“Give me paw,” she said.
The dog looked between Connie and him, then held out one of his paws.
“Good dog!” Connie gushed.
“Have you been secretly training him?” he asked with amazement.
Connie reached up above his head and pulled down one of the remaining dog treats. Her perfume wasn’t as strong after her time in the water, but it was still there.
For a few miles, he forgot about his worries while Connie practiced the trick over and over with Big Mac. By the time she was done, he did it without hesitation. She’d started working on getting him to do left or right paw when the CB crackled to life.
“Buck Rogers, I have news,” Sparky called.
Buck knew by the tone of voice it wasn’t going to be good.
His brief moment of happiness was over.
Twenty-One
Search for Nuclear, Astrophysical, and Kronometric Extremes (SNAKE). Red Mesa, Colorado
Bob ran up, out of breath. “Faith! Holy shit! Are you all right?”
Faith heard his voice, and recognized his face, but had trouble replying. She’d mostly recovered from the car bomb outside the window, but her ears wouldn’t let go of a high-pitched squeal. She patted both ears to try to get them to pop and clear up while she and General Smith waited in an interior room.
An Air Force guard ran up behind Bob. When he saw the general, he stopped. “Sir, this man ran through our cordon at the end of this hallway.”
“I had to make sure she wasn’t hurt, you twit,” Bob snapped back without looking at the man.
General Smith busily conferred with some of his men but dismissed the guard with barely a glance. “He’s fine. Thank you, son.”
The guard glared at Bob, then spun on his heel and left the room.
“I didn’t know you gave a damn,” Faith said to Bob when it was just the two of them. Her ears weren’t getting any better, so she picked through her hair, amazed at all the tiny pieces of glass stuck in her tangled locks.
“Geez, c’mon. I don’t want anyone to hurt you. I’m supposed to be your only bad guy.”
It touched Faith to know her ex had a tiny bit of compassion, but he’d have an uphill battle if he expected her to forget everything he’d done leading up to the crisis. However, before she could answer him one way or another, General Smith was in her face.
“Doctor Sinclair, I need you to walk with me. Alone.”
The general gestured her away from Doctor Stafford.
“You sure you want to go with him?” Bob asked, as if his date was being stolen at Homecoming.
“I’ll be fine. Go check on the others.” She hadn’t heard of any deaths, but her staff was shouting about injuries in the hallway. She wanted to go out and check on them herself, but she had to stay with the general. Once he had done his job, she could do hers.
When Obadias had her alone in the hallway, he began talking in a conspiratorial tone. “Faith, do you have any idea who could have done this? The car is totaled. We’re trying to figure out who it belonged to and how it got on your lot. In the meantime, it would help to know if you have any enemies.”
She chuckled. “Where do I start? Radical environmental groups have been at our throats since we started up, and they’ve been angry at CERN for years before that. Those are the people who think what we do is going to open a black hole and swallow the Earth or something.”
They looked at each other for a moment. She realized what she’d said.
“No, this isn’t a black hole, general. We could measure that easily if it was. Rest assured, the Four Arrows experiment didn’t open one.”
“Well, okay, then. I feel better knowing that.” He put a knuckle to his chin. “But no one else? Does anyone on the inside feel slighted by or vindictive towards what you’re doing here?”
“No. Well, I’m not aware of any. Why would one of my own people do this?”
“I don’t know, but it’s the typical logic in these situations. No one from the outside could have come here this fast, you know? Not unless a terrorist group was based in Denver and rushed to action as soon as SNAKE was mentioned on the news.”
“Not likely,” she agreed.
They walked down the hall until they came to the circular ring around the experimental chamber. She looked down at the clean room, which was currently empty and running at low power. Most of the facility was working on the math regarding the energy flowing through the collider and up into the atmosphere.
“You’ve got to think of all the possibilities, Faith. You know the people working for you far better than anyone else. Even with formal interrogations, it would take forever to weed out a malcontent. There has to be someone you’d consider a threat.”
“I have hundreds of employees here. I haven’t even met them all.”
“Faith!” Bob cried out behind them.
“Not him again,” the general mumbled.
Bob ran up, holding his phone.
Smith stopped him before he made it the last ten feet. “I insist we be left alone, Doctor.”
Bob ignored the general and ran up to Faith. “You won’t believe this! There’s been another explosion.”
“I didn’t feel one,” she replied.
“Where?” the general demanded.
“In the super collider tunnel. Cameras went offline at Transition Point Seven.” Bob peered directly at Faith. “A Four Arrows box was there.”
“My men!” the general exploded. He’d put guards on each of the boxes.
“Guys, there’s something else. The guards have been chased away from the remaining two boxes. Someone is down there, and we don’t know what they’re doing.”
“Dammit all to hell!” The general went over to the stairwell to the tram station. “I’m going down there.”
“I’ll go with you,” Bob announced.
“No!” Faith insisted. “I need you up in the control room. Find Sun. If all the boxes are destroyed, there is no telling what’s going to go wrong. I need someone I can trust to manage things up there.”
“Shit, Faith. This ain’t right. I can’t let you go alone.”
She smiled. “I’m not alone. I’ve got a four-star general watching over me.”
“I don’t care who, but one of you needs to come with me right now to open the tram doors and drive the damned thing.” The general started down the stairs.
Bob stood still while she and General Smith hurried away.
There was no romantic goodbye, but she felt a little like it was a farewell with Bob. If the terrorists blew up the other two boxes, all of reality could unravel. There was no way to know for sure what would result, but she was confident it wouldn’t be anything good.
“Take care of yourself,” she said as she went into the stairwell.
“Yeah, you too,” Bob said slowly, disappointment tingeing his words. “I’ll watch over things here until you get back.”
“You always wanted to be in charge,” she allowed. “Now’s your chance.”
“Not like this,” he said in a quiet voice.
She went through the doors and didn’t look back. Her flats slapped on each of the steps as she ran as fast as possible to the bottom, but when she entered the station, the Silver Bullet wasn’t there.
General Smith faced her. “I don’t suppose there are other tram cars on the line?”
“There are two, one for each hemisphere.” She trotted to the tracks and looked to the right. “There’s a sister station about a hundred yards that way.” She pointed down the lighted tunnel.
“I’m not too proud to run.” General Smith hopped into the tram pathway, which was a smooth slab of concrete bracketed on each side by long metal magnets, which acted as the tracks. Without waiting a second for her, he jogged away.
“Me, either,” she assured him as she got onto the tracks.
Ahead, the wedge-shaped back of the tram engine pointed right at her.
Please don’t move.
European Labor
atory for Particle Physics (CERN), Switzerland
When Philip walked into the lobby of the research facility, it reminded him of being in a library. Ethan conversed in hushed tones with two overnight security guards at the front desk. The sparkling-white floors and metallic walls bounced and warped the echo of the voices.
There didn’t appear to be any urgency in the conversation, so he strode up to the desk to listen in.
Ethan saw him and waved him over. “The guards have made a phone call to the director. He should be here momentarily. At first glance, they say we’ve wasted our time, because nothing unusual is going on.”
“Did they say anything about a failed experiment?”
The other man shook his head. “Nope. Nada.”
“Do we report in?”
Ethan looked at Corporal Grafton. “I want you to report to Battalion. Tell them our first impression is that nothing is amiss. The facility is intact. No reported problems. Waiting for the director. That’s all.”
Grafton took off his radio to make his report.
“What are we looking at for time?” Phil asked. “Did they say when the boss is going to get here?”
“No,” Ethan replied. “But he is in this building.”
“You want a perimeter?” he inquired quietly.
“Yeah, go ahead. Give the men something to do while we wait. Have them pair up and keep eyes outside and down the two main hallways just in case.”
After setting the men in place, Phil checked on Grafton. “You get HQ on the line?”
“Still trying, sir.”
“Very good.” He went back to the main desk to advise Ethan of the delay, but then a scientist walked up to the Colonel.
“Hello, I’m Dr. Tomas Eli. Can someone tell me what the bloody hell all these guns are doing on my campus at this late hour?”
“I’m Lieutenant Colonel Ethan Knight, sir, and with all due respect, we’re the least of your worries.”
“Then why are you here?”
Ethan pulled out a piece of paper. “I’ve got some questions that must be answered, okay?”
The doctor crossed his arms and shifted his glasses as he assumed a defensive stance, arms crossed and leaning backward.
“Do you have any knowledge of the Four Arrows Project, a covert attempt to piggyback on experiment 7HC?”
“Four Arrows? No. But I do know of 7HC. We ran the experiment a few days ago.”
Ethan kept reading.
“Do you know the whereabouts of the American, Doctor Kyle Johnson?”
“I do not,” the scientist deadpanned.
“Why did you say it like that? You seem upset.”
He removed his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. “We’ve been trying to track him down for days. He and his team walked off the floor at a crucial moment during 7HC. We haven’t seen them since.”
“But you said everything is okay?” Ethan wasn’t reading from the card.
“And it is. We have over twenty nations represented here at CERN. Each one can come and go as they please. I’m sure the Americans had something important going on, but it doesn’t change the fact that they left without warning during an international experiment.”
Ethan seemed to think about the next question because he stared at it for a good ten seconds. “Final item here. By executive order of the President of the United States, in cooperation with the Swiss Federal Council, we have been ordered to evacuate and shut down all power to your facility.”
Doctor Eli’s face dropped before he recovered, clenching his jaw and glaring at the lieutenant colonel.
I-80, Wyoming
Sparky’s voice came out of the tinny speakers. “Buck, there has been a terrorist attack in Red Mesa, Colorado. At that messed-up science place. It’s all over the news. You should—”
The audio kicked off. Buck couldn’t tell if it was because Sparky had stopped or his radio gave out, but he soon didn’t care.
“Oh, shit,” he mumbled.
A rush of dizziness clouded his vision, and he desperately gripped the steering wheel to maintain consciousness.
“Buck, it’s happening again…” Connie’s voice might as well have been over the horizon, it sounded so far away. “The red.”
The yellow line down the middle of the dual highway lanes became a tunnel in his vision. The rest of the world was dark, save for a red tint on the remaining pinhole.
He fought to keep the truck on the line, although he tapped the brakes to slow the truck.
Don’t pass out, you dumb lug. People depend on you.
The intense buzzing sensation in his head passed as quickly as it arrived. When his vision firmed up, he adjusted the wheel to make sure he was in the lane, then he looked at his side mirror.
Fuck me.
Sparky’s blue Mack shot off the highway into the median.
“He’s tipping,” Buck said dryly.
“Who?” Connie replied weakly.
It happened in slow motion. Sparky’s truck tore into the soft ground between the lanes because he came in at an angle. The direction of the wheels was controlled by the force driving them into the dirt, and they yanked his entire rig to the left. A competent driver would steer into the turn to avoid putting so much stress on the frame, but Sparky either didn’t or couldn’t.
The truck’s front left tire continued to dig into the dirt, and nine of the eighteen wheels were soon off the ground.
At the same time, the roadway behind his rig filled with white smoke as the other two semis locked up their brakes to avoid leaving the highway with Sparky.
Finally, the giant Mack truck fell over. The fifth wheel sheered under the extreme stress, and the kingpin separated. The entire tractor-trailer seemed to wring itself out like a wet towel. The front half was yanked left with the tractor, while the back half swung right with momentum. Eventually, the whole warped box trailer split open like a sleeve of crackers. Pallets of boxes hemorrhaged out the sides.
Buck finally stomped on his brakes and brought his trailer to a safe stop.
Smoke and dust whipped past his windows. None of the three trucks were visible as he glanced back because of the debris in the air, but his immediate concern was for Connie and Mac.
“You okay?” he asked her.
She sat straight up in her chair, held there by the seatbelt. A second after he hit the e-brake, she shucked off the belt and reached under the dashboard.
“I’m fine.” Mac sat up and gave her a lick on the hands. “We’re fine.”
“You sure?” he asked.
“Yeah, go,” she replied with insistence. Somehow, she knew exactly what he was going to do.
“I’ll be right back.”
He jumped down from his truck and was greeted by a disaster. Sparky’s rig was on its side between the two directions of the interstate. Eve had jackknifed her red Peterbilt, so her cab faced backward. Monsignor was between the other two, stopped, but holding onto his steering wheel like he’d barely dodged the sixteen-inch shell of a battleship.
Everyone, please be okay.
Twenty-Two
Princess Anne, Maryland
Lydia patted the white cloth hanging from a belt at her midsection. “I’m stuffed. Do you eat this much every day?”
Garth laughed. “I could eat that meal for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and not get tired of it. Something about a Big Mac always makes me want another one.”
She held up the cup of soda. “And this fizzy drink? Uh, soda? You consume this all the time too?”
He scratched his ear. “Well, not always. Dad doesn’t let me have it on school days. Says it makes me lose my concentration. He also doesn’t let me have it after dinner. Says it keeps me up at night. However, Sam’s parents aren’t as strict.”
It struck him how often he did the opposite of what his dad told him to do.
Garth drove off the McDonald’s lot and pulled up to the gas pump in the station next door. He made up his mind to go for broke and try to buy a f
ull tank of gas. As much as it impressed Lydia to go for forty miles on those two gallons, he didn’t want to spend every half-hour faking his way into gas stations to buy a few drops of fuel.
“You stay here,” he said after turning off the engine. “I’ll be right back. This time I want to go in and out without any trouble, okay?”
She nodded enthusiastically. “I will stay here with my drink. It is so delicious.”
He got out, then looked back into the car. “You are drinking Sprite, which is one of the tamer sodas. When I think you’re ready for it, I’ll get you the good stuff. It’s called Mountain Dew.”
Lydia grinned. “It sounds like a heavenly place. I loved seeing the mountains.”
“No, it’s not really from there. Well, maybe it is…” It went on his list to check the next can or bottle he found. Maybe it was made in Colorado or Wyoming?
“Be right back,” he assured her.
The convenience store had been crowded while he and Lydia ate lunch, but now the congestion had ebbed a bit. There were a couple of biker-looking guys at the soda fountain, an elderly woman studying the candy aisle, and a couple of teenage boys in baseball uniforms grabbing large boxes of Twinkies and Ding Dongs.
He walked up to the tattooed dark-haired woman behind the counter with all the confidence he could summon.
“I’d like to buy fifty dollars of gas on Pump 1.”
She held out her hand and he gave her a fifty-dollar bill, which was the change he had from his earlier purchases. Dad’s bugout bag had included four crisp hundred dollar bills, which at first seemed like a fortune, but after the motel and miscellaneous purchases, he now realized how fast he’d gone through most of the first two.
“You’re golden,” she said dismissively.
He stood there for a few moments, unsure what it meant. He’d been prepared to argue his way through the transaction.
I guess I look older in Maryland.
Grateful for the luck, he shot out the door and went back to the car. Lydia remained exactly where she’d been, sipping soda through her straw. When he reached in to unlock the gas tank door, she waved at him like he’d been gone for a week.
End Days Series Box Set [Books 1-4] Page 63