Eighty-Sixed: Chapter 72 - Unreasonable Fear

Photo by Eduardo Sánchez on Unsplash

“That was my husband!” Olivia screamed in James’s face and slammed the receiver back into the cradle, nearly crushing James’s fingers in the process.

Since joining this exploratory group, weaving their way into concrete catacombs beneath the oppressively heated July night in Chicago, Olivia stayed close to Frankie until the black hole appeared in the concrete hallway after she’d contacted her mother-in-law in North Carolina. After she and Tabitha sprinted down the corridors, passing the older men in their group, she somehow became unspoken allies with the diminutive red-haired woman stuck in the tiny ten-year-old body.

So to have James hang up the phone — to have crashed in with his bulbous body and slammed his puffy fingers down on the telephone’s receiver like a toddler hurtling a tower of blocks in a tantrum — caused a fury of righteous indignation to flood up and spew out of her like venom. The unfairness of it. The irrationality of it.

“It was my deceased husband, you idiot!” she wanted to scream but somehow couldn’t. “How could you do that? Don’t you understand that was the first time - the first time - we’d been able to talk? And it was real! It was him! And you just took that away!”

The flurry of invectives she so desperately wanted to hurl his way was so overwhelming that they crammed into each other like a congested roadblock of words — so many of them that they got stuck in her mouth before she could cast them out. The typhoon of emotions that had been held inside for so long, her worry of never seeing David again, of more than two weeks of not knowing if he was alive, of mourning the loss of their children, of being hedged and captive in her childhood home again, surrounded by small town homesteads and churches and disgusting former teachers and everything she’d worked so hard to escape so many years ago. All this was coupled with her perpetually stubborn resoluteness in corking it all in and acting as if she wasn’t terrified with every passing second as everything fell apart in all directions of the world. And yet, still, at this moment, having finally made contact with her husband, she could not allow her nearly bursting emotions to make their way out into the world. To do so would be to give emotions life, animate them, and set them free. And in freeing her worries and fears, they would become real.

At times like these, she believed those emotions were most dangerous when allowed an escape.

The others stood taut and unmoving as they stared at the phone. Tony held his hands before him as if keeping a rabid dog at bay.

“It’s not doing anything,” Tabitha said.

“You hung up the phone on my husband!” Olivia spewed again, the only words she managed to say. The heat rose in her cheeks, but still, James ignored her, his eyes locked on the black telephone attached to the wall.

“I think you’re right,” James said, then let out a slow whispery breath and stood upright. “Nothing’s happening.”

“So what?” Frankie asked. “We’re supposed to walk around forever more with a preposterous fear of telephones?”

“Telephonophobia,” Tony added.

“Hah, right!” Frankie laughed. “Wait, is that an actual thing? Brilliant!”

“We need an EMP,” Tabitha said, resolutely pursing her lips. “I’m surprised someone hasn’t already thought of that.”

“Electro-Magnetic Pulse?” Tony asked, his bushy mustache wiggling like an alarm. “Isn’t that a kind of bomb?”

“That happens after a nuke goes off, yeah?” Frankie asked. “Is that what you’re suggesting?”

“It doesn’t have to be on that scale,” James said, smiling, as he started for the glass-enclosed observation room adjacent to the warehouse laboratory. Through the glass, a metal work desk and white cabinets ran the length of the far side of the room. We could make a hand-held unit right now.”

“We need more than a hand-held unit,” Tabitha said, chasing behind him, with the rest of the group following. Olivia trailed behind at the tail.

“But with a hand-held unit, we can hold these smaller anomalies at bay the moment they appear,” James said. “I can cobble one together in ten minutes.”

“Doubtful,” Tony said.

“Is that a challenge?” James asked with a wide grin. At the sight of his smile, Olivia’s fury grew.

As one of the founders of the ENH Initiative, one of the visionaries who saw the endless potential of the work they set out to do, James could himself imagine colonizing far-reaching planets, even within his lifetime, and being part of saving an entire civilization that was hellbent on its own destruction.

But as he realized the ulterior motives of some of his less virtuous colleagues, as plans were forged in isolation amongst hushed whispers, everything tinged with the scent of conspiracy, James slowly began to withdraw himself from the plots that formed within the lengthy concrete corridors of the establishment he once held in the highest esteem.

He’d been surprised by his nearly instantaneous fatherly admiration for Dr. Tabitha Small when she joined ENH while pursuing her doctorate, having seen in her naive enthusiasm a mirror image of the similar intense fervor he once possessed himself.

Then, after learning of a rare board meeting being held in his absence, a meeting which he attended nevertheless and was quickly escorted out of the room, James spent his remaining days at ENH with the definite sense that he was being outed. At that time, when he and Tabitha worked closely and regularly together — regularly followed close behind by James’s ever-present and much-needed nurse, he developed his secretive plan to leave ENH in hopes of pursuing more benevolent research and breakthroughs once again.

He had contemplated taking his work elsewhere, moving to Europe, and working exclusively with CERN to continue the development of their own LHC. He thought he would invite Dr. Tabitha Small to follow him elsewhere and take their knowledge, research, and vision somewhere that appreciated the good that could come from it all rather than staying at ENH and seeing all their work manipulated, bastardized, and used for self-motivation.

Reasons like transchronologic travel.

But before he could leave, before he’d even expressed his intent to do so to his protege, Dr. Tabitha Small, James dropped dead on the floor. But now he was here, where he always belonged: back at ENH trying to save the world.

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