“Wait!” he said, holding out a hand in warning. “They’re going to see—”
Samuel didn’t care. He opened the door and stepped back through, into the sun. He wasn’t trying to hide his identity anymore, and he held up his head in a half-daze as he approached the ill-tempered crowd.
He was recognized immediately.
“It’s him! The disbeliever!”
“He stuck Tristan in that cell!”
The two remaining guards outside looked up in alarm, and then had to struggle against the angry group, as they started to encroach.
“Grab him!”
“If we can’t get Tristan out, we’ll take him instead!”
Samuel not only stood his ground...he advanced. He shoved his way through the woefully outnumbered guards, who yelled after him in annoyance, and then he was in the middle of the throng. At once he felt their hands on him, grabbing his arms and pulling him seemingly in all directions at once.
He felt white-hot fury blaze up within him. He was angry that he had become so vulnerable in front of Tristan. He was angry that these idiots continued to follow him. He was angry that nothing ever seemed to go the way it was supposed to.
Most of all, he was angry with himself.
He gathered himself up and bared his teeth in defiance at the zealots that hungered for him, clutched at him. He conjured up the most imposing presence he could, using every bit of his rage to do so, and glared hard at them.
The effect was instantaneous. The hands that groped at him withdrew as their owners lost heart. Their cries didn’t stop completely, but there was certainly less vitriol in them, and all at once Samuel noticed that there was a cushion developing around him as the crowd stepped back, its collective conviction withering. He started forward again, and a channel opened up before him, like his ire had created a shield around him that physically pushed the people out of his way. He strode, still limping slightly, until he reached the periphery of the mob. He kept walking, followed by their jeers, but he never looked back.
He had left a part of himself in that cell with Tristan. Maybe it was because he had lost control. Maybe it was because he felt manipulated.
Maybe it was made worse that he had gotten no closer to figuring out the identity of the traitor on the team, and that if he couldn’t, more people would suffer for his failure.
The more he thought about it, the more he was sure it was those things, but more so, it was because the man whom he hated most in the world had somehow gained free access to the innermost chamber of his psyche, and given him nothing in return for it. Samuel felt soiled inside at the unforeseen invasion, and somehow he knew it would be a long while before he felt clean.
He was so wrapped up in his knotted emotions that he didn’t hear the beeping coming from his pocket for the first thirty seconds or so. When the sound drilled far enough into his head, he could only blink, uncomprehending.
Then he remembered, and cursed.
He thrust a hand into his pocket, and produced a remote for a security lock. Its partner wasn’t the lock he’d used to isolate Tristan Englewood for himself...no...that one had been disengaged and was resting with its remote sibling in his other pocket.
No, this was the remote that he’d taken from his bedside table, in his room. Its partner was the security lock Kelly had placed on the server room door, down in the third sub-level of the Dome. The indicator light on the remote should have been a reassuring green, indicating a nominal function of the security lock they’d placed, there.
Now, it was an angry red, and the alarm was going off. Someone had figured out a way to disengage the lock.
Someone had broken in to the server room.
* * *
Chapter 16 – Ejelano
The White pursued him through the desert. Its speed was relentless, and so to outpace it he had no choice but to run. All the time. He’d had little cause to be thankful for what he had become, for the body he’d been given; it had never evolved past its purpose as an instrument of destruction. Nevertheless he found some gratitude for his enhanced endurance, now that it allowed him to stay ahead of what was eating the world.
“Can’t anything stop it?” he asked his ethereal companion as he raced along. “Anything at all?”
NOPE. IT’S AN ALL-CONSUMING, UNSTOPPABLE, WORLD-SUCKING MOTHERFUCKER OF A THING. THE ONLY THING YOU CAN DO, EVEN WITH ALL OF YOUR SUPED-UP SUPER DUPER POWERS, IS RUN. IF YOU DON’T—IF IT CATCHES YOU—WELL, YOUR EVER-LOVING IMMORTAL ASS WON’T BE SO IMMORTAL, NO MORE. THE GOOD NEWS IS, YOU’RE MAKING GOOD TIME. IF YOU KEEP IT UP YOU SHOULD HAVE LONG ENOUGH TO DO THE JOB, AND THAT AND ONLY THAT, MY GOOD SIR, IS HOW BOTH OF US GET OUT OF THIS.
“Both of us? I didn’t think you were afraid of anything.”
I’M NOT. I’M JUST UNCOMFORTABLE. Y’KNOW, UNCOMFORTABLE WITH THE PROSPECT OF HAVING MY ESSENCE DISSOLVED BY THE PHYSICAL EMBODIMENT OF ENTROPY, ITSELF. IT’S A COMMON THING TO BE UNCOMFORTABLE ABOUT. I’M ALSO UNCOMFORTABLE WITH SPIDERS. NEXT TO THIS THING, SPIDERS ARE A REALLY CLOSE SECOND AND SHOULD ALL BE SHOT INTO THE HEART OF THE SUN.
“How big is it? I mean...how far does it reach? It looks like it goes on forever.”
THAT’S BECAUSE IT DOES, SHERLOCK. I MEAN, KIND OF.
“But how is that possible?” Ejelano lithely hopped over a pile of rubble, landed, and sprang forward without losing his stride.
LISTEN, I’M NOT GOING TO GO INTO THE TRUE NATURE AND FORM OF THE UNIVERSE. THAT’S OUTSIDE OF MY JOB DESCRIPTION.
The voice paused. Ejelano got the distinct impression that it was carefully considering its next words.
OKAY, SO I’M NOT SUPPOSED TO TELL YOU THIS, AND I DON’T KNOW HOW IT IS THAT YOU CAN KEEP PULLING INFORMATION OUT OF ME, BUT IT LOOKS LIKE THE RULES HAVE CHANGED, SO FUCK IT. THEY DIDN’T TELL ME THAT IT WAS GOING TO COME EARLY, SO THEY CAN ALL KISS MY ASS.
HERE’S WHAT I CAN SAY: IMAGINE A BUBBLE...THE BIGGEST BUBBLE YOU CAN POSSIBLY THINK OF. BIG ENOUGH TO ENCLOSE THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE. THAT’S PROBABLY HARD FOR YOU, CONSIDERING THAT THE ORGAN YOU THINK WITH IS A FEEBLE, OUT-DATED COMPUTER MADE OF MEAT, BUT TRY FOR ME ANYWAY. SO THIS BUBBLE...IMAGINE THAT IT STARTS TO COLLAPSE. IT’S SHRINKING AND SHRINKING, ITS BOUNDARIES OVERTAKING EVERYTHING THAT IS AND BREAKING IT DOWN INTO NOTHINGNESS. FORGET ALL THAT CONSERVATION OF MASS AND ENERGY CRAP; THAT DOESN’T APPLY TO THIS THING. WHEN SOMETHING ENTERS IT, THAT SOMETHING AIN’T SOMETHING ANYMORE. IT’S THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF “SOMETHING”. YOU CAN THINK OF IT AS A KIND OF GARBAGE COLLECTOR. WITH ME SO FAR?
“Yes,” Ejelano said. He was hesitant, not completely sure he wanted to hear this. The implications of what the spirit was telling him were enough to make his brain seize up. Up until now his fear of the White was based on what he didn’t know about it. The voice’s fear was based—
AGAIN, NOT AFRAID. UNCOMFORTABLE.
—on what it did know. Ejelano wasn’t sure he wanted to find out which would be proven worse.
ALRIGHT...SO, BACK TO THIS SHRINKING BUBBLE; WELL, ITS MIDPOINT, THE EXACT CENTER OF ITS VOLUME, JUST SO HAPPENS TO BE STRAIGHT AHEAD OF YOU, IN THAT FINAL, FLOUNDERING, RAMSHACKLE DEN OF CATTLE, A.K.A. PEOPLE. THAT’S NOT A COINCIDENCE, BY THE WAY.
“You said before that it shouldn’t be here, yet. Why is it early? What happened?”
The spirit sighed...frustrated.
THAT I DON’T KNOW. SOMEBODY THREW THE SWITCH WHEN THEY SHOULDN’T HAVE. PROBABLY THE NEW GUY. HE’S AN IDIOT.
(I ACTUALLY TOLD HIM THAT, ONE TIME, RIGHT TO HIS FACE. HE STARTED CRYING. CRYING. IT TOTALLY MADE MY DAY.)
WHERE WAS I? OH YEAH...I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT HAPPENED. WHAT I CAN SAY FOR SURE IS THAT SOMEBODY’S GONNA GET FUCKING FIRED OVER THIS ONE.
“So why not just turn it off...flip the switch back the other way?”
THAT’S NOT HOW IT WORKS. YOU CAN’T JUST “TURN IT OFF”. ONCE IT’S SET IN MOTION, THE PROCESS MUST CONTINUE TO ITS CONCLUSION. IT WAS DESIGNED THAT WAY ON PURPOSE. CONVENIENT, HUH?
Ejelano mulled this over. In the distance,
he saw a steep, rocky incline. It was directly ahead. He could be at the top in minutes.
“Casting everything into nothingness...what is the purpose? Why does the universe need to be consumed?”
The voice laughed.
NOW THAT’S A GOOD QUESTION. A VERY GOOD QUESTION, INDEED.
After that, the voice went quiet, and he was left alone and dissatisfied. As usual, gaining answers from it only made him aware of the greater void of what he did not understand. It swirled around him...a blackest black in the darkness of his mind.
When he reached the base of the rocky slope, he added the power of his arms to that of his legs, and scrambled his way up through the rough terrain. He didn’t feel the sharp edges of the gravel pricking his palms; he was still too far inside his own head, striving to come to an understanding of the new enigma the voice had dropped on him.
The entire universe...snuffed out. He was well familiar with the sadistic nature of his spirit companion, but even it seemed to pale in comparison to the perverse intentions of whatever being had placed such a devilish mechanism into the fabric of all that was.
The ground began to level out. Soon enough he no longer had to crawl forward like an animal, on all fours, and he stood up to resume bounding forward on his feet. A plateau lay spread out before him, flat and even, and he was relieved to continue on with ease. He could see the edge of the plateau ahead. It cut across the wrecked landscape in a jagged slash, a cliff face, and he could see a great plain beyond, a flat expanse that dropped and leveled out a hundred feet down.
That was when he caught his first sight of it.
First the upper scaffolding, covered with red rust. It rose up over the edge of the cliff as he moved forward. As he pressed on, more of it was revealed, down and down the central, latticed tower, until the curve of a great domed building blossomed into his view, outward and earthward. Then, the formidable cannons, aimed upward and outward, proud and fierce. Last, the ring of the outer wall, standing resolute...defiant.
He had finally, at the end of a road that spanned tens of thousands of years, arrived. He felt so many things at that climactic moment that he couldn’t pinpoint the origin of his tears. Relief. Despair. Apprehension. Joy. One of each and all together, locked in either a wrestling match or an embrace, behind his eyes.
His feet moved faster under him, and over him in the sky the roar of winged darkness spread and grew until its thunder dominated all other sound.
At long last, here we are. If this world must end, then let us be done with it.
AMEN, BRO.
* * *
Chapter 17 – Samuel
Samuel drew some strange looks as he hastened to the Dome. He whipped out his hand radio and, for the second time that week, tuned it to the emergency channel. He raised it to his lips, and was just about to start barking into it when his fingers froze over the transmit button.
His brain was churning. If the saboteur was down in the server room, as he suspected, and the saboteur was one of the members of his team, then they would have a radio and would receive any warning he broadcasted. Samuel wasn’t even inside the Dome, yet...it would take him at least five minutes to get inside, take the elevator down, and make his way to his destination.
He was too far away. If he blabbed his intentions all over the radio, the saboteur would hear it and be long gone by the time he arrived. In addition, whoever had broken in had obviously found a way to disable the security lock. It was therefore reasonable to assume that they knew somebody would be notified of the intrusion on the remote, and that someone would be coming for them. That meant that his already limited time was even shorter than he thought.
Samuel didn’t want to tip his hand by using the radio to call for backup, even though it meant that he would be facing the traitor by himself. He bitterly stuffed the radio back into his pocket, and kept going.
He all but broke down the door that led to the service entrance, through the interior fence. It rattled on its hinges and banged open. He didn’t bother to re-latch it, and bolted to the small door that was set into the base of the Dome. In a flash, he was inside.
***
If he had been a few seconds slower, he might have seen it like the others did. He would have heard the murmur of the crowd and he would have seen the anxious hands covering their mouths. He would have seen their fingers point to something in the western skies, something that none but him had ever seen. He would have felt the dread that came over them as well, the variety that all prey feel when their sensory instincts reveal the arrival of a predator.
But, no, Samuel was inside too quickly. Maybe he wouldn’t have noticed it, after all. He had his own prey to catch.
***
He hammered on the call button of the elevator. Impatience danced on every nerve ending...he was positively buzzing with it.
After an eternity, it arrived. He dashed inside, slapped the “S3” button, the one for the third sub-level, and did his best to will the metal box earthward with as much haste as it could go.
His mind was racing in circles inside his skull. Who could it be? He played every scenario in his head with every possible cast member, put them all in the villainous role to get a taste of each possibility that had led up to the attack on the Dome.
He imagined the young, insufferable Seth Feron sneaking away the explosives, all pretense of immature joking gone and replaced with malicious, focused severity.
He imagined Kelly Prince, the one he most trusted, surreptitiously wiring each charge and delivering the detonators to an eagerly waiting Tristan Englewood. He now admitted to himself that he felt something for her. Had it dimmed his vision?
He imagined Aiden Reed, sitting on his bed in his quarters, staring with his unblinking eyes at his clock as the minutes ticked down to the appointed time, when the bombs would be triggered and fireballs would rip open the skin of the Dome from the inside, emerging like demons born of smoke and fire.
Then, the scenarios shifted, and suddenly Henry was colluding with Ronny, and now Nicole with Ethan. Then Cameron was guilty all along, and working with one, two...hell, maybe all of them before his trip off the wall.
Samuel had no “somebody”, and so he was forced to assume “everybody”. The paranoia was enough to make him question his own state of mind. Suspicion felt to him as an ugly, sticky thing, and he desired to peel it from his thoughts as soon as possible. That was why, when the elevator door opened on sub-level three, he burst out of the elevator and forced his aching body to obey his command to hurry along.
He needed to know. He needed to put all of this at rest.
The door came up on his left, and the camera inside his brain slowed things down and took a snapshot of the discarded security lock on the floor, the door itself gaping open like the inviting maw of a beast in wait. Samuel charged up and blocked the opening, grasping the edges of the portal and sucking air for all he was worth. His eyes devoured the interior of the server room, and when he saw...even though he’d prepared himself for anything...his mouth dropped open in shock.
The saboteur sat in plain view, in the chair at the main computer terminal, the same chair that had been occupied by George Gomez when he’d been taken. George’s clothes had been removed from the chair and discarded to the floor. The man turned and looked at Samuel, his cartoon-like, ridiculously large eyes blinking behind coke-bottle lenses. He didn’t wear the expression of a man who had just been caught in the act. Instead, he looked like someone who had been hanging on to the side of a cliff for too long without help, and had come to the end of his strength. He looked like a man ready to let go.
When he saw Samuel in the doorway, the man quickly reached up to the terminal and entered a keystroke command. Something on the screen, something he’d been studying when Samuel arrived, winked out.
“Samuel,” Ronny said, and he dropped his eyes. “I figured you’d come. I’m...I’m sorry about the lock. I think I busted it. It took me a while, if that’s any consolation.”
The first thing that registered to Samuel after the initial shock of discovering the traitor’s identity was the alarming amount of blood that was dripping out of Ronny’s nose. Ronny had produced a handkerchief and was pressing it to his face; it was rapidly becoming saturated with the red fluid.
“Why, Ronny?” he asked. “Why did you do it?”
“I had to know,” the rodent-like man replied, weakly. “She was taken, and I had to know what happened to her.” He took a deep, gurgling breath, and when he let it out it took the form of a coughing fit. Crimson droplets flew.
“I’ve never been much of an attractive man,” he continued, when he could. His voice was thick with sadness. “I know. I have a mirror in my habmod to look into. But when she looked at me, she didn’t see what I saw. She saw somebody else: A man with...potential. Someone she could love. I never felt like I really deserved Mary, but I’ll be damned if I was gonna ever give her a hint at that, and so I did the best...my very best...to come as close as I could to being the man she thought I was.”
He shifted in the seat, and Samuel could see that even the small movement caused him great pain, for he took a sharp intake of breath and he pressed his teeth together. When he settled, he went on.
“When the disappearances started, all I could think was, ‘If one of us has to go, please, let it be me’. That might sound noble, but I wanted it for selfish reasons. The ones who are taken don’t have to feel the aftereffects. Wherever they go, it’s not here, and that has to be better. Lucky them.”
He chuckled, and coughed again. It took him even longer to recover, this time.
“Then,” Ronny continued when he could, “she started to get sick. I didn’t want to see it, denied it was happening. I wanted to chalk it up to something I could understand, like a virus or something. But the things she started to say...they were really out there. It was like she’d totally come unglued. Her mind started to conjure what I then thought were delusions, and all I could think was that she was at the beginning of a nervous breakdown. But now I know. She wasn’t. She was seeing what they all see, before they go.”
The Footsteps of Cain Page 16
