The Void Protocol

by F. Paul Wilson

  His hands found the wheel that would retract the latches. He tugged on it, first clockwise, then counter. It wouldn’t budge. He put all his strength and weight behind it with the same result.

  He wanted to scream but didn’t dare because the sound might echo down the shaft and give away his location.

  Then he heard something on the other side—rustling and scraping, followed by a clank—metal on metal against the hatch.

  Someone was up there—not only up there but trying to open the hatch.

  Throwing caution to the wind, he began shouting and hammering on the inner surface.

  Faintly he heard a woman’s voice, barely audible through the hatch.

  “Who’s there?” she said. “Rick, is that you?”

  Rick? Someone looking for Hayden? That wasn’t good. Oh, that wasn’t good at all.

  Greve pulled his pistol and double-checked that it was ready to fire, then hid it away. He began voicing nonsense syllables as he fabricated a cover story.

  30

  Turning in a circle as he walked, Rick guided the two women down and across the hall to where Stoney’s head protruded from a doorway.

  “Take a gander,” the older man said, gesturing through the door when they arrived. “I think I found one of the ones you’re looking for.”

  The Anomaly hovered near the ceiling inside, directly over a cowering Ellis Reise. He sported a shock collar like Annie had worn and was manacled to a leg of the room’s desk. The Anomaly had changed, expanding from the soccer ball form to the more discoid shape it had displayed back in the chamber, though not quite so large now.

  “Ohmigod!” Annie said. “What is that?”

  Before anyone could answer, Ellis shouted, “Hey, don’t just stand there gawking! Get me out of here!”

  But Rick couldn’t resist a little more gawking as he took in the scene.

  “You checked the rooms upstream from here?” he said to Stoney.

  “Yep. It sailed through the walls, one after the other, straight as an arrow. Every single one.”

  “But it stopped here.”

  “Maybe because it’s occupied? I don’t know who that fellow is or why he’s chained up, but the Anomaly seems to have taken a shine to him.”

  “Because he’s nadaný?” Moe said.

  “Get me outta here!” Ellis shouted. “Whatever it is, this thing is trying to freeze my ass off!”

  He wasn’t kidding. Frost rimed the desk that restrained him, and Ellis’s breath fogged as he spoke. Rick pulled out Watts’s key ring and found the one that had worked on his own shackle. Now … what?

  The Anomaly looked as bizarre as ever but not particularly threatening. Still, anything with an ability to dissolve its way through walls demanded a high level of respect.

  However … Ellis couldn’t free himself, so someone had to do it for him.

  How would the Anomaly react? Was it, as Moe had suggested, hovering over Ellis simply because he was nadaný? Was it protecting him or trying to freeze him? Whatever the reason, would it object if he moved away?

  Did it even possess that level of awareness? Was it aware at all? Or was it being guided by another intelligence?

  Yeah, well, whatever the case, someone was going to have to go in there, and Rick knew who that someone would be.

  Lowering himself into a crouch, he kept an eye on the Anomaly as he eased across the room. Ellis hadn’t been kidding about frostbite. The closer he moved to the Anomaly, the colder it got. Ellis was visibly shivering when Rick reached him.

  “Never thought I’d be glad to see you,” he said, teeth chattering. The bruise on his cheek wasn’t as blue or as swollen as it had been.

  “It’s all relative, ain’t it.”

  “What the fuck did you get me into?”

  Typical Ellis. Rick wasn’t about to delve into it here, or mention that Ellis had been a few minutes away from the loving arms of a car crusher when Rick first met him.

  “Cut the whining or I’ll go back to the hall—without you.”

  Ellis’s lips straightened into a tight, angry line but he kept mum while Rick unlocked the manacle encircling his wrist.

  “Okay now, let’s move. Low and slow.”

  “Got a key for this?” he said, tugging on the collar as the manacle dropped away.

  “No, but I can get it off you—just not here.”

  “I hear that.” Ellis stared up at the Anomaly. “How dangerous is that thing?”

  “Potentially … very dangerous. You saw how it got here?”

  “Yeah. I mean, no. I looked up and spotted it floating across the room. But I saw the hole it left behind so I guessed it came right through the fucking wall.”

  “It did. Which means it can probably go right through you.”

  “Then I guess I should be glad it only stopped over me. Not that the end would be any different. I swear it’s trying to freeze me to death.”

  Rick doubted that was the case—unless, of course, the Anomaly found Ellis as annoying as everyone else did.

  Keeping his eye on the Anomaly, Rick grabbed a fistful of Ellis’s shirt and tugged him back toward the doorway in a slow crouch. The Anomaly held its position until they were almost to the door, then it began to move.

  “Oh, hell,” Rick muttered.

  With a panicked cry, Ellis pulled away and dove for the door.

  But the Anomaly didn’t seem interested. It compacted itself into its soccer-ball form again and headed for the opposite wall. Rick watched fascinated as it plowed straight through—no noise, no flashes, no steam or vapors, no dust or debris, just … a hole. And then it was gone, leaving its trademark tunnel.

  Annie was gaping. “What the—?”

  Reaching the doorway, Rick grabbed Stoney’s arm. “Where does the concrete go—I mean the part that it eats away?”

  “Probably the same place as all the stuff we threw at it over the years—nowhere. Or somewhere.”

  “Why’s it so cold?”

  Stoney raised a finger. “Now that I can answer. We’ve measured its surface temperature many times since it appeared and it’s a consistent thirty-nine-point-two Celsius.”

  “I don’t do Celsius.”

  “About one-oh-two Fahrenheit.”

  “So it’s warm?”

  He nodded. “What we determined is that it absorbs heat—sucks it right out of anything within a couple of meters—that’s six feet to you.”

  “That’s what it was doing to me?” Ellis said, rubbing warmth back into his arms. “Sucking off my heat?”

  “Yep. And it would keep on sucking until you stopped generating heat.”

  “I’m taking that to mean until I was dead.”

  “It does, sonny. It does indeed.”

  Ellis turned to Rick and tugged at his shock collar. “You said you could get this off?”

  “Right.”

  He hoped he wouldn’t regret this. He didn’t know how far he could trust Ellis, but a little telekinesis just might come in handy on their way out of here. He took out Watts’s folding knife and used it to pop the lock as he’d done with Annie’s.

  Ellis yanked it off, bringing the scalp contacts with it, and stared at it.

  “You’re okay, Rick. A pain in the ass, but okay.”

  “I’ll take that as a thanks.” Rick noticed burns on his neck. Annie’s neck hadn’t been blistered like that. He leaned closer. “What happened here?”

  Ellis nodded toward Moe. “Her pal upped the current.”

  “Greve,” Stoney said.

  Ellis’s face darkened. “That’s his name?”

  “Yeah. Why’d he do that to you?”

  “Thought he was teaching me a lesson.” He twisted the collar out of shape and hurled it back into the room. “I’ve got a few lessons of my own to teach him when I catch up with him.”

  Rick wondered why he didn’t seem to bear the same animus toward Moe, then noticed the ointment on the blisters.

  “He burned you, then gave you ointm
ent?”

  Ellis’s expression softened as he nodded toward Moe again. “That was her doing.”

  Rick wasn’t surprised. “Yeah. Figured it wasn’t Greve. Okay, we’ve got everybody, let’s look for that emergency exit.”

  “Hey, wait,” Ellis said. “They took Iggy too. We can’t leave without her.”

  Kind of shocking to hear Ellis voice concern for someone else.

  As with Annie, he simply laid it out. “Iggy’s gone. Dead, I’m afraid.”

  Ellis’s jaw dropped as he stood there blinking. “What? No. How?”

  “Greve. He shot her dead.”

  “WHAT?”

  Rick felt something hit him like a body slam from a giant swinging door. The blow sent him flying back into Ellis’s room. He saw Moe and Annie tossed to the sides and Stoney flung into the center of the hall to land flat on his back.

  Ellis looked as surprised as everybody else. “Whoa! I was never able to do that before!”

  No, he hadn’t. Not even close, as Rick knew from personal experience.

  What was amping up his gift? Had it been the shocks? The bunker itself? Or the Anomaly?

  Rick’s best guess settled on the Anomaly. Melis came from the Anomaly and the Anomaly was presently buzzing around and feeling its oats.

  Moe and Annie were getting to their feet. Moe’s expression said she still hadn’t accepted the reality of the nadaný while Annie looked angry.

  “Ellis Reise, don’t you dare do that again!”

  He was staring at his hands. “I don’t know what I did. It’s never happened like that before. I could move pool balls but never people!”

  “What the fuck just happened?” Stoney said from a supine position in the middle of the hall, propped up on his elbows and staring at Ellis in disbelief. “Pardon the language, ladies.”

  Rick hopped back to his feet and returned to the doorway. “Maybe it was the shock of hearing about Iggy.”

  “Yeah, Iggy,” Ellis said, his face darkening.

  “Easy-easy-easy,” Rick said. “We don’t need a repeat performance.”

  “I want that guy Greve. I want him soooo bad.”

  Rick was about to ask him if he and Iggy had had something going when the Anomaly zipped past, not two feet away.

  “Dear God!” Moe cried. “That just missed me!”

  Rick had felt the cold of its passing—and it had to have been traveling at eighty or ninety miles an hour.

  “What got into that?” Stoney said, still on the floor.

  Rick watched it pierce the door into the research section and disappear.

  Something had energized the Anomaly. Its movements had been measured, almost languid until now. Had Ellis’s use of his amped-up power juiced the Anomaly, or vice versa?

  Down the hall to his left Rick could see a hole through the barrier that opened into the tunnel. The Anomaly must have bored through all the rooms and then looped back through the hallway.

  Stoney was slowly regaining his feet, wincing with the effort. Rick bet he was riddled with arthritis.

  Movement to the right. The Anomaly had made another hole in the research barrier and was streaking down the hall again, still only three feet off the floor.

  “Hey, Stoney!” Rick called. “It’s back!”

  As Stoney turned to see, Rick realized the Anomaly was heading straight for him.

  “Hit the floor!” he shouted. “Hit—!”

  Instead Stoney dodged to the side and wound up against the far wall, eyes wide as he watched the Anomaly race by.

  He waved and said, “Thanks for the heads-up. That was too close!”

  The Anomaly veered to its right and entered another wall.

  “It’s gone crazy,” Moe said. “When’s it going to stop?”

  Rick shook his head, baffled. “Can’t tell if its movements are random or following some sort of crazy pattern.”

  “It seems to me like it’s looking for something,” Annie said. “You think that could be it?”

  Moe said, “That would mean it has a purpose, and a purpose would mean intelligence. It’s never exhibited intelligence or even awareness before.”

  “The intelligence may belong to something that’s controlling it,” Rick said.

  That thing had ICE written all over it. He was sure of it and he wasn’t letting go.

  Looking both ways like a wary pedestrian crossing a highway, Stoney started back toward them. He’d made it halfway when the Anomaly emerged from the floor about a dozen feet to his left and zoomed his way.

  “Oh, no!” Annie cried.

  Stoney froze, then turned to see where it was.

  The Anomaly caught him square in the chest, passing straight through him without the slightest hesitation. And Stoney … Stoney showed no sign of impact or resistance, didn’t even wince. His eyes showed no pain, but were filled instead with dazed wonder. His mouth worked spasmodically as he pivoted to show the perfectly round, soccer-ball-size hole through his abdomen.

  “What …?” he said in a shocked tone as his knees began to fold. “Did you see …?”

  For a single heartbeat the opposite wall was clearly visible through the hole before it filled with ruined, collapsing organs and spewing blood.

  Around Rick, Moe screamed and Annie gagged and Ellis made incomprehensible shocked sounds as Stoney, spraying red in all directions, sagged to his knees. With no spine to stop it, the top half of his torso folded backward as he accordion-crumpled to the floor.

  Rick started for him but the Anomaly, after passing through the tunnel barrier on its way out, was back through and into the hallway again, racing their way.

  He pulled the two women into Ellis’s room. Ellis followed.

  “Did you see that?” he said in a hushed, shocked tone. “It came out of the floor and went through him like, like, like Pac-Man!”

  “We’ve got to get outta here!” Annie wailed.

  “No shit,” Ellis said. “And how do we do that?”

  Rick explained about the escape hatch and its attendant problems.

  Ellis threw up his hands. “You mean, there’s a way out but nobody fucking knows where it is?”

  “Right. Which means we’ve got to go look for it.”

  “Look for it? As in wander around while Pac-Man’s on the prowl? If that thing can pop out of the floor, it can show up anywhere, any time! We are so fucked!”

  Rick wanted to clock him a good one on the jaw and shut him up. Here he was trying to keep morale from going down the toilet and Ellis kept hitting the flush handle.

  The Anomaly zoomed past again.

  Annie sobbed. “We’re never getting out of here!”

  31

  “You hear that?” Cy said. “Someone’s down there!”

  Laura turned to Marie. “Nadaný?”

  She shook her head.

  Could it be …?

  Laura leaned closer and heard a faint male voice on the other side. He seemed to be shouting something about the hatch but she could barely make it out.

  “Who’s there? Rick, is that you?”

  The voice stopped for a few seconds, then started up again, but she couldn’t understand a word.

  It had to be Rick. If she knew nothing else about him, she knew he was driven by duty. If he was in lockdown with the rest of them, his duty would be to round up the nadaný and get them to safety; and with the elevator not working, the only way to safety was through the escape hatch.

  Suddenly, with a rustling-ripping sound, the vines began parting and receding to the edges of the mound, revealing a dome of rusted metal.

  “Wow!” Tanisha said. “I’ve never been able to do anything like that!”

  “That was you?” Laura said.

  “Yeah. Looks like my gift is in hyperdrive too. Back home I could only move little stuff. What is it about this place?”

  Laura wanted the answer to that question as well. And not knowing it made her uneasy. Could the wellspring of their powers be here? Was this where it all
began? And was that the reason the abductees had been brought here?

  But more than anything right now she wanted to know who was under that hatch.

  Cy had been giving it a close inspection with his flashlight.

  “How do we get this thing open?” he said. “There’s no wheel, no sign of a release.”

  Tanisha said, “I got a sense from the diagrams that it wasn’t meant to be opened from the outside, only from inside. No way to sneak in—just escape.”

  “Then whoever’s down there has to open it,” Marie said.

  Laura suppressed a groan of dismay. This was what she’d dreaded all along. “But if it’s part of the lockdown …”

  “Here, take this,” Tanisha said, handing Laura her flashlight.

  “Why?”

  “I really have no idea, but I’m going to try something.”

  “Should we stand back?” Cyrus said.

  Tanisha shrugged as she stared at the hatch. “Probably not a bad idea.”

  Everyone took a step or two back.

  For a few seconds nothing happened. And then, with a strange groan, the lip of the hatch began to bend upward. One inch … two …

  Tanisha released a harsh, ragged breath and stumbled back. Laura caught her.

  “I’m okay,” she said. “But that’s the best I can do.”

  “That’s plenty!” Cyrus said. “That’s awesome!”

  And now Laura could hear the voice from below. Her heart sank when she realized it wasn’t Rick’s—nothing like Rick’s.

  “Hello? Who’s up there? Can you open the hatch?”

  “We’re trying. Who are you?”

  “I’m Special Agent Benjamin Greve, Defense Intelligence Agency.”

  Laura peeked through the opening and saw an older, balding man in a wrinkled suit standing on a steel mesh platform eight feet below.

  “Where’s Rick—Rick Hayden?”

  “Never heard of him. Was he one of the patients?”