“This isn’t to scale, nor are the dimensions correct. Because the beams cut into the mantle of the earth and because CERN isn’t directly below us on the other side of the planet, the real circles would appear more like ovals relative to each other. Still, this is a crude representation designed to show what I believe will happen when we remove the other boxes.” She tapped a button on the keyboard, and it began to play.
At first, it was a tube with four points assigned to the circles on both ends. A blue line connected each box to a companion on the far loop.
“First, we have the initial experiment, Four Arrows as it was set up to run. Then, this.” She pressed another key.
One of the boxes was removed on the larger end of the oddly-shaped tube. It represented the cabinet pulled aside using the winch. The animation showed the blue line splitting in two, then getting pulled to the two nearest boxes.
“This is where we are now. The energy of Box One is being shared with the others.” She pressed the button. “And this is where we’re going.”
The simulation ran through the scenario she had set up.
At the very end, she spiked the flow of energy by a factor of one hundred. She had to make a host of assumptions, including the designed capacity of each of the four boxes and the broadcast power of known energy sources on the CERN end. She also took into account a best-guess for the amount of energy shooting out from SNAKE in the blue and red waves.
The result was a new shape.
“I think this explains it all,” Faith concluded.
Near Georgetown, Delaware
Garth decided to take his chances and headed in the direction away from the Dollar Palace and the looters. He and Lydia walked next to each other for about fifteen minutes before they saw the familiar shape of a gas station.
They were headed into the business district of the town.
“Well, we finally got some good luck,” he told her. “Now we need it to hold while we buy some gas.”
“Your time is strange, Garth. You are a man, apparently in good standing. There should be no reason you cannot buy what you desire.”
Her kind words made his head swell to hot-air-balloon size.
“Would a fifteen-year-old be a man in 1849?”
“Sure. At that age, his parents would seldom insist he was to be seen, not heard, like younger boys. It would be unusual, I suppose, to marry that young, but I know the elders of the wagon train were trying to find me a husband among my peers. Girls marry younger than boys, usually. If I did get married, then I would be his problem.”
“Wow.” He looked at her. “Amazing. You were going to be married? At fifteen?”
“I’m sixteen, to be accurate. And, yes. If a suitable man was found for me, I would probably be married off. Once my pa died, you know, I was a burden.”
“That’s harsh,” he admitted. “You’re not a burden.”
“It just is,” she conceded.
He looked ahead as they approached the gas station’s parking area. “I’m close to being sixteen,” he said as if it were no big deal. “Here, I think you have to be older to get married. Maybe eighteen? I’m not sure, because I’ve never thought about it. I also don’t have any friends who are married, not even at my school, and there are hundreds of girls and boys there.”
“Incredible,” she gushed. “I would love to go to school with that many kids. My school has eight, but seldom are we all together at the same time. Often, the boys have to help with the wagons. Back in Pawnee, Indiana I was in a proper school for a short time. There were ten pupils of all different ages.”
“I have two hundred in my sophomore class in high school. All my age.”
He held the door open for her as they went inside the combination gas station and convenience store. The wafting aroma of wood-fired pizza greeted him when he went inside.
“What is that?” Lydia asked. “It smells wonderful.”
He walked fast, because she would be overwhelmed by the rows of treats, chips, and candy if he lingered. However, before he could get near the cashier to pay for his gas, she dragged him by the elbow to the aisle he wanted to avoid.
“Can we buy our chocolate now?” she said, clapping her hands with anticipation.
Hurry, dude.
“Okay,” he replied. “You’ll still want this one.” He picked up another pair of Hershey bars and handed them over. Her green eyes twinkled.
“Thank you, Garth,” she said as she studied the packaging. “This is amazing. It looks so clean.”
“It’s nothing,” he said, walking farther down the aisle. A flash of red caught his eye on the top shelf of the next row, so he went over to check it out.
“Wouldn’t you know it?” he said with dry humor. “Gas stations carry gas cans, too.”
She seemed let down. “We could have bought this a long time ago?”
He thought about it for a few seconds. “No, not at the first place. That clerk had it in for us. But I bet the other two stations sold these.”
The aisle was filled with automotive and household goods, as if offering a small selection of frequently-used items to drivers. One object caught his attention.
“This could be useful,” he said as he picked up a can of black spray paint. Lydia came over to see what he had, but she didn’t look for long because it wasn’t nearly as interesting as the chocolate bars.
“Actually,” he continued, “I’ll need a few more.” He stuffed his arms with six of the cans. “Now, let’s get out of here.”
They walked together to the front of the store and set the cans and candy on the checkout counter. He also deliberately set his gas can in front of the clerk, like he did it every day. The fake story was on his lips, ready to be told.
The older teen girl in a red vest looked up at him and smiled brightly, then scanned his purchases.
“You want two-and-a-half for your can?” she asked in an offhand way. “You didn’t have to bring that in, y’know,” she added.
“We ran out of—” he started to say before going silent.
He’d prepared a long story about how his parents pulled over on the highway and sent him to get gas for them. He built the tale as a way to get around the questions about his ID, because obviously he was getting gas for his parents. However, her friendly demeanor short-circuited the need to convince her of his plight.
The clerk stopped the checkout process, brushed aside some of the blonde hair blocking her eyes, and looked at him seriously. “Sorry to hear that. I’ll set you up on pump five. It will put two and a half gallons in your container. You and your pretty girlfriend will be home in no time.”
The clerk spoke up so Lydia would hear. “I love your Laura Ingalls dress!”
Girlfriend?
“Thank you!” Lydia curtseyed a little.
The blonde girl smiled at him again in a friendly way.
Garth looked sheepishly at Lydia. All of his complicated scheming was supposed to impress her, but the girl behind the counter had other plans. Not only did she not require his story, but she’d also seen him as boyfriend material, even if it was for a girl dressed like she was from the frontier.
“Thanks for helping us,” he said.
He paid for the gear with cash, then it all went in a plastic bag.
“Good luck, you two,” the clerk said in sing-song.
After holding the door for Lydia, he paused on the front walkway.
“The lovely woman seemed pleased to serve you, yet you appeared uneasy.”
Garth nodded. “I expected to have to talk our way through the gas-buying process. Instead, she didn’t ask me anything. I guess it took me by surprise.”
Lydia smirked. “Your time is not that much different than mine. She saw you were a man and treated you as such. It’s obvious that was what it was.”
She grabbed his hand before he could read anything into her words. “Show me what we do next.”
He was going to shake off her hand out of pure reflex, but he didn�
�t. They were doing great as a team and were having a streak of good luck. If she wanted to hold his hand in the process, he was happy to do it.
“C’mon, we have to fill up this can and then get back to the taxi. When we get there, assuming nothing goes wrong, I want to show you the next part of my master plan.”
“Is that when we can eat the chocolate?”
He chuckled and respected her single-mindedness. “We’ll eat those on the way. Maybe they’ll help us maintain this winning streak.”
“I hope!”
I-80, Wyoming
Buck and Connie didn’t listen to any books on tape after leaving Little America. The only thing that mattered was learning more about the situation in Montana. Even the problems at the SNAKE laboratory took a back seat to the threat of a nuclear war.
“This is unreal,” Connie declared. “America went over to fight in Iraq, and I guess I was afraid of chemical weapons, but I never thought I’d hear of countries using nukes. It’s madness.”
“Saddam didn’t have shit, as it turns out, but you are right. It has been decades since anyone seriously discussed using nuclear weapons. I still can’t believe what we’re hearing.”
The news was all over the place. They often repeated the role of Malmstrom Air Base in managing and possibly launching the big missiles originally designed to crush the Soviet Union, and then the talking heads debated the why of it. There didn’t seem to be a consensus. Enough time had passed that Buck expected they should have already heard about a retaliatory strike if the missiles had truly been launched.
Outside, balls of weedy green appeared randomly and in clumps over the dry, flat land. Gashes of white rock and sand appeared where the foliage didn’t grow and made long intrusions in the otherwise uniform scenery.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States is speaking from the Rose Garden. We take you there live.”
“Turn it up,” Buck requested.
Connie cranked up the radio, then removed her boots. She drew her feet up and put them on the dashboard as if hot lava were below her. In reality, it was the sleeping Golden Retriever.
“My fellow Americans and fellow humans of the world, I’m here today for one purpose. I want to reassure every nation of Earth, including anyone who may have been less than a friend previously, that we have no intention of launching our nuclear arsenal. There has been chatter in diplomatic circles explaining how changes in the Earth’s geomagnetic field, as well as the loss of many tracking satellites, has made it impossible to target anything smaller than a continent. Some believe the time to use ICBMs is coming to an end and will soon be gone. As God as my witness, I will not give the order to launch unless we are attacked first.
“The recent voluntary evacuations of New York and Philadelphia because of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant have reminded us of the dangers of radiation. The specter of all-out nuclear destruction should terrify us all. Mutually assured destruction is not what I want for the citizens of this or any country. Please follow my lead. If these weapons are soon to be obsolete, then let’s let them die.”
The President talked about the events taking place around the country and the world, but Buck and Connie already knew about those. The only thing new was an admission that troops from overseas were coming back home.
When the President was done, she turned the radio back to dull background noise.
“You think anyone will attack us?”
Buck laughed. “We have a lot of enemies, but I don’t think any of them are dumb enough to light us up.”
“Don’t politicians still excel at being dumb, or has that changed in the seventeen years I missed?”
Buck was silent for a long time since he couldn’t come up with a good counter-argument.
“That’s what I thought,” she quipped.
CHAPTER 13
Canberra-to-Sydney Train, Australia
Destiny woke up on the train tracks. The dizzy spell was gone, and it was still the dead of night, but the spotlight of the train no longer pierced the jungle.
Becker was nearby. “I was three parts gone for a second, there,” he confessed.
“No, we weren’t drunk. I’ve felt the wobbly sensation before.” She looked for the train, thinking the light had gone off by accident, but the moonlit scene showed no evidence of the engine.
“They went back!” Becker cried out.
She got to her feet and brushed off.
“But that’s impossible,” he declared a moment later. “None of them could get into the front compartment. I locked it. I swear. It’s protocol.”
There was nervousness in his voice.
“I’m not going to report you if that’s what you’re worried about.” She helped the engineer get off the ground.
“Uh, thanks. It means a lot.”
“I blacked out this time,” she volunteered. “That’s never happened before.”
“What does it mean? Did I black out, too?”
“Not sure,” she replied.
Faith’s message about SNAKE was now overwhelming her mind. Whatever changes were going on in the world, good and bad, they stemmed from the experiments her sister was running at her place of work. If the effects were this serious in Australia, were they worse in America? Or were they better the closer one got to the source?
A train whistled in the distance. The crush of trees on both sides of the railroad grade made it difficult to tell which direction it came from.
“Is that the train arriving to pick us up?” she inquired.
“I—I don’t know. Maybe. I think it’s coming from across the gorge.”
She breathed in and steadied her exhale. “Okay, mate. Neither of us wants to end up in Canberra, so we need to get across this gorge.”
Becker had a small flashlight, which helped immensely when they went into the ditch where the bridge should have been. It did nothing to fend off the gloom of the darkened trees. They dropped about five meters into the dry creek bed, then scrambled up the far side. She was tempted to point out that the bridge hadn’t fallen in disrepair. It was gone, exactly like the Sydney Opera House.
Becker didn’t seem interested in anything but moving forward, so once they were on the far side, he started into the dense jungle.
The high-pitched train horn blew three quick times in the distance.
“They won’t leave without us, will they?” Becker worried.
She chuckled. “You tell me. Would you leave if you’d come to pick us up but we didn’t show?”
He thought about it as they walked. “If I was ordered to depart, I guess I’d do what they wanted.”
“You wouldn’t break the rules?” she quipped. “It seems like you’re breaking them right now.”
Her snarky tone got the serious young man to laugh. “Yeah, maybe. Trainlink is pretty rigid about keeping everything moving on time. They said I might see some weird shit out here, but no one said it would be like this. When tracks end like they’d never been there, even though I just traveled on them earlier in the day, what good is protocol?”
“They knew it was bad but sent you out anyway?”
“I thought the other engineers were me mates, but I guess they used me on this route to see if I could make it out and back. Though, to be fair, a lot of them went missing, too. Still, a few of the last ones think the sun shines out their asses. They’ll probably be there when I get back.”
“Yeah,” she agreed. “Every organization you ever work for will have that type of people. For what it’s worth, I’m glad it was you out here and not one of them. They would have played it safe and stayed on the stranded train all night.”
“I feel a little bad about losing the engine, but if they figured out how to get it back to the Canberra shed, all’s good.”
They walked for a short time in the heavy jungle, but they had no path to follow. The train tracks stopped where the bridge should have been, but they didn’t resume on the far side. The steel rails were gone completely.
Even the raised rock bed of the grade was gone. She had assumed it would be there and easy to follow. Nothing made sense, just like everything else she had seen in the past few days.
Sounds of beetles, crickets, and a thousand other insects made the forest seem to vibrate with energy around them. The flashlight often revealed little creatures scurrying to get out of their way.
The trumpet-horn of the passenger train sounded again.
“We’re going in the right direction,” she reassured him. “It has to be the pickup train, but we need to turn a little more. We’ll go that way, through those tangles.” Destiny pointed and Becker shined the light in the same direction.
“I sure don’t remember this mess on the ride in,” he said. “Maybe we went off on a siding and got lost, but the jungle shouldn’t be anywhere around here. There aren’t this many trees on the entire Canberra route.”
She knew why.
“The night makes everything look different, you know? I’m sure if we waited around until first light, we’d probably both look at this and remember where we’d seen it before. Things don’t magically appear out of nowhere.”
Oh, yes they do.
She bent the truth like a pretzel because there was no point in speculating and freaking the kid out of his mind. She hadn’t accepted the truth until she had seen the Duck of Doom up close and for real.
“Yeah, maybe,” he finally agreed.
The rescue train’s horn belted out again and sounded a lot closer than it had been a few minutes before. “Time to pick up the pace,” she encouraged, but with the brambles and dense undergrowth, they could go no faster.
As they walked, the horn continued to blare, mostly in short, repeated bursts.
Becker high-stepped into the bush, using his hands to pull him through.
“What is it?” she asked, keeping to his heels.
“They are in trouble. I think they’re leaving.”
“Bollocks,” she exclaimed.
Becker broke free of the worst of it and started to run.
Broad America: A Post-Apocalyptic Adventure (End Days Book 3) Page 10
