The Push Chronicles (Book 1): Indomitable (2 page)

Chapter 3 Whiteout

I had always hoped there was an afterlife but, as a physiologist, it was often hard to have a real belief in it.  The curse of too much knowledge, I suppose.  It was with that thought that I was happy to open up my eyes.  After all, I had to be dead and this had to be the afterlife.  What I had just seen should have vaporized everything nearby, at least according to my basic understanding of physics.

My next thought was that the afterlife looked scarily similar to the dingy apartment in the aging apartment building that I had been in before I died.  My last thought as my mind came to full consciousness was that, for a vaporized person, I felt amazingly intact.  White phantom lights still blinked in my eyes and my entire body felt aching and tingly, as if I were recovering from a full body muscle spasm, but otherwise, I felt shockingly good.  I willed the pain into a side corner of my mind and sat up slowly, just in case I was more injured than I thought.

I had fallen unconscious a few feet away from where Eric had been sitting and the scene that remained there was confounding.  The wooden chair was still there, mostly intact, but with a very exacting indentation that matched Eric’s form burnt into it.  Electrode wires dangled lifelessly from the equipment on the table, melted off on one end.  It was then that my nose decided it was a good time to come back online and assault me with the smells of charred wood and the heavy ozone of burned out electronics.

As for Eric, there was no evidence he had ever existed outside of the burnt outline of his body.  I gingerly got to my feet and reached out for the chair, almost afraid to touch it.  I ran my fingers over the burnt impression, amazed at how precise the contouring was.  There was no ash, bits of cloth, or specks of human remains.  It was a moment before the emotions hit me.

I screwed my eyes shut as the tears came without warning.  No matter what had just happened ... I wasn’t even sure how much time had passed now ... I still held feelings in my heart for Eric.  For that moment, Eric's growing lists of transgressions against me were forgotten to make way for the wash of grief.  His enigmatic smile, his soft-spoken way of turning a phrase, and the little ways he showed affection, I was remembering them all and was hit with the near-certainty that I would never see or feel those things again.

I don’t know how long I was standing there, mourning.  Eventually, Rational Irene pushed her way through the grief.  Grieve later, deal with this situation first.  After all, I was standing in what was essentially a crime scene.

Eric had died here, yes, but he had also lived under a false identity and stored hundreds of thousands of dollars of stolen scientific equipment here.  Who knows where it all ended?  It wouldn’t be long before the night security would finally stumble across the theft from my lab.  I had to decide, here and now, what to do, before the police came to me or, possibly worse, found me here.

Was I that heartless that I could think about that right now?  Apparently I was.  Wiping at the tears with one hand, I pulled out my smartphone with the other.  It was only 12:04 am.  No more than four minutes had passed since Eric’s final experiment.  I couldn’t even fathom it.  I assuaged my scientific curiosity by promising to figure it out later and unlocked the phone.

I had a message.  The time stamp was 12:03 am.  It was from Eric.

Much to my embarrassment, I have to confess I almost fainted from the shock.  My much-lauded ability to withstand the sudden swerves of life was overwhelmed.  It was only stubborn pride, I think, that kept me standing.  I could catalog all the stress reactions my body was starting to show as my trembling thumb tapped on the screen to open the message.  My rational mind was screaming at the impossibility of this, while my emotional mind was twisted in knots of anger, grief, and relief.

Sorry I left you there.  Your vitals were quite strong and I need to adjust to changes.  No idea how long I will be gone.  I will explain, trust me.

I wanted to slap him again.  No, I wanted to punch him.  Hard.  Across the jaw.  The moment this had started, I was already sick of this notion of ‘trust me’.  How could I trust a man who had lied and used me for how many months for some insane experiment?  God particles and altering reality?  Really?

Something had happened though, I could feel it in the air.  Crazy or not, Eric’s experiment did something other than burn out my prototype and make an artistic burn mark in a wooden chair.  Whatever it was, the strange feeling in the pit of of my stomach was something more than nerves and I didn't like it one bit.

Was there some scientific truth to what Eric had been trying to explain to me?  Was I too stubborn to have given it a chance?  Even so, what right did he have to do this, especially with so much deception?  I warred internally with the ideas of jotting off a relieved reply, smashing my phone into a million bits, or just trying to blot out the whole thing from my mind.

Through this internal argument, my actual ears picked up on the constant beep of news alerts on my phone.  With numb fingers, I brought up the Associated Press news site.

BREAKING NEWS!  BIZARRE ‘WHITEOUT’ COVERS WORLD!

I can’t remember precisely how I made it back to our, no, my apartment, only that I did so without splattering me or my bike on the Atlanta streets.  I do dimly recall passing several cars pulled off to the roadside and stunned motorists chattering on phones or dialing through radios.  The AP bulletin didn’t have much information, it had only been a few minutes since the Whiteout after all, but what it did say was startling.

At precisely midnight Eastern Standard Time, seemingly every inch of the Earth was lit up by an instantaneous blinding white light.  The origin wasn’t known yet and no reports from various space agencies had come in to confirm or deny an extraterrestrial origin.  So far no ill effects from the flash had been reported, but there were indications that the momentary blindness may have led to accidents and casualties.  Whatever Eric’s experiment had done (I was sure his experiment caused this), it was global.

I found myself sitting in front of my desk with the computer booting up.  My initial visual impairment and pain had entirely passed.  Even that odd twisting in my gut has settled down.  Outside of the emotional and mental strain, I felt better than I ever had before.  It occurred to me then, much delayed, that I was the only other person on the planet who had any inkling of what Eric had done.

Again, Rational Irene chimed in:  I should be calling the police.  I should be calling the college, the government, NASA, somebody.  I had vital information about some world-wide freak event.  I would even be better off writing a paper on my experiences for peer review than clicking up every news site I could think of.

I knew why I wasn’t doing any of those things.  I had to know.  I had to know exactly what he did and why.  More than that, I felt responsible.

Whatever Eric Flynn did, he couldn’t have done it without my machine.  He couldn’t have done it without my negligence and without my blind trust.  Sitting there, as I looked back on the past year, I could point out to myself so many things that were wrong and that I stupidly didn’t question.  Until I knew what happened and, if I could, correct any harm Eric had done, I didn’t feel like I could pass the buck to someone else.

It was stupid.  It was like I was a character in one of Eric’s comic books.  Why did he have a pile of comic books at his secret lab anyway?  No matter how much he loved them, Eric wasn’t one to mix work and play.  Why was I even thinking about that?  I again willed myself to focus and started clicking on news links.

The computer clock read 12:37 am at this point, so news was start to conglomerate.  A spokesperson for NASA reported that the Whiteout was entirely confined to the planet, the light literally stopping at the edge of the atmosphere.  Several satellite photographs made that quite clear.  It was disturbing and fascinating at the same time to see the Earth as a perfectly homogenous white sphere in space.

There were endless eyewitness accounts already up, both with the various international news agencies and on social media.  As suspected, there were also now reports of injuries and fatalities brought on by the sudden inescapable blindness.  Reports of small riots and other panics were also starting to come in, especially in the parts of the world already awake when the Whiteout occurred.  I massaged my temples as the thought of religious fanatics came unbidden to me.   These were just the most obvious and immediate effects; where was this going to end?

I was reading and processing all of this data for some time when I ran across the first sighting.  An airliner en route to Hartsfield International Airport was thrown off course when the pilots were caught in the Whiteout while on their landing approach.  A minute later, the airliner collided with a small private plane right over the airport.

However, the report said, before the jumbo jet crashed catastrophically, it miraculously slowed and stopped in mid-air, then slowly came down to the tarmac.  Eyewitnesses swear that it wasn’t a freak natural event.  Several credible individuals, including an off-duty air traffic controller, reported seeing what looked like a flying man swoop in with a trail of white light and *catch* the plane, setting it down safely.  The report included several blurry cellphone images showing flashes and streaks of white light.

My rational mind pointed out the poor nature of the photographic evidence.  Eyewitness testimony was always relative and unreliable.  It could have been any number of extremely unlikely natural events that happened.  That part of me did not want to accept what my creative mind was putting together.  What other explanation could there be?  What other kind of world would Eric think was perfect?

It would be the ‘bad guys’ were always caught and the heroes always triumphed.  The world he loved to flip through while sitting in the living room after dinner would be the world Eric Flynn would want to create.

“Oh God, Eric.”  I couldn’t help but start crying again.  It was pure stress and mental fatigue and maybe, just maybe, a touch of fear at what Eric had unleashed on the world.  “What did you do?” 

Chapter 4 Push

The last thing I clearly remember before I fell asleep was being engaged in the ongoing struggle to wrap my rational mind around what I kept seeing crop up in the news feeds.  The Hartsfield incident was the first but not the last bizarre report of unnatural occurrences, all of which seemed to center on a human.  So far, there was yet to be hard, indisputable evidence but I had a feeling it was only a matter of time.  It was sometime after 1 am when I think I finally passed out on the sofa, having switched to flipping through cable news channels for more insights.  That’s how I spend the evening of the Whiteout and the first hours of what is now commonly called the Push.

I woke up, surprisingly clear-headed, as my smartphone’s alarm went off.  Just a normal Friday.  I was already standing and stretching, about to peek in on Eric to see if he had made it home from the lab last night when I finally caught up to the present reality.

Eric was gone, having seemingly rewritten the laws of reality to who knows what end, after breaking the trust we had built over a year of intimacy.  Oh, and he stole my prototype, which means the presentation to the dean later today was going to completely crash and burn.  Why didn’t that bother me more than it did?  This was the pinnacle of my research I was thinking about.

I realized that this sort of thing had been happening since Eric’s experiment.  I would find myself thinking or feeling in ways that didn’t seem to match how I should be thinking or feeling.  It was like two simultaneous divergent thought processes were going on and occasionally clashing.  Whatever was going on, I needed to sort this out.  To piece together what I could of Eric’s intentions and experiment.  Maybe even to stop it before more people got hurt or killed.

There it was again!  Why would I even think that?  Not that I wanted people to be hurt, but why was I suddenly so eager to take the weight of a world-wide phenomenon on to my singular set of shoulders?

I stabbed the speed-dial for my lab before I could panic myself with any more strange notions.

“Hello, Dr. Roman’s office, Ken speaking,” the deep voice on the other end answered.  Kenneth Louis was one of my brightest research assistants, working on his Masters in Physiology.

“Hey, Ken.”  I put on an effort to sound sick.  The best I could manage was grumpy.

“Oh, hey Dr. Roman!  I’m surprised you’re not already here, what with this being the big day and all!”  For being part of a research team that had just had it’s top work stolen, he was awfully chipper.

“Yeah, about that: is everything okay over there?”  A pause.  I needed an excuse to ask, didn’t I?  “Because I totally think I forgot to print out the presentation notes last night.”

“No, everything is good.  Got the presentation notes here, the prototype is working great, and we’re all set for today.  Well, except for not having you here.”

Eric did say he would return it like nothing had happened.  Of course, that was before he had cannibalized it and burnt it out with mad science.  So how was it there, safe and sound?

“Right.  About that.”  I was a pretty poor liar, but I felt like I was in a corner here.  I was in no mental or emotional condition to try to make that everything was normal in front of the dean.  “Eric is really sick, came down with a stomach bug hard last night.  I think I’ve got it too.”  I feigned a cough.

“That sucks, Doc.  You think it had to do with that Whiteout?  I hear a lot of freaky things are going down!”

“Uh.  Maybe?  I really don’t think I can draw a scientific conclusion that a momentary white light made me and my boyfriend sick.  Either way, I need you to try to postpone the meeting to Monday.  I don’t want to get the entire lab and the dean’s office sick with who knows what kind of crud.”

“Yeah, I bet they’d cut our funding for sure then!”  Ken laughed.  “I’ll see what I can do and let you know, but you know Tyson will probably call you anyway.”

“That’s fine.  Germs don’t transfer over the cell signal.”  Well, they shouldn’t.  Frankly, anything or nothing could be the same anymore.

After making my goodbyes to Ken, I went into the kitchen, sure that a good breakfast might help me think clearer.  As insane as it seemed, assuming what Eric had told me last night was true, he used the biofeedback device to echo his brain’s electrical impulses, essentially creating who knows how many identical thought patterns.

That would result, in Crazytown de Flynn at least, in a massive surge of these God particles, which change reality at a quantum level to match the thought patterns.  Brilliant really!  No, not brilliant, crazy!  I was having divergent thoughts again and it was actually painful this time.

I stopped what I was doing, peeling oranges for juicing, and concentrated on what I thought was the ‘real’ me.  You know, Eric-is-Crazy me.  After a moment, thoughts started to clarify and the pain subsided.  Eric may be unhinged in some parts, I was forced to conclude, but at least a large part of his theory had to be correct.  It was the only thing I could rely on to explain the unnatural things happening both around me and to me.  Vigilant for odd thoughts, I decided to celebrate this small mental victory by finishing and consuming breakfast.

“I can reliably report to you that there are, indeed, human displaying unnatural abilities.  This is not a hoax, this is real and it is live ...” *click*

“... explain how it is you began flying and what does it feel ... ” *click*

“... a plot by the Devil himself that can only be the first sign of the end ...” *click off*

The television news had descended into pure information overload.  There was little explanation they or any government body could give, other than the confirmation that there were hundreds of reports from around the world of people gaining what any layman would call ‘super powers’.  No doubt there were many of my colleagues in every scientific field chomping at the bit to try to decipher this mystery.  I had the feeling that my meeting with the dean was going to be forgotten.

A few of these superhumans had started to spontaneously come forward, seeing a chance at quick celebrity or placed in a position they couldn’t dodge the media.  To top it off, there had already been the first super-fight, cut almost from the very whole cloth of Eric’s comics, one of which I had open on my lap as I finished my lunch.  The problem, of course, was that, no matter how the world had changed, some things still remained the same.

For example, if a man who apparently is made of concrete and strong enough to flip an automobile punches an unprotected human being, the cold hard laws of physics take over.  There isn’t ‘the man is battered and bruised and knocked out in a single blow’.  There is ‘F = mA vs. the structural hardness of the human body’ and ‘horrific tissue and organ damage’.  If you don’t remember from the news that day yourself, I’ll remind you that the world’s first 'Push Battle' (as those headline hungry media jockeys dubbed it) resulted in thirty-seven fatalities and over ten million dollars in property damage.

I had spent the last four hours digging through Eric’s possessions, his comics, his computer ... anywhere I thought I could find a scrap of information.  It had been slow going.  Not because his possessions were a mess or unorganized, Eric was incredibly fastidious.  It was the emotional impact that slowed my progress.  When I found the first picture we had taken together, that first night he asked me out, I almost stopped.  Seeing us just one year earlier, happy in each other's company, giggling like idiots in front of Fellini's Pizza, left me stunned, trying to make that man in the photo and the man I saw last night combine into one whole being.

When I was finished, I had little to show for it, but it wasn’t totally fruitless.  There were two things that, while not providing insight into what exactly his scientific basis was, provided me with a deeper insight into the emotional and mental state that must have led up to this.

First, well, the comic books themselves.  I read some when I was a little girl (I only ever really got into Wonder Woman; I was always insulted that most other female heroes were distaff counterparts of the men) so I was woefully unprepared for the vast array and evolution of the medium since then.  Between a couple of hours browsing and referencing comic book history, I could only confirm my initial suspicion that comic books, specifically superhero ones, were forming the basis for whatever thoughts he was amplifying last night.  The problem I found was that there was so much hypocrisy and circular logic in the genre, at least in the more classical versions of it.

Heroes and villains often generated each other.  Depending on the title, a villain could murder a hundred people and at worst spend time in a jail from which they easily escape when the writer needs them again.  Heroes themselves could then inversely perform the same acts of mass murder as long as the situation or the writer warranted it.  I didn’t try to argue it’s entertainment value to myself:  A lot of enjoyable fiction required the suspension of disbelief and a sometimes illogical approach to cause and effect.  It was the fact that someone was using this, or their perception of it, to rewrite reality that scared me so much.

Second, I found on his computer photographs and records on his family.  His mother and father had been a topic that Eric actively avoided.  It was something he was intensely private about.  I assumed initially that there had been a falling-out or bad blood or possibly abuse, so I didn’t pry.  It was a month ago, during one of our frequent walks through Grant Park, that he told me that both of his parents were dead, that they had died in an unnamed accident when he was ten years old.

It was obvious that Eric had made an active attempt to clear out as much biographical information as he could but he must have felt either compelled by sentiment or simply rushed, as there were a few files left intact.  What was clear from these files was that his parents hadn’t died in a simple accident, but the specifics were unclear.  I wasn’t beat yet.

It took more time than I expected to find the information I needed online.  Web traffic, especially to news sites, was at an all-time high.  Still, it only took patience and some rudimentary net sleuthing to discover first Eric’s parents’ obituary and then, from there, several news articles in connection to their deaths.

The tale they told was one straight out of one of Eric’s comic books.  The story of a young boy orphaned when his well-regarded parents were murdered in a failed mugging attempt.  The mugger-turned-murderer, Gerald Schuller, was eventually apprehended.  After over twenty years of imprisonment, he was set to be released on parole tomorrow.  Eric’s court date last month to clear up a speeding ticket was yet another lie:  he had testified at Schuller’s parole hearing.  In yet another point of serendipity or, more likely, design, the anniversary of the murder was today.

I closed the comic book and tossed it onto the stack I had been skimming through.  Gerald Schuller was plagued by several mental illnesses.  He was dirt poor and was never properly treated until he went into prison.  I had little doubt that Eric wanted to do something about what must seem to him like a miscarriage of justice.

I also had little doubt that Eric was one of these ‘Pushes’ ... my guess was that he was the one who caught the plane at Hartsfield.  It would explain his vague mention of changes in that text.  So, basically, my boyfriend changed the universe because he wanted to hurt the man who took his parents away, who, while not innocent, certainly wasn’t in full control of his actions.

I felt a huge wave of divergent thought come on and pushed it away.  I was becoming adept at that.  I scribbled in my notebook’s margins to do a full physiological examination of myself, especially an EEG, as soon as possible.  I had a suspicion as to why these odd thought processes were happening, but I would have to wait to confirm or deny that suspicion.  After all, my equipment was at the lab, and I was officially playing hookie today.

There was actually one thought, while divergent, that the real me was starting to embrace.  The thought that I might be in the peculiar position to actually do something about Eric ... about the Whiteout ... about all of it.  Didn’t I have the obligation to try at least?

If I was going to go through with this, I had one realistic shot at making contact with Eric.  There was no way in Hell I was going to sit and twiddle my thumbs waiting for him to show up on his own time.  Pushing aside the bizarre notion to pull a distressed damsel routine and lure him to rescue me (disgusting and dangerous in one neat package!), there was one place I knew he would be today: his parents’ graves.  I could only hope that I hadn’t already missed him.