2. Helsa #3
"We are," I insisted.
From the direction of the door we'd come through, I heard a footstep.
Then another. Something moving at a pace that said it wasn't worried about being heard.
I looked down the length of the building.
At the far end, maybe fifty feet, a green emergency exit sign gave off just enough light to see the door beneath it. That was the way out.
I put my hand on Greta's arm and she went still.
We waited. The footsteps moved left, then stopped. I counted to fifteen and looked at Greta and pointed at the green sign. She looked, then nodded.
We moved along the row, crouching, keeping the machinery between us and the sound.
I was watching the floor for anything loose, anything that would roll or clatter.
We made it the length of the building without making a sound, which surprised me, as I was usually the loudest component in any space.
I got both hands on the push-bar of the emergency door and leaned against it slowly.
Please , I thought. I'm not asking for much. I'm asking for one door to not be alarmed. That's all. One door.
The bar depressed. The door swung open. And… no alarm. I heaved a sigh of relief. I stepped through and handed it to Greta. I appraised the alley we were in, looking for the nearest exit. "Ease the door shut, don't?—"
The bang shook the whole frame. The echo came back off the walls twice.
I looked at Greta .
Her expression was of someone who has broken something and knows there's no point in saying anything other than: "Sorry."
“It’s all right. It’s not like our lives are on the line or anything.”
I grabbed her arm and ran.
The service lane between the two buildings was narrow and dark, broken tarmac underfoot, a skip bin shoved against one wall. We were maybe twenty feet along it when the light came from above.
Not a streetlamp. A beam.
It was white, very white, and when I looked up, it seemed to come directly from heaven. There was no source. It swept came down out of the sky and swept the lane like it was looking for something. It roared past us and then swung back again. It settled on us and I felt my hair move.
Not the wind. My hair went up.
So did Greta's frizzy curls. We looked at each other and she whimpered.
"Quick," I said. "In here."
The nearest door opened and we went through it into the second warehouse.
This one housed pallets. Stacked high, rows of them, shrink-wrapped machinery parts or boxes of something, the smell of cardboard and old grease. We got behind a stack near the middle of the building and crouched down. I could hear one set of footsteps now, somewhere inside with us, unhurried.
Greta had started wittering to herself.
She did this sometimes when she was working through a problem, this low fast murmur, except normally she did it with a whiteboard in front of her and a cup of tea in her hand and not while hiding behind a pallet stack from something she couldn't name.
"— which means the apparent reduction in gravitational pull can't be accounted for by any conventional field interaction because the fall-off rate would require a mass that isn't there, so if we're talking about a localized inversion of the gravitational constant then the energy requirement alone would be, conservatively, orders of magnitude beyond anything we've?—"
"Greta."
"— which doesn't work , none of it works, because I felt my feet come off the ground and that is not something that happens, feet don't come off the ground unless something is lifting them?—"
"Greta."
She stopped and looked at me.
"It's nothing," I said.
"It is extremely something," she said. "It is probably the most something that has ever happened to me."
I looked around the edge of the pallet. The figure was at the far end of the building, working its way up through the rows.
They’re looking for us. I don’t know why, but they are. And they’re going to find us. They’re going to ? —
BANG!
The first hole punched through the ceiling like it wasn't even there.
A circle of night opened up six feet to our left and the dust and insulation that should have fallen down went up instead — drawn out through the gap in a thin pale column, debris spiraling upward into the dark above the building. We both gasped .
A second hole. Then a third, moving in sequence toward us, boom, boom, boom.
The light fell upon us.
I felt it before I could think about it. My hair stood on end and my heels lifted — actually freaking lifted! I threw myself sideways out of the beam and hit the floor on my hands and knees. In the shadow gravity was normal again.
I looked across the beam at Greta, who had done the same thing and was lying flat on the concrete on the other side of the beam, her hair settling back down.
We looked at each other.
"Oh my god," I said.
"Yes," said Greta. "That’s where I am right now. And I’m an atheist!"
We ran. Through the warehouse, around the pallet rows, the light tracking behind us and smashing new holes in the ceiling.
The sound of it was what got to me — not the impact of the beam finding us, but the punching through the roof, that boom, boom, boom like something very large and very patient conducting a search it expected to complete.
We got behind the biggest stack of pallets I could find and I said, "As long as we stay in the dark —"
"The beam is the delivery mechanism," Greta said. "Outside the radius the effect?—"
The pallet stack behind us shivered.
Just slightly at first, a millimeter of gap between the bottom pallet and the concrete floor, the steel strapping around it going taut.
Then another millimeter. I watched it rise to six inches, to a foot, to two feet, lifting slowly and evenly the way something rises when it isn't fighting gravity but following another set of physics entirely.
It went up four feet and then it accelerated .
The ceiling took most of the damage. The pallet stack smashed through it and was gone. The concrete dust and debris went up through the hole with it. And we were already running.
"I don't want to be abducted!" Greta wailed.
"This isn't an abduction!" I snapped.
"Then what is it?"
I didn't have an answer, except for, “Because… that’s ridiculous!”
Ridiculous or not, it was clearly happening.
There was another way out. A set of roller doors on the far wall, one of them only partially down, a gap of maybe two feet at the bottom. I pointed and we went for it.
"We're going to get out of here. We're going to come out of this in one piece." I didn't know that either. I said it the way you say things you need to be true.
The light came through the ceiling at a different angle this time, faster as if it’d run out of patience. It hit the floor between us just as I stepped forward, out of it. Greta wasn’t so fortunate and she was immersed in it. Greta’s shadow fell across me as her feet left the floor.
Not slowly. Not like the pallet stack, that careful deliberate ascent, but immediate. She screamed, and I instinctively grabbed her hand.
The pull was extraordinary. Not weight — nothing like weight. It was a direction.
She rose. As I held her hand, she tilted forward, her feet rising toward the ceiling.
I pulled but could only hold her steady.
Then I rose with her. The floor dropped away — two feet, three, four — and I could feel the sweat on both our hands, the grip shifting, becoming less reliable with every second.
"Don't let go," I said .
"I'm not letting go." Her voice was high but surprisingly controlled. "I want it noted, for the record, that this is a complete violation of?—"
"I know."
"—the laws of physics, which I spent twenty years studying, and I find it completely unacceptable ?—"
"Greta—"
Her eyes locked onto mine. "A scientist should never be an experiment!"
I reached up with my other hand to get a better grip on her wrist and found it for a moment, one good solid second, both hands on her and my weight pulling down, but then the pull became stronger and the sweat between my palm and her skin acted as a lubricant and her hand slipped through mine.
My extra weight gone, she shot upward, the light taking her instantly. She screamed but the time I dropped and hit the floor hard on my knees and looked up, the hole in the ceiling was empty.
"Greta…"
The warehouse was quiet. Somewhere, still, came the slow drip of water.
She was gone.
I stood in the middle of the deafening silence and didn't move. Greta was gone. The holes in the ceiling were just holes now, ragged edges of corrugated steel with the night sky glaring through them. The beam was gone, and the warehouse was dark and still and I was the only thing that remained of the nightmare that’d happened.
My knees were on the concrete. I didn't remember getting there .
I stood up.
I looked at the hole directly above me. I looked at the others. I counted six . The counting was something to do, something to occupy the part of my brain that was currently trying very hard not to think about what had just happened.
I needed to move. I knew I needed to move. I would get out of here and find a police station. They would believe me. They had to believe me. I turned toward the roller doors on the far wall and took two steps toward it.
And the beam returned.
I went backward fast, pure reflex, stumbling, and got into the shadow behind the nearest pallet stack. The light swept over the space where I'd been standing. Then it withdrew, and the warehouse was dark again. I could hear myself breathing.
It wasn’t finished yet. It wanted me too.
I moved along the back wall and found a personnel door with a push bar and put my hand on it.
The hand that closed around my arm came out of the dark, fingers that wrapped all the way around my forearm