The Anomaly Within
Chapter Four
Matt wasn't sleeping when the phone rang, but he answered it quickly not wanting to wake up Emily. The continued efforts to deal with all of the creature incursions had wiped out almost all of the teams. The largest and most dangerous creatures had been effectively dealt with thus far, but there were more creatures to capture. At a point of near exhaustion Lester had called an emergency meeting with the team leaders. Most of the teams had been sent home just after midnight to get some sleep while a select few members of the ARC staff coordinated the squadrons sent out by the military to continue the search and seizure of creatures roaming the country side. Every military squad had an ARC soldier in charge and running each operation. Becker had refused to go home and was leading the team of soldiers assigned to London.
Martial Law had been imposed and all civilian movement had been restricted past sun down. Lester had ended up spending the better part of five hours on the phone with the minister as well as key members of the government organizing the efforts to clean up the chaos left by the convergence. By the time he had been ordered to go home it was nearly one in the morning. Emily wanted to keep working, but she was well past her point of endurance and agreed to going home with Matt more easily than he'd expected. Matt found sleep to be elusive, however. He couldn't get the vision of seeing himself out of his mind, and Connor's odd behavior earlier that day only added to his disquiet.
'Go back. You have to go back.'
Words spoken by himself, or some future version of himself repeated for the millionth time in his head. Matt had just about convinced himself that what he had seen wasn't real, but a vision brought on by the stress of the events that culminated the end his entire mission.
The sound of his mobile drew him out of his own thoughts, and seeing Abby's name on his mobile set warning bells ringing in his head. "Abby? What's wrong?"
Matt was out of his chair in a shot at the sound of Abby's voice. He had never heard her this upset, not even the time when Connor had been captured by the burrowing insects from his time. She sounded close to tears or had been crying already; again not something he had ever heard from the young woman.
"Slow down, Abby, and tell me what happened. Are you all right?"
Matt grabbed his car keys and scrawled a quick note to Emily as he listened to Abby. "Where is he now?"
Abby's answer stopped him momentarily. If she didn't know where Connor had gone then he didn't know where to drive to. After hardly a moment's thought he headed down the stairs at a quick gait. "Stay put, I'll be there in a couple of minutes."
Matt contacted the ARC to find out if Connor had his black box with him so they would know where the young paleontologist had gone, but he had left his flat without taking the tracking device with him. Matt made excellent time to Abby and Connor's flat being that it was after two in the morning and there was no traffic on the roadways due to the enforced curfew. His status at the ARC, not to mention the official vehicle he was driving with government plates would assure that he wouldn't be stopped. As he drove through the nearly abandoned streets he couldn't help but feel very uneasy about Abby's call. She said that she had tried calling Connor but he had evidentially turned his mobile off. It was a wild thought that had no basis in reason, but Matt couldn't help thinking that maybe Connor knew what the vision he had seen of himself meant. Maybe Connor was the key to understanding what had driven him from Emily's side and kept sleep from coming. A sarcastic version of his own voice played in his head.
Or maybe Connor has succumbed to the incredible pressure of the last 48 hours and cracked.
That seemed to be Abby's biggest fear. Either way he needed to find Connor Temple.
Abby was already outside waiting when Matt pulled up. She looked terrible when she got in the car. Her eyes were red and swollen, so she had indeed been crying, but what impacted Matt was how scared she looked.
"Abby, tell me exactly what Connor said."
He had to admire the young woman. She held herself together as she spoke, and he wasn't so sure he would have been able to, had their positions been reversed.
"He has been bothered by something ever since the New Dawn anomaly, but he couldn't really explain it, just that he was missing something important. He was really fixated on that. He said he needed to understand how New Dawn caused the future you grew up in. He was absolutely insistent on that."
Matt felt like ice water had been dumped down his back. "Why, Abby? Why would he need to know how it happened?"
Abby shook her head. "He said he needs to understand how the creation of Phillip's anomaly caused the destruction of the world so that nothing like New Dawn would ever happen again. I got him to go to bed, but he didn't sleep well. He had some kind of nightmare, but not like any of the others."
"Others?"
Abby blushed a little at that. "Both of us suffered from nightmares for a long time, Matt. Living in constant fear for a whole year will do that to you."
Of course. He hadn't thought about how their year in the Cretaceous would have affected either of them since they first got back. They were both so solid and together it never really occurred to him after that first meeting, and it should have. His skills were slipping. "You said this nightmare was different. How?"
"It wasn't about surviving a creature attack. I don't really know what it was about, because he wouldn't tell me, but I think it had to do with New Dawn and..."
Abby hesitated; there was something she wasn't saying.
"Abby, I need you to be completely honest with me now."
She seemed to consider his words before answering. "I think you may be part of whatever has him so upset. I think maybe the fact that you survived what happened yesterday got him thinking about what happened when you drove Becker's truck into the anomaly. Something about how it closed isn't sitting right with him."
Matt felt his heart rate jump up a notch. He knew better than most how important Connor was to the future, and if he was feeling uncertain about that future then Matt had damned well better find him and listen to what he had misgivings about. The stakes were too high to put this off as stress related behavior. "Does he think that we failed to stop the future?"
An indefinable sense of fear began to grow in the pit of Matt's stomach and it showed on his face. Abby could understand that. She had seen the world Matt grew up in and knew how vital his success in stopping that from happening was.
"I don't know. He talked about Cutter and what he said to him right before he died."
Matt sat back taken completely by surprise. That was the last thing he had expected to hear and was intrigued. "Why? What did Cutter say?"
Abby seemed hesitant to go there, but that wasn't going to work for Matt. "Abby, it is vital that you tell me. It could very well lead us to where Connor has gone."
She nodded, obviously understanding the logic. She clearly wanted to find him as badly as Matt did. "Cutter told him 'It's on you' but he was talking about the artifact Helen found in the future and figuring out what it was for. Connor isn't making sense. I think he's blaming himself for something, but I don't really know what it is."
Matt thought about what Abby had told him. He knew that the bond between Connor and Nick Cutter had been strong, but that was years ago. Maybe he had under-estimated the strength of that bond.
"He was close to Cutter, yeah?"
A tear dropped down Abby's face. "Connor lost his own dad when he was a boy and I know that he looked up to Nick like a father. Think about what he said yesterday in that underground bunker. All he ever wanted to do was prove that Cutter was right to trust him. He wanted to make Cutter proud of him. He's been thinking about him a lot over the last few days so I suppose it's not so surprising that Cutter was part of his dream."
Matt remembered Connor's words clearly and the anguish behind them. "All right then. Let's start at the cemetery."
TBC
Preview chapter five:
"Do any of those equations mean anythin' to you?"
She looked at the screen and Connor's scrawled writing and equations. They could mean anything. Maths were never her strong point in school.
"I don't know what the equations are, but that..." she pointed to the large white board in the corner that was sectioned out into three divisions with information in each. "Those detail the worlds that Connor and I have seen through the anomalies."