Big Three-Thriller Bundle Box Collection (31 page)

“What do you see?” I hear Sunny’s voice ask, echoing from somewhere behind the eternal swirling current. It sounds as though she is speaking into a huge steel tank.

Feeling as though I am under nine Gs of pressure, my voice strains. “Nothing. Darkness. I’m in a whirlpool.”

The G forces seem to diminish quickly, and I feel only a slight dizziness as I twirl, drawing ever nearer the center. I reach out and grab the gyrating numbers, pulling them protectively into my chest. The luminous figures cling against me like Velcro on felt as I pass through the middle of the vortex. When I come out of it and into total emptiness, a rush unlike any I’ve ever felt surges through my body. My extremities, the tips of my toes, the ends of my fingers, the top of my head, all tingle as if being misted with tiny ice crystals.

On this end of the vortex is complete peace, quiet. I am floating on what seems to be an invisible cushion of air. In the distance, an object appears, luminous, drifting like a weightless scarf in a gentle breeze. Or no, more as if it is floating in a clear and day-lit sea.

“Beautiful,” I say without intending to verbalize.

“What?” comes Sunny’s voice, again from another place, not in the same dimension as I.

As the drifting entity nears, I recognized a human form, a woman, angelic, and ethereal.

“An angel,” I say. “A woman.”

She soon pauses in front of me, and I note her lovely dark hair and the high cheekbones of a Native American Indian. Her garments are airy and near transparent, and the only sort of jewelry she wears is a necklace made of beads. I find familiarity in her eyes, and she smiles and places her hand lightly on mine. I feel a warmth there, but no pressure or weight.

“Robert,” Sunny says, “are you okay?”

“Fine, fine,” I answer feeling almost annoyed at Sunny’s interruption. “I think she wants me to go with her — she wants to take me somewhere.”

Sunny’s voice is eager. “Go with her, Robert. She’ll help you.”

I abide and float with her in a euphoric feeling of weightlessness. What seems like long minutes pass as we transcended from the vortex, through a constant aurora borealis of shimmering colors. I cannot yet see it, but I am sure she is leading me to the grid of which Sunny has spoken.

The dark but friendly seraph’s lips do not move, but in my mind I hear her mellifluous words, “I am your friend. In this place nothing exists, yet you will find all answers. It is neither a temporal rift, nor a warp in time. Nor is it a dimension. It is nonexistent except in the mind, and your trips to this place will be measured in seconds, although it may seem to you they last for hours. The more often you visit, the easier and quicker it will become. But remember, your ability to come here is a gift from a higher order for a higher purpose. It is for that purpose you will find answers to your questions, understand the thoughts of others, transcend space and time
— but only for that purpose, and at the choosing of the higher order.”

She lets go of my hand and motions to the universal matrix before me, and it is as Sunny has said. Enormous. I think of it as a huge library where all that ever was and all that ever will be is filed
— a tremendous card catalogue for an omniscient library that is organized into a celestial Dewy Decimal System.

“My God!” I exclaim.

“What?” Sunny asks, seeming concerned, perhaps alarmed. “What is it?”

“I see it. I’m there. It’s huge! Beautiful. Brilliant light. Like a thousand main streets at Christmas.”

The matrix spreads out in three directions to eternity, and I am floating in cosmic nothing at the intersecting corner of the three never-ending planes. The symbols are perhaps six inches in size and nearly three feet apart. But I know this is only as my mind interprets it.

When I glance back at the ethereal spirit, she smiles, and I hear, “Tell my love it was not his fault, that I wait for him eagerly when his time also comes. But before that is to pass, he has much to share with the material world.”

For the first time, I notice on her necklace of colorful beads is a small arrowhead — and a name comes to my mind, gently placed there as if laid by God on a cushion of silk.
Moonfeather
. She disappears like a doused light, and still in awe of the lovely entity, I scan about to see where she has gone.

“Robert, you okay?” Sunny’s voice says, snapping me out of my wonder, invading the peace of the universal matrix.

I go about the business before me. “Yes, Sunny. I’m starting my search.”

As I hunt through the numbers, I find I can use them for handholds and pull myself along through the incredible matrix. Almost without thought, I come to a group of familiar numbers, and I pause considering them.

“I think I found them,” I say and pull the clinging numbers from my chest. They correspond to those surrounding me.

Sunny calls out, “Take the
— ”

I interrupt her, “I know what to do.”

When I fling my small numerals at the larger figures, they disintegrate in a brilliant flash of light, creating a vertical pool of a reflective, mercury-like liquid in front of me. Perhaps through some sort of instinct or past experience I cannot remember, I am drawn to the pool, face first. Carefully keeping my hands on the numbers at each side, I push my head into it and discover it is not a pool at all but a sort of atomically thin membrane, a doorway into what I seek.

What I see is terrifying.

Chapter 30

The three men rush into the room, their M-16s blazing. The bullets strike and tear at our bodies. Both Sunny and I fall onto the floor, and blood oozes from our corpses.

I yank my head out of the future and back into the ether’s universal matrix, my eyes wide, pulse racing, breathing rapid. The experience has been so real. I have witnessed my own execution. I wonder how soon this reality will come. I have been groping through the grid work of the matrix for what feels like hours, but I wonder if any time has passed at all. I hope not. If I were to go back to my own time, will I find myself already dead? The thought becomes too mind-boggling.

Sunny’s voice calls out from the other side, reality, and I am somewhat relieved. “Robert, what’s happening? We have to hurry!”

I cautiously edge my face back into the portal to the near future. Again, I see the same scene, the three men bolting into the room. This time, I notice the first man comes through with his gun pointed to the far corner away from Sunny, the second comes through pointing at Sunny and the third turns toward me behind the door. Sunny fires her small pistol, but the bullet strikes the first man’s body armor at the shoulder. Again, the bullets riddle our bodies, and we fall to the floor.

This time, I withdraw my head more slowly, thoughtful of what I have seen.

“I’m coming,” I tell Sunny, but I need one more look. For a last time, I peek into the future through the portal’s membrane. The first guard comes through, again aiming at the corner. Sunny’s bullet strikes him in the shoulder. The second man comes through, pauses briefly in the doorway, then steps in and fires at Sunny. I see that the only exposed part of his body, the only part unprotected and vulnerable to a bullet, is at the man’s throat. Still in the future vision, as I rush the man who is shooting Sunny, the third man comes through and fires half a magazine of M-16 rounds into my torso.

Having seen enough, I jerk my head back from the future and grab at the large numbers around me, pulling and pushing. When I reach the outer-space-like void, I swim through the black nothingness toward the vortex, and it comes quickly. I thrust into the ethereal tornado, and there comes a blinding flash.

*  *  *

I found myself back behind the morgue door, Sunny lying on an autopsy table across the room.

We had mere seconds. I had to decide immediately whether to attempt to take three lives — tell Sunny to shoot the second man in his exposed neck, or go against the odds and try to keep our lives without anyone else losing theirs.

I yelled, “Shoot level to the doorknob at the hand of the second man!”

She frowned, and I knew she was trying to make sense of what I was saying as the door burst open. In that instant, I hoped she would not question what I had said and simply do it.

The first man came through, his weapon pointed to the empty corner. The second man burst in, and Sunny’s gun reported as I went for the third guy’s rifle barrel, which was swinging toward me. I shoved the barrel up as he fired the rifle, the bullets striking the suspended ceiling above. With a kick to his armor-cupped groin, then the knife-edge of my right hand to his neck, he fell unconscious and easily surrendered his weapon. The second guard grasped his wounded hand and his rifle fell to the floor, as Sunny kept the small Beretta aimed at him. The first guard didn’t have a chance to bring his weapon to bear on us before I placed the muzzle of the automatic rifle I had just acquired against the back of his neck and told him, “Don’t.”

Now what in the hell could we do with prisoners?

I shoved the guy up against the wall, his face first, and he stood against it spread-eagle.

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.”