As the doors parted, Griffin raised his M9. They heard a voice yell at them.
“Freeze! Out of the elevator, slowly.”
Griffin peeked around the edge of the elevator car to see Jennifer Turkette sitting on the floor, across a ten-foot wide concrete room. Her back was to a huge vault door, like Griffin had seen in old banks. She sat cross-legged, as she had back in Ellison’s house, when Griffin had first seen the African American woman. But her nurse’s uniform was gone now. Instead she had her hair pulled back in a tight ponytail, and she wore a thick, hooded gray sweatshirt, tan slacks and hiking boots. She also had a holster on her hip, and a Glock in her hand, pointed at the elevator door.
The only thing in Griffin’s favor was that the woman looked like she had been crying.
When she saw Griffin and Avalon, she lowered the gun. She looked like a woman who had nearly given up on life.
“Oh, it’s you,” she said, dejected.
Griffin cautiously stepped out of the elevator, with Avalon following him. He kept his M9 trained on the woman.
“Miss Turkette, are you alright?” he asked, while surreptitiously glancing around the bare concrete room, looking for other threats or doors or even cameras, but the room was bare except for the elevator and the vault door.
Turkette stood up and looked Griffin in the eye, sniffing back her tears.
“That sonuvabitch left me behind.”
8
Kyle Gardner slowed his Ducati. Laurie Whittemore, sitting behind him on the bike, pointed over his shoulder to their turn. The gravel road ran straight, and dipped down to a parked pickup truck. The bike’s headlight illuminated the weather-beaten sign at the entrance to the gravel drive:
Green Meadow Farm
Eggs, Cheese, Apples.
Best in Tow
The N at the end of ‘town,’ had long since faded to a murky yellow, the same color as the rest of the sign. Kyle brought the bike down the lane and parked behind the battered truck, the emergency call he’d received on the two-way radio repeating in his head.
Uh, this is Charley. I’m out to Green Meadow Farm, and Cash’s here. Somebody shot him. We need that doctor feller. Fast. There’s a bomb shelter or something, down the slope of the property. He’s awake, and we’re keeping pressure on the wound, but I don’t know what else to do.
Kyle had jumped on the two-way at the station, and told the man—apparently the town’s drunk, Kyle had later learned—to continue keeping pressure on the wound. He’d be there shortly.
Laurie had overheard and insisted on coming with him, which was fine, really, because he hadn’t known the farm’s location. Plus, he enjoyed her company. When he’d first met her at the diner, he’d seen past her timidity and her badly applied makeup. He’d seen a spark inside her that was dying to get out. He thought she might be a poet or a writer or something.
Through the last two weeks, they’d talked more and he’d finally gotten her to open up. She was a songwriter—but a songwriter with no confidence. He wasn’t sure what she’d been through in the past—neither of them wanted to discuss their exes—but he believed the challenge of their shifting to crazy worlds full of terrifying danger would either make her or break her. He was going to try his damndest to make sure it was the former.
They got off the bike and Laurie started running across the field, a flashlight in her hand. Kyle raced after her, carrying a giant first aid kit he’d found in the hardware store. All the ointments and pills in it were long out of date, but the gauze pads would still be sterile, and it had scalpels and hemostats, needles and thread, bandages and even a few Chux pads. It was the best he was going to find in this town.
Kyle started coughing as he ran after Laurie. The smoke from the fires on the edge of town was thicker now. Smelled of barbequed meat. Winslow had mentioned the bodies that fueled the blazes. The thought made Kyle’s stomach queasy.
“Cash! Are you okay?” Laurie called.
“I’ve been shot in the chest. It hurts like a motherfucker, but I think I’ll live.” Cash’s voice came out of the dark, over the sound of the distant screaming and wailing that had set Kyle’s nerves on edge, even back at the station.
Kyle found the tall man on the ground, his back leaned up against a metal door, in a concrete bunker-like structure that hadn’t been visible from the gravel driveway. He wore a t-shirt, but held a flannel shirt over the wound. Kyle gently lifted the shirt away, just for a moment, and stole a quick glance.
Probably missed the lung. Good.
A jacket was stuffed behind Cash’s shoulder and pinned in place between his back and the metal door. Laurie knelt in the dirt next to him, holding his hand.
As Kyle set to work opening the First Aid kit, Laurie said, “ I can’t believe Charley shot you!”
“Charley?” Cash said shocked. “Nah, Laur, you don’t understand. Charley saved me.” He indicated the blood soaked flannel he held against the wound. “This is the man’s shirt. It was that loony bitch Barnes that shot me.”
Laurie sat back on her heels, stunned. “Julie Barnes?”
Kyle leaned in and pulled the flannel back, going to work on the wound as blue and red flashing LEDs cut through the smoky field. The police cruiser parked behind Kyle’s bike. He could see Frost and someone else hurrying over to them. Kyle would pack the wound and then they would have to take Cash back to the station, where he had some light to do a better job.
When he looked up again, Kyle could see that Frost wasn’t watching them as she approached. She was waving the beam of her flashlight in the air around them, and she had her gun out.
“Lookout!” she yelled. Kyle whirled around and then dove to the side, crashing into Laurie, and knocking her down to the soil, just as something flew past where his head had been seconds before.
He heard a gunshot, and then something fell to the ground nearby with a loud thump.
Frost fired again, and more things fell from the sky around them. One looked like a set of human legs, with thick feathered wings at the hips...and that was it. No real body to speak of. Another had a beak like a raven’s but the size of a man’s arm. The rest of the creature was wings with small white bumps around the edges. As Kyle looked closer, he saw they were human teeth. And maybe some canine teeth as well.
“What the hell?” he asked.
Frost and Dodge arrived and took up positions on opposite sides of Kyle and Laurie and Cash.
“Can he be moved?” Frost asked.
“In a minute,” Kyle said, pushing Cash forward and looking at the man’s back. He started tearing away Cash’s shirt as Frost started in with the questions.
“Where is he?”
“Charley didn’t shoot me. Was Barnes that did it. Then she went inside.” Cash gestured to the bunker’s door with his head. “Charley saved me. Made the call and gave me the shirt off his back. He was sober too. Then he went in there after that broad.”
Dodge fired his M-16 rifle—a single round—and brought down a creature the size of a turkey vulture, with five spindly, spider-like arms, each with a foot-long talon on the end. The limbs twitched madly for a moment, and then fell still.
“What
are
those things?” Cash asked, grunting as Kyle packed his wound from behind.
“Not the worst things that are out here tonight.” Frost answered.
9
Winslow stood from his chair and leaned down over the punctured journal. He’d been translating it long enough now that he could perform the substitution decoding in his head and read the journal as if he were fluent in the language.
Getting the whole picture with a chunk of the book’s center missing was tricky business. Joshua and Lisa worked on the diagrams and blueprints, while Winslow poured over the journal, always getting a partial picture of events on each page.
He had to remind himself that the book had been picked up on an alternate world—not his Earth, or the Prime Earth, as he was coming to think of it. Things on the world this journal had come from were likely radically different from their own. The burned out husk of a landscape and fire-breathing lizards were proof of that. It was possible that nothing in this book applied to their Refuge. Their Ellison. But his gut said there was some overlap. If even half of what he was reading turned out to be true, he would be able to piece the rest together.
The theory was very similar to what he’d come up with on his own. The technology was beyond his grasp, but between him and Cash, they might be able to make a go of it. The thing he really wanted, and wasn’t getting, was the motivation behind putting the technology in place. He understood now, how you could take an entire town and its inhabitants and shift them to another reality or plane of existence. The theories—if not the practical application—on that had been viable since Einstein’s day. The true question was
why
. Especially after DARPA had pulled their support from Ellison’s project.
The journal discussed Ellison’s anger over DARPA pulling out of the project, but then he had decided to continue on without them, and in secret. The project itself was referred to as
J.L.
Winslow couldn’t figure out what those initials referred to yet. The only other details about the purpose of the project were oblique, like with Ellison constantly referring to himself being on the ‘straight path’ with regard to the project.
With each page, Winslow’s frustration mounted. He felt sure he would have all the answers if the middle of the book wasn’t missing. Plus he was getting really tired. He’d stopped trying to keep track of Earth days and nights, because the hours on these other worlds didn’t correspond. All he knew was he felt exhausted, and stressed, like he hadn’t felt since leaving JPL. His body ached and his thoughts grew loopy. He’d even started to think of the journal as a big paper donut.
He ran a finger through his messy gray hair, and rubbed the bridge of his nose, pushing his glasses up onto his forehead as he did so.
“Anything new, Joshua?”
“Well,” the boy scribbled furiously in a document. “It’s a lot of technical terms for parts of the pylons—what these documents call ‘Repeater Elements.’ I only understand about half of what I’m reading and writing. None of these things is a clear instruction manual for Jacob’s Ladder.”
Winslow’s eyes snapped open. “What did you say?”
“I said there’s no easy operation manual. Everything is really technical—”
“No, no,” Winslow cut the boy off. “That name. Jacob’s Ladder. What’s that about? Was that written somewhere?”
“Yeah, it’s the name of the project. Where is it?” Joshua started looking through the stack of pages.
Lisa, seated next to him, found the page in her pile. “Here it is.” She handed the paper to Winslow. It was a memo from someone at DARPA authorizing the start of Project Jacob’s Ladder, and requesting an update after a period of five months. The document was dated five years ago.
Winslow grabbed the two-way radio from the desk and sat on the edge of the surface. He thumbed the toggle switch and called for Griffin.
After a few seconds, the man came on the line.
“What’s up, Winslow? Over.”
“We have it,” Winslow said. “The
why
. You’re not going to like it. I think I have the theoretical how, and we have enough of the technical how to maybe shut it down, but I’m not sure we can get us home yet. I’m being vague like you told me, but you need to get back to the station now.”
“I’ll be right there. I’m just across the street.” Griffin said. “Out.”
“What is it, Mr. Herman?” Lisa asked. “What did you figure out?” She pulled a long strand of her blonde hair away from her face and sat forward to hear the answer. Joshua was also paying rapt attention.
Just then a louder wave of the shrieking and screaming from outside town came over the breeze, causing everyone in the room to cringe.
They sound like tortured souls
, Winslow thought, and given the newly discovered
why
, that might be exactly what they were. “I know where Renford Ellison wanted to go, but I think he found the other place.”