by Sechin Tower
He felt distracted and uncertain of what to do—until he glanced into his rear-view mirror and saw the huge man on the black motorcycle behind him. The danger, he could now see, was very real. He may not have understood why someone would be chasing McKenzie, but now all his worry and confusion fell away and in their place remained only clarity of purpose. He had to keep her safe, which meant he had to lead them away.
Dean slouched down in the seat to prevent his pursuer from recognizing that it was not McKenzie driving the car, and then he took a circuitous drive through the city streets. Before long, the big man peeled off and another black-clad biker picked up the pursuit in his place. The bikers, whoever they were, were taking turns shadowing him. They were pretty good at the tag-team pursuit, too. In other circumstances, Dean might not have noticed they were following him, even though they were not exactly inconspicuous individuals. He considered leading them to the police station, but he would have nothing to report—other than the big man’s lack of a helmet, they weren’t breaking any laws. As long as he had her car, he could make sure they didn’t find her, so he kept luring them on, making sure they didn’t lose him and yet not letting them get close enough to see his face.
Dean led his pursuers through the downtown streets for more than an hour. He had counted five different bikers by then, and the latest one was the most aggressive. Like the others, this biker rode a heavily customized but older-model motorcycle, but this one wore no shirt. He frequently navigated between cars at red lights to get closer and closer, until he was so near that Dean could see the large swastika tattoo over the left side of his chest.
Dean decided it was time to get a little more elusive. He made a sudden turn through a red light and then veered into a parking garage that he knew had an exit on the other side of the block. After he pulled through to the far street, he saw no more bikers behind him.
His impulse was to drive directly home to be with McKenzie, but he didn’t want to risk it. Instead, he headed out towards the coastal highway, where the long narrow roads would expose any pursuers. Only after he was satisfied that he had lost his tail did he return home.
It was early evening by the time he pulled into his driveway, and he was relieved to see his big red truck awaiting him. Dean hopped out of the car and rushed to the front door, intending to throw it open and announce his victory. But when his hand touched the doorknob, his excitement evaporated. The door frame had broken away from the lock. Someone had kicked it in.
In a flash, Dean was inside. The house was dark and silent. When he flipped the switch, the lights didn’t come on.
“McKenzie,” he called. There was no answer. He called louder, but still there was no answer. He moved through the dining room hallway and found that the lights didn’t work here, either. In the kitchen, the microwave and stove clocks were blank. Power outage, he thought, but when he looked out the window he saw that the neighbors had their back porch light on.
At the small kitchen table, he found one of the chairs had been overturned. A black suitcase was stashed neatly beside the other chair, and a laptop set up on the table. He concluded that these must be her things, which meant McKenzie had definitely been here. The question was: where had she gone?
He righted the chair and put it back in its spot and jabbed a few of the laptop’s keys. The screen remained as dead as the lights, but he noticed a white pad of paper tucked underneath the computer. He pulled it out to find a note in her handwriting:
Dean,
They’re coming. They’re here. Whatever happens, I want you to know something.
My answer is yes. With all my heart, yes. I should have said it years ago.
McKenzie
Dean suddenly felt frantic. He must have failed to draw them away. They figured it out, and then they found her here, kicked in the front door, and cut the power somehow. But maybe it wasn’t too late—if McKenzie had gotten away, then he could still find her before they do.
He looked around, desperate to find some clue as to where she might have gone. Then he saw something black and shiny on the second step of his staircase. It was one of her shoes. He ran past it, up the stairway to find her there, on the landing, halfway to the second floor. She was laying face down, one hand underneath her and the other resting limply beside her.
Desperately, he searched for a pulse and found none. He rolled her over and brushed her hair from her face to find her eyes open and staring.
Even as he began CPR, he knew, with the full weight of his professional experience, that it was too late. His futile rescue breaths would amount to nothing more than a goodbye kiss.
September 4th
(Doomsday minus 14 days)
Chapter 5 ~ Soap
“I think you should reconsider that scholarship,” my Dad said as he sat at the kitchen table paying bills. He was resting his forehead on his left palm like he always did when he balanced his checkbook.
I was zig zagging through the apartment with a hand-held version of the EMP broadcasting device. With one hand I adjusted the power level while with the other I kept the focusing dish aimed up at a miniature autogyro helicopter I had constructed from balsa wood pieces salvaged from a model airplane and the motor from an RC car. It flew pretty well, but whenever the autogyro got too high, it would lose its energy and begin to float down where it would come closer to my broadcaster. Then it would get its motor energized by the electromagnetic field I was broadcasting and would go zipping back up to the ceiling. Up and down, up and down in our tiny apartment. The challenge was that it would veer off in all sorts of directions, so I had to move constantly in order to keep the broadcaster directly beneath it. It was kind of like that old game with the rubber ball on the string that you’re supposed to get in the cup, except here the rubber ball flies away on its own.
“I know it’s short notice,” my Dad went on. “But I think it would be a really good experience for you to go to that college.”
“Seriously?” I asked, hopping to my right to stay beneath the autogyro. “I’m only sixteen. I’d never fit in at college. Plus, it doesn’t seem fair that the only reason I got the scholarship is because my cousin was all smoochy-smoochy with the Dean of Students there.”
“That’s not why you got this scholarship,” he said. “Soap, you have a gift—”
I couldn’t hear what he said next because the autogyro veered off and I had to lunge to keep up with it, which made me knock over a floor lamp. The lamp fell with a cymbal-crash, and it made both of my Dad’s autographed basketballs fall off their shelf and bounce to the other side of the room.
“Soap,” I think my Dad tried to yell at me, but it came out more like a sigh of defeat.
“Sorry, Dad!” I said. “I just have to calibrate the amplifier and then I’ll be done.”
“I just feel like you might be happier there,” he said. “This city is just too small for you.”
“Dad,” I scolded. “New York is as big as cities can get.”
“That’s not what I mean. This place is too confining. Too… closed-in. You need open air and empty fields where you can run around and play Frisbee and launch your rockets without raining fire back down on densely populated areas.”
I smacked my shoulder into a wall trying to keep up with the autogyro. Aside from knocking the wind out of me, it took away any argument I might have made about not needing more space.
But I did have my reasons for not wanting to go. First, who ever heard of the Mechanical Science Institute? I was still hoping to get into some really well-known science program like MIT or Stanford or Georgia Tech, even though I had no idea how I could afford one of those big-name places. But the real reason I didn’t want to go came down to this: I just didn’t want to leave my Dad.
For five years now, it had been just him and me and the occasional cockroach living happily in this little apartment. Sure, I was planning on leaving after I graduated high school, but that gave me two more years to adjust to the idea. And now this woman from this
crazy school wanted me to pack up and leave my entire life to travel a third of the way across the country with less than two week’s notice. It sounded seriously mental. Thinking about it made me lose concentration on what I was doing and I accidentally cranked the power a bit too high. The autogyro’s motor emitted a loud POP as it erupted into orange flames and zinged upwards in one last burst of speed. Trailing a line of black smoke, it ricocheted off the ceiling and streaked down onto the stack of bills my Dad was trying to pay. What can I say—my experiments always explode.
My Dad knocked his chair over as he jumped up in surprise. I was already on top of the mess, smothering the flames before they could spread too much. The only problem was that I pushed the papers off the table and they fluttered all over the place.
“Sorry, sorry!” I yelled, stooping to gather up the bills.
“Don’t worry about that,” he said a bit shakily. “Better shuffled than burned, I suppose.”
I started reading the papers as I handed them to him. Water bill: first notice of overdue payment. Electricity: second notice. Rent: warning of eviction.
I unfolded the last one and started reading it.
“Soap, don’t—don’t read that,” he said, but it was too late. I had seen enough.
“We’re being evicted?”
My Dad was quiet a really long time. “Not until next month,” he finally said. “Then we have 30 days to move out. Don’t worry, we’ll work out something.”
“We’re getting evicted and you tell me not to worry? What part of working out ‘something’ is supposed to make me feel better?”
He put his hands up in a gesture that told me to calm down, but we both knew the electrician job market was in the toilet right then, plus there was the matter of repairing the gym and replacing all those cell phones. All because of me.
I let him take the eviction warning out of my hands. He folded it up neatly and placed it on the stack, then absent-mindedly picked at the spot of charcoal where my autogyro had burned through the table’s finish. I sat with my back against the wall and wrapped my arms around my knees.
“This seems like a good time for me to take the scholarship and move out,” I said slowly. “Then you wouldn’t have to keep paying for me and all my disasters.”
“Don’t go unless you want to,” he said, sliding down to sit next to me, then putting his arm around my shoulders and drawing me in close. “Believe me when I say I don’t want you to go if you’re not ready. Actually, I don’t want you to go ever. I’ve been dreading the day when you move out, you know. But, well, education is worth any sacrifice.”
It wasn’t until then that I realized my leaving would be as hard on him as it was on me. Then I imagined him having to live in his van for the rest of his life, which is what would happen if he had to keep paying for my housing, food, and collateral damage. It was only fair that I accept my exile to make up for my mistakes.
Look out, college—here I come.
Chapter 6 ~ Dean
When the knock came on his broken door, Dean was laying on the couch in the darkened front room, his left hand clutching the two slips of paper that McKenzie had left him. He wasn’t sure if he had been asleep or awake, which was how he had felt throughout the past two days as the police had crawled all over his house and grilled him with questions. When he had arrived for his next shift, the station chief took one look at him and sent him home on sick leave. That was probably best, because Dean was having trouble concentrating. He kept remembering McKenzie’s face at the moment he found her, with her wide-open eyes and the orange hair against her blue cheeks. The memory was tearing him up.
“Whatever you’re selling,” Dean called to whoever was on his porch. “I’m not buying any.”
“Mr. Lazarcheck,” said his one of his visitors. “We’re with the FBI. I’m Agent Brian Nash and my partner is Agent O’Grady. May we come in? I’d like to ask you a few questions about Professor McKenzie.”
Dean rubbed his eyes and stood up. His limbs felt stiff and heavy as he went to let them in. One was a short black man with close-cropped hair, a pleasant smile, and a tired look in his eyes. The other was older, maybe in his fifties, with gray-white hair combed straight back and a hard, trim physique that made him look as if his body had been stamped from boiler-plate steel. Both wore matching black suits.
“Your door is broken,” Nash said.
Dean just nodded. Right then, he didn’t care if it ever got fixed, but he wasn’t ready to admit that to a stranger.
“And the room is dark,” Nash observed.
“Everything’s dark.” Dean meant it metaphorically, but it was also literally true of his house. Every light bulb, appliance, and electrical socket had burned out.
The older agent stood by the door while Nash pulled up a seat across from Dean.
“Mr. Lazarchek, I’m sorry for what happened to your girlfriend.”
“She was my fiancé,” Dean muttered. Somehow, calling her a girlfriend seemed to undervalue his history with McKenzie. A girlfriend might have been someone he knew for a day, but she had been so much more than that. He wanted to argue the point, but decided he didn’t have the strength. Besides, the note McKenzie had left wouldn’t prove anything to anyone other than himself.
Nash cleared his throat and began again. “According to the autopsy, the cause of Professor McKenzie’s death was her pacemaker. It shorted out.”
Dean just nodded. Considering the state of his household electronics, he had guessed that the same thing had happened to her. But medical implants like her pacemaker would never simply short out on their own. They were too carefully designed and too rigorously tested. What had happened to McKenzie had not been an accident. Someone had shorted out her heart along with his entire house and then kicked open his front door to make sure the job was complete.
“I’d like to ask you a question, if you don’t mind,” Agent Nash slid a series of photos out of a brown envelope. “Do any of these men look familiar to you?”
One by one, Agent Nash showed him mug shots of men with facial tattoos, missing teeth, and long, unkempt beards. Dean studied each one and shook his head—until the last photo. His hand froze as he held the image of a man who filled the picture in front of him.
“This one,” Dean said. “I saw him the day McKenzie came to find me. She looked at him… it was like she recognized him and she was afraid.”
The two agents exchanged a meaningful glance.
“We believe that the man you saw is Morton Hendrix, better known by any of a dozen aliases, including ‘Brick.’ He is a member of a gang known as the Blitzkrieg Legion, AKA the Blitzkriegers. He is also a person of interest in a series of armed bank robberies.”
“A ‘person of interest,’” Dean repeated. “You mean he’s a suspect?”
“He is a person of interest,” Nash said flatly. “His associates are also of interest in the same crimes. Did Professor McKenzie ever speak of Brick? Or did she mention anything that might relate to the Blitzkriegers?”
Dean shook his head. None of it made sense. Why would she have had anything to do with a biker gang? And yet, she must have. For whatever reason, she had been running from that giant of a man and his friends. And it seemed she hadn’t run fast enough.
Still a man as big as Brick could have just snapped McKenzie’s neck. Why go to the trouble of burning out electrical circuits? Then again, the courts might convict a man of inflicting a broken neck, but not for inflicting a heart attack. It meant there might not be justice for McKenzie. As he thought about it, Dean’s hands tightened into fists.
The FBI agents thanked Dean, collected their photos, and departed. He was free to return to his numbness, but now he found himself unable to do so. McKenzie had been murdered, he was certain of it. What was more, he had seen the face of her killer, or at least the face of someone involved in the killing.
Dean had no answers for who killed McKenzie but at least he was beginning to get an idea of what he needed to do. He
took out the two pieces of paper she had left him, the note accepting his proposal and the sticky-note that indicated he could have her job.
He hated himself for failing to save her, but he still had a chance to do something to help the woman he had loved. Her last wish had been for him to protect her students. Maybe, while he was at this institute of hers, he could find out who did this to her and settle the score.
September 10th
(Doomsday minus 7 days)
Chapter 7 ~ Soap
We couldn’t afford a plane ticket, so I had to travel to Minnesota by train. That meant while people my age had already been in school for half a week back home, I was on a long, lazy trip aboard the oldest mode of mass transportation still available in this country. It promised to be seriously boring.
My problem was that I was going a little crazy without anything to work on. I wanted to tinker with Rusty, but he had to be locked away with all my tools in the baggage car. My Dad insisted that shipping him in a sealed trunk was the only way we could afford to get him out there. My Dad was probably just worried that if I had access to my tools and my robot then we would end up terrorizing the other passengers. I have to admit, he was probably right.
I had nothing to do but sit there and stew about what my life would be like when I got to the university. I had received a letter that the Dean of Students had died unexpectedly and a selection committee had been established to find a replacement. I was sad to hear about the death even though I didn’t know Professor McKenzie. It also made me paranoid that whoever took over might come to their senses and revoke my acceptance letter. But the thing I was most scared of was how I would get along with the other students.
