The Third Message novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: Nine-Forty

At nine-thirty on March fourteenth, half of Ridgemont's geology department stood in the lobby of the science building, watching a screen.

The screen showed the east slope from a camera the geotechnical team had bolted to a pole.

Yellow tape. A chain-link fence. Nobody on the road below.

I stood beside Miles with my cane against my knee.

Burke stood three feet to my right with his arms at his sides.

He had not spoken since I walked in.

The dean of sciences stood behind us in a long coat.

I knew that coat. I had seen it at a podium in the rain, in another life, with a phone in the dean's hand.

"Nine-thirty-eight," the chair said quietly.

Nobody spoke.

I held on to Miles's sleeve.

At nine-forty, the face of the slope let go.

It did not crack.

It slid all at once, a gray tongue of earth and rock rolling down across the empty road.

The sound came through the speakers in a long, grinding roar.

Someone near the front screamed and put a hand over her mouth.

The slide stopped. Dust drifted across the fence.

Nobody had been standing there.

Burke sat down on the floor of the lobby, hard, with his back against the wall.

His glasses had slid down his nose.

"That's where I would have been," he said, to no one. "The cut. I'd have been right there with a hammer."

I did not say anything.

The dean looked down at the screen and then at me, with a long, strange look I could not read.

Then the radio on a security officer's belt crackled.

"We have a subject at the memorial garden," a voice said. "Female. She's digging."

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