“Do you have a license for that?” It fell out before she could stop herself. It wasn’t like she was going to check.
The driver giggled. “It’s back with my other guns.”
Christian laughed like it was the funniest thing he’d heard.
The two big men smelled like a rugby locker room gone bad, but there was an acrid odor lingering, too, like someone had recently chundered in the cab. It was likely the only time she would be grateful for smoke inhalation. If someone had puked in there recently, she could only barely smell it.
“Hang on, little lady,” the driver said cheerfully. “We’re going to rescue you.”
Destiny had nothing to worry about. She was packed in so tight between the men there was no room to move.
She didn’t even need a seatbelt.
Modesto, CA
Buck sat in his captain’s chair looking out over the Walmart shopping center. After the crash of the SUV, most of the customers had gotten to their cars and escaped, but the lot wasn’t empty. Every row had ten or fifteen vehicles remaining, as if the owners had decided to fight it out inside or took off on foot.
The storm loomed larger. The high-altitude, white-topped clouds were almost above him, and the business end of the dark storm was now coming into view in the north. He figured maybe fifteen minutes until it arrived.
But still he waited.
For the first time all day, he didn’t know what to do next. Going north on I-5 was out of the question, as was taking alternate routes around Sacramento. The storm was broad enough that it looked as if it butted up against the Sierra mountains. He might find alternate routes paralleling Interstate 5, but he refused to bet his life on it.
He’d also grown less thrilled with his alternate plan, which was to go south to Bakersfield and then head east along Interstate 40. The GPS said the other route was a few hours longer to White Plains, but he had no idea if there were other storms in that direction. Any delay would make his trip back to Garth even more of a disaster than it already was.
Buck felt compelled to get over the Sierras as fast as possible. In his experience, storms spent all they had on the front side of mountain ranges. If he got over the pass and into Nevada, he’d be safe from this or any other California storm.
“What do you think, Mac? Should we go over the mountain?”
Big Mac barked once when he heard his name. His friend sat next to him, looking forward at the dashboard like it was the most interesting thing in the world.
“I hear you. It could be dangerous, though. We’d be on our own.” Any good freight hauler knew to stick to the major highways when carrying a full load. The DOT also frowned on heavy trucks plowing over rickety bridges or slamming into low overpasses. The farther one got from the main shipping lanes, the more chances of getting into trouble. Heavyweight wreckers were endangered species high in the mountains, too. If trouble did find him, it could be days before he was rescued.
“We can wait for the storm to pass,” he offered, “though I think we both agree that isn’t smart, so let’s toss that.”
He patted Mac on the head, then got the lucky quarter out of his pocket.
“Heads, we go over the mountain to get to Garth on the shortest route possible. Tails, we don’t go the longer route through Bakersfield.”
The dog wouldn’t understand odds.
Buck believed in making his own luck.
Search for Nuclear, Astrophysical, and Kronometric Extremes (SNAKE). Red Mesa, Colorado
Faith left the meeting angry and upset, which was becoming a regular thing. Bob had forced her hand about the Denver Post reporter, and now she had to go talk to him before anyone else did.
She poked her head into Mindy’s office. “Did Dr. Perkins check in?”
“No, Faith, I’m sorry. I’ve left messages for him, but I guess he is sleeping hard.”
She gritted her teeth. The duties of leading the SNAKE lab were supposed to be nothing but rewarding for her. A career capstone, they had called it. But today, she’d had her first experiment shut down and had to explain what happened to a reporter from a major metropolitan newspaper.
I’m not telling him shit.
She went out onto the patio. The shadows of the late afternoon were now deep as the sun fell behind the foothills of Denver. It was warmer outside than it was in the air-conditioned facility, but not by much.
A few administration people still hung out on the patio, but the reporter sat alone.
She went right over to him. “Hello, Benny.”
He stood up. “Hello, Dr. Sinclair. Thanks for your time. I was beginning to think you guys were avoiding me.”
She laughed it off. “Please. Dr. Sinclair was my mother’s name. You can call me Faith, out here.”
They’d talked before, so she found it odd he used her formal name.
“I’ll try,” he assured her.
“It has been a busy day. We’ve just wrapped up a long experiment, and we’re running diagnostics out the yinyang.” None of it was a lie.
They both sat down at the table, facing each other.
“I’ve heard that there was some kind of problem with your experiment. Is there any way I could get more information on that?”
Bob strikes again.
She’d talked to Benny a few times while the SNAKE lab was under construction and during a few of the test runs, but it had been all formal and there had been other people around. As such, she wasn’t sure how to read him.
Faith took a chance she could keep him off the scent for a little while longer. “I’m afraid this all has to be off the record, if you agree?”
Benny looked disappointed. She knew enough that he was fresh out of his journalism apprenticeship at the paper and was keen to tackle bigger stories. For a time, nothing was bigger than SNAKE in the Denver region, but a year after the ribbon cutting, it was already a routine beat. It was an educated guess, but she figured he’d agree.
He put down his pen. “Are there other reporters inside? I’ve seen civilians going in and out that I don’t recognize as workers. I only ask because I want to get this scoop, you know? I’ll do this off the record, but I want to be there when you go back on.”
Faith reached over the table to shake his hand. “Deal.”
Benny smiled. “So, what can you tell me?”
Those were the magic words. She could control the message again.
“It is mostly as I said. We are poring through data today to figure out if the initial experiment was successful or not. Since this is our first live project, we really didn’t know how long it would take to see meaningful results.”
“And you still don’t know?”
“That is correct.”
He seemed to chew on that before going on. “Do you know about all the weird anomalies that happened after the blue light zapped the world?”
She feigned not knowing.
Benny pulled open his notebook. “It has been an unusually busy news day, and most of it happened after we reported the blue light. Several planes went down around the world, but the most noteworthy was the one in New York City. A subway collapsed near that crash site, too. Pieces of Skylab fell in Illinois. The Governor of Pennsylvania has reported an evacuation around Three Mile Island because of fears of a meltdown. Civil authorities reported mass chaos and destruction inside the city of Sacramento because of a freak storm.”
“And don’t forget the fleet out of Russia,” she said without thinking.
“I know, right! How did you know about that? The international news is even more disturbing. The fleet scrambling. A Nazi-era dirigible spotted over the Paris-Charles De Gaulle Airport. Rumor has it there are old Russian tanks appearing inside Kabul. It’s like things are coming out of the past.”
She saw her opportunity.
“Do you mind if I get a list like that? While I’m working on our project report, I’d really be interested in learning more about what’s going on around the world. That blue light didn’t affec
t us, I’m sure, but you know us scientists and our data collection. Maybe we can help to understand what made those odd things happen…”
Benny tore the page from his notebook and handed it to her. “The paper is reporting on all these, so I don’t need to keep track of them. I mainly used it to keep busy while I was waiting for you to tell me about your problems in there. I’m hoping you’ll give me something. Anything?”
She detected a special emphasis on the word ‘problems.’
Faith stood up with the sheet in hand. “I’m sorry I can’t stay any longer. My comment at this time is, I’m afraid, no comment. I assure you, nothing is wrong beyond a little accounting mismatch. As a scientist, I can’t report on something if I don’t have complete accuracy, and that is why I’m not talking on the record.”
Please be enough.
The young reporter seemed to study her. Though she was old enough to be his mother, she found him handsome and rugged, as if he spent his time cycling during the summer and skiing in the winter, like her. There was a touch of guilt at not telling him everything.
She glanced at the paper in her hand to defuse the situation.
“We should know more in the morning,” she offered as an olive branch to their back and forth.
He shrugged. “I’ve got to tell you, I have a source who says the answer should be coming much sooner than that. I’ll hang out here for a while longer and see what happens.”
Fucking Bob!
She kept on the mask of leadership. “Suit yourself. Feel free to come into the lobby when it gets dark.”
“Will do.”
She turned and went back inside. In moments, she was in the dorm wing at Dr. Perkins’ door. Her intention was to wake him up and then dump out all her anger, but she didn’t think that was fair, or professional. Even if Donald was her friend, she couldn’t reveal how events were getting under her skin.
The burden of leadership felt heavy.
I am going to do one thing.
She slid the list of worldwide events under his door. If anyone could make sense of them, it was the crafty old professor.
Twenty-Two
Manhattan, New York
Garth and Sam sat on the stone steps of a large fountain on the edge of Central Park. Garth had meant to go deeper into the trees where it was grassy and shady, but Sam wouldn’t go a step beyond the water feature.
He went to work checking on his phone, while Garth did the same.
Come on, Dad, where are you?
There were no text messages from Dad, which was starting to make him nervous. The last one Garth sent was hours ago when he and Sam were almost at the airport. His dad never replied to that one, which wouldn’t have bothered him on any other day, but today it did.
I have so much to tell you.
He would never reveal it to Sam because he acted like he was glad his parents left him alone, but Garth hated when his dad was gone for so long. Sure, the first few days were fun living with Sam’s family, and it was like being on vacation without real supervision, but that wore off fast. Eventually, all he wished for was to see his dad’s pickup truck in their driveway.
“Anything from your pappy?” Sam asked in an offhand way.
“Nope. Anything from your parents?”
“Nope,” Sam mimicked.
They both went back to working in silence.
Around him, the city felt like it finally knew about the subway collapse. Emergency sirens wailed. It was impossible to tell where they came from or where they were going because of the endless echoes between buildings. He guessed they were for the crash site. He wondered if leaving had been a mistake, like leaving the scene of an accident was a crime.
A few other people sat on the steps or benches near the fountain, but everyone kept to themselves. They had no idea about the strange things he’d seen today.
His mind’s eye went back to the hand on the subway. That reminded him of the plane crash. He thought of the fireball on the tarmac and the shards of glass scattered through the ticketing terminal. If his dad knew how close Garth had come to getting sliced and diced like a cheap steak, he’d probably whip out his belt and spank him for real.
It was their running joke. Whenever Garth made the slightest error, Dad would claim he deserved to get a spanking for it.
Spill a soda—get the belt.
Get a B on a test instead of an A—the belt.
Leave his belt on the floor—that called for the belt.
Telling Garth he deserved the belt was his father’s quirky brand of humor.
The funny part was Dad had never laid a hand on him in anger. He sometimes bonked him on the back of the head with a firm slap, but Garth admitted those only came out when he acted like a jackass in front of his father.
He wanted to hear Dad’s cheesy humor again.
Garth dialed his dad’s number, and it rang a bunch of times but didn’t connect. Not even his voicemail would come up.
“Damn,” Garth huffed.
“Still nothing?” Sam said without looking up. “I think the network is down, or overloaded, or worse. We should have had something by now.”
A man wearing a Jewish yarmulke spoke up from a nearby bench. “I can’t get a signal, either. I hope it’s not Summer Storm Audrey causing all this disruption. My son told me this phone was the best. Paid the lowest price in town for it, too. But it has been nothing but a disappointment to me today. I should have stayed with my other one. Just don’t tell my son, okay?”
A couple of other people overheard him and agreed with the man. Some said their service went up and down. Others that it had been out for hours. They all seemed to have reliability problems with their phones, which was what they’d heard on the subway and bus back at the airport.
Garth gave the man a thumbs-up sign, then turned to Sam.
“Yeah. I hate to admit this, but I’m starting to get worried.”
Sam looked at him sideways. “About a rainstorm?”
“No, not some lame-ass storm,” Garth answered.
“Then don’t say it,” Sam chided.
Garth paused for a few seconds, wondering if his buddy knew him that well.
“How could you possibly know what I’m going to say?”
Sam laughed. “I’ve known you since third grade. I’ve got your mind dialed in. I can anticipate your every move.”
“All right, Mr. Genius, what is it I’m going to say?”
“Easy,” Sam deadpanned. “You want to call Mona.”
Garth’s brain couldn’t wrap itself around the statement.
“Who the hell is Mona?” The instant he said it, the morning ride on the bus came back to him. “Oh, shit, dude. For real? I’m not calling some girl whose name was on a city bus.”
“Well, I still have it in my phone, and you should do something fun like that, because it looks like you are going to ugly-cry. You want to go home, don’t you?”
“How did you know that, dude?” Garth said with surprise.
“Like I said, I’ve known you since the third grade.”
Garth listened to the water splash in the fountain, not sure how to respond. Was his friend being sympathetic for a change or poking fun at him? It was always hard to say with Sam.
“This blows,” Sam said after a few moments of uncomfortable silence. He slipped his phone into his black jeans and looked over to Garth. “No signal. No voicemail. No email. What’s the point of being out in the fresh air if your phone is busted?”
Sam’s parents loved to make him go outside and “play” with Garth, but they seldom went outside to check on what the boys did, so their outdoor rec time was a lot like their indoor activity.
“I do want to head home, I guess,” Garth said cautiously. “If your parents are arriving tomorrow, we can go back out on the town early, but I think I’ve had enough adventure today. I want to get home and see if my dad left a message on our machine.”
That was part of it.
His dad had contingency plan
s for everything, and they once agreed to use the hallway answering machine at their house if their cell phones stopped working. However, in the two years since they got the machine, neither of them ever needed to call the landline.
The other part was he saw himself through his dad’s eyes today. Dad would have said Garth needed to go home the second the plane crashed. His motto in any emergency was to get somewhere you knew it was safe as fast as humanly possible. The bigger disasters, he said, often happened when your guard was down after surviving the smaller crisis.
Sam faked sounding pissed. “Fine, dude, I’ll pay for a cab and we’ll get you home, so your daddy can change your diaper.”
Garth didn’t take offense to his friend’s needling. A passerby would think they hated each other, sometimes, but it was the way they talked, especially on topics of emotion. The undertone of Sam’s statement indicated he knew what Garth was going through, and it was cool to head back home.
Garth chucked his friend on the arm with one hard punch.
“Thanks, asshole.”
Modesto, CA
Buck was glad to be back on the move. He rolled out of the Walmart parking lot as the storm approached, though he judged he still had plenty of time to continue his escape. He’d made a mistake by lingering inside the store, but he wouldn’t make a second one by dallying in the town.
“Take me out of here,” he said to the GPS unit.
Freddy Krueger the GPS stayed true to its name and tried to get him killed. The first route it picked went north out of Modesto before it turned east to go over the mountains. It was the shortest route, but it went directly into the storm.
He clicked over to the secondary route, which started with a leg to the south, through the downtown of Modesto, before it went east to the mountains. It was a little longer, but a lot safer because it got him away from the dangerous clouds.
He’d learned his lesson about pushing his luck near bad weather.
The 9mm Beretta PX4 Storm sat snug in a waistband holster on his right hip. His hand touched the semi-automatic pistol one last time to ensure that it was there, ready to save his life. Laws be damned, he was going to carry the gun every second until he made it back to Garth.
End Days Series Box Set [Books 1-4] Page 18