Callsign: King II- Underworld

He steered straight out onto open ground, away from the Bluelight facility and the shifting horde, letting the vehicle build up some momentum. When the speedometer needle registered forty miles per hour, he carved a wide turn and brought the truck around, lining up parallel to the side of the concrete structure and pointing straight into the heart of the electrical storm. His detour out into the desert had put about a quarter of a mile between him and his ultimate destination; the Humvee would close that distance in about twenty seconds.

He reached under the steering wheel and found the hand-throttle control that was intended to be used with the vehicle’s self-recovery winch. Every Humvee with a winch had a manual throttle, as well as a prominently displayed, printed message stating that it was not to be used as a cruise control. The reason was that unlike sophisticated cruise-control systems, the hand-throttle would not switch off when the brakes were applied.

King had no intention of braking.

He pulled the knob completely out, opening the throttle wide, just as the corner of the building flashed by, then immediately launched himself from the speeding vehicle. Much like the Humvee, King was on autopilot. He knew what had to be done, and he didn’t allow himself to think about the consequences. Thinking would lead to hesitation, and if he had hesitated even a moment in making his leap, he probably wouldn’t have made it out in time. He’d jumped out of too many airplanes to count, and between a youth spent riding skateboards and motorcycling in later years, he’d torn himself up on pavement more than a few times. His body knew what to do, and as he pushed away from the truck, he let muscle memory take over.

His muscles might have remembered what to do, but his body had definitely forgotten about what it would feel like. The silvery mist looked deceptively soft as he jumped, but it simply swirled out of the way as he passed through, traveling at fifty miles an hour. He did his best to curl into a ball, tucking his head against his chest and drawing his arms and legs close to his body, but when he hit the hard rocky ground, any semblance of control went out the window.

The next few moments were a blur of pain and motion, but through the relentless pummeling and the abrasive scraping, he remembered that there was a cliff ahead, and he tried to extend his extremities spread-eagle to slow his doomward slide.

It must have worked, because after a few more tumbles, he came to rest, shrouded in mist. He was almost grateful for the pain, because it told him he was still alive.





40.


King didn’t get to see the Humvee finish its short unmanned trip. While he was still tumbling, the military vehicle shot past the edge of the crater and sailed out over the mine. It nosed over at the end of the short parabolic arc and plummeted straight down. Deprived of all resistance, the engine revved loudly, spinning the wheels even faster, but it was gravity—not diesel fuel—that increased the truck’s speed, albeit only for about three seconds. Then, it came to a very sudden stop.

The Humvee slammed into the middle of the transformer station, annihilating the electrical equipment with kinetic energy alone. The truck then exploded in a ball of fire and debris that finished the job.

As spectacular as the explosion was, it paled alongside the amount of raw power raining down from the sky. And even though the destruction of the transformer instantly shut down the electricity supply to the proton emitter, the storm caused by the anti-matter annihilation in the upper atmosphere did not immediately abate. The lightning continued to hammer down into the collection towers, and because the mechanism for drawing the energy away had been destroyed, the plasma simply pooled at the base of the aerial structures.

In a matter of only a few seconds, the floor of the mine grew hotter than the surface of the sun. Solid matter—steel, copper, concrete, even a layer of rock some thirty feet thick—instantly flashed into plasma, as Bluelight became a flash of pure white light.





EPILOGUE


1044 UTC (3:44 am Local)



The pain might have been proof that he had survived the tumble from the Humvee, but it wasn’t until the mist receded—almost as if sucked back into the Earth—revealing a dark sky, speckled with stars, that King knew his plan had worked.

He got gingerly to his feet, and hesitantly checked himself for damage. All things considered, he’d come out of it pretty well. There were a couple of threadbare spots on his jeans, dark with blood oozing from abrasions underneath, but they were mostly intact. The same could not be said for his favorite Elvis shirt, which hung in shreds from his shoulders. Surprisingly, despite a full body tattoo of scrapes and bruises, the only significant injury he’d sustained was the shallow gash across his back, courtesy of Sokoloff’s knife.

More or less steady on his feet, he ambled forward to the now visible precipice, and stared out into the dark crater where Bluelight had stood only a few moments before.

There was a sharp odor of burning metal, but the air above the pit was clear. The floor of the mine crater was dark, and King could only make out a faint glow, like the belly of a red hot woodstove, several hundred feet below. Aside from that, there was no visible sign that Bluelight had ever existed.