by Jay Falconer
Lucas looked up a steep angle to make eye contact with the officer getting out of the driver’s door. The cop was a few inches shorter than Trevor, and not nearly as muscular. The officer put on his police cap and repositioned his duty belt.
“I’m Sergeant Cherekos. Can you tell me what happened here?”
“Yes, I can.”
Dozens of other police and emergency vehicles closed in on Lucas’ position. Several vehicles slid sideways, nearly hitting each other, as the dew-laden grass lessened the tire traction when they tried to stop. Lucas was being surrounded on three sides with the Student Union behind him.
The officer took out a pad and pen and began to write. “Let’s start with your name.”
“Lucas Ramsay.”
“Okay, what did you see?”
“I was walking across the mall when suddenly a bright light exploded out of nowhere in front of the Union and nearly blinded me.”
The officer glanced at theatre. “How long did the light last?”
“Maybe two or three seconds.”
“Where were you at the time?”
“I’d guess about a hundred feet from the Union’s steps. Close to where those women are standing over there,” Lucas said, pointing to three older people, probably in their thirties, standing twenty feet away from him on the grass.
“Where would you say the light originated from?”
“I don’t know, but I’d guess somewhere near the center of the crater. It all happened so fast.”
The Sergeant looked at the hallow crater for a few seconds, before turning his eyes back to Lucas. “Did you hear an explosion?”
“No, the only sound I heard was this high-pitched squeal. It started right after the light appeared.”
The officer scratched his head with his pen. “A squeal?”
“It was like being trapped inside a room with a thousand children screaming at the top of their lungs. The pain was so intense I fell down. When I looked around, there was a bunch of other people lying on the ground, too. I didn’t pass out, but almost everyone else did.”
Cherekos scribbled more notes into his incident report.
Fire and rescue personnel ran past him carrying hoses, stretchers, ladders, and medical equipment. News reporters came rushing up to the scene with their cameras in tow. Some were out of breath, which Lucas assumed was due to them having to park several blocks away. The mall was normally a pedestrian only zone; vehicles didn’t have access.
“How large would you estimate the light to be?”
“I couldn’t look at it directly,” Lucas replied, looking back at the theatre while thinking about it for a few moments. “I’d say about the same size as the area that’s missing. Maybe a bit smaller?”
“Did you see anything unusual before the flash? Like someone who didn’t belong? Someone acting suspicious, maybe?”
Lucas shook his head. “All I remember was the students lining up for the movie.”
Helicopters buzzed overhead, flooding the scene with swirling spotlights. Lucas had a difficult time hearing the cop over the deafening rotors chopping through the cool desert air.
“How many students were in line?” Cherekos yelled.
Lucas shouted back. “Best guess? Maybe two hundred. The line was fairly long.”
Cherekos seemed to be making a visual count of the human remains along the steps. Then he said, “What happened to the rest of the students?”
“They vanished into thin air, just like the building.”
Cherekos shook his head slightly and mouthed the words “vanished into thin air” as he wrote a few more notes. Two additional officers joined the cop and stood to his left. Based on their body language, Lucas thought they were waiting for instructions.
“What happened next?” Cherekos asked.
“I felt a breeze pull me toward the Student Union.”
“Pull you? Do you mean pushed, like in wind?”
“No, it was more like I was being sucked into the crater. It pulled at me, from the front.”
The officer’s stopped writing and looked at Lucas with his left eyebrow raised. “Sir, have you been drinking tonight?”
“No, officer, I don’t drink. Ever.”
Cherekos clicked his pen, put it into his shirt pocket, and closed his incident report with more force than necessary.
“I know this sounds crazy, Officer, but I’m telling you the truth.”
“Okay, sir, I think we have all we need. Thank you for your time.”
Cherekos stepped away and began a private discussion with his officers. Lucas saw him reach for the radio transmitter clinging to his upper chest.
The police had erected a series of sawhorse-style barricades around the scene, behind Lucas. They were in the process of linking them together with yellow DO NOT CROSS police tape.
After a minute, Cherekos and his fellow officers broke their huddle to escort Lucas and the ever-growing number of paparazzi to the other side of barricades. Lucas waited there for fifteen minutes as hundreds of civilians filtered into the mall area and congregated alongside him. Many of them snapped photos and shot video of the scene with their smart phones.
Lucas could barely keep his eyes open and decided to walk the mile and a half home before he fell asleep standing up by the barricades. He needed to check on Drew, too.
* * *
Lucas didn’t feel like waiting for the elevator, so he climbed up the three flights of stairs. He unlocked the apartment door, removed his shoes, and then slipped past Drew’s bed. Drew was snoring as he lay on his left side, his back to the room.
Lucas sat at the study desk and turned on his computer. While he waited for the sign-on screen to appear, he pulled the flash drive out of his pocket and put it on the desk, careful not to damage it. Once logged onto his computer, he connected the flash drive with one of the two dozen electronic cables he kept stuffed inside the bottom drawer. He turned down the computer’s speaker system and began to play back the video footage on the screen. The audio was just loud enough for him to hear.
The video camera’s operator had been waiting in the movie line with his three friends—two young women and one older guy who wore a baseball cap with a two-inch blue-and-red block-letter A on the front. The camera captured them laughing and joking around about the movie they were about to see.
Lucas fast-forwarded the recording to a frame just before the flash appeared. The camera’s time stamp read 11:52 PM. He reviewed the incident in super-slow motion, playing the recording frame by frame, until he came to the first appearance of blinding light. It started as a microscopic point of light, just to the left of the Student Union’s entrance door, before stretching vertically and then horizontally until the camera’s lens was inundated with light. His suspicions were confirmed: The theatre flash, though more powerful and larger, was a near perfect copy of the one they’d seen inside their reactor’s core. In addition, there’d been the black powder he’d found inside both the crater and in the reactor’s core. The evidence was unmistakable. They were related.
He walked over to his brother’s bed and shook him on the arm several times. “Drew, you need to wake up. We have to talk.”
Chapter 10
Sunday, December 23
Lucas woke up at 10:24 Sunday morning after a lousy night’s sleep, mentally replaying last night’s horror show repeatedly until he finally feel asleep around 4:30 AM. He slid deep under the covers and curled up in a ball, squeezing a second pillow between his arms, then he realized he wasn’t hearing his brother snoring or moving around in the room.
He sat up and looked at Drew’s bed. There was no sign of him or his wheelchair. He hopped out of bed, got dressed, and checked Drew’s nightstand, but his brother’s wallet, keys, and shuttle pass were all missing. It was unusual for Drew to venture off without informing him first. He needed to find him.
The TV was on in the main room but there was no sound. Its remote control was on top of the kitchen table next to two slices
of toast, one of which had a bite missing. A nearly full glass of milk was sitting next to a fresh tub of margarine and a butter knife.
The front blinds were closed, and so was the front door, though its two-sided deadbolt was locked. He unlocked the door, went outside, and wandered barefoot along the catwalk to the elevator. He could see dozens of people down below, loading their vehicles with their belongings. From his view, it looked like everyone was leaving town. He couldn’t blame them. He would have joined them if he could.
He checked the laundry room on the first floor—no sign of Drew. He knocked on the manager’s door, but no one answered. He asked several of his fleeing neighbors if they had seen Drew, but none had.
He waved at little Cindy Mack who was standing beside her father while he packed the trunk of their car. She came running up to him, wrapping her arms around his waist. He bent down to give her a real hug.
She started crying. “Lucas, I don’t want to leave. But my dad says we have to go.”
“It’ll be okay, Cindy. Your dad’s right, it’s not safe for you to stay here.”
“But I’ll never see you again.”
“Sure you will,” he said, looking her in the eyes. “When this is all over, I’ll be right here waiting for you by the swing set. Okay?”
She smiled at him, sniffed, wiped off her tears, and then ran back to her dad.
Cindy was one of the few kids in the apartment complex, and the only one he liked. Maybe it was because she was the only one who liked him. Her parents both worked during the day, leaving her to play by herself on the swing set in the back of the apartment after school. He had gotten to know her a few months earlier when she’d fallen off the swing and scraped one of her knees. He was on his way out to the dumpster with a bag of trash when he found her sitting on the ground, crying. He used the garden hose to clean out the dirt and gravel from her wound, and then found a bandage to cover the scrape.
She took a shining to him and they talked a couple times a week, usually by the swing set. She was a quiet, but cheerful girl in the fourth grade, who carried an empty white purse with her everywhere she went. He worried for her safety since she was left alone for two hours each day after school until her parents came home from work. He often looked out the bedroom window to check on her while she played on the swings.
He went back upstairs to the apartment and changed clothes, still thinking of Cindy’s arms wrapped tightly around him. If something happened to her because of his negligence in the lab, he would never forgive himself.
Once he had his shoes and socks on, he stood in front of the TV, turned on the sound, and hit the remote to scan through several channels. Every station was broadcasting live from the Student Union. Cameramen in helicopters were circling above the Student Union, capturing the best angles of the damage they could.
“Shit, it looks much worse from the air,” he said.
He realized there were no body fragments littering the theatre’s steps. He assumed CSI had collected the evidence and taken it back to their lab.
Lucas settled in to watch his favorite network news station, taking a seat on the edge of their couch. News correspondents were interviewing campus officials and law enforcement. He sat back and put his arm up on the sofa’s back cushion, catching a whiff of his left forearm. Even after last night’s hot shower, he could still smell the stench of burnt hair and severed flesh on his skin. He wondered how many scrubbings it would take to get rid of the stink.
Most of the network’s reporters, and a few of their interviewees, offered opinions on what had happened. Some believed it was merely an accident, like a gas explosion. Others thought it might have been a terrorist attack, with some form of incendiary device as the weapon.
He was flabbergasted when no one mentioned the lack of building rubble or the bloodless body parts. He wondered if anyone was paying attention. The missing evidence was just as important as the tangible evidence.
When law enforcement officials were asked for a cause, they declined to comment, giving the police department’s typical response, “The investigation is still ongoing.”
Lucas could see the Tucson Bomb Squad in the background, milling about, working their detection equipment, scanning inch-by-inch for chemical and radiological evidence.
The local police were straining to hold back the crowd of thousands that surrounded the scene. Many observers were snapping photos and recording their own video footage. Firefighters were keeping watch on the theatre’s exterior, equipment at the ready; smoke still billowed out from the sides of the damaged structure.
When the camera swung around to the front of the theatre's steps, it showed two FBI agents chatting with the Chief of Police. One of the FBI agents looked a lot like the redheaded security guard that broke up the skirmish with the rugby players in the cafeteria. "Damn, that guy could be his twin," Lucas mumbled. Then the camera panned down to show Drew sitting in his wheelchair. He was talking with the FBI agents.
"Drew, what the hell are you doing?" he yelled at the screen.
Standing only a few feet behind his brother was Randol Larson, the pretentious attorney from the Advisory Committee.
“Damn it to hell,” Lucas said, throwing down the remote control. He raced out the door, down the hall, down the stairs, and ran the 1.5 miles to the Student Union. He was out of breath when he arrived.
He checked the pandemonium to figure out the shortest route he had to Drew, but he couldn’t see over the crowd. He climbed up on a short retaining wall to his right. He held on to the branch of a nearby tree to balance himself while he stared over the crowd. He could see the front of the Student Union, but not Drew. There were too many people blocking his view. He figured he could swing around to the right to bypass as much of the horde as possible, cutting through the crowd’s outside edge to get to Drew.
He jumped down from the cement wall, which caused a slight pain in his right shin. After narrowly avoiding a broken beer bottle and a well-concealed sprinkler head, he navigated his way to the front right sector of the mob. He said, “Excuse me,” “pardon me,” and “coming through,” as he worked his way into the crowd with an outstretched arm.
A police barricade stopped his progress when he reached the front row. He could see the back of Drew’s head only fifty feet away. He called out Drew’s name several times, but his brother didn’t react. The crowd noise and the helicopters whirling overhead were almost deafening.
One of several police officers standing guard was just to his left, and just inside the perimeter. He hoped to convince the cop to let him inside the barricade. He just needed to think of the proper excuse.
“Hi, Officer, I’m Dr. Ramsay of the Astrophysics Department. I may be able to help you figure out what caused this.”
The man looked at Lucas and laughed. “Yeah, right. Astrophysics Department. What are you, eighteen?”
Lucas pushed closer to the man. “I know I look young, but trust me, I’m a physicist with the university. I can help you, but you need to let me inside.”
“That’s not going to happen. Now step back.”
Lucas reached for his back left pocket, realizing instantly that he’d left his wallet in the apartment. While he was considering his options, the crowd noise faded and became silent. The only sounds came form the helicopters. Then, like a tidal wave traveling atop the ocean, each bystander turned in succession to face the east end of the grassy mall.
Lucas turned around, shocked by an earsplitting scream behind him and saw about a half mile away, at the east end of campus, a towering dome of intense, white-hot light. Lucas froze in place, his hand hanging over his back pocket, unable to move. The mountain of energy looked like the top half of a giant, glowing white cue ball stuck into the ground. He couldn’t see through the dome, but he thought he could see an intense mass of energy swirling around inside it, shimmering like the surface of the sun.
The crowd panicked and began screaming when they realized the dome was headed their way. Lucas pr
essed his back up against the Student Union’s south wall as the crowd ran wild.
Above the screams, he could hear buildings and other structures being ripped from the earth as the energy field barreled west through campus. Along with the buildings, the energy field tore up trees, cement, and pavement as it moved. Everything it encountered was swallowed up inside. He wondered if the thundering sound was similar to what a person would hear near an F-5 twister as it tore through a Midwestern town in Tornado Alley.
His knees shook as he watched the gigantic energy mass move his way. He thought about running away, but he couldn’t convince his body to move. Nor could he take his eyes off the monster destroying the campus. Though it was still several blocks away, he could guess its size by the buildings near it. The dome was at least fifteen stories tall and over twice that in width. It dwarfed the size of the flash that had come out of nowhere the night before. It towered above the skyline and yet seemed to move with grace and purpose, even as it swallowed up everything around it. If it kept on its current course, he estimated that it would just miss the south side of Student Union where he was standing, but it was headed straight for the science lab at the other end of the mall.
As the area began to clear, he saw a handful of injured students lying on the ground. One was a pregnant woman who was bleeding from her forehead.
Lucas decided it was time to move. He ran to Drew, who was sitting alone by the theatre steps. There was no sign of Larson or the police chief.
“Are you okay, Drew?” he asked loudly.
His brother’s hands were shaking. “I’m fine. What is that thing?”
“I don’t know, but we need to get the fuck out of here, and fast.” Lucas grabbed the wheelchair handles, and pushed his brother west along the front of the Student Union.
Drew pointed to the injured students. “What about them?”
“I’m sure the police will help them.”
