End of Days | Book 5 | Beyond Alpha

by Isherwood, E. E.

Garth watched in horror as the nice Jewish man was forced into the blue light at gunpoint so he could draw a line on the ground with his spray can. If he had any lingering doubt that Strauss and her people intended to do him harm, it evaporated when the man disappeared halfway across the energy field.

  “What the hell?” he blurted.

  Other nomads reacted in similar ways.

  “Next,” Strauss ordered from close by.

  “Now you,” the lead guard said to the woman in the red skirt.

  “Well, here’s to the twenty-first century. It’s been a rip-roaring good time.” She looked at Garth and Lydia. “I’ll be the first woman to make it across. You just watch.”

  She had a quality about her that made Garth believe her.

  She crouched at the edge as if studying it. She tried out the paint by making a short line on the closest section of floor bathed in the blue hue.

  “To the other side, ma’am,” Strauss said unsympathetically.

  The woman looked back. “Give me a second.”

  Strauss rolled her hand in a “get on with it” gesture.

  The test subject stayed in a crouch as she went into the light. Her white shirt turned bright blue and her red skirt a brilliant purple. As instructed, she sprayed the black paint on the floor in a remarkably straight line. She trotted faster than the others, and it looked as if she was going to cross the whole thirty feet of the blue zone to reach safety.

  “Yes!” he cheered.

  But she disappeared a few feet short of the other side.

  The can fell to the pavement with a tink-tink.

  “Shit,” he spat.

  “You next,” Strauss said to a man dressed in a business suit. His tie was off, and he’d unbuttoned the top few buttons of his shirt to keep cool. Garth hadn’t caught up with him to learn his story.

  “Yeah, whatever,” the guy said. He grabbed one of the cans and strode into the light without aiming at the ground. Instead, he sprayed the air while laughing.

  “Spray down!” Strauss exclaimed.

  The man held up his middle finger.

  Then he disappeared.

  The can went with him.

  “Son of a bitch!” Strauss slammed her riding crop against her leg as she raged. “I wish I could—” She cut herself off and calmed down.

  Her eyes fell on the last few of them.

  “That man probably cost one of you your life. Now we have to send someone in to draw the line where he failed to do so. Do you see why this is so important?”

  Garth raised his hand.

  “What is it, kid?” Strauss asked as if she were done with the whole affair.

  “We die when we go in there?”

  “What? No. Where did you get such a silly idea?”

  “You said it,” he accused. “You said the guy cost one of us our life. He’s dead, isn’t he?”

  Garth knew he’d hit home by how long it took her to reply. She paced in a semi-circle in front of the group while she considered the answer.

  “I misspoke. We think there is a doorway here because one of our technicians claims someone came out of this beam right in this area.” She pointed at the light and all the lines on the ground. “You people are about to find it. You can see there isn’t much room left on the ground. The six of you hold the key to finding the doorway, so I am telling you the God’s honest truth when I say none of you has to die.”

  She stopped and adjusted her uniform. “So, who’s going next?”

  The four strangers backed away, leaving Garth and Lydia standing in front. As soon as he saw what had happened, he took a step forward.

  “I’ll go next,” he declared.

  “Garth, no!” Lydia said immediately.

  He picked up one of the fresh spray cans. The lines converged from left and right toward a ten-foot section of clear cement in the brightest part of the blue aura, so he figured he would aim down the middle and be the last one they sent through. At the very least he would save Lydia, but he would also save the other four ungrateful strangers.

  That was how his dad would do it.

  Kiss Lydia. Tell the guards to kiss my ass. Then get it done.

  The female general stepped in front of him.

  “Very brave, young man, but I can’t let you go through.”

  “Why not?” He felt weird fighting for his right to endanger himself.

  She got closer to him, almost putting her Strauss name badge against him. The woman was a head taller than him and almost as big as Buck, but it wasn’t her size that bothered Garth. There was something about her that made him want to take a step back.

  “Because,” she said in a low voice, “you aren’t one of them. You’re from the current era, aren’t you? You were part of the world that disappeared yesterday.”

  He looked into her dead brown eyes.

  “No, I came from the past.” He knew he hadn’t convinced her before she said a word. Being so close made him uncomfortable, and that discomfort made it hard to pump out believable lies.

  Garth tried to look at other parts of her face, but he found himself repulsed by her blotchy skin, the perspiration on her forehead, and the roll of skin where it met her shirt collar. Nothing about the woman was flattering.

  “My men watched you on the walk up here. You interview other nomads, you protect this girl who is obviously not from the same time as you, and you speak like any teenager I might find at the local high school.”

  She cracked her neck.

  “But take heart; that fact is going to get you out of this duty.” She pointed at the paint lines. “The whole reason we separated these people from the others is because they don’t come with baggage, like insurance claims, lawsuits, family seeking them out, or lovers who might desire revenge. The experiment which created this bubble of safety for us also provided these leftovers. Think of them as nature’s expendables.”

  She chuckled as if to brag. “Of course, I know your secret. We might have a problem if you are her lover.”

  His level of discomfort went through the top of the thermometer, then splashed on the bottom of a passing jetliner. How could a person be an expert at putting him on his heels over and over?

  He couldn’t let her win the game she was playing.

  Garth swallowed his repulsion.

  “As a matter of fact,” he said in a loud voice, “I am in love with this girl. We’re going to get married as soon as we can get out of this nightmare place. And you’re wrong about my origins, but I don’t have to tell you shit about who I am or where I came from.”

  He took a quick step around her, grabbed a paint can, and stood at the edge of the blue light. To his surprise, neither Strauss nor her guards made any effort to stop him. He figured he’d been super-fast, or equally likely, they were afraid to get too close to their science experiment.

  Phil stood near the tent, with the other guards. He shook his head as if to signal his intention was a no-go.

  He looked away from Phil, but realized he’d missed step one of his plan, which was to kiss Lydia. She looked at him with forlorn eyes, and he knew she was going to run to him and suffer whatever fate he was about to be dealt. So, before she could make her move, he winked at her, spun, and got down to business painting the floor.

  The hissing from the can sounded insane in the context of what he was doing.

  “Garth!” Lydia cried.

  Her voice echoed. His name repeated, then became slurred and slowed until the only thing he heard was “Arth.” Strangely, “Arth” went on for half a minute.

  He also heard the hiss of the spray can, but the floor, to his amazement, was gone.

  In between the G and the Arth the world around him had shifted.

  The floor was no longer down there.

  Was it above him?

  Lydia was looking at him, but he saw her from the side, not where he’d been.

  “Lydia?” he called, hearing the reverberation of his voice and a million repetitions of her name.


  He was surrounded by the crackle of energy. It also coursed inside him. He looked at his hands and saw they were covered with blue sparks, and he felt a pull on his whole body as if he were iron being yanked toward a magnet.

  “I’m dead,” he yelled.

  The sounds of rushing air hit his ears, creating what he imagined a thunderclap would sound like while inside it.

  He fell to the ground an instant later.

  Garth slammed into an unfamiliar rock ledge, then went over the side of a high cliff.

  “Holy shit!”

  He’d appeared at the edge of a mile-wide crater—a smoke-filled, fire-rimmed, nasty-smelling hole in the earth.

  Garth also spotted a long piece of rebar jutting from the edge. His teen reflexes and years of video games provided the skills necessary to drop the paint can and grab the last thing between him and eternity.

  “Oof!” he blurted as he smacked both hands against the bar.

  Garth swung out, doing his best rendition of a gymnast, then he came back. His feet hit the dirt of the crater’s slope, and the bar shifted as if it had bent a little from the stress.

  “No, no, no!” A break would mean death.

  When his body settled from the rocking, he moved his right hand one length toward the cliff face. When he made it work, he did it with the other hand.

  “No!” he said to the bar as it shifted another inch or two.

  He reached out with his foot, but the angle wasn’t correct.

  Repeating his actions, he shifted another few inches toward safety.

  This time, his foot touched the wall.

  “Got it.” He exhaled.

  Garth used the wall to take the pressure off his palms. That allowed him to release a little pressure on the bar. Once he made it to the base of the metal rod, he reviewed his position.

  Ahead, there were more pieces of rebar sticking out of the wall.

  “Just a little more,” he begged.

  He used his strength to pull himself up and over the bar, then balanced until he could get a hand on the rock ledge. That allowed him to snake his way to the top of the cliff, where he immediately hugged the rock.

  He lay panting for ten seconds before forcing himself to get up.

  The landscape around him was hellish. Trees were on fire in all directions on the surface next to the crater. Part of it was filled with water, and there was water pouring in at the far end as if the explosion had drained a lake. Where there was no smoke, he saw ruined buildings atop another section of the hole.

  “Good thing I’m only deathly afraid of heights,” he remarked with gallows humor.

  Looking over the side with a huge lean, he studied the jagged wreckage a hundred feet below. It didn’t surprise him when he picked out the bodies of the time nomads who had gone before him. The distinct red skirt of the nice woman from New York was easy to see through the haze. The entire group from earlier in the day was spread out where they’d fallen after coming through the gateway.

  “Where the hell am I?” he said with both amazement and apprehension.

  It was too much to take in. Too disturbing to know he had almost been one of the bodies below. He was in the process of turning around when something heavy struck him in the back.

  “Hey!”

  It pushed him toward the edge.

  Was he going to join his fallen friends after all?

  Twenty-Two

  Alpha Site

  Faith picked up a wrench to arm herself for the next task.

  “I’m going to smack that bitch in the skull,” she groused.

  She began walking toward the blue anomaly and the people standing around it, but she halted when she acknowledged her plan was atom-splittingly stupid. A little wrench would give her no advantage over the five soldiers and the high-level general.

  Instead, she returned to the terminal, picked up a white lab coat left by a previous user, and hid the wrench in her back pocket. It was still a fool’s gamble, but she’d at least be able to talk to them instead of being shot on sight as a wrench-wielding attacker.

  “Now, for real this time.” She walked out of the maintenance nook and headed across the floor of the cavernous vault.

  She’d only crossed about a third of the distance when a disturbance ahead caught her eye. Garth ducked and dove around Strauss, picked something up off the floor, then went into the blue light.

  “No!” she yelled.

  Strauss noticed her. True to her nature, the general issued a dismissive wave as if she were completely disinterested in Faith. Instead, the woman focused her attention on Garth’s girlfriend…

  Faith’s stomach knotted.

  “Don’t you dare hurt her,” she whispered as she broke into a run.

  The wrench bounced out of her back pocket and created an embarrassing series of metallic bangs as it hit the floor. The guards looked her way the same as the general had done. She made a better scientist than a soldier, and she didn’t dare stop to pick it up.

  Each step got her a better look at the action, but she knew within moments that her hunch had been right. The general held the girl by the arm, dragged her toward the light, gave Faith an insulting sideways glance, then pushed her prisoner. The girl in the milkmaid outfit wobbled off-balance before disappearing.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Faith screamed as she ran forward.

  She had the attention of all the guards. Four or five rifles were aimed her way.

  Faith slowed and put her hands up but kept moving closer. “I’m unarmed.”

  “You’re the least of my worries,” Strauss said, striding over to another of the prisoners. “We’re doing science here, Doctor Sinclair. You should appreciate that.”

  Faith stopped twenty feet from the closest guard.

  “Now you call me ‘doctor.’ You wouldn’t use my title when talking to those refugees, but you are fine using it when you want something from me.”

  “Ha! There is nothing I want from you.”

  “You should,” Faith suggested as she chanced a few more steps. “Do you even know what this is?” She pointed at the rope-like beam of light that crackled and popped with over-excited particles.

  When she saw the tube of blue energy from the side, Faith got a better perspective on how it was structured. The beam was the size of a New York subway train, and it came out of the floor at a gentle angle before getting steeper ten or fifteen yards down the way. Then it went up through the roof thirty yards above.

  But what the hell was it? She had been there when the blue light flooded the control room and zapped half the crowd as they tried to get through the fence line outside her offices, but she’d never thought the dark energy would go underground. Her back-of-the-napkin assessment assumed the out-of-place reactor had something to do with it. Her front-of-the-napkin assumption was that the Four Arrows cabinets had focused the initial linkup between the supercolliders, but by the time those links were severed, the dark matter stream had already established itself.

  Her mind raced with possibilities.

  Maybe the nuclear explosion on the Swiss end had created a shockwave that sprayed out on the Colorado side. She had witnessed the energy bubble out of the computer equipment shortly before Doctor Johnson fell into one of the streams…with a little help from her textbook.

  Or perhaps the energy was runoff from the changes outside the ring of SNAKE. Energy would always strive to find path of least resistance, and their bubble of safety had been unaffected by the changes on the outside. Maybe the blue particles were leaking into SNAKE’s basement because of that gradient.

  Her final guess was that Doctor Johnson and Strauss had done further experiments without telling her about them. That seemed the most likely and the most terrifying. Johnson was gone. Strauss would never cooperate to make things right.

  “I know exactly what it is,” Strauss bragged. “My people tell me it is the event horizon of a pool of limitless energy now bouncing between here and the ruins in Switzerland. Ener
gy we can use to rebuild the entire planet, then go to the stars. An energy so amazing it can also be used to transfer physical matter along its axis.”

  “Wow, that’s great if true,” she replied. “But you’ve obviously got no idea how it works or how to control it. Not if you are using helpless citizens as your guinea pigs to see how it operates.”

  “Never mind about what we’re doing. You should worry about yourself. I thought you were smarter and could take a hint you weren’t wanted here.”

  There was a white tent ten yards back from the edge of the light. Three eggheads sat behind a wall of scientific equipment and presumably did their research on what was in front of them. Could any real scientist be a part of such crude experiments?

  She took a few more steps toward Strauss, and the lines of paint caught her eye. It suddenly clicked as to what Garth had been doing when he crouched and went into the light.

  “You are mapping the anomaly,” she said matter-of-factly. “You know we have robotic drones for that, you ass.”

  Her anger frothed barely under the surface and was hard to control. It was a good thing she didn’t recognize the scientists. She might have strangled them if anyone she knew had participated in what was essentially a killing floor.

  “Do you know where we are?” Strauss fought back. “We’re at the dawn of a new era for humanity. Every piece of technology you see today is all we’re going to have until we rebuild our world. We can’t risk losing any of it on wild goose chases. Flesh is the only thing that’s expendable here.”

  She recoiled at how easily the general spoke the words. Did mass murder come easily to some people? It was impossible to envision so casually throwing away the lives of the frightened people huddled behind the general.

  “I’ll say it again. You need me. You obviously can’t even figure out how ass-backwards you are doing things. If this is as bad as you say, there is no more important resource to humanity than the pool of human DNA. If we have any hope of continuing as a species, we need every single person we can get. Here you are, throwing them away to save some microcircuits.”

  Faith didn’t bother mentioning that those people had come from the past and probably had critical skills necessary for the day-to-day survival of modern humans. What would the average person do when cut off from their cell phones, tablets, and computers? One milkmaid was easily worth ten useless generals.