9

The Snow Globe

Sheppard’s cell shrieked seconds before the alarm did. It startled him out of a sleep so deep that when he bolted upright, blinking against the darkness, he didn’t know where he was, what day or time it was, or what the alarm meant. He groped for the bedside light, but it wasn’t there. Then a nearby lamp blazed and he realized he was on one of the couches in the cabin’s living room. Gutierrez, sitting up on the other couch, stared at his shrieking phone, trying to make sense of it. Delgado was still asleep in one of the recliners and O’Hara stood next to the other one, scrolling through his cell. He apparently had turned on the lamp.

“What the hell’s happening, Jon?” Sheppard pushed to his feet.

“The GCP is registering something. I’m trying to get a fix on the exact location.”

“You can’t do it with those random number generators,” Gutierrez said. “We need all the security cams online.”

As Sheppard reached for his iPad on the coffee table, the snow globe caught his attention. It looked as if it had been shaken seconds ago. Inside the damn thing, a violent storm raged—snow or sand, he couldn’t tell which—but as the stuff settled, the Tango Market took shape, clearly defined. “Holy shit. The snow globe says Tango Market.” He handed it to Gutierrez and texted Keel.

Check Tango Market’s cams. Snow globe pinpoints it.

Keel replied: Checking security cam footage… got something. Will send. Meet you there.

“Tango Market it is,” Sheppard shouted.

The women pounded down the stairs, with Nigel in the lead. Rincon stumbled out of a spare bedroom. Everyone looked sleep deprived, anxious, scared, Sheppard thought.

“What’s happening?” Mira asked.

“Tango Market.”

The security footage appeared on Sheppard’s cell, which meant everyone else had it, too. He tried to absorb what he was seeing—the chubby kid on the floor by the cheese, stuffing his face, the air at the end of an aisle turning ink black, two Crows tumbling forward as if the blackness had spat them out. A tall, beautiful black woman, a skinny albino man. No sound. As the images unfolded, Sheppard didn’t need sound to understand that a disagreement had broken out.

The tall woman flung her arms into the air and Hal was hurled into a shelf, toppling it. He melted everything within sight and fire shot out of the redhead’s fingertips, creating a barrier of fire between Hal and the others.

The chubby kid just kept eating, but Sheppard already knew what his talent was. He’d been responsible for the soldier’s decapitated head on the ferry.

“Holy shit,” O’Hara muttered, and slung his pack over his shoulder. “Armageddon among the Crows. How lucky can we get?”

“I’ll drive,” Gutierrez said.

“I just dispatched my A team to the market,” Delgado said.

“What A team?” Blanca asked.

“Snipers.”

Mira shook her head. “I don’t think the Crows will be there.”

“Maybe not,” Sheppard said. “But we have to start somewhere.”

Carmen grabbed her purse from the couch. “We’ll come with you.”

“It’s better if you stand guard on the roof,” Rincon said. “Just in case this is a ploy.”

“That’s bullshit,” Annie countered. “You just don’t want us there.”

“You aren’t cops,” Sheppard said.

Annie laughed, a sharp, ugly sound. “And Ian and Jon aren’t, either.”

Sheppard knew this could trigger a gender war. “We need someone to stay here and keep this place safe.”

Mira slipped her arm around Annie. “Fine, we’re staying. But take Nigel.”

The dog now howled, a strangely mournful sound that prompted Sheppard to slap his hand against his thigh. “You join us, Nigel. C’mon, boy.”

The dog hesitated, looked at Carmen, then at Rincon, and the doc said, “Claro que si, Nigel! We need your nose!”

The dog shot toward the front door, tail whipping back and forth, and followed the men outside.

2

The door of the market stood open and the large front window held a spider’s web of cracks and fissures. The Crows, Sheppard thought, had come and gone.

The inside of the market looked like a bomb had exploded. Shelves lay on their sides, bins of fruits and vegetables had been overturned, and avocados, oranges, grapefruits, berries, mangos, cantaloupes and apples were scattered across the floor. A security cam had melted off the wall and its remains had fallen into a bin of chocolates, now a gooey mess. Cans lay all over the place, some of them split open, contents spilling out. Puddles of water added more chaos to the area, the ceiling sprinklers looked like someone had taken a machete to them.

Nigel darted forward, snout to the floor, pursuing scents. Sheppard followed the dog while the others spread throughout the store and Delgado’s team of snipers remained outside, vigilant. Just in case. Keel and two of his men walked around, snapping photos, and Sheppard wondered if those photos would go to Rudy, whoever he was.

He caught up to the dog, “What do you smell in here, Nigel?”

The Golden, tail wagging, looked up at him with those huge dark eyes, then sniffed his way through puddles. He stopped in front of piles of canned goods, glanced at Sheppard, barked, and started pawing through the cans. Sheppard crouched and helped him. When the cans were cleared away, Nigel dropped to his belly and tried to dig something out from under the shelf. But his legs weren’t long enough.

Sheppard stretched out alongside the dog, swung his arm under the shelf and knocked out a disk the size of a man’s hand, but thicker. “Good boy, Nigel.”

Nigel barked, Sheppard scooted back and rocked onto his heels. He set the disk in the palm of his left hand, snapped a couple of photos of it, then sat down on the floor, Nigel next to him, and tried to figure out what this sucker might be.

He turned it over, ran his fingers over the rounded edges, pinched it between his fingers. Was it some sort of device like the snow globe? Like the red laser light Mira had found on the weather freak? The snow globe depicted targets. The laser light held a message from the weather freak’s wife and daughter. What secrets did the metal disk contain?

“You find something, Shep?” O’Hara crouched in front of him.

“Nigel did, but damned if I know what it is. Here, take a look.”

He passed it to O’Hara, who ran his fingertip over the top and bottom. “I feel grooves or something on the surface.” He turned on his cell’s flashlight, shone it on the surface, held it at eye level. “There, see it? A word, Shep.”

What Sheppard saw was HAL, engraved so lightly into the surface that it was visible only in direct light. “Hal, the head dude.”

“So is this a battery pack? A holographic memory storage? Something like the snow globe?” O’Hara asked.

Sheppard shrugged. “No idea.”

Nigel pawed at the floor and whimpered. O’Hara held out his hand to the dog, the disk in the center of it. Nigel sniffed, then did something that struck Sheppard as bizarre. The dog licked the damn thing, it stuck to his tongue, his tongue vanished into his mouth, and he trotted away from them, tail wagging.

Sheppard and O’Hara leaped up and ran after him, Sheppard shouting, “Nigel, hey, stop!”

But the dog didn’t stop until he reached Rincon, who was lifting a sample of blood from some drops that had dried on the floor. “Hey, big boy,” Rincon said. “Why’re they shouting at you?”

“He’s got something in his mouth, Ian.” Sheppard reached them. “If he swallows it, we lose a clue.”

“And it’s metal,” O’Hara added. “It could hurt him.”

Rincon set his blood sample to one side, peeled off his gloves, and tapped the floor. “Drop it, Nigel. Gently.”

The dog’s tail thumped the floor. He looked mischievous, his eyes darting from Rincon to Sheppard to O’Hara. “Please drop it,” Sheppard pleaded.

“Treat,” Rincon said, and brought out a small dog cookie from his pocket and set it on the floor.

Nigel lowered his head, set the disk down gently, and gobbled up the treat.

Just as Sheppard started to pick up the disk, it abruptly burst with light so brilliant it hurt his eyes. He glanced away, wondering if the wetness of Nigel’s saliva had activated it. When he looked back, scenes unrolled of a young boy and an adult woman in what appeared to be a massive library of some kind. As the images marched forward, Sheppard realized he was watching a kind of memory movie of Hal’s life in the dome.

The others gathered around, staring, fascinated, enthralled, repulsed. The memory movie took them right up to the point where Hal had sent Lightning into the past to blow up the Tango Key bridge. Then the light went black and Nigel slapped his paw over it.

“What the fuck,” Keel snapped. “We need that thing. Get your paw off of it, dog.” He leaned over to grab Nigel’s paw, but the dog bared his teeth and snapped at Keel’s hand. He jerked back. “Goldens aren’t ’sposed to do that.”

“You threatened him. You’d do the same thing.” Rincon slung an arm over Nigel’s back and glared at Keel. “Never threaten my fucking dog, Frank. It may be that the warmth of his tongue and mouth activated that disk.”

“I want that disk, Ian.”

“I found it,” Sheppard said. “So it’s now the property of the bureau, Frank.”

“You’re not in charge here.”

“Think again.” Gutierrez aimed his weapon at Keel.

Behind Keel, his two men drew their guns, but Delgado and O’Hara already had them at gunpoint. “Tell your boys to fucking back off,” Sheppard said.

Keel gestured at his men. “That disk belongs to the National Guard, Sheppard.”

“Sue me.” Sheppard touched Nigel’s paw gently, the dog’s leg slipped to the side, away from the disk. Sheppard picked it up, pocketed it. “And who’s Rudy, Frank? Why’re you reporting to someone named Rudy? Who’s he work for?”

The expression on Keel’s face told Sheppard everything he needed to know.

Keel threw up his arms, a half-hearted gesture of surrender. “We’re outta here. You’ll be hearing from our attorney, Sheppard.”

“Yeah, good luck with that, Frank.”

Delgado motioned with his weapon. “I’ll escort you boys to the door.”

Once Keel and his two sidekicks were outside the market, O’Hara said, “We may have just fucked ourselves, Shep. His troops outnumber us by, uh, well, several thousand.”

“Let’s gather up our stuff and get out of here,” Sheppard suggested.

No one argued or suggested otherwise.

3

One World Books surpassed any expectations Hal had about a physical bookstore in the twenty-first. Nothing he ever had seen in the dome archives had prepared him for the reality. The spaciousness, the shelves, the sheer numbers of books, magazines, displays of novels turned into TV shows and movies, the collection of Dystopian fiction, the biographies, historical books, self-improvement tomes, everything so neatly categorized.

He couldn’t remember how he’d learned to read. But he clearly remembered the moment when his dad had shown him a comic book, a tattered copy of Superman from the 1950s, preserved by some secret process the archives had created. He was maybe two at the time, they were at one of the parks, and he promptly had sat on the ground and started reading. Aloud. To his dad.

His father stood there staring at him, in shock. When did you learn how to read, Hal?

He’d shrugged, murmured that he didn’t know, and continued reading about Superman’s exploits and his secret life as Clark Kent.

That memory and the joy he felt just then, surrounded by so much to read and explore, led him to believe that he—and perhaps the other Crows—had known how to read and speak within days or weeks of their births. Perhaps the Crows were an evolutionary version of humanity jammed in fast forward. Or maybe they were just an evolutionary mistake. So much about his own nature and that of the other Crows remained unknown and perhaps unknowable, at least for him.

Hal ended up in a specialized area on the first floor of the bookstore called Visionary. It appeared to be a mix of fiction and non-fiction on health, quantum physics, time, the future, the nature of reality, UFOs, the paranormal, famous psychics, seers. For the next few hours, Hal rapidly scanned numerous books but from what he could glean, few of them got the details right about the future.

Here and there, he found pieces of the world he’d left behind, but only the Dystopian fiction captured some of the emotional horror. 1984. The Hunger Games. The Handmaid’s Tale. Minority Report. His world had held elements of all these books—yet none had captured the specific details. A non-fiction book, Mass Dreams of the Future, mentioned the domes. Stephen King’s The Dome was a more temperate version of life early on in the dome, but both missed the mark in terms of real dome life.

In the end, Hal was most impressed with the predictions by Edgar Cayce about the dramatic changes in the earth. Cayce had pinpointed the spiking temperatures that would melt ice caps, the rising oceans, the quakes that would destroy the west coast, the proliferation of plastics and garbage and the overpopulation that would destroy life as his ancestors had known it. But Cayce’s timing had been off by decades.

In some of the books, Hal crossed out sections and scribbled his own notes. In a book by Jane Roberts, described as a poet, medium, and channeler, he flipped to the blank pages at the back and scribbled memories of how his group had begun, his parents’ involvement. In the front of 1984, he jotted notes about his mother removing forbidden books from the archives and making them available to him. In Mass Dreams of the Future, he wrote about his daily life in the dome and redrew Chet Snow’s map of the U.S. for 2100.

The sun started to rise. He put all the books back on a shelf, lumped together in a new category he thought of as Hal’s Corrections, and went into the cafe where the others had made themselves at home. Trixie sat by a window, reading, books spread out across her table. Squirt sat across from her, engrossed in graphic novels—the comic books of this century. Nico sat at another table, madly scribbling notes. Red sipped at coffee and paged through a magazine. They looked remarkably comfortable, normal, as if they belonged here.

He reached into his pocket for his disc, so he could record this moment, capture it, but it wasn’t where it was supposed to be. He turned the pocket inside out. Empty. Near panic, he slapped the other pockets in his jeans, his shirt, he even went through the bags of groceries. Nothing. It must have fallen out when Trixie had hurled him across the market.

“Fuck.” He started toward Trixie to tell her off, but through the front window, Hal spotted one of the yellow monsters turning onto the road out front. The driver would be able to see them once the vehicle got closer to the bookstore. “Uh, Nico?”

The albino glanced up and Hal stabbed his hand toward the window.

Nico looked, leaped to his feet and hurried deeper into the café. “Shit.” He motioned the others over. “C’mon, squeeze in tightly, clasp hands.”

“Can you hold all of us?” Red asked.

“I can hold the entire room if I have to, but if the driver decides to come in here, it will look weird. And suspicious.”

And just like that, Hal could no longer see the others. “It worked.”

“And not too soon,” Squirt said. “That monster’s drawing even with the window.”

“You don’t have to hold hands,” Nico explained. “But I suggest we head toward the rear exit. Wherever that is.”

“Unless we want to take on whoever’s in there.” Trixie made a small sound, a mischievous giggle. “It would be a good practice run for us.”

“A premature, foolish move,” Red cautioned.

Hal watched the driver and five soldiers exit the monster, fully armed, wearing helmets. They came over to the front window, peered inside. Hal could tell that the driver—the older and shorter man in the group—was in charge. He disliked the man’s thin, twitchy mouth, small dark eyes, and the weapons he carried. The other four men—early twenties, he guessed—looked less certain about being outside of the vehicle.

The man in charge nodded toward the door, where the melted lock was a dead giveaway. He and the others lowered their helmet visors into place, covering their faces.

“Yes or no?” Hal whispered. “Majority rules.”

Trixie, Nico, and Squirt flashed a thumbs up. So did Hal. Red looked disgusted. “Shit, okay. If we’re going to do this, there’s one for each of us, and two of us will have to take on two. Unless you can do something other than turn us invisible, Nico.”

“That’s not enough?” Nico sounded pissed.

“It’s just not lethal.”

“I can do things even better than you Lethals.”

“Dude, telling doesn’t count. Showing does,” Trixie said. “I’m down for two.”

“Me, too,” Hal added.

“Then Squirt and I are backups,” Red finished.

They moved apart.

4

As the men entered the bookstore, their visors in place, Hal saw that their names were imprinted across the fronts of their vests. Lexington and Blake were first and moved left toward the cafe, Gustavo and Thomas moved off to the right, Watkins and Keel peeled away to the left and right. Keel, the head guy, motioned them ahead and then he opened fire, a spray of bullets that caused Hal and the others to hit the floor or dive behind tables.

Enraged, Hal scrambled around the edge of a bookcase just as Lexington was hurled into the air and Blake’s clothes started burning, and something severed one or both of Gustavo’s legs at the knees. He heard Keel shouting and then he sprayed bullets across the cafe and the beast inside Hal busted free. He melted the floor, part of the front counter, a cash register, shelves of books. And he loved the power of it, the stink of melting metal, wood, paper, tile, leather.

Then the ceiling sprinklers whipped to life, probably triggered by the flames that engulfed Blake, and the water drenched their clothes until they were exposed like bones in an X-ray. They hurried toward the rear of the bookstore, hurling up a wall of chaos around themselves of flames and melting objects and stuff that Trixie threw through the front window.

As soon as they were outside, they cut through the woods to remain hidden. When they were deep in the trees, Squirt suddenly stumbled and pitched to the ground. Hal hurried over to him, realized Squirt had been shot, and was losing a lot of blood.

He and Nico started to pick him up so they could carry him to the apartment, but Trixie intervened. “Let me do this. It’ll be less jarring for him.” She raised her arms and he drifted up slowly from the ground, unconscious now, blood saturating his clothes.

They broke into a run and Squirt’s body moved along with them through the air.

Nico rendered them all invisible as they neared the apartment. Once they were inside, he lifted the shrouding and Hal tore around, grabbing towels and looking for a first aid kit. He finally found it in one of the bathrooms and hurried back into the living room. Trixie had lowered Squirt to the floor and Red and Nico removed his shirt carefully, peeling it away from the skin, exposing an abdominal injury that bled profusely. Red grabbed the towel, pressed it over the wound.

“Shit, we need more than a first aid kit. This injury is bad.”

Nico grabbed a bottle of something from the kit, moved the towel off the wound, and poured whatever it was over the injury. Squirt bolted upright, screaming in pain. Red pressed the towel over the injury again and stroked his face, speaking to him softly, calmly, coaxing him to lay back against the floor.

Trixie slipped a couch pillow under his head. “He needs to see a doctor.”

“We can’t do that,” Hal said. “It’s too dangerous.”

“Then he’s going to fucking die,” Red snapped.

“I may be able to help him,” Nico said. “But you’ve got to keep the blood sopped up so I can see how deep it is. If there’re bullets lodged inside him, they’ll have to come out first.”

It was news to Hal that Nico knew anything about medicine. “You have medical training?”

“I was in medical school when I got identified. Red, keep the towel over the injury, maintain pressure on it. I also need plenty of hot water, clean towels, this one is saturated, a sharp knife, alcohol, needle and strong thread, and whatever we’ve got to deaden pain.”

“I’ll put him to sleep, that’ll help,” Hal said.

“Good. Yeah, that’s good. Do it.” Nico sounded rattled.

Hal thumped his knuckles against Squirt’s forehead. “Take a deep nap, dude. Rest.”

Squirt went still.

“Needle and thread?” Hal said. “Where would we find that?”

“Some of those things are in my pack,” Nico replied. “Kitchen counter. Just hurry before he bleeds to death.”

They all scattered. Hal found Nico’s pack on the kitchen counter, rifled through it and brought out a lightweight, rectangular metal box with a red cross on the front. He ran back into the living room with it, set it on the floor, flipped open the top. “What do you need?”

“Alcohol,” Nico said.

Hal handed him a large packet labeled ALCOHOL. Nico tore it open and rubbed it vigorously over his hands, between his fingers, up his arms. “Move the towel a little, Red,” Nico said.

She did, and in the moments before the blood started flowing from it again, Hal saw what looked like a bottomless abyss in Squirt’s abdomen. He nearly gagged. But, even worse, was the guilt he felt. Squirt was the youngest in his tribe, thirteen. He looked at Hal, Red and Trixie as surrogate parents.

“Okay, Trixie, he’s still got bullets in there,” Nico said. “Can you move them out?”

She crouched beside Nico and looked like she might pass out. “Wow. I… don’t know. I’ve never tried… something so… so specific.”

“The other option would be you, Hal, if you can liquify the bullets,” said Nico.

“I might inadvertently melt part of him. Besides, what would melted bullets do to him?”

Nico nodded. “Probably nothing good. Trixie, can you try? I really don’t want to dig around inside there with a knife. It might kill him.”

“Shit. Okay. I’ll try, Nico. I’ll try. But I’m not promising anything.”

Red wiped away some more blood, then Trixie gently placed her hands over the injury and drew them slowly upward. She repeated this again and again until Squirt’s blood covered her hands and smeared between her fingers, beads of sweat popped out on her forehead and sliced across her upper lip like a perforated line. And then three bloody bullets followed her hands into the air. She flicked her fingers at the floor and the bullets clinked against the tile.

“I can’t swear that’s all of them,” she said. “What do you think, Nico?”

“Let’s go with it.”

Squirt stirred, his plump face drawn in pain. Nico looked at Hal. “I need a really deep sleep.”

“Okay.” Hal moved in front of Squirt’s head, placed his hands at either side of it, then leaned forward and brushed his mouth across Squirt’s forehead. “Sleep, Squirt. A deep, deep sleep.”

He heard the abrupt deepening in Squirt’s breathing and watched his shoulders relax against the floor. “Okay, Nico. I think he’s really out.”

“Good.”

Nico picked up the needle, threaded it, stuck two of his fingers deep inside the wound, widening it, while the fingers of his other hand dipped down into the bloody tissue and stuck the end of the needle through it. Squirt made a small, startled sound, so Hal pressed his knuckles to the side of his skull again and whispered, “Deeper, Squirt. Deeper.”

“We’ll need our herbal antibiotics,” Nico said.

“You think it can treat something like this?” Trixie’s face skewed with worry.

“I don’t know,” Nico admitted. “We’ll have to wait and see.”

Every time that needle stuck its way through bloody tissue and skin, Hal nearly puked. And his hatred of these twenty-first century people metastasized.

5

When Sheppard and Gutierrez arrived at the bookstore, they found bedlam. Cop cars, ambulances, a fire truck, the coroner’s van, paramedics loading bodies into the ambulances, glass and debris covered the front sidewalk.

“Jesus God,” Sheppard muttered.

Gutierrez made a hasty sign of the cross on his forehead.

They made their way toward Delgado, standing next to the yellow Humvee, talking with two of Keel’s soldiers, Thomas and Watkins. Both men looked deeply shaken. Delgado looked pissed.

“These two soldiers and the two dead men inside arrived here with Frank Keel.”

“Why?” Sheppard snapped. “Why here?”

Thomas wiped the back of his hand across his broad forehead. A tall, muscular guy. Sheppard guessed he was in his twenties. “Frank… had a hunch. After you made him leave the market, he came back to the airport and tagged his five best snipers. He felt the market Crows might come here since the weather freak had and the stone woman had asked for Mira.”

“And they were inside?” Gutierrez asked.

“Yeah. Five of them. They were… invisible. We all wore thermal visors and could… could see the blobs of their body heat.”

Watkins had been standing there listening. “Frank started shooting and… and before any of us could do the same, they… attacked.”

“Where’s Frank?” Sheppard asked.

“Over there.” Thomas gestured at the coroner’s van.

“Be right back, Goot.” Sheppard hurried over to where Rincon stood at the rear of the van. Keel sat inside, his legs dangling over the edge, and gripped a bottle of water that he kept rolling across his face. His pallor, his obvious unease and anxiety, spoke tomes about what he’d experienced inside the store.

Sheppard nodded at Rincon, but spoke to Keel. ”What the fuck were you doing here, Frank?”

“My job.”

“Your job is to help protect the island, not destroy it.”

“Don’t tell me what my goddamn job is, Sheppard. As head of the troops who are here, I’m in charge.”

“Yeah?” Sheppard leaned into him. “You’re in charge? Fine.” He flung his arm toward One World Books. “Then you’re in charge of paying for its restoration, Frank.”

Keel got to his feet, but Sheppard towered over him by at least half a foot and didn’t move, which forced Keel to sidestep. “Listen closely, Sheppard. We were snipers. Well armed. And within fifteen seconds… two of us were killed, two more were badly injured, and two of us escaped. We don’t stand a fucking chance against these Crows.”

“All the more reason you shouldn’t have come here without backup. So let’s get something straight, Frank. You do your job and take care of your soldiers and protecting the island and the local PD. The FBI will take care of the rest of it. And stay the fuck away from the bookstore unless you’ve got a check to cover the damage.”

Then Sheppard turned away from him and forced himself to walk to the front door to assess the damage.