More "Amens" and hallelujahs and hand-raising followed.
"He's good," said Tildie. "You can't deny that."
Jamie was tired. A strange kind of fatigue that defied her otherwise endless energy and strength. It was the fatigue of being mentally battered. No one, she thought, was up to the task of spending every second of every hour waiting for Armageddon.
"There!" Tildie pointed at the south side of the stadium.
Jamie spun, readying a telekinetic strike. A tall Arabic woman stood up and shook her fist, screaming "Allah Akaba!" Jamie knocked her down with a mental nudge.
"Now over there."
Tildie's voice had lost its alarm. Jamie followed her finger across the Coliseum to a diminutive man waving his arms and wailing that those who did not follow the Quran would burn in "the eternal fire forever."
"It's a distraction," said Jamie.
The wailer happened to be near Hulk Horner who raced up into the stands – bodies flying – and seized the man. Jamie and Tildie flew down to them.
"He says he doesn't know anything," said Horner, holding the man aloft by his collar with one hand. "Says someone paid him $500 to shout this shit. He's not even religious."
Tildie turned away, a wild look in her eyes as she scanned the crowd.
"What do you see?" Jamie demanded.
"Someone else. Near the stage. I can't see far enough ahead to tell if any of them are dangerous or not. Aaaarrggh."
"I think they might've figured out that we get advance warning."
The clean-shaven Arab man standing up near the stage did something none of the other "shills" had: he turned and pointedly gazed up at her, raised one hand, and wriggled his fingers. Goodbye.
Jamie started to lash out –
And she was floating in a mist. Not above the Coliseum, not underground, and not moving in any way she could detect. One thought too slow again. She'd been teleported, but to where? She waved her hands, and the mist slowly cleared. Below, car lights turned a major highway into a Christmas decoration.
It was hard to be sure where she was in the dark, but she wasn't near any ocean. She was out of the Bay Area, but over a major city, judging by the traffic. Of all the things the teleporting terrorist could've done to her, this seemed puzzlingly mild. Just need to go down somewhere and get my bearing.
But as Jamie descended, she soon realized something wasn't right. First, no wind. Second, no sound. Third, no sense of gravity. And as she dropped down on a quiet side-street, the buildings and cars and someone walking her dog looked weirdly fuzzy, a slight fish-eyed lens distortion, as though she needed glasses.
Another thing that was hard to not notice was that she sank up to her waist in the sidewalk upon landing. She willed herself up level with the sidewalk, but as she started to walk she soon realized that she wasn't making contact with the cement...or anything else, as she tried to touch the side of a mailbox and her hand passed through feeling nothing.
What? I've become a ghost? Had the terrorist – which she was now pretty sure was the same guy from AT&T Park minus the beard – killed her?
But no, Jamie thought, it might be worse: I'm in the Phantom Zone. She recognized it from Jay's descriptions and Zachary's puzzling over the DARE scientists' analysis which indicated it was a place that was "out of phase with our reality" to some minuscule but critical degree. Her best guess was that the Hibat Allah agent had simply teleported her without any destination in mind. She would never materialize, but remain trapped in the Phantom Zone or what the DARE scientists referred to as "N-Space."
The jihadist had probably figured that wherever else he teleported her – into mass of rock, underground, into space – she'd manage to claw, fly, or smash her way to freedom. But if he didn't teleport her anywhere...well, she'd just be drifting in N-Space forever. Clever.
But then Hibat Allah had shown a lot of intelligence at the Oakland Coliseum. All those feints with fake proxy terrorists, testing their response capabilities, sowing confusion. And the teleporter terrorist couldn't resist one last taunt before bowing out, his face freshly shaven perhaps to make her hesitate one crucial second.
But what happened next? For a panicked moment she imagined the whole place going up in nuclear flames. Tildie and her friends dead. Hundreds of thousands of casualties. All happening an instant after she was whisked away?
Jamie refused to assume the worst. She wasn't the only one there who could kill a terrorist or stop a nuclear detonation. But it would be a simple matter to find out, even in her ethereal state.
She glided down the sidewalk – walking was useless – and into a sports bar through a closed door. Fortunately, she was already semi-accustomed to passing through solid objects with minimal resistance, so it wasn't all that disorienting to pass through tables or the half-drunk old dude staggering unexpectedly into her path on her way to the mostly empty bar. The few patrons couldn't see or sense her, as expected. That part was unnerving, but she told herself it was just temporary, that she'd find a way out of this.
The big screen TV was on, showing...men fishing. Some kind of fishing show? A sub-caption identified the station as KTXL Fox 40, Sacramento. So she'd traveled a hundred or so miles inland.
The mood of the handful of people around her, despite being copiously medicated with booze, seemed glum. Though Jamie couldn't hear their words, their expressions suggested a "let's get drunk before the world ends" kind of forced cheeriness. Very few of them paid any attention to the TV.
On top of everything else, professional sports in the U.S. and throughout the world were on hold. Major League Baseball, Major League Soccer, the National Basketball Association, the National Football League, and the National Hockey League had all officially suspended their seasons until further notice. Professional tennis, bowling, boxing, golf, power-lifting, cricket – you name it – were kaput. Even reigning chess champion Magnus Carlsen had announced his official retirement after being defeated by a gifted augment who'd taken up chess only weeks before.
In some ways, the death of professional sports had fractured the morale of American society more than any other single factor. As great athletes contemplated inglorious futures as insurance salesmen or Walmart greeters, dewy-eyed fans searched forlornly for something or someone else to cheer. Everyone associated with sports was suddenly unemployed. Soap operas and sitcoms – particularly those featuring the super-powered - had experienced a major revival.
It was not a good time to be the owner of a professional sports bar.
Then, mercifully, the trout fisherman on TV was interrupted mid-cast by a "breaking news bulletin" – the scene shifting to a newsroom with a daylight image of the Oakland Coliseum glowing behind the newscasters backs. Jamie braced herself.
She couldn't hear their words, but fortunately closed captioning was on.
A day of cat and mouse battles between DARE elite forces and Islamic terrorists - involving a nuclear explosion three miles from San Francisco's shores earlier in the day - came to a chilling conclusion at the Oakland Coliseum in California. The last evening of Brian Loving's three-day prayer vigil event was interrupted by multiple hecklers apparently hired by Hibat Allah as distractions for what was to be the evening's main event: the explosion of a backpack nuclear device hidden under the main stage.
Was to be. Jamie felt her incorporeal self sag with relief.
Fortunately, due to an apparent malfunction, the bomb did not detonate, but was discovered only later by a DARE nuclear response team after a brief attempt to apprehend an Hibat Allah agent failed. Much is not yet known of what occurred in the waning moments of the prayer vigil, but we will report the missing details as they emerge...
The bomb malfunctioned? That didn't sound right. They weren't that lucky. She wasn't surprised they didn't get the teleporter. But the important thing was that her team was okay and no one had died. The fact that she might be trapped for all eternity in a ghost zone was a minor down note. On the bright side, she might've achieved Brian Loving'
s promise for eternal life, even if this didn't quite qualify as heaven.
Jamie slipped out of the bar. Her best thought was getting to DARE headquarters. Maybe the scientists would be able to detect her or she could pull a Patrick Swayze from Ghost Story and get through to them somehow. And nothing really lasted forever, did it? The energy or "containment field" or whatever was holding her captive would eventually break apart, wouldn't it? Or she'd find a way to break out.
Jamie took to the night skies, where her disassociation with the world and its people wasn't so evident. Heading east toward DARE headquarters in Virginia, she tried to remember her discussions with Zachary about the theoretical basis for teleportation. The scientists knew, for one thing, that teleportation did not involve breaking down the body into basic elements and then reassembling them. The body remained intact – just out of phase.
The consensus was that a teleporter, in effect, entered a parallel world where the space between Point A and Point B in their world was greatly reduced. Jamie had seen some of the equations showing how that could happen, but she'd need another ten years of higher math to make true sense of them. The gist was that teleportation involved a kind of local space-time warp centered on the individual. She wasn't sure how knowing any of this would help her now, but it was all she had.
Traveling in this mode, especially at night, was proving difficult. Her forward motion seemed to either happen at a snail's pace or in a burst of acceleration. And sometimes she didn't seem to move forward at all, but off in some other direction. It reminded her of trying to get somewhere in a dream, except that her detours now weren't due to lapses of concentration or reality; it seemed more about the fact that she, unlike Jay and the terrorist, had no teleportation abilities. She was a non-teleporter trapped in a teleporter world.
Impatience got the best of her around dawn when after calculating she'd managed maybe one hundred miles east she decided to put her mental pedal to the metal. Nothing happened at first, but as she concentrated, everything did.
First, a blinding flash of light which she prayed was not a nuclear explosion or the final white light. Second, a scary blackness without a trace of light or color that made her long for the Phantom Zone. And third, battling her way out of the darkness one layer at a time, like swimming up from the bottom of the ocean.
When she finally emerged from the darkness, the fuzzy Phantom Zone world seemed like paradise. And weren't those John Denver's Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah River below? Damn, was it possible she'd pulled this off and was actually here? Luckily, she'd flown over the area many times, and despite the slight blurring, it was daylight and fairly easy to see where she needed to go.
The open yards and modest buildings atop Peters Mountain provided minimal hints of the massive underground complex embedded in the hill itself. Jamie smiled. She was home – at least her home away from home. She had faith that the brilliant scientists lurking far under the manicured grounds would solve her dilemma. All she had to do was find a way to communicate with them.
As Jamie sank into the hill, some possibilities occurred to her: first, Margaret Clarkson and her mind-reading abilities. Could they penetrate the Phantom Zone? Or Jay, who might have the ability to see her and even pry her out of her ghostly little kingdom. Kim-Ly might connect with her psychically. Or some incredibly advanced and sensitive scientific instrument in the lab would detect her. One of her ideas was going to work, she was sure of it.
Yet as she descended into the Advanced Research Complex the sense of a homecoming – her anticipation at seeing familiar faces and places – hit a wall. The wall was the missing blue and gold DARE logo grafted onto the opening archway. The original Advanced Research Complex logo hung there instead. Puzzling, but maybe DARE headquarters had been relocated elsewhere in the complex for security reasons?
Continuing her descent, the Second Level featured the familiar shopping mall. No issues there. And the Third and Fourth Levels held the expected living quarters. Except as Jamie sailed through the halls she didn't recognize a single name on the doors – including her own door, which read Xavier Williams. Now that was disturbing.
The next level down – five - was supposed to be the DARE training/staging area, but was all laboratories instead. Had she somehow entered the wrong area? Could there be a parallel underground complex nearby? Possible, maybe, but she had trouble believing she hadn't heard of it. Or that it was so identical in layout.
Jamie drifted through and past the labs, seeing familiar machines but unfamiliar people. She didn't know a lot of lab people and only a handful of scientists, but she had a good memory for faces and bodies and she wasn't getting a match. Her dad was fond of quoting something like "when you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how weird it seems, is true" in defense of his fringe beliefs. It seemed impossible that two incredibly elaborate underground facilities with the name "Advanced Research Complex" had been built, to say nothing of them being built in the exact same location in the same hill. So if that wasn't possible, what was?
She ascended back to Level Two and floated through a shopping mall, pausing at the bar with the same circular logo and name: Advanced Alcohol Lab for Consumption and Inebriation. Alkie.
Jamie drifted through the bar, seeing no one she knew. It was as if she'd entered a parallel world, where the ARC had never changed, where the Department of Registration and Enforcement had never come in.
Wait one damn second...
She remembered in a flash a bedraggled Telly returning after a disappearing act in East L.A.. He said he'd been "elsewhere," and Jeremy told him, joking or not, that he'd been in a parallel universe.
That can't be right.
Then she remembered the flash of white light and the horrible blackness when she'd gone "pedal to the metal." She thought she'd reached her goal, but what if she'd gone wildly off-target? She'd watched enough Fringe with her dad to get the picture.
If she was right, she'd just dug herself a hell of a lot deeper into trouble. Now, she might not only be trapped in N-Space, but also in the wrong world. Kind of like a double helping of lutefisk.
She could think of countless ways to confirm or deny that possibility, but the first thing that came to mind was home. Her true home.
Either because it was the daylight or because she'd made the flight before - or was getting more practiced moving in teleportation mode - the journey northwest over Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, and finally Minnesota only took a few hours. No detours, no disorientation, just a non-stop flight as the bird flies. And not all that much faster.
From the air, maybe a half-mile up, none of the states appeared different. Conventional cars and trucks rolled on the highways, the cities had the same buildings and location, and the patchwork of farmland in southern Minnesota composed its usual geometry. No futuristic gleaming towers or strange-dressing people as Jay had described. Standard heartland.
Grand Forks looked identical, too, but when she approached her property west of town, there were a few obvious differences: an extra building, the dilapidated barn gone, a late-model red pickup in the driveway that she didn't recognize. Someone had been ambitious, in a man-kind of way. A Dennis kind of way.
Twin revelations struck as she descended on her home: Dennis could still be alive here – and she could come face to face with her twin self. Not face to face, exactly; she wouldn't be able to see her. Nor would anyone else living in the house. And it could be anyone, she reminded herself, and not necessarily anyone she knew. Maybe Bob and Mary Jacobson and their two children? She braced herself for any possibility.
But all the bracing in the world couldn't prepare her for the shock of recognition when a young brown-haired girl burst out of the front door and stooped to pick up a grey tabby cat. Jamie couldn't hear words but from her stern expression she was chewing out the cat as she carried it back into the house. Jamie followed, stunned to the core of whatever she was now. It might not be her. Don't go crazy about this.
Inside, th
e girl had the cat in her lap, scratching its head as she continued addressing it in what Jamie imagined were admonishing tones. The girl was nine or ten, the right age if Kylee had lived. Oh God. She bit down on her right knuckle, surprised by the taste of her own skin, the small tingle of pain. And her moan, quite audible in her discorporeal cocoon. She was corporeal to herself anyway. And quite capable of losing it, she suspected.
Dennis walked into the room. His typical boyish grin and confident but ironic swagger. He spoke. Jamie thought she could read his lips: "Hey, honey. You found..." She couldn't quite make out the word, probably the name of the cat.
"Dennis!" Jamie cried, her voice sounding muffled but clear in her ethereal space. "Dennis! I'm here! You're alive! Oh my God, she's so beautiful!"
Neither Dennis nor Kylee heard her, of course. And then Jamie did lose it. Tears washed down her face and her sobs swirled around her trapped in her tiny world which seemed ready to burst from her emotion.
But Dennis and her daughter were in their own world, utterly oblivious to her, and it appeared to be a happy one. Dennis dropped down beside her on the couch and the big screen TV on the wall flickered to life. The five o'clock news.
Jamie pulled herself together. Not as if she had much choice. So the universe was a strange place – stranger than even her dad's most feverish imaginings. Was that really so surprising? So was it all random chance, then? Here they live, there they die? Where was the meaning or the fairness in that?
She wandered through the house, seeking signs of the life she'd never had. Photos hung on a nearby wall, just as they did in her house. Except here the photos of Dennis and Kylee extended beyond the time when she was five going on six and Dennis was twenty-six.
But these photos did share something with those on her own wall, Jamie noticed. She wasn't in any picture with Dennis and Kylee after her age of five or so. That was how it was in her wall gallery: she and Dennis with their arms around each other, Kylee smiling tolerantly between them; Dennis and Kylee horsing around on the swingset; she and Kylee sharing a laughing moment on the front lawn. And then the progression stopped.
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