“Not me,” Carroll said with a shake of his head. “Burrows was going to get me out. That was our deal. One last hunt.”
“Bullshit. Get you out? Out of where? You’ve already absorbed enough rads to kill you. Die here or die in a Navy hospital, what difference does it make?”
“You don’t get it. I wasn’t going to die. Burrows was going to get me frozen. Cryogenics, just like Walt fuckin’ Disney.”
For a moment Blake was taken aback. “Why?”
“Twenty years, I been huntin’ those things. Twenty years of watching the tests and cleaning up afterwards and we never once cracked the walls of heaven. Never saw no cherubs, just those… things,” he gestured toward the monster’s carcass before taking a step toward Blake. “You see, I figured it out. There’s no heaven, only hell. Just us and them. I’ve seen the truth. I know where we go when we die and I ain’t planning on dying.”
The old man was clearly crazy, but then so was this whole situation and unfortunately Carroll was the closest thing Blake had to an expert on this stuff, so he was just going to have to deal with the old man.
“Look, I’m sure whatever deal Burrows promised you is still on the table. We just need to complete our mission and get clear of this storm so we can contact base.”
That wasn’t going to be as easy as it sounded. Not without a vehicle. “Lyons! What’s the news on the Stryker?”
Lyons came over shaking his head. “We could maybe right it if we had time. We can dig her out and try to roll her with the jack, but she’s got two shredded wheels and the front axle is busted.” He glanced back at the Stryker. “We could maybe remove the wheels from that axle and use them to replace the shredded tyres but that’s a hell of a job in the field.”
Blake nodded. “Okay. Better get started then. Everyone’s going to have to pitch in. That means you too, Carroll!”
But Carroll wasn’t looking at him. He was staring down at the candle that still burned despite the raging storm. Its flame was a brilliant white tongue of fire almost six inches long and pointing in the direction of the hypocenter. It seemed their mission was far from over.
They followed the direction set by the candle’s flame. It was tough going. The JSLIST suits had not been designed with operator comfort in mind and they were weighed down with as much equipment from the Stryker as they could carry.
Blake almost had to physically carry Carroll too. The old man seemed truly terrified of dying. Once he had realized this was no normal hunt, his whole demeanor had changed. But the man realized being alone was no guarantee of safety either, so he had eventually agreed to come with them.
Blake tried to keep him talking, asking him all kinds of questions about his time at the Nevada Proving Grounds. It helped to lighten his mood somewhat and it was all useful information.
“What about that shield thing?” Blake asked. “How does that work?”
“It’s called a circle of protection. It’s a holy space. Things work differently inside it, like the candle.”
“And the bad guys can’t get in?” Blake asked as they trudged on.
“Nothing can get in until the circle is broken from the inside.”
“Hey, Sarge!” said Lyons. “How do I get me one of those?”
“It won’t work for just anyone, son,” Carroll replied. “It takes practise and something to focus your faith on.”
“The chain?” Blake asked.
“Chain, chalk… it doesn’t really matter.”
The storm grew stronger until pushing through the wind felt like trying to walk underwater. Then, without warning it was gone.
Something else disappeared too; the constant clicking from their portable Geiger counter. Just seconds ago it had been so fast that it had sounded like the white noise between radio stations. Blake had just tuned it out. Now it was gone altogether.
Blake looked to Pollin who was holding the small instrument. “Fault?”
“No, Sergeant, not that I can tell. Just no reading. Not even normal background radiation.”
Blake spotted something glinting ahead; Howard had seen it too.
“What the hell is that?” the marine asked.
It hung, glinting in mid-air. It appeared to be metal — twisted and ridged like a section of spine from some metal beast.
“It’s a crankshaft,” Lyons said. “Part of one anyway.”
He was right. It had been scoured clean and gleamed like it was freshly-milled. It hung impossibly in the air. Blake waved his rifle barrel above and below it and then to the sides, but there was nothing holding it up. It was hovering.
He looked to Carroll. “You want to fill us in on why gravity seems to have taken a day off?”
“Search me,” Carroll replied with a shrug. “I’ve never seen anything like that before.”
Blake reached out and carefully touched the crankshaft. It felt entirely normal and entirely solid. After his first tentative touch he wrapped a fist around it and pulled, but it wouldn’t budge. He would have had more of a chance to right the fifteen-ton Stryker than to budge the floating crankshaft.
“There’s more over here,” Fernandez said. Blake looked over and saw a tiny metal leaf floating in mid-air — a piece of torn metal plate with viciously sharp and jagged edges.
“There’s paint underneath,” Fernandez said.
Blake peered beneath; in a hollow protected from the wind, some of the original paint remained.
They moved onwards through a cloud of suspended debris — not just metal, but also splinters of charred wood and what looked like shards of black glass fused from the Arizona sand itself.
The debris grew thicker, forcing them to weave through a three-dimensional maze of immovable particles until they eventually came to the source.
It was a house, or rather the remains of one. It seemed to have been caught mid — explosion. The troupe faced the back wall of the property. It was still relatively intact; the door was fixed in its frame, hanging open. A rear window hung like a shattered cloud just outside its frame. The front of the house was just gone. Through the open door Blake could see the front rooms standing open to the street, its contents pushed against the walls as if a great broom had swept through and cleaned the room furniture and all.
To the left and right other houses defined the edge of a dirt road.
“What the hell is this place?” Pollin asked.
“Ghost town,” Fernandez said. “I saw one on Sixty Minutes. There’re ghost towns all over this county, old mining towns just abandoned after the silver dried up. Nothing else out here worth staying for, so folks just up and walked away.”
“Not everyone,” Lyons said, pointing to a car beside the house. Like everything else, it had been frozen at the moment of the explosion. The car stood almost upright in a permanent, impossible pirouette around one of its front wheels, but apart from that it looked to be fairly new and in good condition. It was certainly better than any abandoned vehicle should be after years in the desert.
“Looks like someone set up here. You think it was the terrorists?” Blake asked.
“Drug runners more like, or maybe organised people smugglers,” Fernandez replied.
Blake glanced at Carroll and noted the look of alarm on his face. “Carroll, you got any idea how much energy it would take to freeze a town like this?”
“The energy doesn’t freeze. The life force gets replaced.” Carroll’s frown persisted. “At the moment of detonation, when the forces are strong enough to tear open the portal between dimensions, any life extinguished here gets replaced from over there. That’s it. There is no freezing.” He shook his head “I’ve never seen anything like it. This is something new.”
“Man, that is so not what I wanted to hear,” said Lyons.