Pulse: When Gravity Fails (Pulse Science Fiction Series Book 1) (8 page)

16

Michael Strove and Roman Nikitin – Russia

Michael charged forward between the light and shadows cut between the trees that were still standing. Roman kept a good pace for hobbling, but it wasn’t as fast as he would have liked. They were passing more and more open ground with fallen, broken trees too.

A bullet tore through a tree trunk on a spot a few feet above his head and just ahead of them. Bark and central wood exploded out and peppered out around them. Michael ducked his head as they ran through. He was just glad the pieces fell at a normal rate instead of firing to the ground like sharp bullets.

They hurdled a fallen tree and then another. These looked to be old logs that had come down when nature still obeyed the old rules of gravity.

Michael stepped off into open space and couldn’t find the ground. He tried to get his balance on the slope, but the two of them fell down the hill head over heels. His shoulder connected to a rock with jarring pain that quickly reminded him that he had narrowly survived a plane crash. Michael’s knee wretched under his body and the captain yelped from the sickening agony. His hip slammed a log and Michael tried to claw himself to a stop on it, but raked off thinking he had pulled off one of his fingernails.

The slope became steeper and the men tumbled harder and faster.

Michael slammed to a stop staring up from his back at clouds painted with the bright colors of the setting sun.

“Roman?”

Michael tried to sit up, but winced.

Roman’s face entered his line of sight and covered the colorful clouds. The Russian pulled the captain up to sitting and Michael cried out.

“Broken, Michael?”

“I don’t think I can keep going, Roman. Can you get to safety before I surrender?”

“They have seen me and will keep following until they find out who I am,” Roman said. “And it’s not nothing that we are in this together, Michael. So, get up. We are getting closer.”

Roman dragged Michael to his feet and Michael leaned more on Roman instead of the other way around. “How much closer?”

“Not as much as we would like, but we will get there. Once we are inside, we will be safe.”

As they pressed forward, Michael looked back at the colors under the clouds. The brightness was dying and purple was painting over what had been there moments before.

Something about the idea of being inside bothered Michael. He could not place why. He pictured his older brother in all his gear running into a burning building and Michael sensed that same level of danger about going inside.

Michael shook his head and pulled his eyes away from the sky.

He thought about Carter and said a prayer in his mind for his brother. He had no reason to think Carter was in any danger beyond his normal job, but with the strange things going on with the rules of the world, he didn’t know, so he said the prayer.

Michael looked back at the darkening sky in time to see the clouds dissolve and fall to the ground as swirling fog. He heard trees cracking to his right. Michael bowed his head and they continued forward.

17

Sean Grayson and Jenny Restrepo – Little Rock, Arkansas

Traffic crawled forward again. Sean slammed his fist into the steering wheel until the heel of his hand hurt.

“Do you want me to drive?” Jenny asked.

“We’re not driving,” Sean said. “We are parked.”

Jenny put her hand on the back of the driver’s seat of her jeep where Sean sat behind the wheel. She stopped short of putting her hand on his shoulder and Sean noticed.

Jenny said, “I can do the parking for a while until we get clear of all this.”

Sean took a deep breath and smelled thick exhaust wafting around him in the open jeep. The cars stretched endlessly ahead of them across the expressway. Sean could see the exit ramp about a quarter mile ahead. Cars jammed every lane up the slope and sat clogged over the bridge of the overpass. He glanced at the shoulder on their side and over the median at opposing traffic. Cars had filled the emergency lane and the gritty edge of the road to create one more lane of congestion.

“No, I’m fine. It won’t matter anyway.” Sean laid his head against the steering wheel. “My kids are going to die because I can’t get to them in time. I should have said something about what happened in the building and maybe things would be different. I should have fought for them and insisted that she honor my weekend. They would have all probably stayed in town and we would all be safe even if she was ticked at me for it. She’s always mad at me anyway, but I just let them go. I always just let them go and that’s why they are growing up without a father.”

“They have a father.” Jenny put her hand on his neck then. “You are doing fine. You are being a good father now regardless of what may have happened in the past. None of that can be changed now, so there is no point in destroying yourself over it.”

Sean lifted his head to look across traffic with tears in his eyes. “Now they won’t grow up at all. We can’t get there in time. We will never make it in all of this.”

Several men got out of a truck and opened the driver’s door of an old, tan Buick. Sean thought there was about to be a fight, but then he saw the tan car had been abandoned and was sitting empty. Traffic had moved so little that he hadn’t noticed. The men shifted the car into neutral and turned the wheel all the way to the side. They hunkered down and pushed it rolling the car sideways through the lanes between bumpers until it dove nose first into the standing water along the side of the expressway.

The men ran back to their truck and traffic rolled forward a few feet. Another blue sedan whipped over into the space the men had opened in the lane and halted progress again. The men shouted and cursed. The fellow in the blue car rolled down his window and yelled back.

Sean came to a halt behind the truck. Through a break in the hills beyond the expressway, he got a better view of the high rises that marked downtown Little Rock. Enormous swatches of glass were missing from two of them exposing openings into the offices inside. He wondered if that destruction had occurred when floating desks impacted the glass from the inside before coming crashing down with full gravity again.

How had Carter missed that?
Sean shook his head.
He thought it was from the quakes. That’s what any sane person would think
.

Scorch marks up the exposed framework of one of the shattered buildings caught Sean’s eye. He wasn’t close enough to get a good feel for whether the fire had originated from within the skyscraper or from something from the outside. He imagined a helicopter pilot suddenly navigating a weightless craft over the city only to have that weight come back again suddenly.

He hoped they were able to get all the planes down before the next and greatest wave hit like Jenny’s dad had predicted. He hoped that it would matter. They said people would be safe inside buildings, but could they really know? Looking at the large buildings of downtown Little Rock, he questioned whether inside was safe at all. Would they stand up to the pressures of being yanked upward and back down again. Even if the sun and Earth survived, would this be the end of people?

Sean thought about Carter’s brother Michael. He was in the Airforce and posted overseas. Sean couldn’t remember where. Carter and Sean had not made much small talk recently. He wondered if Michael was in the crush zone or the float zone of all of this. He hoped he wasn’t in the air during any of it. Sean thought a little prayer for his sons and for Michael.

Michael would want me to save Carter. I need to get to my sons and save all of them. I have to
.

The men got out of their truck again. Sean watched and expected them to shove another abandoned vehicle off the road. They opened the door to the blue car and dragged the driver out. People on both sides were yelling and honking.

Sean cursed.

Jenny shook her head and covered her mouth. “What are they doing? We need to stop this.”

The driver took the first swing and then the men were on him. He was curled on the ground against his front tire as the men kicked and beat him.

“Sean?”

“There’s nothing I can do, Jenny.”

“Why are people acting like this?”

A gunshot rang off and one of the men fell. Others ran and dove behind cars. Another shot was fired and the windshield of the blue car exploded into shards.

Sean turned the wheel of the jeep and drove across. He scraped the passenger’s side of the vehicle across someone’s front bumper. Glass from a headlight lamp blasted up into the air behind them

“Sean, what’re you doing?”

“Getting us out of here.”

He drove through another gap just before the pick-up truck backed into the car behind it, crumpling the hood of a car and blaring the horn of the smashed car in one, endless note.

Sean dragged along the back bumper of an SUV on his side of the jeep throwing sparks up around his leg. One more gap and he would be over the shoulder and off the highway. From there, he had no idea what to do next.

One of the men that had been kicking a man on the ground a moment ago grabbed hold of the open jamb of the door on Sean’s driver’s side of the jeep. The man brought one boot up onto the running board and the other dragged the pavement under the jeep. He grabbed Sean’s sleeve. “Get out or I’ll throw you both out on your heads.”

Sean stepped down on the accelerator while lifting his left foot as high as he could in the seat. He extended his knee connecting with the man’s chin with his heel. The man’s hands came loose and he folded backward in the air from the kick. The fellow landed on his back sprawled across the trunk of a Honda. The man rose up on his elbows and shook his head like he had just woken up from a bad dream.

Sean left the highway in the air before he let off the gas. The jeep bounced twice going down the small slope. It tilted hard to one side and then the other with each impact threatening to topple with the high center of gravity of the jeep.

Very high center of gravity if we are still in it when that wave passes through the Earth
, Sean thought despite the desperate situation around him.

It splashed down in the soggy grass off the highway and slogged forward with sluggish weight. Sean stepped down on the gas again spinning black water and muck up into the air behind them. He thought about the mob and the attacker behind him, but he did not turn to look.

“A little less gravity might be good about now,” Sean said as he shifted gears and pumped the gas.

“What?” Jenny looked around them as specks of mud landed on the dash and their seats.

The wheels caught and lurched forward before bogging down again. He prepared to shift again, but the jeep tilted up in the front and bounded forward off the wet ground. Dry grass tore under the tires and sprayed out in their wake on both sides.

Before Sean could make a decision about where to go next, he swerved around a small tree only to plow through and over a low, wire fence. Metal raked and tore under the jeep as it spun out into a grassy pasture. Sean turned out of the fishtail and ripped the jeep up over the rolling hills.

As they topped one knoll, they saw a pond and a herd of cattle staring dumbly up at the passing jeep. Sean spotted a gate farther along on the opposing fence. He steered around logs and missed a couple trenches by inches.

Sean centered on the gate and raced toward it.

“Lock.” Jenny shouted.

“What?”

“The gate is padlocked, Sean. Look.”

He nodded. “Hang on. Sorry, I can’t afford to stop. We’re running out of time.”

Sean picked up speed and squinted his eyes. The front of the jeep slammed the gate head on with enough force to hurt his teeth. As the gate flung open with the force of the impact, Sean saw that the lock and chain had held, but the post had torn loose from the ground flying through the air pulled by the chain.

He thought about every object on the planet being flung up in the air and Sean pressed the pedal down harder. He found a dirt road and turned onto it flinging dust and rocks in a cloud behind them.

Sean shook his head and said, “Sorry about that.”

“Not as sorry as the farmer will be when his cows get away.”

Sean shrugged. “If your father is right about all of this, they may be flying away.”

“He’s right. He’s always right,” Jenny said.

Sean cut a glance at her face seeing the deep set concern as the wind whipped strands of hair around her cheeks. The look of concern was not directed at him this time, but it bothered him and scared him more than all the looks of concern he had endured over the years. He looked back forward.

Ahead he saw a paved road and no farmers had shot at him.
I haven’t been shot at for almost a full minute
.

They bounded up onto the road with no lines dividing one lane from the other. Sean drove on the wrong side as he looked at the sky to see which way west was. He seemed to be headed mostly west. The sky was crystal clear blue. Normally that was the perfect day in his book, but he also knew it meant high pressure. He wondered if the comings and goings of gravity were impacting atmospheric pressure. Sean thought lower gravity would mean less pressure, but he didn’t know.
It’s not really lower gravity, but gravity moving the wrong direction
.

Sean turned his attention back on the road and steered onto the correct side of the street.

“Sean?”

He saw the fire belching out from the crumpled hood of a station wagon crashed into a telephone pole on the side of the road. “I see it.”

He swerved out wide around it. Jenny looked at him and back at the car. A woman spilled out of the driver’s side and pulled at the back door without budging it. Sean saw a girl beating on the inside of the glass and another in a car seat reaching for her mom.

The jeep raced past.

“Sean, the kids.”

“I saw. Hold on.”

He swerved to the side and ran up over a curb onto the grass next to a parking lot. Sean jumped out and Jenny started to follow. He grabbed her arm. “No, stay with the Jeep. If we leave it, someone may try to steal it and we’ll be stranded. If there is trouble, honk.”

“Okay. Hurry. The car is on fire and those kids are inside.”

He grabbed a fire extinguisher out of the back of the jeep and ran. Sean sprayed inside the engine under the openings in the bent hood. The fire fell back and white smoke billowed out. As the extinguisher sputtered empty, the fire blasted back out again.

He moved the mother aside and shouted. “Move away from the glass. Cover your sister’s eyes.”

The girl turned away and put her hand over her sister’s eyes. Sean was impressed. The girl had to be younger than Holden and she was good under pressure.

Sean swung and shattered the side window with one strike. The mother screamed. Sean swept glass out of the window frame with the body of the extinguisher before he tossed it aside.

“Come on.” He held his hands inside.

The girl unbuckled her sister and walked her across the seat to Sean. He pulled the girl out and handed her off to the mother.
You should be a firefighter. You have the iron for it, girl
.

Fire and smoke swallowed the front of the car and licked along the sides. He reached back in. “Come on. Hurry.”

Sean took her under his arm like a sack and guided the mother toward the jeep. Flame wrapped over the car and one of the windows shattered behind them.

He set the girl down on the grass and the mother hugged them both. Seeing it made Sean feel farther from his boys than before.

A man approached from the direction of the store attached to the parking lot. Sean looked at Jenny in the jeep and then stepped between the man and the mother and her girls.

The man said, “I can try to call someone, but I don’t think anyone will come. The whole city has gone insane.”

“Did you hear the news?” Sean asked.

“The gravity thing?” The man nodded. “Yes, we’re inside locking everything down so the place doesn’t fly apart around us.”

“Can they go inside with you until it’s over?” Sean waved back at the family behind him.