Eighty-Sixed: Chapter 87 - Utility Cart

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“Lower the light!” David commanded.

“You came back,” Charlie scoffed weakly, his voice surprisingly weak and choked.

“Lower the light, Charlie!" Jeremy echoed. “You’re blinding us!”

The small contingent — five now — stood huddled in the doorway: David and Olivia, Jeremy, Tabitha, and Frankie. They each looked away, shielding their eyes with their hands and forearms, until Charlie finally dropped the flashlight’s beam and shone it at their feet, casting strange jiggling blue shadows from their shoelaces, like stretched-out spider legs dancing in the darkness. At the group’s rear, Jeremy now pushed a four-wheeled utility cart, the bed of which was no more than three feet long with a worn carpet top, the edges frayed and torn on the corners.

“Why are the lights off in here?” Tabitha asked from the cool darkness of the stairwell.

Behind them, from the direction they’d just traveled, the long lengths of the hallway were still illuminated brightly, disappearing around a slight gradual curve far into the distance like a subway tunnel. But the stairwell in which Charlie huddled over Gordon like an emergency medical technician, keeping vigil over his battered form, was still washed in blackness.

“They were out when we got here,” Charlie answered plainly as if that explained everything.

“Give me the light,” Tabitha commanded, walking swiftly and sternly to Charlie, her hand outstretched.

“And who are you, miss?” Charlie asked, yet readily absconded his flashlight to the tiny red-haired woman stuck like a prisoner in a young girl’s body.

Ignoring him, Tabitha scanned the walls with the light, then hurried up the stairs, turning on the first landing. Then, ascending upward, the blue light jogged and faded until the stairwell was drenched in darkness again.

“You alright?” Jeremy asked in the darkness.

“Who, me?” Charlie asked. “I’m fine. But Gordon here keeps waking up and then passing out again. Don’t know if he has a concussion or what. But he ain’t right.”

“I’m sorry we left,” Jeremy said. “Hopefully, you understand why we did. But, look, we found a cart that may help your friend there.”

“I’ll be honest,” Charlie answered, “I didn’t expect you to come back. I’m sorry about that. For doubting. If it matters.”

“It doesn’t,” David said, stepping further into the concrete cave. His fingers tightly intertwined into the sixteen-year-old hands of the woman he’d been married to for over three decades. “I don’t blame you one bit for thinking we’d left. I’d have thought the same.”

Then, to his wife, he said, “Baby, this is Charlie.”

“This is her, then?” Charlie said. Though it was now too dark to see clearly, a smile could be heard in his voice, light and friendly, somehow finding strength again simply by being amongst other people once more. “Your wife.”

“I’m Olivia,” she said and stepped forward, placing an awkward hand on Charlie’s shoulder for a moment and giving it two quick pats.

“So, the four of you traveled here together?” Frankie asked, stepping into the midst of them, hovering protectively near Olivia, for whom he’d taken a bullet just hours before, though it now felt as if long stretches of days must indeed have passed.

Time, they now all knew, even if they still could not succinctly put it into words, was as malleable as clay and equally resilient, no matter how much you pounded on it and commanded it to form to your whims and wishes. It would still be clay, something of a set mass and density, place and time, no matter how much you twisted it and crafted it to your design. At the center, it would remain as it was meant to be. Time, even with its surges of rapid passage followed by slowly ticking passes of the second hand, racing and slowing like waves between high and low tides, would ultimately be what it wanted to be, no matter how hard someone tried to make it otherwise.

“Not at all,” Charlie said, cradling Gordon’s head against his thigh. “I drove here myself. Looking for this fellow here. And a doctor woman who’d been with him.”

“A doctor woman?” Olivia asked and looked sideways at Frankie.

“And who would that be?” Frankie asked.

As he spoke, the lights in the stairwell flickered rapidly, then held steady, washing everything in a dull greenish-white hue. It was harsh and unsettling, like coming out of anesthesia in a foreign room, looking at the faces of strangers.

“There we go!” Tabitha called from somewhere above.

They stood gathered around Gordon’s ailing form on the ground, looking upward into the space where the staircase disappeared onto the landing fifteen steps above, watching as the rapid-fire pitter-patter of Tabitha’s footsteps reflected off the walls and down the concrete stairs as she speedily descended and joined the group once more.

“That was odd,” she said. “All the switches of the fuse box had been flipped.”

“You were saying?” Frankie asked Charlie. “The doctor woman you were looking for?”

“The doctor?” Charlie answered. “A woman named Becca. A physicist or what have you. You know her?”

“Wait. What?” Tabitha said, visibly bristling at the mere mention of Becca’s name.

“She supposedly drugged Gordon here,” David explained.

“So you know who he’s talking about?” Jeremy asked Frankie.

“I bloody well should,” he answered. “That’s my wife.”

“Your wife?” Charlie cackled and let out a laugh. “Well, no offense, but my condolences to you.”

“She’s here then?”

“I arrived here with her,” Gordon said. “But I have no idea where she is now. I’d imagine she must be somewhere close.”

“I need a drink,” Frankie said, roughly dragging his palm across his face.

“She’s not all bad,” Gordon whispered with dry, cracked lips.

“Ah, hey there!” Charlie said to the head resting against his thigh. “You’re awake again, eh?”

“Who are they?” Gordon asked, struggling to keep his eyes open.

“That there is Becca’s husband,” Charlie said, pointing.

“Frankie?” Gordon asked and mustered a faint smile.

“I’ve no idea what’s happening,” Frankie said, propping his fists upon his hips. “So you both know my wife?”

“Sailed with her in Key West,” Charlie told him.

“Oh, really?” Frankie said. “When was this, then?”

“Just last week.”

“Of course,” Frankie replied. “And just what the bloody hell was she doing in Key West? I’ve never even been to Key West.”

“Came looking for the black holes, apparently,” Charlie said.

“Sounds like Becca,” Tabitha chimed in.

“Before they started popping up everywhere else,” Gordon added, grunting as he painfully twisted his body sideways, propping himself on his left elbow, then pushing up to a seated position.

“Careful there,” Charlie cautioned.

“So she went to Key West, then?” Frankie repeated. “A black hole scavenger hunt, eh?”

“That was the first place the news was reporting about them,” Gordon explained. “Popping up over the ocean, all over the place.”

“The news showed them doing the same thing over Lake Michigan just earlier today or yesterday or whenever the heck time it was,” Frankie said.

“But it’s been doing it in Key West since just about right after all this started,” Charlie explained. “Cleared out the entire city like a ghost town. Reporters, too. I had the whole place to myself until Gordon here showed up.”

“And then Becca a couple of days later,” Gordon said.

The lights flickered throughout the stairwell, then crackled. It was more than just a power surge as if the power was suddenly being sucked out somehow. A hum like a suddenly manifested swarm of droning flies unexplainably emanated from all around them.

“That doesn’t sound good,” Charlie said.

“It’s like earlier,” Olivia said and instinctively looked to Tabitha for confirmation. “When I made that first phone call.”

“Something’s been triggered?” Frankie suggested.

Tabitha, in turn, looked at the portable EMP device still clutched within her diminutive hands.

“We may have oversimplified our safeguard options,” Tabitha said.

“What the heck does that mean? Jeremy asked.

“It means, whoever you are,” Tabitha said and started moving up the concrete steps, “that we should run.”

“I’m not sure I can even stand,” Gordon said grimly as he twisted from his seat on the concrete floor. He grimaced in pain. “No way I’m making it up those stairs.”

Behind the handles of the four-wheel utility cart, Jeremy pushed it further into the stairwell.

“Is there an elevator?” he asked.

“There is,” Tabitha answered, her ears and cheeks deepening with pink frustration. “But we should stay out of the elevators. Besides, it’s in the opposite direction of where we should go.”

The lights flickered again, the droning sound increasing, now more like angry wasps protecting their nest, when suddenly a bulb exploded above them. They were swallowed in darkness once more.

“Guess we don’t have a chance now, do we?” Frankie asked into the now blackened room. “Better get this man loaded up.”

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