Class Fives: Origins (45 page)

Then, at the very bottom, he saw it. Coordinates beneath a single large “X”.

He quickly memorized them, running them through his mind again and again, then bolted from behind the desk, skidding for a moment on a sheaf of discarded papers littering the floor, and rushed from the room.

He was back at the elevator in moments, stabbing at the button, willing the descending box to him desperately.

Keeping a finger jammed on the button, he dug the radio out from behind his belt, fumbled it around and switched it on.

“Hello! Hello, can you read me? Hello?”

But there was only a low static. Too far underground, he realized sourly.

At last the doors opened and he threw himself into the elevator. He stabbed the button for the upper landing as the doors slid silently closed.

Why don’t they put gears in these things, he thought bitterly.

He tried the radio again but got no response.

They’d better at least be listening, he told himself. And even if they are, what can they reasonably do? Was there even enough time?

A sudden calm flooded over him.

Yes, he realized. Or there could be. Maybe more than enough.

But it would require something new. Something he’d never attempted. Something that might kill him.

He was yanked from his thoughts as the doors slid open, and then he was running across the elevator lobby and out the open door of the small building.

He slowed to a jog a dozen paces from the structure, then pulled to a stop. His eyes began to adjust to the moonlight and let his mind reach out, probing, seeking.

The night was dead still, cool and pleasant. The sky was a deep well of flickering stars in all their sweeping majesty. It was the perfect night.

He raised the radio and punched the talk button.

Dr. Montgomery stood in the open wilderness of this desolate place a hundred yards further away, the bald man close by.

“I must say,” he said to his companion, “It is quite intricately constructed, this reality. I must have a talk with the designer. I wonder what sort of being it will be.”

He smiled.

“I wonder what sort of being
I’ll
be. So much to discover.”

He tossed a glance at the other man, taking him in. So nondescript. So ordinary. Just a male, average height, average build. Not even distinguished enough to rate a proper history. Oh, he was sure that if he went looking for one he’d find it, fully constructed and forming a logical sequence of events running back to his birth and beyond. But none of that mattered. And so it simply didn’t exist. The man was furniture, an appliance, to be used and then discarded. Everything in this fantasy was, he thought. This remarkable prison for his consciousness.

He thought back to the day he’d finally realized how this construction really worked. The motion of sub-atomic particles and quantum foam. All of it just the empty bumping of bits and piece in a cold, mindless, meaningless mechanism, with nothing of true substance. It was a distraction from the pure truth that lay beyond it. It was a cage with invisible bars and infinite expanse. It was only here for him to get himself the hell out of. Well, he thought with a wry smile, as prison breaks go, this one would be a doozie.

He turned back to scan the low horizon, seeing clearly the separation line where the stars ended in the utter blackness of the ground.

He raised his arm and glanced down at his watch.

Here we go, he thought, and lifted his gaze to the horizon.

John sensed rather than saw it, and it jerked his attention up from the radio on which he had finally managed to get a connection. The voice on the other end had at last replied with that single word.

“Copy.”

Then it happened.

A wave of something, some indistinct urgent thing of some kind, yanked his attention toward the horizon, as if it had bypassed his eyes and ears and skin and impacted something directly in his brain.

Then the light arrived, like an explosion of fire, welling up across the whole horizon, ascending, growing, approaching. It wasn’t flame, or what his mind told him was light. It was something new. Some white, all-pervasive something, like milk exploding into a glass.

The ground beneath him lurched sharply, a single deep jolt upward. But it did not drop. Around him the ground grunted deeply, squealing and tearing, splitting open and vomiting up great fountains of rock and dirt as it began tearing itself to pieces. And it kept going up, rising, expanding, splitting, as the planet itself began to blow apart.

He had one stunning moment to realize what was happening, then slammed his eyes shut and jumped. No, not jumped. Dove. Ran screaming. Escaped.

And instant later he was falling, tumbling, floating in cold silence.

He hit the ground hard, bouncing slightly, feeling things inside him break. But he didn’t allow himself to come to rest. Despite the pain he struggled to pull himself upward, at least to his knees, or he would pass out and the ending he had just witnessed would come.

He groped around for the radio and his bruised fingers found it close by. He dragged it to himself, and had to use both shivering hands to flip it on.

“Hello,” he croaked harshly at it. “You there?”

“Copy,” came the muted, anonymous voice.

“What time is it?” he managed to gasp back.

“Twenty three ten,” the voice responded flatly.

Almost an hour, John realized. I went back almost an hour. But is that enough?

And then he felt it. The sickness. And he knew it would be bad. The worst. The one that could kill him.

“Listen to me,” he gasped into the radio. “It happens in fifty minutes. You got that? Everything ends in fifty minutes.”

“Copy,” the voice said, perhaps a bit more crisply.

“The coordinates are as follows.”

He slowly recited the longitude and latitude for the site which, he prayed, had been simply called “X” by the insane wacko who, even at this moment, was somewhere beneath him in the ground about to blow up the world.

“Did you get that? Want me to repeat it?”

“Negative,” came the voice, almost sharply, “We’ll take it from here.”

“Well, come get this wacko fuck while you’re at it. And tell somebody I’m gonna need some aspirin. I feel like shit.”

The radio slipped from his hand, clattering to the ground once more, and he felt the strength evaporating from his very skin.

He toppled over, twitched, and lay still.

A few moments later the headlights of the car appeared, pinpricks in the distance, approaching.

Roger crouched between the seats, looking out the windshield of the bomber. Somewhere beneath them were flat plains far below. Nothing but seemingly endless miles of desolate wilderness. Off in the distance, at the far end of the cloudless skies, were the shadows of mountains, thickly carpeted with looming green forest, but closer in, the ground leveled off and was covered with only a low, patchy scrub of vegetation struggling to simply survive.

“Stand by,” the co-pilot’s voice cut in. “Incoming message.”

There was a long pause before the voice cut in again.

“We have coordinates. We have forty five minutes before detonation.”

Roger leaned forward in his seat.

“Can we get there in time?”

“We can get there,” the pilot said.

“Just get me over the place. Fast as you can.”

Neither pilot responded. They had orders to do exactly as their mysterious passenger ordered, regardless of how crazy it might sound. They were already in a delicate enough situation: an American bomber, albeit the stealthiest one in the inventory, was already wildly in violation of Russian airspace. Shooting along at several hundred miles per hour, some local SAM battery Sergeant might spot them by pure chance, and instinctively fire a missile at them before calling in for instructions.

“How long before we get there?” Roger called over the headset.

“ETA, twelve minutes,” the pilot responded.

Roger turned carefully and bent to open the access hatch to the bomb bay.

That would leave a half hour, he thought. Maybe. Before what? Well, before whatever was going to happen, happened. Five minutes to get on the ground, and depending on how far away he landed…

“I’m heading to the back. Let me know when it’s time,” he said over the headset.

“Copy that,” the pilot said, flatly.

Roger crawled into the open, yawning container that was the business portion of this engine of destruction, and eased around to close the hatch. He crawled to the crease in the floor that indicated the outline of the doors and eased himself down onto them, crossing his arms under his chin.

“Sir,” the pilot’s voice crackled over the headset, “They’ve triangulated the location. It’s dead in the middle of some kind of swamp.”

“I should have brought my inner tube,” Roger muttered back.

The next several minutes passed without any chatter between the men. Roger simply lay, his gaze directed out at the blank wall of the space. How far up were they, he wondered? Six miles? Seven?

After a long while, the voice of the pilot cut in over the headset.

“I see something!” it barked.

Roger’s head came up and he felt the tension building within him.

“Step on it,” Roger snapped, “We don’t have much time.”

“I have to ease back so we can open the bay doors – “ the pilot began.

“No, goddamnit!” Roger bellowed back, “Just go straight over those coordinates and open this thing up. I’ll take care of the rest.”

The pilot hesitated.

“You sure, sir? We’re at thirty-seven thousand feet right now.”

“Let me know when we’re almost on top of it,” he called at them. “About a mile back or so, okay?”

“Copy,” the pilot snapped back.

These guys are icy, Roger thought, and somehow felt comforted.

“How long now?” Roger said a minute later.

“Maybe a minute. Better get ready.”

Roger slowly lowered his chin to his hands again.

“Almost there,” the pilot snapped. “Thirty seconds.”

Well, he told himself, a person should try new things from time to time.

“Stand by,” the pilot said, slowly. “Ten seconds.”

“Tell whoever comes to get me to bring some extra clothes. I get the feeling I’ll need them.”

“Five… four… three… two…” the pilot called sharply.

Roger shot up a hand to flip off the helmet, flinging it away. It shot across the space and shattered against the back wall of the bomb bay.

Oops, he thought.

Beneath him the doors opened.

He fell.

It was an incredible sensation, plummeting down through the air, hearing it roar through his head. He let his body whirl and tumble, simply savoring the feeling. And it occurred to him that there was nothing here to damage, nothing here to injure. Here, like nowhere else, he was no more than any other man. He definitely had to take up sky diving, he told himself, then turned his attention to the task at hand.

In a few moments he began to feel a little lightheaded, his attention beginning to fade, but he shook himself and turned his attention below himself.

Looking down, he saw that he had fallen somewhat short of where a large blister of green welled in the flat earth, casting a long, obvious shadow in the blaring afternoon sun. He had to somehow move toward it, land as close as possible. There was no time to traverse the boggy ground if he landed too far away.

He twisted and squirmed, then recalled something he’d once seen on television, rolled over and spread himself out, extending his arms and legs. He felt himself almost stabilize, and when he dipped one arm he rotated in the other direction. Awkwardly he maneuvered himself until he was pointed toward the bulge in the ground below. Drawing in his legs, he willed himself toward it, seeing it slowly growing beneath him.

The ground rushed up, sending its roar of wind before it, and he realized he would impact with tremendous force, perhaps enough to stab deep into the soggy earth.

Spread out, he told himself, as the rounded lump drew nearer and nearer beneath him. He would hit, he realized, less than a hundred yards from it.

And then the ground was exploding upwards at him, and he stretched his limbs as far and as tight as possible.

He plummeted.

The impact sent a loud crack of shattered water in all directions, followed by the spray of hundreds of gallons of fluid instantly displaced. But even before the swamp water splashed back to the surface, he was scrambling to his feet and moving, as swiftly as the sodden ground would allow, toward the massive bubble before him.

He stalked rapidly toward it, his eyes scanning for an entrance before he simply decided to walk straight through the side and save himself any wasted time.

The first shots came from off to his right. He snapped a look in that direction and saw the figure, standing knee deep in the boggy ground, the automatic rifle pointed toward Roger.

No time, Roger told himself, and turned back to the hump, dismissing the annoyance.

Shots zinged around him, throwing up small splashes at his feet, a few pinging off his arm. One bounded off his cheek. Enough, he thought, reaching out a hand and snapping up the charred, bare trunk of a tree as thick as his own thigh without breaking stride. He drew it across his body and flung it toward where the shooter stood. The force of its passage sent it spinning like a lazy saw dagger, cutting through other bare, burned trees, and a chunk of it hit the shooter like a baseball bat striking a rotted melon. The man disappeared in a spray of small red chunks.

Roger winced at the instinctive realization of what he’d just done, but turned his mind away from the thought and strode the last few yards to the edge of what he could now see was a hastily disguised dome, wearing a thick overcoat of limbs, leaves and muck. He could see it sat atop a quickly assembled platform of some kind, chunks of scaffolding plunging down into the sodden ground with flat plastic sheets laid over them. Of course, he realized, it would have to have an airtight seal from the outside air, and would require an absolutely flat surface on which to obtain it. It was one of those inflatable buildings.