Recursion - Blake Crouch Page 0,91
probably hoping they get lucky and take out the chair.”
“Maybe they did.”
They move on, closer to ground zero by the looks of the towering cloud of ash and fire, still roiling and pluming in the indeterminate distance.
They pass an overturned school bus, the yellow turned black, the glass blown out, voices crying from within.
Barry slows down and starts toward it, but Helena says, “The only way you can help them is for us to get home.”
He knows she’s right, but it takes everything in his power not to at least try to help, even with a word of comfort.
He says, “I wish we’d never lived to see a day like this.”
They jog past a burning tree with a motorcycle and its driver blown into the branches, thirty feet up.
Then a woman staggering hairless and naked in the middle of the street with her skin coming off like the bark of a birch tree and her eyes abnormally large and white, as if they’d expanded to absorb the horror all around her. But the truth is, she’s blind.
“Block it,” Helena says, crying. “We’re going to change this.”
Barry tastes blood in his mouth, pain slowly encompassing his world.
It feels like his insides are melting.
Another blast, this one much farther away, shakes the ground beneath them.
“There,” Helena says.
The firehouse lies straight ahead.
They’re standing in the midst of their neighborhood, and he barely noticed.
Because of the pain.
Mostly because it doesn’t look anything like their street.
Every house built of wood has been leveled, power lines toppled, trees blow-torched and stripped of every hint of green.
Vehicles have been strewn everywhere—some flipped onto their roofs, others on their sides, a few still burning.
It’s raining ash and fallout that will give them acute radiation poisoning if they’re still in this hellscape by nightfall.
The only movement anywhere is from blackened forms writhing on the ground.
In the street.
In the smoldering front yards of what once were homes.
Barry feels a surge of helpless nausea as he realizes these are people.
Their firehouse is still standing.
The windows are shattered-out, gaping-black eye sockets, and the redbrick has been turned the color of charcoal.
The pain in Barry’s face and hands is exquisite as they climb the steps to the entrance and move inside over the front door, which lies cracked and flattened across the foyer.
Even through the pain, the shock of seeing their home of twenty-one years like this is devastating.
Weak light filters in through the windows, revealing a place of utter ruin.
Most of the furniture has simply exploded.
The kitchen reeks of natural gas, and in the far corner of the building, smoke trickles through the open doorway to their bedroom, where the flickering of flames is visible on the walls.
As they rush through the house, Barry loses his balance in the archway between the dining and living room. He clutches the side of the archway to stop himself from falling and cries out in pain, leaving behind a handprint of blood and skin where he palmed the wall.
The access to their secure lab is another vault door, this time in the walk-in storage closet of what used to be the home office. The door itself is wired to the rest of the house, so using the keypad entry is out. Helena opens the flashlight app on her phone and sets the five-digit combination manually in the semidarkness.
She reaches for the wheel, but Barry says, “Let me.”
“It’s fine.”
“You still have to die in the tank.”
“Fair enough.”
He steps to the door and takes hold of the three-spoked handle, groaning with agony as he strains to crank the wheel. Nothing’s moving but the layers of skin he’s stripping away, and a horrifying thought occurs to him—what if the heat of the blast fused the innards of the door? A vision of their last day together—cooking slowly from thermal radiation in the burned-out husk of their home, unable to reach the chair, knowing that they failed. That when the next shift happened, if it ever did, they would either blink out of existence altogether or into a world of someone else’s making.
The wheel budges, then finally gives way.
The locks retract and the door swings open, exposing a spiral stairwell leading down into a lab that’s nearly identical to the one they built in the desert outside of Tucson. Only here, instead of digging into the earth, they lined the stone basement of the old firehouse with steel walls.
There’s no light.
Barry leaves part of his hand on the wheel as he pulls it away and follows