by Dan Rix
“Just wait,” I said. “It could be nothing.”
“I’ll tail it.” He spun the wheel and veered back the way we came, pulling up behind the van. He flipped on his high beams.
“You’re asking for trouble,” I said.
“I’m not starting the mission like this,” he said. “We’ll take him around the block if we have to, then start over from room B. We haven’t even been here five seconds.”
We peered into the van’s tinted rear windows. Inside, nothing moved. But we sensed the driver’s eyes in the rearview, watching us. It was three in the morning. No one pulled over at three in the morning.
Without warning, the van gunned it and sped away, past the ISDI office, and around the corner. A cloud of smoke coiled off its tire tracks.
“That’s a change,” I said. “For once, we chased them off.”
“Something’s not right about this,” said Damian, turning back around and continuing up the street. “Something’s not right.”
Chapter 21
Feeling the burn in my abs, I torqued the 42” handles of the industrial grade bolt cutter Damian “happened” to have in his trunk. Finally, the link snapped and the two severed lengths of chain fell to the dirt.
I climbed back into the car and we continued down Salk Canyon Road onto Black’s Beach. The Mustang glided over the sand, and its high beams flashed over a Nudity Prohibited sign.
“There’s a nude beach up ahead,” said Damian.
“Been there, done that,” I said.
His gaze flicked sideways, reassessing me. He raised an eyebrow.
I felt a smile tug at my lips, knowing he had no idea what to make of me. “If you can get us out of here alive, I’ll let you take me there.”
He smirked. “Deal.”
I blushed at how quickly he’d taken me up on it, regretting the offer immediately; never in a billion years would he let me back out of this one. “If you were that desperate to see me with my clothes off,” I said, my lip curling, “why didn’t you just crossover?”
He shrugged. “Been there, done that.”
I gaped at him. “You didn’t.”
“I had to get you back,” he said. “It’s not my fault you sleep naked.”
My jaw plunged. He did. I punched his shoulder and blurted out, “Then I should get to see you naked. That’s only fair.”
“If we make it back alive,” he said. “I will sunbathe nude anywhere you want me to.”
“My high school,” I said. “In the quad. At lunch.”
“That’s just cruel.”
I spat in my hand and held it out to him. “You saw me naked. Shake.”
Damian smiled. “Only because I enjoyed it.” He hocked a fat loogie onto his palm and squeezed our hands together.
“Ew.” I wiped his spit off on my jeans. When my eyes returned to the glittery expanse of beach, though, a thrill fluttered up my spine.
So Damian had crossed over to play out his fantasies with my reflection. I turned away from him to hide my smile.
“We’re getting close.” He flipped off his headlights and steered the car to the foot of the cliffs, where the crescent moon cast a black, impenetrable shadow. Where we could approach the maintenance tunnel unseen. The engine purred, and the gentle back and forth of the car rolling over the choppy sand gave the impression of floating.
With the headlights extinguished, my eyes were drawn to a triangle of lights on the water. The destroyer, its crew fast asleep.
My phone rang, making me flinch. I yanked it out of my pocket and stared at the caller ID: Josh, calling because prom was tomorrow—I’d forgotten.
“What do I do?” I said.
“It’s okay. You can answer it.”
“But that would be changing something,” I said. “Wouldn’t that mess up causality or something?”
“Blaire. This isn’t time travel. We change stuff all the time.”
Duh. I silenced the call, anyway. I’d have to talk to him eventually, but not now—
“Damian, we weren’t in the source,” I stammered, suddenly realizing what we had missed. “We changed something.”
“English, Blaire.”
“The van. We changed something when we scared it off.”
I knew by the hard flexing of his jaw he was thinking the same thing, he just didn’t want to voice it. “Yeah. So?”
“You explained it yourself, about the butterfly effect. What happens when you change something.” I breathed in, trying to calm myself. “The van was stopping at ISDI.”
“Because they saw my Mustang.”
“What if they were cops?”
He shook his head. “Cops drive squad cars. They knock.”
“Not if they were planning a hostage rescue,” I said. “They had that footage, remember? They had evidence that Amy was still inside the building.”
Moonlight shone through a dip in the cliffs, lighting Damian’s rigid face. “In that case, they would send a SWAT team,” he muttered, his voice deadly quiet, “under the cover of night, possibly in an old, unmarked van.”
“We need to go back,” I said. “They only called it off because we blew their cover. In the source, we weren’t even there to blow their cover. They’re still going in—”
“Whatever they did, it’s already done,” said Damian. “We might as well finish the mission . . . let’s just hope there’s still a source to go back to. Anyway, there’s the tunnel.”
***
A hundred yards ahead of us, an array of floodlights drenched the cliffs in a bluish glare, illuminating the concrete reinforcing around the tunnel’s entrance, excavated right into the rock. From the beach, deep tire tracks snaked into the black opening, confirming our hope that a vehicle could be driven inside.
A pair of truck-sized diesel generators rumbled on the sand, jarring loose dirt and debris from the cliffside. The dust sifted down in a steady stream and formed a haze around the tunnel’s entrance.
Without warning, we plowed through a barbed wire fence, and the impact jolted me forward. Twisted metal banged the car and screeched over the roof, and then it was behind us.
“Didn’t see that coming,” said Damian.
“Good thing we brought the car.”
We cruised past a couple parked Humvees and a portable office similar to the one at the south checkpoint. I craned my neck to see inside. Though brightly lit, the portable was abandoned. Like the rest of the beach.
“Strange,” I said.
“I guess no one’s stopping us.” Damian tugged the wheel and guided us into the tunnel’s entrance, and the ride smoothed out. A few yards in, he slammed the breaks.
The tunnel’s red safety lights illuminated a steel blast door inches from the bumper.
“Phew,” said Damian. “I was beginning to think they’d forgotten about us.” He got out of the car and stepped up to a glowing terminal, where he rummaged through the complete collection of ID cards, security overrides, and magnetic keys we had collected in previous crossovers. We had stuffed them all in his backpack.
After sliding a half dozen cards and entering twice as many codes, the door swung open with a hiss.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” he said, climbing back in.
“Yeah. That this is too easy.”
“Way too easy.”
As we plunged down the tunnel, I swallowed. We were now closer than we’d ever been to the artifact chamber, and no one even knew we were here.
Something definitely wasn’t right.
***
We drove the half mile in silence, guided only by dim emergency lighting strips. Abruptly, the tunnel opened into a theater sized cavern, braced with massive steel trusses. Quartz lights blazed along t
he ceiling, power cables hung like vines.
A steel sphere was perched on struts in the center of the cavern, the focal point of giant electromagnetic coils and particle accelerators, steam rising from their cooling systems—I knew, because I’d seen them on the plans.
This was the artifact chamber.
Damian killed the ignition, and the engine shuddered to a stop. We stepped out into the deafening hum of machinery, our feet sloshing in a quarter inch of muddy water. Diesel fumes sank into my nostrils, displacing the breathable air in my lungs and amplifying the slow thud of my heart.
The hull of the artifact chamber was broken only by a steel door, sealed shut. In the center of the door, a tiny fogged up window glowed blue. Lit from the inside.
“Where is everyone?” said Damian, glancing around the empty cavern.
“Is it too much to hope for that they took the night off?”
“If that’s true, then it sure as hell looks like I’m gettin’ naked after this.” Damian climbed the ladder to the catwalk encircling the chamber, where he tried to wrestle open the hand wheel. Locked.
“Can you see inside?”
He released the wheel and pressed his face to the blue glass. “All fogged up.” He slid down the ladder. “Let’s hack the mainframe and find out what the hell is going on here.”
***
“That bastard,” he said, staring at one of the six LCD monitors that comprised the workstation in an adjoining office. Nearby, glass fridges glowed neon.
“Who?”
“Charles. He’s been contacting these people behind our backs.”
“How do you know?”
“Read this email chain. The rest are encrypted.”
I tore my gaze off the video feeds on the other monitors—blue mist obscured the feeds from inside the chamber anyway—to read the string of messages on Damian’s screen.
to: Charles Donovan
from: Sal Benjamin
date: Tue, Apr 8 at 6:17 PM
subject: Artifact
We calculated the angle of lunar parallax and were able to pinpoint the other side in Nevada. We know exactly where it should be, but there’s nothing there. Just a dry lakebed.
to: Sal Benjamin
from: Charles Donovan
date: Tue, Apr 8 at 8:02 PM
subject: Artifact
Have you considered bringing the actual artifact to the location in Nevada? I would very much like to accompany you, as I have a theory of my own I wish to put to rest.
to: Charles Donovan
from: Sal Benjamin
date: Tue, Apr 9 at 9:50 AM
subject: Artifact
A trip will not be possible. Beginning tomorrow, it will be under military quarantine. Charles, there is a life form on the other side.
--Sal
***
Dr. Benjamin’s parallel universe theory came to mind, and a chill fluttered up my spine. A life form on the other side. I fought a shiver. “Where’d they get this thing?”
“I found that out too,” said Damian. “They dug it up at Sycamore Landfill over in Santee.”
“A landfill?”
He nodded. “Want to know what else?”
“What?”
He clicked the mouse, bringing up a recorded video. “Watch.”
I recognized the cavern that held the artifact chamber, since we were now in it. A string of white letters at the top left displayed the date and time of the footage, the thousandths of a second passing in a blur.
“April tenth,” I read.
“The night your dad showed up. Keep watching.”
On the screen, a construction worker soldered something at the back of the chamber while a group of scientists chatted off to the side. Then I saw it.
The door to the artifact chamber . . . the hand wheel was slowly turning. Only no one stood in front of the door. I leaned closer, squinting to see clearly. It was rotating on its own—
On the screen, the door opened, revealing only darkness inside the chamber. A figure stumbled out, rubbing his shoulders, and clambered down the ladder off the catwalk. No one else saw him.
As if invisible, he walked right behind the scientists, lifted one of their white coats off the back of a chair, tugged it around his thin shoulders, and headed for the elevator.
Damian paused the replay and faced me. “Did you recognize who that was?”
I continued to stare at the frozen figure, hardly believing my eyes. “That was my dad.”
***
While I processed what I’d seen, Damian’s fingers flew over the keyboard. So my dad hadn’t wandered up from a mirror, he had come from the artifact.
Just like my DNA.
Already, an even more disturbing question entered my mind. If the artifact was some sort of device you could use to climb up a level, to climb from a reflection to the source without a mirror, then what would happen if you turned it on in the source? Where would it take you then?
The thought chilled me.
“There. Just unlocked it,” said Damian. “Let’s grab this thing and get the hell out of here.”
Together, we approached the artifact chamber and climbed up to the catwalk. My pulse sounded in dull thuds.
Damian gripped the hand wheel.
“Wait,” I said, “it might be contagious.”
“I know it’s contagious,” he said. “It’s got you all over it.” He winked and spun the wheel, and the door came open with a hiss. Water vapor drained out of the sphere and spilled through the grate on the catwalk, leaving only hollow space between us and the artifact. Leaving only hollow space inside my lungs.
Damian stepped into the steel shell, and I followed him, my heart hammering at the base of my brain. Abruptly, though, he halted, and I ran into him—and felt his back muscles tense up.
I leaned around him to see what he was looking at . . . to see the artifact.
“Something’s wrong,” he said.
There, at the focal point of an array of scientific instruments punched through the steel sphere, a pair of steel talons splayed into empty air . . . gripping nothing. The clamps—lined with foam to protect its load—had been loosened.
There was no artifact.
“Where is it?” I whispered.
“Something’s wrong . . . someone set us up—”
As if on cue, an alarm blared inside the chamber, the steel shell amplifying its scream to a roar inside my ear drums. Wincing, I clutched my ears. Damian did the same. Red strobe lights flashed on the ceiling.
They knew we were here.
***
Failure.
It felt like a physical blow.
After all this work, all this training and preparation to recover the artifact, the one thing that would reveal the truth, it was . . . gone. We wouldn’t get another chance.
We piled into the Mustang as a shower of bullets clanged the doors and bumper. Damian jerked the ignition, jammed the stick into reverse, and floored it—and the acceleration glued me to the dashboard. Bullets dinged the car’s hull.
Soldiers flooded the cavern from the maintenance tunnel. More men poured in from above, firing at us from catwalks suspended from the ceiling. Damian twisted his body and craned his neck to see behind us, his right hand on my seatback and his left jerking the wheel. He veered us into the tunnel, splitting the crowd of infantry like bowling pins.
“Didn’t think we’d have a car, did they?” he said, smirking. The tunnel’s emergency lights gave his skin a bronze glow and accented the rigid set of his jaw. I gazed at him, mesmerized. It was official; he was beyond sexy
.
We shot up the tunnel, engine roaring, and I felt my insides floating forward. I stole a glance at the tachometer: deep into the redline. We were pushing the reverse gear to the max.
Bullets tore up the bumper and stamped the windows with spider webs. A side view mirror snapped off. The car jerked, and my door dented in, nearly crushing my knee. The impact plastered me to the window then sprawled me out on his lap.
He straightened us out. “Sorry.”
“You did that on purpose,” I said, peeling my face off his thigh.
“They’re closing the blast door,” he said.
“What?”
“Hang on to something,” he said, his eyes fixed on the black stretch of tunnel behind us. “This is going to be tight.”
I just had time to grab my door. With a nauseating squeal, the blast door—now half closed—raked the length of the car, pulverized the other mirror, and again crunched me into the door. Then we shot out of the tunnel. Suddenly airborne, the vehicle pitched backwards, and through the windshield the cliffs dropped off and I glimpsed the moon’s glowing crescent—before the car groaned to a stop and I was squashed into my seat. A wall of water shot up behind us and rolled down the windshield. We’d backed right into the ocean.
Water submerged my window. I stared out at bubbles, terrified. Unfazed, Damian shoved the stick into first gear, and gave the engine gas. Is he crazy? He couldn’t possibly think we were still on land—the wheels caught on the seafloor, and the Mustang shuddered and hauled itself out of the surf, shedding foam and seaweed. Damian jerked the wheel and we skidded up the beach, gathering speed on the wet sand.
“Now that’s how you fucking do it!” he whooped, flipping on the windshield wipers to clear the last of the foam.
Behind us, the Humvees peeled out in hot pursuit. Hah! On an open stretch, there was no way they could outrun a souped up Ford Mustang GT. We were home free—
The Humvees opened fire. To our right, the dunes erupted in a fountain of sand, strafing toward us.
