Steve looked ahead and saw objects spinning around in the mists. In fact, the vortex was sucking up the Termicide gas as well as buildings, utility poles, rocks, and tons of black dirt. All of it was disappearing into the black hole in space. “Get off the road before that thing sucks us up too!”
Eddie turned to the right. However, there were four small explosions under the armored vehicle. “Oh hell, not now!”
“What just happened?” Steve shouted.
“The Termicide has eaten up the tires. If we hit the dirt on just rims, we won’t be mobile at all.”
Steve looked back ahead. The vortex was almost on top of them. Even the space bugs that littered the ground were being sucked up like dust in a storm. “Just do it! Get off the road!”
Eddie jetted into the field of grass. The vortex was just a hundred feet away. He pressed down on the gas pedal, but the rims just spun around in the soft mud. He looked back ahead. The vortex was now within fifty feet of them, and the vehicle was beginning to shake as well. “Oh Lord, please save us!” Eddie yelled.
Steve closed his eyes as the vehicle slowly started to spin in a circular motion. The front part of the van then lifted off the ground. “Oh God, help us, please!”
The vibration got much worse. In fact, the van was rocking violently from side to side as other flying debris slammed into the windshield and the top. Then, the entire van lifted off the ground and started spinning around slowly. It was like being in a ride at the State Fair, but this was for real.
Steve held on tightly to Jenny as the spinning motion increased. Eddie tightly gripped the steering wheel and prayed a silent prayer too. The van was now being peppered with more debris as the mist blackened the windshield even more. The spinning motion got even faster.
Steve yelled again, hoping to be saved. “Oh Lord, please help us!”
Suddenly the spinning motion slowed, and the vehicle slammed back into the dirt. The swirling vortex was rapidly vanishing too. Some of the trees and scattered debris fell back to the Earth. Above, the giant hole in space was rapidly closing.
Steve opened his eyes and yelled with joy. “Nobody can tell me that prayer doesn’t work. Oh yes, it definitely does!”
“That was too close,” Eddie said. He then looked back to address Steve again. “How’s Jenny?”
Steve looked down into her lifeless face and then back up at Eddie. The sorrow in his eyes told the terrible truth. “She’s dead…” he whispered and dropped his head again. “We are too late.”
Epilogue
A long line of cars followed behind a black hearse as it turned into the gates of Laural Land Memorial Park. The morning sun was beaming down and warming up the area. Light fog hovered over the trees as a gentle breeze fluttered the leaves and swayed the pines.
A blue Honda Accord was at the very end of the persession and the last one to pass through the white gates. Inside, three people were locked in a deep conversation that was not about the dead person at all.
Eddie Wexler looked out the rear passenger window for a few seconds before focusing back on the man sitting to his right. On the way here, they’d passed mile upon mile of chard earth and destruction. “I didn’t realize that Termicide could be so lethal. For almost two miles straight, there is nothing but barren land where they dropped that stuff. Even the grass is gone, rotted down to the dirt as if a fire had gone through. I guess if it hadn’t been for the suction force of that vortex, the area of destruction would have been at least ten times as large. Am I right or what, Mr. McCord?”
The elderly white man in the black business suit who sat beside him leaned back and turned toward Eddie. “That’s true. Still, nothing will be able to grow in this area for at least five years. I guess that’s minor compared to what would have happened if you and Steve had failed to stop Jack Mason.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right. I e-mailed the entire report to your computer yesterday, Mr. McCord.”
“I’ve read the whole thing,” McCord replied, glancing forward at the driver of the vehicle before turning to address Eddie again. “What I’m not understanding is why would you want to join the USG after going through all that hell?” He looked back ahead. “You were almost killed at least three different times during this mission.”
Eddie nodded in agreement. “Look, all of my life, I’ve sought a job with a real purpose that had real meaning. For so long, I’ve been running around in circles trying to fit in where I could. None of it was satisfying. When I learned about the USG and all of the fantastic things out there in the universe, I had a real purpose.”
“I hope you know that once you become part of our organization, you can never go back to your original life.” McCord then looked directly into his eyes. “The USG will always come first.”
“I understand, Mr. McCord,” Eddie replied.
“Good.” McCord looked back up at the driver and then back at Eddie. “A man with your technical skills will be a great asset to us. I’m sorry that I didn’t get a chance to meet you earlier, but I was conducting that emergency conference at Market Hall. From what happened at the complex, I guess that was a good thing.”
“I’m blessed to be alive,” Eddie said.
McCord smiled. “Look, you were very lucky and nothing more. Even at the end, the vortex evaporated at the right time. Before it did, it also sucked up enough of the Termicide to keep most of this county safe from that deadly gas. However, it was all a coincidence and nothing more.”
Eddie gasphed in amazement. “After all that’s happened, you still think that everything was just a coincidence?”
“I believe in science and what can be proven,” McCord replied, while chuckling to himself. “Nothing else is real.”
The driver turned around and spoke for the first time. “That’s what I used to believe,” Jenny said. “Then, I had that life-changing experience.”
“You were lucky as hell too,” McCord said. “Don’t confuse extraordinary luck with anything else.”
“No, I was blessed. When Diamond Jack struck me down, I was thrown into a coma for close to thirty minutes. I could see and hear everything, but could not move. It was at that time that God came to me. I became aware of a higher existence than this life. I clearly saw some of the things that exist beyond death. The spiritual world is real.”
“You were hallucinating,” McCord said. “That often happens to people in extreme conditions. When your head hit the far wall, your skull was fractured. People see all kinds of things in those situations. We almost lost you.”
“No, Charles McCord,” Jenny replied. “I was clinically dead for over twenty-five minutes. I should not have had any memory of anything. However, I remember assending to another level of existence. God does exist and so does the spiritual world. I’ve seen some of it myself. I was sent back here to tell my story.”
Eddie looked over at Charles McCord for a few seconds before saying a single word. “She was really clinically dead—that’s a fact. She did come to in the morgue and literally scared the hell out of the undertaker—that’s a fact too.”
McCord shrugged and shook his head. “I don’t know about any of that stuff. I simply deal with what is and what isn’t. Maybe what you’re saying is all true, but we have other problems now. The queen bug was not among the dozens of dead creatures we recovered. Maybe it was sucked up with the thousands of others into another dimension. I don’t know.”
Jenny turned back around. “That thing was exposed to enough Termicide to kill it twenty times over. Besides, it’s been two weeks. If the queen had escaped, we’d have known about it by now. Those things multiply extremely fast. There would have been thousands more of them by now if the queen had survived.”
“Where do you think Diamond Jack ended up?” McCord asked, changing the subject and straightening his tie.
Eddie shrugged. “I only knew how to activate that super sphere
, not anything else. However, I gave that thing full power. The vortex pulled him into a wormhole that could have exited anywhere. He could have come out thousands of light years away. And with no point of reference or a way to open another wormhole, he’s marooned far out into deep space. He’ll be alive until the oxygen on his ship runs out.”
“That sounds like a terrible way to go,” Jenny said.
“Maybe so, but at least it’s not a lingering death,” Eddie replied.
“Using our most advanced computer, how long do you think it will take for it to zero in on the correct frequency code that will open up that ship on the moon?” McCord asked.
Eddie took a deep breath and shook his head. “I simply don’t know. The number of possible code combinations is approximately ten raised to the sixty-eighth power. That’s more than the number of atoms in the sun. Let me put it another way, finding the correct transmission code to that ship is like trying to find one particular grain of sand in a desert that is a million times larger than the United States. The computer could run for decades and not even come close. I think it would be easier to develop a super-hot torch that could cut through that ark’s ultra-dense metal.”
McCord nodded. “We’re already working on that too.”
“Right now, we’re working on fixing all the damage that maniac did,” Jenny said to Eddie. “We never kept information about this alien technology in cyber space. It would have been too easy for a top-rate hacker to get hold of it. We just stored the information on disks and housed them in the Omni Center. When Diamond Jack blew up that building, we lost so much information. We’ll recover, but it will take lots of time.”
McCord looked out at Steve Miller and his family as they exited the funeral car and started walking over to the tent-covered grave. “It seems that Roy Miller had a lot of friends. I hope that we’ll have as many people at Neil’s funeral tomorrow.”
Jenny sighed and stopped the car. “I doubt it. Neil was not very popular, not even within our organization. I just hope that he’s at rest.” She then looked off into the distance for a few moments before sighing again. “I still fear that we have other problems. We have not found the orb Diamond Jack had.”
“Perhaps Jack had it with him on that alien fighter, right?” McCord asked. “That is the logical conclusion.”
“Maybe,” Jenny answered, “but if we’re wrong, it will be hell to pay eventually. That orb contains the blueprints of hundreds of alien weapons that we’ve never seen before. And if those blueprints fall into the wrong hands—”
“Relax, Jenny.” Charles McCord opened his door and stepped out. “Look, we’ll handle it. I am now running the USG. From now on, things will be done correctly. No more secret projects, no more tortures, and no more covert experiments. I am also putting our best men on the trail of finding out who was financing Diamond Jack. He couldn’t have done all of this alone. They’ll be working on finding that orb too, that is if it is still on Earth.”
“I hope that we can find it,” Jenny said.
Eddie leaned forward. “What happens to Steve now?”
Jenny looked back momentarily. “He’ll spend another week here in Dallas, and I think he’ll be moving his mother to Los Angeles with him. He has agreed to be silent about all of the secret stuff going on with the USG if we promise not to bother him or his family again.”
“Do you really trust him?” McCord asked.
“Oh yes, he could have spilled the beans about another top-secret project a couple of years ago, but he didn’t,” Jenny said. “I know that he’s a man of his word. I’m more worried that some weapons from the blueprints on that orb may turn up one day. That’s my biggest fear.”
“Yes, I know,” McCord whispered, looking across the graveyard. “We’ll make finding that orb our first priority.”
***
Two boys sat in the living room of an apartment and gazed into a television set. Each one was somewhat bored. It was still too early to go to the movies, and no one else was outside either.
The fat boy with the blue-tented hair (Tommy Lee) yawned and reached down for a can of coke that was sitting on the floor. After sipping it, he burped. “Richard, what do you want to do now? Watching the news all morning has gotten kind of boring.”
“Yeah, I know, but the news is on every channel.” Richard stretched out completely and gazed up at the ceiling. “They keep going over the same story about that weird tornado and those giant bugs.”
Tommy Lee looked back momentarily at Richard. “I don’t believe half of that stuff they’re saying. They want us to think that those giant bee-like creatures were thawed out from a glacier that drifted into warm waters. They are blaming this strange story on global warming. Hell, Dallas is not even near where a glacier would be. So how come nobody saw any of these creatures until they swarmed out here? And how could a tornado develop without any clouds?”
“Yeah, I know,” Richard agreed. “I don’t believe that crap about that blazing light in the sky the other week as being a medorite either. They’re saying that pieces of that thing hit a truck on I-20 and other pieces hit a military airport.”
“Richard, Tommy Lee,” a woman called from the kitchen. “It’s time for dinner.”
“Mom is serving liver tonight,” Richard said. “Do you like liver?”
Tommy Lee frowned with disgust. “Hell no. That stuff is gross. I’m skipping dinner and going home.”
Richard laughed. “Before you go, take a look at what I have.” He reached under his bed and pulled out a crystal sphere. “When you hold it up to the light, all kinds of strange designs and blueprints appear against the wall. The images even move if you turn the sphere just right.”
“Where did you get it from?” Tommy Lee asked, gazing at the strange object and the images reflected from it.
A couple of weeks ago, my brother was breaking into cars at that high-tech center. Anyway, he found this thing in the glove compartment of a car that was parked in the outer lot.”
Tommy Lee held the orb in his hands for a couple of seconds before giving it back. “Is that why he’s in jail now?”
“Nope, the cops don’t know about this. My brother is in jail for starting a fight at a club the other night.”
“Richard, Tommy Lee!” the woman angrily yelled. “Don’t let your dinner get cold!”
“Okay, Mom,” Richard yelled back. “We better get going before Mom comes in here with the belt.”
Tommy Lee nodded in agreement. “What do you think that thing is?”
“I don’t know. It’s probably a Russian toy, or something like that. Weird kids and nerds would probably have fun with it.”
“So what are you going to do with it?”
“I don’t know,” Richard said. “Maybe after dinner, I’ll go down to the creek and smash some bugs with it.”
“Yeah, that sounds like fun.”
About the Author
William Lyons is an educator from Texas. He is also the author of The Deadly Lover, Dark Obsession, and The Death Dealers.
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