He jumped up on his side step and reached for the door, but his vision went back into that dark tunnel. A blood-red explosion took place at the end of those pinpricks of light, and the dizziness flooded his consciousness.
This time he couldn’t hold on.
CHAPTER 23
Search for Nuclear, Astrophysical, and Kronometric Extremes (SNAKE). Red Mesa, Colorado
Faith and the general arrived at the alternate tram station after running down the tracks. She made it to the locked doors a few seconds before he did.
“You must work out,” he huffed.
“I ride my bike when I’m not solving time anomalies. Here, I’ve got it open.”
He walked into the compartment as if he were the captain of the ship. He went directly to the control panel at the front. “Show me how to drive this, and you can go.”
“No, that’s not how this works. We’re partners, remember?”
“Doctor…uh, Faith, we don’t have time to argue. This is going to be dangerous.”
She hit the panel for the doors, shutting them both inside.
“Hang on, sir.” She gently pushed him aside and hit the aptly-named Go button. It accelerated slowly as she’d seen it do many times, but once it was at sixty miles an hour, she held her hand dramatically over another lever. “We’re chucking off the safeties. I assume you’re good with me doing so?”
She didn’t wait for an answer. After flicking it off, she pulled out a small foldaway chair from under the switchboard. “Normally, this is all automated, but a driver can take control manually. We used that feature when we had to stop in between stations during the inspections. Now I’m going to use it to get us thirty miles down the line in six minutes.”
“Do whatever it takes,” he ordered.
She experienced the exhilaration of acceleration. The square lights along the wall of the tunnel flashed by like they were under a strobe light.
“We’re passing the safe cruising speed,” she deadpanned. “One hundred miles per hour.”
“You said it can go faster?”
“Oh, yeah,” she said with a quiver in her voice and a lump in her stomach. They were in a sixty-mile tube traveling over one hundred miles an hour.
What could go wrong?
“One-twenty-five,” she announced.
The car accelerated at a nice even pace because the magnetic system wasn’t like a combustion engine. There was no mashing the gas pedal.
“Two hundred,” she said with some trepidation.
The lights now appeared as a solid line of white through the windows on both sides of the car. Their eyes couldn’t see each individual box anymore.
“What is this tram called?” General Smith asked out of nowhere.
She turned back to him despite the speed of the maglev train. “Little Scraggy.”
“What the f—”
He was caught short when they burst through the first station. For a split second, they saw orange flames and bright light.
“Damn!” she yelled. “I forgot, all the safeties are off. Normally we would have stopped at every station.”
“That’s where the bomb went off, wasn’t it?” he asked.
They both looked behind them, although the station was long gone.
“Yeah. We were lucky the track wasn’t hit, or we’d be goop on the walls right now.”
General Smith ran his fingers through his thinning gray hair. “My God, we’re going to be too late. They aren’t playing around.”
“Three hundred miles per hour,” she reported. “This is top speed, sir.”
“Can you rig it to go faster?” he asked.
“No. I’ve got it at maximum power right now. There’s nothing we can do to change the physics of this device.”
“Wouldn’t that be nice?” he asked.
The ride was as smooth as glass. It almost seemed like they weren’t moving at all because the lights outside now appeared as one thick block to a point far down the tunnel.
His phone chirped, and he picked up. “Go.”
He listened to the person on the line, then said, “Dammit!” and hung up.
“The second box has already been blown. There’s only one more.”
“Did they say which one blew up?” she asked. “I need to know where we’re going because I have to decelerate before we get close.”
“They are going in order, apparently. The next one up ahead is gone.”
She looked at the sixty-two-mile ring as a clock. The main offices were at six o’clock. The box they took offline yesterday was approximately in the 4 o’clock position. They’d just whipped by the stop at 7, which was on fire. Now they’d learned the Four Arrows box at the 10-slot was gone. There was one left at the 1 o’clock location.
“We have to cross twelve o’clock and go into the other hemisphere.”
“And?” he asked.
“General, if the Silver Bullet is still on the tracks, we could run into it. That would never happen with the safety on, but we don’t have…”
Her hand hovered over the throttle.
“Keep going,” he said without emotion. “If they get the last one, we’re dead anyway, right?”
She wasn’t sure how to address that. She’d come to believe there was something to be said for turning off the mysterious boxes, but her way depended on understanding the inner workings of the containers and shutting them down according to the internal specifications. Blowing them all up couldn’t possibly be the solution, could it?
“I guess we’re going to find out.” She ignored her instinct to slow down and focused intently on the edge of the curve in the tracks far ahead. If there was something blocking them, she was going to drop the power, even if it wasn’t going to save them.
When she saw the fire at the next station, she almost powered down, but there wasn’t anything on the tracks. The orange glow of burning materials rushed by in a flash, and they were on their way to the last intact box.
Another place I could have died.
Faith stared ahead and kept her hand on the power button constantly. She did that for another minute before she’d had enough. “Sir, at this speed, we’ll get to the thirty-mile marker any second. Once we cross over, we have to start the slowdown so we can stop before our destination.”
“That was it!” she blurted. The map on the console switched from green to red, indicating they were in the other hemisphere of the ring. Little Scraggy didn’t belong on the other side.
“Wait until the last second, then stop us,” he commanded. “We don’t have time to fuck around.”
At three hundred miles an hour, she could go all the way around the sixty-mile loop in about twelve minutes, so they were covering a lot of ground in not a lot of time. She didn’t wait very long before dropping power, which served as a slowing mechanism.
They’d bled off about half the speed when the station appeared from around the distant bend in the track.
“Oh, shit.”
She hit the brake button, which jerked them forward in their seats. It was designed to use the magnets of the levitation system to slow the train, but she saw in an instant that it wasn’t going to be enough.
“The train,” General Smith pointed. She saw it, too.
They lost more speed, but the Silver Bullet got larger every second.
“I have to cut power,” she said as she popped open a panel flush with the top of the console. Inside was a bright-red button with an electrical bolt with a line through it. She hit it without any further thought.
All the power went out and the maglev system shut off, canceling the magnetic repulsion that kept them floating on air, which in turn dropped the bottom of the car onto the concrete. The added slowdown slammed her against the control board.
“Hang on!” she screamed over the sound of metal grinding on pavement. She groped around for a seatbelt, but the ends had fallen to the sides of her seat.
Faith sucked in a breath and held it.
The Silver
Bullet approached like Death incarnate, but there wasn’t anything she could do except watch it.
I-80, Wyoming
Buck picked himself up off the pavement, disappointed that he’d been unable to retain consciousness. After one quick glance back at Sparky and Monsignor to make sure they were getting up, he climbed into his rig.
Mac looked over his shoulder, then went back whining next to Connie.
“Connie?” he said as he shuffled over to her.
“Phil? I’ll drive you to school. Wake me up after you eat breakfast.”
He chuckled, then softly rubbed her hair. “Hey, Connie, it’s Buck and Big Mac.”
His Golden barked once as if to assure her he was there.
That brought her back to the Peterbilt.
“Oh!” she exclaimed when it was clear he’d been listening to her. “What did I say?”
“You said something about—” He made a snap judgment not to remind her of her missing son. “You said you secretly wished I’d bought you that green T-shirt and a Skoal ball cap, and then I think you were talking about how you were going to put me into one of your books as the pivotal hero.”
She rolled her eyes. “I’ll put you in a story, all right, but you’ll be the one with the ugly shirt and hat, not me. It’s the benefit of writing your own stories.”
They both noticed his hand on the side of her head. He was going to pull it away, but she reached up and held it closer to her.
“Buck, I admit it. I’m getting scared. Whatever is happening, it’s making things worse.”
He relaxed with his hand in hers. “We’ve got to keep going. Garth is counting on me, no matter what. Shit!”
Buck had to pull away from her.
“What is it?” she asked with surprise.
He pulled out his phone, but it had rebooted itself and was in the middle of a restart.
“Dammit. I sent Garth out on the road. What if he blacked out and ended up wrapped around a tree?”
The CB lit up. “Buck, we’re ready to roll. I’m riding with Eve. Monsignor said he didn’t want me to blow up with him if we crashed again.”
“That’s right,” the other driver chimed in. “I’ll drive in the back and leave a mile between us, if it works for you? I’m afraid I’m going to kill someone.”
Buck hated to have any separation in his convoy, but the threat was real. He had to drive fast enough to get to Garth before driving became impossible. It was probably prudent to keep the man with the flammable truck as far away from the others as possible.
“Fine with me,” he agreed.
“What’s our mission?” Sparky asked. “We still aiming for Nebraska?”
He thought about it for a second. It was late in the afternoon, and they were still a hundred miles from the target truck stop in Nebraska. However, they were getting close to Cheyenne and the I-25 intersection.
Buck keyed the mic and spoke slowly. “Our first task is to get to the other side of Cheyenne. I want to put ourselves on the eastern side of 25 before they shut it down. Once we make it there, we can plan how far we want to drive tonight.”
“Cheyenne is about thirty miles away,” Connie said in a contemplative voice. She’d pulled the atlas onto her lap while Buck was on the CB.
He glanced over to find her looking at him with watery eyes.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Buck, what are you going to do if you black out again? We could end up sideways if you pass out doing seventy miles an hour.”
“I’ve got this,” he said with as much positivity as possible. “I’m going to put this rig on cruise control and keep it pointed down the long yellow lines. I’ve got perfect wheel alignment, too. I’ll keep a light touch on the steering wheel. If I black out, it will only be for a few seconds, right? The truck will stay pointed in the proper direction, and we won’t go off the roadway. It will be a snap, now that we know what to plan for.”
She thought about it for a few moments. “I trust you.”
He did everything in his power to believe his own words. The Marine in him wasn’t going to stop for anything on Earth, and he did make a good case for avoiding the effects of another blackout, but he couldn’t plan for buffalo herds, closed highways, or floods.
“Let’s make this happen.”
European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN), Switzerland
Phil and Ethan watched the orderly evacuation of the administration wing. Because it was the middle of the night, there weren’t many people inside. However, Dr. Eli hung around the desk asking questions the entire time.
“So, you are saying SNAKE believes we are still broadcasting power through thousands of kilometers of the Earth’s mantle? We are somehow linked together? And that link is causing time distortions throughout the world?”
Phil nodded. “I saw it for myself in Afghanistan. Soviet-era tanks appeared from the 1980s. They were forty years out of time.”
“And I’ve witnessed a plane landing from the Korean war,” Ethan added. “Not to mention hundreds of news items on the networks. I still can’t believe you don’t know about all this. It’s everywhere.”
Doctor Eli leaned against the security desk. “I haven’t heard of this because it isn’t happening. Let me show you the world is fine, and maybe we can skip the shutdown?”
“You can try,” Ethan agreed.
The doctor stepped around the desk to the computer, then he looked at Ethan and Phil like he was unsure about something. “You aren’t going to shoot me, are you?”
Both men had their rifles slung over their shoulders to keep them close, but the scientist still seemed terrified of them.
“We’re here to save you,” Phil assured him.
“Good,” he replied, sitting at the terminal. “Let’s see what we can see.”
He typed for a few seconds, then leaned back in his chair, victorious. “See? Nothing!”
Phil walked behind Dr. Eli’s shoulders to look at the screen. It was set to the international section of one of the big news websites.
“The lead story today is about us Brits still trying to figure out Brexit. Imagine that. There is also something about an actor who is in rehab down in Australia. Oh, and your Yankees won their tenth game in a row. Not sure how it’s international news, but I think it speaks to my point. There is nothing unusual going on.”
The doctor continued with an impassioned plea. “You have to stop this. There is no need to take us offline. All it will do is interfere with our systems!”
Phil and Ethan looked at each other. Phil thought the other man was going to call in for clarification of his orders, but the resolve on his face didn’t change.
“Sir, can you power down from this terminal?”
The hope on the doctor’s face evaporated. “I just showed you we’re okay. There is nothing wrong!”
Ethan was having none of it. “Doctor, you will shut this place down immediately. My orders are to take you offline and report what happens, so that’s what I’m going to do.”
“But—”
Ethan grabbed the man by the collar and pulled him close. “Dammit! Don’t you get it? I don’t trust you, or this place. Websites can be faked, but I saw that old plane myself. Phil saw those tanks in person. Every plane in the world has been grounded, and the entire US military is skedaddling back to America. My superiors believe it can be fixed by you shutting down this place, so you’re going to do just that.”
Ethan pushed the doctor up to the keyboard.
“Fine. I’ll shut everything down except the cryo. If that warms up—”
“Shut it down. I don’t want an ounce of electricity anywhere within a square kilometer.”
The doctor began typing but halted for a second. “You know, electricity doesn’t have any weight. It can’t be put into an ounce.”
Phil thought Ethan was going to lose it, based on the look of frustration on his face, but he simply patted the doctor on the shoulder.
“Get the power off,
and you can joke around all you want. In the meantime, I’m trying to save the world.”
Phil watched as the man’s fingers danced on the keyboard. A minute or two later, the lights in the building turned off and the emergency lights came on.
“Those are battery-powered,” the doctor said, continuing to type. “But the collider and the cryo magnets are powering down. I hope you’re happy.”
Ethan looked at Phil. “Get HQ on the line. We have to see if this worked.”
CHAPTER 24
Princess Anne, Maryland
“Well, what do we have here? A hero?” The man with the gun pointed it at Garth’s face. It was so close he saw into the metal barrel.
“No, uh, sir. I was only here to get change for my gas.” His eyes refused to stop focusing on the gun.
“Turn out your pockets, kid. I’ll take whatever money you have while I’m knocking over the joint.” The man wore a black suit; that much he noticed when not looking at the pistol. He also sported a black felt hat like something they wore in the old days.
My gun.
He entertained the idea of reaching into his pocket and pulling out the PX4 Storm and blowing the guy away, but the dude’s pistol was already in his face. It was an impossible-to-win scenario.
“Are you going to kill us?” one of the baseball boys asked.
The man laughed, and Garth finally looked at his face. He was about the same age as his dad, with slicked hair set under the black topper. The guy had white teeth and a thin mustache, which helped him piece together where he might have seen people like him.
“You’re gangsters!” Garth blurted. “From the 1920s.”
Garth’s entire inventory of knowledge about gangsters came from a single movie he and his dad had watched about Prohibition times. Aside from the gunfights, he didn’t particularly like it, but his dad had enjoyed seeing the bad guys get their comeuppance.
Broad America: A Post-Apocalyptic Adventure (End Days Book 3) Page 18