The Return of the Incredible Exploding Man

by Dave Hutchinson

  “Yes.”

  “And here are we, frankly shit-scared of what you might turn out to be able to do. If you think about it enough, you might be able to see the advantage of coming to some kind of accommodation with us.”

  They had not, so far, threatened him or his family, Alex noted. Whether that was a good or a bad thing, he had no idea. He said, “What kind of accommodation?”

  Flynn thought about it. “We can’t, as we’ve noted, force you to cooperate with us, but I think you’d like to understand what’s happened to you. We can try to help with that. We have the resources.”

  Alex doubted whether Flynn’s resources were adequate, but he didn’t say anything.

  “In return, we need to know what happened at Sioux Crossing. What is still happening. You’re the only survivor, and we believe you’re our best chance of doing that.”

  “Actually,” Dom put in, “we’re more worried about that than we are about you right now. We can reason with you.”

  Flynn glanced at him, then back at Alex. “I’ve had some briefings over the past week or so where some very very smart people have used the phrase extinction-level event,” he said. “I don’t know whether it is or not, and neither do the very very smart people. And personally, I find that extremely worrying. We have to try to understand it, and to reverse it if it turns out to pose a threat. Myself, I’d like to reverse it anyway.”

  “You want me to go back in there,” Alex said.

  “Not right away,” said Dom.

  “I don’t want to do that.”

  “Well,” Flynn crossed his arms and sat back in his chair, “we have a problem, then.”

  “You have a problem,” Alex said. “Not me.” And he stepped out of the room for a moment.

  When he came back, Flynn and Dom were where he had left them. Neither of them looked particularly freaked out, but nor did they seem particularly impressed.

  “We’ve seen the footage of you doing that,” Dom told him. “Old news.”

  “But thank you for reminding us,” Flynn said heavily. “And you might want to put some clothes on.”

  Oops. Alex conjured up jeans and a hoodie. Flynn and Dom didn’t seem impressed by this, either.

  “Tell me,” Flynn said. “Why did you come back?”

  “I want you to find someone for me.”

  FLYNN CO-OPTED A military transport from the Marine base which surrounded the FBI Academy and flew with him to Duluth. Apparently, Alex’s request had sparked a monumental discussion among Flynn’s superiors.

  “We’d rather you didn’t do this at all,” he said. “The official line is that there was an explosion; you’re listed among the dead.”

  Much of the discussion, Alex gathered, had centred around the mechanics of how to do this. Flynn and the people he worked for had finally come down on a least-worst scenario which concealed Alex’s involvement with them. But they were still not remotely happy with him.

  At Duluth airport, Alex was hustled into a windowless van and driven into a hangar, where he and Flynn changed vehicles for an anonymous Nissan. Following the GPS, Flynn drove them around the edge of the city. Alex looked watched the buildings go by, not wanting to talk. He supposed he could have come here under his own steam, but he was still uncertain about his accuracy. He could just as easily have wound up in Doncaster as Duluth.

  Eventually, Flynn pulled up on a pleasant, wooded street. “Just down there,” he said, nodding through the windscreen. “Number 103. Apartment 12. You’ve got an hour; I’ll be here waiting for you.”

  Alex put his hand on the doorhandle. “What will you do if I don’t come back?”

  “I’ll spend what remains of my life simultaneously appearing in front of closed Congressional hearings and trying to find another job.”

  Alex nodded. “Okay.”

  Number 103 was a newish apartment building. Someone was just leaving as he arrived, and he caught the door before it closed and locked, and slipped inside. He took the stairs up to the first floor, found apartment 12, and stood in front of the door for a few moments trying to gather his thoughts before knocking.

  The door opened and Wendy spent quite a long time looking at him. “So,” she said finally, “not dead then.”

  “I DIDN’T EVEN know anything had happened until two days later,” she said, opening her fridge and bringing out a couple of bottles of Budweiser. “Bud was so pissed he threw me in your old cell. Next thing I knew, he was opening the door and the town was under martial law.” She popped the tops off the beers, brought them into the living room, handed one to Alex, and sat down.

  “Martial law?” he asked.

  “Soldiers, Marines, Army Rangers, helicopters. They sealed the place off. Haven’t you seen the news?”

  Alex shrugged. Wendy’s apartment was small and neat. The home of someone who had thought it was just temporary and was now starting to face the possibility that it might be permanent.

  “It was like a movie,” she said. “You know? One where an alien spaceship crash-lands in some little town and the military move in and take over?”

  He nodded and sipped his beer. “Is it still under martial law?”

  “So far as I know. They questioned me for weeks and then they suddenly let me go. No thank you, no nothing. Just put me on a bus with about a dozen other people from the Facility, drove us to Mason City and left us to take care of ourselves. Alex, what happened in there?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Charles said you were in the control room.”

  For some reason, he felt rather happy to learn that Charles had survived. “I never made it,” he said, which was the story he and Flynn had come up with. “I got to the top of the stairs and there was this bang and I turned and ran for it.”

  “Charles didn’t remember you coming back downstairs,” she told him.

  “Charles was already gone by the time I got back into the lobby.”

  She frowned at him. “They say you’re dead.”

  “I’d just busted out of a cell,” he said, sticking to the story. “The police were after me. I stole a car and I got out of there, went out of state. I’ve been keeping my head down ever since.”

  “You’re looking well, for a man on the run.”

  “I’ve still got some contacts from when I was at the Globe,” he said. “They helped me out.” It sounded terribly thin, and he’d told Flynn that, but it was the best they’d been able to come up with. “It might be best if you don’t mention you’ve seen me.”

  “I think Bud has more things to worry about than arresting you.”

  “I didn’t see Larry at the Facility. He might still be out there somewhere.”

  “He was listed as dead.”

  “So am I.”

  She sighed. “You should go to the police.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know what to do,” he said, and it was more or less the first true thing he’d told her since he arrived. “Did you get a chance to see Ralph?”

  She shook her head. “I heard they evacuated the town but some people were refusing to leave. For all I know, he’s still there. I tried to find out but nobody’s talking. I managed to track Danny Hofstadter down and asked him, but he never got back to me.”

  Alex sighed and rubbed his eyes. “What about you?”

  She looked around the apartment. “I’m kind of in freefall. The Facility’s been sealed off but I’m still getting a salary. Nobody’s seen Stan Clayton in months, so we don’t know what the status of the project is.” She shrugged. “Don’t know. I’m waiting for someone to tell me what to do. We all are. A lot of the researchers got tired of waiting and went on to other projects. I got a call from Mickey Olive a couple of months ago and he’s in the same boat. He was talking about going back to England.”

  What a mess. “Does anyone have any idea what happened?”

  “They say it was a bomb. I can’t see what else it could have been; there was nothing in the control room that could have cau
sed an explosion.”

  “Doesn’t that seem at all odd to you? Why would they evacuate Sioux Crossing if it was just a bomb?”

  She spread her hands. “Defense,” she said, as if that explained everything. “I guess they wanted to secure whatever it was they were working on, if they were working on something. National security.” She drank some more beer and looked at him. “It’s been over a year, Alex. I should punch you.”

  “I know,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re sorry.”

  He opened his mouth to make an excuse—something about being on the run, her being hard to find—thought better of it, and closed his mouth again.

  “What are you going to do now?” she asked. “You can’t stay dead; your friends won’t look after you for ever.”

  Oh, I think they might. “I’ll be okay for a while. What’s your phone number?”

  She looked at him a few moments longer, then went to find a pen and something to write on. She came back with an old envelope, scribbled the number on it, and held it out. “Where are you staying?”

  “Better you don’t know,” he said, taking the envelope. “I’ll be in touch, though. I’ll try to come back again.”

  She looked sadly at him. “I don’t think you should make promises you can’t keep, Alex.”

  DRIVING BACK TO the airport, Flynn said, “How did it go?”

  “Is it possible for you to forget all about this?” Alex asked.

  Flynn thought about it. “If it was just me, maybe,” he said. “But too many people are in the loop to just pretend it didn’t happen.”

  “I don’t want her messed around with,” Alex said. “No surveillance, no phone taps, no hacking. Nothing. I want her left alone.”

  “I can make recommendations…”

  “No, Arthur,” Alex said. “You don’t understand. If Wendy gets dragged into this, however tangentially, I’m off, and you’ll never find me again.”

  There was a long silence in the car. Finally, Flynn said, “Okay.”

  They drove for a while longer in silence. Alex said, “Why do people keep asking me about Cairo?”

  Flynn glanced at him. “You sure you want to hear this?”

  “I won’t know until you tell me.”

  “Okay. Well, a day or so after you lit out of Fort Bragg, there was an incident in Cairo. Half the city centre was destroyed. There’s no footage of what happened, but some of the survivors say they saw a djinn walking through the city, a human figure that walked through buildings and wrecked them.”

  “And you think that might have been me?”

  “You keep telling us you weren’t there, although it’s possible you didn’t know where you were. But there’s another reason for us to think it wasn’t you. There was another incident, while you were unconscious at Quantico. A small town called Spicerville. Eight hundred people dead.”

  Alex looked out of the window, thinking about that.

  “We’re calling it an explosion in a railcar full of chemicals,” Flynn went on. “The Egyptians are saying theirs was a meteorite strike.”

  You’re the only survivor we currently have access to. “You think someone else made it out of the SCS. Someone like me.”

  “That’s the theory we’re working on. It might all be unconnected, but what are the chances?” Flynn turned the car off the freeway and onto the airport approach road. “Whoever it is, they don’t seem to be coping as well as you.”

  “They’re in real trouble then,” Alex told him. “Because I’m not coping at all.” He thought for a few moments. “There’s something else I want you to do.”

  Flynn glanced at him. “I thought we had established who was running this operation, Alex.”

  “Without my cooperation you can’t do anything,” Alex reminded him. “And you can’t make me cooperate.”

  Flynn sighed. “You and I are going to have to establish some parameters,” he said. “What do you want?”

  THEY BROKE IT to her gently. As gently as they could, considering it involved flying her to Quantico, sitting her down in a conference room, asking her to sign a six-inch-high stack of NDAs, and then showing her footage of Alex disappearing and reappearing, Alex making other things disappear and reappear, Alex taking a motorcycle to pieces just by looking at it. They didn’t show her the footage of him putting it back together again, because he hadn’t quite managed to do it right and what they’d wound up with looked more like a modern sculpture than a motorcycle.

  When the videos ended, she turned to him and said, “You lied to me.”

  “I did,” he admitted.

  “You came to my home and you lied to me.”

  He glanced at the screen. But look what I can do with my brain. “I’m sorry.”

  “I helped you bust out of that cell and you lied to me.”

  “Wendy,” he said.

  “You let me think you were dead and then you just turned up out of the blue and you lied to me.”

  “Dr McCoy,” Flynn said, stepping in smoothly. “We have a situation here which we think you could help us with.”

  She looked at him. “Who are you?” she said. “What’s going on here?”

  “As far as we understand it, Mr Dolan’s proximity to the accident at the SCS resulted in him gaining certain… abilities,” Flynn told her. “We’re currently assessing those abilities. Our long-term objective is to study the ongoing situation at Sioux Crossing and, if possible, reverse it.”

  Wendy narrowed her eyes at him. “‘Ongoing’?” she said.

  “The accident blew a hole in space-time,” Alex said. “That’s the best guess, anyway. The hole’s still open.”

  She looked at him, then at Flynn, then back. “Did anyone else survive?”

  “There are… indications that there may be one or more others,” Flynn said carefully. “We still don’t have enough information.”

  She sat back in her chair. “Jesus.”

  “I need a friendly face, Wendy,” Alex told her.

  “You’d better go find someone else, then,” she said. “Liar.”

  Alex sighed.

  “I should mention that quite a few people were opposed to your being made aware of the situation, Doctor,” Flynn said, without adding that he had been one of them. “Mr Dolan was very insistent.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “As of this moment, your security clearance is roughly equivalent to that of the Joint Chiefs. That’s how serious this is.”

  She blinked at him. “Does that mean you can tell me who really killed Kennedy?”

  Flynn said, “Dr McCoy.”

  “How about Roswell? Can I see the bodies?”

  “Dr McCoy,” Flynn said, infinite forebearance in his voice. “Do you recall me saying, just a few moments ago, ‘That’s how serious this is’?”

  Wendy gave Alex a final glare. “As far as I know, I’m still employed by Clayton Dynamics. They’re still sending me paychecks, anyway.”

  “And we’d prefer it if things remained that way,” Flynn told her. “The longer they remain unaware of your involvement here, the better. The amount of work you could do for them is limited, anyway. At this point, it seems unlikely that the SCS will reopen in our lifetimes.”

  That gave her pause. “Have you any idea what happened?”

  “We have a theory.”

  “And it… ” She nodded at Alex.

  “That, we still don’t understand,” Flynn told her. “Perhaps you could help us with that?”

  “Can I vivisect him?”

  “Hey,” Alex said.

  “All we can promise you is a government salary and research that no one else on earth is currently doing,” Flynn said.

  She looked at them again. “Well why didn’t you say that in the first place?”

  THERE WERE MORE weeks of tests, visits back there. The scientists were eager to try their theories out on him, calling the other place ‘Calabi-Yau space’, or, if they were trying to be particularly mysterious tha
t day, ‘the Manifold’. The theory was that Calabi-Yau space existed a tiny fraction of a nanometre away from what Alex had once thought of as ‘normal space’, if he had thought about it at all. Under normal circumstances, the scientists said, it would take more than the total energy output of the entire universe to force a single photon to cross between the dimensions, but travel from one space to another seemed to be more of a judo trick than a karate move, more a manipulation of force than a direct application of it. Somehow, the high energy run at the SCS had caught the universe at just the right angle, pitching everyone in the control room into a terrible emptiness and leaving behind Point Zero, a pulsing, open wound between the worlds, a point that wouldn’t be imaged. One of the researchers told him that the odds of the accident happening at all were billions and billions to one against. Like going into every casino on The Strip in Vegas and playing every slot machine and winning the jackpot on all of them, all in one evening. But that was the thing about odds and probability. You could talk about them as much as you wanted, do all the fancy math, but in the end there was only Either/Or. That was all that mattered. Either you won all the jackpots on The Strip, or you didn’t. Either it happened, or it didn’t. It had, and here he was.

  He suspected the scientists wouldn’t have told him anything at all, but he was their only eyewitness—the only one they had access to, anyway—and he was the only person they could bounce their ideas off, even though the concrete information he gave them wouldn’t have covered the back of a postage stamp. One of the scientists asked him, “What’s it like there? How many dimensions does it have?” and all Alex could tell him was, “Not enough. Too many. I don’t know.”

  Flynn’s lead researcher was a woman named Sierpińska, an untidy, genial Pole in her early fifties. “Ah, Alex,” she said, shaking her head sadly. “You mess with Nature, you see what you get?” Which he thought was an unusual point of view for a scientist.

  The latest session was taking place in what had become their informal Situation Room at Quantico, a big roomy boardroom with a table large enough for twenty people. Usually it was just four of five of them, crowded down at one end and talking in low voices about what had happened at Sioux Crossing. Alex’s contribution usually consisted of saying, “I don’t know,” at strategic points in the conversation.