Chapter 48: Your Living Daylights

When the weeks rolled on, Rebecca became familiar enough around the prison to find a spot with a good view. About the same time her patient was able to get up and walk around freely, she finally saw lights from the east out in the distance. Rebecca walked back down into the yard to find Atticus and inform him of Samuel’s accomplishment at Cape Canaveral. Atticus had no chance to respond when screams could be heard from C-Block.

By the time Atticus and Rebecca got to the other cell block it was already too late. Jesse was on the floor covered in blood, holding the old man’s head as he bled out. They got next to him as Rebecca examined Echo and Atticus got some answers.

“We found him like this.”

“Was he bit?”

“No, there aren’t any zombies.”

Rebecca looked back, “He’s going to die, Atticus.”

“Those are knife wounds.”

Jesse couldn’t help but notice Ruby’s change in her natural mood. She was tense, like her confidence was shattered.

“He was murdered?” Annie shouted out.

Ruby looked around nervously. Jesse watched her cower at the sight of all of them. Zombies she could handle, but adults scared her immensely.

“If he was murdered, it had to be one of us,” Malcolm deduced.

Or maybe, maybe Ruby saw something that no one else did, and had no idea how to tell them without risking her own safety. What did she see?

“People please!” Jesse yelled out, “This man is still warm, show some respect.”

“We can’t lose our heads. We will figure out what happened.” Atticus calmed everyone down.

“She did it!” Job pointed at Karina.

No one needed to see who pointed at her because they were all thinking the same thing. She was dangerous. She was certifiably crazy and unchecked. It was entirely plausible that Echo was her next victim after Warren. Malcolm was the only one who saw the writing on the wall. He could see Job’s act for what it truly was and would wait until the right moment to bring this kind of diabolical manipulation to light before the rest of the group.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

Rebecca got up as the men carried the body out of the cellblock to be buried. She went to the wash bucket and cleaned herself up as best she could before her trip. While the group was panicking about what had just transpired Rebecca remained silent. At first she was focused on saving Echo’s life but then, after he passed away, and she listened to blame and mistrust get passed around between the only people left on the planet she knew, Rebecca realized that she had to leave.

Samuel snapped each circuit breaker, hoping one would take and his experiment would finally work. How many more days could go by before obtaining electricity? All of the math was there, he knew it. He had learned enough from Tyrell while they were in the Outer Banks to patch back through to the main power grids. The only problem was if the system grids in North Carolina were still on. Samuel was convinced that the grids in Florida were off, although he had no real way to tell for certain.

His knowledge was incomplete. Samuel was trying his best to replicate and extrapolate what he had learned from Tyrell. If only that crazed lunatic did not take Tyrell away from them. In the brief time that Samuel knew him, he was closest to Tyrell than any other guy in the group, including Atticus. Intellectual minds always fused better than say intellectual and technical minds.

The second to last fuse made a loud crisp snap when Samuel pulled it. A quick wisp of permeation revealed itself through setting sunrays penetrating the control room. Samuel smiled. This was a very good sign. Samuel returned to the drawing board while he snacked on some heated up baked beans.

He missed playing with variables. Something about the solitude of Cape Canaveral brought him back to his days as a professor. Samuel closed his eyes and tried to smell his laboratory. It was feelings like these that first pushed him to attempt time travel. Now he held the power in the palm of his hand and just needed a vessel to use it.

Samuel understood that the variables were too great in predicting what would happen during the time jump and whether or not they would warp into a structure or something else fatal. Their best chance would be to get high enough into the sky where no plane could get in their way. The only problem was he can’t get anything in the air without working electricity. And thus he was back to square one. What good was a laboratory in the dark?

It was officially dark when the Samuel entered back into trial phase. There he stood with a couple of glow-sticks next to the fuse-box downstairs. He was running out of ideas, if this didn’t work his contingencies would just continue to get more and more obscure. He had tinkered enough with the controls, and was beginning to lose track of his adjustments. He needed to make sure not too much was altered for when he started setting up for a launch.

Just like every time before, Samuel went down the line of switches in the same order. Except this time, this time Samuel was keenly focused on the fuse that had smoked. One after the next, he threw the heavy plastic switches back and forth. When he hit the second to last one, the jackpot switch, the fuses and their surrounding gauges lit up. Meter arrows bounced back and forth behind the glass, seeing life again since the fall of civilization.

Samuel hit a couple more fuses again; some emergency lights came back on in the utility room, when it was time to hit the final fuse, the master fuse. Hypothetically, only after everything Samuel had learned in school, on the road, and with Tyrell was put into practice though trial and error after error with only an obscure combination of rerouting and substitutions, granted passage by pure luck, finally conjured up a genuine chance. When he hit the final fuse all the lights came back on in the Cape Canaveral‘s Ground Control Room.

The main ceiling lights turned on as if they had been working the entire time and just now felt like being cooperative. When Samuel opened the door back to the main room everything was up and running. What he didn’t expect was to see someone looking right back at him.

On the main screen at the head of the room, taking up almost the entire wall was a live-video feed of an astronaut floating in zero-gravity aboard a secret government funded satellite.

“Hello…is anyone there?”

“Can you hear me?”

“Come in, ground control”