Turning Point (Book 1): A Time To Die Read online

  “God, what else?” Jeremiah asked the skies as the Coast Guard deployed lifesavers and other disaster response equipment. A couple of frogmen jumped over the side near the now-sunk Angel One. “Oh, don’t do that,” he moaned.

  It was almost noon before the very pissed-off Coast Guard Lieutenant Commander left Jeremiah’s office. There had been complaints, admonitions, and threats of prosecution. “All in a day’s work,” he grumbled. Then someone knocked on his door. “For the love of God, fuck off!”

  “You might want to talk to me,” Alison’s voice came through the door.

  “Why, so you can bust my balls some more about my not following your scientific procedures?”

  She opened the door and entered. Jeremiah made a mental note to lock it when he wanted to hate himself in peace. “No, because you’ll want to see this data.” She held a nondescript SD data chip in her hand. He felt a glimmer of hope.

  “Is it good?”

  “We’re-gonna-win-a-Nobel-Prize kind of good,” she said. He took the chip and plugged it into his personal computer. A self-activating PowerPoint opened on the huge 80” LCD monitor next to his desk. “As much as it pains me to admit it, you were absolutely right about the machine.” She gestured at the display which showed a series of graphs.

  “Like we saw in the bench test, it can neutralize gravity, which is really annoying because we don’t really know how gravity works.”

  “Thought you physicists had it all figured out with that Hardon Collider and stuff.”

  “Hadron Collider,” she corrected with a chuckle. “I don’t even want to think about what you called it. And no, that sort of particle physics often creates more questions than answers. I’m an electrical engineer. That’s what you hired me for,” she said, gesturing to the shuttle, suspended by its harness, ready to be mated to a booster. He was happy she’d talked him out of using it in the experiment. “Theoretical physics is more a hobby. It’s hard to find a paying job in the field, especially when you can’t piss standing up.”

  “I don’t care how you piss as long as you produce results.”

  “That’s where industry kicks academia’s ass,” she said.

  “So, what does all this mean?” he asked. “It looks like lift statistics, but there are no aerodynamics.”

  “Exactly,” she said. “We knew it neutralized gravity from the bench tests, but we could only figure out how to apply it as an anti-gravity generator. Granted, that alone would make us as rich as Bill Gates, but we thought there was more. The thing came out of a spaceship, right?”

  He nodded. “Yes, a spaceship with no obvious motive power.”

  She nodded. “Everything pointed to it having both lift and thrust. So, we had to figure out how to make it behave. We were sure there were no data inputs. Or, if there were we didn’t know how to recognize them. All we saw were those power inputs. It stood to reason they were the source of the data control points as well.”

  “But, nothing worked at the low power settings,” he said.

  “Right, and nothing was working on high power either as I kept telling you.”

  “So what happened to make you suddenly go all Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea?”

  “One of the morons you gave me told a dirty joke. I never did find out what it was. But he was so pleased with himself, he slapped the table and hit the computer controlling the power input.” Jeremiah tapped his keyboard, and the display changed to show four power grids moving across the screen, time stamps indexing their movements. Set in a window on the bottom was another graph, this one with positive and negative values. One of the four input power traces began to fluctuate up and down in a graceful, but quick waveform.

  “He changed it from DC to AC?”

  “Bingo,” she said, shaking her head.

  “But we tried that in the lab.”

  “We tried minor square wave alternating power. Working with such small power levels, made it hard to obtain a reaction. The higher the power, the more wiggle room there is to mess with frequencies. The input was just under 200 kHz. Once I got everyone dried off and back in the lab, I hooked it up to a bench rig again, and started pumping power into it. We were sure it wasn’t going to explode anymore.”

  More graphs appeared, and she examined them for a minute. “The waveform controls the intensity of the effect. After we figured that out, we also realized you could input higher voltages. Orders from 440 volts, 880, 1760,” she began ticking off on her fingers, until he held up a hand at 7,040 volts. She shrugged. “Like I said, we don’t know what that does; I was a little worried we’d lift the building off its foundation.”

  “I appreciate your restraint,” he said.

  “Using 440, we were able to register 2,000 tons of force at 600 kHz. We couldn’t go any higher.”

  “Why?”

  “We broke the meter.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  “Jeremiah, this thing uses some real power, way more than a couple of solar cells worth. You could lift a battleship into orbit, if you wanted to. It transmits force through ferrous metal. We need to experiment to see how far the field extends beyond that metal, and to find the best way to attach this thing to it.”

  “Holy fucking shit,” he said.

  “Yep. We’ve finished preliminary examination of the ship’s power source. Capacitors.”

  “Must be some big ass capacitors,” he said.

  “They’re carbon nanotube capacitors, but very stable. I think we can replicate them.”

  “That ship had no power generation capacity?” he asked.

  “Nope, just capacitors.” She shrugged. “Very little life support, too.”

  “With a drive like that?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It looks like an escape pod to me.”

  “Escape pod,” Jeremiah repeated, then shifted gears. “How long before you have enough data to mount another large-scale test?”

  “Well, Angel One is at the bottom of San Diego harbor…”

  “I have the fines from the Coast Guard to prove it,” Jeremiah agreed. “I was thinking of mounting it in something more appropriate…”

  * * *

  The sun was climbing over the horizon when Cobb stopped the vehicle next to a long-dead tree. Kathy was fighting extreme exhaustion, sitting in the passenger seat with a semi-automatic pistol in her lap, watching the unchanging landscape moving past them.

  “What’s wrong?” she half-mumbled.

  “House ahead,” he said and pointed. Even from several hundred yards away, she could see it was dilapidated. She could also see a half-dozen cars and trucks parked around it, and a curl of smoke rising from its chimney. “There are people camped there.”

  “I see,” she said and tried to sit up straight. “What are you going to do?”

  “That’s the old Hughes estate,” he explained. “When Dan Hughes died ten years ago, the family sold it and the acreage to my father. So, that’s my land, actually.”

  Kathy nodded in understanding. “You want to know what’s going on.”

  “Exactly,” he said, putting the machine in gear.

  It only took a minute to approach the house. As they pulled to a stop, a pair of men came out of the front door. One held a baseball bat, the other a machete. Cobb swung out of the seat. He’d slung his HK91across his body, the barrel angled downward. In his hand, he held a pistol, his finger extended alongside the trigger.

  “Quién eres?” asked the man with the machete, the older of the two.

  “That’s my house,” Cobb replied in English. “Habla Ingles?”

  “Si,” the man replied. “I am a little rough, though.” He lowered the bat, and gestured to the other man to do the same. “We are sorry, we needed a place to rest.”

  “Who are you, and why are you here?”

  “We are fleeing from the enfermo.”

  “The sick?” Cobb asked.

  “Si, they are enfermo…and out of their minds.”

  “They kill everyo
ne,” the younger man said, his English easier to understand. “Some have seen them eat people.”

  “Let’s go inside and talk,” Cobb said, holstering his pistol. “My friend is very tired and needs to sleep.”

  Kathy didn’t know how she ended up in the dusty bedroom, but someone laid her on a sleeping bag, an inflatable pillow under her head. “I’m fine,” she complained weakly. “I want to know what’s going on.”

  “Get some sleep; I’ll bring you up to date later.”

  “Don’t leave me alone,” she asked, suddenly feeling vulnerable.

  He put the handgun he’d loaned her next to her head, and put her hand on it. “You’ll be fine,” he assured her and left. She lay there for a moment, listening to the voices in the house. She struggled with herself for several long moments, then succumbed and dropped into a deep, dreamless slumber.

  Kathy jerked awake. Completely disoriented, she fumbled for and found the handgun, before she realized she was in the room Cobb had left her in. She sat up, breathing hard. Had she been dreaming? She couldn’t remember. The light coming from the filthy, old window was at a different angle. She had slept for hours, but didn’t have any idea how many.

  She rolled off her sleeping bag and got to her feet, looking around the room. She could see several others curled up under blankets, snoring. She quietly left the room. She went downstairs into the living room and found Cobb sitting in a dusty armchair, talking to the two men they’d met on the porch.

  “Up already?” Cobb asked when he spotted her.

  “How long was I out?”

  “Five hours. You want to get some more sleep?”

  She shook her head and walked over to him. There was a gas stove set up on an end table; the delicious aroma of coffee came from a pot sitting on it. The younger man saw her looking at it longingly and got up to pour her a cup.

  “I don’t want to drink your coffee,” she said.

  “This is your husband’s home,” he replied; “it is the least we can offer.”

  “We’re not married,” Cobb said. “She’s just a good friend.”

  The older man looked from him to her, cocked an eyebrow, and a wry smile grew on his face. “Friends,” he said with a nod.

  “So, what’s their story?” Kathy asked.

  Cobb relayed what they had told him. Their visitors were survivors of scattered settlements east of Monterrey. Several days ago, the military had come through ordering everyone to evacuate to the east. They had left immediately, but being naturally suspicious of the military, they headed north. They’d gotten word that many of those who fled to the east were now out of contact. The military had lost control.

  He continued, saying how some of the groups had encountered ‘enfermo’ there as the man called them. There were fights. Those with cars and gas fled; others tried to run. More died. Those in Cobb’s second-hand farmhouse were the remnants of one of those groups. There were roughly three dozen families inside the massive old farmhouse.

  “Mexico appears overrun,” Cobb said, “and they’re heading north. You’ve always known more about this than you’ve said. Will you explain it to me now?”

  “I need my gear,” she said. Cobb led her to a pile by the door where she found the contents of the trailer as well as her pack. She removed her precious case of SD cards and her ultra-compact laptop from the pack. She booted the laptop, noting it still had 92 percent power after sitting unused for days, and found the file she was looking for. “Using a drone, I recorded this in Mexico, only a week ago.”

  After the video played, she talked about how she’d fled from custody and arrived at his farm.

  “Holy shit,” he said when she finished. “You went down to get first-hand footage, hoping it would be what, exactly?”

  “I didn’t think that far in advance,” she admitted. “It’s a journalist thing.”

  “So, our government doesn’t know what’s going on?”

  “I don’t think so. They’re actively trying to cover it up, spiking stories and arresting journalists who release stories against orders.”

  “Fuck me,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief.

  Kathy looked at the two men who’d watched and listened to the entire interplay. “You were in a village when all this started?”

  “Si,” the older man said. “My name is Enrico. Enrico Vetares, at your service, Seniorita.” He got up from the old couch and affected a slight bow. “And this is Manuel, my son.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” Manuel said with a smile, “though I wish under better circumstances. I admit, I believed I recognized you when I first saw you. You did a story for GNN about drug-resistant tuberculosis coming up from Mexico. Telemundo rebroadcast the story. It was quite fair and very accurate. Our country has many problems with diseases, made much worse by the drug lords.”

  Kathy removed her small interview camera from her bag and set it on the floor next to her, flipping it on and pointing it at Manuel and Enrico without their realizing what she was doing. It was a skill born through long hours of interviewing subjects. “Do you think this all began in Mexico?” she asked.

  “I do not think that is the case,” Enrico said. “These sorts of things start slowly. Besides, it appeared to come from the north and move south.”

  “Moved south?” Kathy asked, “Are you sure?’

  “Yes, I heard this too,” his son agreed.

  “Are all the enfermo, as you call them, the same?”

  “Do you mean killers?” Enrico asked. Kathy nodded her head. “Yes.”

  “It is so,” Manuel said. “And they are…”

  “Cannibals,” Cobb said, speaking for the first time. It was a statement, not a question. Both men nodded their heads.

  “People said that, early on, they would just bite and claw,” Enrico said. “Then, it got worse. Mucho, mucho worse.”

  “Yes,” Manuel agreed, “and it spread slowly. The military set up road blocks and controlled it. The news said there was nothing to worry about. Then, a few days ago, it seemed to explode. It was everywhere.”

  “It went away for a while,” someone said. It was an older woman, her hair white and thin. Her English was even better than Manuel’s. Kathy gestured, and she came over to the couch where the camera could see her. “The enfermo were taken by the government. To care for them,” she said. “But we never heard from them again.”

  Another woman spoke in rapid fire Spanish. Manuel translated. “Our village was having a feast. You know, to celebrate that everything was going to be all right.” Others were coming over upon hearing the conversation. The woman who spoke looked at the floor, tears running down her face. “We butchered a steer. It was cooking on a spit over a fire. The men were drinking tequila and slicing off bits of meat to share, talking loudly and joking the way men do. Then they became ill and started acting strangely, and then they were enfermo. It happened very fast.”

  “How fast?” Kathy asked.

  “From the time the first got sick? Maybe a half an hour? Perhaps less. Who is to know?”

  Slowly at first, then with more urgency, people came forward to tell their tales. Tales of villages full of dead, others with nothing but butchered bodies. Some were empty, with no signs of life. Food still sat on tables, hot water boiled on stoves. One man talked about the army killing everyone in his village, while he and his daughter watched in horror from a nearby vineyard. The girl held him, her eyes wide but not seeing.

  Several hours later, Kathy finally managed to end the impromptu interviews. Cobb carried her pack for her as they went upstairs, back into the room she’d slept in. It was empty. “The master’s room,” he told her. “We’re too crowded. I insisted on sharing, but none of them would.”

  “What are you going to do with them?” she asked.

  “Is that the reporter asking?”

  “Sort of,” she admitted. “I don’t think Homeland Defense would look too fondly upon a hundred illegals smuggled across the border during a plague outbreak.”


  He looked at her like she’d said something funny, then shook his head and spoke. “Help them, of course. Regardless of how they got here, they’re on my land now, and I don’t let guests get eaten.”

  “They weren’t your guests when they broke in here.”

  “They are my guests, now,” he said with finality. “And that’s that.”

  She sat back on the sleeping bag, and he stood there for a while, looking out the window and pulling at his lower lip. His eyes appeared to be gazing a million miles away.

  “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m wondering how this is going to end.”

  “You didn’t seem to be a thinker when I met you at that gas station,” she said.

  “That was a long way from here,” he said.

  “God,” she mumbled as she thought, was it only two days ago? “I’ll bet I’m seeing Major Cobb now.”

  He laughed and shook his head. “My men would probably agree.”

  Kathy had a thought. “I just realized I don’t know your last name. You must think I’m a slut.”

  “Cobb Pendleton,” he said. “Pleasure to make the lady’s acquaintance.” He held out a hand and bowed.

  She took the hand with a giggle. Sparks flew between their fingertips. She pulled gently, and he joined her on the sleeping bag. He sat stiffly and radiated discomfort. She put an arm around his middle and slid closer, nuzzling her face into his neck. The quivering of his body was palpable. “Are all majors this nervous around a woman?” She reached over and began undoing his belt.

  “Are all reporters this forward?” he asked and pulled her hand away, quickly getting to his feet. “I don’t want to leave them for long. I loaned Enrico my H&K, but I don’t know if he can handle it in a pinch.”

  Kathy felt flustered and confused. “Don’t leave,” she asked.

  “I don’t want to,” he admitted.

  “Then stay.”