by J. Thorn
"What about Bailey?"
"Bailey has his own job to do."
"Does that mean he will be leaving?"
"No. He has a job to do on this world. I'll leave it up to him to tell you about it, Lieutenant."
"Lieutenant?"
"That's correct. If you accept the task, you are promoted. This world is yours."
I peered at the man who had stopped me killing myself. That day seemed so long ago.
"I accept."
"Good. Here, I have some supplies for you."
He dumped a satchel at my feet. I hadn't even noticed that it had been slung over his shoulder the whole time. It was full of Shredder power supply clips.
That was it. No sooner had our conversation ended than he reached into his pocket, pulled out a gadget that I recognised, pressed a button and walked towards the poral that opened.
"There is a device in the bottom of the bag for opening a portal. It's easy to activate it, just press the two switches together. The digits on the readout are a countdown to the moment that you will need to activate it. Keep it safe, and I'll see you in thirty nine and a half years. We will start six months before the door opens."
Then the door vanished and he was gone.
See that case at the back of the truck, son? Can you grab that for me? We to take that down the depot to set it up. It needs plenty of space. You know I've been waiting for this day for forty years and now it's finally here, I'm even more excited about it.
I travelled with Bailey for a lot of years after we spoke to Joshua, before I met your mother and settled down in our town, and Bailey and me, we would talk about it all the time. I didn't know back then that Bailey wouldn't be here to see them arrive. I always thought it was something that we would see through together, that he would be here as well, but things change.
I asked him a while after we left Rove what it was that he was there to do.
"I have to find the exit point," he said.
"What do you mean?"
"Where Nua'lath left this world. You see, they, I mean Joshua and his tech guys, they can trace where a portal was opened and where it went to. I have this." He showed me a small device that wasn't much different to the one I had been carrying all that time. "It should start beeping when I'm close. Something to do with the portals that Nua'lath opens having a signature of some kind. I don't understand it all myself, but when I get close to it the gadget should let me know. Then I open the portal again and follow."
"And you've never found it?"
"No not yet, but now I have a place to start. It can't be far from Rove, maybe even in the city."
It was.
We found it about ten miles north, in the fallen down ruin of an old factory, about twenty years after we found the bunker. Over the years we went back to Rove so many times to salvage junk and also to check on the bunker. The city of Rove was so untouched that it was just littered with the best junk to be found anywhere. We'd covered most of the city at that point, and Bailey was starting to lose hope in finding his portal. Then one day we entered this factory after killing a couple of Kre'esh that must have been guarding the place, and the thing in Bailey's rucksack just started buzzing and beeping.
We searched the whole factory before I finally spotted it. It was a pretty obvious what we were looking at. About fifty feet wide, with everything inside it burned to nothing. This was the centre of it, the middle of the draining of life that had devastated the area for miles and miles around. It was the reason that nothing grew in the city of Rove and that the wildlife had abandoned it, even well over two centuries after the event. That was how Nua'lath did it you see, he used the destruction of life to power his gateways. If those million people hadn't been safely in their bunker and protected by that strange electrical barrier, they would have had their lives ripped from their bodies to power that thing.
We stood there just gawping at the burned mess, hardly able to comprehend the evil that had created it and in awe of the sheer power that it represented. How did the Resistance even hope to stand up to something that could do something like that?
"Xeno, I think it's time for me to go," said Bailey.
It hadn't even occurred to me that he would be going one day. I had promised to help him finish his job, but I had somehow ignored the fact that it would mean him leaving. I think I just put that to the back of my mind and pretended it wouldn't happen.
"Just like that?"
"Yes. It's what I'm here to do."
"So you just open a door and off you go?"
"Yes. That's about the sum of it."
"I could come with you."
"No, you know you can't do that. We all have our job to do."
I knew he was right and I felt my heart sink.
"Will you be coming back?"
"I don't know. All I know is that I find out what world is on the other side and I signal Joshua, just as you did. Then I start looking all over again, wherever it is that door takes me to."
After he had collected up what equipment he could carry, I watched him go. I couldn't think of a whole lot of things to say to him apart from to say goodbye and good luck. He activated that gadget, opened up the door and stepped right through.
"You take good care of yourself now, won't you?" he said, that big smile lighting up his face.
"I will, and you look after yourself. You make sure that you come back here sometime and I'll be waiting for you. You promise me that?"
He chuckled at that, the same deep and booming laugh that was so addictive. I laughed with him, even though I felt empty inside. I was going to miss that laugh.
"I promise, my friend. I have this feeling in my gut that we're going to be seeing each other again one day. I have a feeling about that."
A moment later and the door vanished, leaving me alone. I stood there for what seemed like hours, just staring at the empty space where my friend had stood. I wasn't sure whether to stay or to go. Hell, if I'm honest with you, I hadn't the faintest clue what to do.
That day was the first time I ever got to drive Bailey's truck.
I didn't enjoy it one bit.
Just place that case down over there will you son, and help me clear some of this junk out of the way. We need a circle about fifty feet across. It's a good job that Bailey and I cleared a lot of the junk away years ago, or this would be a tough job.
That should do it.
Are you ready to do this?
You look surprised.
Don't worry son. There isn't anything for you to be afraid of. I've been waiting for forty years to switch this thing on and that time is now. Six months from now that door down that tunnel will open and either thirty five million people will come out or a million Shamblers will, and the Resistance will be here to meet them when they do.
I've thought about this moment for such a long time and now it comes to it, I want you to be the one to flip the switches.
So go on, whenever you're ready.
All you need to do is flip those two switches and get ready to say hello.
* * * * *
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Cheers!
Glynn
Official Author's website
http://www.glynnjames.co.uk
Books by Glynn James
Diary of the Displaced Series
There is a place where nightmares are real. It is a dark and terrifying place, hidden from the world we know by borders that only the most unfortunate of souls will ever cross.
James Halldon woke up in the dark, alone, without any food or water, without a clue where he was, and with no memory of where he came from.
It only got stranger.
Diary of the Displaced - Book 1
"The Journal of James Halldon"
(Amazon.com Amazon.co.uk)
Diary of the Displaced -
Book 2
"The Broken Lands"
(Amazon.com Amazon.co.uk)
Diary of the Displaced - Book 3
"The Ways"
(Amazon.com Amazon.co.uk)
Other Displaced Books
The Memoirs of Reginald Weldon
(Amazon.com Amazon.co.uk)
There is an old man sitting in a bed on Angel ward, telling stories.
He says he has to tell someone, because he is dying.
He says he doesn't care if you believe the tales are true or not, because he is not sure that half of them ever happened at all.
Reg Weldon claims that he has seen things that would make your skin crawl.
He claims a lot of things...
The Last to Fall
(Amazon.com Amazon.co.uk)
In 1926 Joseph Dean was just getting ready to hang himself when the man named Joshua stepped into his cafe and changed his life.
He made Joe an offer - one that would mean travelling through the door to another world to find something that had been lost for nearly two hundred years.
Joe would discover a lot more than that in the years that followed.
The Last to Fall is a short novel, and the first in a series following Joseph Dean's travels.
Whispers (Short Stories)
(Amazon.com Amazon.co.uk)
A companion book to Diary of the Displaced - a collection of Dark Fantasy and Horror Short stories.
Arisen Series
A world fallen - under a plague of seven billion walking dead.
A tiny island nation - the last refuge of the living.
One team - of the world's most elite special operators.
The dead, these heroes, humanity's last hope, all have...
Arisen, Book One - Fortress Britain
(Amazon.com Amazon.co.uk)
Arisen, Book Two - Mogadishu of the Dead
(Amazon.com Amazon.co.uk)
Arisen, Book Three – Three Parts Dead
(Amazon.com Amazon.co.uk)
License Notes
First published 2011 by Glynn James
Copyright © Glynn James
The right of Glynn James to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any other means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the authors. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
A massive solar storm wipes out the technological infrastructure, and as the few survivors struggle to adapt, they discover some among them have…changed.
AFTER: FIRST LIGHT
By Scott Nicholson
Prequel to the AFTER series
Look for After: The Shock, After: The Echo, and After: Milepost 291
Copyright ©2013 Scott Nicholson
Haunted Computer Books
Scott’s newsletter for giveaways and free books: http://eepurl.com/tOE89
CHAPTER ONE
The sun looked like a cheese pizza that had been broiled in hell’s hottest oven.
Dr. Daniel Chien frowned at the monitor, concerned less with the rippling cheese than the rising bubbles of red sauce. Each bubble erupted with a force equaling 100 billion megatons of TNT, spewing electromagnetic radiation across the solar system. Chien was intellectually aware that the pizza was really a massive star around which Earth and other planets revolved, but technology had reduced it to little more than a commercial-free reality-TV show.
Sir Isaac Newton nearly blinded himself staring at the sun, and I can do it from the comfort of my air-conditioned cubicle.
The images recorded by the Solar Dynamics Observatory were a marvel of modern technology. Not only was the space-based observatory performing a continuous, real-time monitoring of solar activity, it used an array of solar panels as its energy source. In turn, the data allowed Chien and other researchers to study the sun’s electromagnetic fluctuations, solar wind, sunspot activity, and particle radiation.
The sublime beauty of the system had lured Chien from a faculty position at Johns Hopkins. Even as a boy in Vietnam, he’d been fascinated by the sun as the giver of life. The Earth’s precarious position at just the right orbital distance counted as something miraculous, although Chien was careful to avoid debates over science and faith. To him, wonder was wonder and did not require further complications. Let the glory hounds like Newton clog the pages of scientific history while Chien and his fellow grunt workers added to the pool of knowledge bit by bit.
But his role as a researcher didn’t diminish his appreciation of solar myth. After all, there was hardly a more apt metaphor for human hubris than Icarus flying too close to the sun and having his wings melt.
The sun, as Chien liked to tell his friends, was cool.
He still took childlike delight in the real-time images of the sun captured in a variety of spectra, available to the public via the NASA website. The array of sophisticated instruments measured multiple wavelengths and offered two dozen ways to observe and measure solar phenomena. The main image was the one now commanding his attention, and although he was fully aware of the sun’s petulant temperament, he didn’t like the erratic pulsations appearing on its surface.
Somebody’s burning the pizza.
“Katherine?” he said, calling to the other on-duty researcher at the SDO’s offices in the Goddard Space Flight Center. Dr. Katherine Swain was several years his senior, a 20-year veteran of NASA, and a woman who held no romantic notions of the sun at all.
“Yes?” she said, in an annoyed tone, looking up from her laptop. She’d confided to Daniel that she was having “family problems,” and Daniel had projected a polite pretense of concern without pressing for details. Which meant avoiding her unless something important was happening.
“It looks like some irregular plasma activity.”
“We’re in an irregular phase,” she said, not clicking away from whatever she was working on. “The moon’s having its period.”
Much like a woman, or the moon, or any other natural object, the sun went through nearly predictable cycles of behavior. Solar cycles lasted about 11 years, and the study of radionuclides in Arctic ice had allowed researchers to map an accurate history of the sun across geological epochs. Although the cycles followed identifiable patterns, the general agreement was that the current cycle was among the most active on record.
“It’s not just regularly irregular,” he said. “It’s crazy.”
“Ah, here comes the big one?” Katherine teased. “Guess they should have listened to you, huh?”
As a member of a commission asked to assess the nation’s vulnerability to electromagnetic pulse attack, Chien had testified before an Armed Services subcommittee. He’d warned of the impact of massive solar flares, but his cataclysmic scenarios were pushed aside for what were considered the more-relevant dangers of low-flying nuclear missiles. The military couldn’t fight the sun, and neither could it procure billions of tax dollars by provoking the administration’s fear of the sun. Besides, terrorist threats were far sexier than probability modeling.
Last year, Chien had co-authored a report that painted a grim picture of infrastructure failure on the heels of a massive solar storm, calling it “the greatest environmental disaster in human history.” Since then, Katherine and the other SDO researchers had wryly called Chien “Dr. Doom.”
Chien had stood firm in his quiet way. Besides, it really wasn’t a matter of “if.” It was a matter of “when.”
But
even Chien didn’t really expect “when” to be now.
“Look at AR1654,” Chien said.
Katherine’s keys clacked as she brought up an image on her laptop screen. “It’s only an M-1,” she said. “At worst, we could get a few radio blackouts in the polar regions. No biggie.”
“But AR1654 is aligning with the Earth. That means we will be right in the path of the plasma stream if a flare erupts.”
“And it will pass right over us. That’s why we have an atmosphere, so we’re not exposed to constant radiation. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be around to have this conversation.”
Katherine, apparently satisfied with her prognosis, resumed typing. Chien watched the image on the screen for another minute, as sauce leaked from the edge of the pizza’s crust and bulged out into space in huge, curling ribbons.
Maybe I’m no different than Newton, a sensationalistic glory hound. But he died a virgin, so I’ve got him beat there.
Chien went through the rote recording of data that occupied much of his duties, but his mind wandered to Summer Hanratty, the woman he’d been dating for the last six months. He couldn’t escape the irony of her first name, and its connotation with sunny weather had fueled their initial conversation at a colleague’s party. Maybe they were getting serious.
Heating up, huh? Well, even Dr. Doom needs a little comfort in the night.
Katherine’s clipped voice interrupted his reverie. “Did you see that?”
“See what?” Chien had flipped away from the satellite imagery to tables of temperature, X-rays, and magnetic energy.
“Check the Magnetogram,” she said, referring to the telescopic image that mapped the magnetic energy along the sun’s surface.
Chien summoned the proper screen, which now showed the solar pizza as a mossy tennis ball pocked with violent orange and cobalt-blue acne. The area near AR1654 showed a brilliant plume erupting from the surface.
