by Jon Land
“Air, and all other forms of travel in and out of all affected countries, has been shut down,” Red resumed. “Any plane, train, or ship that violates that order will be shot down or destroyed. Financial markets are collapsing, and countries all over the world are panicking over oil normally shipped from the Middle East never reaching them. Add to that the fact that there’s a feeding frenzy going on with the press we won’t be able to fend off much longer either. And when and if this story pops, we’re looking at a full-scale panic certain to plunge this region, and maybe the entire world, into utter chaos and anarchy.”
“That’s not all, Father,” Darby interjected, looking toward Red. “Show him the next slide.”
Red clicked on the remote, a map of the world replacing the one of the Middle East. “Thus far, no cases of the pathogen have been reported outside the Middle East. But our computer simulations universally show that won’t remain the case for long. Here’s the world a week from now.”
Jimenez saw pockets of red displayed all over the map, larger closer to the Middle East and growing progressively smaller the farther away.
“And two weeks,” Red resumed, giving Jimenez time to process what he was seeing.
In this case that was red occupying far, far more of the screen, including a clear spread to the United States.
“Now three weeks.”
The red was everywhere now, in congealed pockets that looked like somebody’s spilled blood had dried all across the map.
“We’re looking at this as a potential Extinction Event,” Darby resumed. “Ebola to the zillionth power.”
Jimenez was having trouble processing all of what the admiral and the man named Red had just laid out for him. “So why am I here?”
“Because you can help us.”
“Me? How is that even possible?”
“Let’s start with this,” said Red, jogging the screen to one of the few pictures ever taken of Mohammed al-Qadir. “Do you recognize him, Father?”
Jimenez nodded. “The leader of the New Islamic Front, who’s pledged to destroy all of Western civilization.”
“Thanks to an apparently inexhaustible supply of funding, originating in non-Muslim countries, that we’ve been powerless to trace. So maybe the NIF has some kind of financial angel on their shoulder, your guess is as good as mine.”
Jimenez’s gaze returned to Mohammed al-Qadir, meeting his eyes close up on the sixty-inch screen.
Those eyes, piercing in their intensity, their emerald shade making them appear almost translucent.
Jimenez felt sick to his stomach, because he’d seen those eyes before, a long time ago, up close and personal.
And then he doubled over, retching.
FIFTY-ONE
West Houston, Texas
“A lightbulb?” Dale Denton asked.
Orson Beekman nodded. “You’ll see why in a moment.”
Denton didn’t bother to nod. His chopper had landed on the roof of WET’s West Houston offices just minutes before, having ferried him back from his meeting with Spalding in Galveston. And now Beekman’s chattering drew Denton’s attention back to the control room, a fresh polymer having been installed to replace the glass that had shattered in the midst of their last experiment. Just in case that turned out to provide inadequate protection, they were viewing this latest demonstration from the safety of Denton’s office via video projection upon his computer monitor.
The lightbulb in question shared the same table as the mysterious rock Ben Younger had first come upon, secured inside the chamber between that clear wall ten times as thick as the one that had virtually dissolved before their eyes. It was screwed into a simple socket, but not switched on yet.
Beekman looked back toward Denton. “On a scale of one to ten, Manhattan being a ten, when it comes to the energy required to power an entire city, Houston would be a five, roughly a billion times what it takes to keep that lightbulb burning.”
“I’ve had a difficult day, Professor. Can you get to the point?”
This time, Beekman physically pointed at a bar grid occupying the far-right side of the monitor. “We’re going to measure the degree to which the rock can amplify minor ratios of energy. The lightbulb wouldn’t even register on the grid. A city block would move the needle ever so slightly, a small town only a bit more.”
“What if the needle reaches the top?” Denton wondered. “What kind of energy output would we be looking at then?”
“Enough to power the entire city of Houston.”
“Through a lightbulb?”
Beekman nodded. “Thanks to amplification.”
Denton turned his gaze on the replacement glass polymer, visible on the wall-mounted television. “Then what are we waiting for?”
British Columbia, Canada
Max snapped alert with a start, totally disoriented, gazing about to find he was seated in an airport terminal waiting area. His cell phone was ringing and he jerked it to his ear, recognizing Weeb Bochner’s number.
“Weeb?” Max managed in a scratchy voice.
“He speaks! At long last, he speaks. What the fuck, Pope, what the fuck happened?”
Indeed, what had happened? A thick fog, more like a blanket, covered everything else that had transpired up until this moment. There were snippets of memory, including sorting through some clothes hanging in a spare bedroom of Kirsch’s farmhouse. Max realized he was wearing a selection of those clothes now, jeans and shirt that fit well enough because they must’ve belonged to Teek, who was about the same size as him. They scratched at his skin a bit and smelled like chlorine bleach, still far better than the blood-soaked garb he must have discarded at some point.
“At least you’re not dead,” Bochner was saying.
Max realized his mouth was dry and pasty. “But Laurie Whitlow is, isn’t she?”
“Her body was found this morning, by the man I sent over there to check on her, like you asked. She’d slit her wrists in the bathtub.”
“She didn’t kill herself, Weeb, she was murdered.”
“How can you know that?”
“I can’t explain. I just do.”
Max tried to swallow again, realized he was sweating so much it was beginning to soak through his clothes. He scanned the waiting area, especially those sitting close to him, to make sure no one was watching or listening.
“What time is it?”
“Nine a.m. here. Six a.m. where you are. Shit’s hitting the fan, Pope.”
“I’ve been recalled to duty, Weeb.”
Max remembered the voice mail from Admiral Darby he’d listened to upon landing at Boundary Bay Airport hours ago. From Kirsch’s farm, though, he’d driven his rental car to Vancouver International Airport instead, where he booked the quickest route he could back to the Middle East, his military ID thankfully earning him a complimentary first-class upgrade on the flight he was now waiting to board.
“Listen, hoss,” Weeb Bochner was saying, “even our friendship, all the shit you did for me, only carries so far. I can’t help you with what went down up there any more than I already have.”
Max felt stiff everywhere, wished he could do some light stretching to loosen up. “What went down, Weeb? What do you know?”
“I know eight unidentified males were found dead on Dr. Kirsch’s property, along with Dr. Kirsch himself. Had the makings of an all-out firefight, except it wasn’t bullets that killed a whole bunch of them.”
Max felt his insides sink, more memories flooding back. As Bochner resumed, he groped through his pocket for the old mood ring that had long served as his lucky charm, the one and only thing he’d kept from his former life, oblong plastic jewel superglued in place, and squeezed it onto his finger.
“Royal Canadian Mounted Police are heading up the investigation, but they don’t have shit and no clue you were there.” Bochner paused, the edge leaving his voice when he resumed. “What do you remember exactly?”
“Bits and pieces, that’s all.”
“Then answer me this: Does you being recalled to duty have anything to do with scuttlebutt suggesting the Mideast is about to come completely unhinged to the point where I wouldn’t be surprised to get a call back myself? Rumors are rampant, and there’s amateur footage out there on social media that’s running on a nonstop loop on the news channels that look like the world really is going to hell this time. Looks like the goddamn zombie apocalypse wasn’t as far from the truth as everybody thought.”
“Admiral Darby ordered me to get my ass back on station. He didn’t say what for.”
“Don’t bother giving him my best because, you and me, we never saw each other. As far as I’m concerned, after what happened in Vancouver, you don’t exist. As much as I want to believe you, there’s too much that doesn’t add up, and I can’t risk it leading back to me.”
“My mother, Weeb,” Max managed.
“I won’t let you down there, Pope, on the condition you lose my name and my number. Old times’ sake only carries so far.”
“I understand. Thanks for everything. Weeb?”
Too late. He was already gone.
West Houston, Texas
“You’re telling me that, thanks to our rock, a single lightbulb might be able to power all of downtown Houston?” Denton posed, after Beekman’s remarks had a chance to sink in.
“That’s a rather rudimentary way of putting it, and that’s the purpose of this test: to find out if the preliminary algorithms were correct. We’re going to turn things up slowly this time. Do our best to avoid any repeats of what happened the first time. The amount of energy is so potentially vast, we’ll need to come up with an entirely new storage mechanism. The difference between the size of a gas tank and an entire tanker, maybe an entire fleet of them—and I mean that quite literally.”
“Start the test, Professor,” Denton ordered. “Let’s see what we can see.”
Beekman hit a button on his keyboard and the lightbulb switched on. Almost instantly, the vertical bar grid begin to fill in from the bottom up. Rising in deliberate fashion toward the one-tenth mark.
Denton studied the screen closer. “What’s happening to the energy we’re generating?”
“Flushed out into the ether beyond where, I suspect, it will become static electricity or something similar. That way, it spreads out and we avoid pockets of concentration.”
“And what could those pockets do?”
“Act in the same manner as some sort of an electrical storm, even a very minor electro-magnetic pulse, I suspect.”
“You suspect?”
“We’ve squarely entered uncharted territory here,” Beekman explained. “Everything is supposition.”
The bar grid had reached the line one-fifth from the bottom, still moving in deliberate fashion. Denton thought he must have seen it wrong, because his next glance an instant later showed the grid to be a third full. But one look at Beekman told him, no, he’d seen it right.
“Professor?” Denton said.
He looked back toward the laptop screen to find the arrow marker had reached the halfway point, picking up visible speed, until it filled in all the way to the top. The colored portion continued to pulse, as if surging beyond the machine’s capacity to measure the energy being generated, and Denton half expected the top of the bar grid to rupture under the pressure.
Something, misplaced motion or something else that didn’t seem to fit, drew Denton’s gaze to the left-hand portion of the screen, where lab technicians five stories underground were beginning to scurry about, something clearly amiss.
“Oh my,” Beekman managed. “Oh … no.”
Canada
Max had boarded the plane without incident. He made sure to exchange just enough pleasant smiles with his fellow passengers in the first-class cabin, before taking his seat, the one next to him empty.
He vaguely heard a recorded voice reviewing the aircraft and the proper steps to take in the event of an emergency, before his eyelids grew heavy and he felt himself nodding off. Max didn’t actually think he was asleep, because he could feel his own breathing, could still think. Then he felt himself twitching, powerless to rouse himself from whatever dream was opening like a curtain before him.
Somebody, wake me up!
He thought those words, but never spoke them. Couldn’t speak in his restive state, couldn’t make any sound other than the low whine, like an elongated guttural grunt, he could hear in his own ears.
The curtain continued to open, the nightmare into which he felt he’d fallen about to begin like some kind of twisted movie.
West Houston, Texas
“Professor!” Denton said, twisting Beekman around in his chair toward a wall-mounted widescreen television, tuned to CNN. “A sub-sea earthquake detected in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Houston?” he continued, reading the bulletin scrolling across the bottom of the screen. “Is that even possible?”
Just then, the Emergency Broadcast System cut into that, and all local broadcasts, signaled by a high-pitched, repetitive squeal.
“It’s us,” Beekman barely managed, his voice cracking. “We did this.”
“That’s fucking insane.”
The room erupted in high-pitched screams and wails, both men swinging back toward the computer monitor picturing the control room five stories beneath ground level.
“Oh my God,” Beekman muttered.
Over Canada
In his nightmare, Max could feel himself still twitching, muttering incoherently as he soared through history, a kaleidoscope of events rippling before him like a staccato montage.
The spear that had just pierced the side of Christ being crucified dripping blood onto a flattened dirt road …
A muck- and blood-riddled field of corpses and severed limbs with sword-wielding Crusaders gazing over their plunder …
Women being hanged as witches as pious puritans looked on, enraptured by the sight …
Soldiers still in their teens in blue uniforms crashing up against boys in gray uniforms, as musket balls and cannon fire showered blood into the air …
A slow-moving parade of emaciated souls in tattered concentration camp rags being led to a flat slab of a building beneath a sign that read AUSCHWITZ …
Flesh and bone being vaporized in the mushroom cloud spreading via a shock wave through Hiroshima …
Masked men lopping off the heads of men, women, and children in an Iraqi Christian village …
He bore witness to it all happening in the same moment of time, history rewound for his private view.
West Houston, Texas
Beekman and Denton heard a rippling series of crackling sounds, like branches breaking, accompanied by horrible, high-pitched screaming that quickly turned to hoarse rasps desperately heaving for breath. The technicians dropped in what looked like a single unbroken wave; no, not dropped so much as crumpled, folding up accordion style, even as more crackling sounds resonated through the widescreen’s speakers.
Over Canada
The ugliest moments in human history continued to unfold, with Max bearing witness. He was a spectator in a vast void that could have stretched to infinity or occupied only the area of the jet’s cabin. It seemed not to matter, the scope of the world no longer relevant.
Because he felt the world in his grasp.
The surge of power he felt seemed to superheat his blood, lending him a sense of pleasure he could feel all the way to his very core. It filled him with a calm reassurance that consumed all the doubt, all the uncertainty. If he could find a way to surrender to this power, join with it, the vagueness and mysteries of his past would melt away.
As he would melt away.
Into something unimaginable.
West Houston, Texas
The screams of the technicians grew so loud Beekman was left covering his ears as he watched them drop, watched them clutching for various limbs, confronted by the impossible reality that exposure to the energy released by the rock was actually shattering their bones. Their spi
nes seemed to go last, stilling their desperate flailing even as they continued to cry out in unspeakable agony, their gnarled bodies twitching and racked by spasms. He thought he saw, actually saw, splintered vertebrae break through the skin ahead of blood splatter showering the air, before he turned away, unable to watch any longer.
“Cut the power, Professor!” Denton ordered. “Cut the fucking power!”
Beekman had just hit the key that switched off the lightbulb, when the television fizzled, sparked, and exploded with a poof! right before their eyes.
“Shut it down!” Denton ordered again.
“I tried, I tried!” Beekman wailed back at him.
Over Canada
Wherever Max was now, his feet were back on the ground, the nebulous nature of vast, opaque nothingness replaced by a darkened room that felt stuffy and stale, the air rank with a stench of plant or tree rot. A dim cone of light shined downward, from a ceiling he couldn’t make out and a fixture he couldn’t see. He felt a shrill, dry wind, like one bred of a desert blowing, not so much into, as through him, leaving his mouth feeling like sand grit was coating it.
He realized the light was centered over a table enclosed by black-cloaked, hooded figures who seemed not to recognize his presence. The ones on the near side parted, squeezing into a semi-circle rimming the table, to reveal the figure of a young, incredibly sexy woman, so beautiful and perfectly formed that she seemed the product of a sculptor’s chisel, lying motionless upon it. Naked everywhere, except her face, which was covered by a mask zippered up from the top down the back of her skull. A snake, shiny black and glowing in the thin light, coiled about the woman atop the altar, caressing her skin lightly, almost affectionately.
Max felt a stirring inside him, wanting to see more of the woman, wanting to see all of her. Consumed, obsessed, and aroused like nothing he’d ever experienced before. He tried to approach her, but he couldn’t move, his feet feeling as if they were glued to the chalky floor. He looked down and realized he couldn’t see them. Maybe they were gone. Maybe they’d sunk through the floor.
