Time Spike: Chapter Six

    Andy paced the length of the hall separating the holding area and examination room. He knew exactly what the nurse would say once the door opened and she ushered him in. Greg Lowry was dead. He was dead before Hulbert arrived with his gurney. He died before the nurses, who were now working their third shift in a row, ever saw him.

    He stopped pacing and looked down the dimly lit hall that led to the medical records room. He had never been in there. All records were kept under lock and key, and the only ones with access were the nurses, doctors and psych department employees.

    None of this made any sense, he thought, rubbing his pounding head. He wasn’t worried about the prisoner who tried to escape. It happened, especially when you were dealing with men who would be in their sixties when they got out of their cage. He wasn’t even all that worried about Brown. It happened. Guards got jumped. What he was worried about was the other stuff. That was the part that made no sense.

    Andy looked at Rod Hulbert, who was standing next to the outside door. The lieutenant had given him a terse report and then spent his time looking out the window watching the cell houses lining the road inside the prison walls.

    Hulbert was tense. Ready for action. A lifetime of weekends and vacations traipsing through the limestone bluffs of Southern Illinois with fellow survivalists had prepared him well. He had already skipped over the why, willing to let that wait till later, and was concentrating on the now. Andy watched him, envying the way he had adjusted to the situation.

    Be aware of your environment. Know what is going on around you.

    These were the words all employees who worked inside the walls lived by. People had a habit of dying when the words were forgotten.

    But this wasn’t a prisoner uprising. This was something different. Andy couldn’t concentrate. He was having trouble even recognizing his surroundings.

    Rod Hulbert’s voice cut through the silence. “There’s movement in the yard, and it isn’t ours. All staff is accounted for.”

    The last count showed everyone locked inside their cell. There had to be a wall breach. Which house had it? Andy gave a silent laugh and glanced at the mirror just inside the door. It didn’t matter which house. Inside this facility, unauthorized prisoners wandering the grounds were dangerous no matter where they came from.

    The mirror showed a dark yard, but not so dark Andy couldn’t see shadows working their way across the open area toward the machine shop.

    “Infirmary-11, M control, 10-2000, moving southwest toward machine shop.” Rod moved from the door to a window, tracking the prisoners. “Possible C, Charles-house, not sure.”

    “How many?” Andy hissed, rushing to the window.

    Rod hesitated then shook his head. “Looks to be at least four, maybe more,” he said, keying the radio so the control room would know.

    Andy stared out the window, trying to count the moving shadows. How many were loose? Who was loose? Were they armed? Could he get help from the outside if things escalated? He shook his head again then waved toward the armory.

    Rod nodded, broke regulations by switching his radio to the off position, and then slipped out the door.

    Andy rushed to the examining room and pushed open the door. “Glasser, we got ‘em AWOL, let’s move.”

    “I heard.” Melissa Glasser was removing a blood soaked paper gown. She had been assisting the nurses. Elaine Brown was on the table, an I.V. of saline solution flowing into her right arm. “Give me a sec.” She tossed the soiled gown into a red receptacle marked as biohazard waste then followed the captain to the door.

    “I’m going to the armory. I want you to position yourself so you can see if the prisoners leave the machine shop. If they do, you are not to intercept. Call only, even if it’s a single prisoner.”

    She nodded, checked the battery reading on her radio, and then took off across the street. She slipped into the dark alley between the buildings.

 

---

 

    Once outside the infirmary, it didn’t take Andy long to catch up with Hulbert. With their radios silent, and their twelve-inch steel and aluminum flashlights held like clubs, they made their way to the armory, quickly and quietly.

    “Who’s the E-team leader for tonight?” Andy asked, as they pushed the heavy metal door open. “And who’s running K-9?” Report had been interrupted and Andy didn’t know who was on the afternoon shift’s extraction team, or its dog unit. He wasn’t even sure who had made it inside the wall for the midnight shift. “Who’s available out of our first responders?”

    Hulbert shrugged and said, “Us, I guess.” He started pulling vests and face shields from the cabinets.

    Andy grabbed the keys from the lockbox and opened the weapons cabinet. This was the part of the job he hated. Unlocking the cabinet, passing out the guns and the ammunition. Watching everyone’s eyes. Worried someone would panic and shoot when they shouldn’t, or not shoot when they should. He’d seen both happen.

    “We just finished the debriefing from the last breakout.” Kathleen said, breathing heavily. She had half-jogged, half-walked from south tower to the armory in under three minutes. “Who’s making a run for it now?”

    “Don’t know. It was too dark to make out anything but a few shadows. We think they’re from Charlie-house.”

    “That would make sense. It’s the only building we haven’t sent inspectors through. Everywhere they’ve gone they’ve seen damage, just not enough to be a major problem.” Kathleen looked toward what was left of the parking lot.

    “We haven’t heard from,” her eyes dropped to the clipboard she held in her hand, “Mark Suplinskas, in over a half hour.” She was answering his unasked question. She then flipped the paper and checked the list on the second page. “All the others have reported in within the last fifteen minutes. Mark’s new. He worked three to eleven, graduated from that last class.”

    Lieutenant Terrance Collins walked into the room. “We found three breaks in the exterior wall facing the river, but only one of them is large enough for a small man to wiggle through. The towers have been notified and I have two armed C.O.s watching it. I’ve also posted C.O.s at the other two areas. They’re not carrying anything more than flashlights and radios.”

    Facing the river? Andy looked toward Hulbert who gave his head a slight shake. The missing Mississippi River was not common knowledge, at least not yet. Okay, the outer perimeter was as secure as they could make it. Now for the inside of the prison. “Kathleen, see if you can raise Suplinskas, and find out …”

    Damn. “Have we heard from Joe Schuler?”

    “He’s been broadcasting almost continuously. But most of what he’s saying doesn’t make sense. He’s on his way back. Should be here within the next ten to twenty minutes.” Kathleen picked up the notebook she had been using to record all communications from the three two-ways she had been using more or less continuously for the last hour. “He’s the only one outside the walls we’ve heard from. And we’re the only ones he’s seen. He says the roads to town are gone. Same for the houses and businesses.” She gave a strained laugh. “He says everything, the entire town is gone. There’s nothing but trees between us and a volcano about twenty miles out.”

    Andy wanted to scream. There were no volcanoes in the southern part of Illinois. There were rivers and lakes and hills. No mountains. No volcanoes.

    “Okay,” he said between clenched teeth, “this is too fucked up for us to deal with in the dark. I want everyone hunkered down for the night. The prisoners on the prowl can’t get out, so let’s just button everything down. Pair everyone up. One sleeper, one awake. There’s no telling how long we’re going to be on our own. I want radio contact every five minutes from now till sunrise. Station a couple of shooters outside the machine shop. We’ll just isolate the bastards till morning.”

    “That’s only about thirty minutes from now,” Terry Collins said. “And when the sun comes up it’s going to be in the north-west.” He shrugged. “That’s not a guess. Before I came in Jeff Edelman had me check it out inside the east tower. The sun is already starting to rise. And another thing, he has one of those watches with a built in compass. He says the magnetic pole has shifted. It’s now somewhere southeast of us.”

    “Who is Jeff Edelman?” Andy asked. “And how does he know all this?”

    “New guard. He is—was—a geology graduate student at the university,” Collins answered. “He had to break off his studies because his mother got sick and the family needed the money. And according to him, everything is wrong. Even the position of the moon and the stars.”

    “That’s impossible,” Kathleen whispered.

    “Yeah, but impossible or not,” Collins said, “the guy’s right. If you don’t believe him, just look at the sky. You don’t have to know squat about what’s supposed to be up there to know it’s off.”

    Andy, putting on his gear, remembered the look of the night sky and felt something inside him shift abruptly.

    The headache was gone. So was the indecision. Now all he felt was nervous energy.

    He cinched his vest snug and slipped on his leather gloves. “Okay. Kathleen, tell Joe when he gets back from town, stay put. We’ll join him after we get things inside the walls under control. Collins, get someone over to Charlie-house. Find out what is going on there. I’m going back to the machine shop. Hulbert, get the E-team, first responders, and K-nine put together, I want them all out on this.” He picked up one of the assault rifles and a clip, then pulled his faceplate into position. “I guess we can’t wait. Let’s gather up our strays before aliens start popping out of the walls.”

    “What?” Kathleen’s face paled to a chalk white.

    “That was a joke, Kathleen. Just a joke. Now, get busy. I want everyone in full gear: helmets, goggles and vests. Then get this prison locked down so tight even the cockroaches can’t crawl around without getting an okay from one of us. Radio Glasser, let her know I’m on my way. And Collins, get this Edelman guy off the tower and into the administration building’s main room. I’m going to want to talk to him.”

 

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    Andy Blacklock, Rod Hulbert, Melissa Glasser, and the other members of the first responders team worked their way across the exercise yard toward the machine shop. Andy kept to the shadows as much as possible, but didn’t try to kid himself. The prisoners hiding inside the building would know that he was there. They would know all of them were there. His best hope was that they would be unarmed.

    Once he was within shouting distance he called to the escapees. “Listen up! You need to come out, and you need to do it now. A showdown does nothing but get people hurt or killed. That’s not something you want.”

    Andy gave Rod a nod and the man took off at a slow jog across the yard, up the side of the building and across the roof. He watched Hulbert long enough to know he had made it across the open areas then held his hand up to stop the others from advancing any further. He was waiting on a call from Kathleen. Things would go better if he knew who was inside the shop. He also needed to know how many, and that they really were just prisoners. He didn’t—deep down—really believe they had been invaded by aliens. But… He couldn’t think of any other explanation for what was happening.

    Once Rod was in position there was no more movement and no more talk from anyone. They waited in the growing light. The sun was rising, and it was rising in the northwest just as Collins said it would.

    His men—three of the twelve were women, but somehow he couldn’t think of them as anything but men, not if he was going to put them in a position of getting shot at—were in position. He had learned that most team leaders thought like he did. They were women in the lunchroom, the meeting rooms and on the practice field, but when it came time to go one-on-one with a prisoner, they were men. It was only the younger guys who didn’t have to fool themselves on that point.

    The guards at the prison were pretty well evenly divided between black and white, and men and women. But the first responders and E-team members were mostly men. Big men, as a rule. Rod Hulbert was the only man on the team under six-foot. And he was the only man on it who weighed less than two hundred pounds. The dozen or so women who were part of it were like Hulbert. Specialists. They weren’t going to be sent into a cell to bring a prisoner out. It wouldn’t happen.

    Prisoners could get huge.

    That was the thing that surprised new hire-ins. The sheer size of the prisoners. Natural size, too, not simply the bulk that so many of them added by weight-lifting. It seemed like almost half the men convicted of murder were walking giants. One popular theory among the guards was based on studies they’d heard about, where scientists found that a lot of oversized men had an extra Y-chromosome. That extra Y made them big; whether it made them violent or not was up for debate.

    Andy was a bit skeptical, himself. True, he’d read an article once that stated a large number of very successful executives also had that extra Y. According to the author, these men didn’t wind up in prison because their parents found constructive ways for their child to burn off the extra energy and aggression. Andy didn’t know if that was true or not, but figured it was at least a possibility since some of those high-powered positions took more than healthy dose of the killer instinct to do well.

    Still, he had his doubts that there was any such neat answer to the problem. The still simpler explanation was that most juries and judges were more likely to convict a huge man for murder—just to be on the safe side, so to speak—and throw the book at him.

    Whatever the reason, though, the fact remained. A very high percentage of prisoners convicted of murder were just plain big.

    He shook his head and forced himself to concentrate on what was happening. He didn’t have his usual team. He had only three of his regulars; the rest were from the afternoon crew. He also didn’t have a backup of state and county boys waiting to be called in. They were on their own.

    Hulbert signaled: he could see three prisoners inside the shop; he could get a bead on two of them.

    “You, inside the machine shop! Come out with both hands on your head and hit the dirt as soon as you’re through the door.” Kathleen, hurry up. I need to know who’s inside that building. Andy gave Hulbert the wait-at-ready signal.

    He checked his radio. It was on.

    The sun was coming up fast. The shadows of a half hour ago were gone. The combination sweet and sulfur smell he’d noticed earlier was still in the air. And the sky was the bluest sky he had ever seen, streaked with great swatches of orange, reds, and greens. The clouds were huge, cumulous, and almost fluorescent white. A postcard morning. He wished for a camera and the time to capture what he was seeing, then took a deep breath. It was too pretty a day for someone to die. Unfortunately, that was probably going to happen. The only question was who, and how many.

    Andy looked at the building and checked his radio one more time to be sure. Hulbert was on his belly, looking through the scope of his semi-automatic rifle. He was following his target, his finger on the trigger, waiting for the go.

    “It’s Charlie-house,” Kathleen called on the radio. “Mark Suplinskas is dead. They used dental floss.”

    He’d been afraid of that. New guards simply didn’t realize how many ways convicts could figure out how to kill or injure somebody. In their own way, they could be incredibly ingenious.

    “There are six of them,” Kathleen continued. “But it wouldn’t have been planned. The back wall opened in the… quake… and they took advantage of it. Three cells opened, six prisoners out.” She rattled off their names: Cole, Biggs, Porter, Robertson, Walker, Taylor.

    “Bless you, girl.” Andy gave a small sigh of relief. It was prisoners inside the machine shop—no aliens, so stop being a jerk—and they hadn’t planned the escape. That meant they wouldn’t be heavily armed or supplied for a long siege.

    He called out loud enough to be heard by those inside the building, “We’ve waited long enough! It’s time for you to come out.”

    “Fuck you, badge!” someone yelled from inside the building. “It’s time for shit. You want us, get yo’ lilly ass in here.”

    “If that’s the way you really want it,” Andy called back, “that’s the way you’ll get it. But think things over. That way someone always gets hurt. And that someone is usually the prisoner.” He motioned to his team to be on the ready.

    Pop!

    It was a zip gun. He could tell by the sound. The small, prisoner-made weapons were usually constructed out of old plumbing pipes, springs and metal scraps. They weren’t accurate beyond a short distance, but they carried a hell of a punch, and could easily kill a man. The load sounded like a .45.

    He gave Hulbert waiting on the roof of Baker-house the go signal.

    Crack!

    Crack!

    Andy knew two of the six prisoners were now dead or down. Rod never missed.

    Frank Nickerson was part of the three-man first responder’s setup team. He moved into position and then fired the military issue grenade launcher, sending a canister of C.N. between the bars, through the plate glass window and into the machine shop’s one large room. It wouldn’t be enough to drive the men out, but it would make them uncomfortable as hell.

    Heather Kolb, the second member of the team, moved into position and tossed a canister through a window next to the one Frank’s had entered. Jason Lloyd finished the trio, with a canister of his own. His went in the same window Heather’s entered.

    Smoke billowed out the broken windows. The three of them reloaded and fired again.

    Now the men inside the building began screaming. “Fuckin’ pigs! Don’t shoot, you cocksucking monkeys! We’re comin’ out! Fuck! Don’t shoot!”

    Four black men stumbled through the door, their hands clasped behind their heads. Once through the door they spread out, coughing and hacking and cussing.

    “Fuckin’ hacks, you had no right. No right. We were comin’ out.” The prisoner doing the talking slid to his knees, his hands clasped behind his head, coughing louder and longer than the others.

    Frank moved toward him. Andy watched, fear rising inside him. The man dressed in prison gray was acting. His coughing was too extreme, his breaths too regular for the distress his actions implied. The chemical released by the C.N. canisters, designed to irritate skin, eyes, mucous membranes and lung tissue, did not affect all people the same. Andy took a deep breath to shout a warning.

    “No!”

    It was too late. The prisoner jerked up, burying a shank made from an old toothbrush into the soft tissue beneath Frank’s vest. “Fuckin’ wood sucker!” he hissed, glaring at the guard—whose skin was several shades darker than his own. Race didn’t really matter much compared to the gap between guards and prisoners. “Fuckin wood lover!”

    Frank gasped, blood running from the wound. The prisoner twisted the toothbrush that had been sharpened to a fine point. He was looking for the artery leading to the leg.

    Andy didn’t think. He aimed his shotgun, fired, and the prisoner collapsed, knocking Frank over, falling on top of him.

    The other three prisoners ran.

    Someone yelled, “Halt!”

    The men continued running.

    Rod fired from the rooftop.

    Crack!

    Crack!

    Crack!

    Two of the three prisoners were dead. The third was on the ground and would be gone within minutes. His gurgling, rasping breaths could be heard in the now silent exercise yard. Rod’s bullet had ripped through both lungs. With each breath, he sprayed a pink froth across the road.

    “Shit, oh shit, oh shit!” Heather was close to hysterical. She was a good guard, had worked for the state for over ten years and seen a little of almost everything, but this was too much. First the quake, and now this. She had never watched that many die that way. And Frank was a kid, just twenty-three years old, who looked a lot like her own son. He was bleeding on her lap now. She had sat down and was holding him, trying to help, to comfort him. “Shit, oh shit, oh shit!” she repeated, finally getting hold of herself.

    Andy was on the radio. He needed medical and he needed them now.

    The nurses were coming, but the three to four minutes it would take for them to arrive would be too long if Frank’s artery had been nicked. Or his bladder. He remembered Brown. Still in the infirmary, unable to be moved because there was nowhere to move her. He checked the man lying on Heather’s lap. Heather was applying pressure, trying to slow the bleeding.

    He then took off at a jog to check the two dead prisoners. He recognized their faces, but couldn’t recall either of their names or why they were incarcerated. He then knelt next to the third one, the one who was still alive. The man was fighting for each breath. There was nothing Andy could do for him.

    The man’s eyes went wide and wet. His breaths came quicker. He’d be dead within a minute, with that wound.

    Andy heard the nurses coming with their carts. It was still shift change, which meant there were three of them inside the prison. Two afternoon nurses and the one and only night shift nurse. Caldwell, Ray and the new one, Jennifer Radford. He knew one of the three would stay behind to care for Brown. So that left only two nurses available for cleanup in the yard.

    He turned around, planning to ask what he could do to help, but stopped and stared. Nothing came out of his mouth.

    Jennifer Radford was all business, taking care of her only patient with a chance at survival. She didn’t see him, but he saw her. And was momentary frozen.

    He recognized the sensation, although he’d only had it a few times in his life. Rare as it might be, it was quite unmistakable. And, as before, he was struck by how little the sensation had to do with anything popular culture or certainly the girlie magazines ever talked about. It was never a woman’s figure, or really even her face. Just…

    Something. In this case, perhaps, the calm seriousness in a pair of intent dark eyes. Who the hell knew? Just something that told him he really, really, really wanted to get to know this woman better. Really better.

    Of all the times!

 

---

 

    With no one in the room but the two nurses, Barbara handed Jenny the tools she needed to cauterize the wound. “We have just about anything you need for emergencies. It’s the comfort measure materials we have trouble getting.”

    Jenny looked at the gleaming metal tip and inwardly winced. This was going to be rough on the woman. The anesthetic was completely inadequate. But she would hemorrhage to death without it.

    The procedure took less than five minutes. Twenty-five minutes after they started, Brown’s bandages were in place and the woman was asleep.

    When Jenny finally sat down at the desk it was Barbara who spoke first. “I have to get some sleep. I’ve been awake for over thirty hours. I’ll be in the break room on a table.” She grinned. “That was some mighty nice work you did. Half the doctors we have here are druggies, doing community work to stay out of the slammer. They couldn’t have done it.”

    “Thanks. For the compliment, and the warning about the docs. I didn’t know that. I thought they were hired by the state.”

    “Some are, but some aren’t.”

    Jenny nodded and made a mental note to nose around and learn which was which. “For a woman with no training in invasive procedures, you didn’t do so bad either.”

    Barbara Ray’s smile was replaced by a look of worried concentration. “Yeah, well, Lylah was just talking. Working here, as short as we are and as violent as some of our emergencies get, you stay up on your skills. And you wind up stepping out of your area of official expertise fairly often. You just don’t talk about it. Not if you’re smart.”

    Jenny picked up on the hint and decided it was time to change the subject. “How many of the psych docs are here as part of a plea bargain?”

    “None. They’re here because they want to be.” Barbara shrugged. “They have to think they’re helping. It can’t be for the money. The state doesn’t pay enough for that.”

 

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    “How’s Brown?” Blacklock asked Jenny as she walked out of the examining room and into the wide hall that doubled as a reception area and rest stop.

    “I think she’ll be okay. I’ve started her on I.V. antibiotics. That room is not exactly sterile. If I don’t give her something, she’ll get a hellish infection.”

    She sat in a chair next to the door. “How long until the phones are working?”

    “I don’t know.”

     “This is the craziest thing I’ve ever gotten myself into,” she said ruefully. “No wonder you guys can’t keep nurses.”

    The captain chuckled. “It’s usually not this bad. Honest.” He looked at Hulbert. “I’ve never seen anything like that… quake. Have you?”

    Hulbert shook his head. “I just hope we don’t get hit with an aftershock.”

    Five minutes passed. “I’m really out of my element and I’m betting you guys are, too.” Jenny pulled the rubber band from her hair and started re-applying it. “What’s up with the sun? And the barometric pressure. And that quake. And the way the sky looks. I have never seen such a blue sky.”

    Neither man answered. They were looking at the floor, their brows creased, their elbows on their knees and their hands dangling between their legs, still and calm.

    Jenny slumped in her chair. Exhaustion, caused from the tension of the last—she looked at the clock—four hours, washed over her. She had hoped this job would be easier than her last one. That, obviously, was not going to be the case.

    She glanced to where Frank Nickerson was lying. In spite of the light and the noise, he was sleeping soundly enough that a soft snore could occasionally be heard. His gurney was parked in the hall, since there was no place else for him. At least no place convenient enough for a staff of one to keep a close eye on him. Jenny didn’t think he was in any danger, but medical emergencies had a tendency to occur when you least expected them.

    Barbara was in the break room catching a nap. Lylah was asleep in the records room. Glasser had said the R.N. fell asleep as soon as she lay down. She had also said tonight was the woman’s third double in a row, and that she was usually very caring and giving. Very reasonable. Jenny had been assured that when Lylah woke up she would be a totally different human being. She would be glad Brown was fixed, and would go to bat for Barbara and Jenny if she had to. She was loyal to her nurses.

    Jenny hoped so, but she wasn’t really too worried about what she had done. She hadn’t done much more than she was licensed in the state of Illinois to do. Plus, she was actually pretty good at the art of C.Y.A., covering your ass. She could do it without lying or stretching the truth. It was a matter of how and what you charted. She just hated the fact that she had needed help, and that need had put Barbara on the hot spot right along with herself.

    Brown’s vitals were stable. The knife had, by some miracle, missed the intestines. That gave her a good chance of avoiding peritonitis, and just as good a chance of being back on her feet in a week or two. It would be at least a month before she’d be back to work, though, maybe as much as six weeks. But with a little care, the woman should do all right.

    Jenny had to suppress a small smile. Brown was one of those black beauties who made most women jealous, including white women. She had the high cheekbones, huge black eyes, and full lips that were money in the bank for magazine models. Which she probably could have been, except she was too short and curvy. And according to the Barbara Ray, the C.O. was as good as she looked, too. She sang in the church choir, helped with the food pantry and spent every Thanksgiving cooking for those who would normally not eat that day. Prison guard or not, she was a kind-hearted sweetie.

    Jenny sighed. Now that things were beginning to settle down, she found herself wanting to look at Andy Blacklock. She actually had to work at not staring at him. Finally, she caved in and gave him a quick glance—and discovered he was staring at her.

    “How’s your wife doing?” she asked. It was her way of reminding him not to look too much, and remind herself not to enjoy his looking.

    “Wife?”

    “The lady having the baby.”

    “Oh. Kathleen.” He seemed flustered by the question. “She’s… just Kathleen. Not my wife. One of the midnight C.O’s. She’s got a husband and three other kids.” He shrugged. “She’s fine. I offered to let her wait this out here, in the infirmary, but she didn’t want to. She said she was too big and clumsy and this place was seeing too much action. She felt safer in the communication center. So I sent Keith Woeltje over. He threw his knee out, so he’s not much good right now. He’ll call if she runs into trouble.”

    Jenny nodded, hoping he wouldn’t be able to read her feelings. Not his wife. Not his baby. Just Kathleen. She straightened in her chair a little then pushed the feelings that had surfaced back down. This was business. A job. You don’t date men you work with. It complicates things.

    You dated Matt.

    She stood up and stretched. It was time to start pulling the meds for the morning drug pass. It took well over three hours to set the meds up, and another hour to pass them. According to the sun, she was way behind schedule. But the clock told her, if she hurried, she might get it done before dayshift arrived.

    If they arrived. She was starting to have her doubts about that.

 

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    Less than one hour after Jenny entered the large room with its three, twelve-foot long combination work table/medicine cabinets, Andy Blacklock slid open the metal door slot and said through the small rectangle, “Unlock the door. I’ve sent for Barbara. She’ll have to finish setting up for the morning med pass. I need all department heads in the administrative building for a meeting, stat. Joe is back.”

    Jenny turned just in time to see him leave.

    Department heads? Joe was back?

    Jenny was the new nurse, not the head of the department. True, it was technically the midnight shift, and she was the only midnight nurse on duty, but that was just a technicality.

    In charge.

    She sighed. She had always been the one in charge. Even as a new grad working an emergency room at a free hospital smack dab in the middle of the inner city.

    Years ago, she had given up fighting the situation. Back then she was naïve enough to believe she hated being the one others looked to for orders. She had thought she preferred to follow. But her time in the jungles of South America had changed that. It taught her a lot about who and what she was. She was no follower. She preferred to rely on herself. She had more faith in her judgment and her skills than she did in anyone else’s. And time and time again, she had proven herself right.

    She put the lid on the bottle she had just taken from a drawer and then locked the cabinet. She didn’t know who Joe was or where he had been but she needed a notebook and pen. Meetings meant new information. And new information usually meant new ways of doing things. Taking notes was her way of making sure she didn’t forget anything, or remember something wrong.

    When she climbed the stairs to the upper level conference room she could feel the tension in the air. The guards rushing up and down were in full gear. More than a few wore bulletproof vests and helmets with faceplates pulled into the up position. Watching them in their black leather gloves, leather pants and knee pads made her feel foolish and frivolous, in her pale blue nurse’s uniform. Silently, she cursed the idiot who had picked out the balloon and heart pattern that decorated her top, and wished she had thought to grab a lab coat. The uniform, issued by the prison, was ridiculous in this setting.

    The purple stethoscope draped around her neck looked just as silly. She slipped it off, folded its tubing, and shoved it inside her pocket. The guards were wearing guns. Big, black guns. Not candy colored tools.

    She slipped into the conference room intending to grab a seat near the back, but was spotted by Rod Hulbert. He waved for her to join him at the front. He had saved her a seat.

    “I know things look pretty bad, and they are,” Rod said, “but we have good people.”

    Jenny nodded. “I hope so. What’s going on? Really.”

    He shrugged. “You’re going to know soon enough. Andy’s going to have Joe give a detailed description of what he saw when he went to town. And since I’ve been out there, at least a little ways, I have a feeling it’s going to be an eyeball popper.”

    “Why?”

    “Haven’t you heard?” He didn’t wait for her to answer. “The Mississippi river is gone. And if that mother has dried up and left us with trees the size of two-hundred year old oaks, town has got to be even more messed up.”

    Gone. Two-hundred year old oaks. She could feel her stomach turn over and fought the wave of nausea that came with it. She didn’t feel the need to argue that those things couldn’t happen. Some instinct told her that they could, and had. The same set of instincts were telling her to jump up, run out of the room, find a dark closet and hide. To stay there and never stick her head into the sunlight.

    Instead, she opened her notebook and checked to be sure the pen she had pulled from her pocket protector was a good one.

 

---

 

    Jeffrey Edelman flicked the lights off, then on. Instantly, the room became silent.

    Andy Blacklock was at the front of the room. Standing next to him was a man that made his 6’1” frame look small. “Quiet,” he said to the people in the room, who almost instantly obeyed him.

    “Joe Schuler has just gotten back from town and is ready to give report. You will be hearing what he has to say at the same time I hear it. I’m willing to do things this way as long as the information given out in these meetings goes no further until I say it does.”

    “We won’t be telling the others?” Terry Collins asked. His face was flushed.

    “They’ll be told. Everything. Nothing held back.” Blacklock looked around the room. “There will be no secrets. None. But there’s no sense terrifying them. That situation never helps. We will give ourselves enough time to decide the best approach to dealing with things. Then when we tell them the bad news, the newest problem, we will have some sort of corrective action in mind. That will make it easier for them to accept. And no one goes off half-cocked, crazy with fear.” He sat down in a metal folding chair facing the audience.

    “Lieutenant Schuler, go ahead.”

    Joe nodded, then began talking. His voice shook, but Jenny knew it wasn’t from stage fright.

    “First things first. Don’t nobody boo me, and don’t nobody call me a liar. I didn’t cause the things I’m going to be telling you and I’m not going to be saying anything that isn’t the God’s own truth. Even though I find it hard to believe it myself.”

    He ran a hand through his hair. “First, the road to town is gone. It leaves the prison, goes for about a quarter mile then stops. It looks as though it’s been cut at a 120-degree angle. One side is blacktop; the other is ground cover. I say ‘ground cover’ instead of grass because whatever the stuff is—I didn’t recognize any of the plants—it isn’t grass. Some kind of ferns, is what most of it looked like. Waist high ground cover and trees. The trees are big, too. I didn’t recognize them either, except for a number of gingkos. But whatever kind of trees they are, they’ve obviously been there for decades. At least. And out in the distance, I could see trees that were even bigger. Huge things. Trees that have to be hundreds of years old. Could be thousands of years old, for all I know. I thought they were redwoods at first, but Jeff Edelman says my description doesn’t quite match. The one thing for sure is they’re conifers. In the distance, that’s it. Only conifers.

    “It took me over an hour to get to what should have been the city limits. The truck couldn’t go but about a mile or so and I had to walk the rest the way. I found this where I guessed the police station should have been.”

    He held up what looked to be an unadorned, well-worn pocket watch. Instead of a chain, a strip of leather hung from the ring above its winding stem. “The man who used this was leaned against a stump, dead. He was dressed in old-fashioned garb, like for a parade, but different. And from the insect infestation and deterioration of the body, I would say he had been gone for several days.” He set the watch back on the table. “That man was all I found. There is no town. No railroad tracks, no cars, buildings, factories, or streetlights. Nothing. No people.” He shrugged. “No living people, anyway.”

    “What happened to them?”

    Joe shrugged again. “It wasn’t a bomb or anything like that. This is something else. Nothing is destroyed. It’s just… vanished.”

    He waved toward the outer wall, to the area beyond. “And I don’t think this is just a local situation. If the sun is wrong here, it’s wrong all over the world. And, according to Rod Hulbert, the river is gone. It hasn’t dried up. It’s gone. I talked to Jeff Edelman about it. He said moving that much water would have affected other things in other places. It would change things over a wide area. According to him, since the Mississippi is over two thousand miles long, if it’s bed is gone, things have to be messed up all over the world.”

    “That’s right,” Edelman said. “It’s as though the planet quivered and everything is now different. The tower guards have been spotting strange animals prowling around the perimeter of the prison, and even stranger looking birds. Woeltje says he saw a creature with a hell of a wingspan flying over the prison just a little after sunup, that wasn’t anything like any bird he’d ever seen. And there has been an increase in temperature as crazy as what we’re seeing in the plant and animal life. This is November and it’s eighty degrees out there. And the sun rose six hours ahead of schedule, in the northwest. And last night, the stars were wrong. They were in the wrong place, and there were too many of them.”

    Jenny swallowed, working at staying calm. She could tell by the reactions of those around her, most of what Edelman was saying was old news. But for her, it was all new. She could feel the sweat on her palms and on her upper lip. She looked at Hulbert and knew even though he had already heard most of it, he was taking the situation no better than she was. He looked calm enough, but his respirations were up to sixteen. That was high for him. He was in such unusually good shape, his resting respirations were usually around twelve to thirteen.

    Kathleen, the C.O. in charge of the communications and control room, stood up. “I have a husband and three children in town.” Her voice changed to almost a wail. “Where are they? What does all this mean?” The man sitting in the chair next to hers put his arm around her and drew her back down into her seat. Her quiet sobbing filled the room, driving home what had been said.

    Andy stood and Joe returned to his seat. “It means we have to get ready for a long stay.”

    Hulbert nodded his head and sighed. “Well, I guess now we know.”

    “Know what?” Jenny whispered.

    Hulbert looked at her and gave a thin grin that held no humor. “We know we’re fucked.”