Cassie melted into her mother’s arms, but her relief quickly evaporated as Emerson lunged at her mother. He wrenched one of Eve’s arms from around Cassie, and in one motion, stripped her of the gun she’d been holding and pushed her to the floor. Eve’s head hit the concrete with a thud.
Adrenaline buzzed through Cassie as Emerson swiveled towards Eve’s slumped form, pointing the barrel of the gun at her back.
“No!” Cassie screamed, her arms outstretched in protest.
And before he could pull the trigger, something happened that Cassie could not anticipate or explain. Her fear released something inside her, and suddenly the room lit up, the electric lamp on the desk sputtering to life as a radio in the corner crackled with static. Simultaneously, a burst of energy issued from Cassie’s fingers and knocked Emerson back on his heels. Then, just as quickly as it started, it all went dark again, all except the subtle glow from the lantern.
Emerson dropped the gun in surprise just as Eve’s eyes flicked open, and she grabbed it and jumped to her feet before he could regain his footing.
“What the hell just happened?” Eve challenged, pulling Cassie protectively behind her as she marched the cocked gun toward Emerson, backing him against the wall.
He glanced worriedly towards Cassie. “She’s cracking, Eve. Please.” He held up his hands in surrender. “Let me explain. I can help her.”
Eve backed off ever so slightly, but kept the gun trained between his eyes. “Talk.”
Emerson gulped down the thick air and stood a little straighter. “You knew when the Institute helped you conceive Cassie that she wasn’t an ordinary child. But we never told you what, exactly, she was.”
Eve waited, and Cassie held her breath. Cassie had always known she was different, but she never understood exactly how. She was finally going to get some answers.
“Cassie is the antidote, Eve. She holds enough energy in her body to bring the light back to the world.”
“What do you mean?” Eve questioned. “How is that possible?”
“We knew it was only a matter of time before the electromagnetic pulse technology you were working on was used, whether by us or an enemy. We needed some kind of backup that could reverse its effects. There was an experimental technology — originally conceived by energy conservationists — that could theoretically harness the energy within a human being, a person’s life force if you will. Think of how much energy we could capture! The only catch was, the source would be destroyed when the energy was transferred to the vessel.”
“You mean that taking a person’s life force energy would kill them?” Eve hissed.
Cassie didn’t understand. Did that mean someone had died so she could be born?
“Well, naturally,” Emerson explained. “But one person’s energy would never be enough to combat the devastating effects of an EMP. We needed more.”
Eve whispered the same question that rattled under Cassie’s tongue. “How many more?”
Emerson hesitated. “Do you remember that small mining town that was wiped off the map about nine years ago by a gas main explosion?”
Eve nodded.
Emerson looked Eve in the eyes and said the words she’d already pieced together in her mind. “That was the Institute, Eve. The life forces of 25,000 people are stored inside your daughter.”
Cassie and Eve gasped in unison. Cassie couldn’t even conceive of that many people dying, let alone for her. “Mom,” Cassie croaked. “It can’t be…”
Her eyes never leaving Emerson, Eve reached back and grasped her daughter’s hand. “I’m so sorry, Cass. I never imagined…I didn’t know.”
“No one did,” Emerson interjected, “except for a few select individuals at the head of the Institute. Your friend Rourke included,” he added.
Eve shook her head in disbelief. Emerson slowly stretched out an open-palmed hand towards her.
“And no one has to know, either, Eve…I’ve already taken care of everyone who was part of the experiment. We can keep it a secret. We can keep Cassie safe.”
“But why?” Eve demanded. “What’s in it for you?”
“Simple,” Emerson shrugged. “I want to keep the lights off. And as long as Cassie is alive, the world will remain dark. But you know that something’s not right, Eve — she’s been sick for weeks. We never knew how long the vessel would hold, and it’s getting to be too much for her. I can help.”
Eve hesitated as she considered Emerson’s deal.
Cassie’s head swam, the voices in her mind shrieking. 25,000 voices.
It was too much. She just wanted a release from this torture. She didn’t want to be responsible for all of these people’s deaths. She wanted the lights to come back on.
There was only one thing to do.
The chorus in her head told her what came next, and Cassie obeyed, reaching into her pocket to withdraw the shard of glass she’d hidden earlier. The voices urging her on, she pressed its razor-sharp edge to her throat, gasping at the sting as the tip pierced her skin.
Against the wall, Emerson’s eyes grew wide as he realized what Cassie was about to do. Eve swung around to see what he gaping at and froze in place, taking in her only child with a blade of glass pressed against her jugular.
“Mom,” Cassie murmured. “I’m sorry. I have to.”
Chapter Fourteen
Written by Saul Tanpepper
As soon as Jared realized he’d never find Cassie in the dark, he turned around and rushed back to the cave. No sense to wasting valuable time or risking a collision with a tree. Or worse — running into whoever had put hollow-point rounds into his friends’ skulls. Besides, he’d trained Cassie too well. If she didn’t want to be found, then in all likelihood she wouldn’t be. It was as simple as that.
You forget she’s just a kid, he reminded himself. You give her too much credit.
But he knew she was more than just a kid. He’d always known it deep down, had seen signs that she wasn’t, well, typical. There was always this strange sort of energy about her, almost electrical. Plus the fact that she was never sick, not with colds or ear infections or other things that affected children. She’d sometimes complain of achiness right before severe thunderstorms, which would sometimes be accompanied by a slight fever. But the ague would always pass without intervention. It happened so often that both he and Eve would simply brush the episodes off, forget about them. Until the next bad storm.
But now those memories floated to the front of his mind, and there they bobbed in the most irritating way possible, as if to say, “Bravo, buddy. You’ve finally caught yourself something. But you best be careful reeling it in, because you’ll lose it if you yank too hard.”
Whatever it was, he knew it would come to him eventually. He just needed to be patient.
After the power went out, and especially now, he’d come to accept that Cassie was somehow involved in what was happening, not just Eve. Even if he didn’t understand how or why. That was why Emerson’s news hadn’t thrown him off balance as much as it should have. Or why Jared hadn’t flatly denied it in the strongest terms possible. And the matter-of-fact way in which that madman had suggested the trade — Your wife for Cassie — it was like he almost expected Jared to already know the truth.
He stopped halfway into the cave, suddenly uncertain of what he was going to do. The tiny flame on the candle flickered from his movement, casting ghoulish shadows on the walls that seemed to dance to some macabre but unheard tune. He felt lost.
There was no radio here to send or receive transmissions — Cassie had seen to that — and he had no idea where she was going. He assumed it was to save her mother, to offer herself up in exchange. But that begged the question: How did she know where to go?
The bobber tugged at his brain: Because she knows where Emerson’s holding Eve.
Which meant that wherever it was, it had to be somewhere nearby, somewhere within walking distance.
Another tug: It’s somewhere Eve’s taken her before
.
But where?
He absently patted his pockets, his eyes desperately scanning the meager trappings they’d brought with them into the cave, hoping the answer would present itself. His fingers found the shape of his cell phone, and a jolt passed through his body from the sudden understanding which came to him then.
Trapped inside of the palm-sized rectangle was Eve’s contact lens GPS data for the weeks leading up to the power outage and, supposedly, images of those places. He’d been perplexed by her willingness to be tracked by him, to access the places where she’d been. He’d promised her that he would never look at it, that to do so would feel like a breach of trust, a violation. And she’d laughed his discomfiture off with a careless flip of her hand before wrapping her arms around him in an embrace that now seemed loaded with some deeper and more sinister meaning. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep, honey.”
But he had been sincere about it at the time, so much so that he’d pushed the whole episode from his mind.
After the pulse, Eve had insisted he continue carrying the phone around, even checking to make sure he’d slip it into his pocket each morning. “Some routines help keep us grounded,” she’d said. “Besides, you never know when the service might come back up.” It was a strange thing to say, and they both knew it. The service wasn’t going to come back, not any time soon, anyway. And when it did, the phone would still be fried. Anything with a circuit board was toast.
It had to be the GPS recordings. That’s why she’d made him keep the phone.
So, assuming the chip was still intact, he needed to extract the data. Well, that shouldn’t be too hard. The equipment he would need was secreted safely away at the main camp, inside its own Faraday Cage. Beneath the boards of the raised platform to the outdoor classroom where the bodies of his three dead friends now sat in silent vigil.
He prayed the chip was still intact.
* * *
Jared stumbled over the two-way radio on his way there. The casing had been violently smashed. More tread marks marred the soft ground beside the road — two, maybe three different pairs of boots, each with a distinctive chevron pattern on their soles, and a single partial print of one of Cassie’s smaller sneakers. That’s when he knew she’d been taken, and he nearly collapsed in despair at the thoughts which forced their way into his mind.
Get it together, man! You can still save her. You have to!
Who would do it? Who would take her? If it was Emerson’s men, then the immediate danger was to Eve, not Cassie. Given Emerson’s willingness to swap, Jared had to assume the man behind the outage wouldn’t need Eve anymore. The moment Cassie was safely in his hands, his wife was just as good as dead.
But if it was someone else —
He wouldn’t let himself complete the thought. It was just too horrible to contemplate. For the first time, he actually hoped Emerson’s people had gotten to his daughter —
She’s not your daughter! his mind stubbornly corrected.
“She is, damn it,” he growled in greater defiance. “I don’t care what anyone says. She’s my girl.”
He stood up and, fists clenched in rage, ran.
* * *
Stage floorboards pried up, Jared unlatched the lid of the first thick-walled container and set it aside. Then he reached down past the insulating mesh. He set the small computer tablet on the edge and cursed himself for not adding a few hand-cranked flashlights. In the darkness, he struggled to find the port for the power cable. Once connected to the static generator, he carefully cranked the handle.
Please work. Please work.
After a moment, the power button began to glow. He kept at it for another ten minutes, patiently resisting the urge to crank faster, knowing he could easily burn out the delicate circuitry if he wasn’t careful. Finally, the light turned from yellow to green. The screen woke and cast enough of a glow for him to proceed.
Fingers shaking, he gingerly removed the back of the phone and tweezed out the tiny chip with its precious digital cargo. To the naked eye, the tiny black object — no larger than his pinky nail — appeared undamaged.
Jared had been in such a state coming back that he had barely even noticed his friends as he ran passed them, had blocked out the smell of their death. But now, as he prepared to insert the chip into its tiny port in the tablet, the mental bobber popped once more to the surface of his mind. He flashed on the scene he and Cassie had encountered earlier in the day, and now two things registered to him as odd. First was way the bodies had been arranged, seated without bindings. The other was the absence of wounds besides the single small holes just above the bridges of their noses.
None of them had put up a fight.
He could see Percy not resisting. The man had never raised a hand against anyone. Had, in fact, dedicated himself to saving lives.
But both Wade and Ed were highly trained, fit, and young. They knew more about weapons and hand-to-hand combat than just about anyone Jared had ever met. They would never have let themselves be taken without a fight. Not even if the odds were stacked heavily against them.
Which meant only one thing: They had known their killer. And they had trusted him
Rourke.
Had to be. But what did it mean?
The tiny chip slipped from his trembling fingers and fell into the darkness at Jared’s feet. “Son of a —”
Panic rising in his throat, he carefully tipped the tablet to direct the meager light into the darkness beneath him, and there he saw the tiny black object balancing on the toe of his shoe.
With excruciating slowness, he bent down and retrieved the chip. Then, just as carefully, he inserted it into the tablet. A folder popped open and asked whether he wanted to view the data. He did.
File upon file scrolled across the screen. He let out a deep sigh and wondered how he would ever find what he needed in time.
“Help me out here, guys,” he murmured, glancing one last time at his silent colleagues. Beyond them, that damn beacon blinked on and off again. Then it came on once more.
This time, however, instead of going out, the light grew brighter and brighter until it lit up the whole southern sky in an intense blinding flash.
And as it faded Jared got this awful sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach that something terrible had just happened.
Chapter Fifteen
Written by David Estes
Cassie knew that if her mom were to take her temperature at that moment, the thermometer would burst, spraying mercury like blood spatter. It was as if her body was on fire, burning from the inside out, sending light and heat and crackling electricity in all directions. Healing her. Clotting the blood that was spraying from the mortal slash she had made in her neck. Repairing tendons and arteries. Stitching her skin back together as easily as a seamstress sews a hem.
But not only healing her. Healing the world. Instinctively she knew how to control the energy, sending it to only those devices that needed it, diverting its power and capacity for destruction away from the human forms she sensed all around her.
Away from Cassie’s mom, whose dark shadow cowered behind an overturned table, her hands thrown over her head.
And the souls that created Cassie, that gave her life, were speaking to her, their whispers growing louder and louder, rising to deafening shouts, exclamations of joy at having been reborn — because of incredibly advanced technology — in the form of pure energy; the same pure white-hot energy now rushing from her every pore like a deluge through a canyon.
In that instant, she knew them. Somehow, she knew them all. Their memories, their dreams, their hopes, their fears, and their last thoughts as their world ended in an eruption of fire and smoke and pain.
Pain, Cassie remembered. She should’ve been feeling intense pain, like she had for so many weeks. Instead, she felt nothing but the frantic buzz of energy and a strong desire to laugh, which she did, throwing back her head and giggling.
Her laughter was cut off, however, when t
he voices of every single soul within her screamed the same name, like a threat aimed at the one who caused their pain, their suffering, their deaths. “Emerson!” they cried. Then louder: “Emerson!”
Cassie realized then that his dark shape was trying to regain his feet, trying to push toward her, swatting at the white light swarming around him, as if fighting against a heavy wind. Reaching toward her with hands meant to cause her harm. Hands meant to kill her in the hopes that her death would snuff out the light inside her.
She knew what she had to do. Not for herself, but for them. For the souls lost in that small mining town, crying for the blood of their enemy. With nothing more than a thought, she let the energy close in on Emerson, like air rushing back into a crack in an airtight vacuum.
Unlike her own body, which had adapted to the energy coursing inside her, Emerson’s body was no match for the intense flash of power. Although Cassie wanted to look away, she couldn’t, silently bearing witness to the end of a monster, his screams filling her ears as his skin peeled away from his bones, laying bare muscle and organs for a brief moment before they too were reduced to a puddle of gore.
With a final burst of indescribably white light, the energy left her all at once, leaving her breathless and exhausted. Cassie dropped to her knees, staring at her hands, which were the only part of her still glowing with energy. But as the seconds ticked away, they too returned to normal.
She was dimly aware of a light glowing in the corner. The electric lamp, which was previously dead, now lit the room. Somewhere a phone rang. Then another. At first there were shouts of surprise, but they quickly morphed to anger. Believers in darkness coming to realize their plans had been thwarted.
“Cassie?” a voice said. Her mom dragged herself out from behind the toppled-over table, her eyes wide with wonder.
“I’m here,” Cassie said.
The woman who raised her approached slowly, tentatively, the way Cassie might expect someone to approach a cornered dog. Or a ghost, perhaps. “You’re alive,” her mom said.
The Catastrophe Theory Page 6
