Chapter 44
Rebecca Carter
She entered Scotland in a beat-up rental car, exhausted, bruised, and a dozen times almost-shot. At least she had retained her hat.
The cat had not reappeared.
McFinn intercepted her just past the border, flying low along the highway in a helicopter, the late morning sun glinting off the blades. Was that legal? Didn’t really matter, with him. And how had he found her? Again, didn’t matter. What mattered was that she was tired and hungry and afflicted by a throbbing headache, and Riley McFinn could fix all of that. For once, in a long time, she was happy to see him.
He landed in a field while she pulled off on the side of the road. It would be no problem leaving the rental here. Riley would take care of it. He probably already had. He had probably told his intelligent computer with the sexy voice to just buy it from the rental place.
She stomped across the field and mounted the helicopter without hesitation. It began lifting off as soon as the door hissed shut behind her. The main cabin had couches (thank god), a mini-bar (later, later), and Riley McFinn. He handed her a fizzing glass. She accepted this and downed it in a few gulps.
“Food,” she said, “then sleep.”
Riley opened his mouth to say something witty, then decided against it and went to the small refrigerator while she collapsed on the couch. He returned with a ham-and-swiss. Pre-packaged, but she didn’t care. She ate it while watching the Scottish countryside fall away below. Where were they going? Didn’t matter. After this she’d go find Kaitlyn even if she had to travel to a god-awful place like Chicago.
Riley, wisely, said nothing while she ate, and then continued to say nothing when she flung herself out on the couch and placed her hat over her face. She sensed him turn off the lights.
She awoke hours later to the sensation of descent. She yawned, stretched, rose to her feet. She was alone in the main cabin. She drained a bottle of water from the refrigerator, then grabbed another sandwich and a small flask of brandy. One for now, one for later. Out the windows she saw stormy skies mounting in the distance. The helicopter was landing on some hillside, no city in sight. No human development at all, save for a distant road and a few fences.
Riley came out from the back door of the cabin looking fresh. “Sleep well?” he asked.
She grunted.
“Excellent. We’ve arrived.”
“Where?”
Riley grabbed his cane and approached the hatch. It hissed open. “Wrong question, Carter,” he said as he hopped down the steps.
Rebecca gritted her teeth and followed. They had landed in what looked like the empty parking lot of a trailhead on the side of a low mountain.
“Why am I here?” she asked. She didn’t bother attempting to filter the asperity from her voice. Is that the right question, you pompous ass?
“I know you want to get back to Kaitlyn,” said McFinn as he offered her his hand. He knew she didn’t need it. She took it anyway. Habit. “This will not take long. I only want to show you something. You will be one of the privileged few to know what is really happening, when it happens tomorrow.”
Rebecca thudded down beside him and put her hands in her pockets as they began a trek into the sparsely forested stony hillside of the mountain. A gun was still there in her jacket.
Riley didn’t speak as he led Rebecca up the hill. The rocky slopes of the mountain receded down to a lake or a channel of the sea separating them from the low, grassy land beyond. The vista of green hills and rocky slopes was half in shadow from the evening sun, and the sky overhead was clogged with dark clouds. Some Hebridean isle, she guessed. It smelled of rain, and a cool breeze drifted up the slope. Kaitlyn would enjoy such a view.
Riley led her to a metal door in the side of the cliff, which he opened without ceremony. “There is a road, of course, into this mountain,” he said. “the helicopter is simply faster.” They entered a dimly lit hallway that sloped down through the rock. The door hissed shut behind Rebecca after she entered.
They descended in silence for about a minute. At the end of the hall waited another door. This one required Riley McFinn’s fingerprint, eye-scan, and apparently a McFinnium crystal. Rebecca, although in darkness, rolled her eyes again. She knew all about Riley’s secret lairs and their draconian security measures.
“The world is going to end,” said McFinn. He led her into a room very different from the dimly lit cave. This was a type of place that Rebecca recognized, a scientific laboratory. The bright, sterile fluorescents, the neatly labeled cabinets and shelves, the machines and equipment. It reminded her of the barn out back of her house. Riley McFinn led her through all of this without glancing at any of it.
“There is not anything that anyone can do about it. It is…inevitable, as far as I can tell.” McFinn walked in front of Rebecca, so his expression was hidden, but he slowed down when he said this, and he didn’t seem too happy about it. This meant that something disturbed him deeply. It meant he was frustrated. It meant that the great Riley McFinn had come across a problem his genius had been unable to solve. It turned out that a whole world of things fit into that category. She had discovered this only after marrying him.
He came to a stop in front of a door at the far end of the room, his hand on the door handle. “Therefore,” he said. “I am going to be the one to initiate it, as that will afford us a measure of control. For this reason I created what I brought you here to see. I call it…” He opened the door. “The Apocalypse Machine.”
He stepped aside and waited for Rebecca to enter. She resisted the urge to laugh. Good god, but he hadn’t changed. If anything, he was worse. Borderline mentally unwell, like a cartoon supervillain. She stepped into the room.
It took her eyes a moment to master the scene before her. The first difficulty lay in the scale. It did not correlate with what she knew about secret laboratories inside mountains. The space in which she stood was much larger than any enclosed sports stadium she had seen. It had to occupy the majority of the interior space of the mountain.
Most of this space was empty, save for a single enormous object rising up in the center. It looked like a satellite dish, perhaps a kilometer across. She and Riley stood on a walkway that wrapped around the edge of this vast cavern, partway up. This vantage allowed her to see over the lip of the satellite dish. A series of spikes, prongs and antennae arose from inside the dish, each easily the size of a radio tower. They all aimed at a levitating mass which hovered over the dish, pulsing with energy and dimly illuminating the entire room. This mass was roughly spherical, slightly smaller than the barn out back at the estate. It rippled with light and color.
“Antimatter?” Rebecca hazarded.
“Anti-? No. No, you couldn’t…no. It’s McFinnium,” said McFinn. “Most of the extant supply. I am going to use it to initiate the Cascade.”
Rebecca wanted to turn to face McFinn, but she could not take her eyes off of the machine he had the gall to name The Apocalypse Machine. “And end the world,” she said. She had not believed everything he had said to her—the bit about the world ending, mainly. But now, seeing this… monstrosity he had created…
“Yes,” said McFinn.
Rebecca Carter here came very close to holding her ex-husband at gunpoint. Her grip tightened on the firearm she had kept in her coat pocket. Confusion alone held her back. He wouldn’t end the world, not really, while Kaitlyn was still in it. Surely…
He would not endanger Kaitlyn. If there was one thing she knew about him, it was that.
She sensed that Riley understood every thought she was thinking, and this both reassured and infuriated her. “It won’t really be the end,” he said. His tone was regretful, as though he were apologetic that he could not provide her with a real, meaningful explanation.
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Rebecca looked at McFinn, then back at the Apocalypse Machine. She noticed that a small army of drones zipped around like flies out in the vast shadowy space. She didn’t know what to say. Her own willingness to accept all of this surprised her. It made her priorities startlingly clear. Kaitlyn first. Her niece, who idolized this fool of a man.
Riley McFinn, a man capable of building something like this, and saying with a straight face that he was going to end the world. And her, Rebecca Carter, not going to try and stop him. Who was insane? Both, probably.
They gazed up together at the incandescent mass of McFinnium as though entranced. Riley spoke. “You told me once that you felt you were in the wrong place. The wrong setting. The wrong time.”
“Yes…”
“The wrong story.”
“I always wished I had been born a hundred years earlier. Or more. The world was all mapped out when I arrived in it. Such a shame. We’ve discussed this.” She removed the bottle of brandy, popped the cork out, and took a swig.
“I feel the same way,” said McFinn softly.
Rebecca raised her eyebrows. “I thought you loved this world. You were always so set on changing it.” She offered him the flask, but he declined.
“I was. And I do. But this isn’t my story. I would have changed the world, Rebecca. You know that. I was going to change everything. I was going to save the world.”
“Your humility alone would have done the trick, I’m sure.” Another sip.
“None of that will happen now. None of it has ever mattered.” He seemed genuinely distressed, and Rebecca was annoyed with herself when she realized that she felt a pang of pity for him. “This world was doomed as soon as I…” He held up his cane and observed the crystal on the end of it. It pulsed with light in time to the larger mass above them. “If not for the Cascade, this could have been my story.”
“Fool,” she muttered. Arrogant, arrogant. For all his genius, he still hadn’t learned. He hadn’t learned that his life was his story, and always would be, just as Rebecca herself was in the midst of her own story, and so was Kaitlyn, whose story was only beginning, and so it was with every one of the billions of people out there. But Riley McFinn thought that he needed to be a part of everyone’s story in order to matter, when in fact it made no difference. He didn’t know, he didn’t pay attention, and he wouldn’t understand even if she slapped him across the face and sat him down and tried to explain it to him. Rebecca knew this would not work because she had already tried it years before. So she kept silent.
Riley sighed and lowered the staff. “Doesn’t matter anymore. It’s all out of my hands. Maybe it always has been.”
Rebecca took another drink to clear away the melodrama.
“Alan has told you a bit about October Industries, I suppose?” said Riley.
She grunted in affirmation. “Something about a Nikola Raschez as well.”
“Yes, he is their leader. Well, there’s something I have to tell you. It’s about Nicholas.”
That name made Rebecca freeze, and then for the first time in what felt like hours she pulled her gaze away from the seething radiant mass above. She knew with a dread certainty what Riley was going to say, but she wanted—needed—him to say it regardless.
“October Industries…Raschez…killed him. I know you suspected that there was foul play.”
“The plane was never recovered,” she replied, her voice rough. “The black box failed.”
Riley nodded sadly, and she knew it was genuine sorrow. If anyone had rivaled herself and Kaitlyn in loving Nicholas Carter, it was Riley McFinn.
Riley now reached out for the bottle, and she handed it to him. He took a long draw and gave it back. Like old times. Getting drunk in memory of Nick. For a moment she was back in the study, holding Kaitlyn while the girl sobbed, drinking furiously in a vain attempt to dull the pain, the surprisingly strong hand of Riley McFinn on her shoulder as though he were holding her down in the chair, keeping her from falling apart in front of Kaitlyn. An awful moment, yes, but a warm memory. Everything had unraveled after that. And now she knew the truth, that which she had suspected from the first.
“Thank you for telling me,” she said, resting her arms on the railings. “And go to hell for not telling me sooner.”
“I was thinking of the safety of Kaitlyn.”
“Where is she now?”
“Just about arriving in Chicago, I imagine.”
“I want to see her.”
“You may take one of my jets here. Supersonic. You can make it to Chicago in two hours.”
She nodded. Satisfactory. “I shall depart momentarily, then. Unless there was anything else…?”
“Just…don’t give up, Rebecca.”
“Hrm?” A strange thing for him to say. He was gazing up at his machine, his pale freckled face lit blue and purple and pink. His expression was one of grim determination. She was not sure she had ever seen quite that expression on him before. It made a faint chill run down her spine.
“It’s a bit late to say that,” he said, now murmuring as though to himself. “But what really matters right now, Rebecca, is that no matter what happens, you keep going.”
“I’m afraid I don’t follow, Riley.”
“This is our last chance, Rebecca.”
She nodded “Very well. I suppose I can remember that.”
“Good.” He raised his watch and spoke to it. “Prepare the model 3.1-A for takeoff. Set coordinates to Kaitlyn’s phone.” The watch beeped rapidly in response. Rebecca doubted it was a breathing human receiving the command on the other end.
Rebecca looked around for signs of life besides the two of them. “Any people here, Riley?”
“No.”
“Any living humans besides yourself work on that?” She gestured at the machine.
“Not directly, no.”
“The robots, then?”
He nodded.
“Hrm.” She didn’t like his robots. They came too close to being people. They asked personal questions.
“I’ll get you some things for the trip,” said Riley, turning from the railing and marching off.
She followed. She didn’t like his fancy gadgets either. But she had to admit, they could be helpful.
Riley McFinn watched the 3.1-A rise up from the landing pad and shriek off to the west. Clouds swirled in interesting patterns where it passed. He sighed. Soon. He’d have to do it soon.
“They weren’t really lies, Nick,” he said. “But they were close. I hope Rebecca will forgive me.”
He watched until the blue light of the thrusters had faded. Then he turned and retreated into the mountain. Time to begin. First, the top of the mountain would have to go.