Top got to his feet first. He was the oldest of us, and probably not the strongest, but in many ways he was the hardiest. He struggled up and stood swaying over me, chest heaving from the effort, hands shaking as he checked his gear. The process of doing that kind of routine check made sense. It was a reset button to reclaim normalcy and control. Doing routine things can do that. When he was done he still looked like crap, but less so. He blinked his eyes clear, then hooked a hand under my armpit and pulled me up. My muscles were composed of overcooked rigatoni and Play-Doh. It didn’t even feel like I owned a skeleton anymore. Top had to hold me up until I could stand, however badly, on my own.
It took both of us to get Bunny on his feet.
We stood in a nervous huddle, legs trembling, faces pale with sickness. Nerves absolutely shot. Burned out like bad wiring.
“Holy Mary, Mother of God,” breathed Top. And he crossed himself. I had only ever seen him do that once before.
Bunny wiped pain-tears from his eyes and sniffed in a chestful of air.
The machine sat there, cold and silent and dark. Around us the impossible city loomed, mocking us and everything we believed in. Top’s prayer faded into nothing.
Bunny coughed, cleared his throat. “What… what…?”
“I know,” said Top.
Bunny’s head snapped around. “Top, did you…? I mean…”
“I don’t know, Farm Boy,” said Top, but he was clearly in distress that ran deeper than the physical. “This is some voodoo shit right here.”
“It’s nuts,” said Bunny, shaking his head, “but for a moment there I…”
Once more his words trailed away, and he shot me a very strange look. A suspicious and horrified look.
“What?” I asked cautiously. “What did you see?”
“Nothing. I didn’t see nothing.”
“Bunny… look, I saw something, too.”
His eyes widened. “What?”
“I saw something, too,” I repeated. “For a couple of seconds after that thing went off I saw…”
And I stopped, too. How exactly do you have that kind of conversation? You need to hear that someone else shared it so that it’s not just you. And you’re afraid that it is just you. But at the same time what if it’s not just you and stuff like this is possible? You see the problem? There’s no way to Sudoku your way out of it.
“Say it, Cap’n,” said Top. “What’d you see?”
I wiped sweat out of my eyes and took a moment. “I saw two things and neither of them make any sense,” I began. “I saw me — my body — kneeling a few feet away, looking right at me.”
“Yeah,” said Bunny, nodding but not looking anything but scared shitless about it.
“Then for a second I was somewhere else,” I continued. “I was in your cottage, Bunny. Lydia was there and…”
I let it tail off. Bunny’s face went from a greasy mushroom white to a livid red.
“What else did you see?” he asked in a low growl. A frightened dog growl, but definitely a growl.
“The fuck does it matter what else he saw?” barked Top. “He saw it.”
Benny wheeled on him. “What makes you so sure?”
“Because I saw my ex-wife,” he snarled. “Clear as motherfucking day. Sitting at the kitchen counter drinking that shit mint tea she drinks and reading stock numbers off her damn computer. Want to know where Apple stock is right now? I can still taste that son of a bitching tea.”
He dragged a trembling hand across his mouth, which had become wet with spit. He looked at the moisture, shook his head, then they both looked at Bunny.
“What did you see, Farm Boy?”
“What,” exclaimed Bunny, “so we’re all just going to accept that this stuff just happened?”
“What did you see?”
Bunny cut a look at me and then he looked up at the ceiling far, far above us. “I had a nightmare,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“I didn’t see Lydia or your ex, Top. I didn’t see anyone I know.” He shook his head. There was a quaver in his voice that made his teeth start to chatter. It wasn’t the cold, though, and we all knew it. He was simply that scared. “It couldn’t have been anything but me freaking out. It was this weird place… like the beach, except the ocean was black and oily, and the sky was wrong. Not our sky, you know? The stars were wrong. And… and there were monsters.” He stopped and shook his head, unable or unwilling to continue. “There aren’t words for it, you know?”
They both looked at me. As if I had any answers.
“I feel sick,” said Bunny. “That air we breathed? I feel like crap.”
He raised his BAMS unit. The light was no longer green. Now it flickered back and forth between green and yellow. Mine was doing the same thing. So was Top’s. I peered at the tiny digital screen to see what kind of particles it had picked up, but all it said was: SYSTEM ERROR.
Top frowned. “Was it me or did the power go out when that thing flashed?”
“It went out,” I said.
“And it came back on?”
“Yeah.”
He held up his watch. The digital display was flashing the way those things do after a power interruption. “All my gear’s in reset mode except the flashlight. It doesn’t have a circuit breaker. Just a battery. It went off but came back on.”
We all checked our gear and got the same results. Bunny said, “You think that machine is the EMP weapon they were building?”
Top shook his head. “Can’t be the EMP cannon. It’s too big.”
“I know, but we got hit by something like that.”
“EMP would have fried the electronics,” said Top. “This just interrupted the power.”
“What can do that?” asked Bunny. “I mean to everything, even our flashlights?”
“I have no idea,” I said.
“Doesn’t make sense,” said Bunny. “If something could interrupt electrical conductivity all the way down to a watch battery, wouldn’t it fry our central nervous system? I don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth, guys, but why ain’t we dead?”
We had no answer for that.
Top gave the big machine a long, hateful look. “Cap’n, I’m two-thirds convinced we ought to put some blaster plasters on that thing and blow it back to Satan. We got a nice airplane waiting outside.”
“Yes,” said Bunny fiercely.
I shook my head. “Blowing it up isn’t our job and we don’t know what will happen if we damage it.”
They didn’t like it, but they nodded. Hell, I didn’t like it, either.
“Let’s gather what intel we can,” I said, “find Erskine and his team, and then get the hell out of Dodge.”
“Hooah,” agreed Top.
“Hooah,” said Bunny, but his voice was small and unemphatic.
We stood in silence, lost in the strangeness of the moment, still caught in the net of whatever had just happened to us. Three soldiers, gasping like beached trout, feeling small and scared.
That’s when we heard a voice say, “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”
INTERLUDE FIVE
“Did my son talk to you about his God Machine?” asked Oscar Bell. He sat on the doctor’s couch, legs crossed, hands resting on his lap. Greene thought he could see a flicker in the man’s eyes. Nerves, perhaps, or excitement.
“Please understand, Mr. Bell, that I encourage an air of unrestricted confidence in my sessions with your son,” said Green. “However, that comes with a certain level of trust. He knows that what he says goes no farther than—”