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  What I realized when I looked at this man was unnerving. He was taller than I was, taller than Mike Wu, probably six three or so.

  As I pulled off his protective helmet, I told Sunny, “These aren’t the guys, Sunny. These aren’t the guys Mike Wu sent. They must have run into the others and were helping to find us.”

  I turned to my captive and got up real close and personal to the back of his head. I didn’t need the assault rifle I had in my hands to intimidate him, he probably knew that. Still it made me feel more secure.

  “What about it, dipshit?” I asked him. “Are the rest right outside?”

  He nodded slowly.

  Sunny cried out, “Fast forward.”

  As I look to the door, the doorknob turns.

  * * *

  I find myself in the eternal vortex of space and time once again, traveling through the ethereal gateway into the universal matrix. This time my trip through is accelerated, supercharged. As my spinning stops, the never-ending grid of symbols and figures appear before me, and I realize I have none of my own coordinating numerals for use in relating to my quest of the immediate future. I make the numbers up in my head, and they materialize in front of my eyes like the ones Sunny had given me before. I grab and pull frantically at the grid to find their match, hopeful, somehow, I can uncover the future and the key to stop what seems inevitable.

  I come upon my numbers quickly, drive my face through the reflective portal and begin to view what is to come. Again, a brilliant light flashes unexpectedly.

  Suddenly back in the morgue, I’m watching the door with a sort of ghost-like double vision. The morgue doorknob stops moving in the more opaque view, what I guess is real-time. But the door opens slightly in the ghostly one, which I figure is the future. A voice calls in the present, “Briggs, Carlson, you okay?”

  I elbow my prisoner. He knows exactly what I want him to say and the consequences of not obeying.

  “Yeah, we’re okay,” he says. “We got ‘em.”

  I see the door begin to open in the apparition — the future. A head pokes through, and I witness my own see-through, phantom-like arms bring up the M-16 in my hands and shoot at the intruder. Still in the future, they lob a hand grenade through the door, and it cracks onto the floor and explodes in a mighty burst. We are all dead in this blood-splattered and flesh-ripped future, and the double vision ends.

  * * *

  As the door opened in present time reality, I didn’t wait for a head to poke through to shoot. Instead, I pulled my captive from the wall and shoved him toward the face emerging from the doorway. I followed, rushing my prisoner nearly off his feet until we hit the edge of the slightly open door, and I forced him through. I grabbed our other prisoner — the one Sunny shot in the hand — and found a hand grenade hooked at his side. Pulling it free as the other two antagonists rolled out onto the hall floor, I shoved the injured one out the door. After yanking the pin out and tossing the grenade, the only thing I could hear was running feet.

  I went to Sunny and leaned over her body on the table protectively. She was groggy, listless. I felt something slip into my pocket. Without taking the time to check, I figured it was her pistol.

  “You might need this,” she said.

  “Brace yourself, Sunny,” I said, but her eyes were closed, and she didn’t respond. I hugged her tightly.

  * * *

  The explosion throws the door wide, and I feel myself falling toward the floor in slow motion. Once again, I enter the vortex passageway to the matrix.

  I spin rapidly. However, this time in my journey into the ether, Sunny comes with me as I clutch the autopsy table she lays on. We revolve wildly for minutes, hours, or perhaps only milliseconds, until the universal matrix appears before us. And I realize why I have returned.

  I climb hand over foot through the symbols making up the matrix’s grid, this time looking for answers, not numbers. The whole thing is becoming more familiar to me with each quest. Behind me, I pull Sunny one row of numbers at a time. When I come to a set of figures that are somehow familiar, I stop. The pool-like portal appears in front of me, and I push my face into it immediately.

  The world has changed. My vantage point is above what had been Mt. Rainy. In the kind of lunar landscape spreading before me, no visual evidence appears that it had been a mountain at one time, but I know it had been. Now it is merely a crater. I look toward Gold Rush, and it has disappeared, also. The trees and buildings are gone, not even a board or a piece of roofing to be found. It has become nothing more than a barren plateau, now perhaps a day after the nuclear blasts, only long enough for the smoke and dust cloud to dissipate.

  I don’t like this near future. I pull out from it and struggle forth for a new set of integers, for a glimpse of something that can help. I stop at the next random symbols I feel somehow connected to. This time what I find gives me more hope when I push my face through. I am looking from the end of a cave or tunnel of some kind. The eastern sky glows from a sun that will rise in a matter of minutes. To my left is a small trail that leads away, probably winding between two mountains I see in the distance. I turn to the right and see only more mountains.

  Below me is an airfield. Two large passenger planes are loading with cargo and people I am sure are Xiang’s essential personnel. The planes look like Boeing 747s. They are completely white with what few markings they have being small and indistinguishable from my distance. A smaller jet is taking off from the airfield, and I zoom inside it to find Dr. Xiang. He looks through the oval window to his side at what he is leaving behind and he smiles.

  I want to gaze at this future longer, inspect these jumbo jets on the airfield, but I begin spinning yet again. Sunny slips from my fingers and falls, swirling slowly away, into a cosmic abyss. I grab for the matrix and think I’ve found a solid hold, but the symbols in my hands and at my feet also begin falling, tumbling away. I grab for more, and they too drop from my grasp. The entire grid work moves around me, plummeting into nothingness. The numerals, letters and symbols cascade like a waterfall, flowing like a landslide. I scamper as if a rat on a burning curtain, until finally, I run out of numerals and fall with them, twirling in a cyclonic storm of symbols.

  * * *

  I felt the floor of the morgue beneath my back and opened my eyes.

  Mike Wu stood over me with a smile on his face.

  Sunny’s voice said, “Fast forward,” and Wu turned to her on the table above me.

  * * *

  I immediately see the double vision again, and this time without transcending into the matrix.

  In the ghost view, Wu looks at Sunny, his stare — the deadly brainwave projection — causing her body to buckle. Her arm falls limply over the side of the table. He faces me and blood immediately comes to my nose, ears and eyes, and as my body quakes a final time, Chief Dailey rushes into the room and gazes in horror at my dead body.

  * * *

  In the present view, Wu looked toward Sunny. Knowing I had but a fraction of a second to affect the future, I placed my toe squarely to the crotch of Mike Wu’s protective-cupped trousers.

  With him wearing the shielding jock, my kick didn’t hurt him much, but it did divert his glare from Sunny and back to me.

  I found the helmet of the security guard I’d captured earlier in my left hand and figured if it had worked as a weapon against Wu before, it might again. I flung it at his face.

  He caught the thing, partly with his hands, partly with his chin, and he staggered back. It took him but a second to recover and step up to me again, and his gaze was fearful.

  I held my head and tried to combat his psychic energy with mine. The floor trembled. The room, the walls, the ceiling, even the autopsy tables began emitting a low-pitched hum, reverberating throughout and increasing to a cacophony. The metal tables began to jump in a quaking dance. I felt blood trickle from my nose. My vision became blurry. Fluid ran from my ears.

  In my bleary vision, I thought I noticed a rivulet of blood spring
from Wu’s nose, but I knew it would be too little too late. Then, in my peripheral vision, I saw the morgue door open and a figure moved behind Wu. I had delayed Wu long enough for the cavalry to arrive. Wu ducked as if pummeled in the back of the head, then fell. Chief Dailey now stood over us, a Colt .357 revolver in his hand.

  “Damn, boy,” he said. “I thought you was dead.”

  He noticed me nervously watching the door.

  “Don’t worry about the others. I sent ‘em away. Told ‘em Wu and I would do the cleanup.”

  He held his hand out and helped me to my feet. I leaned against the table next to Sunny’s. I held my head with one hand, my pain subsiding quickly. I looked at Sunny.

  “You okay?” I asked before I noticed her eyes were closed. “Sunny.”

  The chief checked her heartbeat at her throat. Checked her eyes. “Pulse is good. Looks like she’s in a deep sleep.”

  I thought about Dr. Yumi saying she would probably be passing in and out of consciousness for a while, and I hoped that was all it was.

  The chief turned to me. “Listen, son. I’m not here to hurt you. You know that, don’t you.”

  I remembered the video made before I woke up in my bedroom, the chief placing the warning note under the soap. What else could I do but consider him an ally.

  “Do I have a choice?” I frowned at him. “I trust you.”

  “I guess you do or you’d have killed me by now.”

  I gave him a slight nod, not knowing for sure how my powers worked or how to turn them on or off. “We’ve got to get everyone out of here, Chief, out of Gold Rush, too.”

  “I already got the evacuation started in town. My boys are sortin’ the marbles. They’re gettin’ all the civilians packed in cars and lined up on the highway out of here. The abductees are on their way here. I have no idea what’s going to happen to them. Maybe Xiang will have a change of heart and take a few of them with him. Otherwise, can’t do much until Xiang leaves. If he finds out about the native folks skidaddling, no tellin’ what he’d come up with to stop ‘em. Even in the best hopes, I can’t see how we can save more than a few dozen.”

  “Civilians and abductees?”

  “Yeah. You know, the ones from here and the ones they snatched. If one of Xiang’s men radios him about people leaving . . .” He pulled out his walky-talky and frowned at it.

  “Here,” I said, “let me fix that for you.”

  I felt an electrical pulse from my cranium, and the radio popped. The chief dropped the thing as smoke streamed out and it sizzled.

  He smiled. “Damn, boy!”

  “I believe that should have taken care of all the radios that were turned on.”

  He nodded. “One of these days, you’ll have to show me how you did that.”

  “I hope I get a chance.”

  He grew serious. “I’ll be expected to leave with Dr. Xiang. I’m not sure how, yet but I’ll try to get away from him at the last minute and get back to help you folks. I’ll get Wu out of here. If he doesn’t get back to Dr. Xiang soon, Xiang will come looking for him with a whole mess of security on his coattails. We don’t want that. I’ll wake up Wu and tell him I found you dead and him unconscious, that this lady, here, was holding a gun. Figured she’d hit him over the head with it, and I shot her. I’ll convince them you’re both dead, and that’s that. You two get the hell out of here. Yumi says you’ve got a chopper waiting, so get it called in and get your asses out. We’ve got less than two hours before the shit really hits the rotor blade. And you’ve got to be long gone before that happens.”

  “My son and her husband are still here.”

  Dailey frowned. “Robert, you ain’t got no son.”

  I didn’t like what the chief had said. I felt the tingling at the base of my neck again. The chief grabbed his head as if he was in pain.

  “It’s the truth, boy,” he said, grimacing. “You gotta believe me.”

  It took me a moment to calm myself. Sunny had been trying to hint to me that Will wasn’t real for some time. Now the chief, who was apparently on a different side of the fence than Sunny, was telling me the same thing. Dr. Yumi had played it off, wanted me to find things out on my own. That’s why she didn’t simply come right out and say it. Nevertheless, the memories were still there, and I wondered if this was yet another game, another trick they subjected me to.

  I felt the tension in my skull ease, and the chief seemed to relax some, still rubbing his temple. “Damn, Robert, you really got a way of puttin’ a hurt locker on a fella.”

  “What about you, Chief? Why are you here?”

  “You don’t know? I figured they woulda filled you in by now.”

  I shook my head as a moaning came from the floor.

  “Shit,” Chief Dailey said. “We don’t have time.”

  He hustled over to Wu and grabbed him under the arms. I went to the door, cracked it open and peeked out, glancing both ways in the smoky corridor.

  As the chief pulled Wu through the doors and headed toward the elevators, he said, “I was a Marine like you. Went to Cambodia for the Mayaguez in ‘75. I missed the chopper gettin’ out, and they caught me.”

  Chapter 31

  Instead of answering any of the myriad questions whirlpooling inside my head, the chief had presented me with a big set of new ones. He said he’d been involved in the Mayaguez incident in ‘75. That “they caught” him. What did that have to do with what was going on now? And now, at least a couple of people were trying to convince me I did not have a son. I doubted what they would have me believe. The paternal instinct was too strong inside of me. Sure, the emotions I should have felt when I thought of Will were somewhat flat, but the world I had awakened in this morning was not exactly conducive to warm and fuzzy feelings. A safety margin of less than two hours remained, but I had to find out the truth about William, and still there was Sunny’s husband to rescue.

  Before I started toward the hallway, I looked back at Sunny. She slept peacefully, undisturbed, and I hoped she would remain that way until my return. I carefully posed her as if she were in her finally resting, her arms folded across her chest. I remembered her medallion necklace/panic button, found it in the pocket it had been put in earlier, and placed it in her hand. Then, before I pulled the thin sheet over her face, I hugged her and kissed her on the cheek. She sighed in her sleep.

  “I won’t let anything happen to you, Sunny. I promise.” I gazed at her, felt a closeness I couldn’t remember ever feeling before. “I lo — .”

  Sunny whispered, “I’m scared,” her interruption surprising me. She seemed to have spoken from her subconscious, her eyes still closed, her body limp, her mouth now slack.

  “You’ll be okay,” I said. “I’ll be back for you soon.”

  With no time to waste, I turned away, picked up my former captive’s helmet, set it over my head, and found his M-16 on the floor by the door.

  After slipping through the door, I considered our nearly defenseless state. More guards could come for us or happen by. I needed a way of slowing them down, interfering with their movements, giving me more time. As I trotted down the hallway, I passed a doorway labeled Storeroom, and I stopped. The door was unlocked. Inside were shelves of cleaning and office supplies on one side and foodstuff on the other — the health department wouldn’t have liked that.

  Harvey asked, Remember any old recipes from the Anarchist’s Cookbook?

  “Hmm.” I thought of Sunny. I thought of Major Jackson’s search and rescue team. I thought of nonlethal weapons.

  I looked about the room and the shelves. Liquid bleach, liquid dish soap, drain cleaner, string and thumb tacks on one side — on the other, gallon cans of honey. In the middle of the floor — four large plastic bags that I guessed were full of trash and garbage.

  Hey, Superman, Harvey said, you thinking what I’m thinking?

  “Uh-huh,” I answered aloud.

  * * *

  Taking less than three minutes to place my tactical delaying
measures, I took the elevator to the second floor and then jammed its door open. There were sure to be a number of elevators, but this one was the nearest to the morgue — it could buy us a couple of seconds.

  I sprinted three hundred feet down the hallway to the children’s ward. I’d remembered this part of the hospital from one of those home movies they’d used to program me. After passing through the large double doors, I inspected each of the wardrooms but found only empty beds in them. After about a hundred feet of corridor, I came to a second set of double doors, and I figured if I wasn’t already deep within the mountain, I soon would be when I passed through. The Biotronics facility was even larger than it appeared from the outside. Much more of its cold hallways and sterile rooms were hidden underneath the protective mountain, much like the unseen portion of an iceberg floating under the waterline.

  These doors were labeled, familiarly, Restricted Area, Authorized Personnel Only. Underneath the warning were the words, Residence A.

  Yumi either hadn’t been there or figured I could find a way to get through ordinary locks. The doors were barred and padlocked on my side. The wire-reinforced windows were smoked to the point of being opaque. If there was anyone on the other side of those doors, the only way they could pass through this entryway would be for the doors to be unlocked from this side.

  Still curious about what was on the other side, and without keys to enter the doors the more traditional way, I fired a bullet in each of the locks. They were not MasterLocks. Their shanks popped open immediately.

  I dropped the bar to the floor and flung the doors open to a long, empty hallway. When I proceeded, I found more rooms on either side. These areas were not empty. The first room was packed with people, probably fifty men, women and children, most Orientals, all huddled, their arms entangled, frightened gazes on their faces as they watched me quickstep by. With no beds or furnishings in the room, I guessed the few blankets on the floor in front of them had been where they had slept. I found the same in each of the next three rooms and figured it would be yet the same for the next six.