Would that be more than he could say for his patient? Panicked, he pulled out his PDC and punched in the “panic” code that would set off the hospital’s intruder protocol. A few seconds later, the alarm klaxon went off on all floors. An electronic voice came over the intercom, alerting everyone in the hospital that precautionary security measures were being initiated and that all employees and patients should shelter in place until the “All Clear” was given.
Samuels was not a particularly brave man, not like his father, an Israeli fighter pilot killed in the Second Persian-Israeli war. He’d been shot down somewhere near Tehran, just two days after Abe’s fifth birthday. At the time of his death, he had sixteen confirmed kills to his credit, making him the IAF’s deadliest pilot at that point in the war.
Unfortunately, Abe had taken after his mother. Quiet, introverted and gentle, he wasn’t a fighter in any sense of the word. He was a compassionate young man, idealistic in his beliefs and dedicated in his duty to his fellow man.
Thus, it was more out of concern than any semblance of heroism that his next move was to rush into Jocko’s room blindly. What he saw caused him to freeze in his tracks.
The woman he’d been crushing on, the woman who’d given him childlike hope, stood over DeWitt’s body doing a brain drain. He’d seen them performed before and immediately recognized the small nodes placed on the man’s temple. It wasn’t an invasive technology as far as instrumentation, but he knew the havoc it was wreaking inside the man’s skull. Horror filled him.
“Officer Jones! Wha—” He started to protest, but she quickly cut him off.
“You best hightail it outta here, Doc.” She didn’t even turn to look at him. She just kept doing what she was doing, tapping on her PDC-induced hologram, sending data to whoever it was she was communicating. “Shit’s gonna hit the fan here in a sec. You won’t wanna be here when it does.”
She hadn’t even considered him enough of a threat to even look at him … much less pull her weapon. His ego took a battering. What kind of pussy must she see me as!
“Go on, Doc,” she chided him, almost like a mom sending her reluctant kid out the door on his first day of school. “It’s gonna get rough here. I don’t wanna see you get hurt needlessly.”
“It doesn’t have to be like that!” He was beginning to sense what she was inferring. Desperation gripped him at the realization of what she was planning. “Just stop whatever you’re doing.”
She turned to look at him, and he felt as if a knife had stabbed him in the heart. Those pretty, vivacious green eyes no longer sparkled. They were dead, the light gone from them completely. Zombified. As he watched, a tear rolled down her now pale, gaunt cheek. Blood trickled from one nostril, and a look of fateful resignation clouded her once-beautiful visage.
This wasn’t Trooper Stella Jones. It was a poor counterfeit of the woman he’d secretly fallen in love with. He fought the urge to scream in anguish as he turned and bolted.
She waited until he left, calmly waiting until he was in the elevator before speaking into the PDC.
“It’s begun,” was all she said.
“Very well,” Frost’s voice came back to her. “You know what you have to do.”
“Yes, Father.”
“Remember,” he reminded her. “No matter what … Inspector Burlington dies. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes, Father,” she acknowledged. “But …”
“But what?”
“It’s Special Inspector Burlington.”
***
“My God and yours! What is this place?” Tiger looked around in awe at the expansive interior of the facility. It was an interior far, far too extensive.
“I know what it used to be,” Dee stared in his own stunned disbelief. “What this is … I have no fuckin’ idea!”
Ruff couldn’t help but smile a little sardonic smile. He put a reassuring hand on Tiger’s unsteady shoulder. “Welcome to the world after Weird Wednesday,” he said simply, as he walked by the entranced men and stepped through the proverbial rabbit hole.
The building had once housed the Possum Works’ state-of-the-art propulsion systems testing facility. It had been the domain of Otto “Odder” Schmidt. Here, he’d perfected the legendary Star*Burst engines and their Moonshine XXXpress fuel cells for the Charger spacecraft that had single-handedly revolutionized deep space travel during the Great Space Rush.
But those had only been kiddie steps. Schmidt’s dream had always been to develop a faster-than-light propulsion system that would take humankind to the stars. Tiger knew he’d been working on just such an endeavor and that the result had been the mysterious event now known by the infamous moniker of Weird Wednesday.
And this building had been ground zero.
Tiger looked at Dee. “What the hell happened here, Dee?”
Time and space had suspended normal operations inside the facility. However vast the building might be on the outside, inside what had probably once been a large test hangar, a strange new dimension now existed. The inside of the dome appeared to go for miles and miles in all directions. Through what seemed to be a rip in time and space, unrecognizable stars and strange planets were visible. Right in front of them, a massive ball of light flashed and glowed different colors. It expanded and contracted, continually moving, seeming to digest itself and then regurgitate light in an endless, eternal cycle.
Dee stared in bewilderment at the scene before him. “Granny’s Jesus, man. That crazy bastard! He did it!”
“Did what?” Tiger grabbed the man by the arm and jerked him around. “What are we looking at?”
“Odder was working on creating a portable wormhole generator,” Dee explained, still staring at the phenomenon as if mesmerized by the colors. “He was building a device that would allow a ship to open a temporary wormhole, allowing it to travel through time and space faster than light.” He shook his head in wonder. “We
