*
The ash man’s voice sounded like pieces of ground glass rubbing against each other. Utterances somehow stringing themselves into words. He stood before them maybe a dozen feet in front of the entrance to the particle accelerator, which once activated would trigger the sequence ending the world as it was known today. Maybe ten feet before Alex and Sam.
“I didn’t give you enough credit, Alex,” the ash man continued. “I never thought you would get this far, especially so fast.”
“I had help,” Alex told him, stepping protectively in front of Sam.
“You don’t understand.”
“What don’t I understand?”
“The truth, who you really are. Have you stopped to think why you, why an infant, was made guardian of knowledge vital to our civilization?”
“I haven’t had a lot of time to think lately.”
The ash man seemed to move, or float, closer, looming larger in one moment than he had in the last. “I should have told you the truth of your identity the first time we met.”
“After you killed my parents, you piece of shit!”
The ash man looked utterly unmoved by Alex’s feisty show of emotion. “The truth of who you are and why you were taken through one wormhole lies on the other side of this one,” he said in that ground-glass voice, tilting his gaze toward the tunnel, which weaved its way beneath Alcatraz Island. Then he extended a grainy hand forward, the palm seeming almost translucent. “Join me on that other side, Alex. We can take the girl with us if you wish.”
And with that the cylindrical entrance to the accelerator opened, disappearing into the thick steel walls to reveal a brightly lit tunnel that seemed to stretch emptily forever.
“Embrace your true identity and take the place that is rightfully yours,” the ash man continued, stretching a hazy hand forward. “Come back to your world.”
“This is my world!” Alex screamed at him and, for the first time, Sam realized the shrill alarm wasn’t sounding down here. “This is my world!”
“It won’t be for very much longer.”
*
“Drop the weapon!” the big bald man wailed on, Raiff watching his eyes, sizing up the situation. “Where’s the boy? What have you done with him?”
The hall beyond him seemed dimmer to Raiff than it had when they’d first traversed it, as if power were being pulled away from down below. The overhead lighting faded, flickered, and Raiff realized a power drain wasn’t to blame, that something else was …
coming …
“The boy,” the giant standing before him resumed, “where is he?”
Raiff never had a chance to answer. A rumble seemed to pulse through the whole of the prison structure before the floor broke apart along an endless cascade of crisscrossing fault lines. Gaps opening in the cracking tile through which the cyborgs burst with their plasma rifles at the ready.
Raiff shoved Donati against the elevator’s far wall, covering him protectively as the battle erupted beyond. The plasma rifles made a pinging sound, something like a toy weapon might, white heat erupting from their barrel bores instead of a muzzle flash. All this in eerie contrast to the steady rat-tat-tat of the human force’s assault rifles, their fire deafening in the narrow confines of the hallway.
Raiff watched the soldiers of Langston Marsh’s Fifth Column being slaughtered in virtually effortless fashion by an army that provided the ultimate vindication of Marsh’s obsessive crusade. The sounds of screams and the incessant barrage of fire continued to hollow their hearing, and Raiff realized Donati was screaming in cadence with the constant cacophony of gunplay.
Marsh’s forces tried to make a stand while seeking some form of cover, only to have the plasma rounds fired by the cyborg army trace their trails wherever they darted. The rounds flared in the semidarkness like streams of light, darkening only when they hit their targets and obliterating whatever lay in their path.
Raiff had been in this world so long that he’d practically forgotten the fearsome impact of the weaponry from his world. As advanced beyond this world’s as virtually every other form of technology. Strangely, the plasma rounds ejected with only that soft pfffffft, just a hissing in the air as they sizzled through it en route to their targets.
The big bald man who was obviously the leader of this phalanx of Marsh’s Fifth Column managed to hang on to the last, amid the sprawl of spilled bodies around him. He was holding a pair of M4 assault rifles in hand, firing them while wailing himself and managing to take down a few of the cyborgs in his relentless spray. His eyes locked briefly with Raiff’s when he crossed even with the elevator cab, sweeping his assault rifles toward him, when a series of plasma rounds tore into the man and blew him apart, pieces scattered all directions.
The damn machines saved us, Raiff thought, but only for the moment.