Apocalypse

69

Ethan’s fingers scraped across the deck panels as the metal gratings snapped at his nails and rasped across his face. His fingers caught painfully, bearing his body weight on the steeply inclined deck, and he looked up in time for Joaquin’s boot to smash into his shoulder and send a lance of bright pain through his collarbone.

‘Die, Warner!’ Joaquin screamed.

Joaquin’s boot smashed again into Ethan’s shoulder and searing pain jarred his arm as he felt his grip fail, his fingers numb from the bitter cold now creeping across his entire body.

‘It’s over, Joaquin!’ Ethan shouted. ‘Give it up and we both live!’

‘Fuck you, Warner!’ the tycoon screamed back, his eyes poisoned with rage. ‘You’ve taken everything from me! If I die, I take you with me!’

The dome around them was deformed now into an oval shape, with the black-hole chamber close below and the entrance to the dome far above, seemingly fifty meters away and pinched to a tiny point of light that glowed an unearthly blue.

Joaquin lifted his boot once more and aimed this time at Ethan’s face, the tycoon’s features shining with unrestrained malice, and then smashed it down toward him. The boot slammed across Ethan’s arm, missing his face entirely, the light now so distorted by the black hole’s gravity that it was warped sideways, the distant exit now not just above Ethan but also off to one side. Ethan felt his body becoming increasingly, impossibly heavy as the black hole’s immense gravity finally began to overwhelm him.

Joaquin, hanging on to the deck plating with one hand above Ethan, screamed in fury and grabbed at the pistol in his shoulder holster, whipping it out and aiming it down at Ethan. With a flourish of malice the tycoon squeezed the trigger.

Ethan saw a flicker of movement in the distance far above them. In an instant Bryson’s huge form surged into view like a curveball travelling at hundreds of miles per hour to smash sideways into Joaquin Abell and grab the pistol as he did so.

Ethan flinched as the sound of the gunshot crashed out, but the bullet never reached him as Scott Bryson slid down past him, his huge arms folded around Joaquin’s body as they tumbled toward the black hole. Ethan saw the shot exit Bryson’s lower back amid a spray of blood that shot toward the black hole and turned to crystals of ice as it vanished into the breach. He heard the big man grunt in agony as he twisted the pistol from Joaquin’s grasp and sent it spinning down into the breach looming below them. Bryson twisted himself around on top of Joaquin, then grabbed the smaller man’s collar in one giant fist and hauled him up onto his knees on the wildly tilting deck.

‘You want to see the future, asshole?’ Bryson yelled at Joaquin. ‘Here it is!’

Bryson swung one huge fist back and then ploughed it through Joaquin’s chest like a battering ram. Joaquin screamed out loud, his eyes wide with unspeakable fear as the blow lifted the tycoon off of his feet and he plunged down into the abyss below, his screams spiraling away with him.

Ethan saw Joaquin’s clothes freeze on his body, saw his eyes go pale as the fluids within them froze solid and saw his hair turn white with frost as he plunged into the chamber, smashing a panel as he did so and opening the breach wider. Ethan saw the black hole now fully exposed, a demonic abyss ringed by searing coils of plasma.

Joaquin’s body warped as it span in tight whorls around the black hole’s fearsome gravitational field, bent by light and suddenly glowing brightly as it was torn apart at the sub-atomic level and ripped into ribbons of pure energy. Joaquin’s image turned a deep blood red, and then suddenly it was gone.

Bryson collapsed, his fingers scraping on the metal deck plates and the shirt on his back thick with blood. In one terrible moment, as Ethan reached out to him, he knew that it was too late. Bryson’s eye caught his, the twinkling light within already fading, and a brief smile flickered across one corner of his lips.

‘It’s your turn to keep an eye on Nicola,’ he mumbled weakly.

‘Don’t quit, Bryson!’ Ethan yelled, reaching out for him. ‘Don’t quit now!’

Bryson’s eye glazed over. ‘Don’t let her down.’

The big man’s eye closed as his grip failed him and he was snatched away, his body freezing instantaneously and then flaring with bright energy as he vanished into oblivion far below.

‘Bryson!’

A terrible sense of loss ached through Ethan’s chest as the raging storm of plasma around the black hole glowed brightly, the crackling, snarling bolts of energy reaching out for Ethan.

He tried to back away from the hole, but now it felt as though the deck of the dome was pitching almost vertically. He felt his feet slip from beneath him as he clung desperately to the deck plates, staring down toward the sphere below him and its terrifying host. The plates beneath his shirt began slipping and scraped painfully against his skin, and he saw frost forming on his boots as they slipped closer to the swirling maelstrom of light and energy.

‘Ethan!’

Ethan looked up, and to his amazement he saw Lopez reaching out for him, her hand inches away and yet appearing small and stretched as though viewed through a fish-eye lens, her face seemingly twenty paces distant. Ethan reached out for her, saw his own arm extend crazily and bend sideways to his left into the distance as though twenty feet long. He blinked, nausea poisoning his innards as he struggled to make sense of the world now spiraling out of control around him, the light beginning to fold in upon itself.

He felt as though his weight were increasing with every passing second, the muscles in his arms screaming for release as he began sliding again, particles of ice forming inside his boots as his feet went numb within them.

‘Ethan!’

Ethan looked back up to see the tightly coiled light curve above him and a warped face loom as though out of some terrible nightmare.

‘My voice!’ he heard Lopez shout. ‘Close your eyes and reach for my voice!’

Ethan’s arm wavered wildly from one side to the other in his vision, and he realized that it was useless for him to see where Lopez was, her image in the distance before him far removed now in time and space from where she actually was. Against every instinct in his body, Ethan closed his eyes.

‘Reach for my voice!’

Ethan waved his arm left and right, focusing on Lopez’s voice as she called to him, and suddenly he felt her fingers brush against his. With a final, monumental effort he held his arm still and Lopez’s hand gripped his wrist and folded upon it. Ethan felt her heave, and he pushed against the floor plates as he clawed with his hands to pull himself free from the black hole’s savage grasp.

Ethan felt himself being hauled upwards and away from the sphere, and as he travelled he felt the deck of the dome slowly begin to right itself beneath him, as though he were on a capsized ship that had somehow been saved from certain doom. He heard Lopez more clearly and opened his eyes to see her pulling on his arm, her free hand gripped by Katherine Abell, who was in turn hanging on grimly to the loop of computer cables stretching out from the main control panel.

Thick blood oozed from Lopez’s temple into her hair as she pulled Ethan up, and he saw her eyes drooping from exhaustion and blood loss. Ethan slumped alongside her, his own body drained, yet even as he did so he felt the deck tilting beneath him, back toward the sphere. ‘Come on!’ Katherine yelled. ‘We have to leave now!’ Ethan looked down toward the sphere and saw the remaining panels folding like the petals of a steel flower toward the dark and terrible center.