Apocalypse (52 page)

The big man’s eye closed as his grip failed him and he was snatched away, his body freezing instantaneously and then flaring with bright energy as he vanished into oblivion far below.

‘Bryson!’

A terrible sense of loss ached through Ethan’s chest as the raging storm of plasma around the black hole glowed brightly, the crackling, snarling bolts of energy reaching out for
Ethan.

He tried to back away from the hole, but now it felt as though the deck of the dome was pitching almost vertically. He felt his feet slip from beneath him as he clung desperately to the deck
plates, staring down toward the sphere below him and its terrifying host. The plates beneath his shirt began slipping and scraped painfully against his skin, and he saw frost forming on his boots
as they slipped closer to the swirling maelstrom of light and energy.

‘Ethan!’

Ethan looked up, and to his amazement he saw Lopez reaching out for him, her hand inches away and yet appearing small and stretched as though viewed through a fish-eye lens, her face seemingly
twenty paces distant. Ethan reached out for her, saw his own arm extend crazily and bend sideways to his left into the distance as though twenty feet long. He blinked, nausea poisoning his innards
as he struggled to make sense of the world now spiraling out of control around him, the light beginning to fold in upon itself.

He felt as though his weight were increasing with every passing second, the muscles in his arms screaming for release as he began sliding again, particles of ice forming inside his boots as his
feet went numb within them.

‘Ethan!’

Ethan looked back up to see the tightly coiled light curve above him and a warped face loom as though out of some terrible nightmare.

‘My voice!’ he heard Lopez shout. ‘Close your eyes and reach for my voice!’

Ethan’s arm wavered wildly from one side to the other in his vision, and he realized that it was useless for him to see where Lopez was, her image in the distance before him far removed
now in time and space from where she actually was. Against every instinct in his body, Ethan closed his eyes.

‘Reach for my voice!’

Ethan waved his arm left and right, focusing on Lopez’s voice as she called to him, and suddenly he felt her fingers brush against his. With a final, monumental effort he held his arm
still and Lopez’s hand gripped his wrist and folded upon it. Ethan felt her heave, and he pushed against the floor plates as he clawed with his hands to pull himself free from the black
hole’s savage grasp.

Ethan felt himself being hauled upwards and away from the sphere, and as he travelled he felt the deck of the dome slowly begin to right itself beneath him, as though he were on a capsized ship
that had somehow been saved from certain doom. He heard Lopez more clearly and opened his eyes to see her pulling on his arm, her free hand gripped by Katherine Abell, who was in turn hanging on
grimly to the loop of computer cables stretching out from the main control panel.

Thick blood oozed from Lopez’s temple into her hair as she pulled Ethan up, and he saw her eyes drooping from exhaustion and blood loss. Ethan slumped alongside her, his own body drained,
yet even as he did so he felt the deck tilting beneath him, back toward the sphere. ‘Come on!’ Katherine yelled. ‘We have to leave now!’ Ethan looked down toward the sphere
and saw the remaining panels folding like the petals of a steel flower toward the dark and terrible center.

June 28, 20:42

Ethan dragged himself to his feet, and with Katherine they helped Lopez upright and staggered through the exit hatch and out of the dome. Ethan turned and slammed the hatch
shut, sealing it.

‘It won’t make any difference,’ Katherine gasped. ‘You saw it! Nothing can stop that thing now.’

Ethan somehow managed to heft Lopez onto his shoulders. He staggered slightly, stars of light sparkling before his eyes, but he managed to move forward on his last remaining vestiges of
energy.

‘There might be a way to hide from it,’ he gasped to Katherine. ‘We have to hurry. Go ahead, get to the sub and start the batteries and engines. The controls are simple
enough.’

Katherine ran away down the corridor ahead of him as he wobbled along with Lopez slumped across his shoulders. He heard her voice in his ears.

‘I can walk,’ she mumbled.

Ethan struggled through each painful and unsteady step and shook his head.

‘If only that were true,’ he managed to rasp. ‘How come Joaquin missed his shot so close to you?’

Lopez’s reply was weak and soft in his ear.

‘The light. It was bent by the black hole, so I wasn’t quite where he saw me. The shockwave must have knocked me out for a few moments.’

Ethan, his shoulders aching and his legs quivering, stepped through the hatch into the storage hangar where the aged remains of the captured ships and aircraft loomed. The lights flickered
intermittently as the power began to fail, Ethan losing balance in the shuddering light and keeling sideways.

He hit the deck and gasped as his left knee cracked painfully beneath him.

‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered to Lopez, unable to take another step. ‘I can’t carry you.’

Lopez slid from his shoulders as Ethan slumped onto his hands and knees. He felt one of her small hands touch his and fold around it as, on her knees beside him, she took a deep breath.

‘Just a few more paces,’ she whispered, ‘we can do this.’

A terrific crash echoed from somewhere far behind them, and Ethan guessed that the sphere had finally collapsed inward into the black hole, imploding and finally allowing the full force of the
hole to act upon its surroundings.

Ethan hauled himself to his feet with Lopez, and together they staggered between the boats and aircraft, stumbling through the exit hatch and down the long corridor to the docking station ahead,
the lights in the corridor flickering weakly. They arrived see the
Intrepid
waiting with its lights on and Katherine waving at them from the open hatch.

Scott Bryson’s abandoned atmospheric diving suit bobbed in the water nearby.

‘Come on!’ Katherine yelled.

Ethan staggered the last few paces and let go of Lopez’s hand, untying the submersible from its moorings before following Lopez aboard. He clambered down the ladder into the interior as
the lights finally failed in the facility and plunged it into darkness, and the entire superstructure began trembling.

Ethan clambered past Lopez and Katherine and into the cockpit to slump into the pilot’s seat. He opened the ballast vents to expel the air and the
Intrepid
sank into the inky black
water, her lights piercing the deep gloom outside as Ethan turned the submersible around and threw the throttles forward.

The
Intrepid
soared clear from under the docking dome and out into the silent blackness of the deep ocean.

Behind him, Lopez’s voice called out. ‘We’ll never get far enough away at this speed!’

Ethan shook his head.

‘We’re not running,’ he said. ‘We’re going to hide.’

‘Where?!’

Ethan watched as the
Intrepid’s
lights illuminated the barren ocean bed, sweeping ghostlike across endless dunes of lifeless sand, and then quite suddenly the beams were lost into
absolute blackness. Ethan waited until the
Intrepid
had cleared the edge of the Miami Terrace reef and was over the abyss before he pushed the controls down and dove toward the endless
depths.

The terrace dropped more than three hundred feet below the
Intrepid
, joining the abyssal plain that extended all the way out beyond Bimini Island before finally dropping off the edge of
the continental shelf hundreds of kilometers away. Ethan peered over his shoulder and could just make out the edge of the reef shelf rising above them.

Somewhere behind them a bright light flared suddenly, and for an instant the entire ocean floor was illuminated as though a sun had risen across a distant horizon. Ethan squinted and saw the
freezing depths glowing in the blast, saw the plunging drop before them and the abyssal plain of the Atlantic stretching away into the unknown distance. The silhouette of the
Intrepid
was
cast into the brightly illuminated distance, a long shadow piercing the ocean, and then the inky blackness returned.

‘Hang on!’ Ethan shouted.

The submersible plunged down into the darkness over the edge of the shelf, the steep slopes rising up behind it, and then something surged past, a blast of energy that tilted the submersible
almost vertically as it slammed into them from behind.

Ethan yanked back instinctively on the control column as the
Intrepid
plunged down into the deep, her engine straining to right her as the shockwave raced past. Suddenly the entire ocean
seemed to surge and pull them back toward the IRIS facility and for a moment Ethan feared that he had been wrong, that the black hole would continue to consume everything around it, growing
exponentially, unstoppably.

Then, as suddenly as the surge had arrived, it disappeared, and the ocean depths fell silent once more.

Ethan stared out into the gloom for a long moment and then turned in his seat.

Katherine Abell looked at him. ‘Is it over?’

Ethan, utterly exhausted, nodded.

‘I think so.’

Ethan looked at Lopez. She sat slumped in her seat, blood caking one side of her face and her hair matted on top of it. She stared out of one of the portholes into the empty wastes outside, as
oblivious now to her companions as if she had, after all, been dragged into the black hole.

Ethan turned back to the controls, and on an impulse looked at his watch. The hands were fixed in place, the watch stopped by the electromagnetic blast that had just surged past them.

20:48, June 28.

Ethan realized that Charles Purcell’s final prophecy of the future had been proven correct.

Ethan eased back on the control column, guiding the
Intrepid
up toward the surface glittering faintly above them through the gloom.

July 3, 9:14

Ethan stepped into the office of Warner & Lopez Inc. for the first time in five days, tossing his keys onto his desk and standing in the center of the room for a long
moment. His shoulder still throbbed with a dull ache from the damage he’d endured in the IRIS facility, and he had slept deeply and eaten ravenously ever since; but he knew that his wounds
were superficial compared to those suffered by Lopez.

She followed him into the office, devoid of the feisty spirit and short temper that had enshrouded her like a force field ever since Ethan had first met her.

‘Nothing’s changed,’ she said, observing the office without interest. ‘It’s like we never left the place.’

Ethan looked around the office, but then hesitated. A feeling that he’d occasionally experienced in his life, a sixth sense that somebody had preceded him, filtered into his consciousness.
He remained still, letting his eyes soak in the office until he realized what was bugging him.

‘Some of the surfaces have been cleaned down,’ he said, and made his way over to the filing cabinets.

Truth was, neither he nor Lopez were much into cleaning: a little dust makes a place feel lived in, he figured. But the handles on the filing-cabinet doors were spotless. He turned and checked
the drawers in his desk. They were still locked, no signs of tampering, but also looked suspiciously clean.

‘My keyboard’s been wiped,’ Lopez said.

‘Mine too,’ Ethan confirmed, and then looked at her. ‘We’ve been swept professionally enough to not have left any evidence, but they’ve been overzealous.’

‘CIA?’ Lopez hazarded. ‘Shit, I don’t want to have to deal with this right now.’

Ethan nodded, choosing not to reply just yet. He’d felt that Lopez needed a break after their return from Florida, and had suggested that she head home to Guanajuato, Mexico. Catch up with
her family. Maybe see friends and just goof around. Lopez had thanked him for his concern but said that she was fine – and that was what had bothered Ethan. In the past she would have just
told him to fuck off or something. The loss of Scott Bryson, a man whom Ethan had reluctantly realized was something of a heroic figure, had hit her harder than he’d expected, and right now
he didn’t have much of an idea of how to deal with it.

Ethan flicked a small television on as Lopez sorted through the pile of mail that had built up. A news article on an earthquake that had hit the Florida Straits caught Ethan’s eye, and he
turned up the volume as the news anchor outlined the story.

‘
. . . The clean-up continues on Miami Beach today after the magnitude 6.8 quake that hit the Florida Straits just before nine in the evening on the twenty-eighth and caused a tsunami
that hit the coast just four minutes later. Although there were no casualties from the wave, Governor MacKenzie has suggested that more suitable warning facilities should be installed along the
Florida coastline to guard against such geological events in the future, and provide earlier warning of tsunami conditions.
’

The image of Miami was replaced with one of Puerto Plata, with a picture of Joaquin Abell in the top right corner of the screen. The news anchor kept reading from her autocue, but was not
visible on the screen.

‘
The governor’s comments come just days after Puerto Plata in the Dominican Republic was hit by a similar quake and tsunami, killing over five thousand residents and tourists. The
CEO of IRIS, Katherine Abell, has led calls for international intervention in the crisis, a plea made all the more poignant after her husband, Joaquin Abell, pictured here, was tragically lost at
sea and presumed killed along with several of his employees, after a diving accident aboard his yacht, the
Event Horizon
. With currents in the Straits so strong, it’s considered
unlikely by the Coastguard that their remains will be found.
’

Ethan looked down at Lopez.

‘That’s the news article that Joaquin Abell saw,’ he realized. ‘Without sound on the report, he knew nothing of his own death, and with no anchor on screen there was no
way anyone could have read her lips.’