End Days Series Box Set [Books 1-4]

by Isherwood, E. E.

  Garth pointed to the rack of packaged candies. Her eyes brightened when she saw the colors on the packaging. She looked closer to see the pictures.

  “It’s like the best party ever.”

  He tried to see things through her eyes, but it was tough. To him, there was nothing remarkable about the store. Sure, it was filled with candy, bags of chips, and refrigerators for energy drinks and soda, but so was every other store.

  “If we ever get to a Walmart or a Costco, you would shit your—”

  He swung his head to see if she’d heard him, but she was engrossed with a giant Kit Kat bar.

  “You would just die if you saw them.” He walked away, hoping she didn’t hear him swear. He figured it would be impolite to talk like it was him and Sam. Besides, he knew a whole vocabulary of curse words she couldn’t possibly understand.

  “I’m sure,” she said distantly.

  Dad’s bugout bag had four hundred dollars in cash, so he had the money to buy her whatever she wanted, but he began to feel the clock.

  “How about I pick one for you, and the next time you can pick whatever you want? I’m going to get gas and get on the ferry before it leaves.” He didn’t tell her he had no idea when that might be, but the most likely scenario is it would leave a few minutes before they got there, especially if they screwed around for the entire morning.

  “Would you? I can’t see what they are besides what’s on the pictures. I’ll trust you.”

  “Do you like chocolate or sugary hard candies?”

  “I’ve had chocolate a few times,” she said in a dream-like voice. “I really liked it.”

  There was no need to shop around. He grabbed the biggest Hersey chocolate bar they had, then picked up a second one for himself. “You are going to love these, but first we have to take them to the counter and pay.”

  “I understand,” she reassured him.

  “These two, and twenty dollars on Pump Five, please,” he said to the smiling woman at the counter.

  “This is all you could find, sweetie?” she said to Lydia.

  “It’s what he told me to get,” she answered excitedly.

  “Well,” the clerk huffed, “He sure is a big spender, isn’t he? Two lousy bars.”

  Garth understood by her tone that she wasn’t too happy with what he had picked out, so he tried to head off some of the ill will. “We are buying gas. That’s something, right?”

  “I guess,” the woman replied as he handed her a twenty and a ten.

  She looked at the money, then at him. “License, please.”

  His eyes must have rolled around in his head as he tried to figure out what she meant because it made her even more impatient.

  “I need your ID, son. Big spender like you getting a whole twenty dollars in gas? And you drive a taxi? I’m going to need to see your identification before I can sell gas. You look like you might be a minor.”

  It was his first time buying gasoline, so he wasn’t sure how to act.

  “I don’t have ID,” he replied, before thinking they probably thought he was going to buy cigarettes or beer. Asking young people for ID was probably standard procedure. “I just need a little gas, and this candy.”

  The woman turned her whole attention on him. Her brown hair was tied up in a ponytail, and her blue smock covered a T-shirt with what looked like a rock band on it. The name started with Super, but the smock blocked the rest of the name. “Son, the state of Delaware requires that I don’t sell gas to anyone too young to drive. If you drove your taxi into my station, you have to have the proper ID, right?”

  “Right,” he replied. “Let me go get it.”

  He had no idea what to do next.

  Canberra-to-Sydney train, Australia

  Destiny sat on the stopped train for over an hour while the crew took care of whatever delay or obstruction was up ahead. It wasn’t unheard of for a train to strike an animal, and she assumed that was what it had been, rather than a bush fire.

  She had no interest in mingling with the political jerks in the front of her carriage, so she watched through the window. There wasn’t much to see in the darkness, but eventually, she caught sight of someone walking below her beside the train.

  I have to know what’s going on.

  She got up and headed for the exit from her car. Once she got there and made like she was going to go outside, one of the group finally said something to her.

  “You can’t go out there. You’re supposed to wait until you’re told what to do.”

  She looked at the well-dressed woman and could tell by her tone of voice what she was trying to do, but Destiny’s respect for authority was jaded from working under bad leaders for too long. That was why she preferred working with animals. She opened the door while staring at the woman, then hopped down the three steps without looking back.

  A man stood near the back of the train.

  “Oi! What’s the holdup?” she inquired as politely as she could.

  The lights inside the carriage acted as a dim lantern, allowing her to get a good look at the young man’s face.

  “I’m just a trainee,” he whined. “They said this might happen. It’s been happening.”

  “What are you talking about?” Destiny replied sympathetically. “What did we hit?” She figured he was upset about hitting an animal. In her profession, she’d seen lots of pictures of trains and other vehicles after big animals had splattered all over the windscreen.

  He pointed behind the train. “There’s track back there. See?”

  There was no denying he was right. The moon was only half-full, but it gave her enough light to see the parallel metal rails heading off a kilometer into the night. “I do see tracks, yeah.”

  The man hustled toward the front of the train, so she followed. The engine was only pulling one carriage tonight, so they didn’t have far to go. When they reached the front, the giant spotlight on the nose made it possible to see well ahead of them.

  “And what about this?” he said breathlessly, as if the short jog had been too much for him. “Do you see this?”

  The tracks seemed to stop about fifty meters away. She also saw that the sides of the tracks were choked with trees and vines up ahead, like they’d driven into the edge of a rainforest.

  “It looks like a tree fell. You guys can cut through it, right?” Was it unreasonable to assume a train company would have ways to cut trees if the service line went through a forest?

  The man seemed unnerved. “Will you walk with me?”

  She was touched that he wanted her to go with him, but she couldn’t figure out why.

  “There’s a carriage full of political-types back there. You sure you don’t want one of them to help you? They probably fund this line.” She’d help anyone in need, and the guy seemed innocent enough, but she was wary about walking alone far from the train with him. The politicians were an easy way out for her.

  “You came down first. I didn’t think anyone was going to come outside all night.”

  She tried to keep the moment light. “You could have come in and asked for help.”

  He kicked the rocks. “They said we’re not supposed to bother the passengers.”

  She was glad it was dark, because she rolled her eyes so hard, they banked off her eyelids. The guy was not too keen.

  “Fine.” She exhaled heavily. “I’ll go with you.”

  “You’re a life-saver,” he remarked.

  He took off down the path of light thrown out by the engine’s high beam. It took her a few paces to catch up to him, but the guy didn’t slow down until they reached what turned out to be the end of the rail.

  She saw what had him shaken.

  “How the fuck did you know this was here?” she asked.

  “Safety systems, miss. I stomped on the brakes as soon as the warning came on. I had to come out here to see what it was, but then I didn’t know what to do.”

  Ahead, where the train was supposed to cross a steep ravine about twenty meter
s wide, there was nothing. No tracks. No bridge. Just a rocky crag.

  “The bridge is gone,” she said, amazed.

  “And the tracks. There should be tracks on the other side, but there’s nothing over there besides trees. How is that possible?”

  Destiny was aware of all the changes taking place around her. Ever since the blue light had sent her running from her campsite, nothing had been normal with the world. Faith said SNAKE had time all messed up. If Tasmanian Tigers could come back from the past, then perhaps the land itself was restoring things to how they were before humans got too involved in reshaping things. If it snuffed out a bridge or the Sydney Opera house at the same time, then so be it.

  She stood in silence, absorbing what it meant to see the change taking place so close to her.

  Do we have time, or don’t we? she thought. I need to get hold of Faith.

  Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah

  “This may be crazy,” Buck said into the CB radio, “but stick with me.”

  Buck turned the wheel to the left and guided his Peterbilt into the breakdown lane next to the median. The emergency shoulder gave him room to pass the two lanes of stopped traffic. There were only about ten cars lined up ahead of him, so there wasn’t far to go.

  Connie braced herself on the front dash like he was going to try to flip the truck over. “What are you doing, Buck? There’s water ahead.”

  He laughed. “I know that, Connie, and thanks for noticing. I figured you’d like to go for a swim.” Buck revved the motor to tease her.

  “I have to admit, I’m a little worried,” she replied, sounding nervous for real.

  “Trust me,” he said in a soothing tone. “I’d never do anything to panic you, but I’m not willing to turn around until I have no other choice.” He pointed at the long stretch of water ahead. “Look at the perspective of the highway as it goes into the lake. It can’t be very deep.”

  “But no one else is going in,” she responded.

  That was true, but most of them were cars. They sat lower to the ground and from their point of view, it was more difficult to see where the pavement went. As he neared, the white and yellow lines under the water were distinct and clear.

  He keyed the mic. “This is Buck Rogers. I’m going in.”

  When his tires first hit the water, he held his breath.

  The yellow line wasn’t visible the whole way.

  Six

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

  Faith banged on Dr. Donald Perkins’ door and prayed he opened it for her. He was her mentor, but he had also become a close friend. Recently, he wasn’t getting around as well as he had been, but his mind remained sharp. He often served as a sounding board for her ideas.

  “Come in!” a weak voice replied from inside.

  She went in, and was shocked to see that he appeared worse than the day before. He looked like he was now over a hundred years old, with ghost-white skin and sagging cheeks. Someone had given him a wheelchair, which completed the effect.

  “I’m not going to say it,” she exclaimed when she got close to him. The previous day she’d lied to him and told him that he looked fine. He hadn’t believed it yesterday, and he would not believe it today.

  “Don’t listen to anyone who tells you these are the golden years, Faith. Life was golden when I could walk without a cane. It was a treat when I wasn’t in constant pain.” He coughed three or four times in a row. “And it was especially golden when my heart wasn’t failing.”

  “Why is this happening to you?” Two days ago, before the Izanagi Project had shut them down, he’d been a spry old guy who was always cracking jokes and having fun. Now he would fit right in on a brochure for hospice care.

  “It’s because I’m lucky,” he said in an expressionless voice.

  His delivery threw her off-guard, and it took a few seconds to recognize he was joking.

  “I was lucky to live to see what’s been going on in your collider, Faith. Thanks for sending me the data last night.” He pointed to his laptop on the coffee table. “I’ve been looking at it between naps.”

  “And?” she asked when he seemed to lose his train of thought.

  “Oh, right. When we lost contact with one of the Four Arrows, as Bob called them, I checked to see if there were spikes at the other three boxes. I’ve studied the cameras recording in those chambers, and it seemed to me there was an increase in brightness in each one. I can’t swear to it since we can’t as yet measure the flow, but it’s a best guess.”

  “They are picking up the load from the missing one to maintain an overall constant in regards to the total energy,” she declared.

  “My thought precisely.”

  “What do you think would happen if we keep destroying the boxes? Would the load get shared to the last device? And if so, what would happen if we destroyed that one?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that too, and my conclusions are, uh…inconclusive.” He coughed briefly. “We cut one leg off the table, and it is still standing. A table will fall if two legs are cut off. My gut tells me dark energy will find a way to compensate, no matter how many legs we cut.”

  “Quantum entanglement?” she suggested.

  “Perhaps,” he said sadly. “If that’s the case, SNAKE and CERN are linked in ways current physics cannot explain.”

  She didn’t want to go down that path yet. “So, let’s focus on what we know. When we cut the first one, it sent that red wave of energy out into the atmosphere. Do you have any data in your laptop suggesting what it did?”

  He smiled weakly. “Are the strange occurrences still taking place on the outside?”

  She nodded grimly. The news was consumed with SNAKE, but there was still unusual activity elsewhere. The red blast of energy went all the way around the globe, just like the blue one, and seemed to double the world’s problems. More storms. More extinct animal sightings. More disappearing structures.

  And was SNAKE really immune to the breakage of time that was taking place everywhere else? If so, was there any way to get her sister and best friend to SNAKE all the way from Down Under? She’d have to figure that out at some point.

  “You seem lost in thought,” Donald noted.

  “Oh, yeah. I’m worried about my sis.”

  “She’s in Australia, right?” he asked.

  “Yes. Sydney. She has a cushy job with some wealthy foundation. Goes around capturing animals for tracking and checkups. She loves it.”

  “You two must have made a funny pair when you were kids. The scientist and the animal lover.”

  She gave him a mock scowl. “I love animals, too.”

  He held up his hands and chuckled. “I should have known. You are both trying to save the world, I suppose.”

  That tempered the pleasant moment.

  “Donald, how do I do that? I think the general will wait before destroying more of the devices linking us to CERN, but his patience won’t last forever. We need to get someone to Switzerland and confirm if it is still there, although I fear what will happen if it’s not.”

  “I think you’ve got it exactly right. You have to find the answer to that question, Faith. If there is no one at CERN and it was destroyed, you may have no choice but to shut things down here. However, if CERN survives, you may have better luck turning off the energy from over there.”

  He gestured to his laptop. “We can look at formulas and solve equations all the day long, Faith, but the answer is going to require someone like your sister. They’ll need to get their hands dirty out there and tell us what’s going on at the other end of the Four, uh, Three Arrows.”

  She put her hands together. “Will you come with me to a meeting with the other staff? I’ll wheel you down there.”

  Donald wore a faint smile. “No, I don’t want them to see me like this. That’s another lie about the Golden Years, Faith. You see yourself through the eyes of others. People saw me as an old coot before. Now they�
��re going to see me as a dried-up old coot.”

  She hesitated.

  “Faith, you can do this without me. You came in here already knowing the answers you seek. Trust your instincts, okay? You’ll make the right decisions.”

  His fatherly praise warmed her soul with the glow normally reserved for homemade chocolate chip cookies. She took pride in being smart about how she ran SNAKE. As the general said, it wasn’t her fault she didn’t know about the military aspect of the experiment she’d authorized. She’d had some missteps along the way, but also some victories. Most importantly, she still had an oar in the water to guide her team.

  “I know what I have to do.”

  Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah

  Buck imagined the famous words of Han Solo as he reached the halfway point of the water crossing.

  Never tell me the odds.

  The water was deeper than it had been, but he was sure he still saw the striped white line below him. He tried to keep his truck in the middle of the two lanes, so there was no chance of falling off the edge into a salty quagmire.

  He had to wipe his brow to keep sweat from rolling into his eyes.

  Connie sat up in her seat so she could see over the end of the hood. “Buck, are you sure? I’m having trouble seeing—”

  “I’m good,” he interrupted quickly. “We’re going to make it.”

  There was still half a mile, and the water was certainly getting deeper, but it wasn’t yet up to his side step, so that was a good indicator.

  “Will you stop for a second?” she asked in a sensible voice.

  He glanced over. “You okay?”

  She smiled and held up her hand to show it wasn’t shaking. “Cool as a garden tool, my friend, but there is something I want to do.”

  Buck put his foot on the brakes to stop them.

  “I’ll be right back,” she said.

  Before he could do or say anything, she opened her door and slipped out.

  “Holy shit!” he screamed. “Connie?”