Linkage: The Narrows of Time (13 page)

Lucas turned around, shocked by an
earsplitting scream behind him and saw about a half mile away, at
the east end of campus, a towering dome of intense, white-hot
light. Lucas froze in place, his hand hanging over his back pocket,
unable to move. The mountain of energy looked like the top half of
a giant, glowing white cue ball stuck into the ground. He couldn’t
see through the dome, but he thought he could see an intense mass
of energy swirling around inside it, shimmering like the surface of
the sun.

The crowd panicked and began screaming when
they realized the dome was headed their way. Lucas pressed his back
up against the Student Union’s south wall as the crowd ran
wild.

Above the screams, he could hear buildings
and other structures being ripped from the earth as the energy
field barreled west through campus. Along with the buildings, the
energy field tore up trees, cement, and pavement as it moved.
Everything it encountered was swallowed up inside. He wondered if
the thundering sound was similar to what a person would hear near
an F-5 twister as it tore through a Midwestern town in Tornado
Alley.

His knees shook as he watched the gigantic
energy mass move his way. He thought about running away, but he
couldn’t convince his body to move. Nor could he take his eyes off
the monster destroying the campus. Though it was still several
blocks away, he could guess its size by the buildings near it. The
dome was at least fifteen stories tall and over twice that in
width. It dwarfed the size of the flash that had come out of
nowhere the night before. It towered above the skyline and yet
seemed to move with grace and purpose, even as it swallowed up
everything around it. If it kept on its current course, he
estimated that it would just miss the south side of Student Union
where he was standing, but it was headed straight for the science
lab at the other end of the mall.

As the area began to clear, he saw a handful
of injured students lying on the ground. One was a pregnant woman
who was bleeding from her forehead.

Lucas decided it was time to move. He ran to
Drew, who was sitting alone by the theatre steps. There was no sign
of Larson or the police chief.

“Are you okay, Drew?” he asked loudly.

His brother’s hands were shaking. “I’m fine.
What is that thing?”

“I don’t know, but we need to get the fuck
out of here, and fast.” Lucas grabbed the wheelchair handles, and
pushed his brother west along the front of the Student Union.

Drew pointed to the injured students. “What
about them?”

“I’m sure the police will help them.”

A few steps later, Lucas heard a loud squeal
coming from behind him. It trumped the sounds of buildings crashing
to the ground. It was the same debilitating shrill that he heard
the night before. He was starting to get dizzy, but couldn’t cover
his ears while pushing the wheelchair. He hoped his equilibrium
would hold out long enough to get Drew away from there.

With the sound of death breathing down his
neck, he looked back to check the progress of the energy field. All
he could see was a rolling wall of shimmering energy closing the
gap behind him. He could not see the intruder’s top or sides; it
was too close.

A pair of bicyclists whizzed past him on the
left, and then cut across in front, as they pedaled furiously along
the sidewalk. Fifty feet ahead of them was a pair of young women
who were stumbling forward arm-in-arm, helping each other remain
upright. When the bicyclists nearly ran the women over, Lucas
wondered if the earsplitting squeal was affecting their vision.

Seconds later, both the bicyclists and the
girls made it safely around the corner, just in front of the
science lab. Lucas intended to use the same escape route, if he had
enough time. His thigh muscles were burning and he could hardly
maintain his balance.

They were still alive when they made it to
end of the mall twenty seconds later. Drew’s wheelchair almost
tipped over as they made the ninety-degree corner and headed north
between the science lab and the Student Union.

“Hang on, little brother. We’re almost
there!” he yelled, hoping Drew could hear him above the noise.

Drew’s head was hanging down and bobbing as
they moved—the dome’s high-decibel shrieking must have knocked him
unconscious again. He pushed Drew’s chair as hard as he could,
hoping not to run out of breath.

Just then, the squeal stopped. Lucas slowed
down and looked over his right shoulder. He saw the enormous crown
of the dome just beyond the top floor of the Student Union. It had
stopped moving and was now a blistering orange color.

There was a pair of news helicopters off in
the distance, circling above the giant intruder. Lucas wondered why
the helicopter pilots weren’t affected by the squeal that seemed to
disable nearly everyone else in the vicinity, at least on the
ground. Perhaps it had limited range. It was also possible that the
dome’s shrill was one-directional and only people directly in front
of it could hear it.

Three seconds later, Lucas heard a swooshing
sound as the dome vanished; the sound was followed by a rush of
wind that tried to pull him back toward the mall.

Drew woke up and rubbed his forehead. “Whoa,
my head’s killing me. Where are we?”

“We’re just north of the lab. We’re
safe.”

Drew looked back in the direction of the
Student Union. “What happened to that thing?”

“I don’t know. It just stopped moving and
then vanished.”

“We should go back and see if anyone needs
help.”

Lucas agreed. They reversed course and went
back to the south side of the Student Union. Lucas stared,
horrified, when they turned the corner and looked east. There was a
long, shallow, devastated channel about three hundred feet wide in
front of them. It was perfectly straight and appeared to stretch
all the way to the east end of the mall near Campbell Avenue.

All the buildings along the north side of the
grassy mall were intact, but most of the campus buildings along the
mall’s south side had been obliterated, including the four-story
library and the old basketball gym. He wondered how many students
had been inside when the buildings were destroyed.

As Lucas had predicted, the energy field had
just missed consuming the Student Union. There was an
eight-foot-wide strip of undisturbed grass between the previous
night’s theatre event and the latest incident. Everything else
caught in the dome’s path had vanished. Again, there was no visible
rubble.

“There’s more of that black stuff,” Drew
said, pointing to a film of black powder covering the bottom of the
entire channel.

Lucas saw something else: a tall,
pyramid-shaped mass near the dome’s endpoint. “Let’s go check that
out,” he said, pointing at the discovery.

They moved closer to it, along with a handful
of other witnesses.

“Oh, my God. Is that what I think it is?”
Drew asked.

“Yeah, it is. That’s a pile of bodies, at
least bits and pieces of them.”

The dome had expelled an eight-foot-high
mound of semi-liquid human remains. The heap oozed down its sides
as gravity pulled at its gooey consistency made up of organs,
muscle, tissue, fingers, skulls, bones, brain matter, and
intestines, intermingled like a bloody tossed salad. The coroner’s
office was going to be busy for months sorting out the remains.

Drew vomited twice next to his chair. After
wiping off his chin, he asked, “What the heck’s going on here?”

“Beats me, brother,” Lucas said, scooping up
a handful of the black residue power. “But I think it’s all related
to our E-121 experiment.”

Lucas could not see any clothing in the
bloody pile, and could not visually identify any of the remains as
belonging to Abby or Jasmine. Given Drew’s fragile emotional state,
it was probably a good thing Abby’s pink windbreaker wasn’t visible
in the dome’s waste pile.

“Do you think it’ll happen again?” Drew
asked.

“Beats the shit out of me. But we shouldn’t
wait around here to find out. Let’s go.”

Chapter
11

Retrospect

Lucas pointed to the rear of a white
broadcast van parked a few hundred feet past the science lab, on a
side street to the left. The vehicle was parked behind two other
news vans from competing stations, both facing the opposite
way.

“Let’s go see if Channel 9 caught anything on
camera,” he said to Drew.

When they arrived, they found the van’s cargo
door open, partially covering up the faded black stenciling on the
side. Inside were two clean-cut young technicians wearing jeans and
T-shirts, and one older man with a bad comb-over and a belly
hanging down to the front pockets of his slacks. All three men were
sitting close together in front of the mobile studio, watching the
center monitor.

Lucas poked his head inside the van. “Is that
footage of the energy field that just tore up the mall?”

The older man turned around. “Yeah, it is.
Who the hell are you?”

“Dr. Lucas Ramsay. I’m with the Astrophysics
Department,” Lucas said, stepping inside the van.

The man looked him over from head to toe,
then shook Lucas’ hand with a firm grip. “I’m Don Cain, Field
Producer. Channel 9 News.”

Lucas nodded and gave him a half-smile. “Can
I take a closer look at the video? I may be able to explain what
happened.”

“Sure, Doc, why not? Provided we get the
exclusive.”

“It’s a deal.”

Cain used his left hand to nudge one of the
techs out of his chair, before motioning to Lucas to sit down,
which he did.

“Can you restart it at the beginning? I need
to see the entire footage,” Lucas asked.

Cain restarted the playback, showing an
overhead feed shot from one of the helicopters circling the mall.
The first few minutes showed the energy dome working its way west
from Campbell Avenue, gobbling up street signs, parked cars, campus
buildings, fencing, and most of the university’s newly renovated
aquatic center. It was hard for him to watch as a handful of
students scrambled to get away from it—some made it, others
didn’t.

The helicopter caught up to the dome and then
flew directly overtop it. When its camera tilted down, Lucas could
see deep inside the phenomenon through a fifty-foot opening in the
intruder’s crown. The aperture was much like the eye of a
hurricane. Debris was being carved out along the dome’s inside edge
and, while suspended in midair, it was twisted and compacted into a
long, winding rope of matter, before being flushed through a
swirling black vortex in the center.

Partially consumed buildings collapsed along
the south side of the mall, but only after the energy field moved
past them. While the dome was in contact with them, the damaged
structures seemed to defy gravity and remain erect, leading Lucas
to believe that the energy field’s perimeter was acting like a
stabilizing force, keeping the buildings upright until after it
passed.

He continued to watch the energy field rumble
across the mall, consuming every inch of grass, trees, cement, and
pavement, all of it stripped from the earth and wedged through the
sphere’s powerful vortex.

He saw himself as a miniature on the ground,
running up the right side of the monitor as he and Drew moved west
along the front of the Student Union. On the left side of the
screen, two injured females—one of them pregnant—were struggling in
the grass, trying to get up before the energy field reached them.
Lucas had to look away when they didn’t make it. He was obviously
wrong earlier when he’d told Drew that the police would help those
injured in the mass exodus.

The dome continued up the video screen,
slaughtering people unable to escape its maw. Lucas held his breath
as their bodies were ripped apart like string cheese, then mangled
and distorted as they were sucked through the dome’s violent
eddy.

After the miniature Lucas and Drew
disappeared off the screen, the energy dome stopped moving, turned
an orange color, and then dissipated a few seconds later. The
camera zoomed in for a dramatic close-up of the bloody human
remains left behind.

Lucas had seen enough. “Could you burn a copy
of that footage onto a DVD for me? I would like to analyze it.”

“Sorry, but I can’t. Not without my station
manager’s okay. I’m sure he’s going to wanna see it first.”

“We don’t have time for that. Look, I’m not
going to steal it. If you want, watermark the frames with your
station’s logo and copyright. Just don’t obscure the important
stuff.”

Cain finally agreed. Three minutes later,
Cain handed a DVD to Lucas. “Can you tell me what this thing
is?”

“I’m not sure yet, but once I’ve had a chance
to analyze your footage, I should be able to. Give me your number
and I’ll call you later with the results.”

Cain gave Lucas his business card. Lucas
shook his hand, then climbed out of the van.

“What did you guys see?” Drew asked.

“I’ll show you later. Let’s head back to the
apartment so I can check this out better.”

Neither of them said anything until after
they crossed Speedway Boulevard on the north side of campus.

“Earlier I saw you with the FBI. What did you
tell them?” Lucas asked.

“I didn’t tell them anything except that my
girlfriend was on the steps when the accident happened.”

Lucas thought Drew’s use of the term
“girlfriend” was a little premature. One breakfast without a kiss
goodbye did not constitute much of a relationship; certainly not
one that would qualify her as his girlfriend. “Did you tell them
you witnessed the theatre flash?”

“Yes, I had to. That was the only way they
would talk to me. I’m sorry, but I just couldn’t stay away. I had
to see if there was any news about Abby.”