Jeremy Robinson - Blackout

King shuddered in horrified disbelief. Helicopters were falling from the sky. An earthquake couldn’t cause that. What the hell is happening?

As suddenly as it had begun, the earthquake stopped. The deep rumbling noise ceased, but the din of the temblor’s aftermath continued to fill the lightless city-strident alarms and screams, punctuated by the crump of distant explosions and collapsing buildings. Though he could barely comprehend it, he knew that in a few mere seconds, the City of Light had become a disaster zone.

Brown still lay unmoving in the boat, and King dismissed the idea of trying to rouse him. The gambler was unlikely to share anything meaningful and King wasn’t in the mood to entertain the man’s triumphant crowing. He knew that this event was somehow connected to the activation of the quantum phone, and his gut told him that Brown’s grand scheme would not merely be limited to a regional catastrophe. Whatever his plan, this was surely only the opening gambit.

There was one man who would be able to give King the information he needed. Not Brown. From past experience, King knew the gambler rarely troubled himself with the details-the physical realities-of his schemes. No, the man who could answer his questions was the man who had built the quantum phones in the first place.

King fired up the outboard, and brought the boat around, heading back toward the floating casino and the man who had taken his nom de guerre from the Hindu god of destruction. Bandar Pradesh. Shiva.

A blazing nail of pain drove through Julia’s head and she opened her eyes gingerly, anticipating a world of bright light that would only intensify the agony.

There was no light. Eyes open or shut, she could hardly tell the difference.

What just happened?

She was lying flat on the floor but the floor itself felt like it was sloping away. She thought that at any moment she might roll uncontrollably downhill. She remained motionless, careful not to let that happen.

A light, tiny but seemingly as brilliant as an arc welder, flared in the total darkness. She shielded her eyes with a hand, and saw a woman holding a small LED keychain light. After a moment, she recognized the woman-the American tourist that had accompanied the girl… Sara, that was her name. Now she remembered the girl… Carutius had known them somehow. And then…

“What in the hell just happened?” Sara demanded.

Julia looked at her again, aware now that her appearance had changed dramatically. Her face was caked with dust and sweat, and a trickle of blood ran from one eyebrow and down her cheek like a tear.

When she observed how different the woman looked, it was if the scales fell from Julia eyes. Not just her, she thought. Everything is different.

Indeed, as she looked around, she couldn’t see anything that looked even vaguely familiar. Part of that might have been attributable to the inadequate illumination provided by the LED flashlight, but even that was an important detail. No lights. Were they even still in the museum? Her surroundings looked more like mineshaft after a cave in. Dust swirled in the air, coiling away as if caught by a draft, but she felt no breeze. Still, amidst the chaos, she began to discern familiar features of her environment. They were still in the Louvre; in fact, although nearly every trace of the exhibit was gone, she saw that they were still in La Chappelle gallery.

The wall coverings were gone, the old stone underneath riddled with fractures and in some places, gaping holes. The most dramatic difference however was the floor. An enormous crater had appeared in the center of the room, its focal point almost exactly where the display case had been. She had no memory of moving away from the area-perhaps Carutius had carried her, carried all of them-but the place where they had been standing was now a void, falling away into darkness. The dust motes, illuminated by the flashlight beam, were spiraling into the hole like water running down a drain.

She struggled to sit up. The disorientation she had felt upon waking persisted. Despite what her eyes told her, she had the feeling that if she moved the wrong way, she might pitch forward into the pit. The sensation reminded her of a carnival funhouse, but this was no mere trick of architecture or perspective.

She found the girl, huddled near Sara, and then she saw Carutius. The big man, who always seemed so confident and in control, now looked positively defeated. He knows…

“What did you do?” The accusation was out of her mouth before she knew it. “You caused this. Or you knew it was going to happen.”

Carutius raised his head and met her stare. “I was trying to prevent it.”

“Prevent what?” Sara demanded. “What is going on?”

The big man took a breath and let it out with a sigh. “It’s not safe here. We should get outside.”

“Screw that,” Sara retorted. “We’re all dead already. Lethal concentration of gamma rays…that’s what you said. So the least you can do is answer my question.”

Julia realized that her fingers were curled around a thin piece of plastic. It was the film badge dosimeter. She held it up and inspected it in the diffuse light, certain that she would discover that it had returned to normal…that she had only imagined the color change.

The center of the disk was dark.

Gamma ray exposure…followed by some kind of explosion… She knew of only one explanation for that: an atomic bomb.

Carutius considered Sara’s demand for a moment. Then his gaze moved to Fiona and gradually the despair in his eyes was replaced by a measure of resolve. “Very well. I will answer your questions. But we must move away from here. It may be that we can do something…” His voice trailed off, unwilling or unable to elaborate. “Stay low. Crawl on the floor. The effect will be less pronounced as we move further away from the event horizon.”

Event horizon? Had she heard that right? A point of no return, from which not even light could escape, and where time would appear to stand still.

Julia was an anthropologist, a student of history, not a physicist, but she knew what an event horizons were, and she knew that they could be found only on the edge of a specific gravitational anomaly.

A black hole.

King angled the Zodiac toward the riverboat’s gangplank and killed the outboard, letting the craft’s momentum take it the rest of the way. The brightly lit exterior deck of the floating casino was crowded with passengers gazing out in shocked amazement at the darkened city skyline, but it was a sure bet that at least some of them had noticed the approaching inflatable, and it was only a matter of time before Brown’s security men were alerted to his return.

He slapped Brown’s face a few times to rouse him, and hauled him into a sitting position, the barrel of the Uzi pressed against the base of the gambler’s neck.

“Keep your mouth shut and you just might live through this,” King growled. He didn’t like the idea of walking in the front door using Brown as a human shield. There were too many variables in the situation, too many ways it could end badly. During the trip back to the riverboat, he’d racked his brain to come up with a better alternative, but there simply weren’t any other options.

Brown offered no resistance as King guided him onto the gangplank. An armed man in formal wear, easily identifiable by his burly physique as one of the Alpha Dog mercenaries, stood at the top of the ramp. King stayed behind Brown, but made sure that the Uzi was visible.

“You know how this works,” King called out. “Anyone makes a move against me and your boss is dead.”

The man raised his hands in a placating gesture, his pistol pointing skyward, and offered a strange smile. “You’ll get no trouble from us.”