Begin Again: A Post-Apocalyptic Adventure (End Days Book 4)

by E. E. Isherwood

  Despite the distance, the woman pointed at Garth and Lydia. “That girl doesn’t belong. I told you all! I see them!” She let out loud sobs.

  “It’s like Dad said; people are losing their shit.”

  Garth got back to the screen. “I have to remember my part.” He stared at the last four digits of his dad’s phone number with the hot intensity of a dying sun. His life literally depended on committing them to memory.

  The woman with the gun sounded desperate. “I’m like them. I don’t belong. I shouldn’t be here.” She sniffled a few times, then howled.

  Garth looked up to see what she was going to do next.

  She extended her arm so the toy gun was pointed at the cops.

  “I’m going to kill you all!”

  He almost laughed at how stupid she was acting, because she couldn’t hurt anyone with a toy gun. And he was certain that was what it was because he’d picked it up off the floor for her.

  “It’s a fake,” he said to himself. Then, realizing what she was doing with it, he jumped out of his chair. Garth intended to shout a warning to the police, but he didn’t get the chance.

  Gunshots exploded as both police officers put multiple rounds into the troubled woman. Lydia covered her ears as the dull concussions rumbled past them.

  Much too late to make a difference, he yelled to the cops, “It’s a toy gun!”

  The runner tossed his blue shoebox on the floor as he ran by Garth’s table, probably thinking the shots were meant for him. The guy never looked back, and almost crashed through the glass-paned exit door as he escaped to the outside.

  “We should go,” he said hesitantly as he looked around. “That way.” He pointed in the direction of the nearest set of doors.

  Before he left, he got one last look at the wild scene playing out down the mall. The lady with the silver gun was crumpled in a heap in the middle of the floor. One of the police officers prodded her a little as if to see if she had any life in her. He also kicked the gun away from the corpse, although it skidded and hopped on the tile in a weird way—almost like it didn’t weigh anything.

  That confirmed it was the toy gun.

  One of the officers peered back at him. Garth couldn’t read his expression, but he felt bad for the guy. He and his buddy had been forced to shoot an unarmed woman because she was acting nuts.

  As he ran out the door with Lydia, he wondered if the dead woman had known what she was doing when she raised the fake gun in front of the police, or if she was as insane as she sounded. And how did the woman know Lydia didn’t belong? Was it the obvious pioneer clothing, or did she have some skill that allowed her to identify time-traveling people? He remembered the woman pointing to others in the mall, too. How many were there?

  So many questions.

  To put it all out of his mind, he recited the four numbers.

  He understood those.

  I-80, Nebraska

  The slowdown on the interstate was caused by a white passenger van. It was parked in the right-hand lane, but there were no people around it. Both of the eastbound lanes merged into one line until traffic passed the van.

  “They might have run out of gas,” he said to Connie as they rolled by.

  She let out a taut laugh. “Could have at least pulled off the roadway.”

  “I could push them off, kind of like I did with your car.” He smiled at her, always aware he owed her big-time for destroying her Volkswagen Beetle. Even if it had some criminal bikers inside, he was the one who had rammed it.

  “We ain’t got time for that, darlin’,” she drawled.

  He checked the side mirror next to her. The van was already a hundred yards behind them. “No, I guess we don’t.”

  Minutes later, they were back to their comfortable routine of roving across the FM and AM radio dials as well as dialing Buck’s phone. Connie had just grabbed it off the charger when it rang in her hand.

  It startled her so much she dropped it on Mac, who was keeping watch under her legs.

  “Sorry, boy!” She hurriedly picked it back up and looked at the caller ID.

  “It’s Garth!”

  “That’s my boy!” Buck burst out. He held out his hand and took the phone. His heart pounded in his throat as if failing to connect with this one call would be the end of the world. He took a deep breath, then clicked the green button to answer.

  “Garth! Thank God!”

  A short pause greeted him. Then, a man’s deep voice replied, “Who is this?”

  Buck held the phone away from him so he was able to read the caller ID. It showed Garth’s smiling face, along with his phone number. He put it back to his ear.

  “This is Buck. I’m talking to Garth’s phone. Where is my son?”

  Traffic picked up, but he coasted along just under the speed limit as he tried to listen.

  Connie put her hand on his leg, as she always did when it was obvious something was amiss. This time, however, it provided no comfort.

  “Hey, boss,” the man on the line chattered, “there is someone talking on this black box. He says this belonged to his son.”

  A dark chuckle came from the other person.

  “Look, I don’t know who this is, but I need to talk to my son. Is he there?”

  A new man came onto the line. “This is Frank Squire. I’m in charge. I ask the questions.”

  Buck’s blood pressure went to fire-hydrant strength in an instant. Every ounce of his Marine Dad brain wanted to cuss out the other man, but he had to be smart if he wanted real answers.

  He gritted his teeth. “Sure, Mr. Squire. Fire away.”

  “Where are you? This black box has a man’s picture in this window, but you look far away.”

  His avatar on Garth’s phone showed him standing in the back yard of their home. He couldn’t even remember why Garth had taken that photo, but he thought it was from a summer barbeque with Sam’s family.

  “I’m on the highway in Virginia,” he lied, because he wanted to give the impression he wasn’t far away. Garth’s last known position had him driving toward I-64, so he was likely in that state.

  “Virginny, eh?” the man said. He had an odd accent, like he was a mobster from an old movie. “You must really want your son bad. I think I saw him not long ago in a gas station.”

  “Is he all right?” Buck asked with superhuman restraint.

  The man chuckled. Buck clenched his jaw at bear-trap levels of compression because it wasn’t a friendly laugh.

  “That depends. Does your son have messy hair, wear a funny-looking undershirt, and hang out with a girl who looks like she ate porridge with the Three Little Bears?”

  Buck had no idea what his son was wearing, but Garth had described Lydia as someone who had come out of the past. She would likely dress like a primitive.

  He drew in a deep breath, sure they knew something.

  “Yes, my son is traveling with a young woman who matches that description. Is he okay?”

  Just answer the damned question.

  “Ah. Yes. It came back to me, you see? Me and Benny knocked over a liquor store yesterday. He and the dame were there, but they were mouthy. We had to make an example out of them. Each of them ate a bullet. Sorry for your loss.”

  The man laughed in a malicious tone, then the line went dead.

  Buck felt like he was going into another blackout tunnel, but this time it wasn’t caused by the weird lights in the sky.

  Anger swelled inside him like jet fuel being thrown on a campfire.

  “What the fuck just happened?” he said in confusion.

  “What did they say?” Connie squeezed his leg. “Is Garth…” her voice wavered. “Is he hurt?”

  One hand remained on the wheel, but he wasn’t looking at the road. He held the phone in front of him like it was going to stab someone.

  Buck’s confusion fused with his lingering anger. “What the motherfucking hell was that?”

  He stomped on the brakes and veered into the breakdown lane
on the right side of the highway.

  The CB lit up, but he wasn’t interested.

  A red haze shrouded his eyes as if the anger manifested itself in his vision. It made it hard to see the front of his phone while he dialed Garth’s number.

  “This better be one of his goddam practical jokes,” he groused.

  The phone rang several times, but the mobster guy’s voice greeted him. “I said your son is dead. Don’t you get it? I’m tossing this phone. You are about to hear it jump in a lake.”

  Buck roared into the phone. “Listen, you fucking piece of dog shit, if you fucking harmed my son, I’m going to drive my fucking forty-thousand-pound truck right through your fucking teeth!”

  There was no response for ten seconds.

  “You finished?” The voice snickered.

  “I swear to God!”

  “Sorry, friend. I hated to kill a cute kid like that, but it couldn’t happen to a shittier father. I don’t think you and me would get along at all. Not one bit.”

  “You are fucking dead!” he spat.

  “Goodbye,” the man said in a businesslike voice. A hissing sound followed after a couple of seconds, like he’d tossed Garth’s phone. Some odd noises came through for a moment, then it went dead.

  Buck sat there fuming as he fought the logic of what he’d heard. Garth wasn’t dead. He couldn’t be. And certainly not by some asshole like the cretin he’d been talking to. His boy was smarter than that.

  Connie leaned over and spoke with a wobble in her voice. “What happened?”

  Buck’s internal fire reached the breaking point. He thought one more time about those few words which had ruptured his heart.

  “Your son is dead…”

  Without thinking, he wound up his arm and threw the phone as hard as he could against the front windshield.

  Then he broke down.

  Eight

  Search for Nuclear, Astrophysical, and Kronometric Extremes (SNAKE). Red Mesa, Colorado

  Faith watched with rapt attention as the movie showed scenes of scientists working in a facility a lot like hers.

  “The University of Chicago was the control collider—”

  “They don’t have a supercollider there,” a man said from behind Faith.

  A woman shushed him, which was good because she would have done the same thing.

  “The second collider was located at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana. Together, they formed the two endpoints for the Quantum Bridge Project. As required by order of the Director of Operations in the United States Government Weapons Requisition Program, this is the executive summary of the results.”

  “Holy shit,” Faith let slip.

  Thankfully, no one shushed her.

  The screen displayed a line-drawn map with a small circle on each side. On the right, the circle ran under a park and a few blocks inside a city labeled as Chicago. The left half of the map had a similar ring under the runway of an airport labeled as Malmstrom AFB, Montana. Between the two, block letters indicated the map was not drawn to scale.

  “The primary hypothesis of this experiment centered around the viability of the purposeful transfer of data on an energy beam linking both supercolliders.”

  Faith cringed at the scientific gobbledygook her peers were famous for using.

  “However, as was discovered by both teams, energy inserted on the Chicago side changed its properties during the transit period.”

  The film changed from the map to a video shot of what was obviously a laser beam.

  “The bridge was supposed to be a quantum link between two high-energy sources, a powered transmitter on one side and a powered receiver on the other. However, despite rigorous attempts at equalizing energy levels at origin and terminus, we were unable to achieve equilibrium.”

  A split screen appeared. The white-hot laser shot into a black box on the right side of the screen, while a much larger beam came out of a small black metal enclosure on the left side.

  “The aperture on the origin side was six centimeters. The focused laser was only six millimeters at insertion, well within design tolerances. On the terminus side, the aperture was six centimeters, one hundred times the size of insertion. So the laser was amplified one hundred times but as we all know, laser output can be increased without a concurrent increase in power, but I don’t think that’s the case here. I believe there we probably have an exponential increase in output power.”

  Several people expressed amazement. To Faith, it appeared as if the laser went in as a tiny pinpoint, but it came out in a beam as thick as a softball.

  “How did they do it over all those miles?” a woman asked from somewhere near the front of the room. “This is amazing.”

  Faith restrained herself from being critical of her team. She was interested in the answer, too. No one was there to answer them, though, and the film continued.

  Bob leaned over and whispered. “They are bringing you in as accomplices. I’ve seen this film. I know how it ends.”

  “They showed this to you?” Faith whispered back.

  “Not this exact thing, but I knew they had a smaller pair of colliders. They needed something to prove the theory before they went big time. They let me study these results so I could ensure there were no gotchas in the Four Arrows Project.”

  “I guess they weren’t too happy with your due diligence, were they?” She made no effort to hide her hip-deep sarcasm.

  “I’ll be honest with you,” he said glumly, “I really thought they were going to kill me when the military stormed in. Both times.”

  Faith didn’t know how she felt about his plight. It served him right, she figured, for doing all this behind her back, but she still thought he was being overly dramatic about the forces driving this.

  The film droned on for ten minutes, with scientific formulas and numerous scientists offering their interpretations of the test. She was interested in all of it, but it soon became overwhelming. If she wasn’t killed, like Bob feared, she was going to request to see the film again so she could take notes.

  Her interest piqued when she recognized one of the scientists on the screen. It was Doctor Kyle Johnson of MIT, the guy she’d been trying to contact at CERN for the past several days.

  “We realized right away that this experiment delivered results with applications far beyond the data transmission and reception it was designed to test. Imagine having the ability to fire a modest laser into a fifty-centimeter aperture on this end and have it come out of a five-hundred-meter ring on the far side. An aircraft carrier would vaporize in an instant. Entire cities could be erased once the technological hurdles for building larger rings are solved. This might have applications in space travel. It might be possible to visit quantum parallels. We simply don’t know.”

  I guess you found out, asshole.

  The science was wonderful, but Dr. Johnson and his military masters had left a lot to be desired in how they handled safety. And all for a superweapon? It seemed a terrible waste.

  Dr. Johnson continued speaking.

  “But all of this paled once we examined the file footage of the exit aperture. Please observe.”

  The film played the same footage of the laser exiting on the Montana side. The bright laser ended at a heavy piece of black metal, which she assumed was a lead shield. A second camera flickered on, showing the same lab from a different angle.

  At first, the laser had her full attention. It was a marvel of technology by itself, because by all indications, it was wrecking the laws of energy and mass since the beam coming out was infinitely brighter and bigger than the one going in.

  People around Faith began to gasp and point.

  “What the fuck is that?” someone blurted.

  “Holy shit,” Bob exhaled.

  The film played, but Faith was no longer looking at the laser. The second feed showed a scientist standing behind the lead shield. He was the center of everyone’s attention.

  “What you are seeing is real,” the film
narrator went on. “There are no edits in this take.”

  “Oh, come on,” she said aloud.

  The man was dressed in a white lab coat, exactly like Faith and all her friends wore at SNAKE when they were inside the belly of the beast. However, the man on the screen flickered as the experiment went on. His hair was combed one way one second, and another way a moment later.

  He wore glasses for several moments, then they went away. Ten seconds later, the glasses came back with different frames.

  Faith stood up and moved down the aisle. She fumbled her way along the side of the room until she was next to the video wall. By the time she made it, the changes to the man were becoming more frequent.

  His hair changed several times a second.

  The color of his smock morphed from white to gray to any number of bright colors, like a kaleidoscope being rotated at a hundred miles an hour.

  Then he shifted into a woman.

  Then she was black.

  “It’s the shift,” Faith said to herself. “I’ll be damned. This is what we’ve been doing.”

  In the film, the laser finally turned off.

  The scientist behind the lead plate returned to how he had looked when the experiment started.

  The split screen maintained the same views, but the scientists walked around like they were breaking down the equipment. Faith believed Dr. Johnson, or someone like him, was going to come on and explain what just happened, but the narrator jumped on instead.

  “And this concludes the executive summary of the Quantum Bridge project. Please direct all questions to your supervisor.”

  The lights came on.

  All eyes were on her.

  Red Mesa, CO

  Phil volunteered to go up to the guards at one of the exits of the SNAKE lab. They’d made it close to the front of the facility, so several of the concrete bunkers were within walking distance. It was originally how the three airmen planned to get back to their unit, although Phil convinced them to wait.

  “Sanchez, you want to go with me? Together we might be able to convince them we belong out here.” He handed his rifle to Ethan for safekeeping, but he kept his sidearm.