The Omega Point

20. THE DESTRUCTION OF THE ACTON CLINIC

Just as Mack was ready to move them out, the gunfire rose to a chilling thunder. People began running downstairs, calling to David for leadership.

David went to the nearest one, Susan Denman.

“Get the class back upstairs.” He looked past her to Aaron Stein and the others. “We’re taking the portal to safety. We’ll be back as soon as possible.”

His words were swallowed by the cascading shatter of glass as rifle butts were used to smash the windows.

The sound caused the whole crowd to turn around and then to erupt into panic as men—strangers, not security personnel—began coming in through the debris. People ran everywhere, overturning tables and chairs, dashing for the doors, for the stairs.

“We need to move,” Mack urged.

Bill Osterman appeared, greasy and exhausted, from the machinery room. “I’m the plant supervisor,” he shouted to the armed men, women, and children. “I know what you want! I can show you everything.”

A man walked up to him, raised a pistol, and fired it into his face. He rocketed back across the room, a flailing shadow in the blue-pink flash.

“Drop to the floor,” Mack said to David and Caroline. “Katie, get that damn thing off the easel and bring it with us.”

Katie looked at it. “Is it… liftable?”

“Just do it!”

More shots filled the room and people slammed against walls, flying into pieces as they did so. Modern high-velocity expanding rounds don’t just injure people, they tear bodies apart.

Patients and staff scattered, running for the doors on both ends of the room. Mack noticed that the class—so very disciplined—had followed David’s instructions and returned in a group to the temporary safety of the upper floor.

“Go out the back,” he told Caroline and David. “It’s our only chance!”

He had them now, he sure as hell did.

But David hesitated, so Mack gave him a slap to the side of the head—not hard, but hard enough to startle him.

“Sorry, Doc, but get moving! Right now!”

They scrambled toward the back doors.

Once they were outside, Mack told them, “We need to find a vehicle that works, otherwise we die here, now.”

“We can’t leave. We can’t abandon the mission!”

“David, I’m on your side, so you listen to me. If you die, you abandon your mission. If you live, you still have a chance to come back here when it’s safe and complete it. So do this!”

That seemed to reach him, and he began to follow Mack, and Caroline followed him. In the rear, Katie did a sort of guard action, not that Mack thought for a moment that she would be particularly effective.

Out in the grounds, dawn was just breaking across a running firefight between the security guards in their camouflage and the townspeople. The locals had some decent weapons now, too, not just deer rifles and shotguns. He heard the rasping whisper of an Uzi and saw one of the security guys turn to red haze.

“There’s a lot of ordnance flying around,” Mack said, “heads down.”

Behind them, glass shattered upstairs and the body of Claire Michaels hit the ground, bounced once in a bed of blooming flowers, and was still.

“Claire!” David howled, rushing to her.

Mack grabbed him. “She’s past help, but you’re not. If I have to knock you cold and drag you, I’m saving you, Doc. You gotta understand that.”

Ahead, the parking lot was jammed with derelict security vehicles, their electronics long since killed.

“We can’t escape,” Caroline said. “It’s impossible.”

“We have to,” Mack replied, “because if we stay here, we are dead. No question. We get the hell out, lives are saved, and your thing that is so important to you—that is saved.”

There was a voice raised, echoing across the broad lawn they were crossing, and then another, this one excited. Shots rang out—pistol, .22-caliber.

“Stop,” the first man shouted. The other, right behind him, cried excitedly, “What is that? What’ve you got?”

Mack aimed, braced on his elbow, and squeezed off two rounds, dropping both men. Immediately, more townspeople came out of the house. They were cursing with rage, and letting loose a fusillade of bullets in their direction. No discipline but too many bullets to risk crossing the field of fire.

No choice now, they had to head for the garage.

“Move it! Fast!”

David and Caroline carried the portal.

Then Mack saw two more men coming from around the front of the house. They were not in a hurry. One of them raised a Benelli Riot Gun and blew away a security guard.

“Those two are trained,” Mack said. “They know how to kill and we need to be out of their line of fire right now.”

Moving among the disabled vehicles in the new parking lot, Mack led them toward the old garage. He knew this place as well as he knew every other corner of the Acton estate, and he knew that there were older vehicles in here, vehicles without sensitive electronics.

The garage was brick, built in the same grand style as the house, an incongruous place to store dusty trucks. The side door, as he knew, wasn’t locked.

Taking no chances, he sent Katie in first. When nobody blew her head off, he followed with Caroline and David. Inside, the cars and trucks loomed, a silent row of angles and shadowy bulk. There were a couple of pickups, a Buick Roadmaster, a black Cadillac from half a century ago, a Chrysler convertible from even earlier, and a mid-seventies Pontiac.

Mack had previously identified the pickups with their simple mechanicals and magnetos as good bets. On his way back in from his visit to the town, he’d fueled one of them up and made sure its battery worked. He led them to it and opened the door.

“They went in there,” a voice said from outside. Then the other: “They showin’ any iron?” Then silence.

Mack whispered, “We have one chance. We start this and we blast out through the garage door. That’s our chance.”

David said, “We can’t leave, the gate’s closed.”

“The power failed. Therefore, it opened automatically. That’s the way it works.” Mack replied.

“You certainly know a lot about this place,” Caroline said.

“I know everything about this place.” As he spoke, he watched David carefully. He had detected something there beyond the general level of mistrust of Mack Graham. Did David know anything more? Suspect it? Mack was watching.

“They came in this way,” a male voice said.

Mack saw a shape appear at the door, so he got David and Caroline into the truck. There was room behind the seat for the portal.

“What about me?” Katie asked.

“Ride in the bed,” Mack said.

“I will not.”

He took Katie by the collar of her blouse and lifted her off the ground.

“You will. And you will provide covering fire or they will shoot our tires out, because these two know what they’re doing. Do you understand me?”

The two shooters had opened the garage door and were moving carefully closer. Good soldiers don’t hurry unless that’s the only choice.

“Okay, folks,” one of the men said. “We saw you come in here and we got the door covered. We want to see what you’re carrying.”

With an enormous rattling cough, the old truck’s engine came to life. Mack jammed the gas to the floor and it shot forward, slamming into the garage door.

One of the men raised his rifle and fired across the line of vehicles, but the bullet hit a dust-covered Oldsmobile and went wild.

Mack backed up until the truck hit the back wall, then ground the gears into first.

“Is it fragile?” he shouted.

“Of course it’s fragile!” Caroline responded.

On Mack’s second try, the truck crashed through the door and out into the driveway.

Mack turned out into the grounds, avoiding the choke of vehicles in the drive and—he hoped—most of the marauders.

He drove down the driveway and through the gate into the outside world.

A view opened to the flaring dawn in the east, as to the north and west, the supernova set in purple haze. Mack headed toward Raleigh, from which he could see smoke rising. Was the convoy already there and raising a little hell? Fine, he’d deliver the portal, and with it Caroline and David. Let Wylie join him in tearing the information out of them, he was good at it. And Katie, too. She was going to enjoy sweet revenge.