00:01:31.
Leaning in, they threw their weight into it. Ellis was feeling the sweater about to give, when the bomb began to roll. The whole case inched forward at a snail’s pace, and once it was beyond the sweater, they couldn’t help it anymore, even though Pax continued to try until slipping and falling in the thin sheen of blood.
00:01:15.
Ellis raised his wrist so he could watch the clock and the warhead at the same time. The bomb inched forward at an agonizingly slow pace.
“One minute,” Ellis called just as the bomb reached the portal and then—
Pop!
The sparking hit a high note, and Pax’s portal lost its battle with the portway and vanished.
“No!” they both cried as the bomb rolled a few more feet and then stopped.
Pax took up the Port-a-Call again. “It’s not working! It’s not working!” That last word came out as a scream.
“Warren’s—get Warren’s!”
Together they rolled Warren over.
He’s dead. The thought was there knocking to get in, but Ellis didn’t have the time. He found the little device with its touch-sensitive screen, but the whole thing was covered in blood.
“I can’t get it to work,” Pax cried, wiping the screen on the thigh of the Amish pants. “It’s not the blood—it just won’t work! It’s broken like the other one.”
Ellis looked at his watch. 00:00:34.
He stepped forward, reached out, and took Pax in his arms. “My God, how I wish you were a woman.”
Pax settled against his chest and squeezed. “What difference does it make? I’m me.”
“Yes, you are.” He’d spent almost thirty-five years married to Peggy, but he’d never felt this close to her—to anyone. What happens if your soul mate is in the wrong body?
He felt Pax smile.
“And you’re telepathic.”
“Uh-huh.” Ellis felt Pax’s head rub up and down against him. “I hear the thoughts of those near me—feel their emotions as if they’re mine.”
00:00:20.
“Why couldn’t you tell me?”
“I couldn’t tell anyone. If anyone had known—if the ISP had discovered—they could have used me to make the Hive Project a reality. I like my bowler hat. I didn’t want everyone’s uniqueness taken away—I couldn’t stand for it to all be my fault.”
“That’s why you tried to kill yourself. To deny them the secret.”
Again he felt Pax nod.
00:00:10.
“I wanted to explain, but I was afraid people would reject me, hate me. Still I knew if anyone would be able to understand, be able to forgive me—it would be you.”
“Even though you know what I did to my son, Isley?”
“Yes.”
“He told me he was in love.” Ellis felt tears fill his eyes. “Only it was with another man. I told him he had to get over it. That what he was feeling wasn’t love. It couldn’t be, because love like that was only between men and women. I told him he had to choose between his family and this queer of his, because my son wasn’t gay.”
“I know,” Pax said. Ellis looked down and saw that Pax was crying too. “And I know, afterward, you would have done anything to take it back.”
“I don’t even know why I said it.” Ellis was sobbing. They both were, as they stood hugging each other over the dead body of Warren Eckard in the molten Sea of Gehenna and waiting for…
Pax was the first to say it. “Shouldn’t we be dead by now?”
Ellis wiped his eyes and looked at his watch.
It blinked 00:00:00.
“The timer.” Ellis looked at the bomb sitting in its little chariot, a black silhouette against the blast furnace. “Warren said they were having trouble with the timer.”
Pax looked at the bomb too. “Does that mean it won’t go off at all, or do we just have more time?”
“Does it matter?” Ellis took the Port-a-Call from Pax and began scrubbing it with his shirttail. “Spit on your hands, wash them clean.”
“It won’t work. I told you, it’s not the blood.”
When Ellis had cleaned the device, he carefully handed it back. “Try it again anyway.”
Pax struggled. “No. It still won’t work. It’s frozen. I think the interaction with the other tunnel broke both of—oh, wait.” Pax looked puzzled. “The lock is on this one. No one puts the lock on.” Pax slid a finger across the surface of the device. “There.”
Another portal appeared. The warhead was out of the blood pool, and the two shoved again until the bomb was rolling forward at a good pace. They watched as if it were a caisson carrying a casket.
“Go! Go! Go!” they both began to yell as it neared the opening to space.
They watched it pass through the field and continue drifting at the same snail’s pace, but now through a field of stars. With a popping crack! the portal, just like its predecessor, collapsed.
Ellis looked over at Pax. “We’re alive.”
Chapter Fifteen
Time Will Tell
Ellis and Pax arrived at Firestone Farm with a full force of twenty geomancers, including Geo-1 and Geo-12. It was believed that despite their indenture to Warren Eckard, the Cult of Ren, as Pax had dubbed it, would still be cowed by the awe-inspiring presence of an army of geomancers. Ellis imagined geomancers as some kind of cross between Tibetan monks and the firefighters of 9/11.
Once his eyes adjusted from the incandescent radiance that was the Geomancy Institute to the moonlight of the rural Midwest, Ellis saw that the farm was dark except for a single light that burned in the kitchen of the farmhouse. He also noticed, with some concern, that even the crickets had stopped their noise. In all the time he had been there, the crickets and frogs had been an overwhelming soundtrack. As they all stepped onto the surface of the world, they were greeted by only wind, rustling leaves. Ellis got the impression that the geomancers didn’t get out much. They stared at their surroundings like Iowans in Manhattan. A bunch of mad-scientists dressed in lab coats and safety glasses, they gathered before the open portal until it winked out, leaving them in darkness.
The farm felt different. The house, the road, the barn, even the fields had always been a virtual postcard from home. Ellis followed the line of the wooden fence, getting his bearings. As he did, he noted the dark loft-eyes of the barn and the field of corn. It all reminded him of a Stephen King novel. Something bad had happened there.
They were all still looking around when Ellis heard Pax suck in a breath. He followed the line of sight and saw the body on the side of the porch. Four steps later, Ellis could read the name ROB on the blood-soaked shirt.
“Another,” Geo-1 said, pointing down the lane to where another body lay.
Holding his gun in both hands again, and keeping an eye to the fields, Ellis walked down and turned the body over. It was Bob. Clutched in his hand was a pair of bloodstained sheep shears.
They all waited before the porch. No one wanted to go inside. Geomancers fought a daily, high-stakes battle with the primordial powers of a thermal dynamic planet, but two dead bodies in front of a farmhouse had left them helpless. Ellis wasn’t a cop, and had never served in the military, but he was from Detroit. This was his landscape, his jurisdiction, and that made it his job to look inside.
He advanced, holding his arms bent, the barrel pointing up the same way Jaclyn Smith used to in Charlie’s Angels. Why he didn’t think of Mannix, Adam-12, or Hill Street Blues, he didn’t understand. The door was open, and Ellis rotated in with extended arms, sweeping the room. He looked down the sights of the gun, still drawing from his vast repertoire of television, movies, and crime novels.