The dog sat on his butt.
“Good pup.” He wished he’d brought one of the jerky treats.
Buck slid into the driver’s seat and kicked off the emergency brake. There was just enough downslope to the road grade that the SUV rolled ahead toward the dirt shoulder. When he judged he had enough clearance to get his Peterbilt through, he stopped and re-did the parking brake.
“If there’s a camera in here, I’m sorry for getting in. I only wanted to get by.”
Buck had high hopes things would clear up by the time he got into Nevada, and he would look pretty stupid by going full-on Rambo in this forest if the rest of the world was still at condition green. Although the police vehicle would have to contain valuable survival supplies, he wasn’t ready to take them. The world hadn’t crossed that line, not yet anyway, but it was getting close.
When he stood up, Mac still hadn’t moved. “I knew you wouldn’t let me down. You’re such a good dog. How’d I get so lucky to find you?” He bent down and detached the leash, confident there wasn’t a threat.
But Mac almost hopped when he saw something kick up dust next to the trunk of one of the nearest trees. Buck saw Mac’s reaction and quickly grabbed the dog.
“Holy shit,” he whispered. “What’d you see?” He spoke breathlessly but also at the lowest volume. “We’re exposed!”
Buck pulled Mac by the scruff until they both crouched behind the open door of the SUV. The dog seemed anxious to go running, but Buck wouldn’t allow it. His own heart rate accelerated to hummingbird-speed as he considered his options. The world might be green, but this encounter had gone right to emergency red.
Let’s get a look at you, shall we?
Buck leaned down and looked under the SUV, but he couldn’t see into the woods beyond. He slowly rose, with just his eyes looking through the open door. He smirked at what he saw. “If you’re not afraid, I’m not afraid,” Buck whispered at the foraging rabbit. The presence of wildlife was the best indicator that people weren’t around.
Buck raised his 10/22 and set it on the sill of the open window so he had a stable shooting platform.
“Stay,” he said to his furry partner.
Buck lined up the iron sights of the small rifle. He needed a high-caliber long gun to do any serious hunting of big game, including the bipedal kind, but this was dinner and called for a lighter touch.
The rabbit moved slowly as it foraged. Buck waited patiently, twenty, thirty seconds. There was an ambush, after all, but Buck was the one who delivered.
He exhaled, froze, and pulled the trigger. The 10/22 hardly made a noise. At best, it was a loud snap. For a Marine sharpshooter, it was more than enough.
Buck stood up, relieved.
“All right, Mac, go get that rabbit.” Mac bolted for the woods, reaching the fallen prey and barking viciously as he pranced back and forth. “Bring the rabbit!” Mac continued to bark and prance, nipping at the dead rabbit as he lunged in and jumped away.
Buck searched the area to see if the shot drew any visitors of the human variety, but silence and calm had returned to the park entrance.
Manhattan Bridge, between Manhattan and Brooklyn, NY
Garth and Sam swished around the back seat of the cab as the driver made a screeching left onto the bridge.
“Sir, um, Mr. Dawson, we’ll be getting out here if you don’t mind,” Garth said as if this was any other cab trip. Yelling and screaming hadn’t worked, so he went for calm and cool.
After passing Grand Central, the driver seemed to come off his suicidal high, but red lights were still optional for him. He refused to do more than look for cross-traffic as he sped through intersections all the way through midtown. And he adamantly refused to let the boys out each time they asked.
“Where the fuck is he taking us?” Garth grumbled to himself.
Dawson kept saying he was driving them to a battle. Garth’s imagination ran wild with fight scenes from innumerable movies, but it settled on the idea they were being driven to a warehouse down at the marine terminal. There, several gangs would converge in one large, bloody to-the-death.
The eccentric cabbie gave them no other clues.
“At least we’re getting closer to Staten Island, and home,” Sam said to Garth in his own calm voice.
“We’re not going to Staten,” the driver replied while hitting the Manhattan Bridge at 80 miles an hour. He dodged the occasional slow-moving car, which sent Garth’s heart into his throat each time.
“Sir, could you at least do the speed limit?” Garth asked to be sensible.
Cabbies always drove fast, but Dawson’s foot was either pressed to the floor in acceleration or stomped on the brake to slow them down. He had no middle.
“We made it off the island, fellas. Get yourselves together. We’re almost to the dinosaur!” Dawson guffawed, then spoke like he was announcing a movie trailer. “They won’t know what hit them. Three knights in a yellow cab, armed to the teeth, go to meet their fate. Who will win? Dinosaurs created by aliens, or friends created by disaster?”
Garth watched helplessly as they zoomed past the first metal archway holding the suspension cables of the iconic bridge. The towers of lower Manhattan, the Brooklyn Bridge, and, in the distance, the Statue of Liberty, but he wasn’t in the mood for sightseeing.
He whispered to Sam, “Remember, the second this thing stops, we make a run for it.”
“No shit. I’d rather walk all the way home than spend another second with this guy.”
As if on command, Dawson locked up the tires and skidded behind a box truck that took up both lanes while barely doing the speed limit. He laid on the horn, got the truck to move to the right, then pounced on the gas. When they sped past the other driver, the man looked down at Garth with anger.
“Help,” Garth mouthed to the man. The message wasn’t received, however, because the man raised his hand and showed off his middle finger.
It only took a few more seconds to reach the Brooklyn side. The ramp took them several blocks into the city, and Dawson exited the main road the first chance he got. The boys tumbled to the left during one maneuver, then they both slammed to the right moments later.
“Coming up on the dinosaur,” Dawson said as he picked up his cigar. “Be ready. I have weapons in the trunk.” He took a long drag and exhaled a cloud of stench like it was pure luxury.
“Yeah, no problem,” Sam replied.
Garth looked at him like he was crazy, but his buddy shrugged. “What am I supposed to say?”
It wasn’t clear if the cab belonged to Dawson, or if he stole it. The man was jacked in the head, yet the guy drove like he knew every corner, pothole, and stop sign, and he avoided too many fender-benders for it all to be luck.
They careened down a narrow one-way street. There were people out his window, Garth was sure of that, but they went by far too fast to get a good look at them. He didn’t want to peek at the speedometer, but the blur of parked cars suggested sixty or seventy miles per hour. And they kept accelerating because Dawson’s foot wouldn’t come off the floor.
“We’re toast, dude,” Garth said with finality after shutting his eyes.
The motor screamed as they went even faster, but Dawson finally spoke up. “One more turn.”
Garth and Sam crumpled against the front seats as Dawson hit the brakes. The tires dragged like a cat’s claws on the urban street, and the car shuddered as it fought to slow down.
“Hang on!” Dawson shouted, sounding a little frightened himself.
The car drifted and slid into a right turn like a race car, but it screeched as metal rubbed metal. The sound only lasted an instant, and the rear side window above Sam exploded at the same time. Safety glass rained on the boys.
“Jesus,” Sam shrieked.
Dawson didn’t seem to care about the wreck. “There’s the dinosaur!” He pounded the gas pedal like it was a cockroach that needed to be smashed.
“We just hit a car,” Garth advised. “Shouldn’t
we pull over?”
The boys climbed back onto their seats. The acceleration made them slide into place and stay there. Ahead, Garth got a troubling first look at where they might be going.
A lot of it was blue water.
Dad, I’m sorry I got into this mess.
He tried to think of what his dad would do. Garth had no weapons, but if he did, now might be the time to risk using one. At worst, he’d knock out Dawson and they’d get into a fiery crash. The alternative was drowning…
The street ended in a huge pier with some green-turfed soccer fields on it. A giant black crane and the blackness of water threatened him from beyond the last pair of teams.
“Get ready for war!” Dawson exclaimed.
The insane driver crashed through a pair of picnic tables and tore through black netting designed to keep soccer balls inside the designated fun zone. Dawson drove the cab onto the playing surface where games were already in progress. A few of the nearest kids jumped aside before the yellow arrow could get them.
“He’s going to kill us,” Garth said like he’d just figured it out.
Dawson’s foot got heavy again.
NORAD, Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado
General Smith was inundated with information but little real data and no sound conclusions. He stood at a large table in the center of the action, with all the reports he could handle. As the afternoon wore on, it became clear the blue light preceded the mayhem around the world. Was the blue light the cause or was it a visual indicator of the underlying cause? The intelligence reporting was wild speculation at worst and empty at best.
“Lieutenant, read this to me aloud. I can’t be the only one who thinks this is a joke.”
The general handed over a printout with a few lines highlighted.
“Yes, sir. JSOC reports the 75th Ranger regiment has captured a platoon of Soviet T-62s deep inside Afghanistan. Their markings indicate the Russians are part of a larger formation of the 5th Guards Motor Rifle Division.”
“Impressions?” The general liked to probe his people relentlessly. Lieutenant Darren was sharp.
“5th Guards hasn’t been around since the late 80s. We studied their missions inside Afghanistan during their war. Their unit history helped with some of our mission planning when we went in.”
The general nodded, satisfied with the answer. “So, what do you make of this report? Is Special Operations Command smoking crack?” Technically, he didn’t have responsibility for operations in Afghanistan. His mission was to keep watch on the North American airspace, but he’d concluded the blue light originated inside his area of operations before it circled the world, so everything was now on his professional radar.
Lt. Darren was ready with more. “Could be militants dressed as Soviets, perhaps to draw in Russian involvement. The Soviets did leave behind some of their tanks when they left. I don’t know why militants would bother, though. A-10s could kill those tanks almost without leaving their dugouts.”
The general tapped his chin. “Agreed. Using those tanks as a ruse seems possible but highly unlikely. What are we missing?”
That wasn’t even the strangest report. Somehow, in the last several hours, the lost Malaysian MH370 flight came in for a landing in Thailand, an entire supertanker dropped off the radar in the Straits of Hormuz and showed up minutes later in the Red Sea, and the Indian government sent notice that someone plowed over the Taj Mahal. All of it seemed impossible.
That was the reason he had his staff read some of it out loud.
His biggest fear was one he wouldn’t dare express in front of his subordinates. As a four-star general, that meant everyone. He wasn’t allowed to speculate except within the confines of his own mind.
This weird shit could be explained if it was done by aliens.
“Sir!” Lt. Darren caught his attention again.
He blinked a few times to get back into the moment.
“Go ahead.”
“I got the intel you wanted back from the 50th.” Lt. Darren swung his laptop on the table and clicked his secure email. A globe appeared on his screen with the same white halo over North America as the general had been shown before.
“Here, now it compresses down to its smallest point. They tell me this still may not be accurate down to more than a thousand meters, but it’s what we have.”
General Smith leaned in to finally see the root cause of his day’s problems.
“This is the scene of the crime?” he asked the junior officer. “That’s the SNAKE lab, isn’t it?” It became clear he could cross UFO off his list.
“That’s what it shows on the map, yes.”
“What are the odds? It isn’t even that far away.”
The small circle represented an object powerful enough to send a ring of energy around the entire planet. To an untrained observer, the obscure patch of hills southwest of Denver metro was the last place anyone would look for such a source. There was one lonely road to that location, and a few buildings standing among the foothills.
The energy was underground.
Lt. Darren knew what came next. “We can have a security team dispatched from Peterson Air Force Base and be there inside of an hour.”
“Do it!” the general snapped. “Tell NorthCom we’re sending everything we can, just in case there is a terrorist component we’re not seeing from here.”
Twenty-Seven
Search for Nuclear, Astrophysical, and Kronometric Extremes (SNAKE). Red Mesa, Colorado
Faith spent an hour locked in her office, ignoring all calls. Dr. Perkins’ papers spilled across her desk, and she’d been poking pins into a laminated world map on the wall corresponding to each news item. She had intended to use pushpins to mark the home cities of the scientists who stopped in, as an ice breaker, but she’d usurped its purpose based on her compelling need to get to the bottom of the outage.
There were pins all over North America, but fewer overseas. It made sense, since American networks had to cover news for their home audiences. She was certain there were overseas events that had not seen their way onto the American news.
She tapped her fingernails near the red pin over New York City. “This tells me nothing.”
Donald linked three dots using a straight line, so she used a marker and ruler to trace a path along the same three points. Denver. Chicago. New York City.
She tried drawing similar lines through other points on the map, but the lines weren’t straight. On a whim, she tried to link the pin in New York to one in Europe, but that didn’t line up either.
Maybe it’s the map projection?
If she had a globe, the lines would be easier to draw around the curvature of the planet, but she didn’t have one. She would make do as scientists had done through the ages and compensate with her mind.
“Maybe it goes the other way?” she said as she traced the line from New York back through Denver and over to a blue pin on Yosemite Park, California. The line wasn’t exact, but it was close enough, given the scale of the map.
“What happened in Yosemite?” She scanned Donald’s spreadsheet and found a weird news item concerning an unexplained disappearance of several park visitors as well as staff. And beyond that…
“Oh, shit.” She continued the line to San Francisco, where a green pin waited for her. “What happened there?”
She checked the list.
“The north half of the Golden Gate Bridge had all its paint stripped off down to bare metal. Hmm. Weird one, but why is that news?”
Faith stepped back from the map to see what she’d drawn. It was a line from the West Coast to the East Coast, linking five data points. The connection was right in front of her.
“Of course!”
Faith scrambled to her desktop computer and pulled up a website with national news. She went to the story on the Golden Gate.
“Blah blah blah, paint stripped. Blue light earlier in the day. Came from the east.”
She clicked out of that and searched for the sto
ry of the fallen plane in New York.
“Authorities are at a loss for how it happened.” She scanned several paragraphs looking for her clue. “Blue light came from the west.”
“Am I really this dense? The source is somewhere between the two.”
Faith looked over her shoulder to the world map.
No! Her shoulders slumped as she dug further.
She checked the news reports for the Chicago Skylab wreck and the Yosemite Park incident. Then she hunted for more clues in other locations on her list. A grain silo collapse in North Dakota. A fishing boat tossed on a beach in Belize.
Each time the blue light came from a different direction.
At that point, it was rudimentary geometry. She drew arrows from each news item denoting the direction where the blue light originated. Four of them pointed to a middle location. It was the one place in the world she wasn’t searching for the cause of the blue beam of energy.
SNAKE.
“Holy shit,” she lamented, rubbing at the throbbing pain that had appeared in her temples. “This is unbelievable.”
Faith was shaken to the core. The Izanagi test wasn’t shut down by the loss of power from Denver. She’d been looking at it from the wrong direction. The power was shut down by an energy surge from inside SNAKE.
She stood up to look at her pushpins.
Her voice wavered while gently touching pin after pin across the United States, the timestamps from each event emblazoned in her mind. “We caused this?”
Was it even possible? They dealt with energy, yes, but not in dangerous amounts that could spontaneously travel around the entire planet and do the kinds of things reported in the news.
Unless there was more to the Izanagi Project than she was led to believe.
Her breathing sped up as her excitement rose. “Who do I tell first?”
She picked up her desk phone.
Donald was number one on her list, but he wouldn’t answer.
“I’ve got to tell the world.” Faith sat for a second, then snapped her fingers at how it was all so obvious. “The press conference!”
End Days Series Box Set [Books 1-4] Page 22