“Hurry!” she cried.
Thick vines and giant tree trunks surrounded them. Some of the largest trunks pressed up against the metal exterior of the engine, so they had to run around the base of a couple of trees before they reached the entryway.
“There’s no carriage,” he said with sudden realization. “It’s just the engine.”
Destiny looked at him for a moment, wondering what was going through his mind, then pushed. “Get on.”
Becker hopped up on the step and opened the door at the front of the engine, which was pointed back toward Sydney.
“Don’t leave!” he shouted to the person inside.
The engineer was a frumpy-looking woman in her mid-thirties. Her blue jumper and non-matching trackies made Destiny wonder if she was even an official employee.
“I can’t,” the engineer replied as they climbed into the small engineer’s compartment. “I think I backed into these trees and got stuck. Am I on a siding or something?”
“No. This is the main line,” Becker exclaimed.
Destiny took some time to consider. The trees had been close to the outer skin, but she assumed they had been there when the train pulled up. “The trees and the tracks seemed merged here. We have to get out, like right now.”
The engineer nodded excitedly. “That’s why I was blasting the horn. I wanted to leave, but where are the other passengers? They can ride in the back.”
“It’s only the two of us,” Becker reported.
The engineer’s name tag said Gladys. Destiny assumed she was going to ask a host of questions about the missing people, but she wasn’t fazed. She hit some controls, and the engine groaned with the rise in power.
“Grab a chair and hold on,” Gladys said in her engineer voice.
She and Becker pulled down a pair of jump seats attached to the side walls, facing each other across the cabin. The pumping sound of the motor increased quickly, as if the train were going at high speed, but they weren’t moving.
Gladys looked at Becker, then worked the control board again. The straining motor died back, then the engine vibrated and creaked.
“We must be hung up on a tree,” Gladys declared. “We’ve got to bully our way past it.”
The motor roared to life again, and the engineer leaned forward like her added weight on the throttle was going to make the difference. The frame shuddered, and the metal wheels squealed below her feet.
“Come on!” Gladys yelled.
The motor revved for a few seconds, then the whole machine lurched forward. Destiny used her legs to steady herself on the seat.
They hit something else, but they had a little momentum now. The warping and ripping of metal became much louder, but Gladys seemed prepared to rip the whole engine apart as long as they got free.
The powerful spotlight shined into the vines and leafy growth of the forest. Enough of a path remained clear, like a deep, dark mine shaft through the jungle.
“We’re pushing through,” Gladys declared.
The jungle outside felt raw and primal, but Destiny found comfort in the reflective surface of the tracks. The twin beams of steel were the only link to civilization. Gladys followed them for many minutes, until the suffocating forest backed off a little. To Destiny, it felt like they’d escaped from being sucked into the primordial past.
She shivered despite the warm interior.
“Get us home,” Destiny declared, “and I’ll never badmouth Trainlink again.”
Near Georgetown, Delaware
Garth finished with the sixth can of black paint, disappointed in the results. Lydia had done a great job covering the taxi company information on the side of his door, but the rest of the vehicle looked like toddlers had splashed watercolor paints over the yellow base. It was about ninety percent black, but long streaks of yellow were everywhere, and the roof was almost entirely unpainted.
The only positive was that it no longer looked like a taxi. The top plastic sign was broken, and all the words on the side doors were covered.
“It will have to do,” he said, disappointed. In his head, he had envisioned that the car would look as professional in black as it had in yellow.
“We did a fair job,” Lydia added. “It could use some work here and there, but I think it is pretty good for my first time painting with spray.”
He gained some perspective. “Yeah. It’s not perfect, but it does what we need. If we look like a dumpy car, fewer people will be interested in stealing it.”
“You must live in a world of criminals,” Lydia remarked. “You always worry about them.”
“They aren’t everywhere, but it only takes one to ruin your life. Better safe than sorry, my old man says. I’m trying to make sure you don’t have to walk ever again.”
“Thank you,” she replied.
She smiled at him like he’d saved her life, which made him feel proud. They looked at each other for a long moment, and he was drawn once again to the simple girl’s complex green eyes.
“Are we going inside for lunch?” she asked. “I’m quite hungry.”
That brought him back down to reality. “Would it make you mad if we skipped lunch?” He spoke quietly. “I don’t trust him. Who waits for an hour to come outside? He’s up to something. Even if he isn’t, I want to get moving while it is still daytime. I’m going to get in the car and leave.”
She looked hurt for a few seconds but then became stoic. “I trust you.”
They split apart and walked to their respective doors. He slid into the driver’s seat and turned the key.
At first, nothing happened except for a whining sound.
The second time he turned the key, the engine let out a short sputter before stopping again.
“He’s there,” Lydia croaked.
Garth only gave him a cursory glance. Elwyn was inside his garage but moving slow. He twisted the key again, willing the motor to start.
It cranked for a few seconds, then caught.
He banged on the steering wheel. “Yes!”
The motor roared to life. He immediately put it in reverse, then hit the gas.
The car didn’t move.
The emergency brake.
Garth pictured himself in a slasher movie. The old man was the killer, gun in hand, moving in his direction…
He kicked off the brake and looked over his shoulder to see where he was going, but then he took a chance and peered into the garage. The old man was there, holding out his hand as if to wave goodbye.
Garth took a second to wave, uncertain if he was doing the right thing after all, but then he gave it some gas and slowly reversed his way up the gravel drive. He was no expert at going backward, but he tried to convey the sense that he knew what to do, if only for Lydia’s sake. When he reached the road, he did his best to look both ways, but then he goosed the gas and backed out onto the blacktop roadway.
He turned so the car faced away from the looters.
“We can finally relax,” he advised her. “We don’t stick out like a sore thumb, anymore, and people won’t constantly flag us down for a ride. With this disguise, we might be able to get home before nightfall. All we have to do is get back to the ferry.”
“I can’t wait,” she said happily.
He drove forward, almost positive he’d thought of everything.
I-80, Wyoming
Connie and Buck sat side by side on top of the Peterbilt. She’d come up after he showed her how. The herd of buffalo continued across their path, and the brown dust blew everywhere around them like they were inside the herd.
“You aren’t very good at patience, are you?” She sneezed a few times in a row.
“Bless you!” he replied.
They had to speak loudly to hear each other over the clopping of hooves on the concrete.
“Thanks,” she replied with a sniffle.
“No. I hate waiting more than anything. For years, my job has depended on moving the ball forward. Get to the next truck stop. The next town.
The next state. Ever since I left Modesto, I’ve been forced to go slow, and now we’re stopped. It’s a hundred times worse because Garth is counting on me to get back home.”
He pointed indiscriminately at the galloping mass. “And stuff like this could delay me for days.”
“Well, I want you to get to Garth as soon as you can, so don’t doubt that for a second. However…” Connie scooted closer. “I don’t think it’ll be days. You’re not bad company to keep in the meantime.”
Buck smiled, remembering their almost-kiss in the water, but he didn’t dare lean over to repeat the attempt because there was nothing romantic about sitting in the dust cloud.
“If Garth were here, I’d pull off the highway, find an out-of-the-way patch of forest, and live off the land until everything got back to normal. I can hunt. Fish. Trap. But each time things like this happen,” he gestured to the buffalo, “it proves time is broken, and maybe there is nowhere to hide. It also seems to be getting worse.”
“Uh-huh,” she replied before sneezing one more time. “I was thinking the same thing. Ever since yesterday morning, we’ve seen amazing things, each bigger than the last.”
“Bless you again, by the way. And now the threats have gone all the way up to nukes,” Buck explained. “What can be worse than that?”
Connie seemed to take it as a challenge. “Zombies. Plague. An extinction-level meteor impact. A—”
“I get it,” he interrupted with a laugh. “I’ve listened to books about all of those. But there’s something about nuclear war that seems to be worse than them all. I think that’s because it is so preventable. If a giant rock hits the Earth from space, you say it’s terrible but unavoidable. If we blow ourselves up, all you can say to describe it is ‘stupid-level event.’”
Connie leaned over the windshield as if to slide down. “Come on, let’s get down to Mac and see if your fancy truck can filter this air. I’m breathing in God-knows-what filth from those animals, and I think I might be allergic.”
The blowing debris seemed to get thicker, but when he looked to his right, the dust cleared a little.
“Hey!” He nudged her before she slid down the windshield. “Look!”
Connie halted and turned to where he pointed.
The herd of buffalo was still incredibly massive, but the thick stream of running animals was now about half as dense on the right side of the highway. There was suddenly less dust in the air, and visibility improved to the point that he saw to the horizon in that direction. “This is the end.”
“The end?” she replied hopefully.
“Yeah! Let’s get down. I’ve got to tell the others to be ready. Once the last animals cross, we have to lead the whole highway, or we’re going to get stuck here until everyone else passes.”
“That is not going to happen,” she insisted before sneezing once more.
CHAPTER 17
Search for Nuclear, Astrophysical, and Kronometric Extremes (SNAKE). Red Mesa, Colorado
Faith and her team worked for two hours, using her theory of a second energy field wrapped around the planet. She opted to stay in the conference room and work on her laptop, but most everyone else went either to the computer lab or the physics lab, which was essentially another computer lab filled with supercomputers.
She looked at her watch every ten minutes, certain she was about to get a call from General Smith about the team sent into CERN, but no joy.
“Mind if I sit for a while?” Bob asked as he hovered at the door. “We’re hitting brick walls in my lab. None of this makes any sense.”
“Funny, coming from the guy who set it all up,” she replied dryly.
“Ha, ha. I get why you would say that, but I’m serious. None of the effects we’ve seen around the planet can be explained by shifting magnetic fields. Yeah, it would affect anything dependent on having a correct relationship with the natural field created by the planet, but it wouldn’t bring planes from the past, it wouldn’t shift the weather, and it certainly wouldn’t change the landscape. Did you hear Salt Lake is filling up?”
Faith absently tapped her keyboard. “I hadn’t heard that.”
“Yeah, I-80 is under ten feet of water. Closed, maybe forever.”
“What’s your point, Bob?”
“I don’t have a point. Well, maybe I do. I think you’re wrong.”
She pushed back from the table. “It took you long enough to work up to that. Do tell.”
“Your energy-field scenario looks a lot like a magnetic field, and the magnetic field of the Earth is being upset by something, but I don’t believe the link between CERN and SNAKE is purely magnetic. If it was, we’d be able to measure it with precision, like any other source of magnetic interference. The Four Arrows experiment was designed to tap into dark energy.”
“So this is a dark energy field?”
“I don’t know. Possibly. The problem is, I can’t enter it in my equations because we don’t know enough about it. Hell, the experiment was designed to give us clues to its existence inside the mass of the planet. If it had been successful, we might have been able to measure it and explain its properties. That knowledge would have really helped with our issues.”
She laughed without mirth. “So, if your experiment wouldn’t have broken the world, we would know more about the root cause of what did break the world? Talk about a closed loop!”
He sucked air through his nose. “Please don’t start. I’ve said I was sorry. I’m only trying to help.”
“We’ll have our come-to-Jesus moment after this is all over. If you don’t think we’re dealing with a magnetic field, I need you to tell me where I went wrong. What the fuck is going on here?”
“Faith, you have to understand. I can’t measure energy that defies classification and avoids our existing equipment. Aside from the brightness of the beams, I can’t even quantify what we’re looking at.”
She shared his pessimism. “I understand that you supported this thing and then installed it without my knowledge, and you aren’t sure what it does. How does that work, Bob? You personally are responsible for everything that is happening out there. No one else, you. I need you to figure it out, and I need that to happen right fucking now.”
Her cell phone vibrated in her pocket. When she pulled it out, she saw the name on the screen. It was from her office phone, which meant it was the call she’d been waiting for from General Smith. “We may know something more.”
“Hello?” she said.
“Ah, good. The phones are working,” the general remarked. “I’ve been trying to call you for ten minutes.”
“What is it, General? Any news?”
“Yes. I wanted to inform you that my team is inside Geneva city limits. They are approaching the facility now. We should have some answers inside the hour.”
Her stomach did a somersault. She wasn’t sure what answers would help her, but anything would be better than what she had.
“Very good. I could use more information. I’m running on fumes here,” she said in a measured voice.
“Yep.” General Smith hung up without saying goodbye.
She hung up too.
“That’s it?” Bob asked. “Did he hang up on you? Kind of a dick thing to do.”
“No, it’s fine,” she replied. “His team is going in. We’ll know our colleagues’ fates soon.”
Geneva, Switzerland
Phil Stanwick stood next to the Fox armored personnel carrier and looked through a pair of binoculars. It was just after midnight, but the place was well-lit, with many overhead lights.
“What do you see?” Ethan asked.
Phil scanned the campus of CERN, noting the numerous low, flat buildings in the mile-long arrowhead-shaped property. The driver had brought them to a hilltop with a perfect line of sight to most of the grounds.
The long front side of the place was lined with a tall hedge along a busy suburban roadway. Farmland and houses surrounded the rest of the property, making it easy to discern if an
ything was damaged or destroyed, even in the darkness.
“It looks like nothing is wrong. I don’t see any people running around. There are cars parked in the lots. The civilians I can see are standing around or walking between buildings like nothing out of the ordinary is going on.”
“That’s my assessment, too. It’s almost like they don’t know they are the focus of an international missing person alert.”
Phil focused the lenses of the binoculars. If terrorists had taken over the facility, they might want people walking around so things looked normal, but he’d expect furtive glances from the hostages or telltale shifts in blinds from upper windows as the overseers kept watch. He saw none of that.
“Something is going on,” Ethan went on to say. “No one has come into or out of the parking lots since we got here.”
“Like there’s an experiment in progress?”
“Bingo.”
“Do we proceed?” Phil wasn’t in charge, but they had one job to do, and he expected the other colonel to order it.
Ethan nodded. “We don’t have enough men for anything fancy, but I’m not going to drive in the front gate and allow us to get ambushed. I want to split the team. You’ll take three men on foot. Go in through the hedge running along the border of the property. That will give you concealment, and you can be ready in case we need support.”
He’s assigning me the duty of reporting to HQ if he gets killed.
They spent fifteen minutes driving in a long route out of the direct view of the campus. The driver brought the Fox down the roadway next to the hedge, then pulled onto the dark sidewalk as far as possible between two light posts.
“This isn’t going to be very stealthy, but there isn’t a better option,” Ethan remarked as the back door opened. It was the least exposed approach. It wasn’t decent cover since bushes didn’t stop bullets, but they wouldn’t be out in the open.
Phil ignored the Swiss traffic and scrambled into the tangle of bushes that signified the edge of CERN’s property. When he and the other three men were in position, he radioed for Ethan to move the Fox.
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