Spiderman 3 (10 page)

The grass was now chest high, the ground spongier than ever. Marko was soaked in sweat, his breath labored. The marsh air was so thick with moisture that he felt as if he were trying to breathe water. Still the dogs grew closer. How the hell were they managing that? They were lower down to the ground than he was; how could they be moving faster? It didn't make any sense.

He glanced back to see how close his pursuers were, half-expecting them to be no more than five feet behind, and slammed headlong into a fence. He staggered back and fell into the marsh grass. Sputtering and furious over this dead end, he scrambled to his feet and saw—in a dim outline as the moon once again scampered behind a cloud—the closely woven mesh of a cyclone fence.

Marko had no time to retrace his steps, and certainly no time to move down the length of the fence to find a way around it. It could run a mile or more, and by that time they'd have him.
One choice is no choice
, his grandmother used to say. She'd had such high hopes for Flint when he was a child. He wondered what she'd say now.

Actually, he didn't wonder. He knew.

Flint forced himself to take one deep breath to steady his nerves, then he sprinted toward the cyclone fence once more. He vaulted as high as he could and his fingers snagged into the upper links. His feet scrambled for purchase and found some minimal support, but it was mostly the strength in his arms that enabled him to pull himself up and over.

Just as he reached the top of the fence, lights hit him from behind. Powerful flashlights, maybe even searchlights. There were shouts of "Halt! Freeze!" and other orders that Marko was only too happy to ignore.

He clambered over and threw himself to the other side. Marko landed heavily, but the spongy ground cushioned the fall. As he got to his feet, he noticed for the first time that a sign was posted on the side of the fence from which he'd just come. He hadn't taken the time to read it—probably a standard keep out warning, as if he cared.

Marko started running once more. He discovered that he'd injured his ankle in the fall and was now limping badly, just to add to his aggravation. He heard the dogs barking at the fence, their claws scratching the links. He risked yet another glance, fully expecting to see the police scrambling over the fence after him. Instead they were remaining right where they were, on the other side, and were angrily shouting for Marko to come back before it was "too late."

Too late? Too late for what? For them to catch me? Screw that.

To his surprise, the marsh grass suddenly disappeared, giving way to a paved, pitch-black field. Something had been constructed here. A private airfield, perhaps. Yes, that made perfect sense. He had stumbled upon a private airfield, and this might be the biggest break he'd ever gotten. All he needed was to find a pilot with a private plane and "convince" him to transport Marko out of here. He was certain he could do it; Marko was a pretty persuasive guy when he wanted to be.

His luck was finally turning. Even his ankle was starting to feel a little better.

That was when the ground went completely out from under him.

With no warning at all, Marko suddenly found himself tumbling down a massive concrete slope, curved like a gigantic bowl. He desperately tried to find a way to slow his downward skid, but the walls were perfectly smooth. He kept falling, rolling end over end, until finally he skidded to a halt in the bottom of the structure.

Marko went headfirst in a large pile of sand. He pulled his head out, sputtering, coughing up granules that had gotten between his lips, his teeth. Getting to his feet, he looked around, trying to get his bearings.

Suddenly a massive light kicked on above him. He had no idea what it was. Oh, Lord… what if he'd foolishly broken into, not an airport, but a prison? Wouldn't that be just too freaking perfect if—in his determination to escape—he wound up back in jail?

Marko looked up, shielding his eyes, uncertain of what he was going to see. His jaw dropped. Now that he was looking at it, he still didn't know what it was.

It appeared to be about three stories tall and bore a passing resemblance to an agitator in a washing machine. The upper section began to turn, slowly at first, then faster. Three mechanical arms extended above Marko and started whirling. They formed a high-speed arc around him. He tried to find a way out, but the metal arms were moving by him so quickly that he couldn't get past them. It was like being trapped inside a helicopter with propeller blades that were tilted down, blocking escape.

On the far side of the bowl, a servomotor whined as a bank of observation windows were being covered by reinforced steel blinds. The noise was sufficient to draw Marko's attention, and he desperately waved, trying to get the notice of whoever was in there. If the windows sliding into place and blocking any further view of Marko's predicament was any indicator, then Marko had failed spectacularly in his endeavor.

At that moment, as Marko felt the hair on the back of his neck standing straight up and heard the energy around him building up toward what sounded like some sort of detonation, he really, really wished he'd read that sign before jumping the fence.

Knowing that the sign screamed DANGER! high energy particle physics test site! keep OUT! would not likely have made him feel any better.

Inside the research facility, the technicians studied the arrays on their computer screens. "Capacitators charged," Ashley Michel said, satisfied at the results she was getting.

"Right," said Chafin, confirming it. Then he saw something that didn't look quite right, and he leaned toward Blaswell. "Donnie, got a little fluctuation on one."

Adding his own concerns, O'Shea said, "There's a change in the silicon mass."

Donnie considered the possibilities and reasonably concluded, "Probably a bird." It made sense. Stupid birds saw the pile of sand at the base of the particle accelerator gun and didn't know it was there to measure molecular bonding. They thought it was someplace convenient to build a nest and lay their eggs. "It'll fly away when we fire it up."

The others nodded, satisfied with the explanation. Chafin called out, "T minus three and counting. Three… two… one…"

"Initiating demolecularization," announced Michel, and she activated the cycle.

The spinning arms crackled with electricity as the centrifugal force whipped up the sand around Marko. A centralized energy blast triggered an electronic ripple effect that began to spread, bathing Marko and the particles of airborne sand. Marko and the sand began to glow.

Had Marko been capable of perceiving things on a microscopic level, he would have seen the particles of sand—single granules no larger than a period in a sentence—being broken down into their atomic components. Glowing from the intensity of the particle gun's radiation, the sand atoms slid between the atoms of Flint Marko's atomic structure, affecting Marko at a fundamental, molecular level.

Like any human, Marko was a carbon-based lifeform. But that was about to change, as the glowing silicon atoms of the sand slammed into Marko's carbon atoms, knocking them out of their orbit and taking their place in his molecular structure.

It was not an isolated occurrence. The inorganic atoms of silicon dioxide—sand—penetrated Flint Marko's entire body. None of his physical makeup was spared, and he staggered under the barrage. The heaviness in the air that impaired his breathing increased until his lungs felt as if they were full of sand. Now he couldn't breathe at all. He put a hand to his chest as the sand whirled around him, peppering ever molecule of his body like a dust devil.

He twisted in place to see if the mechanical arms were slowing, if there was any way out of this. He watched in disbelief as his hand started to transform into sand.

Transform.

Into sand.

Reflexively he grabbed at his chest and felt Penny's locket nestled against it. There was no practical reason for what he did then; it was entirely instinctive. He yanked the locket free and threw it low. It bounced once, twice, and under the whirling arms, clear of whatever was happening to him.

Only in the final seconds of reflection before his hideous fate overtook him did he realize why he'd done it. His desire to protect his daughter was so overwhelming that he couldn't allow even an image of her—an image that had smiled out at him every time he had opened the locket and peered in—to come to harm. At that moment he realized he was never, ever going to see her again. That knowledge, more than the horrific transformation he was undergoing, caused him to throw back his head and scream.

Nothing emerged from his mouth except a geyser of sand.

If Flint Marko had been able to see himself, he would have witnessed his features starting to dissolve. Like a million years' worth of erosion happening all within a few seconds, his head became sand and his face began to slide off. Eyebrows, nose, his eyes, his mouth open in a silent howl of protest and then falling away, leaving his face inhumanly blank and featureless, like a department-store mannequin.
Please, no… she needs me… Penny needs her father… I can't die now, I can't
. Then seconds later, his entire body fell apart and was whisked away into a small whirlwind of air that looked like a sandy, brown cyclone.

"
Shut it down?! Now
?!?" Chafin was outraged at the timing. He was on the phone with a guard at the front gate and couldn't believe that the call had even been put through to him. They were busy men involved in serious work—work that was finally giving them proper readouts for the first time. "You can't be serious! Why are you even calling me?"

"Because the police are here," shot back the guard from the front, sounding both irritated and nervous. "They said they're pursuing some criminal and that he's somewhere here on the base. And I didn't think
it
was a good idea to have them stumbling around in the dark while you're testing whatever the hell it is you guys are testing in there."

"Of all the—"

Suddenly the anomalous readings that had been reported came back to Chafin. The readings that had carelessly been chalked up to a bird. Yes, it could still have been a bird. But if a man had been down there by the gun, it would have generated the exact same readings, which could have meant…

Oh hell.

"Shut it down!" Chafin abruptly shouted.

Everyone gave him stunned looks, their expressions demanding explanations. There was no time to provide them. "
Shut it down! Now
!" he screamed, the urgency in his voice giving them all the impetus they needed. The particle accelerator deactivated within seconds.

As the readings spiraled to normal, Chafin realized that he was gripping the receiver so tightly that his knuckles were getting white. He forced himself to relax and said, through gritted teeth, "All right. Send them back here. But I want an escort with them at all times. Make sure they don't touch anything. We don't need them contaminating the field."

He slammed down the phone without waiting for an acknowledgment and sat back in his chair, shaken to the core. The others approached him, looking bewildered. "What happened, Al?" asked Michel. "Why'd we shut down? Everything was going fine. It was the best—"

"What would happen," Chafin said, ignoring the question and instead responding with one of his own, "if a human subject were trapped in the field that the gun generated?"

The scientists looked at each other quizzically. "Are you thinking of looking for a volunteer?" asked Donnie. "Because I don't think it's a good—"

"
What would happen
?" Then, as an afterthought, Chafin added offhandedly, "Hypothetically speaking."

There was a moment of silence, and then Ashley Michel said, "The subject would be dead, I suppose. If everything worked correctly, his molecules would essentially bond with the air, so he would be functionally discorporated."

"How do we know he wouldn't bond with the concrete of the pit? Or the sand?"

"We don't," Michel said reasonably. "But either way, he's dead, so what difference would it make?"

"None," Chafin admitted. "Probably none."

"Al, what's going on here?" demanded O'Shea, taking charge of the situation as the senior technician. "Are you saying there was a person down there during the test?"

Chafin pictured what the poor devil's final moments would have been like. Would he even have understood what was happening to him? How long would his consciousness have held on? Would he actually have felt his body falling apart around him? Would he have felt nothing… or everything?

"I hope to God not," was all Chafin could say.

The police searched the entire grounds. They paused at the top of the large, bowl-shaped pit with the ominous-looking tower, like something out of a James Bond film, protruding from dead center. At first they wondered how in the world they were going to get down there and inspect it, then concluded that shining the searchlights down would be sufficient. There really wasn't any sort of cover where Marko could hide. Still, one of the technicians, a twitchy-looking guy with the name CHAFIN on his ID, had said they might want to check it out. Furthermore the dogs were sniffing around one of the edges and whimpering in an odd manner.

The lights played all along the interior and came to rest on the pile of sand at the bottom. There didn't seem to be any sign of Marko, and the sand certainly wasn't deep enough for Marko to have buried himself under.

"Where'd he go?" wondered one of the cops. The others shrugged. They continued to shine the light down there for long moments, making absolutely certain there wasn't some hatchway or other means of egress that might have eluded them at first glance. Finally, satisfied that wherever Flint Marko had made off to it wasn't here, they turned their attentions elsewhere. Curiously, they practically had to drag the dogs away, since the stupid mutts seemed determined to haul the cops down into that pit in pursuit of nothing more than a pile of sand.

A pile where, had they looked very, very closely, the police would have seen the glint of a half-buried locket that had slid back down from the edge and come to rest in the sand, as if returning safely home.