Wormholes
Authors: Dennis Meredith
Copyrighted Material
Wormholes: A Novel
Copyright © 2013 by Dennis Meredith. All Rights Reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise — without prior written permission from the publisher, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to people living or dead is strictly coincidental and not intended by the author.
For information about this title or to order other books and/or electronic media, contact the publisher:
Glyphus, L.L.C.
4159 Summit Rd., Purlear, NC 28665
Library of Congress Control Number: 2012950608
ISBNs:
978-1-939118-00-4 (print)
978-1-939118-02-8 (epub)
Printed in the United States of America
Cover and Interior design: 1106 Design
To Ryan
“E
d?
Ed!”
The husband opened his eyes and squinted up at his wife. “We’re going to the store,” she announced. She stood over him with the sun at her back, her curly hair highlighted like a frizzy halo, so he couldn’t fathom the expression on her shadowed face. The commanding edge in her voice, however, told him what was coming next. “Now you remember the barbecue’s tomorrow, so if you don’t mow the lawn today it won’t get done in time for all the grass to dry—”
“Okay, sweetie.”
“—and I don’t want everybody tramping wet grass through the house.”
“Absolutely, dear.” He strove to prove his commitment by making a dramatic effort to rise from the chaise, achieving a sitting position on its side. The cool breeze swirling beneath the trees felt good on his face. He looked beyond her out into the large sunny lawn where it was hot. The lawnmower still sat there in grass-stained patience where he had trundled it earlier that morning.
“Okay, then,” she said with the curt exasperation of a woman at the top of her daily energy curve, whose husband was indolently wallowing around at the bottom of his.
A soft, small form barreled lovingly into him, wrapping its arms around his neck, and he laughed and fell back onto the chaise. The little girl sat up imperiously on his chest, her sweet, big dark eyes staring seriously into his.
“Daddy, you got to mow the lawn. Mommy says.”
He laughed again and looked up at his wife, still silhouetted against the sun.
“
My
daughter,” she declared with mock haughtiness. He knew her shadowed face showed a smile of womanly triumph at their daughter’s sassiness. She gathered the giggling girl into her arms, kissing her loudly on the neck and padded off through the tall grass to corral her older brother from the yard next door.
Ed laid there in lizardlike repose, hearing the garage door open with a whine. There was a pause. He tensed slightly. The car started and backed out, the door rattled shut, and the sound of the car faded. Home free! After a few vague plans wafted through his heat-soaked brain, one cool image crystallized itself. A beer.
He heaved himself to a sitting position, felt around in the grass with one foot to find his comfortably ratty deck shoes, slipped his feet in and stood, letting a full-fledged plan slowly accrete around the concept of a beer, like a pearl around a grain of sand. It was near noon. Hottest part of the day. She’d be back in an hour, maybe two. The sun would have begun to go down beyond the tall oaks in the Matthews’ back yard. He would have plenty of time for a leisurely beer or three. Then maybe a nap.
He went into the quiet house, pulled a cold can of Coors from the refrigerator and relished the fizzy whoosh when he opened it. He took a healthy sip of the cold, malty liquid to help him face the return trip. He shuffled back outside and cagily estimated where the shade of his own more modest stand of trees would be in an hour. He moved the chaise to ensure that he would be safely situated in shade the entire period of her absence. He kicked off his shoes and curled his toes in the lush grass, congratulating himself for having fertilized it well that spring. Finally, he eased himself back down onto the creaking chaise, scratched an itch that he couldn’t scratch in polite company, felt around on the grass beside him for the
Sports Illustrated
and placed it on his chest, closing his eyes.
Enough activity for a while. He lay there trying for perfect, blissful immobility, save for an occasional smooth move of his arm, raising the beer to his lips.
Zen
, he thought as the cold liquid tingled his mouth and washed down his throat. Perfect Coors Zen. He blanked his mind. He would send all the bad stuff into Coors Zenland. He sent away into Zenland that damned memo from his boss about excess inventory. Away went the screw-up that Shipping made Friday on the Baker order. Away went the business trip to St. Louis next week. His mind thus cleared, he made significant progress on the beer and hazily considered getting another. But the breeze played over his body and he began to doze.
In his dim torpor, at first he thought the annoying sound was the guy down the street starting up that damned chainsaw. The noise was kind of a chainsaw sound, but deeper, with more … rumbling. He sleepily lifted his head as the sound grew louder and cocked his ears one way then the other, the better to pinpoint the direction. The muffled sound originated toward the yard. A lawnmower? Nope, his Lawn Boy stood silent.
With a gut-wrenching roar, the sound erupted into the open, sending him leaping with a loud, startled curse off the chaise. He glimpsed a movement out of the corner of his eye, turning to see one of the big trees in the Matthews’ yard — one of the
really
big ones — jerk over violently at an angle. Its massive branches quivered as if being shaken by an unseen giant hand, and it slumped several feet into the ground. The grinding, sucking noise rose to a deafening level, like being thrust inside a jet engine.
Unthinkingly curious, he took a few steps toward the massive, shuddering tree — the worst mistake of his life. The tree sucked down into the earth like a celery stalk chewed away into an unseen hungry mouth. For an instant, the vibrating tips of the topmost branches slashed back and forth before disappearing. The earth around the vanished tree began to collapse away, opening a great spreading maw of a crack. The smooth green fabric of the lawn slumped and tore, falling away in tattered chunks. The widening gorge revealed the hidden earth beneath, like a deep slash in the skin exposes raw flesh. The gaping hole ripped its way up to the lawnmower sitting in the grass like innocent prey, and the lawnmower too was sucked away. The devouring of the machine produced a brief shriek of tearing metal above the subterranean roar.
With a chest-clutching horror he had never known, he realized that the rift was eating its way toward
him
at the speed of a running man, so he became one. He turned and hurdled the chaise, sprinting barefoot toward his house and, he hoped, safety. He leaped onto the back deck and glanced over his shoulder to see the gorge yawning into a great dark malignant cavity, widening to devour his yard and part of the neighbor’s. Panting with fear, he slammed the door and backed through the kitchen, watching through the screen the crater’s hellish approach. Jesus, dear Jesus, it seemed like some predator coming for him!
The phone! He yanked the receiver from its cradle, checked for the dial tone and punched in 911. He gathered his wits, took a deep breath, prepared his speech. But it rang only once, then went dead.
A crunching, grinding roar enveloped him, a sound of pulverizing concrete mixed with the explosive crack of snapping foundation timbers, and his whole house dropped with a massive thud, tilting toward the inexorably approaching, invisible monster. The abrupt slanting of the floor made him slip and fall, and he scrambled desperately up its treacherous slickness toward the dining room.
“
OH GOD! OH HELP ME!
” he screamed, grabbing the door jamb and hauling himself through the doorway. The oak china hutch tilted and crashed to the floor with the lethal tinkle of shattering glass. It slammed into him with a ponderous inanimate determination, smashing one hand on the jamb, crushing the bones like matchsticks. He screamed in agony, desperately tore the shredded bleeding hand from the trap, and clawed his way over the top of the hutch, cowering behind its bulk. The kitchen imploded with tortured sounds of tearing metal, splintering wood and cracking ceramic tiles, all ripped away into a darkness he could not fathom. Sobbing with gut-wrenching fear, cowering on the floor, he felt the house shake to its very foundation in its death throes. He heard the snakelike hiss of a ruptured gas pipe and smelled the sickening stench of natural gas filling the house and his lungs.
He screamed a final scream as the dining room walls collapsed over him, as moist earth smothered him in darkness.
F
iremen, rescue workers, policemen, reporters, TV crews, and neighbors crowded around the crater … or sinkhole … or earthquake fault … or whatever it was. They stood and speculated, still trying to figure out the frightening chasm that had devoured a chunk of quiet residential neighborhood, an entire house, and a man some of them knew. Taking care to stay behind the yellow police tape and away from the edge, they stretched and peered down into the gaping pit as if intense scrutiny would compel the hole to give up its secrets. The crater slashed seventy-five yards through the well-tended suburban lawns. Because the low sun shone palely through the trees, its depths remained hidden in shadow, making it even more ominous. Only the periodic flash of camera strobes or the glare of video lights lit the hole. Everybody, it seemed, was taking pictures. The Internet was already rich with video and images of the pit.
An occasional car horn blast, a revved motorcycle, and other street sounds reached the crowd, but the unfathomable hole in their neighborhood and their lives riveted their attention. All day their numbers had grown, attracted by television news reports. The police held the crowd well back, except for the neighbors who lived nearby and asserted their property rights to examine the hole.
The rescue chief stood solidly scowling into its depths, his large tanned arms folded over a pronounced stomach. It wasn’t the hole that had provoked his anger. The hole was a freak of nature to be dealt with. And it wasn’t the crowds. From beneath his battered, yellow hardhat, he glowered at the idle equipment and people poised to mount a rescue effort. A full complement of ladders, ropes, climbing gear, stretchers, emergency technicians … all just waiting. The fire chief had ordered him to hold, damnit!
An insistent rising sound of honking made him turn away from the hole to see a battered Range Rover jump the curb, bull its way through a line of policemen and speed across the front lawn stopping smack up against the police tape.
A young woman leaped out and ducked lithely beneath the tape. She ignored the shouts of the cops, striding briskly toward the hole. She peered down into its blackness from beneath the bill of a baseball cap that said “Schist Happens.” Her light brown ponytail jutted impertinently out the back hole of the hat, above the adjustment strap. She wore a sleeveless work shirt, slightly baggy khaki shorts and sturdy hiking boots with rumpled white socks. She stood with her hands on her hips, her feet apart, her sturdy tanned legs braced.
The rescue chief strode toward her, a freshened anger raising the veins in his neck. But he reined himself in at the last instant, remembering the public relations class he’d had to take.
“Honey, what the hell do you think you’re doing? You just get on back there. You might fall in. I’m the rescue chief here and—”
“What’s the situation?” She turned to the scowling middle-aged man, her gaze intent from beneath the cap bill. He took note of the attractive, oval, apple-cheeked face, the full lips, the slightly bent nose and the light blue-gray eyes. She was certainly an athletically attractive young woman, but he had other things to deal with.
“Look, honey, I’m going to have the cops take you out of here.”
“I asked what’s the situation?”
“The situation is, honey, that my boss says we got to wait for some damned geologist from the university to tell us it’s stable and we can go down and start a rescue operation. That’s what the damned situation is. Now get on back.”
“I’m the ‘damned geologist,’ chief.”
The rescue chief blinked. He decided to hide his embarrassment with bluster. “Fine … well, honey—”
“And my name’s not honey. Dacey Livingstone. Now, tell me what’s known.”
Dacey turned back to examine the crater, as the rescue chief managed to switch gears and relate what information had been gathered about the hole and how it got there. Dacey nodded as he talked, intently examining the crater with a geologist’s eye.
She’d seen plenty of cave-ins, impact craters, sinkholes, and other gashes in the earth’s surface. But this hole somehow seemed different. Its darkness seemed to harbor a special sense of dread. She took a deep breath and began to let the rocks, the soil and the vegetation tell her what they knew.
She saw evidence of sudden, unrelenting violence here. For some of its circumference, the thick grass hid the violence, slumped over the lip, obscuring the edge. But along large stretches, the topmost layer of sheared-away raw earth revealed raggedly torn grass roots, as if great hands had clawed viciously at the soil. Farther down, the crater walls showed layers of tortured soil and dark tan clays. The apparent depth was about thirty feet to a rubble-strewn floor.
The crater floor was especially striking, showing what could be a roof. Ignoring the rescue chief’s recitation, and deep in thought, she walked back to her
SUV
, passing the impatient rescue workers, whose stares she also ignored. As she returned with an iPad, a siren’s keening warble rose in the distance. She turned briefly back to the rescue chief.
“You mind explaining what I’m doing to those cops there? They started chasing me on the freeway. I didn’t have time to stop and explain.”
The rescue chief started to protest, but she was gone, striding away along the hole, stopping occasionally to peer in or to crouch down to poke at the soil. Finally, she rose and began to peck at the iPad, staring intently at its screen.
With a muttered curse, the rescue chief turned to meet two uniformed cops angrily exiting their squad car, its lights still splashing color across the dusky landscape. Dacey heard cursing as they colorfully described a hundred-mile-an-hour chase. But she was intent on the iPad. The chief returned to her side, his annoyance replaced with curiosity. She held up the screen for him to see. It showed a flashing dot marking their position amidst a three dimensional map of the underlying rock strata.
“There’s no obvious reason for this hole,” she announced. “I positioned it with the
GPS
and accessed the Oklahoma Geological Survey data on the area. There’s nothing down there but solid strata. No quake faults, no mines, no caverns … solid.” Before the chief could launch into a lecture on the dangers of police chases, she strode off to get the best view of the crater bottom.
She saw most of the roof of a house wedged amidst the rubble. Some of the edges had been ripped away, leaving shredded shingles and plywood, but the gray-shingled peak jutted up as if it were perfectly normal for that dwelling promontory to lie in a deep hole in the earth.
From behind the police tape came a voice quavering with anguish.
“Miss? Miss? Are you the geologist? Can you do something?”
Dacey turned to see a young woman with short curly hair, tears staining her puffy face, with two children clinging to her side. A little boy, perhaps seven, stood staring up at Dacey through dark frightened eyes. But it was the little girl, maybe four, who riveted her attention. The child clung to her mother with small hands, her round little face forlorn, still not truly understanding what had happened. Dacey had managed to keep a cool professionalism until she saw the little girl. She felt a tightening in her chest, which she quickly replaced with a growing anger that these kinds of disasters had to visit themselves on innocent people. The anger, in turn, hardened into determination. She ducked under the police tape and took off her cap.
“Did you live here?” she asked the woman gently.
“My husband. He’s down there. You have to …” The woman’s voice choked. A middle-aged lady moved to comfort her.
“I am so very sorry.” Dacey took the woman’s hand, then reached down to stroke the soft brown hair and delicate cheek of the little girl. She took a deep breath. “I’ll certainly do everything I can to find him.” Then, as gently as she could, she questioned the mother about any earth tremors, any ground subsidence, anything unusual that had happened in the back yard over the previous weeks. The woman pulled herself together enough to answer, relieved that she could be of some help.
After a moment, Dacey felt the impatient presence of the rescue chief once more looming behind her. She reassured the mother once more and turned back to him.
“Any change in the hole since you arrived?”
The rescue chief decided to postpone once again his lecture about the cop chase. He’d have his chance to give this nervy young woman some hell.
“Well, an
EMT
who was first on the scene said he thought he saw that roof shift a little once. But he couldn’t really tell for sure. So, you got enough information? Can we get started now?” Dacey walked back to the hole, scanning its sides.
“Not you. Me. I’ve got to do some more examination before I let anybody down there.”
“So, what are you going to do?”
“Well, I’m gonna get harnessed up and let myself down in there and see what we’ve got.” She strode briskly away toward her Range Rover.
“Look, I don’t care—” began the rescue chief, but she was gone.
She reached the Range Rover and opened the back, hauling out a long bright blue coiled rope, a scarred yellow miner’s helmet, fitted with a light and video camera, and a black climbing harness from which hung a jangling array of tools and bags.
“Damnit, this is my case and you’re not going into that hole, you hear?”
Dacey ignored him, taking off her cap and deftly stepping into the leg loops of the climbing harness. She belted it firmly around her waist, tightening the loops around her thighs. She pulled on leather-palmed climbing gloves, efficiently twisted her ponytail into a tight rope atop her head and jammed on the helmet, fastening its strap beneath her chin.
“Do you hear me?” The rescue chief moved around in front of her, considering whether to call up a couple of the men to restrain her.
She clicked the helmet light on. “Am I lit?” she asked the rescue chief.
He nodded in spite of himself. “Yeah, sure, but I’m not going to let you down there without a partner,” he announced with authoritative finality.
But Dacey had already attached the rope to the Range Rover’s front winch.
She reached up and switched on the camera, fiddling with the iPad to bring up the video image on the screen. She handed the iPad to the rescue chief, who found himself looking at his own image. “Okay, you’ll see what I see,” she said. “Just flick the switch to let me down, and when I tell you, flick it the other way to hoist me up.”
“That’s it!” growled the rescue chief, with a wave of his hand that brought two burly rescue workers to his side. “You don’t hear what I’m saying, so I’m—”
“Do you hear what I’m saying?” She glanced at the two confused rescue workers and pointed up at the rescue chief. Her blue-gray eyes flashed and her jaw tightened. With a sharp yank, she tied off the blue rappelling rope on her harness and pitched the coil down into the darkening chasm. “Your chief asked me to check out this hole and he didn’t say I had to answer to you. You talk to the chief. You tell him that poor lady’s husband … those children’s daddy … could still be alive down there, and I’m not waiting on one of your guys to figure out how to put on a harness. And if you do send these guys down there without me checking it out first, and you got an unstable soil structure, and it collapses, you’re gonna be digging more bodies out!”
Before the apoplectic rescue chief could answer, she slipped over the side, the tools and carabiners on her belt clanking. The rope tightened and cut into the turf on the crater lip.
She signaled the rescue chief to start the winch, and it whined to life, lowering her into the hole. She examined the layers as she went. Now she was in her element. Now she could bring into play her almost instinctive understanding of rocks and soil. She still saw in her mind’s eye the little girl’s somber, innocent face. She dug her fingers into the wall and pulled out chunks of soil and crumbled them, letting the bits fall away. She pulled a small geologist’s pick from her belt, prying out rocks and turning them over in her hand before pitching them away, too.
“Ya got good compacted clay soil here,” she called up to the rescue chief, whom she couldn’t see over the rim. “It’ll keep the sides stable.” Finally she had descended out of the waning sunlight and into the shadows of the crater’s bottom. The winch had reached its limit, so she pushed off from the crater wall, swinging out and paying out the rope. She stepped lightly onto the ripped edge of the roof, testing it with her foot. Satisfied with its solidity, she let out the rope, walking across the roof, feeling with her boots for weak spots.
She stopped and surveyed the side of the hole, looking for unstable areas. She sensed the sudden violence that had produced this hole, felt a dread here. It was so raw, so fresh; not the slow geological violence that thrust mountains up from the earth’s crust. Not even the ponderous, rumbling violence of an earthquake or a volcano. This was sudden, ferocious, somehow more powerful than any geological processes. This was not natural.
She remembered the woman and her children, and sadly realized that amidst this violence, the husband and father could not possibly have survived. But if force of will could save him, she would have that force of will. She also resolved that she would learn what had happened here.
