Eighty-Sixed: Chapter 90 - Crumbling

“There!” James yelled. “Hit the button! Hit it now!”

Still deep in the laboratory, both James and Tony listened to the continuous crashing of thunder from within the very center of the facility. The walls of ENH seemed to be collapsing from within, preparing to fall like the walls of Jericho, with the pending calamity growing closer by the moment.

“That’ll launch the missile?” Tony asked, in a tone more of a statement than a question.

“Yes, we’ve no choice!” said James, who’d been a part of ENH from the beginning and had substantially contributed to the same technology they now feverishly scrambled to nullify.

“And the power will go out?” Tony asked. He’d been so quickly brought into the nearly indefinable seismic activity of ENH that he struggled to understand anything happening.

“Yes,” James said, his own confusion and frustration growing. “Well, I think so. If the satellites are indeed in place as I suspect they are, then, yes, the EMP network should knock out the black hole once and for all.”

“And you’re basing this on what? You said you didn’t make this missile for another few years.”

There was another slow rumbling, like boulder-sized marbles racing across the floor, followed by another tumultuous crash that crescendoed from a reverberating crumbling sound to an explosive boom that shook the room so violently that the two men seemed to blur before each other’s eyes as everything vibrated and the lights flickered like strobe lights.

“We don’t have time for explanations!” James yelled.

“I don’t like making hasty decisions!” Tony called out, and his voice cracked, panicked, as fear seeped out of him, transparent and obvious. He was no longer a curious journalist, asking questions to satiate his thirst for a good story, but a man whose thin veneer of bravado was finally cracked.

“Nor do I,” James said solemnly.

“With no power, where does that leave us?”

“Alive,” James answered. The walls shook again, dust falling from the sheer face of the concrete all around them. “At least we’ll be alive.”

Cracks had not yet formed in the walls, but every edge of the room groaned with each pulsing explosion.

James waddled hurriedly over to Tony, who stood by the ignition switches. He slapped his heavy hand down on a series of switches before finally pressing a large red button, unmarked, at the top right corner of the cobbled-together control panel.

From within the yellow storage container, a hiss of smoke shot out in a silver and white cloud from the bottom edge of the glass partition, where the large plexiglass cube was merely set in place without being attached to the ceiling or floor. The smoke cloud grew as the rocket within the partition shook and hissed.

“Wait!” Tony cried out and moved toward the control panel, though even if he reached it, he had no idea how to stop what was already set in motion. “We’ll be stuck here!”

“We’ve no choice,” James said, grabbing the thinner man by the shoulders.

“This isn’t our decision to make,” Tony said. “What you said before. Is this the choice we should make?”

Suddenly, he was sobbing as they watched the storage container fill with smoke, the cloud overflowing out the port door and into the laboratory.

“James!” a tiny voice called from above and behind them.

The two men spun to see their recently departed contingent standing on the overheard platform with several new members. Among them were an injured man on a utility cart and Dr. Becca Watts.

“No!” Becca cried out upon seeing James and another man she didn’t recognize standing near the yellow storage container. “Don’t let that rocket launch!”

Tony’s eyes widened upon hearing her words, despite having no idea who this new person was who shouted the command. But something in her voice - harsh and shrill and weighed down with frenzied alarm — sent a chill across Tony’s neck like a specter tracing an ice-cold line down his spine and across every nerve, as if his fears had been proven true simply by the sound of panic in this unknown woman’s command.

There was another crumbling boom from the wall opposite the platform, the very insides invisibly collapsing. Tabitha and the others started to descend the steps, save for three members of this new contingent — a skinny, older man and a younger man with dark brown hair who looked no older than twenty. Both of whom set about assisting another man—injured and moving slowly—who was placed upon a utility cart and was attempting to sit up.

“It’s too late!” James called back.

And as he spoke the words, the far wall didn’t so much buckle outward as it was sucked inward. The dust puffing out from the exterior of the walls just moments before was now completely gone, evaporated from existence along with the rest of the wall as everything gave way to the immense darkness of the round black curve that sliced through the wall as light shines through the night. It appeared out of nowhere, a giant spinning ball spanning from floor to ceiling, cutting into the room and pulling everything into itself. Several metal carts on the far side of the room skittered across the concrete floor as if in some strange race and then were lifted off their wheels, tossed like feathers across the room before disappearing entirely into the black. The metal stairs on which the others descended creaked beneath their very steps as the blackness reached out with invisible fingers, greedily pulling, pulling, pulling everything into itself.

Frankie, at the rear of the group heading down the stairs, leaped to the concrete floor and tumbled, rolling sideways, as the staircase separating the concrete floor from the landing above pulled away from the wall. It crumbled up like no more than a bundle of straw and then disappeared into the black hole.

From above, Charlie let out a hoot and a laugh, covering his fear with a nervous cackle.

“David!” Jeremy yelled from above, down to the brother he was determined to keep within eyesight, the brother who, time and again over these last few weeks, kept falling just out of his grasp.

Tossed from his yellow kayak into the roiling riverbed and dragged under the pounding waves.

Pulled from the boat by strangers back on Lake Hazelton.

Locked and beaten and abandoned in the lakeshore cabin’s coat closet.

Hurtled from the rolling car as the man in the Pink Floyd shirt disappeared into the void that David said appeared from nothing in the center of the car’s stereo.

And now Jeremy watched helplessly as Becca ran across the arena-sized room accompanied by Tabitha, Frankie, Olivia, and David on the floor far below. The missile from within the yellow storage container shuddered again, then broke free from the blustery cloud of smoke. It rose upward through the roof of the container, clearly visible through the plexiglass chimney that ran to the laboratory ceiling, where it disappeared in a blur, filling the chimney with remnants of blue smoke.

David looked up at his brother, stranded on the dangling platform above, and suddenly remembered the memory that had eluded him since he had awoken on the boat in the middle of Lake Hazleton. His mind had been muddled and confused as he looked across at Jeremy, who was equally confused as David.

Now, he remembered the precise instant on that kayak moments before dying. Jeremy tried to reach out to grab hold of David’s craft. David recalled when he finally released his backpack from the kayak’s rear storage hold. And in his mind, the memory returned of the last thing he saw, the split-second image and realization of a wet and gnarled tree branch appearing from nowhere just an inch from his face, reaching out like the arm of a wrinkled, ancient creature from the still unattainable bank of the river. He remembered the painful slap of the soggy branch clapping across his eyes, the radiating bolt of lightning across his eyes and through his brain. And then nothing else, just this, his final memory before his life was ended beneath the cascading foam of the river.

Blackness.

Through the far wall in the launch room, the black hole pulsed again, increasing in size as metal fragments flew through the air - chairs and cabinets and computers.

A deafening scraping sound rose from the room as the yellow storage container suddenly spun ninety degrees on an invisible axis. James and Tony stumbled backward, narrowly avoiding the steel corner of the structure. The container was then pulled off the ground and sent through the air like nothing more than a Matchbox car being tossed by a spoiled brat.

It flew into the open, gaping mouth of the black hole, which now consumed everything like cancer, pulling, pulling, pulling.

A yellow storage container floating in the middle of a black hole