“Dad, you said ‘right before the last one.’” Ford prompted. “Right before the last one, what?”
Joe finally looked away from the sputtering light. He turned his haggard face toward Ford.
“Something responded.”
Responded? Ford still wasn’t sure what exactly his dad was getting at. Was he actually talking about some kind of animal? All he could tell for sure was that Joe was acting like this was a matter of life and death, and not just from fifteen years ago.
But before Ford could get his dad to elaborate, the van door slid open with a bang. Two armed guards, their granite faces reflecting how hardcore they were, invaded the back of the van. Without a word, they unhooked Joe from the security rail and muscled him none too gently away from the bench. They dragged him toward the open door.
“Hey!” Joe protested in Japanese. Ford could barely make out the gist of it. “Slow down! Where are we going?”
“Whoa!” Ford added, alarmed by the soldiers’ rough treatment of his father. He lunged forward as far as his cuffs would allow. “You’re gonna hurt him!”
Snarling, one of the soldiers shoved Ford back against the wall. Ford tugged uselessly at his restraints. Still handcuffed to the rail, he could only watch in dismay as the men hustled Joe away from the van. And away from Ford.
“Hey! Hey wait!” he shouted. “Where are you taking him? HEY!”
The soldiers ignored his frantic cries. They slammed the door shut behind them.
With full power restored by the generators, the equipment within the crow’s nest monitored the pulse. Glowing screens, tracking emanations all along the electromagnetic spectrum, registered a continuous spike that only gradually diminished in intensity before subsiding altogether.
“That was twelve-point-two seconds,” Jainway reported. “We’re trending exponentially and—” He rapidly worked his keyboard, collating and translating the latest data from the pulse. “—that’s our new curve.”
A distinctive waveform appeared on a central display screen. The pattern displayed a series of rising peaks, starting small at first, but quickly increasing in size and frequency. Serizawa examined the display in fascination. The pattern matched no biological phenomenon he was familiar with.
A hand tapped him on the shoulder. He turned to find David Huddleston, the base’s head of security, behind him. He was a tall, brusque American who took his duties very seriously.
“Dr. Serizawa,” he said. “We arrested two men in the Q-Zone—”
Whelan was annoyed by the interruption. “Can this wait? Have Dr. Graham take a look.”
“She did, sir,” Huddleston replied. “She sent me.”
Whelan glanced around, as though noticing for the first time that Graham was no longer present. Serizawa recalled her being called away during the countdown to the pulse. Intrigued, he gave Huddleston his full attention. He trusted Vivienne’s judgment, and wondered what about the trespassers was so significant.
“One says he used to work here,” Huddleston said.
At the old nuclear power plant? Serizawa found this provocative enough that he let the security chief escort him downstairs to the antechamber of a utility room that had apparently been converted into a makeshift interrogation room. He found Graham waiting for him outside the utility room, while an armed soldier stood guard at the locked glass door to the larger room beyond. A table held what Serizawa assumed to be the trespassers’ confiscated belongings: a duffel bag, a couple of American passports, a vintage Geiger counter, a flashlight, and other odds and ends.
Looking troubled, Graham nodded grimly at Serizawa as he arrived. They peered through the clear glass door as one of Huddleston’s subordinates, an American named Fitzgerald, attempted to question the distraught prisoner, whom had been identified as Joseph Brody, a one-time nuclear engineer, formerly employed by the doomed Janjira facility. Serizawa wondered what had brought the man back to this site, some fifteen years later. He noted that Brody was wearing a battered brown radiation suit, minus the hood.
“I want my son,” Brody demanded, visibly upset. “I want to see him. I want to know he’s alright.” He pointed accusingly at the guard posted outside the door. “This guy, he knows where he is. I want my son and I want my bag and my disks and I want to talk to the person who’s in charge here. I know what’s going on, okay?”
Serizawa listened with interest. Just how much did Brody truly know about what now occupied this site? And what might have caused the disaster so many years ago?
Fitzgerald tried to calm the prisoner. He had a shaved skull and an intimidating manner. “Mr. Brody—”
“You’ve been telling everybody this place is a death zone,” Brody ranted. “All the while you’ve been hiding something out there! My wife died here! You understand? Something killed my wife and ten other people, and I deserve answers!”
Serizawa recalled that several lives had indeed been lost during the meltdown, although the death toll could have been much, much worse had not all necessary emergency measures been taken in time. Curious, he rifled through the man’s possessions, finding a framed family photo, along with over a dozen obsolete zip disks and a collection of graphs and printouts.
“I thought all the data from that day was lost,” he whispered to Graham.
She glanced at Brody’s collection. “Guess he was doing homework.”
Leafing through the confiscated material, Serizawa froze as he came upon a crumpled computer printout of a certain waveform pattern. He recognized the rising series of crests immediately. It was the same curve he had just observed on the monitors upstairs.
Snatching up the printout, he turned excitedly toward Graham — just as the overhead lights flickered once more, even more noticeably this time. The electromagnetic pulses from the cocoon were indeed increasing in intensity.
“See?!” Brody exclaimed, as though in vindication. “There it is again! It knocks out everything electrical for miles!” The foundations beneath their feet rumbled as the lights continued to waver, despite the best efforts of the backup generators. Brody grew louder and more agitated. He shouted fervidly like a prophet of doom. His face grew flushed and the tendons in his neck stood out. “It’s what caused this whole thing, and it’s happening again. IT’S GONNA SEND US BACK TO THE STONE AGE!”
A technician from the control room rushed into the antechamber. “Dr. Serizawa, they need you upstairs! We have a problem.”
Serizawa glanced back and forth between Brody and the confiscated printout. Was it possible that this crazed American engineer knew something they didn’t? He stared apprehensively at Brody and their eyes met through the glass door between them. Serizawa wanted to stay and question the man directly, find out what precisely Brody knew about the events of fifteen years ago, and how they related to what was happening today, but the technician from the crow’s nest hovered in doorway, waiting anxiously.
He hastily gathered up Brody’s possessions and rushed to answer the summons. He shouted back at Huddleston and the guard.
“Keep that man here! I need to talk to him!”
Graham accompanied Serizawa as they raced back to the control room, which was now in a barely controlled frenzy. The elation and excitement of only a few minutes ago had been supplanted by an almost palpable sense of panic. Emergency alerts and warnings flashed urgently on almost every screen and console. Buzzers and sirens sounded. Alarmed technicians shouted over each other.
“Just seconds apart!” Jainway called out.
Another man, whose name Serizawa didn’t know, stared in dismay at the readings before him. “—stronger, broad spectrum!”