“Why is this happening?” Mr. Sure’s voice was small, almost childlike. The supervisor sensed the question wasn’t directed to him but to God.
The needle slid into red. “Phoenix,” said the supervisor.
The explosion moved quickly, reducing the room to atoms before he could even register the pain.
THE LIGHTS came on in Baskov’s room, battering him awake through his eyelids. He’d never been able to sleep without total darkness, and this new light was an irritant.
Groaning, he looked at his watch: four-forty. The power was back on. He did the math. That meant the city had been without electricity for a grand total of nine hours. Ridiculous. Heads were going to roll, he was sure. He sat up and swung his feet to the floor, cursing himself for not having the foresight to make sure all the light switches were off before he went to bed.
His mouth tasted like cotton gauze, so he reached for the half-empty drink on the night table. It burned going down but settled into a nice warm glow in the pit of his stomach.
He’d met with the president and several other state heads earlier in the evening. It hadn’t gone well, and he’d retreated into his bottle afterward. There would be another meeting tomorrow.
He reached for the wall lamp above the nightstand and clicked it off. The room darkened somewhat, but the bathroom light spilled across the floor to his bed. He looked toward the bathroom, weighing his options before giving in to the inevitable and angrily throwing the covers off. The room was cold; without power, the heat had shut down. Phoenix might be a city in the desert, but at night a chill could still seep into the air.
He walked across the carpet, stepping onto the bathroom tile. He reached for the switch, but just before his fingers made contact, the light went out by itself.
He clicked the switch, anyway. Up, down—nothing happened. He left the switch in the down position and walked blindly back toward the bed, arms groping in front of him. He found the wall lamp, clicked, and nothing. The power was apparently out again after being on for only a few seconds.
“Like some damn third-world country,” he grumbled into the darkness.
A red glow in the window caught his eye. He turned, and the glow grew brighter. Curious, he walked to the sliding glass doors. He found the handle, slid the door open, and stepped outside into a warm breeze. His eyes widened.
He saw his death. A huge wall of fire rolled toward him from the east, engulfing the dark shapes of buildings and swallowing the city in its giant red maw.
He had time enough to hope it was a dream, and then the warm breeze turned into an oven blast that singed the hair from his body and let him know how awake he was. His skin burned. The red wave crested overhead, pushing a molten, hurricane wind before it.
He shielded his eyes and careened backward, crashing through the plate glass to the floor of his room. He writhed, screaming, on the smoking carpet as the blast slammed toward the building.
He looked to the light, and the heat made ashes of his eyes. The maw closed around him.
“TURN HERE.”
“Here?”
“Yeah, a left,” Ben said.
The taxi barely slowed as it took the corner wide, throwing Ben against his seatbelt. The cabbie had four minutes left on the deal they’d struck, and he was taking it personally. Inside the running wash of the taxi’s headlights, the road skipped by in a pattern of gray asphalt and yellow dashes. At this speed, the cabbie apparently thought the center of the road was the safest bet. The car’s headlights provided the only illumination as far as Ben could see. The power was still out, and the world flew by in darkness.
“Left at the next intersection,” Ben said.
“How far is that?”
“Should be coming up.”
The cabbie eased back slightly on the accelerator, checking his watch for the tenth time. Ben had already decided that the guy had earned the extra money, but he didn’t want to tell him that. The tires squealed as they rounded the turn.
The driver hit the gas and they roared along a high chain-link fence.
“Stop!” Ben shouted. He’d almost missed the opening.
The anti-locks mooed as the cab shuddered to a stop.
“Back up.”
The reverse gear whined, and the driver looked over his right shoulder. The car sped up, slowed, stopped.
“Through there.”
The cab pulled up to the gate. Ben craned his neck for the guard, but the gatehouse was dark. He rolled the window down and began reaching for the electronic pass from his wallet when he saw that somebody had already pushed the gate open enough to slide a car through.
They were here.
Ben smiled in the darkness of the backseat.
“Drive on through.”
“We’re not going to have any problems for this, are we? This looks like private property.”
“It’s actually publicly owned.”
“You mean government. That’s worse. I’ll just drop you here.”
“You’re getting the three C’s. Plus an extra fifty if you take me all the way.” It was one hell of a long driveway. He wasn’t in the mood to walk.
“You got it,” the cabbie answered, fast enough that Ben knew he’d been bluffing for more money.
The cab slunk through the gate with inches to spare on both sides.
“Follow the bend to the left, then take the right lane all the way to the back.”
As they neared the building, Ben scanned for any sign of his coworkers. There was nothing out of the ordinary. No car, no broken windows, nothing.
“Let’s go around back.”
They rounded the corner, and Ben immediately saw the car up against the wall. At first he thought it had crashed there, but then he saw the broken window above it and understood. They’d stood on the hood to reach the window.
“Stop here,” Ben said. The cabbie hadn’t noticed the broken window, and Ben didn’t want him to be more nervous about this than he had to be.
Ben was reaching for his wallet when the lights came on. Everywhere. Just like that. After so much darkness, the building seemed to absolutely glow.
“About time,” the driver said.
Ben took the bills from his wallet and passed them over the seat. “Thanks,” he said.
“My pleasure,” the cabbie answered, as he took the money and folded it into his breast pocket.
The sound of breaking glass caught his attention, and Ben turned his head.
SILAS FELT the gladiator like an elemental force, a cresting wave rushing toward him in the small room. Time slowed, and Silas knew assuredly that he was about to die. But it’s strange how the body works, what it refuses to accept.
In the darkness, his eyes still caught the swivel of the arm, and his body leaped instinctively. Even as his body did these things, his mind did the calculations and knew he would be too slow. The creature’s blow would kill him.
Then the power came on.
Blinding white light deluged the room, and instead of taking his head off, the blow struck him squarely on the shoulder.
He heard the bones snap like branches, and then he was flying. He hit the wall upside down and slid to the floor headfirst. Color rose up in his vision, and he blinked against brightness. He looked up, and the light had driven the pupil of the gladiator’s single remaining eye into a thin slit. Silas tried to stand, but something wasn’t working right. He looked down at himself and saw jagged bone extending from the mash of hamburger that used to be his shoulder. His arm was still connected, technically, but the thin shirt he wore did little to hide the dent in the side of his rib cage. He felt no pain. Shock, he diagnosed himself. I’m dying already.