The Void Protocol

by F. Paul Wilson

  “Wh-wh-what did you do?” Stoney cried, running up behind her. “What did you—?”

  “It’s responding to her,” Maureen said, following him.

  “But in the past it’s responded to nothing and no one! I’ve never—no one’s ever seen it do anything like this. No one!”

  He did an abrupt about-face and brushed past Maureen on the way to his console.

  “Where are you going?”

  “The cameras! Got to make sure we’re recording this!”

  “Aren’t they always on?”

  “Yeah. Supposed to be. But wouldn’t it be just my luck to have them go off now!”

  Maureen came up behind Iggy. She sensed Hayden beside her and glanced his way. She was sure her own expression was awestruck; his was merely curious. But in a way that figured. He’d had no previous exposure to the Anomaly, so he’d find nothing unusual in this sudden bizarre behavior.

  “What’s going on?” he said.

  The Anomaly was maintaining its globular soccer-ball configuration. Maureen had never seen it hold the same shape for longer than a heartbeat, but there it floated, just inches inside the glass, hovering before Iggy’s face.

  “I’m not sure,” she told him. “This is unprecedented. It—”

  Iggy said something in a hushed tone that Maureen missed.

  “What did you say?”

  “It knows me.”

  It knows me … The implications of those three words were mind-numbingly vast.

  They meant the Anomaly was not only aware but communicating.

  If Iggy was right.

  She could simply be voicing an emotional response. But if she was right …

  It could mean the Anomaly had spent decade after decade playing possum. Or it could mean the Anomaly had just now become aware—Iggy’s touch on the glass triggering something, awakening it. Or maybe it had been programmed for this.

  Iggy’s touch … a small army of researchers had touched the glass countless times across the decades with no response. But one touch from Iggy …

  It knows me …

  Of course it does, Maureen thought. Melis is from the Anomaly and you’ve got some of it in you.

  Okay, not really in you. I put it in your mother and the melis changed you, affected you somehow. You carry its indefinable imprint on your genes.

  In a way, you’re its child.

  “It knows you?” Hayden said. “You mean it spoke to you? Greeted you?”

  Iggy’s pigtails flew as she shook her head. “No. Yes. It—this thing here—that’s not what knows me. Something behind it knows me. Something bigger. Much, much bigger.”

  Was she linked to whatever … whatever what? Maureen didn’t have a word for it. Didn’t even have a concept for it.

  “Is that where the Anomaly came from?” Maureen said. “From behind it?”

  “It didn’t come from anywhere. It just is.”

  “Why is it here?”

  She turned and pointed at Hayden. “It came for Rick.”

  Confusion flashed across his face. “Me? That’s impossible! Stoney told me it appeared in 1957. I wasn’t even born yet!”

  “Because you saw it when you helped bring it.”

  “But I saw it—or something like it—just a few years ago! This doesn’t make any goddamn sense!”

  “Time is different for them.”

  Rick stepped closer to her. “What does that even mean, Iggy?”

  She shook her head, her expression baffled. “I don’t know. It’s just in my head.”

  “Okay, Iggy,” Maureen said. “You said ‘them.’ Who is ‘them’?”

  “I don’t know!” Her voice rose to a wail and she looked ready to cry. “Why do you keep asking things I don’t know? I just know what I know but I don’t know how I know it!”

  Maureen wrapped her in a hug and tried to soothe her. “It’s okay, Iggy, it’s okay.”

  Look at me … getting all maternal. What’s going on here?

  “It’s so crazy,” she said against Maureen’s shoulder. “I know stuff I shouldn’t know and don’t know how I know it.”

  Hayden muttered something about “ice” and approached the chamber to stare at the Anomaly’s new compact form with his nose almost touching the glass.

  And then Maureen felt a tug at her lab coat pocket, turned to find Greve pulling the pistol free, grabbing Iggy by the pigtails, pressing the muzzle against the back of her skull and firing two shots into her brain.

  Maureen watched blood splatter the glass of the chamber as the shockingly loud retorts faded away.

  “She’s too dangerous!” Greve screamed, his eyes wild. “Too dangerous to live!”

  Maureen shook herself into motion and caught Iggy as she fell. Greve was already aiming past her and firing—at Hayden? Before she could look, Greve was in her face, grabbing her by the throat and jamming the muzzle against her cheek.

  “And now you! You! How could you ask me—?”

  She had an idea what he was going to say before he shot her in the face but he was interrupted by a wave of bone-freezing cold enveloping both of them as the Anomaly darted past, just inches away.

  With a hoarse cry Greve lurched away, allowing Maureen to lower Iggy to the floor. Blood was spurting from the back of her head and from a hole where her left eye had been. So much blood.

  She saw Hayden picking himself up from the floor. Without hesitation he rushed over and dropped to his knees beside Iggy, saying “What the fuck?” over and over. He rolled her onto her back and pressed the heel of his palm against her eye socket.

  He looked up at Moe. “She’s just a kid … just a kid!”

  Pressure on the eye socket seemed to stanch that flow but blood continued to gush from the back of her skull, creating a crimson pool around her head. Her remaining eye blinked and her jaw worked but she made no sound.

  Iggy … Greve … the shots … the Anomaly … too much to process …

  The Anomaly! The Anomaly was out!

  And then above it all she heard Stoney shouting, “Breach! Breach! We’ve got a breach!”

  What?

  Maureen tore her gaze from Iggy and looked up at the chamber—the empty chamber. The Anomaly was gone. The three-inch glass displayed a perfectly round hole the size of a soccer ball where the Anomaly had been floating.

  Movement caught her eye. The Anomaly was sailing through the air toward the far wall. Without slowing it penetrated the ferroconcrete like a hot poker through a block of cheese, leaving behind a smooth-walled tunnel.

  Stoney must have hit the emergency lockdown button because red lights began to flash as a deafeningly loud klaxon sounded again and again.

  24

  … BREACH … BREACH … BREACH …

  Laura stared at the word blinking on the monitor and willed it to stop. She willed the red flasher and the buzzer to shut down as well.

  No success on any front.

  She turned to Harv. “How can you work here and not know what that means?”

  “They keep us on a need-to-know basis and apparently no one thought we needed to know.”

  “That’s insane!” Cyrus said.

  “No argument here. When we replaced the government guys who’d been here before us, they told us about the breach signal and the automatic lockdown. But they also told us this place had been here since the 1940s and there’d never been a single alarm in all that time.”

  “But one happens as soon as we get here,” Laura said. “I repeat: Isn’t that convenient for you?”

  “Maybe it’s got something to do with those people on the stretchers.”

  Breach … What could that mean? It couldn’t mean anything good. It meant a breakout, it meant something that was supposed to be contained had broken free. And if it triggered a lockdown, that could only mean that Rick and the others were in some sort of danger. Unless, of course, they were the breakout. And with Rick aboard, that might well be it.

  Still she couldn’t help worrying about s
omething like a radiation leak. She imagined ionizing rays—gamma, X, whatever—piercing their tissues, mutating their genes to start cancers growing.

  “Okay,” she said to Harv. “The buzzer’s going, the lights are flashing … what are you supposed to do when that happens? Is there special gear you’re supposed to get into?”

  Please don’t say radiation suits. Please!

  Harv shook his head. “No, nothing like that. We were told just to sit tight and wait for help to arrive.”

  “Help?” Not good. Help meant reinforcements—for the bad guys. “Where’s this help going to come from?”

  “Fort Dix.”

  Never heard of it.

  “Where’s that?”

  “Browns Mills.”

  Laura suppressed a scream. Was he playing games?

  “Where is that? Distance, Harv—I want to know distance!”

  “About fifteen miles as the crow flies, longer by road.”

  Damn! That gave them almost no time.

  Laura pointed to the PARTS cabinet. “You say the elevator is in there, right?” Receiving a nod, she said, “Let’s go check it—just to be sure this lockdown story isn’t BS.”

  She let him lead the way. With his hands behind him, he couldn’t part the sliding doors on the cabinet, so Cy did it. At the rear an elevator cab stood open and dark.

  “Never seen this before,” he said.

  “Never seen what?”

  “The doors open and the lights off. Usually you’ve got to press the button to make them open. Must be part of the lockdown thing.”

  Cyrus stepped inside and started jabbing at buttons.

  “Dead,” he said.

  Made sense. The protocol probably sent the elevator up to the top and locked it there so no one could leave the bunker.

  “So you’re telling me the U.S. government built this place with only one way in and one way out.”

  “Well, I heard talk of an emergency escape hatch when we took over from the government guys.”

  “Hallelujah! Where is it?”

  He jerked his head toward the rear of the hut. “Back there somewhere.”

  “ ‘Somewhere’?” she said. “Somewhere in the back of this building or somewhere back in the woods?”

  “In the woods.”

  “Where in the woods, Harv? It’s dark and there’s a lot of trees back there.”

  A frightened look settled on Harv’s features—as if he knew he was about to catch hell. “I don’t know!”

  “How can y’all not fucking know?” Cy shouted, his hands opening and closing. “Y’all don’t know anything about anything!”

  “Only what they told us, and they didn’t tell us much of anything! They didn’t think they had to. Their whole attitude was that a breach or a lockdown was never going to happen!”

  Cy stepped toward him, his tone menacing. “Then you’re not much use to us, are you?”

  “Easy, Cy,” she said. “The escape hatch is no doubt part of the lockdown, so we won’t be able to use that either.”

  “But if we could find it, maybe we could override it.”

  “We’d be better off trying to override the elevator, but I know nothing about electronics. You?”

  He shook his head. “They’ve cut the power to it, most likely from below. No way to override that from up here. But an escape hatch … we might be able to force that.”

  A long shot but, as far as Laura could see, the only shot they had. But in the dark … in a thick pine forest?

  Something clicked. Her last conversation with Rick, talking about Pentagon black funding.

  I’m talking a mysterious German scientist and an underground bunker and major weirdness. It’s all on a thumb drive …

  Hadn’t she seen a thumb drive in that bag full of paraphernalia?

  She rushed out of the tool cabinet and back to the console where she immediately spotted the drive among the junk. She pulled it out and sat down before the computer on the console, found a USB port, and poked the drive at it. Of course it didn’t go in—somehow they never did on the first try. With only two orientations, the probability of getting it right on the first try was fifty percent, but Laura’s wrong rate ran somewhere in the nineties. How was that possible?

  The computer auto-ran the drive, opening it to reveal a half dozen folders, one of which read “Lange-Tür bunker.”

  She didn’t know what Lange-Tür meant but it said “bunker” so she opened it. And array of .jpg, .pdf, and .doc files filled the screen. Cyrus, Marie, and Tanisha gathered behind her as she started scanning through the files. Harv stood on the far side of the console looking miserable.

  A photo viewer toured her through an array of black-and-white photos dated 1946. They showed a lot of concrete being poured into a big hole in the ground in the middle of the woods. Whatever they built was covered over.

  “Gotta be the bunker back in the day,” Cyrus said. “The pines filled right back in, covered the bare spot like it never was.”

  “Nature abhors a vacuum,” Laura said.

  She tried the .pdfs next and found schematics of an underground building—obviously the bunker.

  “Now we’re talking,” Tanisha said. “I took an architecture and mechanical drawing class in high school.” She leaned closer and squinted at the screen. “But look at the date on these things—1946. Wow. Ancient. Where are the controls? Let’s rotate this thing and see—”

  “It’s a pdf, Tanisha,” Laura said. “It doesn’t rotate.”

  “You mean these were done by hand? No CAD? Oh, wow. Okay, let’s see what we can find.”

  Laura scanned through the .pdfs until she came to an overhead diagram. It showed the elevator, then a long tunnel leading to the main building with its central corridor leading to a blocked-off area labeled RESEARCH.

  But no escape hatch.

  She was about to switch to another drawing when Tanisha grabbed her shoulder.

  “Wait!” she said, pointing to the last room on the left before the research area. “See that circle there? That’s not in any other room. In fact, it’s pretty much the only circle in the whole drawing. See if you can find another angle—a lateral view.”

  Three .pdfs later, Laura found one that showed a shaft of some sort leading up from the last room on the left.

  “That’s it!” Tanisha said. “Got to be! See? It’s got what looks like a steel ladder embedded in the wall. But, Jesus … that shaft’s gotta be fifty feet straight up. That’s a mean climb.”

  Laura rose and patted the chair. “Here. You take over. I’m putting you in charge of figuring out how far back from the elevator we have to travel before we find the hatch.” She turned to the others. “I’m going to get the flashlight from my car, then … who’s up for a walk in the woods?”

  25

  “She’s gone,” Rick said, hovering over Iggy’s still form as the room blinked red and the Klaxon howled.

  He’d felt the final, unmistakable loss of tension and turgor as the life went out of her tissues. On the far side of her corpse, Moe sobbed.

  “Jesus God, why?”

  Yeah. Why? Why any of this?

  Why Iggy, of all people? Just a kid, and a sweet kid, at that. Never hurt anyone.

  Although that power of hers … truth. So dangerous to so many.

  For years now Rick had been lying about pretty much everything in his past, including his name. “Rick Hayden” had become an automatic response whenever asked his name, yet when Moe had asked Stoney his name, Rick had had to battle an urge to blurt “Garrick Somers.”

  He would have advised Iggy to keep it under wraps because it threatened powerful people in so many walks of life. If someone like Luis could find a way to spread that talent, that gift around, it could change the whole damn world. And the people who held the reins would not let them go without a fight.

  But now the threat had been eliminated.

  “What the hell happened?”

  Moe wiped at her tears with her
lab coat sleeve. “Didn’t you see?”

  “I assume it was Greve, but I was having a staring contest with that thing in the tank when I heard the shots. Before I could react the thing rushed the glass and melted through it like it wasn’t there. Came straight at me. Might’ve melted through me if I hadn’t ducked and covered.”

  Moe was nodding. “Greve, right. He came out of nowhere and just … just … executed her. That’s what he did, he just fucking executed her!”

  Her voice slipped its gears, double-clutching, finally stalling as she sobbed again. Rick gave her a moment and used the time to scan the area for a sign of Greve.

  “Where’d he go?”

  She pulled herself together. “I don’t know. I was next on his list. He had his gun in my face and I’d be gone too if the Anomaly hadn’t taken us by surprise. The near miss must have spooked him and he took off.”

  Greve was nowhere in sight. Rick didn’t buy him being genuinely “spooked” by the Anomaly, but he probably assumed that direct contact with it would be unpleasant at the very least, and most likely fatal.

  Stonington rushed up then and skidded to a halt when he saw Iggy.

  “Oh, my God! Did the Anomaly—?”

  “No,” Rick said, rising to face him. “Greve.”

  “Greve? What assholery is he up to now?” He looked around. “Look, I didn’t know her and she seemed like a nice girl and I’m sorry and all for your loss, but we’ve got a major problem here.”

  “The Anomaly?” Rick said.

  “Goddamn right, the Anomaly. It’s on the loose.”

  “Any idea where it is?”

  “Not a clue. And since it appears to treat walls like they don’t exist, it could be anywhere.”

  “No way to track it?”

  “Something has to have identifiable properties—let’s make that at least one identifiable property—before you can track it.”

  “I get it. Any reason to believe it’s still here?”