CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
First Steps
They all piled into the Sheriff’s old gas and wheels car, Kevin and Heaven in the front. Eric grabbed the back seat. He pulled out his holophone as they were talking and dialed up Chevelle.
“What are you doing?” Heaven asked. Tensions were up, now that their task seemed so urgent.
“Calling Chevy,” he said. “I’ve got to warn her.” He hit call and held the phone to his ear.
“Why don’t we get some help?” Heaven asked. She jumped on the task with them, unwilling to be left behind, but she was equally afraid of what lay ahead.
“You are all I’ve got,” Kevin said, eyes on the road. He turned down main street. Eric signaled for him to turn left two blocks ahead.
“It’s ringing,” Eric said. “Why won’t she pick up?”
“What about your deputies?”
Kevin shook his head. “Only Deputy Wentworth came to 2099. He left two days ago to be with family.”
“And the Sheriff of 2099?” she suggested next. “What was his name? Joshua?”
Again, Kevin shook his head. “I’m not going to get any favors from Joshua. We don’t have time to try to convince him, either.” He sighed. “Or anyone else.” The pressure was mounting on them all.
“Voicemail,” Eric muttered. Chevy didn’t pick up. He poked at the holophone to skip the automated message. “Chevy, I know this sounds crazy, but you’ve got to get out of town now. We’re all in danger. I don’t have time to explain, just trust me. Get your parents and go north. Go to... to Duluth. Just get out of town.” He hesitated, unsure of how to end the call. I love you. He hung up the phone instead.
“There is no one else,” Kevin said to Heaven again. “You two are all I’ve got. And Eric I need if Motega’s plan works and we disappear.” Kevin turned on the street in front of the library. In the back was a parking lot, but Kevin parked on the street out front.
“Let’s just make sure we find that bomb,” Eric said.
***
“Slow down,” Alina said. The freeway exit had been close to the school and they were already out of Mapiya and headed south on 35E. Alina adjusted her dress and sat down. A nice dress from the future, there was a tiny attachment on the side that slid along the slit like a zipper, though it would hold and stay wherever she set it to. Alina opened the slit up about a foot from her hip so she’d be ready for anything, not stumbling over her dress if they had to run.
“There’s no time,” Motega said. He glanced over his shoulder back at Mapiya, as if he expected to see a mushroom cloud rise up behind him. The speed limit, Alina noticed, was a ‘sensible’ 90 miles per hour. Motega was already pushing past 100.
“You must know where you are going,” Alina pointed out.
“Dravin took the machine the other day,” Motega said. “The QED. He has it at Elko, a military research center about a half hour south of Mapiya.” Rain started to dot the windshield so he flicked the wipers on low. “At least, it was a half hour, back in 2012. Now, at these speeds, about half that.”
“You’ve really thought this through, haven’t you?” Alina said. She tried to suppress an angry outburst; this was not the romantic evening she had in mind. “What are you going to do when we get there, just walk right in? Did you give it any thought?”
Motega pulled out a key card from his jacket pocket and handed it to Alina. “I stole it from Dravin when we got in that fight yesterday. Not even a week into 2099 and he’s in the IIA, and a high security clearance from what I’ve heard.”
“Why?”
“Our experiment,” Motega said. “It was a century ahead of its time.” Motega paused as he wound his way around a car in front of him. A freeway sign indicated they were fast approaching Elko, the city the facility was named after. “To this day, nothing like it has been developed, and now that they’ve seen what it really can do? I can’t even imagine what the military thinks they can do with a device that can suspend a town in time, can you?”
“Do you even have a plan?” Alina asked.
“Oh, there’s a plan,” Motega said, but she was ignoring him.
“Or were you just going to run in there pretending you are Dravin?” She looked out the window as the world went by in a blur. “This is so like you, Motega, so focused on what you have to do, on your work, that you miss what’s right in front of you.”
“What are you talking about?” Motega said, slowing down a bit as the facility became clear in the distance. “You aren’t talking about the device.”
“Oh, now he notices,” she said. She rolled her eyes and wiped a tear from her face, watching the rain on the window stream by in diagonal streaks. “The invitation, Motega, for the job at the University. I didn’t tell you because I wanted you to be happy for me. I told you because I wanted you to stop me, to actually want me to stick around and be with you. Instead you were just eager to get rid of me.”
“I can’t believe this,” he said. They were almost at the facility now, but he pulled the car to a stop on the side of the road. “It wasn’t to get rid of you,” he said, speaking quickly and angrily. “I was happy for you because your career was progressing, because I want the best for you, but mostly because I wanted to be with you.” He ended almost yelling, but what he said took her aback and she didn’t respond.
Calmer now, Motega drove slowly toward the facility, coming up just on their right. He came to a stop in the parking lot and turned off the car. “We’re here.”
***
“So you think there’s something here that will give us a hint to where the bomb is going to go off?” Kevin said. Kevin, Eric, and Heaven crouched in the shadows in front of the library entrance. It looked so dark inside, closed for the weekend. Eric cursed himself, wishing now that he had kept his materials in his backpack. Instead, they were now destroyed in his house in the tornado.
“I had been researching The Mapiya Event for a school project,” Eric said, looking out at the road nervously. Any minute someone could pass by and see them talking, huddled suspiciously by the library’s glass door, and bring an end to their quest before it began. They had left Kevin’s car parked on the street out front and went around to the entrance by the parking lot in the back, safer from street lights and passing cars.
“They’ve got books, newspaper articles, lots of information about what happened,” Eric explained. “Actually, I don’t know where to find the newspaper articles. The librarian had to grab some macrodisks from the back and those were in my house when the tornado took it, but I know where the books are.”
“They know what happened,” Kevin said. “But how do they know what’s going to happen?” Eric could tell the Sheriff didn’t like this plan, but frankly, he didn’t either. They didn’t have many options, though, or the town could go up ten times worse than Hiroshima at any moment.
“The disaster that happened to the town, that’s going to happen to the town,” Eric said, trying to explain. “When the device was turned on the particles from South Mapiya were switched with particles from South Mapiya about eight minutes in the future, after the bomb went off. So we’ve already seen what the town will look like.”
A car passed by quietly, and Eric instinctively drew back out of fear, but it didn’t slow down to come back to them, so he relaxed a little. “In some of these books there are overhead maps of the town. We can see the shape of the explosion.”
“We can use that to pinpoint where it originated from,” Kevin said.
“Exactly.”
“Well, what are we waiting for?” Heaven pressed.
“When we do this, we’re not going to have a lot of time,” Kevin warned. The Sheriff looked around again, to make sure no one would see or hear what they were about to do. “You take me to the books and we get out. I’m not on good terms with Sheriff Joshua, so if we get caught it’s over.” He turned to Heaven. “You keep lookout. Warn us when they’re coming.”
“And what if Motega’s plan works? What if he turns on the machine and you disappear?” Eric said.
“Then it’s up to you,” Kevin said, putting a hand on Eric’s shoulder. “You’ll need to spread the word and get help. Then get someone to turn the device back off so you can stop the bomb once and for all.” He looked through the window of the library once more. “Ready?”
“Ready,” Eric said. Heaven nodded.
Kevin swung back, catching the glass door with the back of his elbow. It wasn’t very strong glass; it shattered with the first hit. He pushed the pieces of glass in and stepped through the door. Either breaking the glass, crossing the threshold, or some motion detector surely tipped off the security company to their breaking in, though no alarm sounded in the building. It was only a matter of time now.
“Come on,” Kevin said. “Lead the way.”
They walked quickly back to the stocks, to the few physical books still left in the library. Past the main counter, take a left, then all the way down, third aisle from the end.
Eric heard a phone ringing at one of the desks. That meant that, detecting a break in, the security company didn’t immediately call the police. First they would call the library to make sure whether it was a false alarm or not. A library employee could have come in and forgot the password or accidentally tripped the alarm. They’d then have a vocal password, or probably a voice identification system, that the library staff could use to tell them everything was okay.
Eric was tempted to answer the phone and try to fake his way through it, buy them some more time, but he had no idea what the keyword was and the voice identification was very good these days. He’d probably only waste more time. He scanned the books on the shelf with his finger as the phone rang again.
“Here it is,” he said excitedly, fumbling for the book now that he found it. He pulled the book off the shelf and thumbed through the pages as the phone rang a third time. He tried to hurry up. They didn’t have enough time. “Here,” he said, holding the book out for Kevin.
The book contained a two page spread of South Mapiya after The Event, looking very much like a nuclear warhead had gone off. Kevin looked it over for a moment. “Oh, no.”
“What is it?” Eric asked.
“If I’m right, the bomb definitely went off, or would have gone off, in South Mapiya, right here,” Kevin said, putting his finger on the page. It was in the eastern half of town. It looked like a crater with concentric circles of destruction and debris radiating out from that point.
“Where is that?”
“Shem Sweeny’s house,” Kevin said. “Why didn’t I think of this sooner? There was a break in at South Campus just before The Event. A science classroom and one student’s locker was broken into.”
Eric glanced impatiently at the door. The phone had stopped ringing and he heard a police siren in the distance. They had to get out of there, and soon.
“The locker belonged to Jack Sweeny, Shem’s son. I went over to Shem’s house after The Event and he was acting very strange, very cautious. His son wasn’t there, or so he claimed, and Shem wouldn’t let me in, or even let me see inside the house. He’s hiding the bomb there. He has to be.”
The sirens were closer now. Eric saw the distinctive red and blue lights of a police car out front. “We’ve got to get out of here,” Eric said, and they turned to leave out the back when he heard Heaven’s voice outside.
He glanced back at the entrance to see Heaven standing there, acting like she had just broke in to the library and was walking away with some macrodisks. She screamed as the police grabbed her and fought with her, but Eric knew exactly what she was doing. She was sacrificing herself, giving them a way out. “Come on,” Kevin said, and they refocused on escaping, making their way to the entrance on the other side of the library, leading out to the street.
“What about Heaven?” Eric asked when they were outside. He wanted to go back for her, protect her.
“Don’t worry,” Kevin said, pulling him along back to the car. “She’s a minor. She’ll get off pretty easy, at least if the laws are still anything like they were in 2012.” Eric wasn’t so sure, with her previous visit to the police after the IIA agents came and snatched her. “We’ve got something more important to deal with right now. We’ve got to stop Shem.”