The Rising(103)
“Move!” Raiff wailed. “Don’t stop!”
And they hurtled toward the stairwell drilled down farther than the eye could see, while Raiff swung toward the cyborg guards converging on him.
104
DESCENDING SPIRAL
“DON’T LOOK BACK!” ALEX yelled over the incessant wail to Sam. “And don’t leave me!”
“Don’t worry!”
She clung to him, not about to let go. The stairwell spiraling downward was closer to them than it had seemed. They stepped onto the platform at its top, even with the floor of the catwalk, together.
And then the stairwell started to move.
At first, Sam thought it was an illusion, then she realized, no, this was really happening. The stairwell was indeed churning, picking up speed on a descending spiral that pushed the air past them in gushes.
“Close your eyes!” Alex ordered, hugging her tight against him.
The spiraling descent continued, everything around them visible only as a whirling blur. Sam opened her eyes. She’d always imagined she could see the miniscule particles that made up air rippling before her and that’s what this felt like now, as if she were watching the air itself swirl around them.
She was still hugging Alex when the swirling seemed to slow, an entirely new phenomenon starting to sharpen around them. She recalled Donati’s and the professor’s descriptions of the particle accelerator they’d constructed at Laboratory Z and realized she was looking at what could only be a far more sophisticated and technologically advanced version of that.
Enabling the wormhole that would open again from the other side. A cylindrical, tubular channel of black steel interlaced with thick glass panels, fifteen feet or so in height and wide enough for a car to pass through. It reminded Sam of the Chunnel, which ran beneath the English Channel connecting Britain and France. If she remembered her lessons correctly, once activated a particle accelerator of this size and magnitude would generate power on a millisecond level equal to that of the grid powering an entire city or even state.
“Oh, shit,” she heard Alex say, figuring he was seeing the same thing she was.
Until her vision cleared, settling on a shape standing before them that wasn’t totally there.
“Hello again, Alex,” said the ash man.
*
Raiff felt the handle of his stick weapon heating up and thought it into its whip form as the first wave of cyborgs descended upon him and Donati. Keeping the NASA scientist close behind him on the catwalk, Raiff lashed the whip out, up and down, side to side, slicing through everything in its path. The air filled with a baked-rubber-and-hot-steel scent, mixed with the corrosive odor of burned wiring. Residue of what his cuts with the whip-like weapon had left in its path: broken machines collapsing in heaps to the ground.
Raiff continued retracing their steps back to the elevator, a junkyard left in his wake. The first wave of androids weren’t equipped with weapons but the second wave, reinforcements surging up from the levels below, carried plasma rifles every bit the equal of his whip and capable of working at much greater distances. Up close, along the narrow width and close confines of the catwalk, which forced the cyborgs into a virtual single-file attack, Raiff’s whip proved enough to hold them at bay all the way back to the elevator.
Raiff shoved Donati into the open cab ahead of him and pressed the “up” arrow. The door slid closed just ahead of the cyborgs opening fire, their plasma rounds boring effortlessly through the elevator’s old-fashioned heavy steel door as the cab shook into hydraulic motion.
“Are we supposed to outrun them?” Donati managed to say between gasps.
“I haven’t figured that part out yet,” Raiff told him.
“What about—”
“He’ll be fine. The girl too.”
“You can’t know that.”
Raiff’s stare bore into Donati’s. “Yes, I can.”
The elevator trembled to a halt, squealed into place. The door slid open.
“Don’t goddamn move!” ordered Rathman.
*
The ash man’s voice sounded like pieces of ground glass rubbing against each other. Utterances somehow stringing themselves into words. He stood before them maybe a dozen feet in front of the entrance to the particle accelerator, which once activated would trigger the sequence ending the world as it was known today. Maybe ten feet before Alex and Sam.
“I didn’t give you enough credit, Alex,” the ash man continued. “I never thought you would get this far, especially so fast.”
“I had help,” Alex told him, stepping protectively in front of Sam.
“You don’t understand.”
“What don’t I understand?”
“The truth, who you really are. Have you stopped to think why you, why an infant, was made guardian of knowledge vital to our civilization?”
“I haven’t had a lot of time to think lately.”
The ash man seemed to move, or float, closer, looming larger in one moment than he had in the last. “I should have told you the truth of your identity the first time we met.”
“After you killed my parents, you piece of shit!”
The ash man looked utterly unmoved by Alex’s feisty show of emotion. “The truth of who you are and why you were taken through one wormhole lies on the other side of this one,” he said in that ground-glass voice, tilting his gaze toward the tunnel, which weaved its way beneath Alcatraz Island. Then he extended a grainy hand forward, the palm seeming almost translucent. “Join me on that other side, Alex. We can take the girl with us if you wish.”