Orders of Magnitude (The Genie and the Engineer Series Book 2) Page 9

  Capie got busy, thinking of the spell she had seen Paul use on John back at Yerkes Observatory.

  “In the name of Gandolph, Queen Elsa, and Tim the Enchanter from Monty Python, may there be an avatar of this man to answer some questions,” she pronounced firmly with a wave of one hand.

  In her goggles, she saw a ball of green smoke spring into existence a few feet away. It swiftly grew into an exact image of one of the two guards.

  And then she blinked.

  Well no, not quite a duplicate. This one was subtly different.

  Even in the green lighting of the goggles, the face appeared distorted, almost radiating evil. And the eyes were slanted and cruel.

  “Ugh!” Capie hissed. “Like a zombie! Not cool!”

  Waving both hands frantically back and forth, the figure faded from sight.

  “Wow,” she said, breathing a sigh of relief and looking again at the man she had cast the avatar from. “You, sir, are one total sicko. Talk about ‘monsters from the ID!’” she said, quoting from Forbidden Planet. “I guess I’d better try the other guard.”

  This time the spell worked as intended and a ‘normal-looking’ duplicate of the second guard appeared in the corridor.

  “Now,” Capie demanded sternly. “Where is my father?”

  • • • •

  “Paul! Paul!” clamored Capie as she dashed down the corridor.

  As he stepped into her way, he hissed at her. “Not so loud! What’s wrong?”

  “He’s not here! Dad is not here!” she shouted. “The guard told me!”

  “Calm down! Where is he?”

  “The Bolling Clinic, he said! Paul, they brought him in several hours ago! Two special agent types, the guard said. And then, an hour after that, they had to take him to the Bolling Clinic. The guard I was talking to didn’t know why, just that his condition was serious!”

  Paul nodded then realized that the gesture was pretty pointless in the dark. “Those special agents were Oni, no doubt. Okay, let’s get out of here and find the Bolling Clinic.”

  “I asked the guard already,” snapped Capie as she yanked frantically on his arm. “It’s just north of the motor pool! Let’s go! Hurry!”

  SEVEN

  579th Medical Group (Bolling Clinic)

  238 Brookley Ave SW

  Washington, DC

  June

  Tuesday 4:01 a.m. EDT

  The Humvee raced up Mitscher Road, the tires squealing as it tore into the clinic’s rear parking lot. Paul drove like a mad man, the vehicle screaming around the building and up to the north end, where the emergency entrance was located. Standing on the brakes, all four wheels locking, the tires squalling as they burned rubber on the asphalt, Paul brought the Humvee to a jarring halt.

  Leaving the engine still running and its doors wide open, Paul and Capie bolted across a narrow strip of pavement and through the double-wide metal doors of the clinic, using a sleep spell on the four Normals (nurses and orderlies) that got in their way. At the nurse’s station, they put two more nurses to sleep and then used a spell to create an avatar of one of them.

  “Where is my father?!” demanded Capie hotly of the holographic image.

  “Christopher Kingsley, the fifty three year old man they brought in a few hours ago,” Paul added breathlessly.

  “Room 108, down that hall,” was the emotionless response.

  Capie didn’t hesitate but tore off in that direction. Paul took a couple of seconds to dismiss the avatar spell.

  And then he too took off at a sprint down the hallway.

  He was just entering the doorway of Room 108 when Capie started screaming at the top of her lungs.

  “NNOOOO!”

  The shriek was so loud that it pierced Paul’s brain like ice picks. He turned away, clapping his hands over his ears.

  Snapping back around, he saw that Capie was standing over a gurney, her mouth wide open, her eyes filled with terror, both her hands gripping the body there tightly.

  Her father’s body.

  One corner of Paul’s mind noted that the medical staff must have tried to treat him. Chris was shirtless and there were red marks on his chest. Also, there were several items of hospital equipment nearby including a heart monitor and a defibrillator.

  As Capie continued screaming, she pulled her father up to her bosom, her arms wrapped like a vise around him.

  A stab of pain hit Paul squarely in the chest and he found it difficult to breath. Tears welled up in his eyes and he choked and then coughed. For several more seconds, he froze in unbelief, hoping against all hope that he was misinterpreting what he was seeing. It just couldn’t be true, not after all that they had been through to pull off a daring rescue, and not when they had the man safely in their grasp.

  Paul dashed over to the two of them, reaching out to clasp his hand on the professor’s arm, instantly noting how cold the arm was. A quick spell confirmed his worst fears.

  Chris Kingsley, his wife’s father, was dead.

  Capie screamed and bawled for what seemed like a lifetime, but it was actually only several minutes, gently rocking her father’s body back and forth with her own. Bewildered by the unexpected calamity, Paul’s mind refused to think logically. All he could feel and think about was Capie and the pain that she was suffering.

  Merlin snapped into existence in the doorway and steadily moved toward them. Paul looked up at the older wizard’s saddened face. Paul guessed that his own expression must have told Merlin exactly how he felt.

  “I’m so sorry, young man,” Merlin said, his calm voice reaching Paul’s ears even over the din of Capie’s wailing lament. “He’s been gone for hours, much too long for any magic to help.”

  Paul nodded, still stunned by the loss.

  Merlin turned and stared at Capie and Chris intently. “The cause of death isn’t obvious,” he announced sadly. “No signs of trauma. You would need a doctor, of course, to tell you more than that.”

  With a troubled nod, Paul agreed. “Let’s have Dr. Beverly Crusher here with a tricorder, please.”

  Merlin morphed into the image of the red-headed physician in the blue and black StarFleet uniform, carrying a standard medical tricorder.

  Without a word, she brushed past Paul, sweeping the tricorder over the body, the trilling of the instrument barely heard over the sound of Capie’s crying. Capie seemed not to notice the hologram.

  The tricorder warbled for a few seconds and then chirped.

  “Acute myocardial infarction,” Dr. Crusher announced sadly. “Moderate state of atherosclerosis. Apparent rupture of atherosclerotic plaque and blockage of the distal right coronary artery.” She leaned back from the body and gave Paul a sad frown. “In other words, a heart attack.”

  Looking down at the floor, Paul wiped away a tear. “So they didn’t kill him.”

  Dr. Crusher shook her head. “Not directly, no. But his case is not that advanced. I would say that acute physiological stress was a major contributing factor. So yes, they are at least partly to blame.”

  “Thanks, Doctor. Can I have Merlin back?”

  The image of the doctor blurred, to be replaced by Merlin. He nodded at Paul. “Yes, the shock is great right now but you cannot stay here. Apparently, when Chris Kingsley died, the Oni left, since there was no special reason for them to stay after that. That seems to be why there are no Oni here at the moment. But when they realize that you avoided the trap in Chicago, there will be wizards and Oni coming here. You must take Capie and be gone by that time.”

  Merlin was right. Their time here was limited. There would be time later to mourn Chris’s loss but only after they left this place.

  Looking at Capie, Paul instinctively knew she would not go anywhere without her father’s body. And that was just as well. The man deserved a decent burial and Paul pledged in that moment to see that he got it.

  Moving to his wife’s side, he put his arm around her shoulder.

  “We’ll take him home, dear, just as soon
as you are ready,” he told her gently.

  • • • •

  It was a hot and muggy day in southern Wisconsin, the air uncommonly still. Capie watched as Pastor Abrahams mumbled the words of the graveside service, speaking of the resurrection of the dead in the life to come.

  In front of her lay the casket, the one with the remains of Professor Christopher Edgar Kingsley. In a few minutes, it would be lowered into the ground and covered over with dirt and sod, with a dual headstone already in place to mark the gravesite. The grave of Chris’s wife, Myra, lay next to his.

  Paul stood beside Capie, glancing anxiously at her every so often. Her face was bleak and vacant as she stared at the casket.

  Inside, Capie felt hollow with a terrible emptiness, along with the loneliness, the grief of never again seeing her father, of sharing the things of her life with him, of talking to him and listening to his voice.

  On the one hand, she knew her father was dead. After all, she had held his body in her arms, had felt the cold clammy skin, had stared at his lifeless eyes and sensed the absence of life therein. Intellectually, the fact of his death had been driven into her soul like a long sharp dagger. There was no denial possible.

  But her heart spoke a different story. Every fiber thereof denied that such an event could have taken place at all, let alone so quickly. He just couldn’t be dead. It just wasn’t possible. Her memories of his life were just too strong. Her heart insisted that at any moment she would hear his strong confident voice again, feel the touch of his hand and see his smiling face staring down at her. The sight of the closed casket in front of her was an impossible nightmare, from which she would wake up any minute now. It wasn’t real. None of this could possibly be real.

  And yet it was.

  The pain was so intense. She just didn’t know how she could carry on. The emptiness in her soul could never be filled again; the wound to her psyche could never be healed.

  Paul knew of his wife’s pain. And he also knew that in time, all those feelings would diminish. No, they would never entirely go away. There would always be a hurt deep inside her soul, just as there still was in his for his mother and yes, even for his father too. And just when Capie would think she had learned to deal with it, something significant would happen in her life and she would have a sudden urge to call her father, to share that event with him. But then the memory of his death would all come crashing back down on her again and she would mourn his loss once more.

  All of this Paul knew. And much more. He would help his wife through it, as well as any spouse could help someone who had just lost a parent. He would be there for her when she needed him. After all, he owed it to her, for not finding a way to stop Chris’s death in the first place. He had known it was likely to happen. Yes, intellectually he understood that it wasn’t his fault. That he had been left with few options. But that was what his logical engineering mind told him, not his heart. If he had just been smarter, perhaps a bit more forceful, perhaps he could have done something—anything—to have prevented this tragedy and to have saved his wife from the awful pain she was going through now.

  And he hadn’t. So yes, he was feeling more than just a little bit guilty. And the only way to make up for his ‘mistakes’ was to make sure Capie recovered as quickly as possible from this catastrophe.

  Paul glanced around at the people present. There weren’t many. Two of Capie’s aunts, an uncle and a handful of her cousins. Also a couple of Chris’s co-workers and one of his long time neighbors. It was a thin crowd.

  Part of that was Paul’s fault. He was worried that Errabêlu might use the opportunity of the professor’s funeral as a trap to snare both Capie and himself. Therefore, Paul had made a few arrangements to throw them off the scent. First, he had secretly arranged to ship another corpse to a different funeral home in Illinois. Right now, there was a sealed casket in a funeral home in Chicago with Chris’s name on it. The obituary published in the newspapers named that same Chicago funeral home and stated that the funeral service and burial would be held tomorrow, in a cemetery in that state, not Wisconsin. Paul was sure that Errabêlu would be quite upset when they discovered the switch and learned that Paul and Capie had indeed been present for the actual funeral and burial.

  In addition to all of the preparations for the funeral over the last two days, Paul had also been busy with a few other tasks. Using McDougall’s talisman, he had ‘rescued’ all of Capie’s personal belongs from Fermi Labs, storing them and his tantalum block in a PODS container and paying to have the container shipped to Park City, just north of Wichita, Kansas. Then he had retrieved the computer and the emerald from the small cave under Bauer Road in Naperville. Unfortunately, the computer had been thoroughly soaked with water and was probably useless to him now.

  Furthermore, he had transported the Errabêlu prisoners, dropping the eight Oni onto Cannibal Island and McDougall on Little Sandy Island in the middle of Lake Winnipeg in Canada and leaving them with several cases of Spam, PBJ sandwiches, and Vienna sausages. There was very little human presence on the lake and therefore much less of a chance that the Oni or McDougall would be rescued accidently. Oh, sure, an even more permanent solution was needed, but now he had weeks, maybe months to work it all out.

  For the hundredth time, Paul glanced around the cemetery. He was still nervous about how exposed they were right now and had several sentry spells out, to warn him of any use of magic in the extended area.

  The pastor closed his bible and nodded at the undertaker. With a snap of a switch and the quiet whine of an electric motor, the casket slowly began its one-way journey downward, six feet into the hard ground.

  It was incredibly difficult to say goodbye for the very last time.

  “His death will have meaning,” Paul muttered softly to Capie as she cried bitter tears into a handkerchief. “This I swear to you. He didn’t die for nothing.”

  Capie nodded absently, the only clue that Paul had that she had heard him at all.

  EIGHT

  The Big Island, Hawaii

  Hapuna Beach

  July

  Tuesday 9:16 a.m. HAST

  Immediately after the funeral, Paul took Capie on a worldwide tour, avoiding all of the capital cities of the planet but visiting a great many tourist traps strung across the globe. In the process, Paul discovered that there were eighty-eight nations and territories where English was spoken as a primary or secondary language. And the newlyweds stopped in quite a few of them.

  Paul tried to help Capie deal with her grief not only by giving her lots of attention, but also by giving her lavish gifts such as clothing, jewelry, gourmet chocolates, a hardcover set of George RR Martin’s Song of Fire and Ice series, and even a one foot tall jade statuette of Elsa, the snow queen from the Disney movie Frozen. He had personally mined the jade in Guatemala and the sculpture was a gorgeous deep blue-green with white flecking.

  In addition, he made a special effort to take her to a multigenre convention, the ConnectiCon, in Hartford Connecticut, one of the larger such conventions, with over 10,000 in attendance. For three days, they had immersed themselves in anime, comics, fantasy and science fiction workshops, panels, contests and even a costume dance. Paul had whipped up a Captain Marvel outfit while Capie dressed as Firestar. From all Paul could tell, Capie had seemed to enjoy the convention.

  Even after the convention, her mood, overall, seemed to be very slowly improving. The death of her father had hit her very hard but life moved on and she appeared to be slowly dealing with the loss and the pain. But deep inside himself, he still had his doubts. He was very worried about her.

  • • • •

  Basking in the warm Pacific summer sun, Paul shifted slightly in his beach chair to a more comfortable position, continuing to admire the gorgeous view of the vast blue Pacific Ocean and the white sandy beach of Hawaii. And too, he was getting quite the eyeful of his increasingly beautiful wife, currently dressed in that tantalizingly small bikini.

  The two
of them were sunbathing on Hapuna Beach on the Big Island of Hawaii, the warm summer sun toasting them a deeper shade of brown, while listening to the hypnotic sound of the surf lapping against the white sand. In Paul’s humble opinion, the scene was incredibly idyllic. And he hoped that Capie found it that way too. That was the major reason that they were here, to help her in her recovery. However, in reality, he wasn’t all that convinced that his efforts were having the entire desired effect. He could only guess what Capie was thinking.

  He would have been horrified to have known that his assumptions weren’t even close to being correct.

  Three weeks had gone by since the funeral. Three of the most painful weeks of Capie’s life.

  She had managed to move beyond the denial stage now. But what she currently felt was even worse than that terrible empty loneliness. Now there was a war in her soul, a war fought with pure raw emotions, a war that was internally tearing her apart.

  On the one hand, she felt an incredible anger and hatred. A pure hot flame of emotion was intensely focused on murdering the wizards of Errabêlu. She wanted nothing more than to kill them, each and every one of them, to get her hands around their necks and slowly strangle the life out of them. She could visualize every moment involved, the gasping of their breath, the bulging of their eyes, the clammy feel of their skin as she slowly increased the pressure on their throats. And, most of all, she visualized the thrill she would feel, the intense satisfaction, the anticipation of their deaths as each wizard succumbed to the lack of oxygen, as life fled their bodies.

  But then, on the other side, there was the guilt.

  It was the other raw emotion tearing at her, assaulting her mind with seemingly never ending waves of pain. Her father’s death was her own fault. There could be little doubt. She could have prevented it. She could have easily saved him from being killed. There were a thousand things she could have done to have avoided it. Simple things too. And her imagination proceeded forth to list the possibilities in minute detail. All the things that in hindsight, she should have done to have saved his life. All the things that she should have done, because she owed him a million times over for the type of father that he was. What a worthless, ungrateful, wretched excuse for a daughter she was, to have turned away from him at a critical moment, the one time that he most needed her, choosing that one crucial moment to have run off for selfish purposes, leaving him alone and defenseless to face the evil wizards of the world and thereby sealing his fate.