by George Lazăr
A red warning signal, followed by a buzzer, diverted their attention from the drama that had unfolded below. The helicopter using its reserve fuel. They could only remain in the air for another fifteen minutes.
The colonel gave up uselessly flying in circles, looking for places that no longer existed and headed northeast.
As they approached land, Folder turned on the chopper’s radio, as if he had woken from a trance. He scanned the ether in search of a news station, but the digital scan function counted up and down again and again without receiving anything but atmospherics.
Finally, the chopper’s radio found a station in Santa Clarita. At first they didn’t understand – the broadcast had breaks that were interrupting words and sentences, but the announcer was talking of at least ten million dead and missing people, swallowed by the movement of the tectonic plates under the western part of America. The terrestrial side of the Mendocino Fracture Zone, the San Andreas Fault, alongside the smaller faults, Banning and Garlock, had cut out a big chunk of California, from San Francisco to Los Angeles, and then sunk it into the Pacific Ocean.
For Bolden, it was more than he could grasp.
Even though it defied reason, he felt overwhelmed by a feeling he had never experienced before. A feeling very close to absolute bliss, stirred by the destruction that had taken place below him. Death had taken others; in fact, it had taken everyone around him. Anonymous people he had never known, never seen.
He had fooled death again, but this time he understood without question that Folder had been right all along. In his struggle for survival, he, Ian Bolden had been responsible for millions of lost lives.
In a strange way, his life felt even more precious now that he had kept it at such a cost.
Chapter 19
They found dry land just when the helicopter’s engine started misfiring and the day was dawning. The recently formed coast line was roughly jagged, rising here and there as high as thirty meters above the ocean. Geological layers exposed by the rupture were everywhere. The enormous wave had passed and then receded, leaving the waters of the Pacific to rest wherever they had found hollows.
Old landmarks were useless. Everything along the shore line up to the San Bernardino National Forest, had disappeared. The cities of Santa Ana, Long Beach and Santa Monica, which were actually suburbs of the megalopolis of Los Angeles, had become nothing but memories. The streets near the new shore line had remained with their traffic lights dangling among the ruins. They ended directly in the Pacific, as if they had been cut with a huge knife.
They found signs of life and civilization only after Pasadena, another of the cities destroyed by the earthquake. From the helicopter, the buildings looked like enormous domino pieces fallen here and there. Sporadic clusters of survivors drifted among the ruins in search of their friends and relatives. Some of them looked up at the helicopter with absent eyes; others frantically waved their hands or their clothes in the hope of receiving help.
Folder ignored them, his face motionless, and continued to fly the aircraft. They couldn’t help anyone, especially since the alarms were buzzing and blinking in the cockpit. They needed help themselves.
Although a good many hours had passed since The Great Earthquake – as it was already being called – federal assistance began arriving. America’s institutions were overwhelmed by the unprecedented scope of the disaster. With so much infrastructure gone, it had become increasingly difficult to send and receive information. The National Guard rallied its effort with difficulty and didn’t turn out to be of much help. They were sent randomly about the area, with insufficient supplies and manpower.
The confusion lasted until sunrise when daylight harshly uncovered the true scope of the catastrophe.
The two of them found out all of this from the radio announcer of KHTW radio station in Santa Clarita, whose voice, scrambled by atmospherics, gradually gained tinges of seriousness, in contrast to the alert and incredulous tone in which he had begun his report.
Outside the bunker, The Guardian Angel had had another base which, after being warned at the last moment, they had managed to evacuate without loss of lives.
“This surpasses everything we have imagined and trained for, but congratulations. You’re the first to reach Level Six,” said Folder bitterly, and yet without being able to hide a touch of admiration in his tone. “Until now, it is other people who have tried to kill you. But it seems you have passed to a new phase, something we knew nothing about.”
“What do you mean? What phase?” Bolden asked.
The colonel pulled the stick vigorously, bringing the sputtering helicopter in for an emergency landing near an improvised camp in a lonely gas station on Golden State Highway.
“You’ve begun to cause natural disasters,” Folder said.
The gas station was jammed with travelers and refugees, people trying to escape the destruction of Los Angeles and people frantic to reach it. They had all stopped as soon as they felt the earthquake, and then, as if attracted by a magnet, they pulled over at the gas station in the hope of meeting other people that could tell them everything was all right and to whom they could tell the same thing. They listened to the radio and couldn’t believe what they were hearing, watched the images being broadcast without the ability to recognize any of the familiar places they had just left behind.
They formed a queue to use the only public phone in the gas station, after they had uselessly tried to call their homes using their cell phones. Neither provided any relief beyond the sense that they were doing something.
“Is it… true?” asked a robust man who didn’t even notice that his broad-brimmed hat had been blown from his head by the prop-wash from the chopper’s blades that still revolved nervously.
He had tears in his eyes, and his big, red beard trembled when he spoke. He almost begged them silently to deny it, to say nothing had happened, that everything was all right and there was a big misunderstanding. But the colonel sighed and gave a swift nod to the man’s despair and to the anguish of the others.
From the opposite side, on the highway, an ambulance followed by the sheriff’s car appeared, with their sirens and lights turned on. Bolden felt the need to let out a huge laugh; he managed to stifle it with some difficulty, biting his lips until he had tears in his eyes. The disproportion was ridiculous. Hundreds or perhaps thousands of square miles of coast had sunk into the ocean, there were millions of dead people, and a sheriff came to bring order, taking an ambulance with him for help.
One of the people in the gas station, seeing Bolden’s tears, patted his shoulder consolingly.
The colonel spoke to the sheriff for a few minutes. The latter shook his head in disbelief more than once. Folder taught him how to use the helicopter’s radio to ask for instructions on the emergency frequency, the only one where someone actually answered. The sheriff requisitioned the aircraft, but Folder and Bolden were happy to be rid of it. Without fuel it was useless anyway.
Folder bought with cash, without haggling, an old Ford pickup truck from the restaurant’s owner. He asked the sheriff for permission and used the radio transmitter for a few minutes, reporting to The Guardian Angel. He listened attentively on the headphones, removed a small suitcase from the helicopter and beckoned Folder to get in the Ford.
He started off when everyone’s attention was directed to the television in the restaurant, where another news bulletin was being broadcast. The television network had obtained the satellite images, taken in real time, of the affected area and overlapped them on the map before the disaster. The earthquake, which had reached 9.1 on the Richter scale, had removed almost two thousand square miles of California.
They traveled in silence, heading northeast, alone on their lane, with their radio turned on. No radio station they could receive played any music. Without bringing anymore news, the announcers were talking only of the Great Earthquake – the greatest disaster in United States history and modern civilization. Some announcers mentioned Atlan
tis in serious tones.
Later in the day, Folder and Bolden pulled over a few times to let convoys of National Guard vehicles pass. Troops, food and basic medical supplies were finally on their way to the area. The irony was, the area itself was gone.
***
Long after they reached Nevada, they left Interstate 15 and drove right into the heart of the desert, with neither of the men in a mood to speak. Folder eventually turned off the radio and stopped the truck in the middle of the desert, in a place that was no different from the hundreds of square miles of desert surrounding them.
“This is where you’ll get off, Ian.”
Bolden shook his head, without understanding, tired and numb from the road, the heat and the monotony of the scenery. He turned his head towards the colonel; suddenly, his sleepy eyes, with half-closed eyelids, gaped wide as fear gripped him. The colonel was pointing a black Glock automatic pistol at him.
“What… What’s going on? What’s with the gun?” he mumbled.
“We’ve gone far enough, and it’s time for you to get out of the car. Here. Now.”
““It’s the middle of the desert,” he protested faintly. “I have no idea where I am. I could die.”
“Yes. That’s the idea,’ Folder said.
Bolden braced himself in his seat, and the colonel raised his gun reflexively.
“Look, if this is about money…”
“Of course it’s not about the money,” Folder practically spat with contempt. “Jesus, will you think what we’ve seen in the past day? We’re now counting the costs of your life in millions of other lives. Another round of this game would be madness. So keep your money, Ian. I’m not all convinced I’d be able to find anyplace I could spend it.
Bolden passed his hands over his sweaty face, continuing the movement over his hair. Inside the pickup truck the air was hot despite the fact that the windows of both doors were opened and the cooling system was running at maximum capacity.
“We’ve made it until now. We’ve been through so much. You can’t… Listen, this could just be nonsense – this whole story about the Device and your game of hide-and-seek with death. It’s true, you’ve saved my life a few times and I don’t forget that. But how can you think my simple presence caused an earthquake? It’s absurd. Or a tsunami. You know very well I had nothing to do with those events. With any of it!”
Folder sighed and looked through the windshield at the sparse cacti that were bravely coming out of the brown sand. He watched his passenger from the corner of his eye and the hand holding the pistol didn’t flinch.
“I’ve been trying to explain this to you for a while, but I’m going to try one more time. Perhaps I owe you that much.”
“You owe me what you promised. We have a contract…”
The colonel ignored him.
“Death always wins. So if you know that, you ask, what’s really important? Is it a man’s physical survival, or the way he interacts with his environment? Is that too hard to understand? Too philosophical?” Folder asked. Bolden gave no response.
“So everybody dies, and most of us do it in mundane ways. We grow old and leave this world. We get sick, get shot, run into bridge abutments. A few lucky people live longer than they should, but the more they beat the system, the more violently the system responds.
“So no, you didn’t kill those people, but your crimes against the law of the universe caused each of their deaths. A person could make a strong argument that you, my friend, are the greatest mass-murderer in human history.”
Bolden refused to understand.
“I’m your client, not your scapegoat, so if you’re looking for me to pat you on the head and tell you how noble and clever you are, forget it.”
Still, the unwaivering muzzle of the pistol stared at him. Bolden was terrified and desperate, and so turned instinctively to the one thing on which he had always been able to rely: negotiation.
“Really, what do you want from me? I know you said it wasn’t about money, but come on, everybody says it’s not about money. It’s a good opener to a negotiation. So come on, tell how much you want. I’m feeling generous today.”
Folder smiled, but it was a weary smile.
“You know, Ian, I’ve always been something of an over-achiever. But I really screwed the pooch when it came to you. No case officer in the history of The Guardian Angel ever got his client past so many incidents. Nobody.”
“Congratulations! How about a billion-dollar bonus? Just put that gun down.”
“Nobody knew what would happen once someone got to your level. Turns out the increase is exponential. You know what that means? Maybe next time the universe gets so pissed off about the mockery you’ve made of its rules that it just destroys the whole freakin’ planet, just because you’re on it.”
“You can’t know that,” Bolden said.
“Call it a hunch then.”
“Please, colonel...”
Folder opened the driver’s door and braced the pistol with his off-hand, drawing a deadly bead on Bolden as he backed out of the truck.
“Time for you to get out of the truck, Ian.”
“If you leave me here in the desert it will be the same as if you’d killed me,” Bolden groaned.
“I’ve killed other people,” Folder said. “But I’m a professional, and actually shooting your client is still considered a faux pas in my business. So I’ll be leaving you here, as something of a good-will gesture to a very powerful and pissed off universe. Besides, the Device doesn’t indicate an immediate threat of death for you, so no need for me to tempt my own fate by pulling this trigger.”
“I’ll die horribly.”
“That’s probably true. On average it takes a man about three days of exposure in the desert before death, and that’s just outside our 72-hour horizon on the future. Use those days to meditate on all the lives you’ll be saving by letting your own slip away. Feel good about that.”
“Folder, don’t leave me here! That’s an order from your employer!”
“Actually, I’m already violating one order by doing so. The Army ordered me to shoot you.”
“The Army? What Army?”
“The U.S. Army, you idiot. The Army in which I so proudly served, the Army that assigned me, as a young captain, to work as liaison to a company that was deploying a top-secret technology called the Device. Did you think I was born with the rank of colonel? I retired as a flag officer, then picked up where I left off on your case as a civilian employee of The Guardian Angel. My entire career revolved around you, and for a while, I hated you for that.”
“So that’s it? All these years, and you hate me?
Folder shrugged. “You turned out to be an interesting experiment.”
“The bunker?” Bolden said pensively.
“Army. The satellite surveillance systems, the eavesdropping, the digital sniffing equipment, all of it. All Department of Defense. You don’t get technology and devotion like that for mere money, son. Those things were provided to you out of a higher sense of duty than you’ll ever understand.”
“But why?” Bolden asked softly, although he could pretty much guess the answer.
“The Guardian Angel became a military program when the first client reached Level Three,” Folder explained. “The first Device was an interesting failure as a means of anticipating the future, but once we got a demonstration of what happens when a person levels up, somebody got the bright idea that we might be able to turn the technology into a weapon.”
“A weapon,” Bolden whispered. “You mean me.”
“Well duh. If we could plant a person with your destructive potential in enemy territory, we could wipe out entire battlefronts without firing a shot. You’re a one-man pre-emptive nuclear strike, but you’re still too uncontrollable to weaponize effectively.”
“So this was all just a DoD experiment?”
“It was also a business, yes, but for us you were an experiment. The Army insisted we keep you in the program u
ntil you reached Level Six. I think they’re regretting that decision today.”
“You mean the Army was behind these events all this time?”
“You gotta admit, it sounds like a perfect stealth weapon. We send you to some target city, the hand of God destroys it to kill you, and we’re the first to lend a helping hand in the aftermath. Untraceable destruction.”
“So I was going to be killed all along,” Bolden concluded in disbelief.
“You ever heard of a bomb that escapes after fulfilling its mission?”
“But what about our contract? You’re supposed to protect me!”
The colonel beckoned him with the barrel of the gun. Bolden quickly pulled the door handle without taking his eyes from the weapon. He opened it and leaned back. He fell in the sand, but he quickly got up and shook the dust from his clothes.
“That is what we’ve done, Mr. Bolden,” said the colonel while he reached to close the car door. “We’ve protected you. The military component of The Guardian Angel program wasn’t going to use you as a weapon. The generals only wanted to find out how far it could go. If you care to know, they reached the conclusion that, this way, they obtain a highly unstable weapon that can explode in their hands anytime. And they don’t like that. Just as they don’t like how far things have gone. So they also concluded, although for reasons different from my own, that the experiment and the weapon are to be terminated.”
“So this is it, then?”
“Ian, the next time the cosmos decides to put out a hit on you, there’s a significant chance the scale will be planetary. So goodbye, Ian Bolden, and I have to say it hasn’t been a pleasure knowing you.”
“At least give me some water!” Bolden shouted.
Folder started the pickup truck, shrouding him in a cloud of fine sand that gushed out when the drive wheels dug for traction and fish-tailed away. Half-blinded, with sand grinding in his teeth, he noticed the pickup stop a few meters away. Ian instinctively ran toward it, hoping that the colonel had changed his mind.