THE SLIDE: Part 3

Chapter 34: A Previously Unconsidered Variable

Intense Drama, Frenzy, and Chaos

Zed’s Emergency Meeting

“Get out the full execution list,” Zed shouted at A, C, D, Q, R, and U. They all looked at him; stunned. “I know it’s not fully assembled, yet. Now’s the time.”

“Does this mean that we will be shooting traitors?” Q asked.

“Of course. It’s absolutely necessary. Vite, vite, vite.” Zed folded his arms with a scowl on his face and the others scattered like rats fleeing a sinking ship.

The Event

“Can it be true?” the Magistrate quivered with trepidation.

“You have a view of it, even without scopes, if you squint you can see,” Tem was excited, but restraining himself somewhat.

“I guess I am acting like a trembling schoolboy,” he admitted.

“We can go out onto your terrace and look. Seeing is believing,” Tem couldn’t help but smile. His entire body was smiling. His joy was explosive.

Tem burst onto the terrace and the Magistrate sheepishly followed.

He timidly stepped to the dual scope and looked in the Slide’s direction.

“Oh, my Spirits, it’s gone!” the Magistrate exclaimed.

“Yes. According to the monitoring station at Ground Zero the electromagnetic energy dropped at zero four hundred hours. The hum was gone too.”

“How did this happen? Will it come back? What’s happening out there?”

“Excellent questions, Magistrate. No one knows. All our scientists are looking at live feeds, recorded feeds. Five balloons have been launched. We’re gathering data,” Tem said. And he couldn’t stop talking about it:

“The Slide has been gone for three hours and counting! Caution is being advised, of course. Some of the deranged have wandered into the Ground Zero base and have caused problems. Those people have been detained.

“Groups of homegrown militias awaiting entrée have swarmed the slide hoping to get to what was formerly known as the other side and haven’t been seen since. It’s mayhem. But the formal military advises extreme caution.”

Four Days Earlier

Hrez and two of his fellow Berbers carried the withdrawn Farha in a cocoon she had spun around herself. The three of them brought her out of the mine into the light. She was placed in a tent they had erected there, at the mouth of the tunnel.

After Tim’s ordeal, and the profound affect on Farha along with Hanna’s download, she was forced inward. Her worlds had been shattered and pulverized. In shock, she slowed all time down until, for her it nearly stopped. Hrez visited her in an attempt to communicate without making matters worse at the edge of her dreamtime paralysis. It was difficult for him to see into especially with lines of communication being scrambled, shredded and fragmented.

On the second day she managed delivered a phrase into his mind:

The Counsel of Six. Hrez knew exactly to what she referred. It was five other shamans from his home in the Grand Atlas Mountains about 3,000 miles to the south as the crow flies. She implied he needed help from them with her. But there was something else. When he went outside the tent and sat facing west he whispered to himself, “What is that something else?”

On the third day late in the afternoon after eating some dried figs he tuned into her and was assaulted with a barrage of images, voices and chaos. He took in the context and set it aside in a column of light he set up nearby. On the fourth day Hrez remained fraught with indecision, troubling since he had always known what to do with precise accuracy. He left the tent with Farha in the cocoon and one of his trusted Berber allies by her side. Dusk light emerged easily from the west with no Slide to obscure the dying light. He sat in the concave of a dune and sent a message to the council.

“Hrez, Hrez,” the Berber called out with urgency and fear in the message. He ran back to the tent.

“Look,” his friend pointed. Hrez was aghast. Farha’s body was disappearing on a molecular level. She was disappearing in small increments and her cellular tissue appeared to decompose into ash, blown into dust by some unseen impossible breeze.

“Help me cut this open,” he told his companion. Their knives, as sharp as they were, could not cut through the webbing of the cocoon. Black material oozed from the cocoons webs as Hrez stared into it just before he collapsed into a heap in the tent as the sun broke over the horizon.

Report/Evidence Over Paris

Since the Slide had disappeared, contact from the satellite became available worldwide through jerry-rigged satellites in polar orbits four times a day. Enormous weather and electromagnetic vortexes appeared over major cities on what had once been known as the American continents and in the Confederacy. Photos from high in orbit were being received. Several photos showed Paris being pulled up into the vortex.

Tem rushed from the satellite monitoring station. He ran into the Magistrate’s office out of breath. A newly installed document sender-receiver telephone had been installed and was receiving a top priority message. Tem pointed at the machine and then waved the photographs of the destruction of Paris from high orbit. He slapped the photos on the Magistrate’s desk and said:

“See, see, see,” Tem pointed at the black and white photographs. The Magistrate stared at the photos, in shock. In an infrared scanned photo, in color, one could see debris in the large vortex in the dark cloud and above it.

A Guard rushed in.

“Sir, there’s an enormous black cloud over us now. What should we do?”

The Magistrate pointed out onto his terrace. “Tem, I order you to look and advise.”

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