Apocalypse

56

Dennis Aubrey stood alone in the hub, staring vacantly at the video camera before him on the control panel. Joaquin had passed it to him less than an hour before, after it had been returned to him by that lumbering brute of his.

Joaquin’s instructions had been clear: download the entire drive and have it ready within the hour. Whatever was on it would be viewed as soon as Joaquin had ensured his guests had left the hub and returned to the yacht, to be flown back to Miami.

Aubrey had obeyed his instructions to the letter, but through every excruciating moment his mind had been filled with images of the earthquake that had shattered the tranquility of Puerto Plata. The murder of Benjamin Tyler had cemented Aubrey’s conviction that Joaquin Abell’s sanity had been abandoned, and that had been confirmed when Joaquin had proved to his guests that he could not only predict the future, but could reduce entire populations to medieval poverty and decades of dependence on foreign aid.

When the demonstration had been complete and his guests had left for the surface, Joaquin had been elated, drunk on his own prowess, giddy like a spoilt child with yet another unearned gift clasped in its hands.

Aubrey, on the other hand, had experienced a dizzying nausea that had flooded his throat with bile and sent flushes alternately scalding and chilling his skin. Thousands of innocent human beings were dead. Thousands more would die later when the millions of dollars promised by Joaquin to aid the needy were siphoned off into IRIS accounts scattered in tax havens across the globe.

Worst of all, Katherine Abell had almost certainly perished in the catastrophe. For reasons that Dennis could not bear to admit to himself, that filled him with an anger he had rarely felt in his life.

It had struck Dennis, right there and then, that no human being on earth held any value to Joaquin Abell. Dennis had realized — too late, he now knew — that he was as likely to be killed next as anybody else. Sooner or later he would be murdered, wiped from the slate of Joaquin Abell’s world like a fly swatted from a meal. An irrelevance, an irritation. A risk.

Aubrey looked again at the camera. He had hoped, desperately, that when the group of guests left for the surface he would be among them. Yet now it was clear that he would never be allowed to leave. The Intrepid was back at the yacht and the Isaac under armed guard. He was a prisoner beyond the reach of law enforcement, his family, his friends and rescue.

He pressed a button and the camera’s contents played on a small screen on the panel. He sped the timeline forward until he was watching events in the near future. As he watched, his heart sank as a terrible scene unfolded before him. He doubled the replay speed, and as the seconds ticked by so he felt his bowels loosen at what he was witnessing, a terrifying future of death and destruction. Appalled, Dennis paused the footage and took several seconds to gain control of his breathing.

There was no escape. There was no alternative. The future could not be changed.

Dennis moved to a computer terminal beside the control panel and opened up a software package. He sat down and began methodically going through the camera’s scenes one by one and noting specific times, scribbling them on the inside of his palm with a pen. The work took him almost half an hour, but when he was done he shut the display off and leaned back in his chair, his mind haunted both by what he had seen and what he knew he must now do.

‘Dennis!’

Aubrey shot upright, a lightning bolt of fear shuddering through him as Joaquin strode into the control room. ‘What news?’

‘Has the governor gone?’

Dennis Aubrey watched as Joaquin approached. Olaf lumbered in behind him, wearing a shoulder holster with black straps that stretched across his broad chest. A heavy-looking 9mm pistol nestled under his left arm.

‘They’re on their way back to Miami,’ Joaquin replied and then rubbed his hands together. ‘There’s no longer a man among them who will oppose us. Now, where is that camera?’

Aubrey pointed to where the camera sat on the panel beside him. He waited for Joaquin to join him at the panel.

‘How long is the recording?’ Joaquin asked, his eyes wide and sparkling with uncontained delight.

Aubrey took a deep breath. ‘Just over four thousand hours.’

‘Four thousand hours?’ Joaquin echoed in wonder. ‘That must be…’

‘Six months, give or take. Six months of the future, as viewed through the lens of this camera.’

‘Play it!’ Joaquin almost shouted. ‘I want to see it, all of it, on the big screen over there!’

Aubrey unplugged one of the jacks on the panel before him and then plugged it into a different feed. Instantly, one of the large plasma screens lit up. Aubrey reached out and pressed play.

Joaquin gasped as an image of the hub itself appeared, one of the news channels on the screens viewed through the camera’s lens from within the black-hole chamber. Almost immediately, in front of the portal through which it gazed, the face of Charles Purcell appeared. The scientist gazed into the lens and then vanished. Moments later, the camera backed away from the portal and began moving along its track within the chamber, brief flares of blue-white energy flickering around the edges of the screen.

‘This was when Charles Purcell retrieved the camera,’ Dennis said. ‘This is the past.’

‘From yesterday,’ Joaquin said. ‘Forward it to the future!’

Aubrey span the recording forward and watched as the camera was hastily packed into a bag that was sealed shut. Blackness enveloped the screen. Aubrey span the timeline forward and all they saw was hours of blackness. He felt a little current of joy as Joaquin raised his hands to his head.

‘What’s he done?!’ he wailed in despair.

Dennis remained silent, spinning the footage forward further. Moments later, the image returned. Aubrey’s joy withered as he saw a modern family lounge, the immaculate carpets splattered with blood. The inert bodies of a blonde woman and a young girl dominated the scene. Joaquin fell silent.

‘His house,’ Olaf said without apparent emotion. ‘He found their bodies. He must have arrived moments after I left.’

‘He knew you were there,’ Joaquin realized, ‘and what time you would give up waiting for him and leave. He must have filmed the scene as some kind of evidence.’

Aubrey remained silent despite the fact that his blood seemed to be running cold now through his veins. He watched as Charles Purcell walked with the camera across the lounge and picked up a framed picture of himself standing with his wife and daughter, the glass of the frame thick with smeared blood. Purcell would have known that the camera had already seen this future whilst alongside the black hole’s event-horizon, the information stored on its hard drive. Even if he had turned the camera off in horror or disgust at the sight of his slaughtered family, the camera would still have harbored the horrific imagery.

But Charles, ever cautious, was taking no chances.

‘This is still the past,’ Joaquin shouted. ‘I want the future!’

‘You already have it,’ Aubrey said, and pointed to a different screen before playing the feed from one of the other cameras, which he’d retrieved from the chamber earlier. ‘The news, Joaquin, from tomorrow. I pulled it from the chamber just a half-hour ago.’

Joaquin glanced at the screen and saw an anchor from Robert Murtaugh’s news station speaking silently to the camera. Beneath her, the scrolling text revealed the nature of the story.

Aubrey watched as the image switched from the anchor to the devastated shore of Puerto Plata, and a still image of Joaquin Abell appeared in the top-right corner of the shot. A reporter on the scene stood in front of an IRIS helicopter as food parcels, medicines and blankets were unloaded by personnel into waiting trucks.

Joaquin’s face creased into a smile of deep satisfaction.

‘Good work, Dennis,’ he said. ‘Our future is assured. Now, show me what happens here in the control room. Olaf brought the camera back here, so it must have seen what happens to us today. I want to know exactly what occurs here in the next few hours.’

Dennis shut off the newsfeed camera and sped the frames forward on Charles Purcell’s recovered camera. A blur of light whizzed past the screen, then he slowed it carefully as he watched the digital time display. An image of the IRIS hub once again appeared, but this time Joaquin was standing with a pistol in his hand, alongside Olaf and several armed guards. And before them was Ethan Warner and Nicola Lopez, their hands in the air and every gun in the hub pointing at them as they stood beside the black-hole chamber, the outer hatch open.

‘So,’ Joaquin smirked. ‘The two detectives decide to pay us a visit, do they?’ He turned to Dennis Aubrey. ‘Pray, Dennis, show us what happens to them both, if you will?’

Dennis carefully span the recording by several minutes, the images flashing past in a blur of color, then returned it to normal speed and looked up as the screen showed an image of Joaquin and Olaf watching as the black-hole chamber flared with bright bursts of energy and light that flickered out into the control room through the narrow portals. The two men were laughing, and Joaquin was clapping the big man on his huge shoulder.

Joaquin smirked and looked over his shoulder at Aubrey.

‘Excellent, Dennis. Perhaps we should prepare for our guests’ arrival? Olaf! Ready our men to welcome Ethan Warner and Nicola Lopez on their one-way trip to oblivion!’