Seize the Night

the eye couldn't quite seize upon the outline of it.
    Bobby whispered, “Sasha, your light. Here.” She directed it where he pointed, at the floor.
    The light gleamed off one of the inch-thick steel angle plates anchored to the concrete, where heavy machinery had once been mounted.
    These prickled up from the floor at many points in the room.
    I didn't understand why Bobby had called our attention to this unremarkable object.
    “Clean,” he said.
    Then I understood. When we had been here last night in fact, on every occasion that I had passed through this hangar, these angle plates and the bolts holding them down had been smeared with grease and caked with dirt. This one was shiny, clean, as though someone had recently done maintenance on it.
    Holding the cat in one arm, Roosevelt moved his light across the floor, up the steel post, across the tracks above us.
    “ Everything's cleaner,” Doogie murmured, and he meant not since last night but just since we had entered the hangar.
    Though I'd taken my hand off the post, I knew the vibrations in the steel had increased, because I could hear that faint ringing coming from the entire double colonnade that flanked us and from the tracks that the columns supported.
    I looked toward the far, dark end of the building, and I swore that something immense was moving in the gloom.
    “Bro!” Bobby said.
    I glanced at him.
    He was gaping at his wristwatch.
    I checked mine and saw the digital readouts racing backward.
    Sudden fear, like cold rain, washed through me.
    A strange muddy red light rose throughout the hangar, evenly distributed, with no apparent source, as if the very molecules of the air had become radiant. Perhaps it was a dangerous light to an XPER like me, but this seemed the least of my troubles at the moment. The red air shimmered, and though the darkness retreated across the entire building, visibility hardly improved. This odd light cloaked as much as it revealed, and I felt almost as if I were underwater, in a drowned world … in water tinted with blood.
    The flashlight beams were no longer effective. The light that they produced seemed to be trapped behind the lenses, pooling there, rapidly growing brighter and brighter, but unable to pass beyond the glass and penetrate the red air.
    Here and there beyond the colonnades, dark forms began to quiver into existence where there had been nothing but bare floor.
    Machines of some kind. They looked real and yet not real, like objects in a mirage.
    Phantom machines at the moment … but becoming real.
    The vibrations were getting louder, and their tone was changing, growing deeper, more ominous. A rumbling.
    At the west end of the room, where there had been a troubling darkness, there was now a crane atop the tracks, and hanging from the boom was a massive … something . An engine, perhaps.
    Though I could see the shape of the crane in the dire red light, as well as the object that it was lifting, I could also see through them, as if they were made of glass.
    In the low rumbling that had grown out of the faint high-pitched ringing in the steel, I recognized the sound of train wheels, steel wheels revolving, grinding along steel tracks.
    The crane would have steel wheels. Guide wheels up above the track, stop wheels below to lock it to the rails.
    “… out of the way,” Bobby said, and when I looked at him, he was moving, as if in slo-mo, out from beneath the tracks, sliding around a support post with his back pressed to it.
    Roosevelt, as wide-eyed as the cat he held, was on the move.
    The crane was more solid than it had been a moment ago, less transparent. The big engine—or whatever the crane was transporting—hung from the end of the boom, below the tracks, this payload was the size of a compact car, and it was going to sweep through the space where we were standing as the crane rolled past overhead.
    And here it came, moving faster than such a massive piece of equipment could possibly move, because it wasn't really physically coming toward us, rather, I think that time was running backward to the moment when we and this equipment would be occupying the same space at the same instant. Hell, it didn't matter whether it was the crane moving or time moving, because either way the effect would be the same: Two bodies can't occupy the same place at the same time. If they tried, either there would be a fierce release of nuclear energy in a blast heard at least as far away as Cleveland, or one of the