The Carolina Union had been reduced to little more than a pile of stone rubble and torn metal. The Bull of Heaven’s cone of energy clearly worked differently than my pistols, since the Union was torn into pieces rather than rendered into molten rock and solidified into obsidian.
“Do you really think they could have escaped?” Liz asked.
“Maybe,” I lied. “To confirm what happened, we’ll have to find them one way or another.” Though I tried to sound hopeful, the tone of my voice was much darker than I intended.
Liz took her phone out of her pocket and began tapping frantically on the screen. Halfway through, she cast a sidelong glance at me, and I understood the significance of the look very well.
“About thirty minutes ago, Professor Carlyle sent you a text telling you to be careful around me, right?”
I had used this trick around Liz a few times, so her expression of shock was less pronounced than Hellman’s. We both knew my guess was right, so Liz felt no need to deny it. With one eyebrow up, she said, “Explain.”
“About an hour ago, I gave my name to an on-duty police officer.”
“Officer Jack Fulton?”
“I guess. I never learnt his name. Anyway, I knew that Officer Fulton would search my name in the police database as soon as possible. As you can imagine, my name is flagged. From there, he would naturally inform his immediate superior, Professor Carlyle. Since your father didn’t know about my condition, he would feel the need to warn you about me.”
A muted smile creased Liz’s lips as she said, “You know, this Sherlock shtick is really impressive when it works, but I’ve seen you get it wrong before. You made three spurious assumptions there that just happened to be correct. If any of those assumptions were incorrect, you would have just looked like an idiot.”
“I was right, though, so it was impressive,” I said with a smile. “Detective Blackwell strikes again.”
“What’s the plan?” Liz asked as she looked out at the pile of fine stone shards that stood where the Carolina Union used to be. The stones were each about the width of a fingernail, so it was hard to pick out anything substantial from the rocks alone. “Will you be able to figure out what happened?”
I wiped the smile off my face before saying, “The Bull of Heaven’s attack would transform an SDC body into vaporized flesh and bone shards too small to pick out.”
A look of nausea passed over Liz’s expression.
I continued. “Someone with an MDC body would probably still be killed, but they would at least leave a recognizable body. Officer Fulton definitely took the Knight class. If I can find his body, we’ll have confirmation.”
“How? It would take us weeks to sift through all of this rubble.”
The pile of rubble was almost completely uniform, and it covered an area of several thousand square feet. We would need a construction crew to dig through the rubble effectively, and I figured those weren’t readily available at present.
“If my theory is right, we’ll be done here in five minutes,” I said, stepping forward onto the pile of small stones.
“Do you- do you really think they’re all dead?” Liz asked.
“Yes, but remember that I might be wrong,” I said, trying to inject some optimism into my dour pronouncement.
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The moment I stepped onto the pile of rubble, I imagined the Carolina Union as it once was, and the original structure sprung up around me. I had walked through the Carolina Union so many times that visualizing the structure was not difficult, and the hallucination that sprung up was so clear I knew I could only dispel it with a significant effort of will.
Standing there, at the top of the staircase leading to the underground pathway, was Officer Fulton. He stared suspiciously at his phone before walking over to Professor Carlyle, who stood about forty feet to his north. They conversed, and Officer Fulton delivered his warning. I was surprised to find that their conversation included one more interaction that I hadn’t previously considered.
“Officer Fulton, if you would, please guard the northern entrance,” Professor Carlyle said. “I’ll collapse the underground walkway so that we no longer have to guard from that direction.”
With a nod, Officer Fulton walked over to the northern entrance. He stood there for nearly half an hour without incident. I blinked several times, willing the hallucination to skip to the appearance of the Bull.
“You’re hallucinating, aren’t you?” Liz asked.
The image of the Carolina Union flickered as Liz appeared a few feet to my right.
“Yes, but I’m in control of this one. It’s really just a visualization technique to help me reconstruct the scene. Have you ever heard of Simonides of Creo?”
“The Memory Palace guy?”
“Yeah. He used a memory technique to remember where the guests of a party were seated when the palace they were within collapsed. I’m trying to do the same thing but with a slight twist.”
The Bull of Heaven appeared far off to the side. The view of the Pit from the Carolina Union was unobstructed, so Officer Fulton and everyone standing inside of the Union saw the Bull at around the same time.
I began relaying what I saw to Liz. “When he saw the Bull of Heaven, Officer Fulton realized that fighting it would be a fruitless endeavor, so he returned to Professor Carlyle. The students ran to the opposite side of the lobby, and a few screamed in fear.”
Within the hallucination, the two men spoke. “Professor Carlyle told Officer Fulton to help the students evacuate while he stayed and kept an eye on the Bull. The students, along with the officer, took the most direct path away from the Bull of Heaven.”
I began walking down the hallway that Officer Fulton and the students fled down. “They ran down the hallway and…”
The fleeing students reached the entrance to the Carolina Union auditorium, and the hallucination suddenly became hazy. They either fled into the auditorium, or they fled toward the street further to the east. If they had fled to the street, there was a possibility that some of them could have survived.
“What about my Dad?” Liz asked with emotion heavy in her voice. “Is there any chance that he could have survived?”
“If things happened this way, no,” I said truthfully.
“Maybe you’re wrong.”
“Maybe,” I said with a shrug.
I followed the path into the auditorium and saw Officer Fulton and the students retreat into the corner. This was their most logical course of action. They did not know about the Bull’s beam attack, and they wanted to protect themselves against the threat that would typically be posed by a charging bull.
“Don’t worry,” Officer Fulton said. “We’ll be safe here. We’ll just wait until that bull walks somewhere else, and then we can all fall back to the [Town] created by those aliens.”
The sixty-second charging period for the Bull’s beam attack ended, and the auditorium surrounding me instantaneously splintered into nonexistence. The students were shattered into millions of pieces, and the flesh was torn off Officer Fulton’s bones.
“At least they all died immediately.”
Officer Fulton fell slowly to the ground, and the fractures metal and stone around him covered his body in several inches of shattered material. I saw where he fell, and the hallucination ended a moment later.
I reached down and slowly began digging through the fragmented material. After less than five seconds of effort, my fears were confirmed. My hands passed through several inches of weak SDC material and brushed against the telltale rigidity of an MDC material. I unfurled my fingers and grabbed hold of the MDC object buried in the ground.
A moment later, my hand emerged from the rubble holding a spherical object. When I got a good look at it, I realized that I held in my hand the smoldering and torn skull of Officer Fulton.