Buck turned to Connie, who still appeared happy to be there. He spoke to everyone, but mostly to her. “And we stick together. That’s the best way to get through any crisis.”
After nods and grunts of agreement, the group broke up.
“Let’s go see what the highway holds for us,” Connie declared as she helped Mac into the cabin.
“Charlie Mike,” Buck replied automatically.
“Continue with mission,” she answered, nailing the military jargon.
Four
Search for Nuclear, Astrophysical, and Kronometric Extremes (SNAKE). Red Mesa, Colorado
“Ladies and gentlemen, for your own safety, please vacate all offices and conference rooms at the front of the building.” The military police officials arrived a couple of minutes after the protester threw his rocks.
“Kicked out again,” she mumbled. Her whole management of the SNAKE facility had been upended by General Smith and his men.
“I’m going to see if we’re in any danger,” she said to her team as they cleared out. “We’ll reconvene in one of the interior conference rooms in thirty minutes. Bob, you pick. I’ll bring Donald if he’s up to it.”
She hurried down the hallway to her old office. The door was ajar, so she knocked.
“Enter,” the general called.
“It doesn’t look like you’re evacuating, Obadias,” she said in a slightly accusatory tone. After watching the red light blast out from SNAKE last night with him, she and the general were on more familiar terms. She wasn’t afraid to express her real emotions or use his given name when it was only the two of them.
“Hiya, Doctor Sinc…uh, Faith. Please come in.”
“Aren’t you afraid someone will throw a rock through those?” She pointed to the bank of windows behind him. The view of the Dakota Hogback and high plains had once belonged to her.
“My men reacted with valor and took the scumbag down. We won’t see any more rocks come through the glass. Trust me.”
We’ll see.
“Does it mean we’re safe to go back to the front offices? They just told us to leave.”
“No, let’s keep them empty. We don’t want to give anyone a target.”
She tried to keep her jaw from hitting the floor. “Wouldn’t a general be a pretty big freakin’ target?” she exclaimed.
He stood up. “My dear doctor, I’m touched.”
“You know what I meant.” She backpedaled to avoid ceding the point to him. “I’m worried about my window, not you.”
He laughed a bit. “I’m sure. Rock-tossers don’t scare me. I saw some grim scenes back in the Gulf War. Warheads on foreheads and all that comes with it. I’m not going to cower on account of a rock. It’s not my style.”
“But it’s our style?” she parried.
“You aren’t in my chain of command. If one of you got hurt, it would reflect poorly on me. Whether or not you believe it, I am sworn to protect the people of this great country. Better to keep the chance of you or your people getting hurt as close to zero as possible.”
She shrugged. The whole facility was hers to have meetings wherever she pleased, and she would never tell this to the general, but the windows kept the walls from feeling like they wanted to smother her. Being inside the tunnels for days on end tended to make people go a little nuts.
He peered directly at her. “Your friend was right, it turns out. There was a military component to this experiment, but it wasn’t easy to find. I had to report my suspicions directly to the President, and he had to knock over some huts to smoke out the department responsible. I got the call this morning.”
“Who are they? What do they know?”
“I don’t know, and I don’t know,” he said cryptically. “But I did find out where they were. We grabbed them overnight, and should have them here in the next six to eight hours, depending.”
“Depending on what?”
General Smith tapped his desk. “It depends on whether the highways are safe to travel. Planes aren’t moving, and trains don’t run where I need them. The FBI went in and grabbed ‘em, but now we have to see if the Bureau is similarly skilled at driving.”
“This is a real mess,” she said sympathetically.
He gestured outside the windows. “You have no idea, and you’d probably prefer it that way, wouldn’t you?”
“No, general, I would not. If there’s a threat to my people, I want to know about it. I mean, let’s start right here. What’s going on outside? Why are you shooting protesters instead of arresting them?”
“Deterrence, plain and simple. Your SNAKE is all over the news, and every one of those news reports paints your team as the villain. They’re blaming the weather on you. They’re blaming missing persons on you. Hell, probably the only people on Earth who like you are the passengers on that missing Malaysian airliner.” He chuckled, but not for long.
“But, General,” she countered, “we’re the only ones who can make things right.”
The man’s eyes were sympathetic. “I know it. You know it. Everyone here knows it. But we can’t go on the news and explain what’s really happening.”
“Why not? Isn’t the press the best way to get our message out?”
He pretended to hold a microphone. “Yes, hello, I’m Dr. Faith Sinclair, and I run this facility. Well, I sort of do. The experiment that screwed you all was not my fault. I didn’t even know it was running, in fact, but I’m sure I’m the one who can fix it, even though I have no idea what ‘it’ is.”
The brutal truth pierced her soul.
“It won’t sound that bad,” she said without convincing herself.
“I take no pleasure in saying it, Doctor, but you were never going to win against the military. Your leadership was doomed as soon as the military work order was signed. I’m glad I followed my instincts and didn’t sack you when I walked in. This was too complex an operation to blame on any one person.”
“Thanks, I think.”
“My instincts in keeping you around paid dividends, too. If you hadn’t fought me, I would have turned off all four of the CERN beams, as you call them, and we’d likely all be dead right now.” He took a short pause as if to chew on his words. “None of this can be said on TV, either. They would crucify us both.”
“So, what do we do?”
“All the scientists I brought in are at your disposal. Put them to work. Make them take out the trash if you need to keep them busy, but use them however you see fit. My job is going to shift toward getting better security for your property. That man should never have crossed the parking lot and gotten within throwing distance of a window. If he’d had a gun… Well, let’s just say he might have found a juicier target.”
She noticeably gulped.
“But to shoot them? Is it the right thing to do?”
General Smith smiled. “The more distraction we can sow among the television-watching public, the better. By shooting the rock-chucker, we’ve tossed down the gauntlet for all to see. It will be the only thing they talk about on the news today. As an afterthought, they’ll be theorizing what you do here. It should buy us the time we need.”
“Time for what?”
“For me,” the general answered, “I’ve got more troops coming in to keep the peace on this property. I’ve got to stretch what’s here until relief arrives.”
“And for me?”
“You need to give me the answer to the only question that matters: how do we shut this merry-go-round down once and for all?”
She smirked. “And I thought you were going to ask something hard.”
Ramstein Air Base, Germany
“How the hell did I get here?” Lieutenant Phil Stanwick demanded of anyone who would listen.
He wasn’t in his command post. There were no explosions. No Phalanx auto-cannons. No soldiers screaming.
A man standing at the adjacent bed turned to him. “They said you were medevacked from Bagram. Said it was a nightmare op. I heard them talking.”
Phil concentrated on the man’s insignia. It was the same silver oak leaf as his own.
“Thanks, Colonel,” Phil replied. Then, realizing the surroundings, he took stock of his condition. “I’m not injured?”
“Well, I’m no doctor, but it seems to me that if you have to ask the question, you must be doing pretty well.”
It didn’t make Phil feel any better. “My men. I should be back there.”
“Battle is over. Hell, the whole war is over. You were one of the last ones who caught a plane out of there, if what I’m hearing is true.” He looked around at other beds in the ward. Some had men in them, but most were empty.
“That’s impossible,” Phil insisted. “We had thousands of men.”
“Some went to Kabul, some were stuffed on other planes.” The guy spoke in a quieter voice. “Some died.”
“But the whole airbase? Why?”
“Didn’t you hear? The Army is going back to the States. Our mission has changed.”
Phil sat up and slid to the edge of the bed. “Colonel, you have to tell me what’s going on. How the fuck did I get put in this bed? I’m fine.”
“Have you looked at yourself?”
That caught him by surprise. “No.”
His arms were bruised and covered in dried blood, but they otherwise felt fine. He got on his feet with no problem. “I feel a little beat up, for sure, but I’m fit for duty. I was pulled out by mistake.”
“Maybe,” the other man answered in an odd tone. “Or maybe fate brought you here for a different reason.”
He didn’t care about anything but finding a mirror. One hung on the wall a couple of beds down the row. Phil passed his fellow officer and noticed the wounded soldier in the next bed. “And sorry about your man.”
“Thanks.”
Phil walked in his socks. The floor was cold under his feet, almost like a morgue. That gave him a moment of panic, and for a couple of footfalls he imagined the other Lieutenant Colonel as Death come to collect him, but his doubt went away when he looked in the mirror.
“Fucking hell,” he said when he saw himself.
He wasn’t dead, but his face was bruised and swollen, as if a honey badger had taken out a lifetime of anger on him. The sides of his neck were blanketed with dried blood, and his uniform above the waistline was bathed in it. He patted around for tender injuries but came up with nothing. The blood wasn’t his.
The image in the mirror jogged his memory, and he pieced together what must have happened.
“We were surrounded by Soviet, British, and mixed Afghan units. Our command post collapsed on us when a bomb struck. I did black out for a time. Medics must have thrown me on the plane with the others. Probably thought I was just as bad as them.”
“Sounds like a one-in-a-million injury.”
He didn’t see it that way. “I have to get back in the fight.”
“I told you, the fight’s over.”
Bonneville Salt Flats, I-80
Buck had driven I-80 numerous times in the past. He could compute how many times per year he went up and down the highway, and from there, come to an approximation of how many times he’d been over this particular stretch. Probably hundreds, at least.
And never in all those journeys had he seen a drop of water on the Bonneville Salt Flats.
“What’s wrong?” Connie asked.
Buck wasn’t driving at the speed limit, which raised red flags for his navigator. However, he had every reason to drive slowly and observe the new threat.
“You see the water too?” he asked, as if testing his sanity.
“Yeah, it’s the Great Salt Lake, right?”
“No,” he replied. “That’s still up ahead. We’re seventy-five miles from it, at least. This has always been a salt flat. It is fifty miles across, and I don’t know how many miles it goes away from the highway.”
The two strips of interstate were separated by a shallow median, creating parallel lines from his position to a tiny dot on the horizon. Instead of the packed white salt on both sides of the highway that should have been there, everything was now covered by water.
“It’s like driving on the ocean,” she remarked.
“Yeah, but why?”
She looked out her window, then out his. “Maybe the system threw snow on one side of the desert and rain on this side?”
“That must be it,” he said without conviction.
Buck picked up the CB. “This is Buck. Anyone ever see water like this?”
“It reminds me of the bridges over the Florida Keys,” Sparky replied. “A bridge over endless water.”
“Is this another one of your changes?” Eve asked when the channel was clear.
During their brief conversations previously, Buck explained his theory about the blue light. As soon as it passed, he had started to notice odd things. The red light apparently didn’t make things return to normal.
“Maybe,” he replied.
“I don’t want it to change again,” Eve remarked matter-of-factly.
“We’ll be fine,” Beans said dismissively. “Right, Buck?”
“Yeah,” he said, agreeing with Beans to instill confidence in the others. “We’ve got to push on.”
They drove the first half hour without incident. Ahead, a grouping of hills rose from the vast stretch of flat water like an island mirage in the morning sunshine. Before the roadway made a turn and started to follow the rise in elevation, it seemed to dip down.
Ahead, water covered both sides of the highway.
“This ain’t good. Look.” Buck pointed a couple of miles ahead. A handful of vehicles lined up at the transition between dry road and wet. None of them seemed willing to wade into the water to get across the final mile of road before the incline.
“I’m glad we’re among the first to see this,” Connie said to him. “At least we didn’t have to wait behind fifty miles of a traffic jam just to see that the road is blocked. Now we can turn around and find an alternate route as fast as possible.” She got busy with the atlas.
He didn’t want to say anything, but his survival instinct kicked in because of how things looked ahead. As he pulled up to the end of the short line of traffic, he felt confident he could tell Connie what bothered him about it.
“If there were more cars in line, it would mean the water has been there for a long time. Hell, they might even have blocked the highway back at Wendover. The fact that very few people are here tells me this water only recently started to cross the lanes.”
“It’s rising?” she asked, concerned.
“Or we’re sinking,” he said to play devil’s advocate.
“I’ll find you an alternate.” She flipped pages of the atlas to get to Utah, which was near the back.
“Yeah, maybe,” he allowed.
He hated the idea of going backward. It would be almost an hour back to Wendover, the last town, and from there, he had no idea where the backroads would take him. Each hour of delay might not mean much over the course of his trip, but if he got home an hour too late to save Garth, he’d never forgive himself.
“Then again…”
Five
Lewes, Delaware
“We’ll get some gas at this station up ahead, then we’ll get back on the ferry and go home.”
“Okay,” Lydia replied, distracted.
Garth wasn’t pushy, so it took him almost an hour to get his teen friend into the taxi and away from the motel. She had begged him to let her take a warm bath, which was a luxury she’d seldom experienced back home. Then she fell in love with the blow dryer because it dried her long hair in record time. According to her, she had never looked better, although she admitted they didn’t have many mirrors back home, so her comparison was only partly valid.
In the taxi, he showed her the mirror behind the sun visor, and she stared at herself some more. “Your grooming tools are truly from the future,” she beamed. “I’m practically a woman.”
No kidding, he thought, try
ing not to stare.
He allowed her to indulge herself because he felt bad for her. Getting pulled out of your time and stuck in someone else’s would suck, he assumed, and having no parents or family only rubbed salt into the wound. She had to wonder if anyone from her time missed her. It might be impossible to get her back to where she belonged, but he could deliver a few modern luxuries to soften the blow.
Then again, everything in the twenty-first century was a modern luxury compared to what she was used to.
The motel breakfast soaked up the rest of the time. She’d never seen such excess, even in the dumpy little breakfast nook of the motel.
“I’m pretty now. And pretty stuffed.” She laughed at her joke.
Garth pulled the car next to the gas pump of the filling station and turned off the motor. “Do you want to come inside or stay here?”
He wanted her to stay in the car, because of her appearance. She was still dressed like a bumpkin from an olde tyme farm, which was fine, but it did make him nervous that she would stand out.
“I’ll stay with you, Garth,” she said nervously. “I do not want to be trapped inside this machine.”
“You won’t be—” he started to say, before relenting. As much as he wanted her to stay, he knew she’d be scared by herself. “That’s great. You come with me, and we’ll go check the place out. We’ll be back on the road in no time.”
Minutes later, he realized nowhere was going to be an easy in and out with her.
“Oh, my gosh! Look at all this candy!”
The older woman at the register smiled as if a couple of suckers had walked into her store. “Welcome! We have whatever you need.”
Garth had been going into gas stations all his life, and he’d never seen a reaction like that. The joke was on the woman, however, because she had no money to spend.
“What’s your favorite?” Lydia asked him as they stood in front of a massive display of handmade candies in a glass case. There were chocolates and fruit chews of all shapes and sizes. “I don’t think I could ever pick. We have candy stores back home, but we only have a few choices to make. This place…is like heaven.”
End Days Series Box Set [Books 1-4] Page 50