by Celia Crown
“I will get to work when I’m done, and I’m waiting for my car anyway,” I curl my feet under the table and snake them around Adrian’s muscular leg.
Even his legs are muscular, and I haven’t yet seen one place on him that isn’t packed with steely muscles.
“What?” he shouts while slamming his beer on the table, “These are lives you’re talking about. There is no better time to get to work!”
His outburst gets the attention of everyone in the small diner, and Adrian’s body reacts strongly against the yell. He has yanked the back of my chair with his long arm and puts me by his side. The table is small, so he can do that without standing up.
I’m happy that I didn’t knock my knees on the table legs. I don’t need a bruise that is the size and color of Pluto.
At this point, I’m so used to his protectiveness that I don’t blink an eye when he does stuff like this. He hovers; Adrian has a habit of doing things for me when I’m fully capable of doing them, and he perceives every little thing as a danger to me.
I have told him, from time to time, that he doesn’t need to be on guard when it’s just us. I’m not going to get hurt by going up two floors on the elevator to get food.
Of course, he wouldn’t be Adrian Shafer if he listened to me. The man has selective hearing, and it’s infuriating, but I know he means good. It’s his approach that’s a bit overbearing at times, and some would say that he’s a bear protecting his territory.
“The meteor isn’t going anywhere,” I comment plainly, gauging his reaction.
He bristles, eyes flaring in panic and it’s understandable that he is concerned because the Earth is about to be scorched in hellfire and the mutation of what’s left of civilization through radiation.
“That is very irresponsible of you,” he says with disappointment filling his face, but his voice is tight as if he is restraining himself from exploding on me.
Just a little more, I think to myself.
“I’m not irresponsible,” I correct him, drinking another mouthful of water.
“What do you call sitting here, eating and drinking, when you have the future of humankind in your hands.”
“I am merely enjoying the fruits of my labor.”
Adrian’s hand creeps to my thigh as soon as I said it. He doesn’t know what my plan is and he is not going to get involved because he doesn’t need to put himself in harm’s way when he’s already got enough on his plate of protecting me.
I want to be able to protect him too, and I am not strong like him, but I have my own ways.
A lightbulb must have popped on top of my captain’s head because he’s suddenly gasping in shock with wide eyes.
“You have figured out how to stop it?” he asks, frantic and scared.
The captain that I know and spent time in close quarters within space is a calm and collected man. His old age gives him experience and maturity to differentiate the types of dangers. He has steered us clear of many flying objects headed to our shuttle, and it would have caused havoc to the shuttle if he wasn’t a perfectionist in his aerodynamic measurements.
“Yes,” I confirm with a nod.
Adrian’s hand kneads my thigh; it is his way of telling me that he is still there, and I can be a little bit bolder than I usually am. He has my back, and he won’t let anything happen to me.
“How?” the captain breathes harshly, eyes wild and impatient.
I detect a hint of agitation in his tone, but his eyes are more expressive; they show frenzy as if he is stopping himself from pacing like a chained animal.
“You should know,” I point out vaguely, and I can feel the stare of Adrian’s dark eyes tapping at the side of my head.
“I do?” he raises his tone to incredulous, and it sounds too fake.
I caught him by surprise, and Adrian notices it too when he straightens his posture even more. I’m afraid this man will permanently be in his military stance, and I have never seen him slouch; that takes dedication and skills to get the type of muscle memory to not bend his spine.
I need to take lessons from him. I have back tenderness when I work too much because I’m always bending my neck to write on paper. It’s hours before I notice that I must use the restroom and then I’ll be back to my turtle position again for the rest of the night.
“It was big news, and all the conspiracy theorists were having a field day with the truck robbery that happened down the road from here.” I lean back in my chair; the wood digs into my back as a chill runs up my arms when the fan pushes a gust of wind towards me from the ceiling.
“I do recall hearing about it,” he admits.
The captain wraps his hand around the beer bottle and takes a swig that gets the beer down his throat.
“What does that have to do with the meteor?” he frowns with a drop of beer falling down his lip.
He’s not drunk, but his inhibition lowers just a fraction. This man is cautious when he does things, and he would never willingly reveal top secrets. Being intoxicated would ruin the confidentiality of things, and it’s why the chemist in the space shuttle refused to make alcohol for anyone who asked.
Not even to pass the time or to relax our nerves when we have managed to avoid another encounter with death in space.
One wrong move and we would all be floating in space in catatonic states.
“Here’s what I think,” I drum my nails on the table.
The soft music is the beat that I tap with, and the captain’s wide eyes follow the movements.
“This plan was hatched years ago, but not too long to let the advancement of technology hinder with the major pieces of the overall picture. Maybe two years ago; that’s my best guess.”
“Two years ago?” he’s sweating and flexing his knuckles over the neck of the beer bottle.
“Two years as felt on Earth, but not according to the two years we were up in space. Thirty years of technology will not work in this scenario, and there are too many outside factors that are unaccountable for,” I shrug casually. It rubs the captain in the wrong way when his jaw clenches.
“Tabby,” Adrian’s warning reaches my ear.
He doesn’t say anything else and he respects that I have this covered. Adrian’s doctorly manner comes out when he focuses on feeling my joints in a nonintimate way; it’s too impersonal and premeditated as he feels around the bone for any anomalies.
“Once the plan was hatched, it was only a matter of waiting for the right time to do it. It was a group of people, but everyone has a different job and limited knowledge of what the other team member’s orders were.”
I nod, pulling the details together for this story is more fun than I thought, and I like keeping the captain in suspense as he’s about the break the beer bottle if he clenches any harder.
“Of course, everyone needs an alibi if things go bad. What is a better alibi than an airtight alibi?”
His hand is shaking way too much, and it gives away the tension he feels, “How did you know it was me?”
“I didn’t.” I smile, “Until now.”
His brown eyes narrow, and the creaking from the fan above adds the suspense to let him sweat while people are leaving after their meal.
“Botulinum and the eight strains, hmm, that seems to be the wrong analogy…” I wrinkle my nose.
“I knew something was wrong when none of the equations I have been solving yield the results that it should match. Then I realize it was some of my pieces of different equations that I have created into one, and only those who know my work intimately have that knowledge.”
He tries to deflect responsibility and doubt, “I am not the only one with access to your work.”
“No, but I did teach you when you wanted to learn. Two years in space is a lot of time to be familiar, even a professional, at astrophysics given the right type of teaching.”
I didn’t think anything of it when he asked me to teach him astrophysics because it was to pass time when we were waiting for results, an
d sometimes they take longer than others, and we can’t move on to another experiment of trying to breach a black hole without tampering with the previous ones.
Our entire mission was to understand black holes, and this project was way ahead of its time, and it’s one of the many reasons why it’s one of the most classified missions that ever went down in history. If other countries found out about what we were doing—searching for the truth on the other side of the black hole and searching for life forms in the solar system—then it would be a race that isn’t going to be about science anymore.
Politics will always be a pissing match between countries, but only the countries with resources can compete as the best if we exhaust all our options.
Deep-sea research, technological advances on solid grounds, and the unlimited mysteries of space.
Humankind is too ambitious, and they are lucky that nothing happened to the space shuttle; not a single soul wanted to be there because going to space was still a relatively new thing that isn’t a one hundred percent, guaranteed safe way of breaking through the Earth’s atmosphere.
The captain claps slowly with a bit of a condescending smile, “You were always the most brilliant in the group.”
“How did you figure it out?”, conserving his energy by crossing his arm over his chest and leaning back to the chair.
“When my fever destroyed my brain cells,” I casually state. “Some things just happen, and it just went downhill from there. It took a while, but I knew that, until you were in space, they wouldn’t be able to start the plan of stealing government equipment because they wouldn’t know what to look for.”
I shake my head, feeling slightly stupid and sorry for myself because I got used, and it makes me feel sick to the stomach. I taught this man out of the goodness of my heart, and he turns around and uses it for bad things.
“You needed my help to locate a specific chip that allows you to control and manipulate data of factors in space to mimic a meteor. I realize that you have to have someone on the inside to know the routes of the truck that switches roads at the last second, and today confirmed my suspicions when I met your inside man, General Lynell Moreno.”
It’s hauntingly quiet when he stares at me, but I’m not scared of him. He will have to go through Adrian to put his hands on me, and by the looks of his hand choking the neck of the beer bottle, I’d say he’s close to smashing it over my head.
“Once you got the chips, you were able to manipulate data and send it through the satellites in ways that I have taught you to perform the clearest messages. Tricking everyone into thinking it’s the end of the world is smart, and it’s a distraction that will get people in hysteria.”
He reels himself back, closing his eyes and breathing through his nose. “You seem to forget that I do not have contact with your so-called robbers.”
“A little data replacement on the shuttle does the trick; you call and scrub the data immediately after and rewrite different codes on it to make it look like there is no communication coming in or out of Hercules—which is what the rule was.” I put my weight on my hand that’s pressed to the side of the chair.
“Once you got the fake meteor warning going, you needed me to keep my focus on stopping it and hope that I would get so far into my research that it would already be evacuation time. Then, I couldn't figure out your plan.”
His eyebrows jump to his hairline, his posture still defensive and unwelcoming. “My plan? Enlighten me as to what I could benefit from causing panic to citizens.”
“The bigger the distraction, the bigger the reward. It got me thinking once I suspected you were part of this, what would be the one thing you want the most to cause something this big. And, I realized that you told me you were a child of slavery when your parents sold you off for money.”
The captain’s teeth grind, fists clenched and anger fuming through his red ears. I thought he was cute once, but now he is not the same kind captain that I knew. I don’t think I knew him at all since he had been planning this before we met, and he used me for knowledge for his greed.
I take a breath, minding the condensation glide down the glass. “You value money more than anything else in the world and it’s when I knew that the meteor is just a fancy distraction for you to steal money.”
“I do hope you have proof behind those accusations, Sterling,” he glares, brown eyes curling in heated anger and a touch of fear.
“I will,” I assure him light-heartedly, “You can’t carry money around without being seen by evacuation helpers, so my educated guess is that you’re planning on hitting Rio International bank and walking out of the vault with a flash drive that contains hundreds of millions.”
The chair screeches, echoing into the quiet diner and the waitress runs over to see what the commotion is when he says, “I won’t sit here and be accused; you will be hearing from your supervisors soon.”
I hum, “I will be waiting.”
He knocks the chair over, stomping out and swinging the door open to step into the dark night.
It should be any second now because he always has a backup plan no matter how frenzied he is. I have seen him work under strenuous conditions that cause great stress to him psychologically, and he still gives his best.
Seconds tick by, I turn to the waitress as she sets the chair back up. “Is there a basement you can retreat to?”
“Basement?” her voice inquires, and her mother comes out from the kitchen.
“Is everything okay?”
I nod, “Yes, please go down to the basement if you have one. If not, do leave the diner immediately.”
They look at each other in question and turn back to me with a frown, “Ma’am, what—”
“Now,” Adrian barks, the tone of authority startles them, and they are too scared of Adrian to argue back.
I thought they would have done more arguing, but I can’t complain because their safety is important.
“Adrian, go with them and make sure they’re safe,” I watch them run into the kitchen and hear more pans banging as a door slams shut.
“I’m not leaving you with whatever stupid plan you have,” he scowls.
I roll my eyes, standing from my chair, and open my mouth. Suddenly, with a similarity to a scratchy record; a second of glass shattering, a thud on the floor, and Adrian’s voice booming in my ears, his body comes flying towards me and a spark of flashes fires in my brain.
“Tabby!”
I see a young boy; black hair and dark eyes, chubby cheeks, and too mature for his own good.
Oh, Doctor Adrian Shafer is that eight-year-old kid that I was babysitting for my college tuition—
Everything goes black.
Chapter Ten
Adrian
A strong ringing whips in my ear; it throws off my equilibrium as I groan in pain. I have not felt this way since the last time I was in the vicinity of a bomb, and this déjà vu feeling gets stronger as dust, concrete, and smoke fills up the diner.
The pillars in the diner had crumbled with part of the roof caving in behind me. Darkness shrouded around me as I cough into my hand. My back is hurt from a piece of drywall smacking into me, but I’m able to get on my knees and shake away the dust from my eyes.
They adjust to the darkness; the only source of light is the moon, and that is limited to the clouds that move in front of it.
A cough jolts the muscle underneath me. I snap my head down, and Tabby is covered with grey dust and a speck of blood dribbling down from her forehead.
She mumbles something under her breath while hissing in pain. Her little hands come up to rub her eyes. There are particles everywhere, and it’s getting into my eyes, making them water and itch, but I don’t rub them.
I blink them away, and my hands are all over her body, searching for injuries or bloodstains on her that could tell me if she is hurt. Sometimes adrenaline is too high that people don’t realize they have a piece of foreign object stabbing into them, and that could be the case for m
e, and I’m not worried about myself.
Making sure she is not harmed is my top priority, and it doesn’t seem like she has any external injuries that suggest she might have internal bleeding. All her bones are intact and not broken. Her skin is a bit scratched, and the only blood that seems to be coming is from the wound in her hairline.
“Tabby,” I whisper deliberately; there is a chance that my voice will overwhelm her.
She peels her eyes open. Those amber hues gleam under the moon, and I have never felt more relieved to see her smiling at me.
“I can’t hear,” she says, louder than what is necessary.
I hush her with a hand going behind her neck, searching for any pain on her face as I feel her spine. No damage on her spine is a good thing, and I try to get her to stand up slowly just in case I missed something.
It’s too dark here. I can’t make a proper scan when we’re surrounded by wreckage.
“Are you hurt?” I ask as she tips toward my chest.
With a long sigh, she buries her face into my shirt and shakes her head.
“You sound weird,” she says with a chuckle, murmuring something into my chest while slumping sluggishly.
“Are you okay?” Tabby lifts her hand to curl her fingers on my waist.
I lean down to her ear, “No, I’m alright. We need to get out of here. Can you stand?”
She doesn’t hear me. The buzzing in her ear must still be too loud from the explosion. I have a faint idea of what the explosion could be, but it shouldn’t have caused that much damage from a grenade.
Unless it’s a bomb that’s been modified; the hollow sound of it hitting on the floor is distinguishably consistent with a grenade.
I would know, having a grenade thrown at you is like having lunch every day. It’s such a common occurrence that I almost expected it when I was overseas, and my brothers in arms tease me for being a dumbass by running in the front line while I’m the one with more extensive medical training than all of them.
“Tabby, can you stand?” I say it louder.
She jerks with shock, “Y-yeah, I can.”
I help her up, rocks, and concrete falling from our bodies; they disrupt the quietness of the middle of nowhere in Arizona.
