The Age Atomic (27 page)

 

FORTY-EIGHT

 

Mr Grieves led Rad, Jennifer, and the small group of agents through the police cordon on Lexington Avenue with barely a pause, only Jennifer sparking any interest from cops and onlookers alike.

“Doesn't look like there's a Cloud Club for us to visit anymore,” said Grieves, pointing to the broken cap of the Chrysler Building.

The group came to a halt. It was carnage as they got closer, and Rad couldn't even tell whether they were standing on the street or the sidewalk. Rubble the size of cars formed a maze around them, the air thick with dust and smoke. There were fires, too; Rad could feel the heat on his face from smoking piles of stone and metal, some lit from within by glowing red and orange.

“Come on,” said Rad. “Let's find out what happened.”

They continued, the smoke and dust getting thicker the closer they got.

“Here!” Jennifer was ahead, apparently impervious to the acrid tang in the air. Rad squinted, and saw her golden face bobbing as she waved back at the group.

The rubble changed suddenly, and Rad realized they were on the other side of the building. Ahead, smoke rose from the shattered shell of Grand Central. Here there was stone and dull metal but glass and steel too, brilliant and electric, untarnished from its fall from the crown of the building – and a twisted framework, black and burnt, of something else.

Rad swore and leapt over the nearest pile of rubble. His coat sliced open as the tail caught on an Art Deco sliver from the roof of the building.

“What is it?” Grieves called from close behind.

Rad reached Jennifer just as she pulled a hulking panel to the side, revealing a large box-like structure with a conical front, the nose crushed. Rad realized with a start it was the front of the
Nimrod
, flight deck and all, separated and thrown from the primary crash site.

Rad and Jennifer paused, looking at each other. Then Rad turned back to the wreckage. “Carson?”

They began digging into the debris, pulling, bending the remains of the downed airship aside as they fought to get into the detached flight deck. Finally an open hatchway was cleared. Jennifer didn't pause as she stepped in, Rad following her into the dark interior.

The flight deck was unrecognizable. It was merely a space, bent metal walls enclosing an obstacle course of twisted metal, wires, and shards of stone, steel and glass.

“Here!” Jennifer called from a few steps ahead, and she stepped back so the others could see. Rad swore again and rushed forward to help.

Under a cradle of riveted metal frames was a figure, kneeling on the floor, his body hunched over, protecting something. Jennifer yanked the heaviest pieces of debris away, and the figure rose up on its knees.

“Kane!” Rad pulled at his shoulder, and the figure uncurled. The Skyguard's suit was battered and scraped, but it was intact.

The figure turned its head and Rad paused, unsure. The figure shook its head, and when it spoke it was with a different voice.

“Kane is safe, Mr Bradley. I am looking after him.”

Rad's eyes went wide. “Byron?” But his train of thought was interrupted by coughing from the floor, long and labored, followed by a wheezy intake of breath.

“My dear detective, I am so very glad you made it.”

“Carson!” said Rad. He reached forward, then stopped, wondering whether he should touch him.

Captain Carson was on the floor, his great white beard matted with blood that looked too bright, too arterial. He smiled and the beard moved; then he coughed again and put a hand to his chest. His eye patch had been torn off, and set into the socket Rad saw what looked like a miniature camera lens.

The Captain closed his eyes and sighed, and in desperation Rad looked at Byron.

“What the hell happened?”

The Captain answered from the floor, his eye still closed, his voice quiet but strong enough. “I decided we should follow you. The Empire State was collapsing, and while I had utmost faith in your abilities, I felt it would be something of a waste if you were to encounter unforeseen circumstances only to have myself and Byron trapped, unable to provide any assistance.”

Carson coughed, and Rad's eyes were drawn to the blood that covered his body. He turned back to Byron. “How badly is he hurt?”

“I fear I am unable to answer, sir.” Rad winced as the voice that didn't belong to Kane came from somewhere inside the suit. “I believe I shielded him from the worst, but there was some violence to our collision with the building.”

“You took the top right off it,” said Jennifer. “It's a scene out there, that's for sure.”

“What happened?” asked Rad.

“We were Shanghaied, my dear detective,” said Carson from the floor.

Jennifer shook her head. “What?”

Carson opened his eye and fixed it on Jennifer. Rad watched the camera lens in the other socket rotate, focusing.

“Bushwhacked. Ambushed.
Hijacked!
We had a stowaway…” Carson collapsed into a fit of coughing.

Rad frowned. Carson needed help. He looked over his shoulder at Grieves and the agents, but Grieves was already on his feet, turning to his men.

“Get this man out and to the ambulances by the police cordon. Move.”

The agents moved in, and Rad gently pulled Byron to one side.

Jennifer looked at Rad, and Rad thought he could see her blink deep within the eyeholes of the golden mask. She turned to Byron. “A stowaway made you crash?”

Byron inclined his head.

Rad looked around. “He must be buried under this lot somewhere.” The stowaway's chances didn't look good.

“It was the robot commander, the one who called himself the King of 125th Street,” said Byron.

Jennifer jumped like she'd been given an electric shock. She whirled on Rad, the tails of her long coat flying.

“James,” she said, breathlessly. “James is here. He came through.”

Rad grabbed hold of Jennifer's arm. “I don't like to say it but I'm not sure he would have made it. Look at this. It's a miracle that the Captain and Byron got out like they did.”

“Rad!”

The call came from outside the wreck. Rad and Jennifer looked at each other and raced to the exit, Byron close behind.

Mr Grieves was kneeling beside some torn debris that matched the metalwork of the crashed airship, his three agents carefully making their way towards the police cordon with Captain Carson carried between them.

Rad dropped to his knee, Jennifer by his side.

“What is it?” she asked.

Rad peered at the ground, then looked at her, his expression set. “Looks like… blood?”

“No,” she said as she trailed her gloved fingers in the substance. “Machine oil. Lubricant. From a robot.”

“There is more here,” said Byron. The trio moved, and Rad quickly caught sight of the oily spatter that formed a trail through the rubble, towards the husk of the Chrysler Building.

Rad and Grieves exchanged a look.

“He's gone inside,” said Rad.

“If you're going to say we need to follow the trail, I'm not sure the building meets city regulations right at the moment,” said Grieves. Rad stared at the man for a moment, then turned around.

But Jennifer had already left, walking at pace towards the shattered entrance.

“Yeah,” said Rad. “Good luck with that. Come on.”

Rad turned and jogged after Jennifer. After a moment, he heard Grieves follow.

 

FORTY-NINE

 

The gun kicked in Nimrod's hand, the sound loud, reverberating off the thick plate glass behind him. He blinked the smoke away and his nostrils were filled with the smell of fireworks and dirt.

Evelyn McHale smiled, and Nimrod took a breath and fired again, and again, five more shots. Then he sighed, his arm dropping to his side. He stepped forward, until he was within touching distance of the Director's rippling blue aura. Through her he could see the marks on the New York mural where the bullets had struck.

“Well?” he said, his eyes dark and narrow. “What do you want from me? You have what you want. You have the Fissure. Your organization has control of the city.” He waved at the cityscape below and behind them. “I must have a purpose. You said that everything does, that free will is an illusion and that you can see into the future, down our predetermined paths. So what is to become of me,
hmm
?”

The Director tilted her head, and when she spoke it was with infinite patience. Nimrod had to control the rage burning inside him. He could already feel the heat in his cheeks, the tremble in his jaw as his anger grew. And all the while, she was calm, quiet. A ghost out of time.

“Is that a question you really want the answer to, Captain?”

Nimrod raised his head and stared at the Director down his nose.

“Do you want to know the future?” she asked “Do you die in bed, peacefully? Does cancer claim you, eating you from the inside out? Do you choke on a fishbone at a restaurant in Maine? Do you take a vacation to New Zealand and die in a car wreck? Does someone shoot you in Times Square, accidentally, perhaps the police chasing a dangerous felon as you are caught in the crossfire? Or do you die here now, with me, in my Cloud Club?”

Nimrod raised an eyebrow. “It hardly seems to matter, does it? You already know. You already know the outcome of this very conversation. How awful it must be for you, reading lines from a script as you do.”

“I can tell you what happens. Don't you want to know?”

Nimrod laughed. “If that is supposed to be a threat, then it fails completely. It does not matter if I know. What will be, will be, and it appears I have little choice in the matter. If I am to meet my end here, then there is nothing I can do about it, because it is already written in the stars.”

The Director smiled. Nimrod viewed her warily, rolling his fingers along the grip of his seven-shot revolver.

There was one bullet left.

“I need you, Captain Nimrod.”

“Is that so?”

Nimrod raised the gun to his temple and pulled back the hammer. Perhaps he could cheat fate, disturb the universal harmony. Perhaps everything the Ghost of Gotham was saying was a lie, another of her games to pass the torment of eternity. He could understand that.

Nimrod pulled the trigger, and he heard the gun go off even as the floor dropped away from him. Surrounded by blue light, when he blinked he was somewhere else.

The Director of Atoms for Peace was still floating in front of him, but they had left the Cloud Club. They were standing on a circular platform with a grilled metal deck. Below them stretched the great factory floor buried deep underneath Manhattan, where a thousand silver robots stood in their ranks, active but awaiting orders. The glow from the floor was a brilliant red and orange and the light moved as the fusors inside each robot torso churned. The platform on which he was standing was directly above the main fusor reactor, the great torus suspended in the center of the factory. Mounted above the reactor's control panel, hanging underneath the platform above, was a large mechanical digital display, nothing but an empty black rectangle.

Nimrod was lifted into the air slowly, a foot at a time until he hung there, floating higher even than Evelyn. She pointed to him, gesturing with her hands, and he felt his arms being pulled outwards until he hung like a crucified man. The empty gun was still in his right hand.

“You cannot cheat fate,” she said. “You do not die in the Cloud Club.”

“I can see that, Madam,” said Nimrod. The tingle of the Director's power surrounded him like a warm bath, but it was getting hotter, and more intense, quickly. He gritted his teeth against the burning pain.

“Now you know what it is like, being dragged through the universes against your will. Pain – infinite, eternal.”

Nimrod said nothing, focusing instead on dragging air through his clenched teeth.

The Director lowered herself to the platform, and began to walk around its edge, trailing ghostly fingers on the railing and leaving a trail of sparkling blue dust in their wake. She surveyed the robot army below her.

“Elektro?”

A robot walked out from the beneath the platform and turned to look up at the Director. The machine saluted, cigarette smoke curling from its mouth. “At your service, boss.”

“We are almost ready. Begin synchronization.”

“You got it,” said Elektro. The machine puffed on its cigarette and walked back underneath the platform. Nimrod dragged his head down as much as possible, and through the grilling saw Elektro operating the controls of the torus. The steady hum of the device increased in amplitude, the glow of the ring brighter until it was almost white.

The Director looked up at Nimrod, pinned like a butterfly to a board in midair. “My army of atomic robots. They are necessary, Nimrod. Do you understand? The atomic army is required. Now that I have control of the Fissure, I can move it here, to the factory. My army will be taken as one through to the Empire State, and there each fusor reactor will be detonated. Each will yield twenty-five megatons. Multiply that a thousand-fold and the energy released will be enough to cause the Pocket universe to collapse.”

Nimrod hissed, and she resumed her walk around the circumference of the platform; with each step she rose a little higher in the air, until she was floating free again.

“Yes, Captain. The Pocket and the Origin cannot exist without each other, not anymore. They are tethered. The implosion will start a chain reaction, one that will continue, consuming the very fabric of this universe, accelerating exponentially until every universe, all the worlds beyond the fog, dissolve.”

Nimrod growled and forced his mouth open. His tongue was dry and his teeth hurt as the tendrils of energy from Evelyn swirled, looking for the quickest way to the Earth through his body.

“You would destroy everything?” Every word was a struggle, every syllable spat out against a tidal wave of pain. “That isn't war, Evelyn. It's not even madness. You would destroy all of creation.” He hissed a breath, and expelled one final question: “Why?”

The Director tilted her head at him and frowned. Perhaps it was madness, thought Nimrod. Perhaps that is what being brought back from the dead did to you.

“So I can be free,” she said. “The universes will be no longer, and I shall be free.”

“You would destroy everything, just to save yourself?”

“Enough!” The Director's eyes flashed blue, and she turned away from Nimrod in the air. She floated to the edge of the platform and raised her arms out towards the far wall of the factory. “I control the Fissure. It is mine.”

Blue energy, smoke-like, ethereal, streamed out of Evelyn's arms, towards the factory wall. Nimrod watched as a small spot appeared, black against the flat grey concrete, then increasing in size, the edge ragged and glowing blue. Within seconds, the blackness had swallowed half of the wall and was still growing, the blue energy pouring off Evelyn.

Then he felt it, the vibration, the pins-and-needles sensation behind his eyeballs, the same feeling he got when he was standing next to the Fissure down in Battery Park. The blackness on the factory wall seemed to flash blue, the edges still spreading as the Director of Atoms for Peace dissolved the barrier between the Origin and the Pocket.

A cold wind blew in from the blackness. It flashed again, and then Nimrod saw it: a street, buildings shrouded in darkness. As the factory wall vanished, he realized he was looking at a street in the New York night, empty and cold, frozen in winter.

No, not New York. The Empire State. Evelyn had moved the Fissure into the factory, ready for the invasion to commence.

Nimrod wanted to cry out, to scream in anguish and rage, but he was held firm in Evelyn's grip. He ground his teeth.

“Stop,” he whispered. “You will destroy everything.”

She ignored him. The portal to the other universe opened, she lowered her arms, blue energy curling off and spinning towards the gateway like smoke on the wind.

“Elektro,” she said. “Activate.”

From directly below him, the main reactor ring spun into life, deep bass notes increasing in volume and pitch until they were howling like a tornado. With an almighty crunch, the robot army turned to face the interdimensional portal, the dark glass windows in their chests now spinning with bright red light. As Nimrod watched, they began to march, their synchronized steps vibrating the platform above the reactor as they walked slowly towards the Empire State.

Nimrod wanted to die. This was the end of all things, and he couldn't guess why she was keeping him alive. She could see the future, and had spoken of it. Which meant it was going to happen. Her plan would work; the Empire State would die in a nuclear maelstrom, taking the rest of reality with it – not just one universe, one pocket dimension, but
all
of them.

The end of everything.