Night Beyond The Night (12 page)

In the meantime, Elliott would have a bit of discomfort.

And he just had to make sure he didn’t touch anyone.

But what happened if he bumped into someone as he walked by? Or did it have to be flesh to flesh, hand to skin?

At last, Mr. Waxnicki paused at an elevator and, using a crowbar, took a moment to open it. The clunking and clinking sounds indicated that there was some sort of combination or lock to release, but when the doors rolled open, a bold light glowed up into the semi-darkness. The elderly man stepped back and gestured them to enter, directing, “Down the stairs, if you will.”

Elliott followed Jade down a circular stairwell built into the elevator shaft. Definitely
not
looking at the way her hips swayed with each descending movement.

His first impression of the room below was that it was a combination of Dr. No’s underground lair and the villain’s hideaway in
The Incredibles
.

Yeah, he’d seen
The Incredibles
. It had been one of his nieces’ favorites, and Uncle E was a sucker for his girls. His lips flattened as he had a flash of memory . . . then pushed it away.

The subterranean room was vast and brightly lit. Computers and their monitors were arranged throughout on a variety of furnishings—cabinets, desks, tables—and even a few printers hummed. Wires led up into the ceiling and walls, and lined the floor.

Other than the electronics, the room was empty except for a woman who sat at one of the counters that held five different screens. Her back was to them, as she worked industriously, her fingers flying over a keyboard as she stared intently at the center screen. She had long golden red hair with thick waves and delicate, narrow shoulders.

She turned from her work, half rising as if to move to a different chair, and froze. Her gaze cast around the room as though startled to see the five men, Jade, and Mr. Waxnicki standing there, which was a bit surprising as they hadn’t exactly been silent. Not loud, but not silent by any stretch. She must have been very intent on her work.

“Lou,” she said, getting all the way to her feet, removing small earbuds. Ah, that explained it. Had she been listening to music? Or blocking out the constant whirr of the multiple computers?

She couldn’t be more than thirty, and Elliott knew most men would consider her beautiful, with fair skin dusted by golden freckles and all that great hair. But he was more interested in the cinnamon-haired, green-eyed witch with the curly-edged smile and the smoking body that had, just an hour or so ago, been plastered up against his.

Elliott pulled himself back to the moment and noticed that the strawberry-blonde didn’t look pleased at all.

Her voice carried a sharp warning. “What are you doing here?” Elliott recognized that the “you” actually meant the five of them, not Mr. Waxnicki or Jade.

“It’s all right,” Mr. Waxnicki said, “Jade and I believe they can be trusted. Everyone, this is Sage Corrigan.” And he completed the brief introductions.

Elliott nearly laughed at the choked look on her face, complete with prune-like lips—pink and full, but definitely pissed
off
—as she glared at the elderly man. He could almost read her mind:
You
believe[_ they can be trusted?_]

“They helped me and Geoff Pinglett last night,” Jade said quietly. “You know Lou wouldn’t take a chance unless he was certain.”

“Why did you bring them down here?” she asked, persisting as if they didn’t exist.

“Let’s all have a seat, shall we?” said Mr. Waxnicki. “And I believe things might become clear. Any news from Theo yet?” he asked as he opened another door. Beyond, Elliott saw a space furnished like a small flat.

Sage’s face lost the pissed look and took on a hint of worry. “No.”

“Theo is my brother,” the old man explained. “He’s a Runner.”

“Lou,” Sage said, her voice and lips tight.

Mr. Waxnicki waved off her warning and them into the room. “Sit, everyone. And let’s have some tea, shall we?”

“I don’t suppose you have anything stronger than tea,” said Wyatt. Elliott could see the lines growing deeper in his face.

“It’s six o’clock in the morning,” Sage responded in affronted tones.

Mr. Waxnicki gave her a look meant to flatten out those pursed lips, and she seemed to take the hint and settled in a chair in the corner.

“Are you going to tell us why you’ve brought us here?” Wyatt asked, with a half-glance at Sage, who’d settled, glowering, in a corner. “Before someone blows a gasket?”

Mr. Waxnicki gave a little laugh that made his eyes grow narrower. “I haven’t heard that phrase in a long time. ‘Blow a gasket.’ ”

“How old are you, Mr. Waxnicki, if you don’t mind my asking?” Elliott asked suddenly. He’d noticed that the old man didn’t speak like an old man . . . at least, the old men he’d known. He talked . . . well, like they did. Which would make sense if, as he suspected, they had all been raised in the ’80s.

“I was born in nineteen eighty-three,” he said. “I’m seventy-seven years old. Perhaps you’d like to assuage my curiosity and tell me the same for you.”

Tension crackled in the room for a moment, and Sage seemed to be the only one who wasn’t sitting on the edge of her seat.

Elliott replied, “I was born in nineteen seventy-seven.”

He could almost hear the sigh of satisfaction from Mr. Waxnicki. The man’s dark eyes brightened with interest, and he looked at Jade, whose green ones widened in surprise. But to his surprise, she didn’t ask how or why. He saw that the pinched, worried look had eased from Sage’s face, replaced by an intelligent, thoughtful one.
Huh
.
Not so much of a surprise
.

Why was that?

“I suspected as much—not the particular year, but that you were . . . different,” said the older man. “What happened to you?”

“We were in a cave in Sedona,” Elliott said. “Quent, Wyatt, and I. Fence and his buddy Lenny were our guides. Suddenly, it felt like an earthquake, and everything began to shake and fall, and then we felt a sizzle of energy. A burning sensation, not really painful . . . and there were some flashes of light. The next thing we knew, we woke up. And everything was different. We found out fifty years had passed.”

“We discovered Simon nearby—” Wyatt began.

“Did you have to waken him?” Lou asked, leaning forward eagerly. “And do you know what awakened you?”

“I put my hand on his shoulder to see if he was alive . . . after all, our last memories had been of this powerful earthquake,” Elliott said. “He was breathing, he was warm. And I don’t know what, if anything, woke us.”

“We figured we’d just been caught in the earthquake, knocked out maybe by some gasses being released—since we weren’t blocked in or hit by rocks or anything. But when we came out and saw how everything had changed. . . .” Wyatt’s voice trailed off.

“Unbelievable,” Mr. Waxnicki said. His eyes were shining with excitement, and he glanced at Jade. “It makes sense . . .”

“Makes sense?” Wyatt said. “How the fuck does being asleep for fifty years when everyone else around us died
make sense
?”

“You were in Sedona, an area known for its mystical properties—an area in which many sources of energy seem to collect. That must have put you into the . . . freeze . . . I guess I’d say.”

“So what happened fifty years ago?” Elliott asked. “Why and how? I have a feeling there’s more than what you told us upstairs.”

“Yes,” Mr. Waxnicki said. Despite the fact that Elliott had been born before him, he found it impossible to think of the elderly man by anything other than his title. Damn good manners, drilled into his head by his
abuela
.

“My twin brother Theo and I happened to be here in

Vegas—that,” he added, looking at Elliott, “was what made me realize that you’re . . . different. No one would speak of this place as Las Vegas any longer. No one your age, anyway.”
p. “Is that really the fucking Pacific Ocean out there?” Fence asked, leaning forward in his chair. His large hands and solid wrists rested on his knees, bared by the cut-off shorts he’d dragged on when Elliott woke him.

Mr. Waxnicki nodded. “Yes, it is. My brother and I were here at the time everything happened. Not for fun, but for work. Computer geeks,” he said with a wry smile. “I haven’t used that term in a long time either.”

“For good reason,” Sage put in. Her voice had turned pleasant and lilting now that she wasn’t pissed off anymore. She looked around the room. “The computers are a secret.”

“We figured that,” Wyatt said, not bothering to hide his sarcasm. “The secret lair in the unused corner of the hotel and all.”

Sage’s gaze frosted, but she didn’t respond.

“Go on, Lou,” Jade said. “Tell them how it all happened.”

“Very simply, all hell broke loose,” Mr. Waxnicki said. His voice became a bit thready, his eyes a bit unfocused, but he didn’t pause. “The buildings shook and the earth erupted. This was no ordinary earthquake, nothing like anything we’d ever experienced. People died in the quake, but they also died from . . . I don’t know for certain, there’s no way to know now, but it seemed as if some gasses were released from the earth, or somewhere. Like I said earlier, people just died. Dropped like flies everywhere.”

“But you didn’t? You and your brother?”

“I didn’t. A very few of us escaped injury and death. My brother . . . he. . . .” Mr. Waxnicki hesitated, glanced at Jade. “Well, things were different with him. I’ll tell you more about that later.”

“People died in the quake,” Fence said. “But how could California and half of Nevada and who the hell knows what else just fucking drop into the ocean? I mean, there were always fears about the San Andreas Fault, but this is not just the San Andreas Fault,” Fence said.

“Oh, no, no it’s not,” Mr. Waxnicki replied. The sharpness returned to his face, and the unfocused look eased from his eyes. “It wasn’t Mother Nature who did this. And it didn’t just happen here.”

“But how can you know that if the place was destroyed?” Wyatt demanded. “There could be other parts of the country—there have to be. A quake wouldn’t destroy all of the United States.”

“My brother and I aren’t just computer geeks,” Mr. Waxnicki said. “We’re fucking computer geniuses. We were poised to be the next Don Knuth or Linus Torvalds. In fact, we may as well be.”

Elliott found it quite an anomaly to hear the elderly man use the F-word. Senior citizens in his day just didn’t throw that word around. Of course they didn’t generally have ponytails either and he supposed if the guy had lived through the apocalypse, he had the right to say fuck. And whatever the hell else he wanted to say.

“It was
many
months later,” Lou Waxnicki stressed, and Elliott thought he might be able to think of him as Lou now that he’d shown off his dirty mouth. “Many months before we were able to do much of anything but look for food and water and see who’d survived. But once we realized this was what we had to live with and work in, Theo and I and the other few survivors began to organize ourselves.

“We’d been running electrical generators on gasoline stores that we found, and Theo and I were able to find a few computers and set them up. Eventually, maybe a year after all of this happened, we were able to hack into weather satellites, and some other ones. That,” he said, looking at Wyatt, “is how we know that these catastrophic events happened worldwide. And,” he added, turning his gaze at each of them in turn, “that, just a bit northeast of where Hawaii used to be, a small continent the size of Colorado had erupted in the Pacific Ocean.”

A continent?

“But the most important thing we’ve come to believe is that the cause was man-made.”

“Lou believes it wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t Mother Nature going haywire,” Jade put in, her eyes sober. She was looking directly at Elliott.

“And it wasn’t a materialization of the Mayan End of Times prophecy,” Sage said in precise tones, sounding a bit like a lecturing professor. “They’d predicted great devastation or, at least, a great change in the world, and many people expected it to happen on December twenty-first, two thousand twelve. But this happened two and a half years earlier, in June of two-thousand ten.”

“The bottom line is, the destruction of the earth—and humanity—was deliberate.” Lou’s words settled flat and heavy in the room.

Elliott was the first one to find his voice. “But . . . how? By whom?”
Maybe Sam Pinglett wasn’t too far off when he said Lou Waxnicki was crazy
. “Nuclear war? Aliens?” He couldn’t believe he said it with a straight face. But this world was so bizarre, he didn’t think twice. Anything could happen.

“We call them Strangers.” Lou shrugged, a brief glint of humor in his gray-blue eyes. “For lack of a better name . . . because that’s what they are. Strangers. To us.” The light moment passed as quickly as it had come, and a shadow crossed his face. “For a variety of reasons, Theo and I have come to the conclusion that the Strangers caused the Change. We believe they wanted to take over the earth, and somehow caused all the destruction as a way to destroy the human race—or most of it.”

Elliott stared at him and felt the same disbelief from the others. He felt the urge to pinch the shit out of himself in hopes of waking up from this dream, and once again considered sympathizing with Sam Pinglett’s impression of Lou.

But . . . no. This man was too intelligent. Too sane, too focused and clear-eyed to be a paranoid conspiracy theorist.

Wasn’t he?

“So, the Strangers aren’t
gangas
. So they’re . . . what? Aliens? Something else?” Wyatt asked.

“They look like us, but they’re different. No one’s sure if they’re human or not,” Lou explained. “But Jade knows as much or more about the Strangers than any of us. She lived among them for three years.”

“In captivity,” Sage added flatly. “She was kept a prisoner.”

Elliott’s gaze shifted to Jade and he felt an uncomfortable twist in his belly that had nothing to do with the
ganga
gouges on his shoulder.

Three years. What had they done to her?

Jade met his gaze with clear green eyes, as if she had nothing to be ashamed or afraid of. She spoke in her low, husky voice, “The Strangers are immortal—or, at least, they can’t be killed. You can tell a Stranger for sure when you see them without a shirt on.”