Keepers & Killers (The Alchemy Series) (24 page)

"When did Nevada start getting tornados like that?" Buzz asked.

"Since Nevada started getting space holes," Cormac answered.

Nevada's had small twisters in her past, but the emphasis was on the word
small
. This thing was a monster, even by Tornado Alley standards. I'd never thought such a thing possible in the Nevada climate.

"The real question is, is
closing them making things better or worse?" I knew Cormac was right about what he'd said. Something was changing. Buzz and Dodd knew it too. Their silence in answer to my question was deafening. We all felt it, but nobody knew what exactly was happening or what the hell we could do about it.

I leaned back in my seat and closed my eyes again
, to block out the rest of the world and try to concentrate on another way to solve the problem posed by the space holes. Nothing, there was nothing.

"If we left the last one open, what then?" I asked aloud.

"Radiation would continue to spill out, with no end in sight. We would be okay but eventually it would spread to the point that a large chunk of North America would be uninhabitable. Eventually, over a long enough period of time, civilization would die, including us," Cormac answered. "I keep trying to figure out a way around this but I can't think of one."

"We have no choice," Buzz said. "We all know it. I
'd rather die by fire than death by a thousand cuts."

"Agreed," I said. "It
's got to be done."

I didn
't realize the magnitude of what was wrong until we hit the Vegas Strip. It was empty, as it had been recently, but that wasn't what was surprising. What shocked me is it looked like a war zone. Several prominent buildings had crashed to the ground, street lights lay knocked over and there were several fires burning, grey smoke clouds hovering above.

The road became impassable about a mile away from
The Lacard. Dodd stopped the car and we all got out.

Buzz and Dodd went to clear the road of several steel poles that were lying in the way.

"Just leave it. We'll get it later," Cormac told them as he started to walk ahead. He pulled out his phone and I heard Kever answer on the other side of the speaker. "What the hell happened?"

"Boss, it
's real bad here. An earthquake of some sort hit."

"When?"

"About twelve hours ago," Kever responded.

We all did the math. Just as we we
're closing the hole. I wanted to throw up. By the sounds coming from the bench Buzz just ducked near, he beat me to it.

"Why didn
't you call me?"

"I tried. Cell service is completely down and you must have been out of range of the new circuit."

"Is everyone okay?"

"Yeah, there
's a few more, though."

"What
's that mean?"

"You
'll see."

"I
'll be there in a couple of minutes."

We walked
the rest of the way to The Lacard at an uneven pace as we had to step over fallen poles and debris. It looked like a bomb had gone off and I hadn't even seen the worst. A large crack in the ground, ten feet wide, ran straight toward The Lacard Casino and then diverted around it, like a crazy weird moat. The Lacard stood there, in the mist of rubble, a pristine bastion, untouched. It was the only building I'd seen that appeared to have no damage whatsoever.

Buzz laid a large piece of fallen steel over
the gap as a make shift bridge for us to cross. I found it humorous that Dodd carried Abby across. I felt a little woozy crossing it and grabbed on to Buzz's arm in front of me while Cormac followed behind. I couldn't see how far down the crack reached but I couldn't look for very long, without getting wobbly, either.

"Why didn
't this crack run right up through the middle of the casino? Why is The Lacard untouched?" I asked.

Dodd answered from somewhere behind me. "Because the ground
The Lacard stands on, and the ground surrounding the basement, is a fifty feet thick steel alloy of some sort. I don't know the exact mixture - it's something Cormac came up with. The building itself is made of some other type of metal he created."

"I can
't believe it's still so perfect."

"Cormac always told me that this building would withstand anything."

I hung back a minute, still trying to get my bearings on what Vegas had become. Cormac walked in the main entrance with Buzz. Dodd, Dark and I entered a few minutes later and I was stunned to see a crowd of people all huddled in the main gaming room; there had to be at least five hundred of them. They weren't playing cards or games, they just sat, huddled in corners, some on the floor because of lack of chairs.

"Holy shit!" Dodd said next to me.

"They must have been forced from their hiding places when the earthquake hit." I scanned the room and saw evidence of cuts and bruises on many. Their clothes were torn and dirtied from the fallout.

When Dodd went still, I noticed him staring at something in the corner. It was Sabrina working on a cut on a little girl
's arm. "She's a good woman. I wouldn't hang on the sidelines too long."

"You, of all people, should not be dispensing romantic advice."

"Fine. Suit yourself. In the meantime, what are we going to do with all these people?"

Kever walk
ed through the crowd toward us and stopped by Cormac's side. "Why are these people huddled on the main floor?" Cormac asked.

"I didn
't know what to do with them."

"Tell the staff to get them in rooms," he told him and then the two of them walked back toward us
, out of the earshot of the crowd. Buzz walked over as well from where he'd been surveying the new guests in the corner.

"Any word outside of Vegas?" Cormac asked.

"No," Kever replied. "We haven't been able to get a line out. Everything is down. Cable, internet..."

"I know we said we weren
't going to revisit this," I said, "but what happens when we close the space hole in NY?"

Everyone was speechless. There was only one way forward where civilization even had a chance of surviving. I looked again at the people in
The Lacard, now being directed to different places by staff. Slow confirmed death or a chance at a future, but with pretty bad odds; I wondered which way they'd bet?

"NY it is. Let
's just hope that maybe the damage is localized to where there used to be portals. We didn't see anything driving in, other than the tornado."

"Oh, ye
ah, you mean the F5? No biggie," Dodd said on the verge of hysteria.

I understood. The pressure was enough to make anyone crack.

"Kever, we're going to need everyone for this," Cormac instructed

"Even the Doc?"

"No," Dodd answered.

Cormac looked at Dodd for a moment and then turned back to Kever and shook his head. "She stays. Too many hurt people here. Tell everyone to be ready to leave for NY in five hours. Dodd and I are going to go get the 747."

He paused by my side before he left. "Rest." It might have been endearing if he had stopped there, but he didn't. "You're going to need it."

Chapter Twenty

I
lay on my bed in the penthouse and actually did try to rest, but I might as well have had coffee running through my veins, instead of blood, for all the good it did me. I tossed and turned until I heard a rap at my bedroom door that alerted me that it was time to go.

I threw on a pair of jeans and a shirt and grabbed the bag I
'd packed in case we managed to live past tonight and I needed a change of clothes. We piled into the SUVs that would take us to the desert landing strip. We could've been headed to a funeral for all the enthusiasm I felt among the Keepers with me. How quickly things change. After the first space hole we had closed, we'd been walking on air. But, like so many things in life, we hadn't known all the details, and the full picture wasn't quite as pretty up close.

I
'd thought killing the senator would be the hardest hurdle to cross. That turned out to have been a small stepping stone. Dodging the police was a nonissue. What police? I hadn't seen a single soul, other than the huddled masses on the casino floor, since the latest round of environmental disasters had begun. Those people certainly weren't in any position or desire to turn me in. They were clinging to survival; in life, that trumps pretty much every other want.

The large plane sat ahead of us on the paved strip in the
middle of the deserted desert. It was quite nice, with the name Lacard painted across the side in gold lettering; probably the genuine thing. A plane this nice seemed like overkill to bring high rollers to a casino that was more of a front than anything else, but like everything to do with Cormac, nothing was ever what it seemed.

I climbed the stairs up inside and
discovered the interior was even nicer. Leather lounge chairs and sofas were all around, with a bar in the corner of the large room. A gigantic flat screen was playing the news and I wondered how it was even getting a signal, since the entire area had gone dark.

I settled in closer to the TV
to listen as the reporter spoke as we all settled in for takeoff.

"Someone change this?" one of the Keepers in the room with me yelled out
, but I grabbed the remote before anyone could change it. I'd never been a news watcher but I would've beaten the guy to a pulp before I let him change the channel. I knew it was going to be bad but I had to know.

Picture after picture of destruction was being displayed on the screen. There
'd been a tsunami in California that had devastated the coast and ten miles inland. Chicago looked worse than Vegas, with half of its skyscrapers now rubble on the ground. It wasn't just the U.S. either. They showed a picture of where the Eiffel Tower had stood, now a pile of scrap metal. Australia's Sydney Opera House was gone. And they were just buildings.

The reporter started to cry on screen when she said that no one had been able to get a human death count since what everyone was now calling the apocalypse had begun.

I heard the same Keeper who'd wanted to change the channel, Donald, laughing at something on the other side of the plane and I wanted to kick him in the teeth. The world was falling apart; there should be no laughter from anyone. I knew I needed to keep my anger in check. Donald, like so many others, was in denial. I knew that game. I'd tried it myself a couple of times. Just because I wasn't any good at it didn't mean I should deprive someone else of their relief from reality.

Cormac walked in and out of the main cabin several times during the flight and my feelings were as conflicted as ever. I wanted him in the most primal of ways but I wanted to kill him as well. I was still so angry about so many things. Having sex with him and then stabbing him to death just didn
't seem like a good idea, and we're talking end of the world logic. If I couldn't rationalize it now, you know on a normal day it was seriously bad thinking.

I leaned back and spent the next hours of my life just watching what had become of Earth. What I
'd helped make it.

We landed the giant plane in the middle of the NJ turnpike, which
was devoid of cars. In horror movies, they always show highways packed to the gills with abandoned cars, but this was different. When NYC had first been swallowed by the massive space hole, everyone had thought it was localized. Now they knew the disasters were everywhere. Where were they going to drive? There was nowhere to escape
to
. There was nothing left for anybody to do but board up their windows and sit by the door with a rifle, or a baseball bat for those that were a little late to the game and hadn't had time to stock up.

We made our way over to the same dock in Middletown, but this time
, instead of a yacht, we took a small cruise ship. The defectors were on deck already. This was the largest group we'd had yet, at close to seventy, and I still wasn't sure if it would be enough. After watching the destruction on the news, I didn't want to admit it, but I was starting to hope it wasn't.

If I weren
't capable of closing the hole, then I wouldn't be the cause of even more damage. The big problem with that was that the world would eventually die anyway. So there's the rub, did I cause more destruction and try to explain to human kind that I did it to save them, or did I pray I couldn't save the world and we all died together - but at least I wouldn't be the evil villain who ruined the Earth. Lucky for human kind, I didn't feel like I had a choice. I figured I would try to do what I knew was right, while I prayed I'd fail. Even if it meant I might go down in history as the woman who destroyed the world. There would be no historians left to repeat the tale anyway.