Eighty-Sixed: Chapter 44 - Lake Michigan
A curious crowd in gaudy clothes - neons and tight-fitting Polos, parachute pants, and distractingly short shorts — had gathered into a restlessly swarming mass on Navy Pier along Lake Michigan’s western shore just north of Chicago’s Grant Park. The crowd constantly shifted in an undulating movement fueled by a combination of fear, hope, and adrenaline. They’d come to witness the unexplainable display of randomly appearing black holes that pulsed and rotated not more than a hundred yards offshore.
It took Tabitha and Dr. Harbash nearly two hours to arrive, though it was just a handful of blocks from James’s apartment. The sidewalks were packed with sweating throngs of people in their mismatched clothes, either seeking escape out of the city or making their way to the curiosity now being reported on every television station available.
By the time they arrived, at least two thousand people had crushed into each other, their mouths agape at the site of at least twenty black hole anomalies now appearing in various sizes. Some pulsed and grew in size, while others somehow folded back upon themselves like widened jaws stretched to their limits before mysteriously swallowing themselves and disappearing.
James barreled into the crowd ahead of Tabitha, who held onto his hand and let herself be pulled behind. For every person trying to escape the pier, two more forced their way into the crowd. Surrounded, Tabitha lost her grip and was pulled away from James by the crowd.
“Dr. Harbash!” she cried out.
James, eyes wide, lowered his head and pushed his way back through to his protégé.
“I've got you,” he said when he was back within arm’s reach.
“Can you lift me?”
“Are you sure?” James said uncomfortably. “I mean, that’s just, well…”
“Do we have a choice?” Tabitha said. “As long as I’m stuck this size, I have no choice but to make concessions.”
She held her arms up like a small child waiting for a hug from her father. James plucked her up, and Tabitha was amazed at the vastness of the crowd growing at this new height.
“I’m out of here,” they heard a man fearfully proclaim as another black hole was suddenly snuffed from existence.
They pushed forward for nearly another thirty minutes before fighting to the far end of the pier, where the crowd had unexpectedly thinned out. As Tabitha and James broke through the crowd, they understood why. From the time they started pushing their way through the crowd until they finally reached the end of the pier, the number of black holes had nearly doubled. As soon as one anomaly was gone, they watched as more holes randomly appeared.
On the edge of the pier, the same television crew they’d seen just an hour before on the television in James’s apartment continued their broadcast. James set Tabitha down, and they watched momentarily as the perky, teenaged-looking blonde reporter spoke directly to the camera pointed at her. She stopped and touched her earpiece, her head tilted to the side as she intently listened before talking to the camera again. A thin older man in his forties with a thick, bushy, walrus-like brown mustache stood scribbling notes onto a yellow legal pad. He stood next to a young boy who struggled to hold upright a massive video camera with “ABC7 - CHICAGO” emblazoned upon the side. The cameraman, resurrected in a small and awkward prepubescent body, appeared to have been served the same fate as Tabitha.
The two doctors turned their attention back to the anomalies just offshore.
“How do they keep increasing in number like this?” Tabitha asked.
“It’s like cells replicating,” James said. “But not quite.”
“Ten…Twenty…There are at least fifty of them now,” Tabitha counted aloud.
“That’s from just over an hour,” James said. “How many new ones show up each time one disappears?”
“I can’t tell,” Tabitha answered. “Their replication is erratic, but the way they’re lining up out there is not.”
“You’re right,” James said. “That’s dipole vector movement. Look at the distance between each of them.”
“Completely uniform alignment despite their sizes,” Tabitha said. “I’m guessing twenty yards between each one.”
“An electromagnet,” said James.
“Exactly.”
“Do you know what I wonder?” James asked. “It would make more sense if there had been more than one of these things.”
“What do you mean?”
“Based on how you described the original event, do you suppose there was more than one black hole?”
“At ENH? I suppose, but I only saw one. What are you thinking?”
“What if it took the gravitational pull of two of these things in close proximity to somehow trigger the nascent gaps of wormhole space between them?”
“Oh no,” Tabitha said. “Is that what Becca did?”
“What would happen if we somehow could pull these things closer together?”
“Do we really want to know?”
“Look at those boats out there,” James said. “Do you see them?”
“They’re keeping their distance. I’m surprised that they haven’t been hit with an electromagnetic pulse that would short out their motors. And considering that, we’d have to get a rowboat out there if we wanted to trigger some sort of reaction.”
“We need to get closer.”
“We don’t have a boat,” Tabitha said.
“No, not closer to the holes,” James said. He was looking at the awkward trio at the edge of the pier. “To that television crew.”
Ohh. I like this. Sciency but not over my head - it makes sense.