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Nightfall

  The Tyke McGrath Series: Book One

  By William Woodall

  © Copyright 2013 by William Woodall

  www.williamwoodall.org

  Chapter One

  Friday, April 25, 2036

  At the worst possible moment, the power died.

  The lab instantly went pitch dark, causing the tip of Micah McGrath’s screwdriver to slip just the tiniest bit. Metal touched metal, and before he knew it one of the capacitors had discharged its built-up load right into the circuit board he’d been trying to fix.

  Mike cursed and slammed his fist on the table in sheer frustration; what else could go wrong today? He didn’t have time for things like this; he was supposed to have his dissertation finished in only three more weeks.

  After a few seconds the university’s emergency generator kicked in and the lights flickered back on. Then Mike promptly forgot about power glitches and burnt-out circuit boards, and his eyes widened in shocked surprise.

  The tachometer was gone.

  Mike knitted his brows and stared at the empty spot where the machine had been sitting just a few seconds ago. He rubbed his eyes to make sure he wasn’t seeing things, but there was no doubt about it. The thing had definitely vanished.

  He didn’t know quite what to think about this unexpected development; in spite of all his efforts to fix it, the tachometer hadn’t actually worked in years. And even if it had, he’d certainly never switched it on or set the controls for it to do anything. There was no reason he could think of why it shouldn’t still be sitting there on the workbench.

  His first thought was to wonder if the discharge from the capacitor might have inadvertently activated some obscure function, even though that seemed highly unlikely. Anytime the tachometer was operational it was always surrounded by a silvery bubble of energy several feet across, and he certainly would have noticed if anything like that had appeared.

  But then again, Mike would have been the first to admit that he didn’t really understand the blasted thing very well.

  The machine was designed to capture and manipulate tachyons; those ghostly, faster-than-light particles which supposedly contained the power to foresee the future before it happened, and perhaps even to travel there.

  True, Mike had never actually witnessed any of those things personally, but he’d heard plenty of stories from people who had. It was a fascinating subject, and when the time came to pick a research topic for his dissertation, there’d never been the slightest doubt that he’d choose to study tachyons. Never mind the fact that not everybody even believed they existed; Mike was determined to be the one who finally proved it to the world.

  Dr. Bevels had smiled and called it “a learning experience”, but that was okay; Mike was confident he’d show them all someday. He might only be twenty-three years old, but then again some of the greatest Nobel Prize winners in history had been in their early twenties. Mike himself was on track to become the youngest Ph.D. graduate in the history of the university, and surely that had to say something good about his prospects, didn’t it?

  He would never have admitted to harboring such grandiose thoughts, of course, but they were awfully nice to think about now and then.

  He glanced at the clock and saw that it was already 4:15; close enough to call it a day if he liked. He normally stayed in the lab at least till five, but the inexplicable disappearance of the tachometer was a mystery he felt too mentally tired to tackle at the end of such a long day. Not to mention the fact that he’d skipped lunch and his stomach was beginning to suggest pretty urgently that it was high time to get something to eat. Maybe he could come back in the morning with a fresh mind and think of some new ideas.

  He shut down his laptop and turned off the lights before locking the door and putting the keys in his pocket. When everything was in order, he tiredly climbed the stairs from the basement and walked outside to where his Jeep was parked in front of the athletics building. The science center and several other structures on campus were closed for renovations at the moment, which meant Mike had been assigned this little niche in the gym instead. It was adequate, perhaps, but certainly not very glamorous.

  His “lab” had actually been somebody’s office before Mike moved in, but he’d done his best to make it work as a research space, shoving the desk up against one wall and moving in a lab bench from the science building. He’d even hung a portrait of Tycho Brahe above the desk, the father of modern astronomy and one of his particular heroes. Heaven knows he needed some inspiration and encouragement now and then.

  There were more people than usual gathered in scattered groups outside, but Mike was too preoccupied with his own thoughts to pay much attention to that. He fired up the Jeep, intending to drive home, find something to eat, and then do absolutely nothing for the rest of the evening.

  He heard police sirens wailing somewhere off to the north, and wondered idly what was going on. He supposed he’d hear about it soon enough, if it mattered.

  He drove slowly down the quiet street next to the university, and other than the traffic lights not working there didn’t seem to be anything out of the ordinary. Just a typical springtime afternoon. An old lady weeding her azaleas waved at him, and he smiled and waved back. He passed the fire station and the white-columned library, then the bank and his favorite coffee shop and the big red-brick Victorian courthouse on the town square. Almost home!

  The house he shared with his best friend Joey Wilder was built on the side of a hill maybe half a block past the courthouse, where Third Street ran steeply down to cross the railroad tracks. But then as Mike swung into the front yard, he noticed an anomaly. There was a small crowd of people standing in front of the church across the street, but it was what they were staring at that immediately caught his attention and left him every bit as speechless as they were.

  Just past the church, the street ended. Where it had once swept on down the hill to the tracks, now it just. . . stopped. And where the street used to be, now there were only trees. Large ones, that looked as if they’d been there since the day the world began.

  That was shocking enough, but when Mike raised his eyes swiftly to look out over the treetops, he was in for an even greater shock. Where there had once been railroad tracks and factories and houses scattered thickly as far as he could see across the valley, now there was nothing. No tracks, no houses, no streets. Just an unbroken canopy of green that stretched all the way to the horizon.

  Mike broke his stupefaction and walked slowly the last hundred feet or so to the end of the pavement, reaching out to touch the trunk of a massive oak tree that stood right in the middle of where the street should have been. The bark was rough and solid. Then he knelt down and touched the edge of the pavement, and found that it cut off as sharply as if someone had sliced it with a gigantic razor blade and left only this side behind.

  The cut extended smoothly in both directions from where he knelt. To the east, it crossed the parking lot between the church and where the Family Life Center should have been, and then it passed quickly behind the church itself and out of Mike’s sight. In the other direction it passed right through his own back yard, almost clipping off the corner of his house as a matter of fact. He could see a little bit farther in that direction, and it seemed that the razor’s edge had a slight curve to it, though it was hard to be sure.

  A dark suspicion flirted at the edge of his mind, but he dismissed the thought immediately. It couldn’t be.

  He gingerly took a step past the end of the street, and then another. Soon he was standing amongst an almost silent forest of trees that whispered tranquilly in the breeze. They were unusually large and thick, but otherwise no different than any other trees he’d ever seen.

&n
bsp; Except for the fact that they hadn’t been there when he left the house that morning, of course. The trunks were widely spaced and the forest floor was level enough to drive a small car through, if the driver were careful.

  After a few seconds he quit gaping at the trees and walked swiftly back up the hill to his own front door. As soon as he got inside the house, he found Joey fiddling with the little battery-powered radio they kept for emergencies.

  “Where have you been, Mike? Have you seen what’s going on out there?” Joey asked. He was almost exactly two years older than Mike himself, but they’d known each other ever since Mike could remember.

  “Yeah, I see it. I don’t believe it, but I definitely see it. Have you heard anything on the radio?” Mike asked.

  “No, I couldn’t find any batteries for it. All the ones I’ve tried are already dead,” Joey said. For some reason Mike had never been able to force himself to throw away old batteries, and as a result almost every shelf and drawer in the house contained at least a few of them. Joey had complained about it times without number.

  “I guess I better run go get some, then. I’ll be back in a little while. One of us better stay here and keep an eye on the house, though, don’t you think?” he asked, and Joey shrugged.

  He grabbed a chocolate chip granola bar from the kitchen before running back outside to where the Jeep was parked. He usually walked or rode his bike around town, partly to save gas and partly to get some exercise, but at the moment he cared more about speed than anything else.

  He didn’t head directly for the store, though. As soon as he was out on the street, he began following the razor-edge to the west. There were places where it had sliced right through the middle of houses or buildings, with the other half disappearing like magic, with no trace of rubble or destruction. Except in a few cases, where the remainder of the structure had collapsed from the stress and fallen into the trees that crowded right up to the line. After a while, he also noted that the tree branches were cut off in a similar fashion; not even so much as a twig crossed the boundary.

  People were gathered all along his route, staring at the trees with attitudes that ranged anywhere from mild curiosity to dumbfounded amazement. No one seemed panicky or hysterical, and some were even laughing and socializing, as if the whole thing were some kind of huge joke.

  The line crossed right behind the National Guard armory and the post office, cut through some more houses and streets, then clipped the corner of the old cemetery. Then Mike saw some major damage; the blue jean factory and the junior high school had been sliced in half, and both of them had mostly collapsed. Thank God school had already been over for the day.

  The line continued on into another residential area where Mike couldn’t follow, but he drove quickly to Pine Street and picked it up again. It ran right through the middle of the Arby’s drive-thru, and then plunged back (again) into residential areas.

  Mike doggedly followed the line as far as he could. It ran right behind the university football stadium, and sliced off the main highway out of town exactly where Pizza Hut should have been. That was a bad scene; someone in a black Lexus had smashed into the trees when the road disappeared in front of her, and two other cars had piled up behind the first one. There was no ambulance to be seen; nothing but the smashed Lexus, and three bewildered-looking cops who kept glancing at the trees.

  Mike made an illegal U-turn and drove urgently back to his lab, parking the Jeep right by the front door. The group of students from earlier had disappeared, which suited him just as well. The fewer witnesses there were, the better.

  As soon as he got inside the gym he heard the sound of someone playing basketball, apparently unaware of what was going on. He rushed downstairs to his little cubbyhole and unlocked the door, almost stubbing his toe in his haste to get inside. There was a city map in his desk drawer, and he quickly unfolded it on the workbench next to where the tachometer had been. Then he took a pencil and carefully marked every location where he’d seen the razor cut pass.

  He noticed immediately that it was an almost perfect circle, and with shaking hands he drew three separate diameter lines with a ruler so as to find the center point.

  The lines met right where his lab stood.

  A cold knot of fear threatened to cut off his breath when he saw that, because there could be only one explanation for everything he’d seen. Namely, the tachometer must have been activated somehow by the discharge of the capacitor, and then dragged the entire central core of Arkadelphia to some unknown point in the future.

  Never mind that it hadn’t been switched on, or that an ocean of trees looked nothing like any kind of future Mike had ever anticipated, or that he’d never imagined the tachometer could swallow an area big enough to engulf nearly a whole town. Those were incidentals which could be explained later. In the meantime, there wasn’t a shred of doubt in his mind about what had actually happened.

  You’ve really done it now, boy, he thought to himself.

  Even worse, he knew it wouldn’t be long before other people started connecting the dots and reaching similar conclusions. Oh, they might not know exactly what happened, true, but it wouldn’t take a genius to figure out who was responsible for it, as soon as somebody noticed whose lab was at the exact center of the circle. His research wasn’t a secret, and neither was the location of his lab. One of the few things he liked about working in the gym instead of in the science building was the extra peace and privacy, but that wouldn’t mean a thing once the whole town was looking for him. And he was sure they soon would be.

  He quickly gathered up his own research notes along with Dr. Garza’s original lab manuals. He didn’t dare leave anything at the lab to be confiscated or destroyed, and least of all those. He even took the laptop, although he felt guilty about that. It technically belonged to the university, not to him, and he wasn’t actually supposed to leave campus with it. He was careful to make sure no one saw him removing items from the building, since that would only focus attention on him that much faster.

  He finished loading up and calmly drove away, thinking hard. Most people in town probably didn’t really comprehend what had happened yet, and some of them might not even know. Things still seemed bizarrely normal at the moment. But Mike could guess what was coming within the next few weeks, if a world of trees were really all there was in this future time. Food and clean water would run out quickly, and when that happened, it was only a matter of time until cholera or dysentery reared its ugly head. And with no medicine to speak of. . . He shuddered.

  Without wasting another second, he drove immediately to the bank. The lobby was already closed, of course, but the drive through was still open. He pulled up to the window and stopped, breathing a sigh of relief when he saw the girl at the computer. It was Allison, and he knew her well enough that she might do him a favor. He smiled and waved at her so she could see his face, and she smiled back when she recognized him. He pushed the call button and noted with satisfaction that the bank must have had a generator, since the machine was still working. Thank God for small blessings.

  Mike quickly wrote a check for 2419.85, which was every nickel he had in his account.

  Allison took the check and sent the cash and his driver’s license back out, which he took with trembling hands. Somehow he managed to smile again and thank Allison before he left. He stuffed the cash in his pocket and then drove directly to the grocery store. If trouble were coming then he wasn’t taking any chances.

  It was busier than it should have been at that time of day, which worried him; apparently word was getting around and people were starting to get uneasy. The bread and milk sections were practically wiped out already, he noticed, but those weren’t the kinds of things Mike had in mind anyway.

  He grabbed a shopping cart and filled it as quickly as he could with anything that wouldn’t spoil, especially canned goods. Then he filled two more. Not just with food, either; he quickl
y cleaned out everything useful he could find in the pharmacy section, too, including all the antibiotics and bandages, all the painkillers, and all the major vitamins. As an afterthought, he grabbed two handfuls of lighters, six bottles of chlorine bleach, and anything else he could think of that was useful and couldn’t be replaced. The checkout lady gave him an amused look when he got to the cash register.

  “You think the end of the world is comin’, honey?” she asked with a chuckle.

  “No, ma’am, just making sure,” he said. That only made her laugh again, as he hoped it would. It took a while to pay for everything and get it loaded in the back of the Jeep, but there was still one more stop to make before he dared go home. His usual sporting goods store was gone, but there was a hole-in-the-wall gun shop downtown, and as soon as he got there Mike bought every .22 bullet they had. He got some raised eyebrows for that, but he couldn’t have cared less.

  He didn’t park in the front yard when he got home as he usually would have. Instead, he backed into the garage to unload his supplies.

  “Where have you been, dude? Don‘t you know-” Joey began, coming out of the kitchen door into the garage. Then he saw the mountain of grocery bags and trailed off.

  “Uh, do you know something you’re not telling me?” he finally asked.

  “I’m not sure. Help me carry all this stuff inside and then we’ll talk about it and try to figure things out. But first let’s lock all the doors, and the windows too for that matter,” Mike added as an afterthought.

  “Whatever you say, buddy,” Joey said, with a shrug that indicated he clearly believed Mike had lost his mind.

  They quickly locked every door and window, even drawing the blinds and drapes. Joey was mostly quiet during all this, even when Mike started taking food down to the basement instead of the kitchen, but when he saw the case of bullets that must have been too much for him to keep silent about.

  “Hold on a minute, dude. Seriously, what’s going on? If you’re gonna come home and start acting like it’s world war three you should at least tell me what’s up,” he said.

  “You’re absolutely right, but let’s finish putting this stuff away first. As soon as that’s done I’ll tell you everything, I promise,” Mike said. Joey looked like he wanted to argue about it some more, but then seemed to change his mind.

  “All right, then,” he finally said. And he was as good as his word; he worked as fast as Mike did to get all the groceries hauled down to the basement and hidden carefully behind the old furnace. Not just the food and supplies, either, but Mike’s computer and lab notes, also. Only when everything was safely stashed away did they both sit down at the kitchen table and partially relax.