CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
It All Falls Apart
Dravin waited at his office for the guard to arrive. He motioned for the guard to keep quiet as Dravin listened to the hallway.
“What are you waiting for?” the guard whispered. “We should secure the device.”
Dravin shushed him and listened carefully. A moment later he finally heard footsteps and two voices carrying down the hallways. “They’re coming,” he said in a hushed breath. “Let them get into the room first. Then we can corner them.” The guard nodded; he understood.
They waited until he heard a door open and close, then he motioned the guard to follow him. They left his office and walked around the corner. The door was closed. He could hear Motega and Alina’s muffled voices from inside. A trail of water droplets led from down the hallway right up to the door.
“When I disappear,” he told the guard. “I need you to prop this door open and go in and turn off the machine.” He had figured out, as well, what would happen if the machine turned on again. In all likelihood he’d disappear again, but so would Motega and Alina.
“Wha— What? When you disappear?”
“Just do it,” Dravin said, annoyed. “Any minute now they’re going to get that machine back together and—” Dravin cut off when he suddenly blinked out of existence.
͠***
Bored of sitting by herself at a table eating cake, Chevelle got up and made her way over to the punch bowl. The infamous punch bowl. No matter what social class you were in, you met here; they were all equals. She grabbed a glass of punch and continued moving, limping along on her big cast extending down from her shin and wrapping her ankle.
The stars and the moon decorations glittered throughout the school cafeteria, like the future hung just before them all. Ironic, she thought. In 2099, when everyone was looking forward to the future, the turn of the century, here in Mapiya a piece of the past came back to join them. Chevelle wound her way between the tables. The DJ put on another fast song from the past. Something from Brittney Pear or some other girl who had long ago crawled into the grave.
But she was getting tired of party, especially since she couldn’t dance much with her cast. Eric was nowhere to be seen, probably spending more time with his new girlfriend. It made her sick. She wanted to find somewhere else to go.
She strode right out of the cafeteria and into the hallways. The lights were all out, encouraging the students to turn back, but she had to get out of there. She walked into the darkest hallway she only to find it already occupied by two teenagers making out.
Chevelle swung back around the corner, hoping they didn’t see her, but something stood out to her about them. She noticed one of them was on the football team; he wore a letter jacket. Blayze had worn his letter jacket to the dance, as well.
She peeked around the corner again, just far enough to see. It was Blayze, making out with Jodie. That was classy, she thought. So cliché. Not that it mattered anyways. He was like all the other boys, a distraction. Someone to bide the time.
Forgotten in her purse, her phone buzzed with Eric’s incoming call to warn her.
***
Don’t we need a plan?” Eric asked as they sped over the bridge into South Mapiya. “What are we going to do when we get there? How are you going to stop him?” His heart was going a mile a minute. They were in a rush to take out a man, and possibly defuse a bomb, by themselves, and the man could either have his finger on the trigger right now or have ditched the bomb and the whole idea of ever blowing up the town.
“There is no plan,” Kevin said. “There’s me and this gun.” He tapped the nine millimeter at his hip. “You are underage and are going to stay out of the way while I take out the bomber. Got that?”
Eric wished Heaven was there with them. She gave him strength. Without her or without Chevelle, he was nothing. He was Eric, not even a very good wide receiver on a high school football team. And here he was with a Sheriff 87 years in the past about to try to take out a terrorist.
“You expect me to just watch?” he said.
“Just, stay out of danger,” Kevin said, finally slowing to a stop in the dirt driveway of a small, run-down house.
Kevin held his pistol in front of him as he approached the house, Eric waiting by the car. “Shem?” he called out in a loud voice. “Are you there?” There was no response from inside. “It’s me, Kevin,” he said, walking slowly towards the front door. “I’m going to come in now. Okay?”
He jiggled the door handle but it was locked. Eric watched as he stepped back, lifted his left leg and kicked in the door, followed immediately be stepping into the house, holding his pistol and flashlight in front of him. “Eric, come take a look,” Kevin said.
As he jogged toward the house he heard a loud click, click, click noise from inside. Just inside the doorway, Kevin turned to face the noise when there was a small explosion. Fire cracked through the door and sent Kevin flying to the right. When Eric made it inside Kevin was crumpled against the far wall, his face burned.
“Are you all right?” Eric said, immediately at his side.
Kevin groaned. “Yeah, I think so,” he said. “Face hurts. With that hit, I probably have a concussion.
Eric glanced around. There was no one there, and Shem booby trapped a bomb to the door to disable anyone coming in. The room was dark, but Eric could see some bomb making materials in the living room here: wires, duct tape, wire cutters, various prototype detonators. Somewhere in a back room a TV was playing. “Where could he be?” Kevin wondered.
“You don’t think he’s just, you know, out, do you?” Eric asked.
Kevin shook his head, then held a hand to his forehead with a groan. “No, I think he took that bomb somewhere. He changed his plan after The Event. He took a few days to see what’s different, then changed his plan.”
“Then where?”
“That’s the real question, isn’t it?” Kevin said. Then, he disappeared.
Kevin disappeared, along with the house. Eric looked around. Shem’s house, the road, the car, the grass, all of it vanished. “It worked,” Eric muttered. Motega’s plan had worked. He turned the device back on, suspending the town again.
Things were different this time, he noticed. The town still looked like it had been destroyed, but the arrangement was different. Part of Shem’s house still stood, a small concrete section of the east wall. Against the wall some piping stood out from the ground, the image of the piping indelibly burned on the concrete behind it.
Eric walked up the hill on the street, then ran up to the top. The hill was still the same. This was the same geographical location, but the mapping of the blast was different. Something had changed about where and how the bomb had gone off, or will go off, rather. At the top of the hill he stood and gaped.
Down the hill, around some buildings and a few trees half a mile distant, would have sat Mapiya’s South Campus High School. The trees and the building were gone or laid flat, so he could see, even from this small hill, that the blast had spread out towards him from the direction of the school.
“Oh, my,” he said to himself. “He went to the school.” The school had been one of the few buildings that still stood after the blast the first time. Now it was gone. The Sheriff had turned the South Campus into a temporary shelter. Shem went to where there were the most people... and took them all out.
͠***
Motega pressed the button and waited for a second. “Nothing happened,” he said. Weren’t they supposed to disappear? Maybe the original field stayed in Mapiya and a new set of particles was entangled. No, that was too far of a stretch. He looked at the button again. He had pressed it, but it was flipped back into its original position. In fact, the first time they were suspended, he realized, they didn’t even notice anything had changed; they just continued where they left off when the machine was turned off. “Alina, someone else pressed this,” he said, spinning around.
“It was him,” Dravin said, standing in the entrance, pointing at the guard that was with them. Dravin leveled his pistol at Motega and fired into his abdomen.
The pain shot through his belly and he vaguely noticed Alina screaming, though it seemed far away at first. She fell over him, lifting him up to a sitting position before he even knew he had fallen to the floor.
He heard the guard objecting and Motega realized his eyes were closed. “This isn’t right. They’re unarmed.” Another gunshot echoed through the room, but Motega didn’t notice any new sources of pain. Just the same sharp throbbing in his belly. Motega opened his eyes as he felt Alina checking his throat for a pulse. He was still alive, for now. He saw the guard lying in a pile, facing away from them.
“You can’t do this,” Alina said, scowling at Dravin.
Dravin shrugged. “Two people broke in to a secure military research complex. When I discovered them they attacked, taking out the guard with his own weapon.” Dravin tossed the guard’s gun to the ground. “I was forced to fire upon them to contain the situation. One of them, the female, escaped in the commotion.”
Alina looked up at Dravin in horror. “The story could be different,” Dravin said, slowly pointing his pistol in Alina’s direction. “The two intruders wouldn’t cooperate. I had to kill both of them in self-defense.”
“You wouldn’t,” she said, almost daring him.
“This project was supposed to be my life’s work,” Dravin said. “There’s no way I’m letting you two mess everything up.”
“You don’t know what you are doing,” Motega said, grunting as he tried to pull himself up. Alina continued kneeling over him, mostly blocking him from Dravin. “The citizens of Mapiya, maybe all of the Twin Cities, are in danger. We have to turn the machine on.”
“You can make up whatever story you’d like,” Dravin taunted them. “It won’t work. I’m the one in power now, and you’re mine. Say goodbye to your girlfriend.”
Motega reached into his pants pocket and pulled out the grenade, holding it between him and Alina to show her. “Go on, get out of here, Alina.”
Alina shook her head. Tears streamed down her face now. “Never,” she said, putting her hand on his cheek. “Motega, I... I...”
“I know,” Motega said. “I love you, too.” Motega pulled the pin from the grenade and dropped it on the ground next to them. Dravin’s eyes widened when he saw the grenade roll out and he dove for the door.
The explosion of the concussion grenade resounded throughout the complex.