Little America, Wyoming
Buck and the others ran for their rigs, but the lot was huge, so it took a little time to get to his. Faster runners made it to their vehicles and started them up while he and Connie were climbing aboard his Peterbilt. Some a-holes in sportscars screeched their tires and left in white clouds of smoke like it was the start of a race.
The instant panic caused by the radio announcement was irrational and unwarranted, and he told himself not to get caught up in it, but the sight of other people running to get away sparked his own flight response. The threat of death could drive men into Mad Max territory, and it was dangerous to be around that mentality for too long. His books about the end of the world had taught him everything he needed to know on the point.
Once he was behind the wheel, he took a long, slow breath.
“Think, Buck,” he said quietly. “Don’t fucking panic.”
Connie laughed nervously. “I didn’t think you knew how to panic.”
“I’m not, yet,” he assured her, “but people here are wound up tighter than a drum. Everyone is looking for answers, but there aren’t any. They fill information voids with the worst things they can imagine.” He gestured out the window as the big diesel warmed up, then ruffled Mac’s ears. Connie gave Mac an ear massage as well. They smiled at each other. “But not us. We know where we’re going.”
“So, what are we going to do?” she asked.
“Not what everyone else is doing,” he declared.
He picked up the CB microphone. “Guys, follow me. We’re not going into that mess.”
“We’re on you like glue,” Sparky replied a second later.
The other trucks and cars scattered like roaches in the sunlight, all desperate to get back on the interstate, but he didn’t turn right on the outer road and drive the quarter-mile toward the interchange with everyone else. There was a four-way stop sign in front of the motel destined to catch everyone in a huge cluster-fuck of delay.
To Connie, he clearly stated he knew what he was doing. “We’re going to cut a new path.”
He drove off the parking lot and went into the grass at the edge of the highway.
“Holy shit, Buck, you can’t ignore traffic laws,” Beans complained.
“Just follow the guy,” Sparky barked. “He knows what he’s doing.”
We hope, Buck thought.
The ground was pancake-flat in all directions. There was a slight rise where the concrete lanes had been poured, but it was simple to drive over the grass and cross over the pair of westbound lanes. There were no cars coming from the east.
After a quick glance back to ensure that his friends were tagging along, he looked forward and planned how to traverse the scrub-grass median. The sixty feet between the lanes dipped lower than the pavement, so there was a minor tip-over risk if he hit it at an angle, but the larger threat was bogging down in the loose dirt and rock if he slowed or stopped.
“Hang on, guys,” he said to his cab mates. His faithful dog sat in front of Connie’s seat, facing her like an attentive student. She used both of her legs to steady him while she grabbed the truck’s “oh shit” bar on the glove box with both hands.
The Peterbilt’s nose dipped as they left the westbound lanes and went into the gravel. Buck goosed the motor and shifted like he meant it.
She looked out her window. “Buck! Cars!”
It wasn’t random highway traffic. He’d done a cursory glance to make sure the roadway was clear before he left the grass of the truck stop. “Are you sure?”
“They’re coming onto the highway right now!”
He hadn’t expected the fleeing cars from the truck stop to have reached the highway yet, but he had misjudged their determination and speed. Several sports cars raced off the ramp and jockeyed for positions in both of the eastbound lanes.
For a few seconds, he thought he’d made a huge mistake by rushing into the no man’s land between eastbound and westbound sides, but he wasn’t going to end his journey stuck in the gravel.
“They’ll move for us,” he reasoned. “The law of gross tonnage is on our side.”
Buck angled the truck across the median and aimed for the breakdown lane at the leftmost side of the highway. He hoped the incline onto the pavement wasn’t steep enough to tip over his load. Over the years, he’d been off-camber more times than he cared to admit, and every close call had taught him more about the limits his trailers could handle. This time, he thought it would be within tolerances. He hoped.
A bright red Dodge Hellcat roared by, its driver hidden behind privacy glass. The speeding sports car swerved and missed his front right tire by only a few feet.
“Good night!” Connie exclaimed.
The Peterbilt hopped onto the highway in the breakdown lane and it came up at a diagonal, so the entire trailer swayed on the fifth-wheel behind him.
“Hang on,” he begged his payload of chili.
The left side mirror filled with dust as the rocks and dirt of the median rolled off his eighteen wheels. Three other rigs came out of the haze moments later, duplicating his maneuver.
“Fuck, yeah!” he shouted.
After merging into a proper lane, he picked up the mic. “That was great driving, guys. We saved half an hour or more not sitting in the traffic jam.”
Truck stops were notorious bottlenecks, and he’d spent his share of time getting in and out of them. The sports cars had made it to open road first because they got in front of the traffic snarl. He made it out second because he skipped the jam altogether. He watched the tach as he accelerated, smoothly gliding through the gears. He had every intention of running wide open as long as there were cars passing him to keep the Highway Patrol busy.
Connie rubbed Mac’s ears but glanced at Buck. “I was joking when I said I could drive your truck. There is no way I could have performed your escape maneuver.”
He laughed cautiously. “That was what we Marines call a high risk, high reward maneuver. I should have waited with everyone else, but a half-hour could become two hours could become a whole day. Garth is somewhere out there, and sitting in a traffic jam burning our precious diesel doesn’t get us any closer.”
A dozen cars cruised past them as he merged into the right lane where he could resume his normal cruising speed of seventy-five. Once all the dust cleared and he got a good look at his convoy, he realized they were one short.
“Beans?” he called out. “Where you at?”
“He’s not behind me,” Sparky reported. “I thought he was.”
“This is Beans. Sorry, guys, I’m in the mobile parking lot.” He laughed. “You did a good job going around it. I’ll be here for an hour. Some dickhead t-boned a pig-hauler. It’s a fucking mess.”
“You going to catch up?” Buck asked with reservation in his voice.
“Nah. I can’t follow you; driving in water was more than I was comfortable doing. Going for broke over the median was one step too far. If the world is going to shit, I’m headed back to SoCal. I’ve got to get to my family.”
He wanted to say it was only a rumor and no nation on earth would really use nukes, or that the effects of the blue light couldn’t stop any of them if they stuck together, but he couldn’t deny the guy an opportunity to get to his family. It was what Buck was doing.
“All right, man,” Buck replied. “Take care of yourself. Thanks for riding along while you did.”
Everyone else said their goodbyes, then Beans was gone.
“It looks like I’ve lost one,” he said to Connie, wincing at his own words.
“That’s some serious bullshit right there!” she stated in no uncertain terms. “You didn’t lose anything. An adult made an adult’s choice. You have your truck, your dog, and me. Maybe you can be droopy-faced if you lose one of us, but until then, you’re doing what you need to do, and they’re following. You are this much closer to your son. Look back there.” She pointed to his side mirror. “There aren’t any trucks on the highway but us. The
y’re all stuck on that lot. Your instinct was right on the money.”
“This time it was,” he said in a more cheerful tone. “But I need to talk to Garth now more than ever. This country is spiraling out of control.”
She reached for his phone, while he thought about what to say.
Twelve
Search for Nuclear, Astrophysical, and Kronometric Extremes (SNAKE). Red Mesa, Colorado
Faith worked with Sun and Bob down in the tunnel for a couple hours. She talked briefly with the NORAD scientists and asked if they could cut into one of the Four Arrows boxes, but they claimed General Smith had advised against it.
She wasn’t in the mood to go begging to him again, so she focused on her laptop and the data generated by Bob and Sun’s research efforts.
“Guys, let’s assume what Bob said is true. The cabinets on both ends are linked via quantum entanglement. Why do you think the energy from inside this box jumped to one of the others? Why didn’t it turn off? To me, it suggests there isn’t a one-to-one relationship between the boxes on each end.”
“Right,” Bob replied. “If the energy was relegated to a certain container, it should have shut off instantly when the box was removed. The fact that it moved to another one would suggest what you say is true.”
“Can we assume, then, that shutting down additional boxes will not stop the flow completely?” It was the working theory she had expressed earlier.
“We can’t disprove that,” Sun said in her quiet voice.
Faith took a deep breath, not sure how her theory would be taken. “I believe the Four Arrows were designed to ensure the energy joined between the two colliders, but they aren’t necessary to continue the relationship.”
Bob’s face was riddled with question-marks and his brow furrowed above his nose.
“Hear me out,” she went on. “I believe the first box showed us the way out of this mess, but not for the reason the general and his people think. While it is true we tracked the energy flow increasing at the other boxes, it doesn’t make any sense whatsoever if there is entanglement between the containers themselves.”
“Faith, I know what they told me. I saw the readings between both sites when it was active for those few seconds before the telemetry went bust. There were four links. Four arrows, just like it says in the name.”
Her experience with particle physics ran deep and wide, as anyone in charge of the world’s most sophisticated piece of hardware would need. However, most of the past few days had been spent in damage control mode after having her project usurped by another group. Now that she had time to look at the data and think, she came back into her element.
“It might not matter if we turn off the other boxes. That’s what I think.”
“But Faith, didn’t you beg the general not to turn any of them off?” he asked. “Are you now saying your caution was for nothing?”
“I wouldn’t yank them at the same time like Smith was going to do, but we know more now than we did yesterday.” She let out a fatalistic chuckle. “I’ve said it before: everything we do here reveals more data, no matter how we get it. Kind of like peeling back the onion. Maybe it worked out for the best that he turned one off, because Sun’s data collection revealed this to us.”
She typed in a few things on her keyboard, then turned the screen so they could see it. A sophisticated graph appeared on the screen, with what a bystander would see as a tube drawn at a forty-five-degree angle. One open end was about twice as wide as the other, making it look like a traffic cone with an open top.
“You’ve drawn SNAKE on one end and CERN on the other,” Sun acknowledged.
Faith painstakingly mapped the data onto the graphing program. It required a black box in the middle, since she didn’t know the nature of the dark energy well enough to represent its effects. Instead, she was forced to guess, based on observed results on her end of the equation.
“This isn’t to scale, nor are the dimensions correct. Because the beams cut into the mantle of the earth and because CERN isn’t directly below us on the other side of the planet, the real circles would appear more like ovals relative to each other. Still, this is a crude representation designed to show what I believe will happen when we remove the other boxes.” She tapped a button on the keyboard, and it began to play.
At first, it was a tube with four points assigned to the circles on both ends. A blue line connected each box to a companion on the far loop.
“First, we have the initial experiment, Four Arrows as it was set up to run. Then, this.” She pressed another key.
One of the boxes was removed on the larger end of the oddly-shaped tube. It represented the cabinet pulled aside using the winch. The animation showed the blue line splitting in two, then getting pulled to the two nearest boxes.
“This is where we are now. The energy of Box One is being shared with the others.” She pressed the button. “And this is where we’re going.”
The simulation ran through the scenario she had set up.
At the very end, she spiked the flow of energy by a factor of one hundred. She had to make a host of assumptions, including the designed capacity of each of the four boxes and the broadcast power of known energy sources on the CERN end. She also took into account a best-guess for the amount of energy shooting out from SNAKE in the blue and red waves.
The result was a new shape.
“I think this explains it all,” Faith concluded.
Near Georgetown, Delaware
Garth decided to take his chances and headed in the direction away from the Dollar Palace and the looters. He and Lydia walked next to each other for about fifteen minutes before they saw the familiar shape of a gas station.
They were headed into the business district of the town.
“Well, we finally got some good luck,” he told her. “Now we need it to hold while we buy some gas.”
“Your time is strange, Garth. You are a man, apparently in good standing. There should be no reason you cannot buy what you desire.”
Her kind words made his head swell to hot-air-balloon size.
“Would a fifteen-year-old be a man in 1849?”
“Sure. At that age, his parents would seldom insist he was to be seen, not heard, like younger boys. It would be unusual, I suppose, to marry that young, but I know the elders of the wagon train were trying to find me a husband among my peers. Girls marry younger than boys, usually. If I did get married, then I would be his problem.”
“Wow.” He looked at her. “Amazing. You were going to be married? At fifteen?”
“I’m sixteen, to be accurate. And, yes. If a suitable man was found for me, I would probably be married off. Once my pa died, you know, I was a burden.”
“That’s harsh,” he admitted. “You’re not a burden.”
“It just is,” she conceded.
He looked ahead as they approached the gas station’s parking area. “I’m close to being sixteen,” he said as if it were no big deal. “Here, I think you have to be older to get married. Maybe eighteen? I’m not sure, because I’ve never thought about it. I also don’t have any friends who are married, not even at my school, and there are hundreds of girls and boys there.”
“Incredible,” she gushed. “I would love to go to school with that many kids. My school has eight, but seldom are we all together at the same time. Often, the boys have to help with the wagons. Back in Pawnee, Indiana I was in a proper school for a short time. There were ten pupils of all different ages.”
“I have two hundred in my sophomore class in high school. All my age.”
He held the door open for her as they went inside the combination gas station and convenience store. The wafting aroma of wood-fired pizza greeted him when he went inside.
“What is that?” Lydia asked. “It smells wonderful.”
He walked fast, because she would be overwhelmed by the rows of treats, chips, and candy if he lingered. However, before he could get near the cashier to pay for his gas, she dragged hi
m by the elbow to the aisle he wanted to avoid.
“Can we buy our chocolate now?” she said, clapping her hands with anticipation.
Hurry, dude.
“Okay,” he replied. “You’ll still want this one.” He picked up another pair of Hershey bars and handed them over. Her green eyes twinkled.
“Thank you, Garth,” she said as she studied the packaging. “This is amazing. It looks so clean.”
“It’s nothing,” he said, walking farther down the aisle. A flash of red caught his eye on the top shelf of the next row, so he went over to check it out.
“Wouldn’t you know it?” he said with dry humor. “Gas stations carry gas cans, too.”
She seemed let down. “We could have bought this a long time ago?”
He thought about it for a few seconds. “No, not at the first place. That clerk had it in for us. But I bet the other two stations sold these.”
The aisle was filled with automotive and household goods, as if offering a small selection of frequently-used items to drivers. One object caught his attention.
“This could be useful,” he said as he picked up a can of black spray paint. Lydia came over to see what he had, but she didn’t look for long because it wasn’t nearly as interesting as the chocolate bars.
“Actually,” he continued, “I’ll need a few more.” He stuffed his arms with six of the cans. “Now, let’s get out of here.”
They walked together to the front of the store and set the cans and candy on the checkout counter. He also deliberately set his gas can in front of the clerk, like he did it every day. The fake story was on his lips, ready to be told.
The older teen girl in a red vest looked up at him and smiled brightly, then scanned his purchases.
“You want two-and-a-half for your can?” she asked in an offhand way. “You didn’t have to bring that in, y’know,” she added.
“We ran out of—” he started to say before going silent.
He’d prepared a long story about how his parents pulled over on the highway and sent him to get gas for them. He built the tale as a way to get around the questions about his ID, because obviously he was getting gas for his parents. However, her friendly demeanor short-circuited the need to convince her of his plight.
End Days Series Box Set [Books 1-4] Page 56