“Go on!” he coughed at the Owens boys, and this time they listened.
In the smoky hallway, Kelton paused and looked down. Butch Rooter’s body was gone.
He continued onward.
Outside, the fresh air of the front lawn was the sweetest he had ever tasted.
But he only had a second to enjoy it.
Another wave of blue light crashed across him—across the houses, the street, the trees, the Owens boys. His heart sped up, and he saw stars behind his eyes.
Immediately, the old man started to move and thrash on his shoulders. Kelton was forced to drop him on the ground.
The younger Owens boy backed off, shaking his head. “Oh, no. Jimmy!” He collided with the spoonman scarecrow and fell down.
The old man’s body was a smoking, blackened hunk of meat and burnt clothing, but still he sprang to his feet like an athlete. Jamie Rooter hissed and bared its teeth.
Kelton was dumbstruck. He realized the old man might attack him and thought he should draw his gun—but his body wouldn’t comply. His fingers quivered uselessly by his holster.
Jimmy Owens hauled his brother to his feet. “Run. Kelton, run!”
“No. Stop, boys. Come back!”
But they had already left the yard and were rounding the house out of sight.
His feet came back to life first, and that was a good thing, because by now Jamie Rooter was reaching for him. Kelton danced out of his grasp and ran for the police car.
He managed to get inside and close the door before Jamie Rooter collided with it. Kelton watched him try to reach him through the window. His blackened hand left a grease smudge on the glass.
Kelton put the car into gear and stomped the accelerator. He switched on the lights and siren, turned the corner out of the neighborhood, and kept going.
***
It took a long time to get his panic under control. He wasn’t sure how long, but it felt like hours.
He pulled over onto the grassy shoulder of Route 42 and rested his head on the steering wheel. The Governator—his action movie idol—never reacted this way in movies. Just shot the shit out of bad guys. What the hell was wrong with him?
More to the point, where were the two Rooter girls? Where had Henry run off to? Where had the Owens boys gone? How was old man Rooter still moving after nearly being burned to death? Never had he so thoroughly lost control of a situation.
He sat back and checked his surroundings. Luckily, this stretch of road only consisted of woods. There weren’t any people in sight. A quarter mile ahead was the entrance to the Nilbog Institute of Science. Beyond that was the airport, where he’d begun his shift investigating silly claims about meteors.
Nothing seemed very damned silly anymore. Probably never would again.
He put the car back in gear and pulled onto the road.
When his breathing returned to normal, he picked up his radio mic. “Thirty-one.”
Chief Simpson instantly replied, “Kelton, where the hell are you? Do you have those Owens boys?”
“No, sir. They ran off toward Sammy’s Grocery. We were attacked. Both Rooter girls are missing now, too.”
“Are you all right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Copacetic. Hold on a minute.”
As he waited, Kelton considered telling him copacetic wasn’t one of those terms you used to sound more hip. Once all this was over, he’d give him a crib sheet.
“Okay, thirty-one, come back to HQ. I’ve lost contact with Clay and Harper, and I don’t need to lose anyone else.”
Kelton put the car in gear and pulled back onto the road. “Is my partner with you?”
“Yeah, Larry’s here.”
“Good. Hey, the Rooter house is burning down.”
“Okay, I’ll let fire-rescue know, but I think they’re staying put until this rioting’s over. Kelton, I’m calling in the state police and maybe the National Guard. This is too much for us.”
Kelton swallowed and noticed how dry his mouth had become. “I agree.”
“Watch your ass, son. Over and out.”
Kelton glanced down to replace the radio mic on its hook. When he looked up, a white figure stood before him in the road.
He stomped on the brakes. His car was a thirty-year-old Ford Police Interceptor, kept in service by economic constraints and two loving mechanics, so it didn’t have antilock brakes. Kelton skidded to a stop inches from the young woman standing there in a lab coat.
His first thought was, She’s not injured or attacking me. She’s normal.
And his second thought was, I know her.
He got out of the car. “Lucy? What the fuck are you doing?”
He’d met the pretty blonde scientist from NIS only once. She’d been in a bucket crane, installing what she called a “field detector” on top of a street light downtown, something to do with monitoring energy emissions from her lab. Kelton had directed traffic as she worked.
None of the self assurance she’d oozed while atop that crane was on display now. She stood there in the road, shaking like a half jerked-off dog.
“Lucy?”
Lucy Grimm burst into tears.
Chapter 8
LUCY
Lucy wiped her tears as the police officer walked toward her. “Thank God. The phones and Internet are out. I couldn’t reach anyone.”
She didn’t have a car or bike, so she’d resorted to walking. She needed to warn somebody about what was happening and tell her grandfather to get the hell out of town. And now, by a stroke of luck, a cop was here. She’d only met him once, so she glanced at his nametag. Oh, yes: the tough-guy police officer who only went by his last name.
Officer Paul Kelton—just call me Kelton, as he’d said when they met—looked exhausted. A sooty black smudge covered one cheek. He reached for her. “Come on. It’s safer in my car.”
“What? No.” Lucy brushed away his hand. “Now that you’re here, we should go inside my lab. It has lead shielding that can protect us.”
“Huh?” He glanced at the woods, as if he’d heard something.
“In case there’s another energy pulse. I recorded two of them on my field sensors.”
Kelton looked at her and clenched his jaw for a couple seconds. Then he returned to his police car, grabbed his keys, and came back. All the while, he kept an eye on the woods. “Let’s go.”
Lucy led the way back inside. She wondered if something awful had already happened. Officer Kelton seemed scared.
“I think something bad’s going on,” she said to test the waters.
“Yeah, no shit.”
He didn’t elaborate, so Lucy focused on unlocking and leading the way through the remaining lead-lined doors into the lab. The doors and shielded walls were the features she’d referred to earlier. The university had long ago installed the same precautions used by medical diagnostic facilities to contain errant radiation and magnetic fields. It seemed logical that it might protect them from what was happening outside.
Her thoughts drifted to Grandpa for the hundredth time that night. Would he be okay?
She stopped by her computer and picked up a yellow legal pad she’d covered in notes.
“I believe we have a huge problem. The lab’s field sensors detected an energy pulse that somehow mimics your heart’s electrical activity. I thought maybe it was coming from here, but when I checked our…”
She trailed off when she realized Kelton wasn’t paying attention.
He was nervously looking between her computer and the door, and then back to the modified MRI machine and the laser. “What do you do here again? I forget.”
Lucy had learned early on that saying, Dr. Robertson wants to resurrect the dead didn’t go over so well with laymen, so she rattled off her standard answer. “We research data recovery from cadaveric brain tissue.” Technically, that was the truth; just not the whole truth.
She didn’t add that microscopes and computer routers were not what was under that white sheet in the corner, as
the shapes and trailing wires might suggest. Revealing it was a cadaver nicknamed Mr. Monster didn’t go over so well with non-scientists, either.
In any case, the monitor she’d hooked up to Mr. Monster’s heart was the one that captured her attention earlier. Its data suggested the energy wave mimicked the signal from the sinoatrial node, the cluster of heart cells that acted as a natural pacemaker. If Mr. Monster were still alive and outside the protection of the lab, it might’ve had a heart attack.
Meanwhile, Kelton’s eyes had glazed over at her statement. “Okay, go on with what you were saying.”
She punched up a modified Google map of Nilbog on her computer. A custom layer showed an array of blue dots across the island. “Remember that dosimeter you watched me install downtown? We have fifteen of them like that. The Institute is paranoid about accidental energy emissions from here. Dr. Robertson says people are in more danger from their microwave ovens, but still, it’s a good idea for liability.”
Kelton was busy punching keys on his cell phone. “Shit. No signal.”
“Kelton? Focus.”
“Look, this is all fascinating, but we have a situation brewing outside, so unless you can show me—”
“I’m getting to it.” She opened a window on her screen to display the sensor net’s logs from the past hour. “Take a look at this.”
“Those are numbers, right?”
Lucy glared at him. Willfully thickheaded men annoyed her. “They’re energy field readings.” She pointed out an entry from sensor 5-B. “This was the first energy spike. Down here is the second.”
“And you’re saying the energy came from your equipment?”
“No, that’s not what I’m saying. I don’t know yet where it came from.”
“So, what are you getting at, then?”
Lucy huffed with frustration. “The second spike was stronger than the first one. And if there’s another one proportionally stronger than that, it might kill people. That’s what I’m getting at.”
Kelton blinked and rested his hand on the butt of his gun.
Good, I got his attention. “Now, it’s my turn. Have you felt anything weird out there, like with your heart? Anything strange happening to people?”
Surprisingly, Kelton laughed. “Remember that brewing situation I mentioned?”
***
Lucy didn’t get much more information from Kelton, because his cell phone caught a signal. He immediately started calling someone.
She picked up her landline phone and was rewarded with the same hiss and crackle she heard earlier. Weird. She would’ve thought telephone wires would be better protected than cellular reception. But if the police officer’s phone was working again, then the effects were fading.
As he talked, Kelton paced the room. “Larry?…Yeah, dickhead, I stopped for a doughnut.”
The moment he was off the phone, she planned to ask him to call Grandpa. This was killing her.
As she waited, Lucy scrutinized the data she’d managed to download from the field dosimeters and Geiger counters before the Institute’s VPN crashed. If the energy pulses didn’t come from her lab, then what was causing it? She started to overlay the figures from the last energy spike directly onto her map. The numbers might be higher the nearer they were to the source.
Maybe the military had accidentally detonated a new type of bomb. Except the nearest Army base was a good hour’s drive away. She found the Angry Birds tension ball in her lab coat’s pocket and gave it a squeeze.
That’s when she saw it, right there in her figures. The discovery stopped her cold.
“Okay, I’ll call when I’m on my way.” Kelton snapped his phone shut and turned to her. “Ready to go?”
“Go where?”
“To the police station. It’s a secure facility. It’s the safest place until outside help arrives.”
“Have you not been listening to me?” Lucy pointed at the map on her computer. “Look at this.”
“I see it. That’s a map.”
Lucy gave him a heavy lidded expression. “Oh, you’re good tonight. Numbers, map, and you didn’t even have help.”
Kelton’s face started to redden.
“I’m sorry. That was the wrong thing to say.”
“Lucy? You jumped out in front of my car, nearly killing you and me. And now you’re wasting my time. You’ve got five seconds to explain why I’m not arresting you.”
“Fine. This energy pulse could kill anyone it touches if it comes again.”
“Come again? I mean, huh?”
“The last two were about forty minutes apart. That means we have maybe ten minutes until the next one, if it stays on that schedule.”
Kelton jutted his chin out, appearing to think hard. He pushed his glasses farther up his nose. “What’s on the map?”
“I think I know where it’s coming from.” Lucy pointed to a location on the east end of the island, only a few miles from the NIS campus. “The numbers decrease the farther you get away from this point.”
“That’s where Nilbog Elementary School is. The building’s abandoned now.” Again, he appeared to think hard. Lucy decided she liked that look on him better than the sarcasm. “What do you think’s there?”
She shrugged. “I dunno. A bomb? A geothermal vent? If we’re still here in ten minutes, the police should go check it out.”
Kelton whipped out his phone and started dialing. “If we’re still here in ten minutes, we should evacuate the town. Not that we have any manpower to spare right now.”
“Manpower?” For the first time in ten years, Lucy wished for a cigarette. As if the funeral hadn’t made her day bad enough. “Kelton, what the hell’s going on out there?”
“Didn’t I tell you?” Kelton stared at her, about to go on, but then his cell phone had his attention again as his call went through. “Larry, it’s me. I’m still at Lucy Grimm’s laboratory. She’s…what? Yeah, I know she’s pretty, but that’s not why I’m still here. What? Yeah, I’ll hold on.” Kelton placed his hand over the mouthpiece and addressed Lucy. “We’re in the middle of a fucking crisis, and my partner’s cracking jokes.”
“Just tell me. Are people out there having heart attacks?”
“Well, rioters are—hold on.” He returned to his conversation. “Larry. Right. So Lucy Grimm says…”
“Rioters? What?”
“…there’s an energy pulse coming from the abandoned elementary school on Pine Avenue. And it’s causing…Larry? You still there? Fuck.” Kelton closed his phone. “Lost reception again.”
Lost reception. It took a moment for the implication to hit her. “Uh oh.”
Kelton frowned. “What do you mean, ‘uh oh’?”
This time, she actually saw the energy pulse move through the room. Blue light splashed into existence on the east wall—from the direction of the elementary school—and washed over equipment and the floor like a tidal wave.
She felt it this time, as well, like an infusion of adrenaline. She clutched her chest as her heart started pounding—no, no, don’t have a heart attack!—and dark spots appeared in her vision.
The ceiling lights winked out and then came back on seconds later as the backup generators kicked in. The uninterrupted power source box under her desk chirruped that her computer was now running on battery.
Kelton held his chest, too. When he took his hands away, they were shaking. “You all right?”
“I…I think so.”
“Do you think the lead stopped it?”
Lucy observed her shaking hands like they were lab specimens—and tried to think of them as lab specimens—in order to calm down. “I’m not sure. Maybe it lessened the strength of the blast.” She took a big gulp of air to get her breathing under control. “Is this what’s going on outside?”
“Worse. People are walking around with mortal injuries like it’s nothing.”
“What?”
“Yeah. It’s like everyone’s on PCP or something.”
Lucy’s
hands started trembling again. She searched the police officer’s face for any sign he was joking but found none. Mortal injuries.
Her mind reeled. Surely he was mistaken. And yet, if these energy pulses had something to do with it, wasn’t this exactly what she was prepared to study here?
She needed to read the data stream from Mr. Monster. This was a golden opportunity. She began punching up information on her computer.
“Kelton, you’re not going to believe this, but under that sheet back there is a—”
“Oh, shit.”
“Huh?” She looked up from her screen.
Kelton stared at something behind her, his face slack with shock. He stood up in hurry, sending his chair crashing to the floor. He fumbled to draw his gun. “Dead guy!”
“What?”
“Dead guy!”
The white bedsheet now lay on the floor. Mr. Monster stood beside his gurney, formaldehyde dripping down his naked body. The wires Lucy had hooked up to him trailed from his exposed brain and from the flaps of his Y-shaped autopsy incision.
Lucy screamed as her cadaver fixed his milky white eyes on her and charged.
Chapter 9
GRANDPA
Climbing up the extension cord hand over hand was easy enough. So was pulling himself over the banister railing so he could stand on the upper floor again. But freeing himself from the noose was something else entirely.
He stood on the upper landing for an entire hour, yanking on the cord like a dog against a leash. But as strong as he was now, the cord remained firmly entwined around the vertical spokes of the banister. The banister in turn remained embedded in the wall. He groaned and squealed in frustration. There was someplace he must go, and this restraint was keeping him from it.
Finally, in between one of these yanks, he felt the pressure lessen slightly around his throat. He hadn’t given his throat any attention so far, despite how the noose constricted his windpipe to a pinhole. Pain no longer existed, only a mechanical awareness that his body either moved or it didn’t. The only bodily sensation that mattered was the one in his chest. The Chest Thing thudded. It told him to leave this place.
When the pressure around his throat momentarily relaxed, he felt it out of curiosity. His hands found that the orange cord was wrapped completely around his neck. He pulled savagely on it, and it loosened further. After a few vigorous head shakes, the cord fell to the floor.
Plan 9- Official Movie Novelization Page 8
