Paul McEuen - Spiral

An old builder’s trick. You want to leave a cavity inside concrete, help keep the weight down, you embed an inflated balloon when you pour it.

Jake picked up the balloon. Something was inside it.

Jake ripped the balloon away, the rubber old and brittle. Inside, he discovered a rectangular metal box the size of a paperback book. Jake guessed it was made of titanium. The box was featureless except for a thin, almost invisible seam at its midsection and an index card–sized display panel on top. The panel sprang to life, turning a soft white in response to Jake’s touch.

Words appeared on the screen.

ENTER #1

Orchid stared at the box for a long moment, then said, “Touch your right index finger to the pad.”

Jake did as ordered. The words on the screen faded, then said:

IDENTITY #1 ACCEPTED

ENTER #2

Orchid said, “Take it to Dylan.”

Jake understood. Liam had programmed it so that only Jake and Dylan could open it. Jake guessed that Maggie’s prints would open it, too. Any two of them.

He carried the box to Dylan, the boy’s hands still cuffed together.

Dylan looked terrified.

“Hang in there,” Jake said. “You never know when the blueberries will come.”

Dylan seemed to understand. It was one of his elephant jokes. It wasn’t blueberries that would be coming. It would be elephants.

Jake held the box out. Dylan touched his finger to the pad.

The screen changed again, said:

IDENTITY #2 ACCEPTED

Jake stepped back. He heard a click. He opened the lid.

Inside was a layer of gray clay. Pushed into it was a thin brass cylinder, perhaps an inch long and thin as the ink cartridge in a ballpoint pen. Jake guessed what it was. Liam had told Jake how on their missions the Japanese Tokkō had carried the Uzumaki in small brass cylinders.

“Put it down,” Orchid said. “On that table.”

Jake ignored her. He carefully removed the cylinder from the box. The thickness changed slightly midway along, where there was a seam. The two halves were threaded, then screwed together. Unscrew the two halves, release the contents, and millions of people would die.

“Professor Sterling.”

He glanced up at Orchid. He saw the excitement written on her face. This was it. This was when she was most vulnerable.

“Put it down on that table. Then reconnect your cuff,” Orchid said.

Jake turned to face her. He held the cylinder tight in his right hand.

“Put it down, ” she said, raising the gun to point it directly at his skull.

Jake said, “No.”

EVERY GOOD SOLDIER KEPT A THREAD, A LIFELINE TO THEIR larger self. The lifeline was a rock-solid anchor, a fixed point that would allow them to act for the greater good no matter what the cost, to put aside any fear or hesitation. For some it was a connection to a particular person: a wife, a parent, or a child. For others it was an idea, a belief in the rightness of their task. For Jake, it had been his belief that a soldier’s suffering, given or received, prevented a still larger suffering. That had been his anchor during the Gulf War. It let him come back from what they had done.

Soldiers without an anchor were time bombs. Once they left the military, once freed from the structure of regimen and hierarchy, these souls became lost. The darkness in Orchid’s eyes said she was capable of anything. She had killed Vlad at close range, without a thought. She had tortured Liam Connor in an unimaginably gruesome fashion. She would set off a pandemic as easily as another might kill a fly.

She could not be allowed to have the cylinder.

Jake glanced at Dylan. He was watching everything closely, intently. He was terrified but still very aware of his surroundings. He knew something was coming. He was ready.

“Give it to me,” Orchid said to Jake. “Or he will pay.”

“All right,” Jake said, swinging his arm back. “Here. Catch.”

Jake tossed the cylinder.

For Jake, the world slowed to quarter speed. Orchid reached out with her free hand. She couldn’t help it, the desire to catch from the air what she most desired. But the cylinder was outside of her grasp. Jake had not tossed it to Orchid. He tossed it toward Dylan.

Orchid lost her focus for just a split second. Her gun hand drifted slightly. Jake was already moving toward her. She was off balance now, trying to recover, and she overcompensated. She tried to do two things at once. She tried to bring the gun back to Jake and fire. And she simultaneously went to tap out the sequence on her leg to shock him.

Twice meant neither. Both were slowed by a split second. The split second that Jake gained was enough. Out of the corner of his eye, Jake saw Dylan catch the cylinder. At the same instant, Orchid fired, but the bullet missed, screaming past Jake’s right ear.

Jake caught her square and they both went down, the gun skittering away across the concrete. Jake landed a blow on her cheek. He felt the crunch of bone, and she seemed to go limp, her hands at her sides.

Zap! The electricity hit him like a hammer, every nerve in his body firing at once. He fought it, forcing himself to focus through the fireworks going off in his head. He felt as though his entire body were on fire.

He grabbed her right hand and pulled her fingers back, breaking at least one of them. He gritted his teeth, growling through them to keep focused, and tapped her broken hand against her leg, trying to reproduce the sequence that would stop the electric shocks. He smashed her hand again and again against her leg, losing his ability to think. He held on to her tightly, but she was like an eel in his grasp, twisting and turning.

“Dylannn, ruhhh! Ruhhhh,” he dribbled out, the words barely understandable, his teeth chattering, his stomach convulsing. He threw up.

Jake held on and Orchid fought, Jake’s thoughts reduced to a single command: Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze . In the strange contours of his electrified mind, he had become a python, choking his prey to death.

They were like this, Jake holding her, the shocks hitting him in waves. He had no idea how long this went on. Seconds? Minutes? All he was aware of was the continuous chatter of the impulses running up and down every nerve in his body.

Then suddenly Orchid was free of his grasp. He reached for her, but his arms curled up like a dying spider, every muscle contracting, every nerve firing at once. He could no longer see Orchid. He could no longer see anything but burst after burst of searing white light.

He could form only one thought: Run .

DYLAN RAN.

He bolted out of the bunker, brass cylinder in his hand. He ran as fast as he could down the middle of the road, back the way they’d come, heading instinctively to his mother.

After a few hundred yards he realized that is exactly what Orchid would expect him to do. He turned right, running as fast as he could between two of the bunkers. The weeds sliced and grabbed at him, his side already starting to ache. He knew he was making all kinds of noise, but he had to get away. He would reach the next road, then turn back in the direction of the FedEx van. Was it better to run down the road? Or stick to the grass?

He heard a slam in the distance, what he took to be the closing of the bunker door. He stopped and listened. Who was closing it? Jake? Orchid?

Please let it be Jake . He wanted to run back, to Jake.

But it might not be Jake.

He started forward again, running fast. He’d heard footsteps. In the weeds.

It had to be Orchid. Jake would call out.