Quake

by Patrick Carman

  He’s watching us, she thought.

  Hotspur’s voice emerged from unseen speakers. He seemed to be everywhere and nowhere all at once.

  “Almost there, just a little farther and we’re finally going to have a chance to meet. I’ve been looking forward to this, haven’t you?”

  The thing about having a pulse or a second pulse was that it didn’t protect you from being moved or attacked. It was for this reason that Faith and Dylan both found themselves being hurled with all the power Clara and Wade had between their two minds. Faith went one way, Dylan the other, pushed through two opposite openings in the walls. As soon as she regained her balance, ready to retaliate, a door slammed down from the ceiling, locking Faith inside. A small opening, maybe four inches square, was the only view of the outside world.

  Faith sensed something bigger was wrong almost immediately. She felt dizzy and weak and, most of all, as if a spear was being thrust through her forehead. She buckled over in pain.

  “I hope you like the accommodations,” Clara said. “It was nice of you to give us a few weeks before finding this place. Gave us time to do some modifications and upgrades. Titanium walls, very expensive. Somehow I doubt you appreciate it, though.”

  The feel of so much titanium, the one physical weakness Faith had, was overpowering. She felt feeble in the knees and the pain in her forehead felt like a vise clamping down tighter and tighter.

  “Dylan, you okay?” Faith’s eyes had become light sensitive and she felt as if she were staring into the sun. “Dylan? Answer me!”

  “We’ve got things to do,” Wade said from outside Faith’s cell. “Afraid we have to be going now. But we’ll see you both again. You can definitely count on that.”

  Clara didn’t say anything; she just dragged the gun filled with titanium bullets along the wall as she walked away.

  When their footsteps had dissolved into a distant echo, Faith slumped down onto the floor and closed her eyes.

  We need a miracle.

  Chapter 10

  Electrogram Madman

  The cold titanium wall felt like something prehistoric and evil against the small of Faith’s back. Like an ancient voodoo, it sucked at her bones and her muscles, drawing energy away into a humming metal death machine. That’s what the titanium felt like, most of all: a death machine. She could hear it vibrating into her mind, loosening the screws, working its way up and down her vertebrae. She felt the room moving, as if she were on a boat at sea, and decided she might do better floating in the open air of the cell. As soon as she was no longer touching the walls Faith felt less as if she was going to throw up, a little more herself, and yet she knew already: If I stay in here too long, it will end me.

  “Dylan, are you okay?”

  There was no answer, so Faith floated closer to the small square in the door.

  “Dylan?”

  His face appeared in the small window opposite the hall, and a wave of emotion crashed into Faith.

  “I’m here.”

  She wanted so badly to hold it together, to show how strong she could be in the most difficult of all situations. But something about the possibility of losing her soul mate, her one and only, her anchor—it cut through Faith like a band saw ripping into a two-by-four.

  “I think we might have messed up here,” Faith said, not so much dejected as perplexed by the swift turn of events. “I thought it would be different. I thought we’d overpower them if we had to or . . . I don’t know what I thought. Clooger is probably turning over in his grave.”

  “It’s not over until it’s over,” Dylan said, his voice showing more optimism than Faith thought the situation called for. “Although I am having a little bit of concern about the floor in here.”

  Faith squinted, peering across the darkened hall.

  “Are you . . . not standing?”

  Dylan looked down, then back at Faith, and they locked eyes.

  “Can’t stand. The cell is filling up with liquid concrete. Looks like it’s going pretty fast, too.”

  Faith thought of what Clara had said—modifications and upgrades—and realized it wasn’t just her cell that had been altered from whatever it had once been. She thought of how it would feel to find herself up to her neck in liquid titanium, every part of her body encased in the one thing that could undo her. The idea terrified her. It made her wonder how Dylan was holding it together.

  “Clara!” Faith yelled without thinking. “Answer me!”

  God, how she hated that girl, and Wade, too, hated how they were so powerful and how they loved to hold it over everyone who stood in their way. If these two ever ruled the world, the world was going to be pinned under the heels of their cruel boots. For some reason she couldn’t stop blaming it all on Clara, because she knew it was her twisted mind that would have come up with cages like these. She would have wanted Faith to watch helplessly as Dylan drowned in a lake of stone. She would want Faith to watch when the door of the cell was pried open and Dylan was encased in solid rock, his head the only thing sticking out at the top, eyes vacant and frozen.

  “Take it easy, Faith,” Dylan chided. “Save your energy. It’s a big cell. We’ve got time to figure something out before I’m in any real danger. And try not to say anything if this turns into a Cold War interrogation scenario. Hold firm. We’ve got allies.”

  “Do you now?”

  The voice came from the hallway just outside the angle where Faith could have seen who it was. But she knew. She’d heard that voice before, sandpapery and a little on the low side, like a smoker twenty years into a good long nicotine run. It was a slippery, conniving, soothing, terrible voice.

  It was the voice of a devil.

  “I would very much like to hear about that,” Hotspur Chance went on. He appeared then, right there in the hallway, unarmed and alone.

  Faith didn’t hesitate, not this time. She still didn’t know exactly what this monster was planning, but she knew how many lives were at risk. She had made the mistake of not striking when she could one too many times. She put the power of her mind into one thought: Put this guy’s head through a wall.

  Suddenly the vision of Hotspur Chance glitched, like the VHS tape of The Shining back home when the tracking went out of whack and lines danced across the old TV. Hotspur’s lips curled into an unfriendly smile and he lowered his chin. His eyes narrowed and darkened and he stared at Faith.

  “I’m not really here,” Hotspur said. “I’m somewhere else. Close, but not right here. You didn’t think I trusted either of you? Although I must say, Faith Daniels, you disappoint me. I know when someone is trying to kill me with a pulse. I invented the pulse—I should know. It doesn’t surprise me that you would have taken my life so quickly, without provocation or explanation. That was a mistake, one I hoped you wouldn’t make. But as you can see, I took precautions.”

  The back wall of Faith’s cell moved closer by a foot, cutting the size of the cell from five feet across to four in the space of a breath. She felt her lungs catch and the weight of the room shift in her mind, as if she’d been plunged deep underwater, turning slowly sideways. She could hear Dylan saying something, but it was garbled and distant. And then she heard Hotspur’s voice, big and close to her head: Don’t do that again.

  Her mind snapped back to reality and she gasped for breath. Something was grinding up her spine, like a cancer moving through marrow, and she realized she was no longer floating. She was lying down, her back against the titanium floor. She rose like a girl possessed and her back slowly arched away into the air. It was like trying to pull her palm away from a vacuum-cleaner hose. The floor didn’t want to let her go.

  “I’m going to explain some things to you now,” Hotspur said, his gravelly voice slow and steady. “I appreciate an attentive audience, so do pay attention. Your lives depend on it.”

  A glimmer of hope, Faith thought as she turned and held herself aloft in a standing posture. Maybe he aims not to kill us after all. She didn’t think of Jade at all in t
hat moment. She couldn’t even think of Dylan. Her own instinct to survive had taken over, if only for a moment, in the terrible pain the cell had inflicted on her. She wasn’t sure if she could survive if the walls closed in much farther.

  “Holographic technology was a passion of mine. You might say it was my recreation, like playing video games or listening to music. What you’re seeing is a manifestation, a mirage built from the energy that already fills every breath you take. There are enough atoms and electrons and molecules floating in everyday places to make me appear before you. I’ve moved beyond something as rudimentary as holographics. What you’re seeing is electrographic. The same technology they use in the States for those useless entertainment devices. I make something as grand as this and they use it to broadcast reality TV in living rooms. Typical.”

  “So if you’re not here, where are you?” Dylan asked from his cell. “And what is this place?”

  Hotspur’s electrographic image turned in Dylan’s direction.

  “I’m near enough. As for the facility, it has quite a history. These containment units were used for testing. The zoo was helpful in this regard; I never wanted for monkeys or mice. You’d be surprised how many animals are available when you’re donating millions to a zoo. Did you know there was, at one time, a mouse with a pulse? Yes, I had a mouse down here that could move cheese with its mind. Astounding. Of course, the mice were in here, with me. You two are in the monkey cages.”

  Hotspur shook his head and smiled at the floor. “A monkey that can move things with its mind turns out to be a very bad idea. No control, none whatsoever. I barely survived Lucy. She had to be put down, and while it might come as a surprise to you, that was hard for me. It’s hard for me now. The idea of killing the both of you, such gifted specimens—well, it’s not something I feel good about. The truly remarkable among us should be treated differently.”

  “So let us go,” Dylan suggested, though his voice wasn’t full of any real hope. “We’ll walk away, never bother you again.”

  Hotspur’s electrogram moved within inches of Dylan’s door.

  “Be careful making promises you can’t keep, young man.”

  A second electrogram image appeared next to Hotspur, sitting in a chair. The angle to the floor allowed Faith to see only the top half of the image, but she could see who it was.

  “Jade!” Faith said. “Where are you? Are you under the zoo?”

  Faith was hoping to gain any intel she could before Hotspur could stop Jade from talking, but it didn’t appear that Jade could hear what she was saying and the image disappeared a second later. It had been only a perfectly framed mirage surrounded by a slightly glowing halo of light.

  “She’s a feisty one,” Hotspur said. “Can’t keep her in the same room with me or she’ll do something underhanded. Just like her mother—totally untrustworthy. But I did want you to know she’s alive.”

  Faith’s anger rose in her chest and it cleared her head. There has to be something I can do. Anything. She thought of the world outside and all that it contained. So many things she could move with her mind, if only she could see them. But she couldn’t. Hotspur had made sure of that.

  “This facility is known only to a very few,” Hotspur continued, getting back on track with the information he wanted to share. “I had it built at the same time the States were being constructed. Back then, the people in charge listened to me. They did whatever I told them to do. They trusted me, gave me complete access. Of course, that was because no one but me understood the complexity of what we were doing, but it was nice to be trusted. I miss that.”

  The electrogram image of Hotspur Chance paused. It seemed to be looking back in time.

  “Regimes change and time marches on. Politicians get their hands into the cookie jar and start digging around. My plan was set aside. They said it was too radical. They said no one could ever know it was considered to begin with. They locked me up, but you already know that. Luckily by then I’d already terminated every single person who knew about this place. You might say it’s my Batcave, my secret lair.”

  “You’re a murderer,” Faith said, trying again to rattle Hotspur into making a mistake. “They locked you up because you’re crazy.”

  Hotspur’s electrogram flinched in anger. “That is a matter of opinion. A wrong opinion. I alone know the way. I alone saw the course of action required. And I’m the only one willing to do what has to be done.”

  What’s he getting at? Faith wondered as she looked back at the titanium wall that had moved and shuttered at the thought of it moving closer still.

  “Do you even know what I achieved?” Hotspur asked. “No, how could you? You couldn’t know that I alone compiled every piece of data from every large city in the world. The crime rates, the disease, the way massive cities grew and fell apart. I mined a billion pieces of information and created a blueprint for the perfect city. Scale is a hard thing. Cities grow like organisms, pushing out in ways that make sense only in the short term, and then not at all. I created a model that can scale to five hundred million people without undue crime, disease, or pollution. I did that alone; no one helped me.”

  “What is it, Hotspur Chance?” Dylan asked. There was an unexpected sluggishness in his voice, and Faith wondered how full of wet cement Dylan’s cell had gotten. “What were you planning that turned you into Prisoner One? Why are you the most wanted man alive?”

  Dylan already knew the answer to this question; Meredith had told them. He wanted to hear Hotspur Chance say it.

  “Ah, now we come to it, the meat of the matter,” Hotspur said with a mix of humility and sadness. When he talked like this, like a wise old grandfather, Faith could see how a person might fall under his spell.

  “The only way then—the only way now—to save this country is to finish what I started. Building the American States was only the start. What other countries do with their megacities is out of my hands, but if we want America at the top once more, to be the leader of the free world, we have to show the way. We have to lead.”

  “Lead where?” Faith asked. “And when did this become about America?”

  This seemed to get Hotspur’s attention in a new, important way.

  “Every place on earth is overpopulated. It’s the scourge of the age. Too many people, too few resources. Piling them up like rats in a cage might work for some, but it gets you only so far. One of the cages has to go.”

  “Meredith knew what you were planning to do,” Faith revealed. The titanium was making her brain feel like oatmeal stew, but she had a storehouse of resolve made for moments like these. “She knew—that’s why she left you. Because you’re a madman. Because you wanted to kill people.”

  A prolonged silence followed, and Faith wondered if she’d said the wrong thing at the wrong time. “First you try to kill me, then you insult me,” Hotspur said at last. “And you haven’t heard both sides of the story, have you? You don’t know the lengths I’ve gone to in order to save this planet, not destroy it.”

  Faith wanted to say, You. Are. Insane. But she held her tongue.

  “I built the entire technological foundation of the States,” Hotspur said. “Can you imagine—one person that brilliant?” Hotspur’s electrogram face lit up with excitement. “And I chose where to put the States, the land to clear first, the precise starting point. From there, each state spanned outward, the land like glassy water being hit with a pebble. And they grew and grew; like a ripple widening in a perfect circle, they grew. One of them is sitting on top of a buried weapon. The weapon is positioned in a very particular way, to intersect with the power grid used throughout the foundation of the State in question. And you know what the power source is as well as I do. It’s nuclear. It’s fusion.”

  “A chain reaction,” Dylan said, barely above a whisper.

  “I have long called it the chain reactor,” Hotspur corrected. “Everything will be over in a matter of minutes; they won’t feel a thing. It’s humane—I always liked that. And it
will achieve what needed to be done: half.”

  “Half the population gone,” Faith said, still shocked at the idea of it. “You corralled everyone for this? No one is that cruel. No one, not even you, would do that.”

  “You think I’m wrong, but I’m right,” Hotspur argued. He was sounding a little bit upset that Faith didn’t see the merits of the idea. “The only way to be sure we survive as a species, as a country, is to thin the herd. I’m doing what no one else has the courage to do. I’m doing it for all of us.”

  Faith knew now that she was dealing with an outright madman. The States might not have been perfect, but the crumbling infrastructure of North America had been rebuilt and centralized. The world was emptied out and was doing a lot better. The States were working. But he’d had a vision, and he was not a man like other men. He was special, he was the smartest person the world had ever known, and he’d set a plan in motion that his God complex wouldn’t let him stop.

  “Meredith was wrong to leave,” Hotspur said, quieter now, as if he really regretted having lost her. “She thought she understood what I was doing, but she didn’t. She saw only in part, not the whole. I was right.”

  Faith realized something else just then, something so simple and yet so dangerous. Hotspur Chance was never wrong; that was part of his diabolical brokenness, the lie he told himself. He was sure he had never been wrong about anything in his life, and he wasn’t going to be wrong about this. He couldn’t be or everything he’d ever done would come crashing down around him.

  Faith heard footsteps in the long, dark corridor and a few seconds later Wade appeared. He spoke first to the electrogram.

  “I found this in Dylan’s pack. Thought you should know.”

  He was holding the Vulcan Tablet, the one they’d used to stay in contact with Hawk. Hotspur’s electrogram image viewed it warily, turning his head side to side.