Command One bore the accusations patiently, then stood smoothly. “If you’ll please follow me.”
“Oh, you bet I’ll follow you,” said Bledsoe. “You couldn’t keep me away.”
Then again, after everything he had seen, Bledsoe supposed Command One could keep him away rather easily. He fell into step behind the taller man, forcing himself to slow both his pace and his mouth.
“So, where are we going?”
Command One led him through what he had assumed was the kitchen door, the same dark portal through which Bernie and Winston had gone.
“To Winston…and others,” said Command One. “I will answer one of your previous questions now.”
As they walked from the dimly lit dining room into the complete darkness of what no longer seemed likely to be a kitchen, Bledsoe said in a much quieter tone, “Much obliged.”
In the trickle of light from the room behind them, Bledsoe was barely able to see Command One stop. He missed running into the man’s back by only a few inches.
Command One turned to face him and said, “The Omega Mesh secured Winston Chase’s cooperation by making a deal with him.”
“I know. He gets to run his errand in trade for his—” Bledsoe tripped slightly on the word that wanted to come from his mouth, but he finished with “—cooperation.”
“Yes.”
A dim glow started around them, and Bledsoe realized that they were standing near the middle of a black, blue-rimmed rectangle within an impenetrable sea of darkness. Bledsoe was curious as to what lay beyond the rectangle’s edge, but not curious enough to test it.
“His errand,” Command One continued, “was to attempt to save his friends and mother from the grenade you used to destroy their plane.”
Bledsoe’s first impulse was to deny the accusation, but Command One said the words with such quiet assurance that he knew there was no point. And the man wasn’t angry — at all. Again, Management seemed more than ready to excuse him for anything he had done in the past. Bledsoe wondered how much that extended into the future.
Bledsoe played the events back in his memory, including his pursuit of Winston from the desert floor until the boy disappeared.
“I don’t see how that’s possible,” Bledsoe said. “There was no time. I would’ve seen him.”
“Apparently, there was just enough. You are going to join them now.”
“Them? You mean Bernie and the boy?”
In the low blue glow, Bledsoe thought he caught the slightest hint of Command One straightening his shoulders and tensing his jaw.
“And others. They successfully rescued everyone from the plane, although there were injuries.”
Even though he had killed her already, Bledsoe couldn’t help but feel his possessiveness and concern flare. “Amanda? Was — is she one of the injured?”
“No,” said Command One. “They are with the fifth piece at Hanford Nuclear Reserve. You need to be with Winston.”
But Bledsoe already knew how that story ended. He had seen it, extracted it himself from Claude’s pulsing, dying brain. Did Command One and the Omega Mesh not know that? Or did they…and that was why they were sending Bledsoe there now? Perhaps they knew Winston was destined to die fetching the piece for Bledsoe, and that was all part of their master plan. It had to be.
For once, Bledsoe decided to keep his mouth shut and let the cards keep falling.
“I understand,” he said. “I’m ready.”
***
Winston had reached Bernie’s foot, but the rest of him remained in mid-lunge as time flow returned to normal and vertigo overwhelmed him. He couldn’t tell where he was or which way was up until his face struck the metal grating forehead first. Even though the edges were blunted, the steel sliced into his forehead, nose, and right cheek. Perhaps getting it over in an instant was more merciful than in super-slow motion.
Regardless, the nausea and exhaustion struck him with tangible force. He lay on the catwalk, doubled up, not daring to breathe as his stomach and willpower struggled to decide the fate of his last meal. His head pounded mercilessly and swam as if trapped in a whirlpool. He tried to open his eyes, but visual input made the vertigo so much worse. Besides, all he could see before his face was the metal grating and a steady red drip trailing away into a bluish-green blur below. His brain refused to supply any immediate information about the latter, but there was no question about the red. He was bleeding, draining into the emptiness below.
“Winston!”
A female voice, tight but seemingly distant. Young. Familiar.
“Dude! What just happened? Are you—? Dude!”
He knew that voice. Shade.
The grating under Winston jostled repeatedly, making the metal rattle into his face. The pain throbbing behind his forehead felt as if it might burst from between his eyes. Hands gripped his back and shoulders, trying gently to turn his body. He gasped as his stomach clenched and he felt bile rise into his throat.
“What? What?” asked the girl’s voice.
Alyssa.
He turned his head up toward her, only to find one eye working and the other obscured by blood.
Her face registered shock and horror.
Another set of hands appeared, then his mother’s face came into view, a white mask of fear. She cupped his cheek in her palm as she scanned his body.
“Winston,” she choked. “Oh, my God, you—!”
In that instant, he feared that he’d missed spotting an incoming shrapnel piece and that part of his head had been blown off. That would explain things.
“Hold on,” Shade said as he came into view beside her. “Let me look.”
He bent down close, brow deeply furrowed, brown eyes intense and worried. He put his hand on the side of Winston’s head, fingers sliding over his hairline and cheek.
“Nah, this isn’t bad,” he said. “Just cuts. They bleed a lot, but I see stuff like this all the time.”
The preceding seconds started to return to Winston. He remembered the plane. Bledsoe returning for his mom. The grenade. Watching the bomb fragments slowly rip into Colonel Bauman’s flesh.
But Shade, Alyssa, and his mom were here. They were real and alive. He had at least done that much right.
Winston tried to focus with his one clear eye, but the space above him was dark and filled with an elaborate mesh of crisscrossing lines. The air felt thick, warm, and damp with humidity from the pool.
“We need a first aid kit,” said Shade. “I’ve got some bandages and antiseptic in my pack.” He winced as he surveyed Winston’s wound.
“Colonel first,” Winston groaned.
“On it,” said Shade.
Winston groaned, feeling sweat coat his body. The clench of nausea around his guts was beginning to ease, but he still had no desire to open his eyes.
That was a lot of words. Winston had a hard time making them all fit together into a coherent thought, but he finally managed,
Winston realized that he couldn’t see Bernie, but the idea of sitting up was more than he could stomach.
Winston squinted his eyes closed as he tried to turn himself to better face Shade and Alyssa and immediately regretted it.
<—you should be able mentally embrace the sensation and mute it. Just as with the cold and heat, link the sensation and energy to your breathing.>
Then Bernie did appear above and between Winston’s friends. He reached down between them and touched Winston’s arm. They didn’t link into a tactile network, but Winston could tell that Bernie was poking around at various points around his mind.
Winston shivered, not feeling fine at all.
Somehow, he did. It felt like his skull was about to rupture from internal pressure, so he visualized the pressure ebbing with each breath, like air escaping from a balloon.
Moment by moment, breath by breath, the pain and nausea receded.
Winston finally dared to glance at himself and found that his body glowed with a fierce blue as the QVs went about their work. Apparently, the time travel impact was systemic, not just in his head and guts.
At last, he thought he had the pain under control. He extended a hand toward his friends and groaned, “Careful.”
They each gingerly grasped him under an arm and helped him up to sitting. Slowly, Winston lifted the neck of his T-shirt and wiped at his eye. Thick blood smeared across the fabric, but he could tell that the area was uninjured. When he opened the eye, he sighed with relief at being able to see normally.
A man groaned, and Alyssa and Bernie quickly moved away to join Shade. They knelt over Colonel Bauman, who lay on his right side. Winston didn’t have much of a view, but he could see that the back of the colonel’s left shoulder was dark with blood and that the stain glistened as fresh blood continued to spill from the wound in his upper back.
“Grandpa!” Alyssa said as she knelt beside him. “Can you talk?”
“When there’s nothing better to do,” he wheezed.
“How bad is it?” Alyssa asked.
The Colonel tried to lift his left arm, but he convulsed in pain.
“Bad,” he said simply, then he launched into a tortuous fit of coughing interrupted only by his own gasps of agony. “Can’t breathe.”
Winston shifted to have a better view of the colonel. Blood trailed from one corner of his mouth. Winston was no doctor, but even he knew that an injury to the upper back that somehow led to blood in the mouth had to be very grim — likely damage to the lung.
Even Bernie knew not to finish the sentence.
“Winston, we need to get him to a hospital right now,” said Alyssa. The barely contained fear was obvious in her voice.
“I can hear the hissing,” said Shade, voice grave and eyes wide. “I’ve read about this. It’s a sucking chest wound. He’s got a punctured lung.”
Shade threw off his pack and tore into its contents. A few seconds later, he held up a Ziploc bag and his small roll of gray duct tape. After having Alyssa slice away her grandpa’s shirt and flight suit and wipe away as much blood as possible, Shade directed her to cover the hole with the baggie. He then sealed the bag into place with several short tape strips.
The ghastly spectacle brought Winston back to where he was and why they were here. They weren’t going to find an emergency room, Winston thought as he carefully turned his body, but he would find—
There. His father, wearing a white jumpsuit with a zippered front, once again a younger man.
Claude stood at the far end of the catwalk, having apparently just exited from a tiny control room mounted to a platform built on steel girders that jutted from concrete walls. As Winston’s gaze traveled up from the small chamber, painted from top to bottom the color of green pea soup, he began to take in the massive scale of the space he was in. A series of wall-mounted cables and hoses ran up the wall from the control room and into a series of supports and beams that formed a scaffold of sorts along the walls and ceiling. Far out in the middle of the space, a lateral crane that slid along titanic rails mounted in the ceiling hung suspended over what at first seemed like an oversized swimming pool. Winston couldn’t see inside the pool very well from his position, but he did make out circular tubes aligned in long ranks, standing upright on their ends, occupying nearly the entire pool’s floor. At a guess, the tops of the tubes were about twenty feet below the surface. The pool was lit from end to end with underwater lighting that made most of the water appear green. However, the radiant blue glow given off by the tubes, or whatever rested inside them, was both beautiful and terrifying.
Winston recognized that glow…and the tubes. He had seen them on the display screen when Bledsoe had scraped the memory of Winston’s death from his father’s failing mind.
Claude jogged toward them along the catwalk, and Winston felt every pounding footfall deep within his body.
“Amanda!” he called.
Winston’s mom froze with momentary amazement. She put a hand on Winston’s chest, unwilling to leave his side. He understood and appreciated the gesture.
“I’m fine, Mom,” he said. “Go ahead.”
Amanda rose to her feet and walked to greet her husband. They met in an embrace, arms instantly locking around each other. Claude buried his face in her hair, holding the back of her head close in his outstretched fingers. They spoke quietly in each other’s ears, and the sight of their joy drove away the last of Winston’s pain, save only for the sensation of his heart straining at them being reunited.
After a rushed moment and an all-too-brief kiss, they separated. Only then did Winston notice the one figure in a white jumpsuit laying face-down on the catwalk outside the control cabin and a similar body slumped against the wall inside the cabin. Both wore respirator equipment.
Claude knelt next to Winston. He appeared only slightly younger than when Winston had visited him in the Tillamook of 1969.
“I just finished placing the fifth piece,” Claude said. “I only have a few minutes to slip away, but I can’t do that if—” He surveyed all of them, taking in Colonel Bauman’s and Winston’s conditions, and shook his head. “What are you doing here? Why not come ten minutes ago when I could have just given it to you?”
Bernie paused in his examination of Colonel Bauman, but he didn’t glance back at Claude, which might have been his way of showing a rebuke.
Winston weakly waved a hand. “My call. My bad. Maybe.”
“Um,” interjected Shade. “First, I don’t know how I’m hearing voices, or how we teleported here, or how your dad as a young guy got here, but…that’s all cool, I guess. Second—” He pointed at the green pool below them. “—correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s all super radioactive waste down there, which means we’re gonna all get cancer and die.”
Claude shook his head. “No. The water acts as an insulator. Very little of the radiation escapes from the pool, and definitely not enough to cause irreparable damage within a short time frame.”
“Especially since we all have QVs,” added Amanda.
“Will they—?” growled Colonel Bauman between gritted teeth, but he couldn’t get the next word out before his coughing resumed.
Alyssa straightened as she prioritized her thoughts. he said. “Details later. Right now, we need to get my grandpa to a hospital. How do we get out of here?”
Winston rose up on one elbow and was about to tell her that they needed to get her grandpa away from the storage pool. Winston and his dad could figure out how to ret
rieve the fifth piece while the others got the Colonel to a different area and to help. They’d get in trouble, but Winston could come back for them in just a few minutes. Hopefully.
Then a six-foot-tall shower of sparks blossomed from a point above the catwalk a few feet away, and the words, along with Winston’s hope, died on his lips.
29
Fifth Piece Plunge
Bledsoe’s sparks fell through the catwalk grating, raining down into the spent fuel pool below. As Winston watched the brilliant pinpricks recede, their blue vanished into the turquoise glow emanating from the submerged nuclear rods. If the sparks hissed as they hit the water, Winston couldn’t hear it above the ever-present hum of the pool’s circulation motors.
Confronted with more people than he had expected, Bledsoe took an involuntary step back as soon as his jump completed. His eyes flicked nervously across all of them, lingering most of all on Amanda. Once he was convinced that no one was going to attack him, Bledsoe relaxed enough to look about the massive concrete room and get a sense for where he was.
“Well, I’ll be dipped,” he said at last, gripping the catwalk rail and gazing into the glowing depths. “It’s the B Reactor canyon. The spent fuel pool. Hey!” He pointed at Winston and grinned. “I could swear we’ve seen this before.”
As soon as Bledsoe moved from his position, Shade rose to face the man and took a protective stance in front of Winston. “It’s a long way down,” he said. “Don’t even think of hurting these people.”
Bledsoe licked his lips and smiled lazily as his usual swagger returned. “Aw, pigskin, that’s sweet. But don’t you remember what happened on that river dock? I brought you back into this world.” He paused in front of Shade, just out of reach. “Don’t make me change my mind.”
He faced Bernie and set a hand on the alien’s shoulder. “And you, my friend. I thought we had a deal, but here you are with him.” He waggled his fingers at Winston. “And me? Just spinning my wheels in that cave out in the middle of nowhere. A man could get jealous, you know.”
Winston Chase and the Omega Mesh Page 26
