The Blaster

by Sandford Parker

  I noticed we were now whispering to one another in conspiratorial tones.

  Geoff said, “It would explain why the light giants took the form they did in Atlanta. Maybe that’s what they look like in their world. Or it was some combination of their form and ours. And the fight was between the Infinity Club and them.”

  Geoff paused a moment and let that idea settle in.

  “But we could be being duped by the entities, then,” Rene said.

  “Or it could be a cry for help,” Geoff countered. “The blaster could be the last hope for the Infinity Club to take out the invaders.”

  Russ was looking at us with a sour expression. “You’re out of your minds. This is insanity.”

  Rene looked at him evenly and said, “You have been paying attention today, right?”

  We were all pretty subdued at this point. The information dump that we had received was staggering. I can only imagine the thoughts, concepts, extrapolations detonating in everyone’s minds.

  After a while the van entered a town—or at least got off the highway. It made turns, accelerated, slowed down, repeat. I felt like a child, not being able to see where my parents were driving me. Our three kidnappers were talking in whispers.

  “I guess we’re here,” I said.

  Everyone nodded distantly, enveloped in their own thoughts.

  The van pulled to a stop.

  Teddy got to his feet. Dez slid open the side door.

  “We’re parked a couple of miles east of the dome,” Teddy said. “There is a tall dormitory on campus, about a mile west. It’s a sightseeing spot of sorts. We’re going to walk to the roof of that building. From there we will have a line of sight on the dome. And then,” Teddy said with a shrug and a worried look as he glanced to the west, “we’ll see what happens.”

  My eyes fell upon the ray gun, which lay on the bundle on the floorboard of the van. It was a brassy, overgrown pistol with three flanges running the length of the barrel. The handle was deep brown leather, weathered like the rest of the ray gun to look well-used and rugged, a mixture of hi-tech and antique.

  The movie itself was not as pulpy as the Flash Gordon weaponry suggested. The gun was a nod to Golden Age science fiction: even within the narrative of the movie it was dismissed as an obsolete relic. No one looked past its dented surface, never suspected that the crafty hero had given its internal mechanics a massive upgrade in firepower.

  Lying there on the floorboard of a van full of kidnapped people and a man who claimed to have had visions, in a world where everyone’s attention had retreated radically toward simple day-to-day survival, the blaster was also a stylized reminder of the importance that I placed on stories in the former world, the power that they had over me, everyone. Society’s pressure valve. Our human-constructed fictions that buffered us from our other human-constructed fictions that we mistook for reality. Like Susie Anderson, I was enamored with the power of ideas, the way in which they travel from the conceptual ether to concrete materiality, things like the atom bomb, communism, and, well, Goggles.

  The blaster resonated with meaning and I was awash in it.

  CHAPTER 6

  And here we are: unbounded and gathered next to the van in a street lined with silhouettes of half destroyed apartment buildings and leafless oak trees. The only source of light now is the full moon, which is thankfully bright.

  I turn to John. “You’ve got your camera, right?”

  He pats a pocket on his cargo pants and nods.

  Teddy hops out of the van with the bundle in his arms. Kendra and Dez turn on their flashlights and the three of them start walking down the road. We all follow.

  “So that’s it?” I ask Russ. “We’re just going to follow them now?”

  Russ nods. “Any chance we’ve got to put things right we have to take, no matter how harebrained. This guy convinced two soldiers that he’s seen something. And the risk factor is pretty small as far as I can tell.”

  “Assuming we all don’t die.”

  “Yes, Evan,” Russ says. “Assuming we all don’t die.”

  Ten minutes later we’re crossing a main artery by means of a pedestrian overpass. The campus of the University of Florida lies on the other side. More half-destroyed, charred buildings await us. The full moon adds to the desolation, projecting a baleful white sheen and long, stark shadows across the fractured landscape.

  Geoff and Rene catch up to me. “Edward Anderson?” Geoff says in a hushed voice.

  “I know,” I say. “And the blaster from The Clarke Orbit War?”

  “Just to make sure we’re on the same page here,” Rene says. “The step-daughter of one of the greatest all-time science-fiction writers is part of a group that somehow managed to transform themselves into a god-like entity and impose their will on the world. They defuse weapons, knock out mankind’s ability to generate power and who knows what else. A schism develops, they fight, destroy Atlanta. The step-daughter contacts her brother—a guy who thought his sister was dead so he drove down from North Carolina, then rode his bike into the city of Gainesville—which was occupied by the United States military—in order to steal a movie-prop from one of the landmark science-fiction movies of all-time—and the sister tells him to, number one, get all of us to Gainesville and, number two, aim the movie prop at the energy dome and pull the trigger.”

  Geoff says, “You forgot about the potential extra-dimensional invaders.”

  “Dude, would you drop the Lovecraft thing?”

  We’re walking on dew-covered grass, up a hill. Our destination is obvious, a plain brick rectangle silhouetted against the full moon. Its twin—clearly having taken the brunt of the blasts from the west—looks like God shoved a jagged shard of obsidian from the earth to stab the sky. It is dead silent. All I’m thinking about right now is the dome.

  Russ looks back at me with a questioning look. “See anything?”

  I shake my head.

  Dez turns to us and points to the top of the building. “You won’t see it until we get up there.”

  Russ and I naturally look up to the building and we hear John say, “Is that a helicopter?”

  I look around. I don’t hear anything. Kendra speaks the first time. “It crashed a few months ago. They crashed it. The dome brought it down.”

  I look to the south. I can see a heap of steel with two rotor blades sticking out of the top of the wreckage. The downed helicopter represents the end of a war, whether it was or not in reality. For me it signifies the last war that the last shred of active, organized resistance to the Infinity Club had fought.

  We walk into the building. Feet shuffling on concrete, light jumping from wall to wall as we navigate the darkness across a small lobby to the stairwell door. Panic sets in. I can’t decide what I want to happen here. The idea of living under the direction of the omnipotent thing that the Infinity Club became scares the hell out of me. They’ve killed, and more people are dying right now through their inaction. And who knows what other microwave blasts or Atlantas are in store? But at the same time, this is a chance I’ve secretly fantasized about—an opportunity to be active architects of our own realities rather than passive recipients of the senseless monstrosity blindly cobbled together by previous generations and perpetuated by de facto social Darwinists who were forcing the rest of us along in their schemes, willingly or not.

  It’s too big. I don’t know what to think. So I stop and follow everyone up the stairs.

  We’re on the roof and my eyes see the dome but my mind is incapable of processing it. I hear some amazed though hushed exclamations. I am gobsmacked. Amid the bomb-made lunar landscape is a shimmering, churning cobalt and green blob. It is much larger than I thought it would be. For some reason I was thinking that it would be the size of a gym. It dominates the campus from our high vantage point.

  John is to my left taking pictures. Teddy and his gang are at the edge of the roof. Russ and the kids stand behind them. Dez passes Kendra a pair of binoculars. There is a busine
sslike aspect to their movements. The dome is old hat to them. It is incredible what the human mind can normalize.

  Teddy unwraps the blaster. He picks it up. “You guys may want to step back,” he says.

  We all see the wisdom in the suggestion and step back a few paces as Teddy steps forward.

  He holds the prop in front of him.

  Aims.

  Fires.

  Nothing.

  I can’t breathe.

  I look over to Russ. He is stoically looking at the dome. His eyes widen suddenly. I follow his gaze.

  In the distance, the dome is undulating. Bright green and dark blue twist and writhe into and out of one another. A shimmering mist forms around the dome. A few moments later the vapor coalesces into thin, long strands electricity. Soon a jagged, jerking scaffolding forms around the globe, dancing violently around it.

  The lattice-work thickens and a bolt strikes out from the dome and lands on a city bus, exploding it. The number of bolts increases, causing destructive explosions wherever they land. Even though we are safe at our distance, I step back and my lungs flutter with fear.

  Small fires are erupting around the dome as the lightning becomes thicker, more powerful. The world is filled with ear-splitting crackles that raise all the hairs on my body and numb my skin. In front of us Kendra screams wildly and Dez grabs her. There is a flash of light behind me and I turn to see that Geoff and Rene are now silhouettes of bright silver, arms wrapped around one other. The light dims, disappears and they are gone. I stand there for a minute, two, twenty looking at the space where the kids once stood. I can sense things winding down behind me—the lightning subsiding, the crackling stopping.

  Kendra sobs and moans loudly into Dez’s chest. My ears are throbbing from the absence of percussive noise. John and Russ and I lift our eyes from the empty space where Geoff and Rene once stood and exchange expressions that are searching for answers, somehow both wild-eyed and blank.

  I turn and look past the kidnappers as they stumble toward us. The dome looks like it did before Teddy pulled the trigger except that silver is now the third color in addition to green and blue. I realize I am walking to the edge of the roof and as I do, the lights of the dome merge to reveal its new color, a teal-tinged gunmetal.

  Kendra is a basket case. She is punching and screaming and writhing away from Dez who is trying to restrain or hug her. Teddy is holding the blaster to his side, looking at the dome with an expression that can only be characterized as contentment. I can only imagine the relief he must feel knowing that he is not a madman.

  “Is that it?” I ask him, yelling for some reason. I feel unbalanced, like I’m about to fall over.

  Teddy doesn’t look away from the dome. “I think so.”

  He turns to me. “Here,” he says, looking at me, smiling, while casually handing me the blaster. “It’s yours now.”

  We’re back on the road, walking to the van. We’re quiet. I’m looking at the blaster, pondering what I just saw, replaying the images, thinking about the kids. John asks no one, everyone, “What happened to them?”

  “They were taken by the Infinity Club.” Teddy says.

  “Why?”

  Silence.

  A few minutes later, John says, “You guys mind if we skip the other stops and head home?”

  “Seconded,” I say.

  “The motion carries,” Russ says. He looks over to Teddy and says, “Hey, buddy, is this kidnapping round trip?”

  EPILOGUE

  We’re just passing Bonifay, a small town on I-10 in Florida. The ride has been rough the past couple of days because of all the hills, and if memory serves, it’ll be this way until we pass Tallahassee, at least.

  We are in a state park located on a spring. It is shady and beautiful and crowded with people who eye us cautiously as we approach, all of us with bikes loaded with supplies.

  Our group of eighty-three decided to leave Hattiesburg and head to Jacksonville. It was something that resulted from a number of conversations that Russ, John and I had on the ride back to Hattiesburg. In a nutshell we decided that a network of fiefdoms was untenable.

  John and Russ approach to let everyone know that we’re just passing through and will only stay for one night, etc. The kids are eyeing the springs. It’s hot and the water looks inviting. I turn to Molly. She’s redoing her ponytail, an act that takes me back to when we were dating for some reason. Emma is helping Scottie and other kids his age take off their helmets while handing out water bottles.

  After we get the all-clear from Russ and John, Molly, the kids and I head for the water. It’s freezing, but we get used to it in no time. Molly and I sit in the water. She leans back against me. I put my arms around her and we watch the kids splash. As time passes my mind wanders, wondering, as I often do these days, about Geoff and Rene. Why them? Maybe it was as simple as the Infinity Club was made up of fans of Geoff’s fiction and they knew Rene was part of the deal. Maybe it was more cosmic than that: perhaps they were what I vainly thought I was: architects of the current zeitgeist. I’m sure that’s just projection on my part, but for whatever the reason, the pair was obviously special and showed up on the Infinity Club’s radar.

  It’s the only theory that explains Atlanta: it was attacked by the smaller faction because Geoff and Rene were there. Russ, John and I were, like the dogs in Savannah, mere pawns. We just happened to be there and fit their purposes: to get the kids to Jacksonville where Teddy would take over. The green faction outmaneuvered the blue faction by using us to smuggle the chosen ones from Atlanta to the dome. Why? Who knows? My best guess is to bring them into the Club to even the scales.

  It’s not a particularly satisfactory explanation, and there are some useful chunks of information I’m missing, but that’s the only things that I can come up with that makes any sense. When I get to Jacksonville I plan to visit each one of those thrown together churches in the Landing and tell them what I know and see if maybe we can all figure out what the electrons are and then decide whether they should become particles or waves. Maybe we’ll get some traction and start a new religion. That’s what terminally solipsistic, self-important, has-been science-fiction writers do, I suppose.

  It’s after dinner and it’s Sunday. I walk over to my backpack and take it with me into the woods. I find a clearing and sit down. I slowly unwrap the bundle. I still can’t believe I have the ray gun used in The Clarke Orbit War. I think that line every week when I take it out and repeat my ritual. Another weekly thought: will this be the week they communicate with me?

  A metaphor I used in the days following Atlanta was that the Bank of America building represented the Tower of Babel that we had made of our world in the old days, a tower that had been irreparably razed by the Infinity Club. Recently I’ve realized that that’s not right. We’ll always build Towers of Babel. It’s in our wiring. But now we get to try again from the ground up, with some notable parameters, and the lessons of the past as our guide. The idea fills me with a scary-but-thrilling sense of freedom. We don’t know what the Infinity Club’s plans were. And if Atlanta was any indication, somewhere along the way they got modified. But things have been quiet lately. No Atlanta-level craziness that we know of. And now they have Geoff and Rene, two natural born communicators. Maybe they’ll let us in on their plans soon.

  That’s probably wishful thinking, true, but if I’ve learned anything it’s that wishful thinking has a funny way of becoming reality.

  I close my eyes. I think about his goofy glasses and her hair and I smile. And I reach out to touch the blaster.

  THE END

  Author’s Note: I hope that you enjoyed this story. If you did and would like to read about Teddy’s journey to retrieve the blaster, please check out THE FIRST PRAYER. Evan’s ‘wannabe cyberpunk’ story, KINESCOPE, is available, too.

 

 

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