The Blaster

by Sandford Parker

  Robert Swanson, the Base Commander of the nearby Mayport Naval Station, watched as his base was taken over by Homeland Security and used as the staging area for the takeover and evacuation of the city of Gainesville. He of course knew what really happened in Gainesville: somehow these seven people—who investigators discovered were a group made of up academics who referred to themselves as the Infinity Club—had subverted the fundamental laws of reality. Not only that, but they were still alive, levitating off the ground surrounded by an impenetrable, nearly opaque energy field.

  Swanson came to the conclusion that something else was going to happen. The levitating phase was merely transitional and the group was transforming into something else. Frozen out of the decision-making process, Swanson turned to the leaders of Jacksonville—governmental and business—and instructed them to get their emergency plans ready.

  Seven days later, a column of white light appeared in the sky, originating from Gainesville. It was the Infinity Club. They had awakened. The military, in typical understated fashion, dumped everything they had on the city, destroying it as power fell across the globe for the last time.

  Swanson and the city leapt into action. Everyone was corralled into buildings near the river as hotels and office buildings were converted to shelters so that the community could be effectively managed. As many resources as possible were confiscated as soon as possible, some by gunpoint. They raided grocery stores, warehouses, gas stations, fuel storage tanks, pharmacies—everything—and stored it all at the base. A week into Lights Out, they had informed the population that the lights weren’t coming back on and that new rules would be necessary.

  “So, is he a benevolent dictator?”

  “Rene!” Russ whispered harshly, shushing her. He followed it up with an apologetic laugh. He turned to Kenny and said. “She doesn’t mean that, she’s just being provocative.”

  Kenny laughed. “Hey, at the beginning there was a lot of concern—hell, I was concerned—about Swanson’s motives and his ultimate goals. People love to read about their military mavericks like Patton and MacArthur, but being around them is an altogether different situation.” He shrugged and sipped his beer. “Time has borne him out. On the first few Sundays that he threw these luncheons, there were a lot of protesters. Not anymore. He’s the real deal.”

  “What about the federal government?” John asked.

  Kenny shook his head.

  He resumed: The power grid was out of service because plants were not functioning for reasons unknown. It was ultimately determined that the entity the Infinity Club had become was “willing” the plants to not work. The turbines simply would not turn. Similarly, weapons stronger than semiautomatics would not work.

  Back in Hattiesburg we knew about the initial blast in Gainesville, of course, and the strange hush-hush takeover there. We knew about the column of light and the destruction of Gainesville. The conclusion that we drew, though, was that Lights Out was the result of the poles switching and that somehow affected our ability to generate electricity. It wasn’t a particularly satisfactory explanation, and we knew we were missing useful chunks of information. Nevertheless, hearing someone authoritative like Kenny, who had contact with people in the know, say that all of the power plants in the world were being mind-controlled to not work…well, suffice it to say that there was enough cognitive dissonance at our table to measure on the Richter scale.

  The light from the setting sun blinded me as I reached the top up the dead escalator. I decided to follow the sound of chatter coming from my left. A number of the stores were packed and being used as gathering places for different groups, mostly religious. The nearly empty corridor was filled with a soft cacophony of singing and preaching from the various services, an outpouring of spirituality that converged into a strange glossolalia, the song of people trying to fit a new reality within the context of their traditional beliefs.

  I strolled to the end of the corridor taking it all in when I heard the opening chords of Led Zeppelin’s “Tangerine” being played by about twenty acoustic guitars. It was the most amazing thing I’d ever heard, a thick wave of sound that made my bones resonate. I walked into the room and sat on a bench against the wall. It took me a moment to realize the smell in the air: in the center of the room was a backyard fire pit filled with a smoldering pile of marijuana.

  I smiled and let the music and the smoke wash over me. Just one song, I thought. I closed my eyes and had the most relaxing moment I had had in a good nine months. If I told this to anyone they’d never believe me if I said it was due to all of the guitars.

  As the song came to an end, I was readying myself to leave. Then the band—with piano accompaniment—began playing Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here,” and I realized I wasn’t going anywhere. For the first time this trip, I really thought about Molly and the kids. And I thought of them because I feared for them, for all of us.

  Members of a science cult had transformed themselves into gods. I was having trouble wrapping my head around it on one level, but on another level I knew that I was partly to blame.

  I have a gift. Always had it. My interests would become the general population's interests in time. I was one of those people who determined whether an electron would become a wave or a particle, if you will. An obscure book I dug as a kid? It’s an award winning movie twenty years later. That band that I discovered in high school? They go platinum and define the sound of an entire decade. Even the Goggles. I was prescient, and hand my finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist, and my influence, limited though it was, helped to determine the outline of the future.

  The dark side of that gift was that my fundamental loathing of the demands placed upon individuals by pre-Lights Out society, coupled with my hunger for violent spectacle and my interest in the apocalyptic led in some small but vital way to seven people plugging themselves into a machine and flipping the switch that turned off the world.

  It was like those PSAs they ran after 9/11 linking the dollars people paid for dope accumulating in the coffers of terrorists, suggesting that the money some stoner used to buy a nickel bag led to two planes crashing into the Twin Towers. The things I enjoyed, the things I hated, the things I ignored—fueled by the dreams I abandoned, the mistakes I made, the opportunities that either never materialized or were never taken advantage of—all of it was like mental currency that funded the Infinity Club and our current Lights Out existence.

  Sitting in front of YouTube and watching (and secretly wishing to experience) catastrophes like 9/11 or hurricane Katrina or the tsunamis led to Lights Out.

  My obsession with post-apocalyptic entertainment led to Lights Out.

  I sighed, closed my eyes and inhaled the music. Tears soon ran down my cheeks.

  I thought about my kids, Scottie and Emma, who amaze me on a daily basis. But mainly, I thought about my wife, Molly, and how cool she was and how much I missed her.

  And how she always handled pot so much better than me.

  CHAPTER 5

  The group was in good spirits when we got to the Santa Fe to grab our gear. Geoff and Rene were actually holding hands—the first romantic contact I’d seen from them—while John and Russ were talking college football for some reason.

  I was moping along in my own metaphysical funk when a white dude stepped from behind our vehicle with a gun in his hand and told us to freeze.

  We all held up our hands, all but Russ, who yelled loudly, “Run!” and turned to do just that.

  “Get down on the ground now!” came an order from behind us. We all turned around and were greeted by two other people who, guns in one hand and cans of pepper spray in the other. One was a young Hispanic guy and the other was a tall black woman, also young. The guy spoke loudly and quickly: “This is not what it looks like, but we will use force, which includes shooting you, if we have to. The first thing you need to do is get on your knees and place your hands behind your backs.”

  We complied wordlessly.

  “Okay, Ke
ndra, start with the old guy.”

  The girl reached her mace-hand behind her back and my heart rate spiked. Her hand came into view again holding plastic ties. They were all clearly nervous, but there was also a focused determination that countered their fear and made them all the more dangerous in my eyes—and I suspect, Russ’s too, which probably explained why he complied so readily.

  Once we were all tied up, Kendra took off and the other two stood in front of us. The white guy said, “We don’t want to hurt you and as strange as this may sound, we are sincerely sorry that this is the way things are going down, but we have to do something—all of us—and when we explain what is going on, hopefully you will see that this was our only option.”

  We heard an engine revving and a moment later a large white van pulled around the corner, Kendra behind the wheel. She came to a stop near us. The white guy opened the side door of the van and waved us in. “Hop aboard, please.”

  “Where are you taking us?” Rene said, more out of curiosity than fear.

  “Gainesville.”

  The van was bouncing along in no hurry, jostling me and the others. We were seated on the uncomfortable metal floorboard, grim-faced and focused on our situation, parsing the enigmatic words from the white guy. Kendra drove and the Hispanic dude sat in the passenger seat. The white guy was squatting between the two seats.

  “Hey, are you gonna tell us what the fuck is going on?”

  The white guy turned around and faced Rene. “Sorry,” he said, looking at us sheepishly. He rubbed his face with his hand, rubbed his hands together, and looked us over. He shifted so that his body was facing us. “Here’s the short version: I had an episode, a vision, three nights ago and all of you were in it. I was instructed to bring the five of you along with me to Gainesville.”

  While we were chewing on that, he turned around and pulled a black duffel bag from between the front seats. He unzipped it and pulled a bundle from it, something wrapped in a towel. He laid it on the floorboard. He looked at us and said, “My name is Teddy Anderson. On the day of the second incident, I snuck into Gainesville. I was…well, I was grave-robbing. My father was a science-fiction writer named Edward Anderson.”

  I gulped.

  “When I was very young, my father left my mom for another woman. That woman had a daughter named Susan. My dad soon adopted her. After my dad died, Susan and her mom kept all of my dad’s stuff. After the first incident, Susan stopped updating her Facebook and I assumed that she had died in the blast. I knew that the city was quarantined but there was something that I needed to get. I drove down from Charlotte, parked my truck in a town in Florida called Palatka, rode my bike into Gainesville, and I got this.” He unwrapped the bundle.

  “This is one of the most valuable movie props in film history and is part of my father’s legacy that I needed to reclaim.”

  He revealed the blaster from the movie The Clarke Orbit War, adapted by the great Edward Anderson from his Hugo and Nebula award-winning novel.

  My skin tingled. I heard Rene blurt “Holy shit!” and Russ ask what it was.

  “As I was heading out of town, the column of light appeared, aimed straight up into the night sky. All hell broke loose as the military was clearing out to make way for bombing the city. I got hustled into a deuce and a half by Dez here. They dropped me off near I-10 and I walked to an underpass. I’ll never forget the sight of all those people lined up on the overpass watching the column of light. I took the blaster out of my backpack, unwrapped it, and as soon as I touched it was knocked out. ‘Knocked out’ might be the wrong words—I was put under. My step-sister’s voice spoke to me. She told me that she was one of the seven people who walked out of the physics building at UF all wired together with cables and metal headgear.

  “She told me that their goal was to quote trigger a connection with the substructure. They maintained that connection and entered what she called a reparative, regenerative stasis. They awoke the night of the white beam, a week after the initial blast—moments after I took the blaster, in fact—transformed. She told me that they could bend reality. Their plan was to make a number of corrections in order to save humanity, to quote place us back on the right path.

  “And then,” Teddy said with a chuckle that conveyed his own incredulity at the words he was speaking, “she told me to take care of the blaster. And that was the last contact I had with her for months. Three nights ago, I had another vision. And like I said, all of you were in it. I saw you and you,” he said, pointing his finger to Rene and Geoff. “I saw you both at Turner Field. I saw what you saw, the fight between the energy giants.

  “I learned—and when I say ‘learned,’ I mean that the knowledge was simply placed in my head—I just knew at some point while watching the fight that the giants were the manifestations of a schism that had developed within the Infinity Club. I don’t know what caused the split, but I know they separated. And I knew that more confrontations—larger, more destructive fights—would take place.”

  “Unless…” Russ said. I couldn’t peg his tone, whether it was skeptical or if he was buying in.

  “Unless we go to Gainesville.”

  John said, “And do what?”

  Teddy pointed to the blaster. “Shoot the dome with this.”

  And with that statement, the man that was turning into something of a prophet in front of us morphed back into the wild-eyed psycho-kidnapper that got the drop on us at the SUV.

  Russ turned to Geoff and Rene and said, “Are you two in on this? Is this some con?”

  “Russ, I swear to God we don’t know this guy.”

  “Bullshit.” He looked at Geoff. “You’d better start talking, son, or there will be hell to pay.”

  Geoff looked past Russ and spoke to Teddy. “You must have been there in person. At Turner Field, in the crowd. You saw what we saw because you were there near us.”

  Teddy shook his head. “Look, I understand that I have zero credibility. There’s no logical explanation for any of this, which is why I couldn’t come up with anything to convince you all to come with us to Gainesville other than kidnapping you.”

  “But why us?” John said. “There’s nothing remarkable about us.”

  “I haven’t the foggiest idea,” Teddy said. “All I know is that you showed up at the Landing just like I was told you would. So I’m going through with my end of it.”

  John said, “Explain something to me, Teddy. The point of the vision you had was that the gun needs to be aimed at this so-called dome and the trigger pulled—I’m assuming by you. Is that right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you don’t know what’s going to happen after that?”

  “Correct.”

  “We could all die. The dome could disappear. The world could disappear. You don’t know.”

  “Right.”

  John shook his head a chuckled. “I’ll give you one thing, man, you’ve got faith.”

  “From my perspective it’s not even a matter faith.”

  “Oh, from my perspective, too,” Rene agreed.

  “After my dad’s funeral,” Teddy said, looking down at the ray gun, “we had the best conversation we ever had, Susan, me and her mom. We were looking at the blaster, talking about it, what it meant to us. Susan was still in high school, then. She thought it was cool because it was the physical manifestation of an idea. She was fascinated even then with the power of ideas—that something sprung from the imagination could have made its way into tangibility and have made such an impact on the world.”

  I leaned forward and said, “You said you were knocked out under the overpass. What happened when you came to?”

  “When I woke up I was in Jacksonville on the day after Lights Out. The attack on the Infinity Club was a combination of an electromagnetic pulse and conventional bombs. The theory was that the Infinity Club was somehow siphoning energy and the EMP was an attempt to sever their connection.”

  “And the conventional bombs?” Geoff said.<
br />
  “To incinerate them.” Teddy said. “But they just fed off of it. They were probably counting on an attack.”

  Russ said, “When that failed the military just threw in the towel?”

  Dez took over the conversation. “The dome has a sort of security system. Everyone knows weapons don’t work, but even stuff one wouldn’t consider a weapon, like bulldozers or acid, simply don’t function, just like the power plants.”

  John verbalized the thought that had leap into my mind. “What about the blaster?”

  “In the vision it wasn’t a problem,” Teddy said.

  John sniffed skeptically. I whispered to him, “I get the feeling that once this dome, aiming a movie prop at it and pulling the trigger will be the most natural thing in the world.”

  “You ain’t kidding, man,” John said, smiling. “What, two hours ago we found out that a group of people is responsible for all of this somehow. Now we’re in a van—kidnapped—on our way to shoot a dome with a toy gun.” He began chuckling, a bitter, rueful, raspy cackle that became ragged and turned into a brief coughing fit.

  Geoff’s nasally voice punctured the ensuing silence. “What if they were possessed?”

  “Possessed?” Russ said. “Like ghosts?”

  “No,” Geoff said. “Not like ‘evil spirit’ ghosts. What if when the Infinity Club tapped into the grid, they created a portal or a wormhole or what have you that allowed an entity to project their will on this world via the Infinity Club?”

  John said, “Say they are possessed? What then?”

  “It would be an invasion,” I said.

  Rene spoke up. “And Gainesville’s the last place we should go.”

  John said, “Because we could be unwittingly helping them?”

  “Right,” said Rene.