STERLING

 

Tuesday January 14 - 2011 CST

One day until Turbocharger activates

 

When I got to the front bumper of the step van stalled in the middle of the street my heart was thumping in my chest. Not from terror, but sheer exhaustion. The flow of the crowd that had been pushing me steadily down this street had suddenly turned and was now pressing back in the opposite direction. I had to fight against the current like a salmon swimming upstream. In the few moments it had taken me to get this far I gained a lot of respect for salmon. And like those fish there was something akin to a bear standing beside the flow plucking them out for a quick meal.

The reason for the sudden course change in the mob's panic fueled rush had grown a few more arms. They were gray, glistened like they were sweaty and had mouths gaping open in them in oddly set locations. When it could reach someone it would pluck them out of the air and stuff that poor soul into one of those mouths. The air was still filled with the constant wail of the crowd and the stink of fear. Thunder rumbled from the unnatural cloud that had formed overhead.

But at least the bleeding has stopped. There's one bit of good news.

The side of my head was sticky with clotted blood. But it wasn't flowing anymore. That was when I made eye contact with Doctor Johnson. He stared back through the windshield from the back of the step van with a surprised look like he thought I was dead. "Steven! Get in here. We need help."

How did he get here before me?

I squeezed between the side of the engine housing and the flood of humanity flowing past it and forced my way into the cab, then through the opening into the cargo deck. What I found in there was the last thing I expected to see. There were twenty faces gazing back at me. Not a single one of them had abject terror in their eyes. In fact it looked more like they lost the will to live. These people were emotionally defeated. And if that wasn't enough to confuse the hell out of me I saw Adam there with Doctor Johnson and both were digging in a metal drum. The drum was filled with blocks of plastic explosive and some sadistic bastard had taped hundreds of nails and screws to the outside of it to act as deadly shrapnel. The last thing anyone with a shred of sanity should be doing was reaching into that barrel of death.

But that was exactly what they were doing. Johnson handed me a block of explosive gel. "Hold onto this, Steven. We'll need it in a minute."

As I looked down at it I saw the stubby end of a detonator cap sticking out of one side. Modern plastic explosives are very stable. You could set a block of C4 on fire or drop it off a cliff and it wouldn't detonate. So a blasting cap is needed, and these are usually paired with some sort of remote controller so they could be safely set off from a distance. Now I was holding enough explosive to vaporize a house in my hand and it had a live cap in it.

"Gentlemen, what exactly are we doing with this?"

Adam pulled a bundle of copper wiring from the drum and looked at me with a sheepish look on his face. "I accidentally fried the remote detonator. So now we have to jury rig one."

That still didn't answer my question. "And why are we jury rigging high explosives?"

Johnson handed me another block. "Because we need to level that summoning circle. It's our only option for stopping this crossing."

I looked out the back of the step van at the spot that used to be occupied by a gazebo. Now all that was left was the stone pillars and a dozen tentacles as big as oak trees. At the center of it all where the stone floor used to be was a dome of darkness pressing against the shimmery barrier of mystical energy that was all that stood between our world and another. Then I realized the dome was the side of an enormous eyeball.

Just the thought of being this close to something so immeasurably large and terrible paralyzed me momentarily while my brain tried to wrap itself around the enormity. Johnson jiggled my elbow and pointed towards the stone pillars. "We each need to place a block on one of those monoliths. Then Adam will energize the detonators. Taking out three of them should be enough to end the ritual."

Adam wiggled the frayed end of one of the copper cables. "I just hope it doesn't kill us in the process. But we gotta try anyway."

His anxiety wasn't misplaced. We would be pretty darn close to the explosion. But that wasn't what worried me the most. It was having to go past the tree trunk-sized tentacles that were snatching people off their feet.

But we gotta try anyway.

I took my block of explosive and the length of copper wire that would go into the blasting cap. Then I set up on the edge of the deck.

"We'll run on three." Johnson stepped up beside with his own block in hand. "Adam you go left, I'll go up the center, Steven you have the right. Just set the block on the inside of the pillar and run. Adam will do the rest."

That sounded simple enough. To the right was my pillar. It looked like it would have been at home in Stonehenge. Somehow it never occurred to me it was really an ancient transient artifact instead of some rustic, art deco sculpture. Not until the roof was blown off and an ancient evil was trying to force its way through to our world. I blocked out everything except that and imagined each footfall on my sprint there. That's all that mattered. Making it there and dumping my block. Inside. We wanted them inside to shield us on the outside from the blast.

"One…two…three!"

Then I ran like it was the last sprint I would ever make. Probably because there was a good chance it was.