Adam Christopher - The Age Atomic

Rad dropped to his knee, Jennifer by his side.

“What is it?” she asked.

Rad peered at the ground, then looked at her, his expression set. “Looks like… blood?”

“No,” she said as she trailed her gloved fingers in the substance. “Machine oil. Lubricant. From a robot.”

“There is more here,” said Byron. The trio moved, and Rad quickly caught sight of the oily spatter that formed a trail through the rubble, towards the husk of the Chrysler Building.

Rad and Grieves exchanged a look.

“He’s gone inside,” said Rad.

“If you’re going to say we need to follow the trail, I’m not sure the building meets city regulations right at the moment,” said Grieves. Rad stared at the man for a moment, then turned around.

But Jennifer had already left, walking at pace towards the shattered entrance.

“Yeah,” said Rad. “Good luck with that. Come on.”

Rad turned and jogged after Jennifer. After a moment, he heard Grieves follow.

The gun kicked in Nimrod’s hand, the sound loud, reverberating off the thick plate glass behind him. He blinked the smoke away and his nostrils were filled with the smell of fireworks and dirt.

Evelyn McHale smiled, and Nimrod took a breath and fired again, and again, five more shots. Then he sighed, his arm dropping to his side. He stepped forward, until he was within touching distance of the Director’s rippling blue aura. Through her he could see the marks on the New York mural where the bullets had struck.

“Well?” he said, his eyes dark and narrow. “What do you want from me? You have what you want. You have the Fissure. Your organization has control of the city.” He waved at the cityscape below and behind them. “I must have a purpose. You said that everything does, that free will is an illusion and that you can see into the future, down our predetermined paths. So what is to become of me, hmm ?”

The Director tilted her head, and when she spoke it was with infinite patience. Nimrod had to control the rage burning inside him. He could already feel the heat in his cheeks, the tremble in his jaw as his anger grew. And all the while, she was calm, quiet. A ghost out of time.

“Is that a question you really want the answer to, Captain?”

Nimrod raised his head and stared at the Director down his nose.

“Do you want to know the future?” she asked “Do you die in bed, peacefully? Does cancer claim you, eating you from the inside out? Do you choke on a fishbone at a restaurant in Maine? Do you take a vacation to New Zealand and die in a car wreck? Does someone shoot you in Times Square, accidentally, perhaps the police chasing a dangerous felon as you are caught in the crossfire? Or do you die here now, with me, in my Cloud Club?”

Nimrod raised an eyebrow. “It hardly seems to matter, does it? You already know. You already know the outcome of this very conversation. How awful it must be for you, reading lines from a script as you do.”

“I can tell you what happens. Don’t you want to know?”

Nimrod laughed. “If that is supposed to be a threat, then it fails completely. It does not matter if I know. What will be, will be, and it appears I have little choice in the matter. If I am to meet my end here, then there is nothing I can do about it, because it is already written in the stars.”

The Director smiled. Nimrod viewed her warily, rolling his fingers along the grip of his seven-shot revolver.

There was one bullet left.

“I need you, Captain Nimrod.”

“Is that so?”

Nimrod raised the gun to his temple and pulled back the hammer. Perhaps he could cheat fate, disturb the universal harmony. Perhaps everything the Ghost of Gotham was saying was a lie, another of her games to pass the torment of eternity. He could understand that.

Nimrod pulled the trigger, and he heard the gun go off even as the floor dropped away from him. Surrounded by blue light, when he blinked he was somewhere else.

The Director of Atoms for Peace was still floating in front of him, but they had left the Cloud Club. They were standing on a circular platform with a grilled metal deck. Below them stretched the great factory floor buried deep underneath Manhattan, where a thousand silver robots stood in their ranks, active but awaiting orders. The glow from the floor was a brilliant red and orange and the light moved as the fusors inside each robot torso churned. The platform on which he was standing was directly above the main fusor reactor, the great torus suspended in the center of the factory. Mounted above the reactor’s control panel, hanging underneath the platform above, was a large mechanical digital display, nothing but an empty black rectangle.

Nimrod was lifted into the air slowly, a foot at a time until he hung there, floating higher even than Evelyn. She pointed to him, gesturing with her hands, and he felt his arms being pulled outwards until he hung like a crucified man. The empty gun was still in his right hand.

“You cannot cheat fate,” she said. “You do not die in the Cloud Club.”

“I can see that, Madam,” said Nimrod. The tingle of the Director’s power surrounded him like a warm bath, but it was getting hotter, and more intense, quickly. He gritted his teeth against the burning pain.

“Now you know what it is like, being dragged through the universes against your will. Pain — infinite, eternal.”

Nimrod said nothing, focusing instead on dragging air through his clenched teeth.

The Director lowered herself to the platform, and began to walk around its edge, trailing ghostly fingers on the railing and leaving a trail of sparkling blue dust in their wake. She surveyed the robot army below her.

“Elektro?”

A robot walked out from the beneath the platform and turned to look up at the Director. The machine saluted, cigarette smoke curling from its mouth. “At your service, boss.”

“We are almost ready. Begin synchronization.”

“You got it,” said Elektro. The machine puffed on its cigarette and walked back underneath the platform. Nimrod dragged his head down as much as possible, and through the grilling saw Elektro operating the controls of the torus. The steady hum of the device increased in amplitude, the glow of the ring brighter until it was almost white.

The Director looked up at Nimrod, pinned like a butterfly to a board in midair. “My army of atomic robots. They are necessary, Nimrod. Do you understand? The atomic army is required. Now that I have control of the Fissure, I can move it here, to the factory. My army will be taken as one through to the Empire State, and there each fusor reactor will be detonated. Each will yield twenty-five megatons. Multiply that a thousand-fold and the energy released will be enough to cause the Pocket universe to collapse.”

Nimrod hissed, and she resumed her walk around the circumference of the platform; with each step she rose a little higher in the air, until she was floating free again.

“Yes, Captain. The Pocket and the Origin cannot exist without each other, not anymore. They are tethered. The implosion will start a chain reaction, one that will continue, consuming the very fabric of this universe, accelerating exponentially until every universe, all the worlds beyond the fog, dissolve.”

Nimrod growled and forced his mouth open. His tongue was dry and his teeth hurt as the tendrils of energy from Evelyn swirled, looking for the quickest way to the Earth through his body.

“You would destroy everything?” Every word was a struggle, every syllable spat out against a tidal wave of pain. “That isn’t war, Evelyn. It’s not even madness. You would destroy all of creation.” He hissed a breath, and expelled one final question: “Why?”