The Quantum Brain (Pulse Science Fiction Series Book 2) (9 page)

Mark Spencer ran another diagnostic of the servers.

Calvin Hall sucked in a breath and turned his back. “Can we hurry this along? I have other things to see to.”

“Go see to them, then,” Mark said, “I’m not stopping you. I’m doing my job.”

“Your job is on a timeframe and we need you to deliver quickly,” Calvin said.

Mark sighed and turned back toward the open server and his device reading the bars of the diagnostic on the floor. Mark leaned down and whispered to the screen, “Listen, Calvin Hall wants you to hurry up. If you could run a standard diagnostic at a faster speed just because he wants you to, that would be super.”

Mark sat up and turned his attention back on the security chief. “Sorry, Calvin. I can’t make the universe move faster just because you want it. Maybe if you stopped being such a terrible distraction, that would help things some. It might help all of CDR.”

“I don’t care how important you think you are, Mr. Spencer, you need to finish your job.”

Mark nodded. The device beeped and he unhooked everything before closing up the panel. Mark began packing away his gear.

“Well?” Calvin asked.

Mark continued to pack without acknowledging the question. Mark shouldered his pack and turned toward Calvin. “Done. You care to walk me back up?”

“Let’s go.”

They took the elevator and stepped back out into the lobby.

Dr. Kell ran from the metal detectors toward the pair. “Is it done? I need to get down to the labs.”

Calvin Hall crossed his arms. “We’re beginning transport now. You need to be sure the other factories are shutting down on schedule. We’re almost out of time.”

Thomas Kell turned to Mark. “Sorry I wasn’t here. The world has ceased to make sense. My brother … nevermind. The locks are completed on the vaults?”

“Yes, it’s all exactly as Decker requested it,” Mark said.

Thomas nodded. “Are you locking down here with us?”

Mark knew he needed an excuse to go. His plan was not to start off in the building. He looked to Calvin Hall.

Calvin said, “Mark Spencer isn’t cleared to be here during the event. You will be paid, of course. You should go quickly to whatever hole you have dug for yourself for this thing. You’ll want to be sure you survive since you are being paid so handsomely. It would be a shame for you to not be around for your reward. You also took a lot of time here, so now you must hurry.”

Thomas swallowed and asked, “Do you have a place, Mark?”

“Nevermind him,” Calvin said as he grabbed Thomas’s arm and pulled him along. “We all have our own responsibilities and he is responsible for himself now. We have CDR business to attend to.”

Thomas glanced back at Mark one last time and then turned away as Calvin Hall hustled him along.

Mark turned away and walked out the front doors. He wanted to leave and needed to get out of CDR for the final set-up, but it still burned. He had been prodding Calvin Hall the entire time he had been there, so it was understandable that the man would be hostile now. Still, as far as Hall knew, he was sending Mark out to die. He might even be hoping he would die. Mark was trash to him and Hall was glad to throw him out.

Mark could smell smoke as he stared down at the street. He could taste acid in the back of his throat that had nothing to do with the smoke.

He climbed behind the wheel of his car started driving back to his apartment. He had time for one last check of his system including the recent set up with the vaults and then he needed to get back in position.

He made a turn and saw a roadblock across the street a few blocks up. All the street lights were flashing red as far as Mark could see in the distance. He was going to have to find some way around now and again once the job was done. That was three separate trips through the city. It was too late. He didn’t have time for this.

The roadblock was chained down. A metal hatch opened on a low structure in the vacant lot beside the roadblock. Two men in body armor carrying automatic weapons stepped out. They had riot gear masks on as they stepped over the sidewalk and into the street facing Mark’s car a few blocks away. They turned their heads toward each other and began walking toward him with weapons aimed.

Mark backed up into the intersection and drove the other way on the barren street. As he passed under one flashing signal after another, he thought the city should have taken those down to keep them from flying all over the city.

He had run out of time. Mark drove back toward the CDR headquarters and hoped for the best. It was time to make his plan a reality. He reached under the passenger seat as he drove and pulled out the laptop without looking. He had some things he needed to check on the security feed before it all started.

Dr. Thomas Kell tried his phone again. There was no answer. There was no ring. If Seth was out on the road trying to drive through the chaos or tied down at home like he should be, Thomas was not going to know until all this was over. Maybe he wasn’t going to know for sure until long after depending on how long communications were down.

Thomas put his phone away and ran his hands over the lab equipment locked into holders along the walls. He turned back toward the empty consoles at the center of the room. “It” was gone. “It” was locked away where “It” should be safe. There was no light dancing off the wall from the chamber. Dr. Kell did not realize how much he had grown used to that strange light until it was gone.

The chairs were missing too. Loose tables had been moved out of the lab as well. Thomas had no idea where or how they had been put away, but they were gone. The lab looked barren and abandoned as a result.

Most of the people were gone too. They had been sent home to hide with their families. Some would live and would be expected to report back to work. Those that died would be replaced by CDR like broken pencils or cracked glass. Others like Dr. Kell would be strapped down in the headquarters away from their families. They would be expected to rebuild and worry about their families later on their own time.

Thomas Kell left the lab and sealed it behind him.

He checked his watch and hurried through the halls toward the stairs. His footsteps echoed through the empty halls. The elevators were already locked down. Thomas should have been too, but like his brother, he felt compelled to check on his baby one more time.

Thomas became winded as he ran up floor after floor, but he kept going, grabbing the railing as he went.

He finally saw his floor ahead of him and pushed his way through. As he weaved his way through offices and cubicles, he stopped in the middle of the floor. The offices weren’t secure. They were abandoned, but not a secured. A few computers still sat on desks. A couple headsets still hung on racks beside monitors or were slung over the low walls from their cords like the workers expected to come right back after the gravitational wave and pick up where they left off like nothing had happened.

Some desks were cleared, but others were still stacked with papers, had cups full of pens, or sticky notes and tacks in bulletin board squares.

“Tacks?” Thomas shook his head in disbelief as he imagined these objects flying about like deadly shrapnel.

There was a bobble head of some figure holding a basketball. It really was going to bobble one the final wave hit. It was going to bobble and might never be found again.

Thomas looked through the glass walls of some of the enclosed offices. A few were still cluttered from some of the earlier waves. They had not been cleaned up with papers and supplies still scattered around the floor. No one had returned to these units or no one had bothered to deal with them.

Other offices still had staplers and paperclips arranged neatly on top. There were plants in corners and pictures in frames on desks and shelves. This was going to be a disaster.

No one was prepared. How could anyone be prepared for this though? If they locked their goodies inside drawers, would it matter then if the entire desk flew into the ceiling or the entire building snapped loose from its foundation? The skeleton of steel inside the stone walls could snap and bring the entire building down from the inside.

There had been other collapses around the city and around the world already from the minor ripples that proceeded the big one. The best scientists in the world had done their calculations. CDR had recalculated and had come to the same conclusions. Still, Thomas could not imagine that the basic math prepared anyone for what was coming. This was going to be the first event of its kind in the history of the world. They had no idea what was going to happen to them or who or what was going to survive once it was over.

CDR planned to survive and they did not much care who joined them. They would replace the pencils, the cracked glass, and the dead employees. And then they would move on as they had always done. They would clean up any record of the dead as they had quickly done with Hazel Conrad. She was senior partner and then she was erased. Her office was already emptied and her things were swept away. If she could be forgotten, then they would not lose any sleep or miss a step over any other losses.

Thomas checked his watch and continued to run through the offices. He used his code to get through two doors and then stepped out into the hallway where he stopped short when he nearly walked headlong into Calvin Hall.

“What are you still doing out?” Calvin asked.

“What are you doing here?” Thomas asked.

Calvin narrowed his eyes. “I’m doing a last minute check and then strapping in for the ride.”

“Me too,” Thomas said.

“Doctor, you’re supposed to be downstairs. The lower levels are sturdier. We assigned you your spot within the concrete columns of the lab complex for a reason.”

“I wanted to check the vaults again.”

“They’re sealed. We’re not opening them again until this is over and we assess the damages. Not a moment before, Dr. Kell.”

Thomas swallowed and nodded. “The Q1 project was secured in the vault. You’re sure.”

Calvin Hall stared for a moment. “If you had been at your post and oversaw the security yourself, you would know the answer to that. But, yes, everything is where it should be. I am sure of it.”

“I guess we are ready for whatever comes then,” Dr. Kell said.

Calvin Hall took hold of Thomas’s shoulder and led him out away from the main passage. “Not quite yet.”

They were not close enough to see the vaults, so Thomas had to take his word for it that everything was locked away. Calvin entered a security code and pushed open a steel door. He led Thomas to a chair bolted to the floor and forced Thomas to sit. Calvin Hall strapped Thomas into a three point harness.

Calvin unlocked a cabinet and lifted out a blue helmet.

“Is this where we ride it out now?” Thomas asked.

Calvin strapped the helmet on Thomas’s head and then locked back the cabinet. Calvin moved along the wall and shook all the equip in the harnesses. “You will be here. I need to be at a different post. We all have jobs that we are supposed to be doing. Stay put now, please, Doctor.”

With that, Calvin closed the door and Thomas heard the electronic lock catch.

Thomas sighed and looked behind him. One of the trackers was on the wall. He reached out and pulled it loose from its clip. They had only just completed this part of the FBI’s list of security demands before the world stopped making sense.

Thomas powered up the device and looked at the screen. It had power, but no signal. Thomas frowned. It could have not been working after all that trouble or it could have been other interference. There were heavy walls and a coming gravitational wave. If the tracker didn’t work through thick walls or certain materials, what good was it?

Thomas shut it off and strained to lock the device back into its clip.

He leaned to the side in his own harness and took his phone out of his pocket. The phone powered up, but got no signal at all. CDR’s network wasn’t showing up and he had no cell service either. The room that was meant to protect him was keeping him from making one last attempt to contact and save his brother.

If he wasn’t somewhere safe by now, it was probably too late. Thomas thought again that he had no idea where his niece or her mother lived. If something happened to Seth, he still had no idea where to begin looking. There was still no contact with their father’s care facility. Thomas had spent years mostly ignoring family and he might never be able to find or contact any of them ever again.

Thomas felt light headed and then heard objects banging around the inside of the locked cabinet across the room. Equipment rattled within their harnesses and clips around the walls. Thomas pulled his shoulders taut inside the belts as his body tried to lift.

He wrestled to shove his phone back into his pocket before he lost his grip on it and never saw it again.

Thomas held onto the belts of his harness and tried to take even breaths as he closed his eyes.

Something crashed outside. It could have been the sound of something shattering, but if it was, it was huge. Thomas struggled to imagine how much glass would have to break to make that noise. He imagined desks and all the other unsecured objects in the offices outside flying loose like they were trying to launch out of orbit through the sides of the building itself.

The lights went out in the room plunging Thomas into total darkness. He sat in the dark holding on as he listened to the horrific sound of the CDR building tearing itself apart outside.