Author's note: The ending approaches! Hoping to wrap this story up in time for Christmas. Warning that there will be some (hopefully not excessive) violence in the chapters ahead, and I can't vouch for every character making it out okay. It's a time travel arc; anthyding can hadplen.
July 25th, 1974
10:00 am
Charlie tried to follow Mabel's instructions. He really did. But he could only remember the vague direction which Dipper and Wendy went in, hadn't actually seen which tunnel they'd entered after they tore themselves away from him. At one point he thought he'd found it, went down a stairwell to what looked like a hidden corridor, but only stumbled across a parking garage and a Capitol policeman who had Very Strong Opinions on sports. Frustrated, he cursed under his breath and rushed back upstairs, wandering around the lobby in a daze.
"Simon," someone said. And it took Charlie a long moment to remember his "ordained" name. He turned and saw the Apostle Paul standing a few feet away, his face showing surprise, with a woman in casual dress and wild brown hair standing alongside him.
"Surprised to see me?" Charlie asked.
"One of our friends told us that you had died in a car accident yesterday," Paul remarked. Charlie couldn't believe it; either he was lying, or the person who seemed like the Number Two Gleeful hadn't been aware of a high-ranking turncoat being executed? If so, the Church of Revelations was even more messed-up, paranoid and compartmentalized than he'd imagined.
Just like President Nixon...no wonder they worked so well together.
"God has other plans for me," Charlie said mysteriously, hoping his colleague would appreciate the answer. Simon indeed nodded his head reverently, acknowledging his friend's Divine mission.
"I was not aware that you were to taking part in the operation," Paul said.
"Change of plans," Charlie said. "It is not meant as a reflection on you, just..."
"No, I understand," Paul replied. "The more the merrier, huh?"
"And who is your friend?" Charlie asked, thinking the girl looked familiar but unable to place her.
"This is Sister Becky," Paul said benevolently, putting his arm around her shoulder. She instantly slapped it away.
"Don't call me that, you fucking creep," she snarled. And Charlie guessed that she was Wendy's "friend."
"She assisted us in carrying out a distraction as our other friends moved the weapon into place," Paul said. "Ensuring the Capitol police were tied up dealing with a minor disturbance so as not to notice the world-shattering one."
"I assumed the police were assisting us," Charlie ventured.
"Some of them," Paul affirmed, "but we couldn't take any chances. It's not easy to transport something so large, even underground. That's why we'd hoped for Sister Becky's group to assist us, but...obviously that didn't work as planned."
He smiled and leered at Becky, who was clearly unhappy and uncomfortable in his presence. "We are extremely grateful for her services. We may have markedly different views of God's place in the world, but on the destruction of the Old Order, we are one."
Charlie struggled to control himself, feeling deeply creeped out by the whole situation.
"You keep some very interesting company," Paul accused. "Why are you spending time with that Congresswoman from New York? Miss Schuyler is not a member of the Church, not anyone who should have any knowledge of our workings at this time. And you wonder why our brothers have questioned your integrity. Very indiscreet."
"I've been trying my best to win her over," Charlie lied. "Figured we could use another voice on the impeachment committee."
Paul arched an eyebrow. "Oh? Well, that didn't stop her from giving that silly little speech last night."
"True," Charlie said. "But it doesn't matter until she votes - does it?"
Paul nodded knowingly; Becky just stared at him, glassy-eyed.
"Anyone else think this is, um, an indiscreet discussion to have in a public place?" Charlie asked.
Paul laughed. "Very well, let's get to work." And he gestured for Becky and Charlie to follow him into a small anteroom. Charlie started to clench up, worried about his friends, let alone himself; despite their planning, they didn't really have a concrete strategy beyond "meet up at the same place."
And what about Mabel? She'd play her role as long as she could bear it, but at some point anxiety would get the best of her. Charlie knew that she wouldn't let her friends and her brother go into harm's way without her and a grappling hook by her side. But Mabel running around the lobby like a headless chicken, with no idea of what to look for, wouldn't help anyone either.
Charlie followed his "allies" into the anteroom, what looked like an old study, barely accessible through a side door near the restrooms. There was a portrait of Henry Clay on one wall, another of John Nance Garner opposite it, a large clock and a bookshelf. And a uniformed policeman stood guard there.
"Whoa, this room's off-limits," the cop said, stepping up to block Paul. "You folks are gonna have to clear out."
"That's all right, we're here on business," Paul said.
"What business?" the cop said, folding his arms. Paul and Becky exchanged glances, Becky reaching into her pocket...
"Gideon," Paul said, softly but firmly. The cop nodded and, without a further word, pulled a book from the shelf. The shelf moved aside, revealing a hidden elevator.
"Praise be upon you," Paul said, nodding to the policeman.
Charlie felt his throat drying out, anxiety overtaking him. Just as Paul and Becky prepared to enter the elevator, his panic overtook him.
"Brother Simon, what's wrong?" Paul asked.
"Nothing," Charlie insisted, pulling away as his head started to spin. "I just need to...I need a minute. You two go on without me."
"Are you ill?" Paul inquired. "Do you need assistance? This isn't the best time for you to fall sick, but we can..."
"I just need some air," Charlie gasped. Then he choked out a joke: "Not every day is the Day of Reckoning." And he walked off as quickly as he could without attracting attention.
Paul and Becky, suspicions raised, shrugged and entered the elevator. "Doesn't matter if he'll join us now or later," he assured Becky. "Reverend Gleeful has a plan for us all."
"Is it Gleeful's plan for you to feel me up?" Becky said, smacking his hand as it grazed her leg.
"He works in mysterious ways," Paul assured her as the elevator doors closed on them.
Right now Charlie slumped down in a restroom stall, his chest tightening and his breathing speeding up, sweat covering his body, leaving him incapacitated. The medicine he used in 2018 to help hadn't even been invented yet; so he just had to sit here and fight through it as best he could. Or, worse, as he .
Of course, of all times - of all times! - for his anxiety to get the better of him! Not when the Gleeful goons were kicking the shit out of him yesterday; not during the awkwardness between him, Mabel and Ariel Schuyler's girlfriend the night before. I don't care what Mabel tells me, I'm a failure - a loser - nothing. The world's going to end because I can't control myself. And won't that be a fitting epitaph for Charlie Huston's life?
The World Ended Because He Was Weak.
Or maybe another, less momentous but even more painful:
He Let His Friends Down.
He wallowed in self-pity, on the verge of tears, for several minutes as these thoughts crowded his mind. Graphic images flashed through his mind of Dipper and Wendy being executed in the basement, their broken bodies laying next to the Gleeful High Fanatics as they detonated their bomb in a pool of his friends' blood. Mabel (let alone everyone else) being incinerated by the blast, her last moments of worry and anxiety and a feeling she wouldn't be able to help, to bring her awesome Mabelness to bear in saving the world. And himself, completely robbed of dignity or self-respect, dying pitifully on a toilet like that guy in Jurassic Park.
All because of me.
Then a single word entered Charlie's head: No.
And he forced it to stay there, allowing the defiance to grow, the will to fight back to swell up inside him. He wouldn't let his friends down - couldn't let them down. Forget the world for a minute - he owed it to the three most awesome people he'd ever met.
Slowly, as he made himself fight back, the anxiety attack faded, his panic replaced with adrenaline, fear with grim determination. At last, he burst out of the stall and splashed water on his face, suddenly feeling energized. And he began to formulate a plan, not only to involve himself but to bring Mabel along and bring the whole Mystery Team into action.
All he needed now was a pen and a scrap of paper.
Mabel had dutifully taken her seat in the hearing room, had answered roll call, stared ahead and doodled on her notepad as the day's debate began. Charlie Wiggins began the day with a pompous, platitudinous defense of the President, arguing that there wasn't enough direct evidence for them to impeach Nixon. It was largely the same thing she'd heard from Sandman the previous night, only more polished, less snide and whining. But to Mabel, not any more convincing.
Not that she cared. She couldn't well focus on parliamentary procedure when Dipper and Wendy and Charlie were fighting for the literal fate of the world somewhere in the same building. Nor could she avoid thinking that the world could end at any moment anyway, without her knowing it even happened.
About ten minutes into Wiggins' argument, Mabel saw someone tap his fingers on the table on her desk, a slip of paper beside them. She looked up and saw Charlie standing over her.
"What are you doing here?" Mabel whispered, seeming surprised and angry. "I told you to..."
Charlie just gestured at the paper again. And Mabel impatiently looked down and read:
"IT'S NOT WORTH SAVING THE WORLD WITHOUT YOU"
Mabel read this for a moment, let the words sink in, then smiled and nodded. She started to get up, then noticed several pairs of eyes creeping over to her. Mr. Wiggins stopped droning for a moment to look at her, then continued.
Mabel scribbled something over for Tom Railsback, the Congressman next to her, if it was alright for her to leave. Railsback shrugged and passed the note back without comment.
On his own, Charlie then scribbled a note asking for a recess and took it over to Chairman Rodino. Rodino looked at him disbelievingly and shrugged, mouthing the words "We just started!"
"Miss Schuyler needs to be excused for a moment," Charlie whispered to the Chairman. Rodino shrugged and mouthed "Go," shooing Charlie away. Charlie nodded and walked back over to Mabel, then tapped her on the shoulder. The two hurried out of the hearing room as discreetly as they could with 37 committee members and dozens of journalists and millions of Americans watching.
Wendy and Dipper slowly approached the entrance to the Gleeful command center. They saw a small door opening out to a catwalk which overlooked the room, which seemed more like a small warehouse than an office. Wendy peered through the doorway and counted about a dozen men standing or sitting around, including Pemberton, whom she recognized because of his tan suit, as opposed to the dress shirts everyone else wore.
Then, from the corner of her eye, she spotted two men with Schmeisers prowling about the catwalk (Wendy wondered if they'd bought them from her old pal "Saito"), and ducked back inside.
"Shit," she whispered, pressing herself flat against the wall as one of them walked past.
"That bad, huh?" Dipper said. Then he saw the shadow of the gunman in the doorway and ducked from the line of sight, holding his breath until they passed.
"You've kept us waiting a long time," they heard Pemberton's voice echoing off the walls.
"This is an old W25 warhead," a quiet voice responded; Wendy instantly recognized it as Chandler. "It's supposed to be detonated with a charge in the missile. That's hard to replicate with a jerry-rigged..."
"Well, that's why we asked for your help," Pemberton interrupted.
"Your people told me that it was an old atom bomb," Chandler snapped. "This is a warhead. I'm not a nuclear scientist, but those are two entirely different things. And this particular design, if you had done any research or actually, you know, talked to your DOD buddies who gifted you this damn thing, you'd know it has a sealed pit which insulates the material from fire or external explosion. I'd either need a missile detonator or some kind of drill to get into it and make it work. Or maybe like 1,000 tons of TNT."
There was a silence. Wendy and Dipper leaned forward as far as they could without attracting attention, wincing as they heard of the gunmen on the catwalk cough.
"So, are you saying you can't get it to work?" Pemberton asked, menace creeping into his voice.
"What I'm saying is that it's not just as simple as sticking a pencil detonator or whatever shit your people gave me into the bomb and making it blow up!" He said it with more volume and anger than Wendy had ever heard him speak.
Wendy managed to peer around the door, just high enough to see Pemberton's body above the shoulders. As Wendy watched, he grabbed Chandler and smacked him in frustration.
"GODDAMMIT!" Pemberton rasped. "You degenerate Bolshevik son of a bitch! We keep you alive to help achieve the Reckoning and this is how you repay us!?"
"You should have consulted me in the first place," Chandler insisted, pushing himself away from the Congressman. "I'd have helped you fashion some kind of portable device, or at least a conventional explosive with contaminated material, which as you'll recall was our plan. But you clever, clever gentlemen had to play sixty layers of deniability and keep us in the dark until the last minute, at least until you decide to show up and shoot our friend in the fucking head. So I don't want hear it from you, you goddamned reactionary creep."
Pemberton smacked the bomb maker again, so hard the echoed thundered around the room. Wendy ducked back out of sight as the guard tromped past.
"You'll find a way, boy," Pemberton said. "You'd better find a way."
"You and your goddamned doomsday," Chandler said. Wendy looked again and saw two men grab him and drag him off. "You guys aren't only insane, you're fucking STUPID!"
Pemberton waited until he was out of sight, then ambled over to his desk and smashed his fist into it repeatedly. "DAMMIT!" he shouted, before tossing his telephone across the room.
"Umm...what just happened?" Dipper asked.
"I dunno, Dip," Wendy said, sitting down and fiddling with her hair. "It kinda sounds like these guys...shat the bed on their own. So, like, they picked the wrong kind of bomb and they can't get it to explode."
"So wait a minute," Dipper asked, feeling dizzy and confused. "Then...Wendy, I don't get it. What happened in this alternate timeline? Why are we here? Why do we need to change anything?"
"Beats me," she shrugged. "Maybe something else we did along the way already stopped it. Somethin' that Blendin missed. Maybe the Gleefuls weren't supposed to kidnap this dude, maybe the FBI guy wasn't supposed to get blown up last night. Maybe it was one of those...man, I don't know how to explain it. Like, maybe the ripple effects of Charlotte and Rick dying were enough to mess things up."
Dipper sunk down the floor, rubbing his injured head and sighing in frustration. Then he got to his feet and started pacing and rambling.
"Man...this has been an awful twenty-four hours for all four of us, and it meant...nothing. At least, nothing we consciously did made a difference. Nothing we knew about had any impact. It was random. It all meant..."
"...Jack shit," Wendy finished for him. The two looked at each other and allowed themselves a quiet chuckle.
"Maybe," Dipper said. "Or maybe whatever really caused the explosion hasn't happened yet. There must be something we're missing..."
Then, as if in answer, they heard an electronic sound from down below. Wendy peaked again and saw...an elevator lowering itself into the room? Man, wouldn't that have come in handy earlier.
The elevator opened and Wendy, to her surprise, saw a familiar figure step out. It was Becky, in the same outfit she'd been wearing the previous day. Only now, it appeared, splashed with blood. She held a pistol in one hand and something else Wendy couldn't make out in the other.
"ALL RIGHT, YOU CRAZY-ASS MOTHERFUCKERS!" she shouted, aiming her weapon at Pemberton's head. "I've had it with you and your goddamn reactionary Church of Creeps and Crackers. This is a People's Liberation Vanguard operation now. Everyone puts your hands up or I'll blow your buddy's brains out."
Wendy leaned a little further out, saw the guards on the catwalk aiming the guns at Becky, then holding themselves back. Wendy popped back into the room with Dipper.
"One of your friends?" Dipper guessed. Wendy rolled her eyes, then grabbed her ax and gestured for Dipper to move behind her.
After a moment, she darted out onto the catwalk. Knocked out one of the gunmen with the flat of her ax, causing his machine gun to drop to the ground below. She kneecapped the second as Dipper moved and snatched his weapon away, then pushed the guard aside at ax point, forcing him to stumble backwards down a ladder. The first man's gun clattered against the floor, attracting everyone's attention. Including Becky's, whose face dropped in shock as she recognized her comrade.
"'Sup?" Wendy said, smiling cockily, with Dipper nervously training the gun down on Becky and the cultists.
Then Wendy got a closer look at the objects in Becky's hands. One was a small pistol, as Wendy expected. The other, once Wendy realized what it was, made her smile vanish in a stab of terror.
A detonator.