Linkage: The Narrows of Time (12 page)

Cherekos scribbled more notes into his
incident report.

Fire and rescue personnel ran past him
carrying hoses, stretchers, ladders, and medical equipment. News
reporters came rushing up to the scene with their cameras in tow.
Some were out of breath, which Lucas assumed was due to them having
to park several blocks away. The mall was normally a pedestrian
only zone; vehicles didn’t have access.

“How large would you estimate the light to
be?”

“I couldn’t look at it directly,” Lucas
replied, looking back at the theatre while thinking about it for a
few moments. “I’d say about the same size as the area that’s
missing. Maybe a bit smaller?”

“Did you see anything unusual before the
flash? Like someone who didn’t belong? Someone acting suspicious,
maybe?”

Lucas shook his head. “All I remember was the
students lining up for the movie.”

Helicopters buzzed overhead, flooding the
scene with swirling spotlights. Lucas had a difficult time hearing
the cop over the deafening rotors chopping through the cool desert
air.

“How many students were in line?” Cherekos
yelled.

Lucas shouted back. “Best guess? Maybe two
hundred. The line was fairly long.”

Cherekos seemed to be making a visual count
of the human remains along the steps. Then he said, “What happened
to the rest of the students?”

“They vanished into thin air, just like the
building.”

Cherekos shook his head slightly and mouthed
the words “vanished into thin air” as he wrote a few more notes.
Two additional officers joined the cop and stood to his left. Based
on their body language, Lucas thought they were waiting for
instructions.

“What happened next?” Cherekos asked.

“I felt a breeze pull me toward the Student
Union.”

“Pull you? Do you mean pushed, like in
wind?”

“No, it was more like I was being sucked into
the crater. It pulled at me, from the front.”

The officer’s stopped writing and looked at
Lucas with his left eyebrow raised. “Sir, have you been drinking
tonight?”

“No, officer, I don’t drink.
Ever
.”

Cherekos clicked his pen, put it into his
shirt pocket, and closed his incident report with more force than
necessary.

“I know this sounds crazy, Officer, but I’m
telling you the truth.”

“Okay, sir, I think we have all we need.
Thank you for your time.”

Cherekos stepped away and began a private
discussion with his officers. Lucas saw him reach for the radio
transmitter clinging to his upper chest.

The police had erected a series of
sawhorse-style barricades around the scene, behind Lucas. They were
in the process of linking them together with yellow
DO NOT
CROSS
police tape.

After a minute, Cherekos and his fellow
officers broke their huddle to escort Lucas and the ever-growing
number of paparazzi to the other side of barricades. Lucas waited
there for fifteen minutes as hundreds of civilians filtered into
the mall area and congregated alongside him. Many of them snapped
photos and shot video of the scene with their smart phones.

Lucas could barely keep his eyes open and
decided to walk the mile and a half home before he fell asleep
standing up by the barricades. He needed to check on Drew, too.

* * *

Lucas didn’t feel like waiting for the
elevator, so he climbed up the three flights of stairs. He unlocked
the apartment door, removed his shoes, and then slipped past Drew’s
bed. Drew was snoring as he lay on his left side, his back to the
room.

Lucas sat at the study desk and turned on his
computer. While he waited for the sign-on screen to appear, he
pulled the flash drive out of his pocket and put it on the desk,
careful not to damage it. Once logged onto his computer, he
connected the flash drive with one of the two dozen electronic
cables he kept stuffed inside the bottom drawer. He turned down the
computer’s speaker system and began to play back the video footage
on the screen. The audio was just loud enough for him to hear.

The video camera’s operator had been waiting
in the movie line with his three friends—two young women and one
older guy who wore a baseball cap with a two-inch blue-and-red
block-letter A on the front. The camera captured them laughing and
joking around about the movie they were about to see.

Lucas fast-forwarded the recording to a frame
just before the flash appeared. The camera’s time stamp read 11:52
PM. He reviewed the incident in super-slow motion, playing the
recording frame by frame, until he came to the first appearance of
blinding light. It started as a microscopic point of light, just to
the left of the Student Union’s entrance door, before stretching
vertically and then horizontally until the camera’s lens was
inundated with light. His suspicions were confirmed: The theatre
flash, though more powerful and larger, was a near perfect copy of
the one they’d seen inside their reactor’s core. In addition,
there’d been the black powder he’d found inside both the crater and
in the reactor’s core. The evidence was unmistakable. They were
related.

He walked over to his brother’s bed and shook
him on the arm several times. “Drew, you need to wake up. We have
to talk.”

Chapter
10

Sunday, December 23

Lucas woke up at 10:24 Sunday morning after a
lousy night’s sleep, mentally replaying last night’s horror show
repeatedly until he finally feel asleep around 4:30 AM. He slid
deep under the covers and curled up in a ball, squeezing a second
pillow between his arms, then he realized he wasn’t hearing his
brother snoring or moving around in the room.

He sat up and looked at Drew’s bed. There was
no sign of him or his wheelchair. He hopped out of bed, got
dressed, and checked Drew’s nightstand, but his brother’s wallet,
keys, and shuttle pass were all missing. It was unusual for Drew to
venture off without informing him first. He needed to find him.

The TV was on in the main room but there was
no sound. Its remote control was on top of the kitchen table next
to two slices of toast, one of which had a bite missing. A nearly
full glass of milk was sitting next to a fresh tub of margarine and
a butter knife.

The front blinds were closed, and so was the
front door, though its two-sided deadbolt was locked. He unlocked
the door, went outside, and wandered barefoot along the catwalk to
the elevator. He could see dozens of people down below, loading
their vehicles with their belongings. From his view, it looked like
everyone was leaving town. He couldn’t blame them. He would have
joined them if he could.

He checked the laundry room on the first
floor—no sign of Drew. He knocked on the manager’s door, but no one
answered. He asked several of his fleeing neighbors if they had
seen Drew, but none had.

He waved at little Cindy Mack who was
standing beside her father while he packed the trunk of their car.
She came running up to him, wrapping her arms around his waist. He
bent down to give her a real hug.

She started crying. “Lucas, I don’t want to
leave. But my dad says we have to go.”

“It’ll be okay, Cindy. Your dad’s right, it’s
not safe for you to stay here.”

“But I’ll never see you again.”

“Sure you will,” he said, looking her in the
eyes. “When this is all over, I’ll be right here waiting for you by
the swing set. Okay?”

She smiled at him, sniffed, wiped off her
tears, and then ran back to her dad.

Cindy was one of the few kids in the
apartment complex, and the only one he liked. Maybe it was because
she was the only one who liked him. Her parents both worked during
the day, leaving her to play by herself on the swing set in the
back of the apartment after school. He had gotten to know her a few
months earlier when she’d fallen off the swing and scraped one of
her knees. He was on his way out to the dumpster with a bag of
trash when he found her sitting on the ground, crying. He used the
garden hose to clean out the dirt and gravel from her wound, and
then found a bandage to cover the scrape.

She took a shining to him and they talked a
couple times a week, usually by the swing set. She was a quiet, but
cheerful girl in the fourth grade, who carried an empty white purse
with her everywhere she went. He worried for her safety since she
was left alone for two hours each day after school until her
parents came home from work. He often looked out the bedroom window
to check on her while she played on the swings.

He went back upstairs to the apartment and
changed clothes, still thinking of Cindy’s arms wrapped tightly
around him. If something happened to her because of his negligence
in the lab, he would never forgive himself.

Once he had his shoes and socks on, he stood
in front of the TV, turned on the sound, and hit the remote to scan
through several channels. Every station was broadcasting live from
the Student Union. Cameramen in helicopters were circling above the
Student Union, capturing the best angles of the damage they
could.

“Shit, it looks much worse from the air,” he
said.

He realized there were no body fragments
littering the theatre’s steps. He assumed CSI had collected the
evidence and taken it back to their lab.

Lucas settled in to watch his favorite
network news station, taking a seat on the edge of their couch.
News correspondents were interviewing campus officials and law
enforcement. He sat back and put his arm up on the sofa’s back
cushion, catching a whiff of his left forearm. Even after last
night’s hot shower, he could still smell the stench of burnt hair
and severed flesh on his skin. He wondered how many scrubbings it
would take to get rid of the stink.

Most of the network’s reporters, and a few of
their interviewees, offered opinions on what had happened. Some
believed it was merely an accident, like a gas explosion. Others
thought it might have been a terrorist attack, with some form of
incendiary device as the weapon.

He was flabbergasted when no one mentioned
the lack of building rubble or the bloodless body parts. He
wondered if anyone was paying attention. The missing evidence was
just as important as the tangible evidence.

When law enforcement officials were asked for
a cause, they declined to comment, giving the police department’s
typical response, “The investigation is still ongoing.”

Lucas could see the Tucson Bomb Squad in the
background, milling about, working their detection equipment,
scanning inch-by-inch for chemical and radiological evidence.

The local police were straining to hold back
the crowd of thousands that surrounded the scene. Many observers
were snapping photos and recording their own video footage.
Firefighters were keeping watch on the theatre’s exterior,
equipment at the ready; smoke still billowed out from the sides of
the damaged structure.

When the camera swung around to the front of
the theatre's steps, it showed two FBI agents chatting with the
Chief of Police. One of the FBI agents looked a lot like the
redheaded security guard that broke up the skirmish with the rugby
players in the cafeteria. "Damn, that guy could be his twin," Lucas
mumbled. Then the camera panned down to show Drew sitting in his
wheelchair. He was talking with the FBI agents.

"Drew, what the hell are you doing?" he
yelled at the screen.

Standing only a few feet behind his brother
was Randol Larson, the pretentious attorney from the Advisory
Committee.

“Damn it to hell,” Lucas said, throwing down
the remote control. He raced out the door, down the hall, down the
stairs, and ran the 1.5 miles to the Student Union. He was out of
breath when he arrived.

He checked the pandemonium to figure out the
shortest route he had to Drew, but he couldn’t see over the crowd.
He climbed up on a short retaining wall to his right. He held on to
the branch of a nearby tree to balance himself while he stared over
the crowd. He could see the front of the Student Union, but not
Drew. There were too many people blocking his view. He figured he
could swing around to the right to bypass as much of the horde as
possible, cutting through the crowd’s outside edge to get to
Drew.

He jumped down from the cement wall, which
caused a slight pain in his right shin. After narrowly avoiding a
broken beer bottle and a well-concealed sprinkler head, he
navigated his way to the front right sector of the mob. He said,
“Excuse me,” “pardon me,” and “coming through,” as he worked his
way into the crowd with an outstretched arm.

A police barricade stopped his progress when
he reached the front row. He could see the back of Drew’s head only
fifty feet away. He called out Drew’s name several times, but his
brother didn’t react. The crowd noise and the helicopters whirling
overhead were almost deafening.

One of several police officers standing guard
was just to his left, and just inside the perimeter. He hoped to
convince the cop to let him inside the barricade. He just needed to
think of the proper excuse.

“Hi, Officer, I’m Dr. Ramsay of the
Astrophysics Department. I may be able to help you figure out what
caused this.”

The man looked at Lucas and laughed. “Yeah,
right. Astrophysics Department. What are you, eighteen?”

Lucas pushed closer to the man. “I know I
look young, but trust me, I’m a physicist with the university. I
can help you, but you need to let me inside.”

“That’s not going to happen. Now step
back.”

Lucas reached for his back left pocket,
realizing instantly that he’d left his wallet in the apartment.
While he was considering his options, the crowd noise faded and
became silent. The only sounds came form the helicopters. Then,
like a tidal wave traveling atop the ocean, each bystander turned
in succession to face the east end of the grassy mall.