Watermind (43 page)

She checked the MIDI file. The setup was working perfectly, transcribing Max's music into mild electric pulses through the pool. She studied the feedback from the sensors. The colloid's temperature was still low. He was still absorbing heat. And the field had gained breathtaking strength. Something in the way the polarity reversed back and forth suggested a musical rhythm. She couldn't be sure. Was that a downbeat?

Max, I need you.

Time was coursing by, so she stepped outside and signaled Creque to start the vacuum pumps. Then Roman came sprinting over the levee, gasping orders.

“Kill it! Fire the pulse!”

“What?” CJ thought it must be a mistake. When Roman raced toward the panel truck, she moved to block him. “We have to take the sample first.”

She heard Creque's pumps fire up. But Roman knocked her aside and bounded into the truck. He wasn't familiar with the equipment. He fiddled with the controls. CJ
climbed in behind and wrenched his hands from the keyboard. “The pumps are working. You promised we could take a sample.”

He caught her wrists and flung her out of the truck like a sack of meal. She landed and rolled on the muddy ground, then sat up reeling.

“That's wrong,” said Rory Godchaux.

“Hell yes—” Then she realized Rory wasn't looking at her. He was staring wide-eyed at the colloid.

Out on its silvery surface, a cavity had formed. It was spinning. Gradually, it widened into a whirlpool three feet across, then ten feet. The entire mass of colloid began to revolve around it. At the whirlpool's hollow center, the vacuum hose dangled free.

“You didn't like the hose,” CJ said aloud. She hadn't anticipated that.

Roman stood on the truck bumper and watched the vortex deepen. Blood drained from his face. “Godchaux, get everyone back from the water.”

Without waiting for a response, Roman returned to the controls and started the firing sequence. An instant later, fifteen synchronized electromagnetic shockwaves bolted at maximum power through the colloid.

 

Sunday, March 20

1:02
PM

 

A grisly hiss thudded through the air, and blinding white light exploded underwater. The whirlpool vanished. The colloid rose up in a great round bead, a perfect half-sphere of bottle-green glass. Then it wobbled and fell without a splash.

Silence descended. The dark pool went mirror smooth, and its luster faded. All motion ceased. Not a flicker of
radiance remained. Not a drop had escaped the shockwave. The colloid's pixelating layers had melted into a single homogeneous drool.

At the sight of it, sorrow wracked CJ like physical pain. She lay in the mud where Roman had thrown her, biting her hand to keep from crying. The colloid's mass lay still and quiet. Still as death.

Roman dropped from the truck and scanned his enemy with binoculars. “Reilly, check the field.”

CJ picked herself up off the muddy ground and tasted salt. Her lip was bleeding. She glared at Roman with undiluted hate. But she had no energy for vengeance. She felt numb. The thing was done, over. The colloid was dead. She climbed into the truck, already knowing what the sensors would tell her. Yet she had to look. Just like the night she'd found Harry lying across his desk. His ruined face, God, her first impulse had been to run. Yet she had stayed and stared, absorbing vicious details like the lashes of a whip. Now that same acid need for punishment drove her to look at the computer sensors.

But when she called up the data, wave forms danced across her screen. She flicked the mouse. All sensors showed active feedback. This wasn't what she'd expected. The colloid was not dead—it was surging. Could this be right? She'd never seen such an energetic force field.

A soft invisible blast pulsed through the air, stinging mucous membranes and shorting every electronic circuit within half a mile. Her skin went to gooseflesh. Her screens went black. She checked the Ranger Joe compass strapped to her wrist. The needle jumped in a steady 3/4 rhythm.

“He's waltzing.” She gasped, almost too excited to find voice.

She sprang to the truck door. “Roman, he's speaking!”

As she hopped off the truck, its tires began to fishtail down the grass toward the water. Startled, she leaped away
from its bumper. The colloid's magnetism was attracting its steel frame. One of the pulse generators catapulted off the dam and plunged into the green pool. Then another. Michael Creque's flatbed truck skated several feet through the mud, then hung on a rock, while his heavy pumps tumbled end over end down the levee. Behind a concrete ramp, Martin's airboat shimmied and creaked like a live creature, but its aluminum frame wasn't magnetic enough to break free.

Workmen scattered. Roman's binoculars shot out of his hands, and the throbbing magnetic field tugged hard at CJ's Ranger Joe. When she unbuckled the strap, it sizzled away through the air. Hammers and screwdrivers zipped past her like bullets. Roman lunged and threw her to the ground, then covered her with his body, as every ferrous object in sight coursed into the colloid's energetic waltz.

“He's answering your shockwave,” she said.

“Hold still.” He gripped her and rolled violently to the left as a ten-foot iron I-beam rifled past them through the grass. His fountain pen tore a hole in his pocket. From every direction, screaming metal split the air. The panel truck with the computers vaulted into the water, and its black cables lashed after it like a nest of snakes.

For two full minutes, the magnetic field raged. Truck bodies, cranes, and metal tools sailed down the levee. Lampposts crumpled and bent. Pipe wrenches morphed into javelins. Every coin, metal rivet, loose washer, and screw rained into the irresistible pool. The green surface danced with froth, and humans buried their faces. Husky roughnecks cowered, and seasoned cops curled up in balls. Only when the colloid had devoured every free magnetic object within range did the noise cease.

CJ and Roman sat up together, shaken. The water thrummed like a bee hive. Nearby, Betty DeCuir moaned. Something heavy and sharp had sliced open her thigh. Next to her sprawled an unconscious Ron Moselle. Roman
gathered his wits and counted the casualties. Scattered up and down the levee, he counted seventeen injured workers. Their blood stained the grass. Abruptly, CJ vomited down her shirtfront.

“Gracia de Dios,”
Roman breathed. Then the colloid began to rock.

 

Sunday, March 20

1:27
PM

 

The metal-heavy liquid sloshed back and forth. Flagpoles, engine blocks, and chain-link fences tumbled through its mass, and sunlight glanced off their wet steely angles. Slowly at first, then with gathering force, the water hurled its clanky weight against the dam. Its blows rang like cannon fire. Max Pottevents stood on the levee, listening.

Behind him, Rayette Batiste prayed behind the steering wheel of her mud-covered Ford Escort. Why Max had decided to enter this unholy place, she could not fathom. Yet from Christian duty, she had driven through Hades to deliver him here. And now only the Lord God could save her.

But Max couldn't hear her prayers. The Watermind's noise confounded him. Nothing in his multifarious creed of spirits, devils, and saints had prepared him for the colloid's anguished scream. Max sensed a trapped soul, fighting for its life.

As the bristling wreckage crashed against the dam, he pounded Rayette's hood with his bandaged hand and signaled to her through the windshield. “Go!” he shouted over the jangling rattle of water. When her tires spun in the mud, he put his shoulder to her rear bumper and shoved till she gained purchase and fishtailed away. Then he listened to the rage.

Chunks of floating steel hammered the dam, and spray
geysered upward, then fell in a deluge. The nanocarbon gates jolted, and the sandbags behind them moved. Max covered his ears.

Everyone was running. He saw injured people struggling up the slick bank, and he hurried to lift Betty De-Cuir over his shoulder. Rory Godchaux yelled through a megaphone, “We got a chopper coming. Load the wounded first.” Rory held one elbow at an unnatural angle and grimaced with pain. A rocketing steel bollard had dislocated his shoulder.

As Max handed Betty to a medic, rotor blades frapped overhead, and Rory signaled to the pilot. But it was not their rescue chopper; it was FOX News. One lone copper-haired reporter was still capturing visuals. Rory shot him a finger.

Max helped a wounded deputy, but his attention stayed riveted to the water's tortured howl. The pitch rose to an ear-splitting ache as metallic edges scraped the glassy blue gates. Over and over, the spiky mass rocked against the dam, and with each deafening jolt, more of the sandbags shifted.

“He'll break through!” someone shouted.

Max turned. That was CJ's voice. He saw her running along the base of the levee, and Roman Sacony was with her. “Ceegie!” Max called, but his voice was lost in the din.

As the colloid plunged against the gates, each violent boom propagated a bombastic reaction wave that mushroomed outward at tremendous speed and walloped the levees. CJ was standing much too near the waterline. Max hurried toward her. He saw her arguing with Sacony. When Sacony tried to drag her away from the water, she fought him.

“Ceegie!” Max called again.

As he drew near, she turned and recognized him. Emotions blew across her face like clouds. Max shuddered. No one had ever looked at him that way.

“You're alive.” She took a step toward him.

Then another reaction wave smacked the levee and
gouged the earth beneath their feet. The bank caved, and the three of them slid down the collapsing mud. Cold electric water crashed over them. Sacony clenched CJ's waist and locked forearms with Max, while Max dug for a hold in the mud. As the receding wave tried to tear them apart, his bandaged hand closed on a lump of broken concrete. He strained to keep his grip on Sacony's arm. They clung to each other as the water raked over their entangled limbs.

Another mighty wave was gathering. Quickly, they helped each other climb up the streaming mud. Sacony boosted CJ up to the grassy bank above the cave-in, then laced his fingers and offered a foothold to Max.

“No arguments. Go,” Sacony barked.

Max stepped into his hand and bounded upward. The next wave was crashing in. Max reached down and caught Sacony's hands. The wave hit like a cyclone, but their joined grip held. CJ anchored Max's legs while he hauled the slender Sacony up through the violent froth. After the wave subsided, they crawled higher through the grass, reeling and knocking heads, side-by-side on their knees.

Then a new noise made them turn and stare at the water. One sustained harmonic chord rose and fell like the moan of bees. Max felt the G sharp in his teeth. The nanocarbon gates were vibrating. The colloid had found their resonant frequency. Reflections quivered over their glossy blue planes as their molecular bonds oscillated. Max couldn't speak the scientific language, but he knew the gates were going to blow. He reached over Sacony's kneeling body and clutched CJ's arm.

When the nanocarbon gates shattered, a trillion azure shards sprayed through the air, and the plume shot forward through the breach. Glistening water flushed through the rubble of sandbags with a sound of blasting velocity. The yellow NovaDam barriers parted like tent flaps, and beyond the dam, the plume dropped its tonnage of metal and accelerated downslope in a chain of jubilant standing waves. With a noise like laughter, it gushed toward the ocean.

CJ's voice choked. “Max, I—Forgive me. I—”

“Amou.”
He pulled her toward him and kissed her, while Sacony rocked back on his haunches and exhaled a loud sigh through his nose.

“I need your help,” she finished. Then she sprang up and darted toward the aluminum airboat that was wedged behind the rampart.

Sacony snorted again, then quirked his eyebrows at Max. They bumped shoulders getting up off the ground.

“We have to follow the colloid,” CJ shouted. “We can't risk losing him in the ocean.”

“I'll track the
picaro
by satellite.” Roman glowered at his ruined dam. “I'll order missiles. I won't give up.”

CJ jerked at the airboat and kicked its frame, but it was wedged too tight. “Grab the stern, Max. Please?”

Max eyed the long silvery plume that was still galloping through the breached dam. “Ceegie, we cain' launch a boat in that.”

Roman squeezed Max's forearm. “I'll pay you a thousand dollars to take Reilly somewhere safe.”

Max shook him off. “Keep your
mauvais largan.
”

CJ threw herself at the airboat and knocked it free. Before anyone could react, the boat slid down the wet bank. CJ raced after it, and when it reached the water's edge, she made a running jump for the deck. But she missed. She fell into the charging liquid. Both men ran for her. Roman found a broken tree branch and sprinted along the bank, thrusting it out for her to grab. Max dove.

CJ watched them through white whirling foam. She stretched out her hands, but the current ripped her away. Eyes wide, she saw the world brimming past. Deep under the water she plunged, where everything grew quiet. Air bubbles leaked from her nose. She clutched her vulnerable abdomen and thought of the embryo quickening in her womb.

What have I done?

This was a mistake. She didn't mean to fall in. She fought for the surface, but the current pulled her down.
The colloid's electric field tingled her scalp, and a kind of clarity spread through the current. Water teased her lips apart. It seeped under her eyelids and osmosed her pores. She felt invaded, borderless, soaked. Here was the oblivion she'd longed for. All questions revoked. All decisions moot. She had only to open her mouth and breathe.

She shut her lips tight.
No, Harry. I will not follow you
. She kicked harder for the surface. And waves of urgency rippled down through her flesh and blood to her water-nested child.
Stay alive.