A great light blared into the abandoned vestibule room. The first strands of that light illuminated a writhing pile of bodies and Gant saw Benjamin Franco wrestling with one of Briggs's feral children and he understood: it had been Franco who had come to the rescue. Franco's bullets had killed Jolly and Briggs; otherwise all that power rising from below would be in the control of a madman.
The light became a tidal wave of energy surging toward the vault door. Gant rolled away, his leg and shoulder screaming.
The energy being smashed part Ronald Briggs, but it did not stop there
General Borman dropped the pistol. It rolled across the floor.
The man who had been little more than a puppet for over twenty years saw it all with crystal-clear clarity. His hand rose to his temples and pushed.
Then the vault door blasted off its hinges, smashed into Harold Borman, turning his body into a jumble of broken bones, and fell to the floor on top of him.
The blue-white mass of energy shot through the vault room, through the vestibule, and along the hall, forcing Sanchez and the other soldiers to dive aside or be smashed to pieces.
Liz lay on the floor to the side of the exposed entryway and watched it soar past like a comet, leaving behind a glowing tendon of smoking plasma.
The countryside around the Red Rock facility shook. The exterior windows and several chunks of the facility's exterior walls and ceiling exploded like a collapsing dam as the energy erupted from within and enveloped the entire complex.
37
Major Thom Gant felt the glow all around him as the alien flowed out the door and beyond. As he did, his eyes glazed over and he was no longer lying on the floor …
… he was surrounded by a storm, standing in a forest … a surreal woodland placed on a stage. So phony that when lightning flashed he saw the shadows of the branches reflect against a gray canvass.
The wind ripped across the façade, casting leaves from the trees. Those leaves warped and dried as they fell, as if the decay of autumn could happen in an instant.
He held his hand aloft to block the wind and to shield himself from the tornado of dried leaves as they swept across. Thom felt no pain in his leg or shoulder, yet he was dreadfully cold. The whole place was cold. Cold and empty and sad.
He staggered forward, looking for something. What was it? Who was it?
Ahead, there, the forest rose and cleared. There was a peak there … a precipice reaching toward a vast nothingness.
Gant moved forward, fighting the wind. A whirling cloud of leaves and sticks followed. There was a person on that ledge ahead. He could not see who it was … not at first … then he saw.
"Jean! Jean!"
His wife stood at the edge of that cliff, looking off toward more nothingness in the distance. A fake void built at the end of the stage.
He shouted and cried but she did not turn.
"Jean! I’m here!"
He approached. She was almost within reach.
Then the swirl of blowing leaves engulfed her.
"No! Jean!"
Her image began to collapse, like those leaves falling from the trees. He heard her say one thing, except he knew it was not Jean Gant speaking but the entity composed of thought that, at that very moment, could probably sense every thought across the planet.
"If you listen, you can hear them screaming."
Then there was nothing but dead, dried foliage. The image of Jean broke apart into decayed pieces. The entire whirling mass moved off the ledge and disappeared.
Thom fell to his knees in the fake woodlands.
Lieutenant Colonel Liz Thunder lay on the floor as the entity filled the chamber en route to points far beyond. Her mind, however, traveled through time, viewing a rapid succession of images torn from her past.
She saw graduation day and a diploma.
She wore an assistant’s jacket at an internship in a hospital.
Her first pair of military fatigues and a counselor’s job at battalion HQ.
Then a place that could have been mistaken for a hospital but was in reality a torture chamber.
Clinical trial one-four-seven. Injecting patient 249 with Blue-17, C variant, at oh-eight-thirty hours.
People writhing and screaming.
My head! What did you put in my head?
Relax … relax … it’s just a side effect … it will pass …
I want out! Open the goddamn door!
Test subject twelve experiencing mental deterioration after fifty-one hours in isolation chamber. Increased breathing, heart rate, and perspiration all noted. Test subject will remain in isolation chamber for another twelve hours.
We should let him out.
No. That will skew the results. He stays.
A hand … reaching at a small window … a bloody hand …
Minds torn asunder, the fragments sifted as if they were prospectors panning for gold nuggets of psychological truth. Soldiers as unsuspecting guinea pigs; waivers for secrecy, withheld medical care, arcane drugs to stimulate mysterious parts of the brain — they were tools to be used in pursuit of … of what?
Not a helping, healing hand but a cold analyst dissecting the human consciousness with no more compassion than a mortician embalming a cadaver.
One man in particular, in his late-twenties with curly black hair. Different from the rest. As close to success as possible. Lying in a bed with restraints holding his legs and ankles.
Are these necessary?
The subject has attempted to harm himself.
But the compound is working?
The results are outstanding.
She leaned in close.
"Peter, can you hear me?"
His eyes opened fast and wide, as if jolted by electricity. It was no longer Peter, but a conduit for something else.
Is this what you are? Is this who you want to be?
The ghost spoke through the lips of a memory: "Can you hear them screaming?"
— The tendon of energy was released from the Red Lab at the heart of the Hell Hole, collapsing the rift behind it and disappearing skyward through Red Rock's broken roof. The entity was complete; entirely free and completely in the dimension of the physical.
It pulled away from the blue marble world and rocketed off into the depths of space, toward the distant reaches of the galaxy; from the infinitely small to the infinitely large.
38
Major Thom Gant limped across the smashed-open threshold into the vault room.
The flow of energy, the glow, it was all gone. Its aftermath, however, lingered.
The first thing Thom saw after his eyes adjusted to the brilliant white of the room was the vault door, knocked over, and laying atop the broken, dead body of General Harold Borman.
Across that room he saw movement. He saw Corporal Sanchez find his feet, although he wobbled. Others — soldiers working the vestibule — massaging their heads and craning their necks as if waking from some kind of sleep.
He pointed back into the gaping black hole and called out, "Medics! I have a man down in there."
A pair of soldiers stepped forward then stopped, realizing they stared into the mouth of the Hell Hole.
"It's okay," Gant huffed, "the danger has passed."
They moved in with sidearms drawn. A moment later two more soldiers followed, one carrying a medical bag.
Thom saw Liz lying on the floor, holding a hand to her head. He limped over and knelt next to her.