people seated around the table looked at her, dumbfounded.
Bob seemed to consider that for a moment, then made it about him. “Or what if a nuke dropped directly on us? The people out there have no love for this place or the scientists within.”
She chuckled, desperate to keep things from becoming only about ego-driven Bob. “There’s a huge leap from rock-throwing to nuking, okay guys? I didn’t call you together to talk about what might happen out there. We have to deal with what we know in here. We’ve been working down in the tunnels doing what analysis we could, and I think we have a lead on an answer.”
Faith tapped her laptop, and the screen displayed on a whiteboard on the front wall. The same graph she’d shown Bob and Sunetra now displayed for the larger teams of computer modelers and physicists.
“This is what we believe is happening between the two super colliders. The four links between them are the controls. We know they guided the feed of energy when the experiment started, and even when the first one went offline, we don’t think it changed the appearance.” She tapped the keys to show the shape generated by the experiment.
One of the computer guys whistled. “Yes. It looks like a new energy field is being generated around the Earth.”
“A torus-shaped energy field, slowly upsetting the Earth’s normal magnetic field,” Faith continued. “It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
The graphed object on the screen was shaped like a sphere, but there was a tunnel through the middle. The simulation showed the movement of energy from one end of the tunnel at CERN through the pipeline, and then its exit at SNAKE. From there, the energy shot up and wrapped around the Earth in all directions until it joined up again at CERN. It appeared as if the Earth was trapped inside a balloon, except for two holes above the super colliders.
“This is a closed loop,” she noted.
Donald stared intently at the data on the screen as if it took a massive amount of concentration to stay focused.
Sunetra picked Faith’s explanation. “We still aren’t able to say for sure what kind of energy we’re dealing with, but my team, with Donald’s help, made basic light magnitude comparisons of each of the four beams. When we shut down one beam, video feeds at the others showed how they grew in brightness by about one-third.”
“They compensated,” a woman physicist suggested, arriving at the same conclusion Faith had.
“Indeed,” Sun answered.
Faith spoke slowly. “You now know what we know. The thing we still can’t answer is what will happen if we remove all the cabinets inside the SNAKE loop. I believe they will keep compensating, but the mystery is what happens when the last one is pulled. Will that cause the closed system to collapse and return the planet to normal, or will the energy continue to flow unimpeded through the link between CERN and SNAKE over the surface of the Earth?”
S
he smirked. “This is where you guys come in. You have to find the answer.”
The mood in the room shifted now that they had a clear problem to solve. Several team members opened laptops and instantly began tapping in data.
“Have we figured out what’s going on at CERN?” Donald finally asked.
She shook her head. “General Smith said there is a team going in to find out, but they are still an hour or two from getting there. We have to be patient.”
A computer team member leaned over the table to see her. “Is the general going to wait until we know more about CERN before shutting off the boxes? Does he have any plans we need to know about?”
“He said I would have the final say. I think he was surprised when I was right yesterday. I told him not to remove the links until we knew more, but he was in a hurry.”
Faith glanced to Donald. “Dr. Perkins, do you have any thoughts on what’s going on here?” She pointed to the screen. Much of the meeting had been set up to avoid the need for Donald to go down into the dingy tunnels. Someone his age had no business poking around down there, but she valued his insights.
“My first thought from looking at the model is the tunnel you’ve drawn should not be in the middle of the sphere, but closer to the edge. SNAKE and CERN are about twenty-five percent of the way around the circumference of the Earth, meaning the tunnel would sit closer to the edge of the sphere.”
She didn’t want to argue with him. She’d explained to the others that her diagram and simulation were crude approximations.
“Can we shut down the system?” she asked with some frustration in her voice.
Donald looked at her seriously, then at the screen, and finally back to her. “Have we heard anything from CERN?”
She almost cried at hearing him repeat his own question.
Her friend and mentor’s brilliant mind was no longer as sharp as she had hoped.
I-80, Wyoming
After walking Mac and making sure he did his business, Buck waited with Connie and the members of his convoy, but not for long. His nervous energy at the mere thought of being trapped in the line spurred him to think of an exit strategy.
“Let’s get back to our trucks,” Buck suggested to them when he couldn’t wait another second. “I have an idea.”
Beans, Eve, and Monsignor stood there for a few moments, looking lost.
“I’ll explain on the CB,” Buck prompted, giving them a thumbs-up and making the first move to return to the driver’s seat.
“Roger that, Buck,” Monsignor replied. The others broke up and went back to their rides.
He and Connie jogged Mac back to the truck. Connie appeared confused, but she didn’t question him until they were back in the cab.
“What do you have in mind?” she inquired. “Are we going to turn around?”
He’d been ready. “I will if I have to. We can’t sit here, possibly for hours, and do nothing. Would you mind looking in the road atlas to see if there are any alternate routes in this part of Wyoming?”
“Sure, Buck, but what if there’s not?”
He was almost certain there weren’t. They hadn’t passed a major intersection in twenty or thirty miles, at least. It seemed unlikely there were too many parallel highways in the remote landscape. They also couldn’t go to the north, since the buffalo herd was going that way.
“We’ll see.”
The Peterbilt was already running, so he adjusted himself in his seat, belted himself in, and put it in gear. He’d left plenty of room between himself and the car ahead, so it was a simple maneuver to get out of the line. He guided his truck to the left and into the breakdown lane as he’d done at the water crossing. There were no cars in the westbound lanes, so he could turn around if that was his decision, but he didn’t want to risk going across the median again unless he had a good reason.
It wasn’t very courteous, but he drove alongside the two rows of parked cars and got closer to the front like he was butting his way there. The rest of his convoy fell in behind, giving him confidence he wasn’t acting alone. When he reached the line of buffalo trotting over the highway, a few of them moved away, as if he might continue into the herd and run them over. However, he put on the brakes and waited at the edge.
Dust and debris floated everywhere around the windows of the cabin, making it difficult to see more than a hundred yards into the thick of the passing mass of animals. There was also a dull roar, like a waterfall of hoof clops right on top of them.
Buck looked at Connie and spoke at a high volume. “Hold your ears.”
She put her hands over her ears, but then appeared to change her mind. Both hands went over Mac’s floppy ears.
They smiled at each other.
Buck engaged the air horn and held it for twenty seconds.
“Come on you bastards, move!” he shouted.
He let off, then blasted the horn in many short, sharp, shots.
A disturbingly small number of buffalo veered away from his noisy truck, but it had no effect on the larger horde. His faint hope had been that he’d blow his horn and effectively part the waters in front of him, but it was a no-go.
“Fuck,” he said in disappointment. “I don’t want to wait here.”
“Can we push through, do you think?” Connie suggested.
He looked ahead, knowing the force of Mother Nature was not to be tested. Three feet of fast-flowing water could sweep his semi away in a flood. Five feet of fast-moving buffalo would knock him and his friends over with no problem.
“Maybe if we used the cars as meat shields,” he suggested with mirth in his voice.
“I don’t think you’ll have much luck with that,” she replied flatly.
He sobered up. “No, I guess not. And no, I don’t think we can push these things out of our way, but I had to try.” He put the truck in park. “Will you look up those routes? I’m going to step outside and see if the end is out there. Then again, as long as they keep moving, they’ll pass. If they stop, then we can bump them out of the way. I think my cool attempt to blast them locked us into going forward.”
He opened his door but didn’t get down. He closed it, then hopped up onto his hood. For a brief moment he looked in at Connie and the excited Golden, but then he jumped up on his roof and stood tall.
“Come on, guys,” he called out to the brown shapes inside their dust cloud. “Get this over with.”
He peered into the thick of it, sure there was an end but unable to see it.
Near Georgetown, Delaware
The garage door went all the way up, and still Garth remained on top of the taxi. A lone man came out of the shadows of the junk-filled garage, looking a lot like a zombie.
“Hello,” Lydia said in a happy voice. “We’re spray-painting!”
“I can see what you’re doing, little lady. But why are you doing it in my driveway?” The man wore baggy jeans that hung off his skinny body. His shirt was similarly too big, like he’d shrunk. When the man walked into daylight, Garth got a look at his sallow old face.
He was about a hundred years old.
Garth clambered down. “I’m sorry, sir. We ran out of gas and turned into your driveway because we didn’t want to be targets up on the road.”
“And you didn’t think you might be targets down here? What if I was a criminal?”
“Are you?” Lydia asked naively, as was her way.
The old guy laughed, then rubbed a red bandana over his almost-hairless scalp. It was hot and humid, and he appeared to instantly boil over with sweat. “I served in Italy in Dubya Dubya II. That was the last violence I ever did in my life. No, I’m no criminal.” He held up his finger. “But! I’ll defend my turf.”
“We mean no harm, sir,” Garth reassured him. “I want to get out of here more than you want us gone.”
“I’m Elwyn. Don’t worry about time. You two seem like cute kids, not like them damned drug addicts who come to my door asking if they can use the phone. That’s why I don’t answer the
door anymore. They always want to come in and scout the place for loot. Then, if they find something they like, they return when I’m not here to get it.”
Garth was horrified. “My dad warned me about those people, but I never thought it was real. Do they ever come back?”
Elwyn laughed. “The joke’s on them. I have nothing of value inside. The mobile meals people come in and give me my food, and folks from the food pantry drop off goods, too. But it’s been a long time since I’ve owned anything worth fighting for, ‘cept maybe my wedding pictures. Would you like to come in and see photos of my dear wife Mary Jo, God rest her soul?”
His mental alarms began to rattle.
“Sure, we’d love to,” Lydia said without hesitation.
Garth looked at the half-painted taxi, then at the old guy. “We’ll finish painting, then we’ll knock on the front door. Will that work?”
Lydia stopped in her tracks as she walked toward the man like she’d done the wrong thing.
“Suit yourself,” Elwyn said with resignation. “I’ll get out some braunschweiger and swiss. We’ll have a nice lunch.”
“Sounds great,” Garth lied.
The hell I’m going inside some old dude’s house.
He got busy painting before there were any more surprises.
CHAPTER 16
Canberra-to-Sydney Train, Australia
Destiny tripped over some vines and almost slammed her head on the side of the rescue train engine. Becker put it in her head that it was about to leave without them, so she passed the man and ran like her life depended on it. The engine’s diesel motor roared, and the horn blared over and over, but even that wasn’t enough to stop her from hitting the side because the jungle rubbed right up against the metal.
Becker tumbled into her.
“We’re here!” he screamed over the noise.
She motioned for him to precede her to the stairs, which he did. The giant wheels of the train were in motion, leading her to believe they were about to be left behind.
Broad America: A Post-Apocalyptic Adventure (End Days Book 3) Page 12