Fabler opened his eyes.
There was no blinding light.
He closed them again.
Fabler opened his eyes.
There was no blinding light.
He closed them again.
Remembered his wife’s face. Every line. Every detail.
Remembered her voice.
Hi, it’s Lori. Can’t come to the phone, but your call is important to me, unless you’re a telemarketer, then it’s not, and you need to remove my number from your list. But if you’re someone I like, such as my adoring husband, leave me a message at the beep.
He opened his eyes.
There was no blinding light.
“What do you want from me?”
Fabler wasn’t sure who he was talking to.
“And God said, Let there be light.”
There was no light.
“Let there be light.”
There was no light.
“Let there be light.
“Let there be light.
“Let there be light.”
Fabler closed his eyes.
He opened his eyes.
There was no blinding light.
GRIM ○ 8:58+am
After searching for hours, trying to find an exit in this endless, technicolor, plastic maze, Grim curled up in some little dent at the end of a long corridor and closed his eyes for just a moment, to rest and to think.
The next thing he knew, he’d jerked himself awake, heart slamming against his ribcage, full-on panic electrifying every nerve.
He stood, expecting to feel sore—especially his abused balls—but felt surprisingly peppy.
He retraced his steps from yesterday, coming back to the twelve o’clock great room with the white light, then following a different light that grew deeper and deeper purple, coming to another giant wall that became translucent when he touched it.
Outside; the now-familiar prehistoric jungle shrouded in perpetual night, lit by towering lampposts. Grim watched, equal parts fascinated and repulsed, as three meter tall, bipedal carnivorous dinosaur covered with tiny, iridescent feathers—an Allosaurus? —slowly circled a massive greyish furry mammal that resembled a giant bear, except it walked on curved claws.
While the dinosaur fascinated Grim on both childlike and visceral levels, it was the sloth he was drawn to.
Almost the allosaurus’s height. Hunkering down, low to the ground, staring at the dino.
The allosaurus darted in, mouth wide, snapping its jaws on empty space as the sloth moved much faster than Grim expected a sloth to move.
Just as fast, the sloth threw an uppercut, its sickle claw ripping out the allosaur’s throat, along with a good section of its neck vertebrae.
The dinosaur died before it hit the ground, and within three seconds a bat swarm had descended on the carcass, each winged rodent the size of a greyhound, tearing and snapping at flesh in a way that reminded Grim of piranha documentaries on PBS.
The sloth backed away from the buffet, then turned and noticed Grim in the window.
It sauntered up to the plastiglass, right up to Grim, and peered at him with big eyes. Big, baby blue eyes, the color of Sinatra’s, shrouded in a raccoon-like mask of black fur.
Like a regular old sloth, it appeared to be smiling.
A long, pink tongue licked the plastic window, inches away from Grim’s face.
“Hi, fella. You know where the exit is?”
The sloth opened its mouth and made some sort of sound that Grim couldn’t hear through the partition. Maybe the location of the exit. More likely just an animal grunt.
Grim recalled the explanation Lori had given.
“What do you say, Sinatra? Is this whole situation just some wacked-out science experiment?”
The sloth pressed its big black nose to the window, leaving a fist-sized wet mark. Grim raised his hand up and tapped the plastic.
“You can help me. I bet those big old claws could tear right through this plastic crap. What kind of advanced civilization designs windows that don’t open?”
“I spent all night trying to avoid those assholes. Now I’ve got to go find one.”
Grim gave the sloth another pat through the window. “Take care, buddy. Maybe I’ll see you around.”
Then Grim headed off to look for trouble.
PRESLEY ○ 9:31+am
She awoke to sobbing.
A woman. From one of the nearby cells.
Presley sat up in her plastiform bed and swung her legs over the side, staring at her foot stump.
Her hand rubbed her flat belly. She thought of Grim.
A deep, pain-wracked moan broke Presley’s concentration.
“Holly?”
The cries abruptly stopped.
“Holly, my name is Presley.”
After a short pause, “Quiet. We get in trouble for talking.”
“How long have you been here, Holly?”
No answer.
“Holly?”
“A few months.”
“Are you… hurt?”
Silence.
“Holly, there’s strength in numbers. That’s why they’ve isolated us. That’s why they punish us for communicating. The more knowledge we share, the stronger we are.”
Presley didn’t think she’d answer, but Holly surprised her. “There’s nothing we can do, Presley. We’re here until they harvest us down to the bone.”
“Harvest what?”
“It’s more than that.”
Presley stared down at her wrist and ankle stumps. “Our limbs?”
Holly didn’t answer.
“They took my hand and my foot, Holly.”
Presley thought she heard a snort. “Welcome to the club. I’m missing both arms to my shoulder, and one leg to my hip.”
“I’m sorry. Are you in pain?”
“Physical pain doesn’t last long here. During the treatments, we’re healed. That’s why they need us. We can heal. They can’t. Not by themselves.”
“Why were you crying, Holly?”
; “I tried to hop to the toilet. Fell. Pissed all over the floor, and got sprayed.”
“Sprayed?”
Another snort. “Trust me. You don’t want to get sprayed.”
“Holly, a friend of mine is loose. He’s going to get us out of here.”
“There’s only one way out of here.”
Presley could guess what Holly meant, but asked anyway.
“Dying, Presley. The only way out of here is dying.”
“You’ve seen people die?”
“There was a man in your cell before you were. Horace. Older guy. Said he’d been here for years. Talked about the war, and I think he was talking about World War II. He’d started to go gray. They don’t need you anymore when you go gray. When we stop producing pigment, they harvest us.”
“For what? The Experiment?”
“You’ve seen the Experiment?”
Presley winced. “Unfortunately.”
“The Experiment… that’s like practice. For something else.”
“For what?”
Holly didn’t answer. Presley repeated the question, louder.
“A few days after they took Horace, a guard came to my cell. He had Horace’s arms.”
“What do you mean? He was carrying them?”
“Instead of his regular grey arms, he had Horace’s attached to his shoulders. I could tell. I saw Horace’s tattoo.”
The thought of being held captive for eighty years, then stripped for parts, didn’t hold much appeal for Presley.
“Grim will get us out. And there’s another guy. A tough son of a bitch named Fabler. We weren’t abducted, Holly. We fought our way in. And if there’s a way in, there’s a way out.”
“I used to think the same thing. I’ve got a twin brother. Jake. You heard the expression the smartest one in the room? Jake is the smartest one in California. I expected him to find some way to come and save me. He hasn’t.”
“Fabler and Grim, they’re soldiers. Good soldiers.”
“They’d need to bring the whole army with them. Have you seen outside? The creatures? It makes Jurassic Park look like a petting zoo. We go out there, we’re lunch.”
“I don’t mean just out of these cells. I mean home. I mean getting home.”
“So… you don’t know?”
“Don’t know what?”
“I hate to be the one to tell you, Presley.” Holly began to sob again. “We are home.”
JAKE ○ August 27, 2017 ○ 1:23pm ○ 1503840225
The ping-pong ball had a ten centimeter piece of five pound test monofilament glued to its surface. The other end of the fishing line tied around a lead sinker.
Jake McKendrick checked his watch—a Hamilton Pulsar that once belonged to Jake’s father—pressing the oversized chrome button to see 1:23 come up in red digital numbers.
Jake thought: <1:23. Other times in a sequence like that are 2:34, 3:45, and 4:56.
Jake saw himself stimming again; finger-drawing a circle on the back of his hand.
He carried the ball and weight to the kitchen, pausing to see the picture on the wall.
Whenever Jake passed the picture, he stopped to look.
Jake patted his robe pockets, found the tube of SPF 50, and made a satisfied grunt, pleased his brain still worked.
Mostly.
He stopped rubbing the back of his hand.
Entering the kitchen, he opened the refrigerator, took out a pre-measured Tupperware container with exactly 28.35 grams
He ate without pleasure, his mind stuck on his equation, using the last piece of carrot to scoop out the last bit of peanut butter. When he finished, Jake placed the Tupperware in the dishwasher with ten other matching containers.
Jake walked up to a one gallon glass jar on the counter, still containing a dozen-plus chocolate sandwich cookies Holly had bought a few days before her abduction.
Jake lifted the lid, took a cautionary sniff.
But Jake didn’t leave them alone. He dumped them in the garbage and took the jar to the sink, filling it with cool water, one inch exactly from the top, using a ruler to measure. Then he dropped in the weight, and the ping pong ball floated up, hanging three inches underwater, like a naval mine.
He set the heavy jar back on the counter, watching the ball wiggle and eventually stand up straight, an underwater buoy. Then Jake glanced at his equation on the white board.
An equation with seventy-two pages of proofs. Still incomplete after all this time.
But it made sense in Jake’s head, even if he hadn’t completely solved it.
At least, the math made sense.
“Energy is mass, mass is energy.”
But the negative equation also worked. −E = −mc2.
“Negative energy is negative mass, and negative mass is negative energy.”
Baryon asymmetry has puzzled scientists for decades. The best minds agree that the Big Bang should have produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter, and they should have canceled each other out, leaving nothing.
“Just because we haven’t discovered it doesn’t mean it isn’t there.”
When Jake was younger, talking to himself made people think him odd. Not looking others in the eye made people think him odd. Staring for extended periods of time at ceiling fans made people think him odd.
After his second PhD, people thought of him as a brilliant eccentric.
Even with the stimming.
“But am I brilliant enough to solve this?”
Jake stared at the ball in the jar, feeling a bit foolish.
He gripped the sides of the jar—
—held his breath—
—and quickly shifted it a foot to the left.
Common sense and years of casual observation lead to the expectation that the ping pong ball would be dragged in the same direction, like a helium balloon towed behind a running child. The jar moved left, so the ping pong ball would be pulled left as well and touch the right side—the opposite side—of the jar.
But it didn’t happen that way.
Just like in the video, the ping pong ball moved unexpectedly in the opposite direction, bouncing against the left side of the
jar; the same direction Jake pushed it.
Jake moved the jar right, and once again the ball led the way, bumping the right side.
Exactly what negative mass is theorized to do.
In a negative mass tug of war, the harder each side pulled, the more they would repulse each other.
Go left, move right.
Bizarro.
Jake glanced to his equation board again, then back at the glass jar, and noticed something. Something unrelated to the experiment.
Rather than alarm, Jake registered confusion.
Jake didn’t know much about guns, but the one this man held appeared large and intimidating. And the trespasser didn’t wear any sort of uniform that announced FBI or SWAT.
Jake decided on crackpot, and made sure he appeared casual when he pulled out his cell phone. He scrolled to Det. Woo and pressed CALL.
Detective Woo answered with a sigh. “No updates on your sister since your last call, Mr. McKendrick. Which was yesterday.”
“There’s someone in my backyard, Detective.”
Another sigh.
“I’m certain this time.”
“You were certain last time. It was raccoons. And the time before that. A lost dog.”
“I’m looking right at him.”
“At a person? Not a deer?”
“It’s a man.”
“Is it the little green men again, Jake?”
Jake clenched his jaw. “I said I saw a light, Detective. I didn’t say it was a UFO. I didn’t say aliens. When I drove up, there was light on my lawn.”
“A flying saucer.”
This again. “A cylinder of light, Detective. It wasn’t flying. Stop twisting my words around.”
“And Holly was floating into it.”
“She was levitating. Yes.”
“The aliens, beaming her up.”
“Over, not up. They weren’t flying. And they weren’t aliens.
What Happened To Lori - The Complete Epic (The Konrath Dark Thriller Collective Book 9) Page 48
