Tether Read online

  We’re New Englanders. If there’s a game on, he shouts his excitement, and I pretend to share it. If there’s a storm, we check on each other. But it’s not like we’re watching Game of Thrones together, or having backyard barbeques. I mean, he’s invited me a few times, so maybe we are friends, but I’ve never gone because there’s only so much sportsing I can take before I’m revealed for the non-sports fan I am, which in Boston—nay, all of New England save for Vermont—is akin to blasphemy.

  I look up into Randy’s concerned eyes, and he flinches back. Something about my face frightens him. He looks to the house. “Where’s Morgan?”

  My head lolls to the pavement.

  There’s a cricket there, hiding in my shadow, perhaps watching the glowing storm.

  Morgan liked crickets. Their songs. When the thing chirps, I let out a little laugh, sniff in a deep breath, and find a trace of resolve.

  She can’t be dead.

  I push myself up and stand.

  “Damn, guy, you’re bleeding.” Randy is eyeing me now with something approaching suspicion. “Saul, where’s Morgan?”

  I lift a finger and point.

  At the storm.

  Right at its bright core.

  “You’re shitting me…”

  “She called when it happened,” I say. “She’s…”

  She’s not fucking dead!

  “Hey!” Randy shouts after me, as I sprint inside the house. The blood running down my legs stretches out, tickling my feet. I move through the front hall, the living room, and the kitchen, instinct guiding my hands to each and every light switch as I go, not a one of them working. Luckily, Morgan was a minimalist—is a minimalist—and everything is in its place. Navigating to the bowl holding my car keys on the kitchen counter is simple.

  Keys in hand, I push through to the garage, slapping the door opener.

  When nothing happens, I’m thrown for a moment. It’s like I’ve suddenly lost the ability to move a limb. Then my mind catches up.

  No power.

  I fumble in the windowless garage, bumping into the RAV4 and following it around to the back. When I find the bumper, I place a hand on the roof and hoist myself up. My arm flails in the dark, like some hungry tube worm at the bottom of the ocean, searching for elusive prey.

  There’s a gentle tap against my hand, and then it’s gone.

  I force myself to resist desperation for a moment. To slow down.

  The plastic handle taps the back of my hand. I let it slip over my skin and into my palm, where I grasp hold and pull down, unlocking the garage door from the automatic door opener. Then I’m off the bumper and shoving the grinding door up. I would normally cringe at the noise it makes this late at night, but everyone is awake. I can hear them inside their houses, panicked. I can see them lighting candles, fending off the darkness.

  “Saul,” Randy says, still in the street watching the lightshow. Like me, he’s in boxers and a T-shirt, but he thought to throw on a pair of slippers and a bathrobe that’s billowing in a growing wind, coming from the explosion’s core.

  I ignore him, hopping into the RAV4. The vehicle is two years old, and thanks to the fact that I’m something of a neat freak, and I barely drive, it still has that ‘new car’ smell.

  It’s familiar, and calming. My own private quiet place.

  A fist pounds on the window, drawing a shout from my lips.

  Randy. “What are you doing?”

  I turn the key.

  Nothing.

  “No power,” Randy says, voice muffled. “It’s not just lines. It’s like one of those things or something.”

  “Electromagnetic pulse,” I say to myself, but he somehow hears me.

  “Right. One of those.”

  I glance in the rearview, into Randy’s yard. His kids are slobs. If they take it out, they leave it out. Tonight, that includes his son’s ten-speed mountain bike.

  I push the door open, forcing Randy to move behind it. Then I’m out and hauling ass across the street.

  “Hey!” Randy calls out. “Damnit, Saul, slow down for a second.”

  I yank the bike up from the perfectly maintained lawn. The slender seat is uncomfortable under my butt, but I barely notice. The sharp pedal grips on my bare feet stand out a little more, but they don’t stop me from putting my weight on them and propelling myself forward.

  Randy doesn’t try stopping me. He kind of just raises his arms in defeat and steps to the side.

  “If you need me,” he says, now behind me, “I’m not going anywhere.”

  Maybe he is a friend, I think, as the bike rolls downhill, picking up speed.

  I glide down the center of the road, not worried about cars. At this time of night, there won’t be many vehicles stalled in the center of the road, and most people are hiding in their homes, no doubt mourning the loss of their power and devices.

  Air rushes up my nostrils with each breath. Smells like ozone. Like just after a summer lightning storm. But the air is dry despite the gathering clouds.

  When the hill levels out, I pedal hard, grinding through gears until I’m moving at a steady thirty mile per hour clip. It’s been a while since I rode a bike like this. Despite my anti-sportsing standpoint, I was an avid biker through high school and college. Marriage and a full-time job changed that, but riding a bike really is like riding a bike. All of my old instincts come back to me, guiding me, as I follow the familiar path through Cambridge’s tight network of neighborhoods.

  Ten minutes later, I’m both unnerved and exhausted. The city’s rising panic is becoming palpable, even though I’m only catching conversations in bits of Doppler waves. But I hear things like ‘terrorist attack,’ ‘nuclear explosion,’ and ‘radiation’ as I pass. A sixty-something-year-old woman, in a frilly pink night gown, shakes a fist at me—not in anger, but in warning. “You’re going the wrong way!” she shouts.

  And she’s not wrong. I really don’t know what I’m riding toward, aside from a sliver of hope.

  She can’t be dead.

  As I approach the base of the hill upon which SpecTek sits, I stand up and put my weight into each pedal push. By the time I reach the incline, I’m doing forty. As the climb begins, my speed drops by half, and then as my legs weaken, by half again. I downshift and work my way up the hill in switchbacks. It’s slow going, but faster than walking.

  Near the top, I slide off the bike and hold my ground.

  Not because I’ve run out of energy, although I have. Or because I’m terrified, which I am.

  But because the hill comes to an end thirty feet sooner than it used to.

  And then I see why.

  3

  A volcano of radiant energy spews from where SpecTek once stood. There are bits and pieces of the building’s outer wall still standing, but the rest of it is just…gone. I thought the structure had exploded, but the complete lack of debris covering the surrounding area suggests otherwise.

  Moving closer is probably a bad idea, but logic isn’t behind my steering wheel.

  Desperation is.

  I creep closer to the crater, eyes widening as I expect to see a foundation, but instead I find striated layers of multiple sub-basements, the middle carved out. Fragments of concrete outer walls remain. Severed water pipes drain into the abyss. The cut is clean, like a giant ice cream-scooper took the building away.

  I shuffle closer to the edge, toward the blue light, expecting to feel heat. Instead, I feel cold.

  My breath turns to vapor, rising into the bright, swirling sky.

  What the…

  I’m directly beneath the otherworldly hurricane that’s absorbing the rising light like a black hole, spewing it out through the surrounding cloud cover. The shimmering pulses move out and away in all directions, but the brightest of them streak toward neighboring Boston.

  I’ve been to the Grand Canyon just once. When I walked up to the edge and looked out over its depths, I felt a strange sense of nausea, not because of its size, but because it f
eels unreal. How could something like that exist? It’s almost incomprehensible.

  I feel the same thing now, as I slide my feet toward the precipice and look down. The incline is a smooth forty-five-degree angle, dropping six stories into the Earth. Farther down, large portions of the floors are intact, carved away at an angle. On the periphery, I can see hallways, offices, labs, desks, and debris.

  But no people.

  That doesn’t mean there aren’t survivors.

  “Morgan!” I shout into the abyss.

  My voice is swallowed by the whoosh of skyward energy.

  I lean forward. The bright blue grazes my skin.

  An unbidden scream pops from my mouth as I flinch back, not in pain from hot or even cold, but because, for just a moment, I feel the dry husk-like grip of death on my body.

  Hooks slip and twist through my flesh, tugging my soul from its mortal coil.

  I gasp and scramble back, body twitching, a degree or two short of a full seizure.

  A final burst of bright blue light billows out and above.

  I cringe away from its chill, my hands over my face, eyes clenched shut.

  The scent of ozone becomes intense.

  And then, for a moment, the scent of night-blooming jasmine. Of Morgan.

  Time loses meaning.

  When I open my eyes and lower my arms, all trace of the strange phenomenon has vanished. The column of light. The swirling clouds. The pulses of energy moving into the distance.

  It’s all gone.

  I crawl back to the crater’s fringe.

  There’s not much to see in the darkness that follows the lightshow’s retreat. But there is something, at the crater’s core. The glowing blue octagonal enclosure is easy to spot, because it’s the only thing I can see. Its shape is familiar. I’ve seen it before.

  In Morgan’s FaceTime.

  At the same moment that I recall the blonde woman with the glowing blue eyes, she slams her body against the glass. I can’t hear her voice, but the bong of fists on the window gives me a start.

  She pounds hard. Angry and violent. Or is it terrified and desperate? It’s hard to tell from six stories above, in the dark.

  But how am I seeing her at all?

  Does the room she’s in still have power?

  “That’s not it,” I say to no one, recognizing the residual supernatural glow flowing around her.

  No…not around her.

  From her.

  Her pale white skin is incandescent. Her eyes shine like LED bulbs. She pounds on the glass again, this time with open palms.

  Definitely desperate.

  But not my problem. Not my concern. I’m here for, “MORGAN!”

  My scream echoes through the crater.

  The woman ceases pounding. When I look back to her, she’s staring up at me, her bright eyes impossible to ignore or look away from.

  She was there, I realize. Would have seen Morgan after the phone connection was lost. Would know what happened.

  But she’s six stories down, in a dark hole and—

  “Yo, that shit was on fleek!”

  The loud voice spins me around with a shout.

  “Ho! Damn, man. Chill.” The young man speaking can’t be more than eighteen. A red BMX bike lies on the ground behind him. His tilted trucker cap is too big, his clothes are baggy, and every move he makes is with exaggerated swagger, like a bird of paradise in the throes of a mating dance. He’s what people of my generation would call a ‘poser,’ someone who’s trying too hard to be something they’re not. In this case, a suburban white kid from an upscale Cambridge neighborhood, attempting to look, and sound, like someone with real street cred…in Southern California…ten years ago. He’ll stop when he meets the right girl, or when he gets the shit kicked out of him.

  The space between us is lit by a lighter in his hand. He holds it out, casting the orange glow on me.

  The kid gives me a once over, frowning. “You could’a got dressed before runnin’ out here, man.”

  Loud thumping rises from the crater again.

  The glowing woman’s light has faded some, but she’s still easy to see.

  “What the fuck…” the kid says, stepping up next to me, his faux accent gone, his true Massachusetts heritage emerging. “Where’d the building go?” He spots the woman. “Holy shit! Someone’s alive down there.”

  While the kid is stunned, I strike, snagging the lighter from his hand and sliding down into the pit.

  “Hey!” he says, reaching out for me in anger, until he realizes where I’m headed. “Oh damn, dude. You gonna save her?”

  Going to get some answers, I think, but then I realize that, yes, to get answers I must first save her. I don’t really know what that will entail, but I’m going to do it, and then I’m going to find Morgan.

  Maybe she’s still here.

  Maybe she’s unconscious.

  “Morgan!” I shout, as I slide over the remains of a concrete wall, all cut at a smooth forty-five degree angle. My journey downward is precarious and slow going, lit by the lighter’s feeble flame. I brace myself on severed support pillars, cross beams, and pipes, inching my way down.

  The woman’s banging stops. She can see me coming, lighter in hand, just as clearly as I can see her, though her inner glow continues to dwindle.

  Sensing I’m in a race against time, I let myself slide several feet at once. I nearly topple over into empty rooms several times, but I manage to reach the bottom without injury. The floor levels out just a few feet from what I can only describe as a cell. The walls are all clear, though, the woman inside meant to be seen…but not heard.

  Meant to be observed…

  What were you working on, Morgan?

  The woman watches me, the dull blue glow of her skin like a dying fluorescent lamp’s bulb.

  A chill spasms through my body, locking me in place.

  It’s the view.

  I’ve seen it before.

  With my cellphone. Back at the house. I replay the video in my mind’s eye. Morgan. The cell. The woman.

  I am standing where Morgan was when…

  My eyes turn downward.

  A circle of white linoleum around my feet has been charred. I launch away from the spot, revealing two, size-eight footprints.

  She was here when it happened.

  She was…

  I crouch down, tracing my fingers over the darkened floor. They come away clean.

  Like the building, Morgan was here…and then she was not.

  And that’s not nearly answer enough.

  “Where is she?” I ask the woman through the glass. “What happened!”

  She stares back at me, the glow inside her flickering.

  Her eyes flick from me to the floor and then widen with understanding, and what I think is recognition.

  Then she goes dark and falls away from the glass.

  4

  My head thumps against the thick window as I try to peer inside the octagonal cell. The pain barely registers. I press the lighter against the glass, attempting to see inside, but most of the light is reflected. Without the woman’s inner glow, she’s all but invisible.

  I can’t tell if she’s inside, or even alive.

  I glance back at the black circle that might represent all that remains of my wife. Intense pain squeezes my chest. I nearly come undone.

  She’s not dead.

  She can’t be dead.

  And the only person who can confirm that for me is unconscious, inside this…whatever this is.

  I seal off my rising emotions and focus on the cell, moving around its perimeter, inspecting its eight walls in search of a door. If the cell has an electronic lock, there’s no helping her. The room could be sealed tight.

  “Oh shit,” I say to no one. If the room is air tight… Without electricity, the woman might have used up all the oxygen in the small space.

  “What’re you doing, man?” the kid calls down from above.

  I ignore him, moving a
round the cell.

  “I think help is coming,” he shouts. “I hear helicopters.”

  Probably news helicopters out of Boston. I have no idea if surrounding cities suffered the same electromagnetic effect as Cambridge, but if there are helicopters, then that seems unlikely. I haven’t heard any secondary explosions. Logan airport must have been spared—thank God for that.

  I nearly miss the lock, tucked into the top right corner of the glass wall. It’s a sliding bolt and comes free with a tug. There’s no door handle, so I grasp the bolt and tug. Nothing moves.

  C’mon…

  I pull again and the top of the door wobbles outward, but the bottom resists. Crouching, I see the problem. A second bolt in the panel’s lower right. The lock snaps up and the door slides open, smooth and quiet, propelled by a resilient rubber seal.

  Definitely airtight.

  I step inside and fall to my knees beside the pale woman with shoulder length, nearly white, blonde hair. Her wiry figure is revealed by the tight black bodysuit she’s wearing. On the right side of her chest is what looks like a serial number–

  005-RAIN

  I check for a pulse and find none.

  “Damnit.”

  While I’m nothing close to a doctor, after spending time with the worst criminals Boston had to offer, I made it a point to carry a first aid kit in my car, and learn CPR. Until now, I’ve never had to use it.

  I lay her flat, lace my fingers, and place them over her sternum. Hesitation locks me in place. For this to work, to really work, I need to push hard enough to compress her chest—which also happens to be hard enough to break ribs.

  This is going to hurt.

  Both of us.

  I straighten my arms, lean over her, and—

  The woman lurches up with a gasp, filling her lungs with oxygen-rich air, like she’s just escaped the ocean’s depths. When she’s alert enough to move her head, she notices me kneeling beside her. Her reaction is violently defensive, throwing herself away from me, like I’m Beelzebub come to collect her soul. She slams into the cell’s wall, her head striking the glass with a bong.