Interversal

9

Alex wasn't sure how long it had been since she left CERN, had no working clock or even a passing moon to track time by. It may well have been hours, a feeling compounded by the various searing injuries she'd garnered back in the control center.

The path to the airport took her down a long split roadway called D35 that, according to the map, led directly to her destination. It would have been a cinch except the road was so cluttered with mangled vehicles that she'd had to weave on and off the road to make her path.

The carnage on the road was in many ways worse than inside the control center. There were wrecks of all kinds, everywhere. Cars flipped over, smashed head-on into one another, and more bodies than she'd been able to count.

Though most of the fires had long gone out, she could still feel the heat they left behind as she snaked her way down the roadway. The whole thing felt so wrong, nightmarish, right down to the dead birds she passed every now and then.

She would have left the bike were it not for her arm and leg. It was slow going but far less painful to ride than it had been to walk. Still, her wheels constantly got stuck as she tried to slip between the wreckage. When she had to leave the road altogether it meant navigating the soft, dewy grass, on tires meant for tarmac. More than once she almost lost control or tipped over on the imbalanced handlebars.

It was against this frustrating, horrific current that Alex made her way, stopping now and again to call out for survivors or inspect a crash. Eventually though she had to stop checking, when she realized a simple truth that had been staring her in the face since she came to; there just weren't any survivors.

Naturally, she wondered why she was the only one, if it had something to do with where she was standing. Had something blocked her from whatever killed so many others?

She reasoned that eventually, help would come. It may take awhile, but they would show up at some point, the medical personnel and National Guard troops, or whatever the European version of that was.

That's why her sole impulse was to get to the airport; it was the perfect staging area for a massive rescue operation.

She turned off D35 onto a side road that would take her the rest of the way. At first it showed many fewer signs of catastrophe, but soon proved even less passable than the highway, with cars stacked two and three high. The mess eventually got so thick she couldn't get through at all and was forced to ride far off it in the grass.

The reason for the pileup became clear after 20 minutes off-roading brought her to the French-Swiss border crossing that separated the airport from her current location. She'd have to leave the bike if she wanted to get through it, which meant a painful walk.

Passing through the maw of smashed cars, she only had to climb over one hood and duck beneath the remains of a mechanical gate before she was back on airport soil. Through it, she turned right onto Route Alexandre Liwentaal following a road sign that read "Genève Aéroport".

It was not the airport's primary entrance. Ahead she saw what looked like a private hangar and judging by its squat shape and proximity to a small parking lot, she guessed this was where charter and private planes operated from.

Until now her view of the airport had been obscured by tall trees that flanked the roadway. From her current vantage point she could clearly see the red-orange glow of a fire casting light onto a hangar beyond the squat building. Passing a stand of trees to her left allowed her to see across the airfield, where her eyes were met with carnage of a new kind.

She stopped to take in the scene, which was dominated by the tail of a large airliner, maybe a 737, jutting unnaturally from the top of a building. The area was well lit by flames from numerous fires, casting the destruction in flickering shadow. Where she expected to see windows on the terminals there was dark, the glass blown out by an explosion, orange light reflecting off the jagged remains.

Scanning the horizon, she looked for the source of the blast, but couldn't see anything obvious.

Alex glumly trod on, her heart sinking as the reality of the situation eked even into her. Tears rolled down her face, then a few quiet sobs. the sheer gravity was terrifying, horrific in every sense. And now the emotional toll was sapping what little energy she had left. She needed rest, time to process, answers to the hundreds of questions that were racing through her mind. She was so alone out here, without even the sound of crickets to accompany lend something familiar, just the sound of the cane hitting the pavement and her foot dragging painfully behind.

In the private hangar parking lot there were a number of expensive looking cars that probably belonged to the kind of people who could afford to charter a private jet. Down on the far end was another vehicle, an old Peugeot that was hardly showing its age, but wasn't the kind of classic car people tended to collect.

Alex recognized it from an automotive auction she'd seen on TV. The exact same model. It struck her at the time because of its odd shape. Standing in front of it just then, Alex had that same feeling.

There was something else about it; the driver-side door was ajar, and it was empty.

She limped to it, tossed the bag into the passenger seat and as gently as she could lowered herself into the driver's side. The seat was like heaven, and for a moment she just sat there letting her body relax. In seconds she was asleep.