Apocalypse

70

Ethan dragged himself to his feet, and with Katherine they helped Lopez upright and staggered through the exit hatch and out of the dome. Ethan turned and slammed the hatch shut, sealing it.

‘It won’t make any difference,’ Katherine gasped. ‘You saw it! Nothing can stop that thing now.’

Ethan somehow managed to heft Lopez onto his shoulders. He staggered slightly, stars of light sparkling before his eyes, but he managed to move forward on his last remaining vestiges of energy.

‘There might be a way to hide from it,’ he gasped to Katherine. ‘We have to hurry. Go ahead, get to the sub and start the batteries and engines. The controls are simple enough.’

Katherine ran away down the corridor ahead of him as he wobbled along with Lopez slumped across his shoulders. He heard her voice in his ears.

‘I can walk,’ she mumbled.

Ethan struggled through each painful and unsteady step and shook his head.

‘If only that were true,’ he managed to rasp. ‘How come Joaquin missed his shot so close to you?’

Lopez’s reply was weak and soft in his ear.

‘The light. It was bent by the black hole, so I wasn’t quite where he saw me. The shockwave must have knocked me out for a few moments.’

Ethan, his shoulders aching and his legs quivering, stepped through the hatch into the storage hangar where the aged remains of the captured ships and aircraft loomed. The lights flickered intermittently as the power began to fail, Ethan losing balance in the shuddering light and keeling sideways.

He hit the deck and gasped as his left knee cracked painfully beneath him.

‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered to Lopez, unable to take another step. ‘I can’t carry you.’

Lopez slid from his shoulders as Ethan slumped onto his hands and knees. He felt one of her small hands touch his and fold around it as, on her knees beside him, she took a deep breath.

‘Just a few more paces,’ she whispered, ‘we can do this.’

A terrific crash echoed from somewhere far behind them, and Ethan guessed that the sphere had finally collapsed inward into the black hole, imploding and finally allowing the full force of the hole to act upon its surroundings.

Ethan hauled himself to his feet with Lopez, and together they staggered between the boats and aircraft, stumbling through the exit hatch and down the long corridor to the docking station ahead, the lights in the corridor flickering weakly. They arrived see the Intrepid waiting with its lights on and Katherine waving at them from the open hatch.

Scott Bryson’s abandoned atmospheric diving suit bobbed in the water nearby.

‘Come on!’ Katherine yelled.

Ethan staggered the last few paces and let go of Lopez’s hand, untying the submersible from its moorings before following Lopez aboard. He clambered down the ladder into the interior as the lights finally failed in the facility and plunged it into darkness, and the entire superstructure began trembling.

Ethan clambered past Lopez and Katherine and into the cockpit to slump into the pilot’s seat. He opened the ballast vents to expel the air and the Intrepid sank into the inky black water, her lights piercing the deep gloom outside as Ethan turned the submersible around and threw the throttles forward.

The Intrepid soared clear from under the docking dome and out into the silent blackness of the deep ocean.

Behind him, Lopez’s voice called out. ‘We’ll never get far enough away at this speed!’

Ethan shook his head.

‘We’re not running,’ he said. ‘We’re going to hide.’

‘Where?!’

Ethan watched as the Intrepid’s lights illuminated the barren ocean bed, sweeping ghostlike across endless dunes of lifeless sand, and then quite suddenly the beams were lost into absolute blackness. Ethan waited until the Intrepid had cleared the edge of the Miami Terrace reef and was over the abyss before he pushed the controls down and dove toward the endless depths.

The terrace dropped more than three hundred feet below the Intrepid, joining the abyssal plain that extended all the way out beyond Bimini Island before finally dropping off the edge of the continental shelf hundreds of kilometers away. Ethan peered over his shoulder and could just make out the edge of the reef shelf rising above them.

Somewhere behind them a bright light flared suddenly, and for an instant the entire ocean floor was illuminated as though a sun had risen across a distant horizon. Ethan squinted and saw the freezing depths glowing in the blast, saw the plunging drop before them and the abyssal plain of the Atlantic stretching away into the unknown distance. The silhouette of the Intrepid was cast into the brightly illuminated distance, a long shadow piercing the ocean, and then the inky blackness returned.

‘Hang on!’ Ethan shouted.

The submersible plunged down into the darkness over the edge of the shelf, the steep slopes rising up behind it, and then something surged past, a blast of energy that tilted the submersible almost vertically as it slammed into them from behind.

Ethan yanked back instinctively on the control column as the Intrepid plunged down into the deep, her engine straining to right her as the shockwave raced past. Suddenly the entire ocean seemed to surge and pull them back toward the IRIS facility and for a moment Ethan feared that he had been wrong, that the black hole would continue to consume everything around it, growing exponentially, unstoppably.

Then, as suddenly as the surge had arrived, it disappeared, and the ocean depths fell silent once more.

Ethan stared out into the gloom for a long moment and then turned in his seat.

Katherine Abell looked at him. ‘Is it over?’

Ethan, utterly exhausted, nodded.

‘I think so.’

Ethan looked at Lopez. She sat slumped in her seat, blood caking one side of her face and her hair matted on top of it. She stared out of one of the portholes into the empty wastes outside, as oblivious now to her companions as if she had, after all, been dragged into the black hole.

Ethan turned back to the controls, and on an impulse looked at his watch. The hands were fixed in place, the watch stopped by the electromagnetic blast that had just surged past them.

20:48, June 28.

Ethan realized that Charles Purcell’s final prophecy of the future had been proven correct.

Ethan eased back on the control column, guiding the Intrepid up toward the surface glittering faintly above them through the gloom.