His world was white and it howled like an out of tune symphony orchestra. With every breath, Sam felt icy daggers stab at his lungs. He became three people. The man arguing to give in, lay down, accept fate. The man arguing to keep going, take one more step, there would be time for dying later. And the man watching those two men, wondering who was going to win the argument.
The small lecture hall was filled with the men and women who comprised the A2Z BART project team. The lights had been dimmed, except for the spotlight on the lectern in front of the tiered seats. Dr. Rachael Winters, one of the lead scientists for the BART project, adjusted the microphone. A slide was projected on the large screen behind her as she spoke.
"I'm coming, I'm coming," Amanda Seymour said, more to herself than to the insistent visitors knocking at her front door. Amanda had made 68 trips around the sun. She was in good health, but at her age, having lived a full life with just a pinch of bitterness and only a dash of regret, she simply refused to be hurried.
"I haven't told you about this in our previous sessions but I've been having this recurring dream. Nightmare, really. I'm an EMT - which is totally weird given my issues with needles, and well, my, um, general queasiness in the area of bodily fluids, I guess you'd say - and I'm in an ambulance, sirens wailing, on our way to the hospital with a patient and, well, it's me, I mean, the patient, it looks like me, except… It isn't human." Peter Peregrin took a deep breath and waited for his therapist to comment.
Captain Jane Shackleton, commanding the container ship Miranda, no longer needed her binoculars to track the phenomena approaching her ship. "Captain," Ensign Tom Waterman said, "We're picking up something big in that squall. On a direct intercept course at… 40 knots."
It's big enough to hide a battleship, Shackleton thought.
Eric MacKenzie, CEO of MKZ Pharma, noticed the island first as a dull spot in the distance - a broken mirror in an ocean of mirrors reflecting the mid-morning sun. "How much longer?" he shouted. The pilot's voice crackled in his headset. "Fifteen minutes. Twenty tops." MacKenzie sat back in his seat, checked his watch, and tugged the seat belt and shoulder restraints tighter. He hated flying. Or rather, he feared crashing. The frequency of the risk was low but - no pun intended or hoped for - the impact was high and potentially tragic.
The four men in charcoal grey suits, with thin black ties and pork pie hats, walked into Jake's Car Works, each one carrying a briefcase. They approached the service desk counter where they were greeted by the owner himself, Jake Weatherbee, a tall, lean man with strong, callused hands and a face was all eyebrows and mustache.
He had made his way to the coast, to the lighthouse at Cape Hatteras. The house and the grounds were empty. This was hardly a surprise. Raleigh was a ghost town, stinking of the dead, of uncollected garbage, of rotting food in empty stores. There were a few survivors, like himself, but he just couldn't think of himself as lucky. He had seen too much death and still feared for his own. Was it crazy to think he was being watched? Was anything crazy in this insane world? Maybe the truth itself was crazy. Knowing the truth. How had he been left to save the world? He didn't know but he had made it this far and as long as he had life, he would hold onto hope...
