The Return of the Incredible Exploding Man

by Dave Hutchinson

  Ralph had been exfiltrated from Sioux Crossing and was now on the way to Philadelphia, where he still had a few friends. Getting money to him proved complicated.

  Wendy asked a friend to set up an offshore bank account for him, then Alex created cash, a few thousand dollars at a time, and she took it out of Quantico and gave it to her friend, who banked it. It wasn’t ideal, but Alex had discovered he couldn’t directly manipulate data the way he could manipulate matter and it was the best solution he could come up with. He’d visit the old man when he was settled in, but for the moment there was nothing else to do but destroy stuff and binge-watch box-sets of old television shows on his laptop.

  Finally, it got too much for him. One morning, without telling anyone, he stepped into the Manifold and then back out again.

  He was standing in the middle of Main Street in Sioux Crossing and the place looked like the set for one of the post-apocalyptic shows he’d been watching lately. All the stores were shut, many of them boarded up, the buildings were dilapidated, rubbish was strewn across the street and along the pavements. Cars were parked haphazardly, left where they’d been when the Army first moved into the town and began its evacuation. At Stockmann, he saw signs of looting—windows broken, items of merchandise dropped on the pavement. It was all, he thought, heart-crushingly sad. He’d liked the town, liked its people, had actually, even after Larry started harassing him, felt at home here, and now it was all gone. Flynn said a lot of the population had been dispersed to family and friends across the state; the remainder were in a relocation camp near Mason City. The government was working hard to help, said Flynn, but he didn’t take into account the farmers suddenly spirited off their land or the store owners or the people whose family had been in the county since before it had been named after Bud’s great-grandfather. It was unlikely any of them would ever be allowed back; the people now in control of Sioux Crossing wanted as big a cordon sanitaire around the SCS as they could manage.

  He turned and looked back up the street. The cloud rose above the buildings, turning unhurriedly up into the sky. There was now a big fat civilian no-fly zone over Rosewater County; commercial flights were diverted a long way to the south and north. That would probably be permanent too.

  Of the supposed Montana militia, he saw no sign. Perhaps they were out on manouvres. He walked down the street and tried the doors of the Telegraph, but they were locked, and peering through the windows he could see it was deserted, abandoned in the middle of a working day, plates and cups still on the tables where people had left their meals behind. The Banner offices were similarly locked up. He wondered if he would be able to locate Dru Winslow without Flynn’s help. He could turn a block of cement into a three-course meal just by thinking about it, but he couldn’t navigate the labyrinthine backwaters of US bureaucracy without at least an initial clue where to look.

  The New Rose was locked, all the lights turned off. He stood looking through the glass doors into the lobby, and to be honest apart from being in darkness it didn’t look all that different from when he was living there; he’d always suspected the staff outnumbered the guests by about ten to one. How Danny had managed to keep it going was a mystery, although he’d probably received a fairly chunky stipend for the government’s occasional use of the top floor.

  The whole town was growing wild. In a few years you wouldn’t be able to see the houses for overgrowth, the roads would be cracked by weeds and frost and snow. Sioux Crossing would eventually be like those old abandoned gold mining towns in California, except tourists would not be allowed to come here to poke around and take photographs. If they couldn’t close Point Zero—and probably even if they could—the town was going to be out of bounds for ever.

  He walked back to the road and stood there with his hands in his pockets. In the distance, he could hear helicopters landing and taking off at Camp Batavia, but apart from that it was eerily quiet. He’d always thought the county was quiet, but he hadn’t noticed how much background noise there actually was. Traffic, farm machinery, human voices. All gone. It probably hadn’t been this quiet in Rosewater County since before the first settlers arrived.

  He wondered why Flynn and Professor Sierpińska hadn’t asked him to close Point Zero. He didn’t know if he could, but surely it was worth a try?

  “YOU WENT WALKABOUT,” Flynn said casually while they waited for the meeting to begin.

  “I got bored. I went and had a look at Sioux Crossing,” Alex said, looking around the conference table. There were some unfamiliar faces here today, all of them not quite managing not to glance at him.

  “Hm.” Flynn reached out for one of the water jugs in the middle of the table, filled his glass. “Let us know the next time you want to do that, would you?”

  “Cause a bit of a stir, did I?”

  He replaced the jug on its coaster. “How was it? Sioux Crossing?”

  “It’s sad. I liked the town.” He wondered briefly if this was the right time to broach the subject of Dru Winslow’s whereabouts, then decided it wasn’t.

  “I never saw it, before.” Flynn sat back in his comfy chair. “We got some new guys, I see.”

  “I was thinking that. Recognise anyone?”

  He shook his head. “I’m getting too old to spend my days in committees. Everyone looks about twelve. I should be out fishing somewhere. Do you fish?”

  “I never have, no.”

  “You should try it, sometime. Calms the spirit.”

  “Unless you’re the fish.”

  “Can I ask a personal question?”

  “You can ask…”

  “If you could change what happened, would you? If you could go back to that day and stop yourself visiting the collider, knowing what you do now, would you?”

  Alex looked at him. “What do you think?”

  “Well, I don’t know, that’s why I asked. I was thinking about this the other evening. Sure, you want your old life back; this stuff sucks, you wouldn’t be human if you didn’t. But on the other hand, you’re not human any more, are you. You teleported from here to Iowa and back, that’s pretty cool. That would be hard to give up and go back to being normal.”

  Alex thought about it. “I wouldn’t miss the meetings.”

  Flynn grunted. “You’ll not hear me argue about that. Speaking of which, try not to lose your temper.”

  Alex said, “What?” but he didn’t get a chance to answer because a young man in a business suit had walked to the front of the room and taken the audiovisual remote control from the podium.

  “Ladies, gentlemen,” he said by way of calling the room to order. “Before we begin, this meeting is classified FORAGE. Could anyone who is not FORAGE cleared please leave now. If you are not FORAGE cleared and you do not leave, you risk prosecution.”

  There was a moment’s silence. Nobody made a move. Alex had never heard the codename before, so he started to get up, but Flynn put a hand on his arm. “You’re cleared, Alex,” he murmured. “Don’t be a dick.”

  The young man in the suit gave the room a last once-over, then nodded and said, “Thank you.” He thumbed the remote and the screen behind him came on with the words OPERATION FORAGE centred on it. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “First I’d like to detail the decision process which led to Operation Forage.” He thumbed the remote again and an image of Point Zero came up. It had been taken from quite a distance, the spiral cloud hanging over the abandoned main building.

  “Eighteen months ago,” the young man went on, “an accident of unknown nature occurred at the Clayton Dynamics supercollider at Sioux Crossing, Iowa. As far as we can judge, everyone within a two-hundred-foot radius of the site of the accident was somehow translocated into a dimension which we are still struggling to understand.

  “A year later, a naked human being was seen to appear out of thin air within the security perimeter of Fort Bragg. This individual was interviewed by base security, and partway through the interview they disappeared. The individual subsequently m
ade a number of reappearances over a period of two months, and was eventually designated Resource Bravo.” Alex wondered if he should stand and take a bow.

  “To date, Resource Bravo is the only individual to have visited the dimension to which the Sioux Crossing accident opened access. A working group was convened to address this fact, and reported that steps should be taken to broaden access.”

  Alex felt a dim stirring of concern.

  The young man changed the image on the screen. This one was of a group of eight men and women in desert camouflage, carrying automatic weapons and equipment. Their faces had been pixellated out. “Oh, you didn’t,” Alex said, so quietly that only Flynn heard him. He put a hand on his arm again.

  “To this end,” the young man continued, “four days ago, on executive order, a SEAL team was transported to the site of the Sioux Crossing incident. Their orders were to access the adjacent dimension and carry out a full reconnaissance, with a view to establishing a foothold situation on the other side.”

  “Now just a fucking minute,” Alex said out loud. Every head in the room turned to face him.

  “Alex,” Flynn murmured.

  Alex shook the hand off his arm. “Did it not occur to anyone to ask me about this?” he demanded. “I mean, just for my opinion?”

  “Alex,” Flynn said again. “Calm down and hear the man out, would you?”

  Alex looked at the young man, who was regarding him as if he was an unexploded bomb. “Did they come back?” he asked. When there was no reply, Alex said, “No. They didn’t. Jesus Christ.”

  “It was a direct order from the president,” said one of the other men sitting at the table, an older man with a deeply unconvincing combover.

  “Your president’s an asshole, and so is whoever talked him into signing off on this,” Alex told him.

  “Alex,” Flynn snapped. “That’s enough.”

  Alex suddenly realised he was halfway out of his chair. He sat down again. “Muppets,” he muttered. Then louder again, “You’ve killed them all, you realise.”

  “You’re not dead,” someone, Alex couldn’t see who, pointed out, and a heavy silence descended on the room.

  HE CORNERED FLYNN in the secure breakout room and jabbed a finger at his chest repeatedly. “That stuff about wanting a foothold situation is bullshit,” he said quietly. “You wanted a squad of superheroes and you thought you could get them by sticking a bunch of SEALs through Point Zero. And now they’re all dead and you want me to clear up your mess.”

  “It was a decision taken above my head,” Flynn said. “For what it’s worth, I argued against it.”

  “Well you didn’t fucking argue hard enough, did you. Jesus.” Incandescent with rage, he turned away and approached the refreshment table. Everyone there moved away, which was fine by him. He poured himself a coffee and glared at the pastries and sandwiches and bowls of fruit.

  “There are those,” said a voice at his shoulder, “who say you’re getting too big for your boots, son.”

  Alex turned, found himself looking at the unconvincing combover. “I beg your pardon?”

  The combover looked Alex up and down, a smoothly plump operator in a suit worth more than a month’s rent on Alex’s old apartment in Boston. “You’re pretty important right now,” he said. “Got everyone running around and dancing to your tune.”

  “I hadn’t noticed much dancing going on,” Alex said in a low voice. Across the room, he sensed Flynn starting to move towards them.

  “Maybe if you weren’t the only one, you wouldn’t be so important any more, Mr Dolan,” he went on. “Maybe that’s why you’re so royally pissed.”

  Alex looked at him a moment longer. Flynn had almost reached them. He smiled at the combover. “Sure,” he told him. “That’s exactly it.” And then he was gone.

  “Alex!” Flynn shouted, but by then it was too late. He was gone too.

  “SO,” SAID FLYNN. “Have we got that out of our system now?”

  “Don’t patronise me, Arthur,” Alex said. “I’m not in the mood.” They were sitting in the Situation Room at Quantico, along with Dom Maserati and Professor Sierpińska and a couple of staffers.

  “Where did you go?”

  “None of your business.”

  “There’s been another incident,” Dom said from the end of the table. “A village in India. Looks like a bulldozer the size of a cruise ship went through there.”

  Alex thought about it. “I wasn’t in India.”

  “Can we believe that, Alex?” asked Flynn. “Really?”

  “I don’t care what you believe,” he said. “I wasn’t there.”

  Dom opened a folder and tossed a sheaf of photos on the table. Alex saw aerial shots of a forest with a wide, neat slot cut out of it down to bare earth. “About twelve hundred people,” he said. “Just gone. No bodies, no rubble, no nothing. Just gone.”

  “Not me,” Alex told him.

  “Right,” Flynn said. “Okay. So, we still have an ongoing situation and we still don’t know how to respond to it. Alex, we need you to go over there and locate the SEAL team, assess their condition, and do a headcount. Are you good with that?”

  “Sure.”

  “Fine.” He closed the folder in front of him, dropped it in his briefcase, and stood up. “Professor Sierpińska will brief you. We’ll make the insertion at ten o’clock tomorrow morning.” And with that he left.

  “He’s still pissed with you,” Dom said.

  “No shit.”

  “He tried to stop them. We all did.”

  “That’s not good enough, Dom. Trying to give people superpowers like that. What were they thinking?”

  “There’s a faction in Washington,” Dom said, “which is more pissed off than you could imagine that the world’s only superhero isn’t an American. I know you don’t think that matters; you have your own problems. Myself, I think it’s insane. But these people think their superhero should sound more like Steve Rogers than Billy Connolly.”

  “I don’t sound remotely like Billy Connolly.”

  Dom looked levelly at him. “Alex,” he said. “You can’t just go round making US senators vanish. I mean, that probably qualifies as an act of war or something.”

  “He’s an asshole.”

  “Well, it took him a day and a half to hike down off that mountain and find someone with a phone, but he says thank you for his unexpected vacation in New Zealand.” Dom grinned. “He might be an asshole, but he’s a tough asshole. Adults are running this operation for the moment; Senator Pulver could change all that, if he got it into his mind to, and we’ve just seen what things are like when that happens.”

  He had a point. Pulver, and people like him, were completely irrelevant to Alex, but for the moment at least the damage they could do wasn’t.

  “I guess I should apologise to Arthur.”

  “Nah.” Dom shook his head and stuffed the folder of photos under his arm. “He’ll be fine. He’s a tough asshole too.”

  He reached out and touched Alex’s elbow. “People like Pulver, they don’t like things they can’t control. It makes them angry, and they don’t ever forget. Art spent twelve years with the CIA, running agents into China; he just rolls with this stuff, gets up, dusts himself down, gets the job done. The Pulvers of this world, they break things that don’t go their way.”

  “Point taken, Dom. But keep me in the loop from now on. I could have prevented this, and now it’s a disaster.”

  “It was handled badly, and Art would be telling you that himself, if he wasn’t so pissed off right now.” He gave Alex’s elbow a little squeeze and let go. “Let’s get the job done, Alex, eh?”

  “WE’D PREFER IT if you didn’t interact with them at all,” Professor Sierpińska said. “The simple act of observing them could collapse them into a rest-state.”

  “They’re going to be hard to count if I can’t look at them,” Alex said.

  She sighed. “This is so unnecessary.”

  “Yes.” Ale
x looked down at the file in his lap. It was two inches thick and detailed the military career of Lieutenant Sarah J Bowman, one of the SEALs who had been sent through Point Zero. The cover of the file was thickly decorated with classification stripes and warnings that any uncleared persons who read it would be prosecuted or shot or thrown into a cage full of tigers. Its pages were a mass of black redactions, but from what was left it was obvious that Lieutenant Bowman had had quite a time in the Navy; the names of half a dozen international flashpoints over the past eight years or so appeared between the crossings-out, and one or two places that hadn’t been international flashpoints, at least officially. There was a photo near the front of the file of a blonde, capable-looking woman in a dress uniform, standing in front of a huge Stars and Stripes. Alex wondered whether Bowman and her colleagues had been ordered to go, or had been invited to volunteer. It would take quite an unusual person to volunteer for a mission like that. What did they tell them? ‘When you come back, you’ll be able to do magic’? He closed the file and sighed.

  The Professor looked up, raised her eyebrows.

  “I’m not up to this,” Alex told her. “I’m a journalist.”

  She looked at him for a few moments, looking sad. “You’re all we have, Alex.” She thought about it and added, “That came out all wrong. I’m sorry.”

  He smiled. “It’s okay. I feel that way too.”

  She sat back in her chair and looked at Alex across the desk. “It’s sometimes easy to forget, as scientists, that real lives are involved,” she said. “For me, this is…” she gestured at the ceiling, searching for the words, “… the opportunity of a lifetime. The research we’re doing here would win every single one of us a Nobel Prize, always assuming it was ever declassified. But in our eagerness, in our excitement, we sometimes forget that… well.” She nodded at the file on his lap, the stack of similar folders on his side of the desk. “Real human beings are getting hurt, and maybe worse.”