“Hiya, Garth! I’m loving this!” She pointed to the drink.
“Wouldn’t you know it? You just said their motto.”
“I’m going to fill us all the way to the top. They didn’t ask for ID or anything in there. We should be out on the highway and making great time in a few minutes.”
“Wonderful!” she exclaimed.
He spent an additional moment looking at her through the window. Her glowing eyes and excitable demeanor reminded him of kids who’d come home from a night of trick or treating on Halloween. She was hopped up on sugar.
She was the only thing on his mind as he gassed up.
Was it harmful to give her so much sugar so fast? Did he have the right to deny it to her? If he’d gone through time from a land of eating leaves and berries and ended up here with giant burgers and pounds of chocolate, he’d want to dive in. He figured it was best to let her go crazy with it.
When the machine kicked off, he noticed he’d only spent forty-eight dollars and a few cents, but he’d told the lady he would spend fifty.
What would Dad do?
Garth looked around, unsure. The other drivers were busy with their own fueling situations and had no interest in him. Dad had never explained this procedure, but he’d seen him mess around with the handle, like he wanted to put more gas in the tank after the pump had stopped. That was what Dad would do here, he figured. Get every cent of fuel he could.
“What the hell,” he mumbled.
He pulled the handle and squirted more gas into his tank, but it shut off a second later. The amount on the pump hardly moved. After trying it a few more times, he figured out it was a safety measure to keep people from overfilling their tanks and spilling it on the pavement.
After hanging up the pump and securing his tank door, he went past Lydia again. “I’ll be right back. I have to go inside again to get change.”
“Fine and dandy!” she replied happily.
As he walked back in, it struck him how easy it would be to blow some more money and buy the Mountain Dew he had promised her. It would be a good drink for doing a lot of driving, but he figured that much sugar and caffeine could hurt Lydia, so he resolved to wait until the next gas station to introduce her to it.
Once inside the swinging doors, he had a moment to orient on the register before his brain short-circuited. A red flash seemed to come from inside his eyeballs, like he’d been zapped by electricity. In the next instant, a dizzy feeling overwhelmed him.
“Whoa!”
He and several other patrons fell to the ground, and a plastic cup tumbled in the next aisle. The sound of sloshing liquid was accompanied by cussing.
The feeling didn’t last long. His head was soon back to normal, but he took some time to sit and recover.
“I need to pay and get out of here,” he mumbled.
After he got to his feet, Garth helped the two teenage boys to theirs. They collected their boxes of goodies, then followed him to the front counter.
A man in a fancy black suit was already there.
Wait up. There’s two.
He blinked several times, not sure if he saw double.
Garth figured out there were two of them, but one was on the other side of the counter.
He lined up behind the first man in the suit, but something about him was off. The posture of the guy was confusing, like he was leaning against the low counter and whispering to the tattooed clerk. The look on her face was unabashed fear.
Danger!
A breath caught in his throat. His body begged him to run away, so he went backward.
“Watch it, dude,” one of the baseball players said when he ran into him.
The suited man heard the voice and spun around to see who it was.
Garth’s eyes went directly to the man’s pistol.
Central Station, Sydney, Australia
It was noon when the engineer brought the engine into the station to deliver the abandoned passenger and the engineer trainee. The trip had taken about twice as long as it should have because every station along the way had lots of people wanting a ride and no carriages to carry them. Gladys insisted they stop at every one and inform the passengers of the problems with the rail lines.
She wanted to scream, but there was no faster way to get to Sydney.
Finally, after what felt like a full lifetime to Destiny, Gladys guided the train to the end of the same walkway where she’d jumped on to catch it during departure. She hopped up, ready to run out the door.
“Thanks for coming to get us,” she said to the engineer to be polite. “And thank you for coming with me through those woods,” she told Becker.
“I admit that I wanted out of there as much as you did.” The young man looked at his feet before asking, “Will you be all right?”
She held out her hands. “I have no baggage, so I’m just going to get a cab and head out. You two should get home, too. After what we saw last night and at those other stations, I don’t think the trains will be running much longer.”
“I won’t be driving one,” Becker answered.
Gladys opened the door. “They told me I was going to be awarded time-and-a-half for working this continuous shift, but now I think it’s laughable. They’re going to have to throw ten times that amount at me for me to head back down those tracks.”
Destiny shook hands with both of them, then hurried out the door and down the steps. As she reached the platform, the wave of dizziness came back like a ninja out of the night. It slapped her with a red pulse of energy right behind her eyes.
Destiny woke up and found she’d fallen to the concrete.
“Not again,” she mumbled.
The wave passed as quickly as before, and she sprang to her feet to see if anything had changed.
Becker was on the floor inside the cabin of the engine.
“You okay?” she called.
He propped himself up. “I think I packed my dacks, mate.”
She hoped he hadn’t really soiled his pants, but wouldn’t blame him. It was a creepy sensation.
“What is going on?” he pressed. “Was that what happened to us when our engine disappeared?”
“No. Back then was different. This time it was sharp and had a red glow. Did you see it?”
Both of the train employees nodded in agreement. “Red lasers burned my eyes,” Becker added. “Like fucking aliens.”
“No, it’s not coming from the stars. These headache-inducing dizzy spells are being caused by something on the other side of the planet. An experiment gone wrong.”
“How can you possibly know such a thing?” he asked.
“Because my sister is in charge of it. She told me weird things were happening with time. Back in Canberra, I saw animals that had been extinct for tens of thousands of years.” She watched as he stood up. Gladys recovered in the engine behind him. “The Opera House is gone, not destroyed. It’s as if it were never there. Time has come undone.”
“What can we do?” he asked in a timid voice.
She shrugged. “Hell if I know, but I’m going to find out. See ya round, okay?”
Destiny pulled out her phone and dialed Faith as she walked into the main terminal. She didn’t worry about the exact time zone conversion, but she guessed it was early evening in Denver.
“Come on, dammit! Pick up!”
She had to know how much worse life was going to get, and Faith was the one person she trusted to tell her the truth.
I-80, Wyoming
Buck had chosen not to pull over, thinking it wouldn’t matter. Eve’s rig was almost sideways because it had jackknifed, and Monsignor was next to her. Cars would not be able to get by them.
The smoke and dust had mostly blown away as he hustled into the median and ran alongside Sparky’s Mack. It had been tossed to the side, so the driver’s window was in the dirt. However, the glass of the front windshield had imploded completely, giving him easy access to the interior.
Sparky was still buckled in, an
d he smiled from behind the half-deflated airbag.
“Just had a helluva ride,” he said. “I blacked out and woke up sideways.”
“I almost zoned out, too,” Buck admitted. “Eve had issues, but she kept the wheels down.”
“I’m assuming my load is gone?” the other driver said despondently.
Buck nodded.
Sparky thought for a second. “Well, shit.”
“On the bright side, you’re alive. That was a big wreck, hoss.”
“Don’t do anything unless you’re going to give it your best. Apparently, I went all-in, because I never scratched a bumper until today.”
Buck held out his hand. “We have to get you out of there. We have to keep moving. Think you can get out?”
Sparky moved his arms and wiggled his fingers. “Looks like I’m fine. Let me pop the belt and gather a few things, and I’ll climb out this new door I’ve made in the windshield.”
Buck drew a deep breath. He’d only met Sparky the day before, but he’d come to appreciate the other driver as the lynchpin of his team. It would have been terrible to lose him to something so random.
After watching Sparky unclick his belt and crawl out of his seat, he ran over to Eve’s red rig. Monsignor was out of his truck, helping direct her so she could straighten out her trailer without running off the highway.
“You okay, ma’am?” he called up to her.
She smiled tentatively. “I film myself around the clock. It makes for good promotional materials when I’m recruiting. However, I’m going to delete this accident. I’ve never jackknifed like this. It’s rookie material.”
“You know, whatever it was that made us all black out, you may have caught it on film. You should hold onto the tape.”
“We’ll see how I feel when we get to safety.”
“Fair enough,” Buck agreed.
“You got this?” he asked as he walked up to Monsignor.
The young guy had a thousand-yard-stare. “I’ll get her out of here, don’t worry about it. Is Sparky good?”
“Yeah. He’s banged up, but there is no blood. I’m not sure how he did it, but he said he blacked out. Maybe it helped save his life.” Since he spent his life on the road, he’d heard every story about crashes there was. Sometimes, people who fell asleep at the wheel or drove shit-faced drunk got into accidents and survived simply because they were too out of it to brace themselves and break something. Sparky had been saved by the same debilitating dizzy spell that had made him crash.
Buck realized they were now a truck short. “Hey, can you or Eve take him in your rig? I’m already plus one.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Monsignor monotoned.
“Hey, driver!” Buck yelled.
The other man seemed to snap out of his daze.
“Relax,” Buck suggested in an even voice. “You look like you’re in shock.”
“Yeah, maybe I am. I watched Sparky go into the dirt, and I almost rammed into him when I had an episode behind the wheel. I thought the bomb was going to go off.” He pointed to his shiny fuel carrier. His biggest fear was blowing up with it.
“You’re good,” Buck assured him. “We’re all alive. Get her pointed in the right direction, put Sparky in a seat, and let’s get the hell out of here. Four-wheelers are going to whiz by here in minutes.”
Monsignor gave him a thumbs-up.
Buck ran back to his Peterbilt, already thinking about what had to happen next. Once they were all in their trucks and going east, he’d have to balance the need to go faster and get beyond Interstate 25 with the need to keep it slow in case they experienced more of the dizzy spells.
He jumped up on his side step and reached for the door, but his vision went back into that dark tunnel. A blood-red explosion took place at the end of those pinpricks of light, and the dizziness flooded his consciousness.
This time he couldn’t hold on.
Twenty-Three
Search for Nuclear, Astrophysical, and Kronometric Extremes (SNAKE). Red Mesa, Colorado
Faith and the general arrived at the alternate tram station after running down the tracks. She made it to the locked doors a few seconds before he did.
“You must work out,” he huffed.
“I ride my bike when I’m not solving time anomalies. Here, I’ve got it open.”
He walked into the compartment as if he were the captain of the ship. He went directly to the control panel at the front. “Show me how to drive this, and you can go.”
“No, that’s not how this works. We’re partners, remember?”
“Doctor…uh, Faith, we don’t have time to argue. This is going to be dangerous.”
She hit the panel for the doors, shutting them both inside.
“Hang on, sir.” She gently pushed him aside and hit the aptly-named Go button. It accelerated slowly as she’d seen it do many times, but once it was at sixty miles an hour, she held her hand dramatically over another lever. “We’re chucking off the safeties. I assume you’re good with me doing so?”
She didn’t wait for an answer. After flicking it off, she pulled out a small foldaway chair from under the switchboard. “Normally, this is all automated, but a driver can take control manually. We used that feature when we had to stop in between stations during the inspections. Now I’m going to use it to get us thirty miles down the line in six minutes.”
“Do whatever it takes,” he ordered.
She experienced the exhilaration of acceleration. The square lights along the wall of the tunnel flashed by like they were under a strobe light.
“We’re passing the safe cruising speed,” she deadpanned. “One hundred miles per hour.”
“You said it can go faster?”
“Oh, yeah,” she said with a quiver in her voice and a lump in her stomach. They were in a sixty-mile tube traveling over one hundred miles an hour.
What could go wrong?
“One-twenty-five,” she announced.
The car accelerated at a nice even pace because the magnetic system wasn’t like a combustion engine. There was no mashing the gas pedal.
“Two hundred,” she said with some trepidation.
The lights now appeared as a solid line of white through the windows on both sides of the car. Their eyes couldn’t see each individual box anymore.
“What is this tram called?” General Smith asked out of nowhere.
She turned back to him despite the speed of the maglev train. “Little Scraggy.”
“What the f—”
He was caught short when they burst through the first station. For a split second, they saw orange flames and bright light.
“Damn!” she yelled. “I forgot, all the safeties are off. Normally we would have stopped at every station.”
“That’s where the bomb went off, wasn’t it?” he asked.
They both looked behind them, although the station was long gone.
“Yeah. We were lucky the track wasn’t hit, or we’d be goop on the walls right now.”
General Smith ran his fingers through his thinning gray hair. “My God, we’re going to be too late. They aren’t playing around.”
“Three hundred miles per hour,” she reported. “This is top speed, sir.”
“Can you rig it to go faster?” he asked.
“No. I’ve got it at maximum power right now. There’s nothing we can do to change the physics of this device.”
“Wouldn’t that be nice?” he asked.
The ride was as smooth as glass. It almost seemed like they weren’t moving at all because the lights outside now appeared as one thick block to a point far down the tunnel.
His phone chirped, and he picked up. “Go.”
He listened to the person on the line, then said, “Dammit!” and hung up.
“The second box has already been blown. There’s only one more.”
“Did they say which one blew up?” she asked. “I need to know where we’re going because I have to decelerate before we get close.”
“They are going in order, apparently. The next one up ahead is gone.”
She looked at the sixty-two-mile ring as a clock. The main offices were at six o’clock. The box they took offline yesterday was approximately in the 4 o’clock position. They’d just whipped by the stop at 7, which was on fire. Now they’d learned the Four Arrows box at the 10-slot was gone. There was one left at the 1 o’clock location.
“We have to cross twelve o’clock and go into the other hemisphere.”
“And?” he asked.
“General, if the Silver Bullet is still on the tracks, we could run into it. That would never happen with the safety on, but we don’t have…”
Her hand hovered over the throttle.
“Keep going,” he said without emotion. “If they get the last one, we’re dead anyway, right?”
She wasn’t sure how to address that. She’d come to believe there was something to be said for turning off the mysterious boxes, but her way depended on understanding the inner workings of the containers and shutting them down according to the internal specifications. Blowing them all up couldn’t possibly be the solution, could it?
“I guess we’re going to find out.” She ignored her instinct to slow down and focused intently on the edge of the curve in the tracks far ahead. If there was something blocking them, she was going to drop the power, even if it wasn’t going to save them.
When she saw the fire at the next station, she almost powered down, but there wasn’t anything on the tracks. The orange glow of burning materials rushed by in a flash, and they were on their way to the last intact box.
Another place I could have died.
Faith stared ahead and kept her hand on the power button constantly. She did that for another minute before she’d had enough. “Sir, at this speed, we’ll get to the thirty-mile marker any second. Once we cross over, we have to start the slowdown so we can stop before our destination.”
“That was it!” she blurted. The map on the console switched from green to red, indicating they were in the other hemisphere of the ring. Little Scraggy didn’t belong on the other side.
“Wait until the last second, then stop us,” he commanded. “We don’t have time to fuck around.”
End Days Series Box Set [Books 1-4] Page 64