Chapter 29: Alexis

Chapter 29: Alexis

I wasn’t dying, at least not at this very moment. Then why was my life flashing before my eyes? Why did time feel like it had decided to stand still? The half-hour timer had just shifted from 30 minutes to 28 minutes, and it seemed that an eternity had passed between those two minutes. An eternity comprising snippets of memories. Memories that made up my life.

The pain was the most resounding emotion in all the memories that were playing in front of my eyes as I stood there vapidly looking at the bomb and its timer, not knowing what to do, ignoring Vincent’s call, completely frozen by the fear of the very likely possibility that in just a few minutes, this place would blow up and take the lives of thousands of people. I could already picture the flames, those billowing plumes of smoke, and the buildings with their ramparts caught on fire. It was bizarre how both my flashing memories of the past and my foresight of the doomed future were playing simultaneously in the present, jarring my senses and draining my energy.

The levies broke, and the barrage of memories started pouring down as I stared into that LED light that would detonate my doom. Repressed memories from my entire life started flooding through, making me drown in a sea of pain and anguish.

There I was, in one of the memories, standing in the graveyard with my knees grazed and my body cold. It was one of the few times Fiddler’s Green had a blizzard warning. Mom and dad had gone to visit their parents’ graves, and I was lost somewhere in the woods around the forest, crying, calling out for mom, surrounded by large trees with blackened barks. When they found me after an hour of searching, I was recoiling in the snow in a fetal position, weeping my little eyes out.

“Alexis!”

It seemed that someone was calling out my name in the present, but what was I to do in the face of this sudden storm of memories? The pain had dug itself underneath my flesh, and there it seethed, burning me from within.

As if to counter my negative thought stream, a new memory came into focus, a memory where Will was holding my hands. This was after the first time we had made love and were lying in each other’s arms. He was staring intently into my eyes. And just as fast as this memory had come, another followed where Will and I were sitting at the skating rink, eating junk food and commenting on the meaning of contemporary graffiti.

And there was Will yet again, saving me from Blair the first time. Will, kissing me after apologizing profusely for being rude to me all those times when he hadn’t been able to control his rage. All these happy memories came to a climax with the latest one, where Will and I were in Vermont, and he was kneeling in front of me, asking for my hand in marriage.

I must live yet, I thought. While there’s Will, and while there’s even a remote chance for us to be happy together. How ungrateful I was to think that all my life had been nothing but sorrow after sorrow. Through my mate, I had come to know such joy as I had never imagined. And with this thought, life came back to my limbs, and I regained consciousness, only to find that Vincent had made his way to the top of the tower where I was standing. He was shaking me vigorously, calling my name over and over again.

“What happened to you?” Vince asked, still holding me by my arms. “I thought you’d lost your mind just now.”

“It became all too much,” I said, staring at the timer—twenty-five minutes to go. “I became petrified, Vince. All my life, I’d been putting on the bravest front I could, only to become enveloped in my fear when I needed to be courageous.”

“It’s okay. There’s still time. And you’re the bravest person I know. If there’s anyone who can get us out of this, it’s you. Below, all the pack members are disarming the bombs as we speak. I gave the order myself. We’ve isolated as many bombs as we could find. But there’s still work yet cut out for us. We need you!” Vince said, taking a look at the bomb as he took out a pair of scissors from his pocket and began fidgeting with the wires. “Even if I disable it, all the bombs are going to go off remotely. We can’t hold them off forever.”

“How are you disabling them?” I asked, looking at what Vince was doing.

“I’m not really disabling them. I’m just cutting down the wires that control the timer so we have more time on our hands. That’s the best we can do. These bombs will either go off through a remote detonator, or they’ll eventually blow on their own. What I’ve done, what the pack has done, will buy us an hour at best. So we have to hurry!”

I knew what I had to do. First, I had to disable the remote detonator, but there was no way in hell I would be able to do that all by myself. I picked up my phone and dialed Maliha’s number. It was the only thing I could do.

Below, the election countdown had started. At any minute, they’d announce the results, and then the situation would truly be out of our control. The people would go crazy with celebration and rush the streets, dance in the town square, and do what celebrating people all over the world do—celebrate vicariously. That would be the perfect opportunity for the bombs to go off. I needed to make sure that didn’t happen.

Not on my watch.

***

“What the actual fuck? Tell me this isn’t one of your jokes,” Maliha exclaimed once I’d finished telling her what was happening. It took ten minutes, but those ten minutes were well invested if Maliha agreed to help us.

“Yeah, you know my famous wit. Since when have I ever joked with you about such matters?” I couldn’t afford another ten minutes consoling and calming her. I needed a solution stat.

“But I’m standing right here, waiting for the voting results. I don’t want to get blown up into a billion bits,” Maliha said, her voice breaking as she began crying.

“Listen to me. I won’t let anything happen to you. But you have to help me first. Tell me how I can disable the detonator. If the perpetrator pushes one button, dozens and dozens of bombs will go off. Is there any way you can disable the detonating mechanism?”

“I can…uh…fuck…Yes. I can help you disable the detonation mechanism, but there’s nothing that can be done about the timer,” Maliha said.

“I’ll take it. Now tell me what I have to do.”

“You don’t have to do anything, actually. You’re already there, at the antenna tower. All you have to do is take down the antenna. It’s responsible for all the cellular signals in town. Remote detonation also utilizes cellular signals. No signals mean no detonation,” Maliha said. “And with this, I’m leaving. I can’t be anywhere near the blast radius when shit hits the fan. It was nice knowing you, Lexie. See you on the other side.”

“Wait!” I yelled. “How do I disable the antenna?”

“You see a control panel up there? There’s a kill switch in there. It should be the big red lever in the panel. Pull it, and you’ll kill the signals. But you have to understand that doing this is highly illegal,” Maliha said.

“Right. Like I’m worried about breaking the law right now,” I said as I pried open the control panel and looked into it. There were many buttons, switches, and levers, but only one of them was red. Praying to all the gods that would hear me, I pulled the lever and saw that the lights in the panel and on top of the antenna abruptly blinked shut. To confirm that the move had worked, I saw that my phone had lost all signals.

Hopefully, this would buy us some time.

Below, I saw Maliha waving at me. I waved back at her to let her know that her tip had worked out. I saw her run into a straight line back to where her car was parked. I didn’t blame her. She was always a brainiac. People like her went into professions such as computing and hacking because they weren’t well-equipped to deal with the stresses of real life. It made sense that she’d run for her life. This wasn’t her war, after all.

“Lexie, I’m going to go down there, and I suggest you do the same. We still have many bombs to find. There’s something we can do about them. We have to dispose of all of them within the hour. Let’s not forget that they’re going to blow up either way,” Vincent said, but before he could finish thinking out loud, the lever that I had just pulled reverted to its original position, turning the antenna back on.

“What the fuck,” I gasped as I stared at the lever.

“Oh, no,” Vince joined in, combing a frantic hand through his hair. “It’s a failsafe. The kill switch turns back on every few minutes so that the cellular service isn’t disrupted. We can’t just pull the lever and expect our work to be done,” he said.

I didn’t respond immediately. My eyes were tracking the wires that came down from the antenna and went into the control panel. I traced their path down to the floor and, from there, watched as they coiled further down the alley, through the square, and into a generator on the other side of the square.

“It’s getting backup power,” I said. “They must have attached it to that generator so that the signals stay on no matter what. It makes sense. Tonight is the biggest night the town has ever seen. They don’t want to lose cell coverage.”

“Game plan?” Vince asked. I could see the panic in his eyes, causing them to dart about, looking in every direction.

“You go back down and assemble the pack. Sniff out the rest of the bombs and take them as discretely as you can to the dock behind the square. Find a motorboat, a small one, and ditch the bombs in there. It’s going to take some time, I know, but in the meantime, I’m going to make my way down to the generator and turn it off, killing the signal for good. This is our only hope right now, Vince. Otherwise…well, I don’t want to dwell on what happens otherwise.”

“Agreed,” Vince said, then, without any further delay, slid down the ladders and landed on his feet. “It’d be one hell of a miracle if we all made it out alive, wouldn’t it?”

Somehow, of all the things that I had done, covering that last mile felt like the longest of them all. I didn’t know how to slide down the ladders as Vince had done just now. Now, zip lining, on the other hand, seemed not so difficult. But first, I had to do something about the big black brick of the bomb that was still attached to the tower. I yanked it free from the tape tethering it and stowed it in my jacket’s pocket.

As I stood there staring at the grounding wire going in a steep diagonal down to the ground, I reconsidered zip lining. I would be no good to anyone if I crashed to the ground and broke both legs.

It took more time, but I went down the ladder. By the time I’d gotten down, there was already a crowd assembled at the base of the tower. These people wanted to get a better view of the election proceedings. They were using the tower’s base as their vantage point for taking pictures and live-streaming on their social media.

“Why are all y’all standing here?” I asked one of them, hoping to confirm my suspicion.

“The signals are weak. We thought that if we stood here, right under the cell tower, we’d be able to get better signals,” some girl said. She was holding streamers in her hands and had her face painted in the colors of her favorite mayoral candidate.

Good. At least the signals had been weakened. Hopefully, that would create some trouble for the bomber. But that still didn’t put us out of danger. While the tower was powered, there was a chance that the bombs would blow up whenever the bomber felt like it.

My only hindrance, besides the distance between me and the generator, was the crowd that was not showing any signs of thinning. In the crowd, I could see my brethren, the pack members, moving to the docks. I assumed this meant that they’d somehow gotten the bombs and were taking them to the docks for disposal. They would have to get the bombs into a boat and set the boat to sail out into the sea. Only then would the people be safe.

But that came later. Right now, I had to manage not to get crushed by the crowd. Already, they were trampling my feet and tackling me, startling me with the constant bumping, eventually causing me to lose my direction.

It occurred to me at the last second that I could just as easily climb on the roofs of the buildings and get to the generator faster. I wouldn’t draw much attention given that the most exciting thing was happening down there at the stage where the mayoral candidates were coming to the rostrum and giving speeches on how they’d improve Fiddler’s Green.

I bumped my way past the crowd and came to the right of the square where the height of the buildings was lowest. I looked around, and when I saw that no one was focusing on me, I climbed the side of the building and reached the roof. I was never one for jumping and climbing, but given the situation, it was the only solution.

On the roofs, I could let my inner wolf out. I didn’t shift, but that didn’t stop me from harnessing my feral force to jump across the gaps between the buildings. Five minutes later, I was out of breath and had reached the last building. The generator was just a few feet away below.

I jumped down and rolled on my back as I reached the generator.

There was still the fence between the generator and me. At the fence’s entrance, a guard was standing, but I could see from his posture that he was focused on the speech of the last candidate, just like the rest of the people.

I rolled over the fence and fell next to the generator’s exhaust pipe. It blew hot air in my face as I crawled near it, hoping no one would see me dismantle the generator’s back hatch.

“And now, for the moment you have all been waiting for. Tonight was an amazing night, one of the best in the history of this esteemed town, but it’s time to call a wrap to these proceedings and declare who won the campaign. And the winner, after a neck-to-neck competition, is…”

Time stood still as everyone quietened down to hear what the commentator was about to say, creating the perfect opportunity for me to pull the socket from the generator. This was my last resort. There was no coming back if this didn’t work. I pulled the plug from the generator and yanked its key. It spurted to a halt, a thing that, surprisingly, no one noticed. It wouldn’t matter if they had; I had the key to the generator, and no one would be able to turn it on.

Unlike how I had anticipated this to turn out, the lights to the entire square did not go out. But the antenna’s green blipping light was not blipping anymore.

Had I done it? Did it happen?

Was the antenna disabled for good?

I couldn’t wait around to find out. I had to head to where the rest of the pack was assembled at the docks and add my bomb to the pile and make sure that they’d be carried out into the sea.

As I’d just gotten out of the generator cage, something happened that I was not anticipating.

All the lights of the town square went off. I didn’t know if this was my doing or something pre-planned to declare the results of the election. Just as the darkness became uniform throughout the square, the crowd erupted into screams and laughter.

How was I supposed to make my way through a crowd to the docks in pitch-black darkness?