As Jim made his way along the corridor, he thought he caught the faint wail of an alarm sounding somewhere off in the distance. The main lab building was so well insulated it was hard to make out any sound from the outside. It was probably nothing, and he dismissed the thought.
Jim placed the palm of his hand on the door to the transmission room and paused for a second. Took in a deep breath and exhaled slowly. Thank God, this is almost over, he thought to himself and began to push the door open. Inside, he saw Lorentz talking into his handheld radio. Towering over him was Horatio Mabry, a look of concentration fixed on his face as he stared at the screen over Lorentz’s shoulder.
“Ah! James. Finally!” said Lorentz at the sound of the door opening.
In the stall of the men’s room, Gallagher stared at the plastic calculator he held in his hand. Such a tiny thing, he thought, but at this moment, it hung like the sword of Damocles over the head of everyone in this building; the power of life and death was in his hands, once again. It was a physical manifestation of the Chaos theory these scientists were always getting so excited about—a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil and a storm is unleashed on the other side of the world.
Well let’s see how well that theory played out in the real world.
He pressed the % key.
Forty-Three
The line of protestors stopped just short of the perimeter security fence. They continued singing as they formed a chain of human flesh that stretched for almost three-hundred feet in either direction of the main gate.
Security Chief Calhoun had pulled most of his men to this location—nearly thirty in all—a small number by comparison to the thousands they faced, but the added muscle made Corporal Parsons a lot less nervous. The Chief had assessed the situation immediately upon arriving on scene. He relocated all but a handful of his men to this one choke-point. If the crowd decided to try something stupid, he would ensure they would meet the full force available to him. He had already called central—command and apprised them of the situation. There were already three Huey’s containing a shit-load of backup airborne and making their way to his location.
In twenty minutes, he would have enough firepower at his disposal to repel a small army.
The Chief was not a violent man by nature; if he could resolve this situation peacefully, without putting his men or the protestors in harm’s way, then he would do his utmost to ensure that nobody on either side of the security fence got hurt. He had already grabbed a bullhorn from the security booth and walked purposefully up and down the innermost security fence attempting to talk some kind of sense into those on the other side.
“This is a secure area,” he announced. “You are trespassing on government property. For your own safety, please disperse and move away from the fence.” His amplified voice was barely audible to the armed soldiers assigned to escort him as he strode up and down the fence line. He was being drowned—out by the sound of over two-thousand voices singing some hymn he vaguely recognized. The volume of the protestors’ voices was doubled by those who had remained in the makeshift encampment on the far side of the road. With one unified voice, the massive crowd cried out for deliverance.
“Please,” the soldier pleaded with them, “Move away from the fence.”
A wave of movement passed through the crowd as they simultaneously began unlocking their arms.
“Thank God,” said the soldier to The Chief’s right. “Finally, they’re listening.”
The hymn reached its final crescendo and, as if on some unspoken cue, the mass of protestors threw themselves as one against the high-voltage security fence. Interlacing their fingers with the chain-link, the protestors embraced the current of deadly electricity as it arced through their bodies, scorching their hair, and blistering their skin as bright blue sparks exploded into the air around them like flares. Mouths leapt open in silent screams as thousands of volts contorted their muscles into uncontrollable spasms.
No song leaped from their lips now, just curls of gray smoke that floated into the increasingly cold night air, suddenly redolent with the stink of burning flesh.
Forty-Four
The explosive was a half-centimeter thick and covered the entire inside of the casing of the video camera. Safe in its airtight container, it had easily evaded the fluoroscope scan and the trace-scent ‘sniffer’ employed by the security personnel at the compound’s security checkpoint. The characteristic nitrogen signature was contained safely within the airtight camera casing, concealing the airborne nitrogen-compound vapor which would have betrayed the fact that the camera was actually a cleverly disguised bomb, capable of destroying everything within a thirty-foot blast radius.
When the black powder initiator detonated, it created a shockwave that traveled through the Haywire explosive gel at approximately the speed of sound, breaking down the plastic explosive into its constituent molecular parts. The fuel and oxidizer that, until a millisecond earlier had been chemically bonded into an inert material, was set free and instantly recombined to form a gas. The gas rapidly expanded within the enclosed space of the camera housing until, finally, it exploded outward in a massive burst of heat and light, sending millions of fractured shards of metal and plastic into the air, ripping through everything in their path.
The dull crump of the explosion in the laboratory wing was inaudible over the screams of those sacrificing themselves against the electrified fence, and the yelling of the horrified security personnel as they shouted for the remaining protestors to get back.
In the unattended security booth, a red light suddenly glowed brightly and began flashing insistently on the fire-alarm monitoring board, complemented by the trilling of an audible alarm.
It was all lost to the commotion outside.
Forty-Five
Jim could not remember how he ended up flat on his back in the corridor. The tiled floor was cold against his cheek and he could smell the piney odor of the cleanser the janitor used to clean it.
His head hurt.
There was a deafening ringing in his head, and he could taste the metallic tang of blood in his mouth.
Had he fallen?
His last memory was of heading back to the transmitter room, his hand had been on the handle of the door and then… here he was.
Maybe if he opened his eyes?
The door he had been about to open now lay on its side, blown from all but one of its hinges. It looked like a broken tooth dangling from a crooked mouth. No—wait—it looked like a broken tooth dangling from the mouth of a dragon, because a white acrid smoke was pouring through the open doorway.
The pallid white fingers of smoke crept towards him from the open gash of the doorway. Alarm bells rang somewhere, too. They became louder as the noise in his head subsided.
Jim’s senses and memory suddenly came flooding back. He felt himself abruptly become aware of what was happening, almost like the reverse action of a drain where the dirty water of his memory and senses rushed back up the pipe to fill his mind instead of emptying away.