End Days Series Box Set [Books 1-4]

by Isherwood, E. E.

  It tore him up to not go with Sam, but he’d wanted to see Dad’s gun collection for a long time, and this was as good a reason as any. As he sat in the big chair, he couldn’t stop thinking about what was in the basement. He felt as if he were trying to capture some of Dad’s mindset by sitting in his space.

  What would Dad do? WWDD.

  Thanks to his father, he had an ingrained fear of opening the gun safe and shooting his foot off. Dad was happy to let him fire the weapons when they went to the Pine Barrens, but he always got the guns out and put them away without Garth’s help. His reason was always some variation of, “I’ll handle them inside the house, so you don’t shoot your foot off.”

  Even sitting there in his desk, he couldn’t say for sure whether his dad had been serious all those times.

  “I’m going to get them, Dad,” Garth told the room.

  Don’t shoot your foot off, his dad’s voice replied in his mind.

  “I won’t.”

  Ten minutes later, he stood in front of the ugly green safe. It was as tall as he was and about as wide as a refrigerator, with one door. The combination lock reminded him of the kind found on his high school lockers, but it was a lot beefier.

  He’d memorized the combination Dad had given him over the phone, and after he entered the last number, the safe’s lock clicked and the door was free to swing open.

  “Dude,” he said when he saw what was inside. “Insane!”

  His dad wasn’t a simple hunter, as he often claimed. Nor was he “just” a gun enthusiast with a few extras, as he sometimes declared when they went shooting with shotguns or plinking with the .22 caliber.

  Firearms filled the safe.

  There were numerous pistols on a high shelf and dozens of ammo boxes of many types next to them. He’d have to pull things out to see how much was behind the first row.

  In the bottom section, he recognized his dad’s shotgun, a .22 rifle, and the synthetic-stock hunting rifle with the big scope. His dad had brought all those out in the past.

  He’d never seen the rest of the guns on the bottom.

  Ten black rifles sat side by side on their buttstocks. He recognized the AR-15 pattern, but as far as he knew, Dad only had one. In the neat row, they looked like they might be identical, which evoked memories of his dad once talking about how to best swap parts between guns. Garth had had no clue what the man had been talking about until that moment.

  “Dad, you are a total gun nut!” He wasn’t sure if he should be proud or embarrassed. The teachers at school sometimes made him feel like a loser for knowingly associating with a father who took him deer hunting. However, his dad was also ex-military, which made him proud. His father obviously took defending his home to a high level.

  “Holy shit-monkeys, dude!”

  Garth jumped in fright at the voice and bumped into the safe’s door.

  Sam had let himself in and come down into the basement.

  Garth grabbed the door and caught his breath for a second, then looked at his buddy. “Damn, you scared the crap out of me.”

  “Yeah, well, I came to tell you I was leaving, but now I’m not sure I should leave you alone with all those guns. I thought you were going to start kissing them.”

  “Screw you,” Garth replied with a laugh.

  “I guess I don’t have to worry about any bad guys getting you,” Sam joked, “but you should try not to blow your foot off.”

  Sam laughed with his usual too-loud cackle because he knew all about Dad’s joke. Garth always found it slightly insulting his dad would suggest he’d harm himself, even if he was trying to be funny. However, being with his goofy friend made him realize that Sam was the type of person who could easily do that very thing. He was always looking for the next bit of entertainment or diversion at the expense of what was taking place at that moment.

  Dad is rubbing off on me.

  Facing all the guns made him feel realize the enormous amount of trust his father had placed in him. He saw everything in a new light, including his best friend.

  “Are you going to take the cab?” Garth asked. “I can give you the key.”

  “Nah,” Sam replied as he got close to the open safe. “I can’t drive.”

  “You mean you don’t want to drive.”

  Sam slapped him on the shoulder. “If you had parents who chauffeured you everywhere, you wouldn’t bother, either.”

  Garth ignored the implication that he didn’t have a mother, although it was true. Sam never meant to take digs at him in an unfriendly way. It was simply how they talked to each other.

  “So, I came over to tell you I’m outta here. My parents texted me from their fourth different bus. They had all kinds of transfers on the way, but they said they’ll be at Grand Central in an hour. I’ll be back before your afternoon nap, I’m sure.”

  They stared at the long line of guns until Sam broke the silence. “Take care of things until I get back. If you come over, don’t hog all the Mountain Dew, okay? We’re down to one bottle, and that’s for tonight.”

  “Gaming until midnight?” Garth asked.

  “No. We’re going to celebrate my parents being home. I’m going to game all night long, dude!”

  Garth got tired just thinking about it. “Hurry back,” he replied.

  Sam wound up to punch his shoulder but instead gave him a firm pat.

  “Don’t worry, Rambo,” Sam declared before saying like a robot, “I’ll be back.”

  Pole Line Motel, Mono Lake, CA

  Buck gathered his things into his travel bag and shuffled out the front door. His eyes were pegged on the two-pump station, but there were ten cars and a couple of motorcycles parked in line. He sighed out relief that Fred would likely be far too busy to worry about him.

  He also was happy to have his pistol in the hip holster again. After giving it a secretive pat to make sure it was secure, he spun around to leave, but bumped into someone.

  “Oh, excuse me,” he said as he backed away from a slender woman in a shape-hugging tank-top dress

  “No problem. I heard what you said about clearing out. That was smart. I’d like to avoid prison, too.” The thirty-something redhead finished closing her door and grabbed the handle of her roller suitcase.

  Her crystal blue eyes paralyzed him and stole his voice.

  “Hello? Prison? You want to get out of here?” she said, badgering him. “I gave you a hand earlier, but now you have to save yourself.” She cocked her head and smiled. “Are you okay?”

  Buck blinked as if he’d stared into a bright light. After the gloomy room, it was a legitimate excuse, but not the truth. Buck couldn’t tell if he was caught off-guard because someone agreed with him about the state of the nation, or if it was the beautiful woman before him. He wanted to believe that is was the madness in the world, but he knew the truth. It had been too long since he’d had the opportunity to spend any time with anyone else, quality or otherwise.

  He did his best to reply. “Sorry, uh, yeah. You surprised me, is all.”

  “Well? Go, escape!” She motioned for him to walk.

  He followed her instructions and took a few steps. Mac resisted for a moment while nosing the woman’s black cowgirl boots, but Buck yanked firmly on the leash to get both of them out of there.

  “Come on, boy, we have to get on the road.”

  He looked back once, to see the pretty woman breeze toward the motel lobby and gas station. He assumed she was going to turn in her room key like a good citizen.

  Mac hesitated as if he wanted to go back and check out the lady, but Buck figured that was his imagination trying to think up a reason to talk to her. Even if he had the time to go back, it was a lost cause after his introduction.

  “Buck, you’ve still got it.” He chuckled as he headed for his rig. “No one can put their foot in their mouth like you can.”

  Four

  Search for Nuclear, Astrophysical, and Kronometric Extremes (SNAKE). Red Mesa, Colorado

  Faith u
nderstood what the general meant by a plague of truth, but she was curious about his other revelation. “What do you mean, the time dilation is getting worse? What does that have to do with plane crashes and junk from space? Or,” she continued with sarcasm, “do I not have the security clearance to know that?”

  The general stood up and went back to the desk but didn’t sit down. “You have a point. I think we’re past clearance issues, doctor. I won’t be handing out launch codes, but this is stuff you need to know since you’re the one who is going to fix it.”

  He motioned for her to scoot closer to the desk. “We tracked you down by reverse-engineering a flaw we found in the global positioning satellites. The blue wave affected our birds at different times, corresponding to their distance from this location. Each lost a fraction of a second of time relative to control points on the ground. At first, the flaw was minor, but it is growing. As of right now, the discrepancy is a few minutes of error.”

  “That explains the plane crashes,” she interjected. “Don’t they need GPS to fly?”

  “Fly? No. But it does help with landings, navigation, and avoiding other planes while in the air.” His tone was friendly. “It sounds like you know something about GPS systems?”

  “I use one when I go for bike rides, yes, but I do understand the principle. My GPS tracker talks to satellites in the sky and they tell me where I am.”

  “Right,” he replied, “but those satellites are aging slower than those of us on the ground. If you tried to find your location right now, your bike GPS might say you are in Kansas. I’m told we can’t adjust the calibration, either. Something is interfering with anything we broadcast up to the satellites.”

  She stared at him slack-jawed, her mind racing.

  “You grasp the implications.” The general shook his head at the seemingly insurmountable challenge before him. “As best we can tell, the effects are most pronounced in the upper atmosphere, which is probably why aircraft were affected first. But there are unexplained phenomena at ground locations, too. It doesn’t seem to be uniform.”

  Faith stood and started to pace. “And it came from SNAKE’s supercollider.” She spoke as if to herself. “Which explains how you used concentric rings to zero in on our particle accelerator loop. A staff member reported not seeing the blue light when they were on the surface around noon yesterday, but he was inside the ring. That was another reason we didn’t make the connection sooner. It means the blue light was broadcast from the ring, but it only went outward, like a ripple on a pond.”

  “That jibes with our data, doctor. Do you know what caused it?”

  “That’s the billion-dollar mystery.” She looked out her window at the Dakota Hogback. “I’ve been studying physics all my adult life. One amazing theory is that it would take a supercollider as big as the solar system to learn all of nature’s mysteries. Did you know such a thing was even possible?”

  “Doctor, I knew SNAKE was here, but that’s the limit of my physics expertise. What aren’t you telling me?”

  She detected mistrust in his statement.

  “As I was saying, the power requirements of a cosmic-sized collider would be off the scale. There might not be enough mass in the solar system to build something that large, but that’s the size engine you would need in order to answer the truly important questions about the nature of the universe. What is dark matter? Is time travel possible? What happened at the moment of the Big Bang? Those are what excite me, general. Wrecking the world, or hiding it from you, is the opposite of what I do.”

  “Did something happen to magnify SNAKE’s power?” The general’s question sounded sincere.

  “Yesterday, I would have said no, but we touched upon at least one of those with our latest experiment. We’ve somehow disrupted time, but I’ll be damned if I know how.” She thought back to the Izanagi Project. She’d read the proposal, supervised the week-long setup, and overseen the experiment up until the final seconds. There was nothing time-related in any of it.

  “Please sit down,” he said as if they were in the school principal’s office.

  Her cheery mood went away. “General, I said I don’t know.”

  “It isn’t that. I believe you when you say you don’t know how your supercollider was responsible. You haven’t tried to hide the fact it is a mystery to you, and I appreciate that you are so open about it. Most people in charge would try to blame someone else.”

  “Thanks, I think.”

  “But if we are going to fix this, we have to know what happened. I need you to tell me the truth about this place. Whatever you were doing yesterday wasn’t as innocent as you let on, was it?”

  “Sir, I promise you I have no idea—yet—what could have unleashed this. I can make a lot more progress if you let my team do more than work on laptops in the auditorium.”

  He didn’t let up. “Doctor, are you telling me you have no idea what’s going on in your particle accelerator at this very moment? I find that hard to believe, even for you.”

  Her cheeks burned as she went into defensive mode. “We’re not even running at full power right now. I was afraid to restart everything because I didn’t want to damage the components if the power went off again. There’s no freaking way anything is happening at SNAKE, at least in the loop.”

  The general seemed disappointed. “Then it pains me to tell you this, but my team—the people you said didn’t need to be involved—reported almost immediately that there is a beam of energy connected to a section of your infrastructure.”

  “No, that’s impossible. What are you saying?”

  “I don’t know for sure. I’m not a physicist, as I said, but the report suggests that your supercollider is still active. It’s still broadcasting the blue wave of energy out into the world.”

  “Bullshit,” she said, forgetting which side of the desk she was on.

  Pole Line Motel, Mono Lake, CA

  Buck fast-walked across the front lot of the motel but resisted the urge to run because he didn’t want to be noticed, similar to a bank robber blending into the crowd while making good his escape. In his case, he didn’t want to be falsely accused of a crime. Fred had turned out to be more tenacious than he had given him credit for.

  “Awe, shit,” he said when he rounded the corner to the rear parking lot. A rowdy bunch of motorcyclists had parked their hogs a couple of feet behind his trailer. He tugged on Mac’s leash as he made for the sleeper cab. “We need them to move if we’re going to get out of here.”

  The yellow VW bug remained in front of his Peterbilt as well. There wasn’t enough room for him to get around it, short of pushing it into the busy two-lane road.

  He helped Mac into the cab and left him inside. This time he shut the door and didn’t look back to the scratching on the window, but instead walked with purpose toward the rear of his trailer.

  Buck smelled the pot before he made it past the fifth wheel, and the odor almost burned his nostrils by the time he passed the tandems. His danger meter hammered the red zone as he came to the rear corner of the trailer. There were six burly men, and they looked rough. Unshaven. Tanned. Wind-blown. They probably lived on their bikes.

  The confrontation made him nervous, but he projected confidence.

  “Hey, guys, I hate to bother you, but I have to back up about ten feet.” The land next to the parking area was flat and open, so the guys could park their bikes anywhere in the nearest square mile of land, even if the lot was full.

  The closest guy leaned against the back of Buck’s truck with a beer in one hand and a fat joint in the other. After taking a huge puff, he blew the fumes toward Buck. It gave him a chance to notice the devil-horned raccoon head stitched on the front of his black leather vest.

  “We’ll move when our brothers are done at the pump. Cool?”

  The other five guys looked as tough as the first. They all wore matching vests, like they were part of a gang, and had the wiry-but-strong builds of construction workers, slaughterhouse operators,
or cage fighters. One guy still wore his helmet; the words “fuck you” were plastered all over it.

  Step away from the cliff, Buck.

  He looked around the lot. Cars kept coming in, mostly from the gas station side of the motel, and soon there wouldn’t be any room to maneuver.

  The urge to turn around and leave almost overpowered him, but it was such a minor thing to ask. He’d move his tractor-trailer if someone needed to get out, so he hoped they’d see it his way if he kept at it. Many bikers liked to dress tough and look mean but were decent guys underneath. He’d met a lot of them on the road.

  “It’s just that me and my dog really need to get out of here. The motel guy thinks it’s 1990. It’s kind of crazy, you know?” He forced out a laugh and hoped it was contagious.

  “Go fuck your dog!” one of the men shouted. The others broke out in laughter.

  Buck retreated. These weren’t the decent breed of bikers he’d imagined.

  “It’s 1982, you dumbshit!” another biker taunted.

  “You wish,” he replied quietly.

  When he got to the front bumper, he confirmed again that there was no possible way to turn the wheels and get out. Even if he had a few feet to work with, the jagoffs in the back had made it so he couldn’t back up a single foot.

  It’s my fault.

  Buck knew better than to get boxed in on a parking lot. He had intentionally put the truck close to the roadway, but he’d never anticipated that someone would park in the wedge of space he’d left in the front. His options were to wait for the assholes to leave or push the VW out into traffic. He’d do it if there was no other choice, but it would mark up his bumper for sure, and probably put the VW at risk of being t-boned.

  He stood on the gravel parking lot enveloped by swirls of dust kicked up from car tires and exhaust. Mac pawed at the window to get his human to come aboard, and he was about to grant the dog’s wish and wait out the bikers, but someone yelped.

  The biker men laughed uproariously, so he turned around.