The crowd was screaming, a thousand decibels of madness in his right ear. People were running, grabbing their kids and trying to get the hell out of here, though there was nowhere to run. The earth was quaking under his feet, but Simmons felt it only in a detached way.
Everyone else was scared witless because the ground, that hard rock that they relied on every day of their lives to be steady, was suddenly not so steady. Clearly not many of these folks had ever been stationed in Southern California. This was only like a 4.1 so far.
It was time to amp things up.
Simmons poured it on, letting that fear out into the ground in waves that caused the tectonic plates deep beneath him to shudder. The earth shook, and shattered, a wide crack in the pavement forming about thirty feet to his right. The crowd was so loud he couldn’t hear anything else except that MP through the fence shouting, “Holy shit!”
Concrete was splitting in the distance. Simmons was pushing the quake forward, toward the graving dock and the big ship within. That sucker was shaking, the tower stretching out of the deck rattling metal against the hull. Simmons was cranking up the power, pouring it all into the earth.
He’d sleep well tonight, one way or another. He’d either sleep the sleep of a free man, or he’d sleep the sleep of a dead man, but either way … he’d be free.
Free from this fear.
Something buckled and burst under the ship as it rocked to the side. It crashed into the wall of the dock, upended off whatever was beneath it, and Simmons could hear concrete shattering from the force of the blow. They’d told him what to do and how to do it, how he had to pour every bit of effort he had into it, and—man, he was doing it.
He was giving the USS Enterprise hell. People slid off the deck sideways, dropping off the sides like crumbs skimmed off the edge of a plate. Simmons looked at the ground. Ants were welling up from one of the cracks in the pavement beneath him.
People. Ants. They all kinda looked the same to him at these respective distances.
The sound of metal tearing was like a louder, more fervent scream in his ears, worse than anything the crowd—what was left of it, anyway, that hadn’t run off—was doing to his right.
The USS Enterprise pitched over, capsizing in its own dock. The entire side of the ship clanged again, striking against the reinforced concrete wall. It had a nasty list, forty-five degrees or worse, and it suddenly rocked back the other way, some serious sliding-water-in-a-bathtub action going on in that dock. When it rose to tilt the other way, he could see the jagged scar down the side of the ship, ripped wide, where it had been pushed violently against the sides, violently enough that the side of the ship had actually buckled.
That was all Simmons needed to see. He was only looking for a sign she was out of commission for the near future, and this damned sure looked like it.
He didn’t even wait for anything else.
Simmons ran.
And behind him, he could hear the MP—damn, he should have sunk that guy into his own personal hole—radioing for help:
“—We have a possible metahuman incident! Repeat, we have a possible metahuman cause for this incident, I have white male fleeing on foot, long blond hair and, wearing a vest and a beanie hat—”
Simmons didn’t wait around to hear the rest. He ran for his getaway car, thinking that—yeah, they’d come for him, probably, but this? Having the US government chasing him? He’d done that before. He feared it, but not irrationally, especially not now that Sienna Nealon was gone from their service.
And having all of them—even her, maybe—after him?
He still didn’t fear it nearly as much as what would have happened if he hadn’t just delayed the launch of the USS Enterprise by years.
He didn’t fear it at all like he feared the man in Revelen …
… The one who’d made him do this.
2.
Sienna
Panama City Beach, Florida
Waking up to bad news sucks, doubly so when it’s around noon that it happens.
I opened my eyes when I heard forced whispers through the walls. You know the kind; hushed but loud, lots of emotion behind them. The speaker can’t quite keep it bottled up so it bursts out, like an acrophobic skydiver shoved from the back of a plane.
That was what I heard when I woke in my bed in the vacation condo. White walls, white ceilings, beach décor. There was an olden wooden oar with the words “Mike’s Beach Place” painted on it in white letters. Seashells dominated the decorating scheme, printed on a strip of wallpaper border, embroidered on the towels, and glued into a box that hung on the wall.
Which made sense. I was only a block from the beach, after all.
I was staying outside Panama City, on the Florida panhandle, that little stretch less than a hundred miles from Alabama. If the rest of the state was a dangling peninsula bordered by the Atlantic Ocean on one side and the Gulf of Mexico on the other, the panhandle was the piece that kept it from breaking away and floating off to party in the Caribbean, a haven for retirees, visitors from the midwest, and vacationers from the southern US. I was staying along a strip known as 30A, a colorful locale filled with lots of screaming kids and sunburned parents.
Or it usually was. It was January now, so there wasn’t a lot of sunburning going on, and it was beach weather for no one, except maybe this Minnesotan.
I sat up in bed, a hangover announcing its presence now that I was up. Light streamed in through white blinds and the curtains that bordered them. I’d gone through a bottle of scotch last night—again—and it was plainly going to punish me this morning.
I was getting pretty used to this feeling by now.
I listened, trying to figure out what was going on with all the whispering. I couldn’t hear it all that well, because it seemed to have stopped, but I listened anyway. I thought I could hear some intrepid soul using the pool in the off-season—crazy; it was probably fifty or sixty degrees outside—but there was no sound from the main room.
Squinting my eyes to try and block out some of the pain streaming in with the light, I put my feet over the edge of the bed and stood, tentatively. The world didn’t sway around me; I guessed that meant I was sober now.
“Ugh.” I made my way to the bathroom on unsteady legs, did my business, and then headed for the door. There was no problem that anyone could have been dealing with this morning that couldn’t wait until I was done peeing. Otherwise they wouldn’t have been whispering.
I slid open the pocket door and light blazed down the hallway. Turning left, I shuffled my way toward the condo’s living room to find Reed, Eilish, Augustus, and Taneshia all sitting on the couches and wicker recliners that made up the sitting area. Beyond them was a sliding glass door to the balcony, which overlooked the pool. And yep, there were a couple crazies in there this morning, splashing it up. I could almost see the blue lips from here.