–:–:– — / 0:03:19 BVST
I put my head on the table and cried. The screams from the back were a wave of background music accompanying me.
“Scott, have you seen the engineer?”
Maguire’s voice jerked me back into the room.
I rubbed my eyes and mentally replayed his question, demanding it to make sense. My brain refused to cooperate.
The engineer? He must be in the control center or one of the bedrooms.
I stood up and surveyed the crowd. The engineer was a bit taller than average, with a shock of unruly, red hair atop his head. I didn’t see him.
Okay, Maguire, try to follow me here, please.
“Did you check the control room?”
“He’s not there.”
What a moron.
What about the kitchen, the bathrooms, the bedrooms?”
“I checked all of them. He’s not in any of them.”
We rotated our heads to face the stage and thought.
“No way,” we said in unison.
“He’s too squeamish,” Maguire said.
“Fatima was in charge of all of that,” I said, fluttering my fingers at the closed curtains.
I turned away from the stage.
Where is he?
I thought about it.
“Did you check under the tables?” I said, laughing.
“He’s not under any of them.”
It took me a second to sync with Maguire. I’d made a joke, and he thought I was seriously suggesting that the engineer might be under one of the dining tables.
Something else has gone wrong. I need a break here!
So, Maguire asked me if I knew where the engineer was even after he checked all the places he could be.
I’d always considered him a few sandwiches shy of a picnic lunch.
You’re forgetting about the stage and its menagerie of machines.
I wasn’t as sensitive to blood as he was, but I had no desire to stroll on the stage. Not now, not after what happened earlier.
When Maguire entered the control room, a bedroom, or bathroom, the engineer was stepping out of one of the others, perhaps a room Maguire had already cleared.
“Walk with me,” I said, tossing my chin towards the front.
We walked to the stage door, entered, and cleared the whole stage and back area as quickly as possible. Fatima helped us, but by the time we left here there, she was looking as anxious as us.
“God that place gives me the creeps,” Maguire said, shutting the door behind us.
He hasn’t worked out the ramifications of our early start.
We cleared the four bedrooms and two bathrooms on the east wall, one by one. One of us stood close to the door and kept an eye on the rest of the ballroom. We crossed the ballroom and repeated our search through the bedrooms, bathrooms, and bar on that side. The engineer had vanished.
“Just the control room left,” Maguire said, swiveling his head all about, frantic for the return of our savior.
We entered the control room. I was always disappointed anytime I went in there. For a command-and-control center of an entire, ballroom-shaped universe, it felt like it should be a bit grander. It was a narrow room with consoles running the full length of the room. There were four workstations: two on the left side, two on the right. The two on the left side were dedicated to security cameras and the music that we played. Massive hard disks meant we had the entire music catalog of all of Earth’s music when we left. Of the two on the right side, one was dedicated to controlling the EMP pulse generators and the ion canons – the stuff that allowed us to create a bubble verse around the hardened shelter that was the ballroom. The other one was for recipes. Again, we downloaded everything before waving bye to Mother Earth.
My mood plummeted yet again. That shouldn’t have been possible, not at that point, not after the early shift and premature firing of the EMPs.
Oh, and losing the love of my life. Let’s not forget that!
The bubbleverse was the engineer’s creation. He was, in a way, both our savior and our pilot. And he was nowhere to be found.
I thought briefly about the incinerators.
Fatima would’ve seen him, would’ve said something.
The engineer wasn’t the type to do that. Plus, why would he?
“Let’s check the video,” I said.
“Dude, we checked everything. What’s video footage going to show us?”
“Not the internal cameras.”
I saw him work out what I was suggesting. Like I said, not the brightest billionaire I’d met. Not that intelligence was correlated with wealth potential; my two years in constructing the ballroom had shown me that. Big time.
Maguire’s eyes went wide.
“You think he cut out? Earlier, I mean. Before,” he said, flicking his fingers towards the rest of the ballroom, towards the stage.
“That’s exactly what I’m thinking.”
“Well, looks like we have our first deserter,” Maguire said.
I thought again about Tina and choked down the need to puke or cry.
We’ve searched the entire facility and seen no sign of the engineer or the woman I planned on proposing to that very night.
We stepped to the video surveillance workstation, but that was when the shot rang out.
(to be continued…)
Stories by Shawn 