Anomaly

by Peter Cawdron

  Anomaly

  Peter Cawdron

  thinkingscifi.wordpress.com

  Copyright © Peter Cawdron 2011

  All rights reserved

  The right of Peter Cawdron to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  First published as an eBook by Peter Cawdron at Smashwords

  ISBN-13: 978-1478175551

  ISBN-10: 1478175559

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-4657-7394-4

  US Edition

  All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental

  Chapter 01: Anomaly

  Shortly after lunch on Friday, cracks appeared in the road. Officer Davies had been directing traffic on the corner of 1st Avenue and East 45th in Manhattan since mid-morning after the traffic lights had gone out. There wouldn't have been anything notable about the assignment except that it was next to the United Nations. World Education Week shouldn't be too controversial, thought Davies, waving with his white-gloved hand, signaling for the traffic to keep moving.

  The sun beat down upon him. Regulations dictated that he wear long sleeves to protect himself from the UV, but in the midst of a sweltering New York summer, the sweat was pouring off him. The electricians had said fixing the pedestrian lights would only take fifteen minutes, but it had been almost three hours and his legs were aching.

  Around him, impatient drivers honked their horns. Apparently, air conditioning can do that to you, he thought sarcastically, stopping a line of traffic so he could allow a party of school children to cross from the corner of East 45th. The kids were bubbly, excited about visiting the UN building as part of a school excursion.

  The smells from the Thai restaurant on the corner wafted through the air. A hint of chicken cooked in garlic and ginger, along with a hint of roasted cashews, drove his taste buds crazy.

  ___

  A film crew set up a camera on a tripod just outside the gates to the UN General Assembly building on a side road adjacent to the T-intersection. The flags of over a hundred countries fluttered in the breeze behind them. Cathy Jones stood with her back to the flags, using their vibrant colors as the backdrop for her news segment. Her cameraman, Jimmy Finch, flipped his New York Yankees hat around backwards so he could peer through the eyepiece of his camera.

  Cathy messed with her hair. If her producer was here she would tell her it looked fine and to leave it alone, but Cathy was self-conscious about her auburn locks. Her hair never seemed to sit just right. American viewers, she thought, had a love affair with blondes that probably dated back to the 50s when Marilyn first looked so stunning on a grainy black and white television.

  Cathy's dad told her she was beautiful, but all dads said that, she figured. Her hair bugged her because she was of Scottish descent, way back on her mother's side, and had a bit of Celtic blood in her. Although her brunette hair was pretty, it had a slight red tinge, something that was barely visible in the sunlight. It meant she could never be blonde. If she bleached her hair it went red and frizzy, making her look like one of the witches from Macbeth. And so here she was, a second-string reporter for a small local cable channel, struggling to get her career going, reporting on World Education Week at the United Nations. Yeah, she thought, blondes have more fun.

  The cracks in the road were getting larger.

  “OK,” said Finch, his head still buried behind the camera. “Ready when you are.”

  Cathy held her microphone in front of her, ensuring it was low, below her chin, as she spoke crisply.

  “In the Western world, education is the norm. No child grows up without the ability to read and write, but for the majority of children born on our humble, old planet, this is not the case. For most, education is a luxury their parents cannot afford.”

  ___

  Officer Davies tried not to pay the news crew any attention. He had his hands full keeping impatient pedestrians and impatient drivers apart. From where he stood, in the center of the intersection, the cracks were not noticeable, but he did notice that the cars driving toward Queensboro shuddered slightly as they left the intersection. It was as though they were driving over a bump in the road, a speed hump or something. Davies didn't think too much about it, but the cars turning west seemed to ride up over a lip in the concrete road about the same distance away. It was as though they were riding over the edge of a low curb. Strange, he thought, the road didn't seem that bad when he drove in.

  “How much longer?” He yelled, calling out to the electricians working on the lights.

  “It's not looking good,” came the reply. “We just lost all power.”

  ___

  The earth shook.

  The US Foreign Missions building on the corner of the intersection groaned. Panes of glass fell, shattering on the street below. The sound of bending, twisting, grinding metal filled the air. Pedestrians ran, ducking for cover. A group of school children walking on the forecourt beside the UN building fell to the ground screaming. Several cars rear-ended each other in the confusion. Cathy staggered backwards while Finch swung the camera around, catching the vision of sheets of glass falling, shattering as they struck the pavement.

  “What the hell was that?” asked Cathy. “A bomb?”

  Finch was cool under fire. Two tours of Afghanistan had steadied his nerves.

  “Nah,” he replied.

  Cathy watched him panning with the camera, knowing the feed was being streamed live back to the studio. The footage probably wouldn't be used immediately, but they'd have it by now and, hopefully, they were already monitoring things.

  “There's been no compression wave,” added Finch, staying behind the lens. “If it was a bomb, we would have been blown off our feet. And there's no wreckage, no smoke. I think sweet, little old New York just had herself an earthquake.”

  Officer Davies steadied himself in the middle of the intersection. The earthquake passed as quickly as it had come. Davies got on the radio, raising a priority call for medics and more police. From where he stood he could see pedestrians lying on the shattered glass, covered in rich, scarlet red blood.

  Finch turned the camera on the State Department building. He focused in on a gash running up the side of the building in an arc. Rather than being jagged, it was smooth, stretching out in a curve.

  “I don't think this was an earthquake,” said Cathy, standing beside him.

  “Why?” asked Finch, his head still buried behind the camera as he zoomed in on the police officer attending to some injured bystanders. The officer was herding them away from the building. A couple of motorists were also helping the injured, bringing them off the pavement and out onto the road, away from any more falling debris. Someone had a first aid kit, but they'd run out of bandages already and had started tearing up an old sheet.

  “Zoom out,” said Cathy, seeing his preoccupation with the injured.

  Finch pulled back on the zoom, taking in the US State Department building on the far side of the intersection. The damage to the building was cut in a half circle, starting at the third floor, slicing around the side of the building and then up in an arc, reaching toward the rear of the building before curving forward and exiting out the front, just a few floors below the roof.

  The sound of sirens in the distance heralded the arrival of fire engines, paramedics and police winding their way through the heavy New York traffic to the UN complex on the East Side.

  “I don't get it,” said Finch. “What am I looking at?”

  “It's not an earthquake. Earthquakes cause damage from the ground up,” replied Cathy, pointing. The lower stories of the State Department were pristine and untouched.

  She struggled, thinking about how to d
escribe what she was seeing. “It looks as though someone's taken a giant ice-cream scoop and reached down out of the sky and just sliced around part of the building.”

  Little did she know her producer back at the station had switched to a live broadcast. Several of the other major networks were already using the raw feed. She would be teased endlessly for the ice-cream scoop comment in the weeks to come.

  “Maybe it was a bomb,” replied Finch. “But it was up on the fourth or fifth floor and blew everything out onto the street.”

  “But,” added Cathy, “not all the windows blew out, just those along the path of the crack. This is weird.”

  Finch panned the camera to the other side of the intersection, looking north along 1st Avenue. The offices above the Thai restaurant had also been hit, along with the Institute of International Education and the Turkish Consular office. Like the State Department, they were only affected above street level, with an arc cutting through them from the middle of the second floor. Directing the camera focus down East 45th it was clear the fracture rose in a curve that tightened as it rose higher. The further down the street they looked, the higher the curve reached, arcing up in what appeared to be the edge of a massive circle that eventually stretched back towards them.

  “And look at that,” said Cathy, tapping Finch on the shoulder and directing him to look behind them. Finch swung the camera around and saw that the top corner of the UN General Assembly building had come apart, but it was the flags that bothered Cathy.

  “Look at the flags,” she said. “Have you ever seen anything like that before?”

  Finch zoomed in on the Belarusian flag waving gently in the breeze. There was a gap between the lower half of the flagpole and the upper half. It had been sliced clean through. They could see through a gap of about four inches to the wall behind.

  Cathy wasn't sure if it was just her eyes, but the gap seemed to grow wider. The upper half of the flagpole was suspended in midair, separated from the lower section of aluminum tubing set firmly in the concrete on the ground.

  “What the?” he exclaimed.

  “I don't like this,” said Cathy. “Whatever this is, I think we're right in the middle of it.”

  “What?” said Finch, finally letting his curiosity get the better of his professionalism and coming out from behind the eyepiece of the camera.

  “Look down,” she said.

  “Oh, I have to get this on film,” said Finch, taking the camera off the tripod and sitting it on his shoulder. “Come on, Cathy. Give us some commentary.”

  Finch swung the camera up, looking at Cathy.

  “Ah, the ground around the United Nations building appears to be experiencing a bizarre disturbance,” she said, tossing her hair back with one hand. “At first, we thought we might have been in the middle of a war zone, with a bomb going off, but there was no blast. Then we thought it might be an earthquake or maybe a ruptured gas main. But now, looking at this, it is clear that some kind of strange, physical phenomenon is unfolding before us.”

  She walked away from the intersection, along the service road leading away from the main gate to the United Nations. Finch stayed with her, filming her as she stepped down off the slightly raised slab. She turned and gestured with her hand at the gently curving crack in the concrete. Finch followed her lead as her arm slowly traced out an arc on the ground running north from the gates and swinging around behind the intersection and across in front of the restaurant. The crack traced out a giant circle on the ground.

  “If this is an earthquake, it's scribed an almost perfect circle through the intersection,” she said. “More than likely, we're witnessing the formation of a sink-hole opening up next to the United Nations here in New York. As I speak, the fire department and paramedics are arriving on the scene.”

  Cathy surprised herself at just how convincing she sounded, and that point about the sink-hole seemed to be right on, she thought. Finch panned around to catch a shot of more police arriving from the south.

  Cathy was curious. The massive slab making up the intersection seemed to be still on the move. She bent down, picked up an empty coke can and stood it next to the raised lip of concrete.

  The emergency crews were evacuating the surrounding buildings while paramedics focused on setting up an emergency triage point south of the intersection, immediately in front of the United Nations building. Hundreds of dazed office workers and restaurant patrons poured out onto the street. Police were clearing the area and establishing a cordon some fifty feet further back. Several other news crews arrived on the scene but were kept at bay by the police. Cathy and Finch were on the north-east side, backing onto the gate of the UN complex, well away from the main buildings, and so escaped the initial attention of the police. Cathy looked at Finch. He was soaking it up, loving the opportunity to capture so much raw footage.

  “Hey, get a shot of this,” said Cathy, pointing at the coke can. Already, the lip of the circular slab had risen higher than the can. “This thing's still moving. It's not over yet.”

  Finch bent down, getting a long shot of the torn concrete edge. From there, he zoomed slowly across the intersection and down East 45th street where the tilt caused the slab to dip well below the road level.

  “What do you make of the flags?” asked Cathy, forgetting for a second that she was still reporting through her back-up mike, a wireless lapel microphone clipped on her blouse.

  Finch turned back to film the flag poles just twenty or so feet behind them. Several of the severed flagpoles had drifted higher, suspended in midair, separated from the lower section of the flagpoles by over a foot.

  “That is some weird shit,” said Finch, not thinking about the broadcast.

  “Why don't they fall?” asked Cathy.

  “And how did they get sliced up like that?” asked Finch. “It's a clean-cut. It's as though they've been hit with a buzz-saw.”

  The police finally caught up with them, herding them away from the intersection to the northern cordon. The fire department cleared the intersection, moving the vehicles and people off the unstable slab.

  From a distance, Finch zoomed back in. The eastern edge of the slab was now almost four feet above the coke can, but that wasn't the strangest thing. The flags were still floating in mid-air, suspended some four or five feet above the severed flagpoles they once joined, and they were moving higher still. On the other side of the intersection, the shattered building fragments were on the move as well, but they were moving down. They were jutting out of their original plane and sliding toward the ground, but they didn't fall. The whole area was twisting and rotating slowly to the west, following the afternoon sun.

  “So much for Thank God It's Friday,” said Cathy, sarcastically, looking over at Finch. She knew her weekend had been ruined.

  Chapter 02: Class

  The East Side Village Community School had been started by a bunch of parents worried about the future of their children. Crime and drugs were rampant in the area, and the government seemed unable or unwilling to address the issues in the local public school. To make sure the kids got a decent start in life, the community started its own school. With a mixture of Black, Hispanic and Asian children, Americans of European descent were in the minority.

  David Teller taught physics and chemistry to all ages, which was unusual in New York. Normally, these topics weren't taught as separate subjects until high school, but, like the parents that founded the East Side Community school, Teller believed in the power of education to awaken young minds.

  Teller had an unusual academic past. Originally, he'd started out studying for a bachelor of science, majoring in astronomy. Stargazing had been his passion since childhood. As a young boy, he'd once thought the full moon was following him as he walked across an open field with his dad, collecting fireflies in a jar. His dad had assured him it was an illusion of distance. The moon, he said, appeared to follow everyone, but it never did.

  The speed of light fascinated Teller. His father expla
ined that light took about eight minutes to travel from the sun to the moon. It would then reflect off the moon and, roughly a second later, young David would see it. The idea of light bouncing around like a cosmic pinball seemed at odds with the instantaneous impression his young mind had of light, and his interest in astronomy grew from there. Young Teller would try to see how fast light was when he switched on his bedside lamp, or when he shone a laser pointer in the bathroom mirror, try as he may, he was never quick enough to see it move.

  Teller's bedroom walls were covered with posters of astronauts floating in space or walking on the moon, images of galaxies and nebulae. As a teen, he saved up and bought his own telescope. It was more suited to bird watching than staring at the night sky, but he could make out the faint smudge that marked the Andromeda galaxy, and he could see the blurred gold and blue sparkle of the space station as it orbited the Earth. For Teller, it was a view like that of the Hubble Space Telescope.

  College, though, seemed to bring out the worst in Teller. Astronomy was no longer fun. With time on his hands, his interests wandered. After his first year he switched to major in biology. His father thought he was on drugs, but it was a girl that swayed his thinking. Lisa was bright and bubbly. The world of Charles Darwin, the voyage of the Beagle, the realization of Natural Selection – Lisa made all these subjects come alive for him. They had dreams. They would travel the world together, fight to protect the rain-forests of South America, journey to Indonesia to raise orangutans, move on to Thailand to protect tigers and elephants in the wild, before heading to Australia to protest against Japanese whaling in the southern ocean. Then, one day, Lisa didn't show up for class, she missed her lectures.

  Lisa had driven to Virginia to visit her folks over a long weekend, but she hadn't returned. It took the local police three agonizing days to find her. When they dragged her car from a lake barely four miles from her home they found her body trapped inside, still wearing a seatbelt. It had rained that weekend. Perhaps she was driving too fast, perhaps the road was slick, perhaps she'd been distracted as she approached the corner, perhaps she had swerved to avoid a stray dog or a deer. Teller would never know.