The Rising(105)
The ash man seemed to float through the air, slipping through the entrance, where his form stretched out to the length of the ceiling, elongated, as if it were made of rubber. Then Sam watched a shower of lightning bolt–like sparks erupt, firing and dancing everywhere, seeming to both strike and emanate from him at the same time.
“Noooooooooooooo!” the ash man wailed.
And then he was gone.
What causes a spark? Sam thought, recalling her lesson with Alex about just this time yesterday in the hospital. A collision of positive and negative energy.
“Come on!” Alex said and tugged her away from the scene unfolding before them, back toward the spiral stairwell that had brought them down here.
Sam rushed toward it with him, aware of the sparks both increasing and thickening, hopefully doing their part to short-out the entire mechanics of the wormhole itself. She ducked into the spiraling stairwell with Alex, felt it starting to spin wildly around them as the glass and steel forming the particle accelerator began to rupture and crack near its entrance and then along its endless reach, faster than her eye could process.
Along with the ash man himself, his image looking like crack lines spreading across fine porcelain.
“Alex!” he screamed. “Allllllexxxxxxxxxx…”
His voice crackling in the last moment before the accelerator exploded silently in a final gush of blinding white light and the stairwell sucked them back upward.
*
Alex gazed about him. He felt exactly as he had the moment before, but this moment found him outside in another place and time entirely: standing with his parents in San Francisco’s Chinatown, celebrating the largest Chinese New Year festival outside of China itself. People packed both sides of a street cluttered with an endless display of colorful floats and displays crawling along.
It had always been one of his parents’ favorite days of the year, the one that still brought a connection to their homeland. But this was different than a dream, since Alex was well aware he couldn’t possibly be here. This was just a transitory illusion of some kind triggered by a boyhood memory.
Except when he looked down he found himself still wearing the jeans, shirt, and sneakers he’d changed into back at his house.
What’s happening?
Alex had no idea, except that it felt real. Like some cosmic trick the wormhole’s destruction was playing on the whole space-time continuum. Like he was in some kind of an alternate reality, where he might be able to remain if he chose. Turn his back on all of it, make believe none of it had ever happened. His parents would be alive again and he with them. Who could blame him?
He felt an incredible surge of relief, happiness, as if he’d woken from a terrible nightmare to the realization everything was fine and good after all. How much he wanted to stay with his parents and just watch the floats passing by on the street before them.
But then the ash man slid by, riding a diesel-powered fire-breathing dragon, seeking him out amid the crowd viewing the parade and pointing a translucent finger Alex’s way.
Was this his doing, his way of trapping Alex? Or was it truly a quantum anomaly a million times more powerful than the destruction of Laboratory Z?
The answers didn’t matter, because Alex didn’t belong here. As safe and secure as he felt on that city street with his parents, his world was still a millisecond behind him, where this scene had never really happened. And if he stayed here, if he stayed, then Sam could be lost forever in some celestial ether, trapped literally between worlds, as represented by the spiral stairwell spinning so fast that the world ceased to exist beyond it.
Sam! Alex called in his mind. Sam!
She wasn’t there at all, then very far away but drawing closer, until she was back in his arms and he was hugging her tight.
*
The cyborgs were still converging on the elevator, just seeming to take note of Raiff’s and Donati’s presence, when something that looked like an electrical storm burst upward through the floor. The machines froze in place, locked up solid, as if frozen by a frigid blast of ice.
“Raiff!” the Guardian heard, recognizing Dancer’s voice from the area of a nearby stairwell.
Then he watched the boy lead Samantha through what looked like a tunnel carved out of the increasing shower of sparks and flames. It rocketed up and through the ceiling, churning its displaced energy toward the sky. A vast, swirling whirlpool that Raiff imagined, like a vortex, would suck everything within its reach into its field.
“Don’t look at it!” Alex cried out, clutching Sam so close to him they seemed extensions of the same person. “Follow me!”
Raiff did, dragging Donati along with him by one hand and retracting his whip in the other, weaving his way through the seized-up forms of the androids, the light gone from their eyes, starting to stink of burned metal and rubber. For a long moment he couldn’t breathe and thought he was holding his breath, until he realized there was no air to breathe, no air at all. Nothing but a vacuum they seemed to soar through, Raiff having no sense of his feet touching the floor as he moved all the way to the main entrance to the prison.
The door had already collapsed before them, the walls cracking in lines widening enough to let the blackness of the night pour through. They rushed through what had been the prison yard, surging downhill without ever looking back, Raiff nonetheless struck by the sensation that the vacuum was on their tail, trying to suck them into the vortex.