Eighty-Sixed: Chapter 80 - Split

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“Alright then, so let’s get to work,” James said. He stood upright with a broad smile, his hands upon his hips as he looked over the warehouse space like some prospector overseeing an open vista ripe with potential.

“I need to go back up,” Olivia said. “Outside. I want to be there when David arrives.”

Though he had just apologized for his earlier out-of-character behavior, James felt himself slip again. Something about Olivia made him uneasy, and his broad grin melted into a scowl. Frustration scrawled across his brown in a deep line, and he heftily puffed out his disdain in a quick breathy burst.

“I’ll go with you,” Frankie said. “You shouldn’t be waiting around out there alone. If what happened out on the highway taught us anything, there are some crazies out there.”

“You can’t be walking around this building by yourself, either, for that matter,” Tabitha said.

“Get over yourself,” Frankie said, gesticulating wildly toward Olivia. “Do you think she’s gonna steal your top-secret tips for blasting through black holes? This one is?”

“No offense,” Tabitha said, looking at Olivia. “But we don’t know her.”

“She wants to go wait for her husband. Who’s going to stop her, small fry? You?” Frankie said with surprisingly abrupt anger. “Or maybe you’re worried about me?”

He glared at Tabitha, her mouth bunched up and pulled to the right like she was chewing at the inside of her cheek.

“What’s got you so riled?” Tabitha asked.

“I don’t care what she does anymore,” James said, turning his back and huffing away toward the storage closets on the far end of the warehouse. Calling over his shoulder, he admonished, “I’ve got more than enough to do, and you all will just be in my way.”

“Like what, exactly?” Tony asked, hurrying after James like a scrawny puppy.

“You too,” James said. “No questions. This isn’t a news report.”

Undeterred, Tony followed closely behind as James lumbered across the warehouse’s slick, grey-painted concrete floor.

“Again,” he said, “you’re the one who brought me here.”

“I’ll go with you,” Tabitha said to Olivia, still chewing the inside of her cheek and contemplating Frankie’s angered reaction.

“And why would you do that?” Frankie asked. “We don’t need a babysitter, let alone one as petite as you.”

He opened his arms again, waving them like an orchestral conductor leading a symphony.

“And aren’t you of more use here?” he asked. “Your grand plan to stop the black hole and whatnot? Help create a giant zapper thingy?”

“The EMP weapon,” Tabitha answered.

“Weapon?” Olivia asked.

“For lack of a better word,” Tabitha said.

“Strong word,” Frankie said and scratched his back, touching the Glock still tucked into the back of his pants. It felt like months since he’d taken it from the apartment, longer still since he was forced to brandish it on the highway, striking down that vagrant who was threatening Olivia, himself ending up in the hospital as a result. “So won’t you be needed to help cobble that together, too?”

Not necessarily,” Tabitha said. “James has a plan. He built a failsafe EMP the first time around, years ago before ENH had even recruited me. There are always contingencies.”

“I don’t understand,” Olivia said. “So this EMP thing that you think will knock out the black holes — you’ve built this before?”

“Of course,” Tabitha said matter-of-factly. “We’re dealing with technologies of cosmic proportions here. Don’t you get that yet? We won’t tamper with transgalactic levels of gravity and magnetism without safeguards in place. You bring a black hole here, and it could fall to the center of Earth’s gravity and suck everything else in with it. The fact we’re back here in 1986 should be testimony to the need for a safeguard.”

“Yeah, but to your point, apparently your safeguards didn’t work too well by the fact that we’re here in 1986,” Frankie admonished.

“Because of your wife,” Tabitha answered. “Because of Dr. Step Back and Be Amazed Becca Watts, who never quite felt protocols and safeguards related to her. Who did her own thing even to the detriment of everyone else.”

“Fair enough,” Frankie said, shaking his head. “Can’t argue with you on that one.”

“But one man can do all this?” Olivia asked. “It just seems you should stay here. We can find our way out.”

“This was always James’s forte. And when he gets like this, you have to step back,” Tabitha said. “He’ll let us know when he needs help, but I don’t plan on sitting around waiting for him to ask. It’s not my style.”

“No, I suppose not,” Frankie responded. “And if he does need help, that skinny fella there could help him.”

“He’ll probably kill Tony if he keeps asking so many questions,” Tabitha said. “I’ll go with you. It’s easy to get lost in this complex.”

Olivia looked nervously at her watch.

“Enough talk, okay?” she said. “My husband’s on the way, and I plan on being there when he arrives.”

“If we’re all going, then let’s go,” Frankie said. “Lead the way, Red.”

Tabitha’s cheeks flushed pink as she nodded firmly and directed them back up the stairs from which they’d previously descended.

“Wait a minute,” Frankie stopped them halfway up the stairs. “Doc back there has the doohickey.”

“The portable EMP,” Olivia said, turning questioningly to Tabitha. They all looked back down the stairs and across the large room.

There, James was on the far side of the warehouse, now, from a distance, just a small man in a flailing white coat, pointing animatedly to Tony, who scurried obediently over to a nearby storage cabinet, retrieved something, and scurried back to James.

“Stupid,” Tabitha said, slapping herself on the forehead as she rapidly descended the steps. “Even if we avoid the telephones, there were far too many anomalies earlier today that seemed to erupt out of nowhere.”

Olivia and Frankie stood on the stairs watching the tiny woman in a girl’s body scamper across the room like a schoolchild during recess in a gymnasium.

“She makes me nervous,” Olivia whispered.

“Nah,” Frankie said, mustering a half-hearted smile. “She’s harmless.”

“Even still. She doesn’t trust us.”

“Do you blame her?” Frankie asked. “She’d spent her life in this place, trying to do things she thought would save the world. She wanted to get us to new planets. New galaxies. Places to set up colonies and new homes to keep civilization going for centuries more. That was her goal.”

“And then all this,” Olivia said.

“Exactly. All this. Caused by my bloody wife and her damn fool ideas that didn’t serve anyone but her.”

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