The Multitude

by J M Fraser

  “No,” a woman said. “We told you—”

  “Silence!” She didn’t know where the power in her voice came from. Her cry stilled everyone in the cage.

  The pregnant woman jumped down and started to run, but in the wrong direction. Maynya caught her by the arm. “Are you able to climb a tree?”

  “Y-yes.”

  “Hurry into the woods, find a tall one, and stay hidden until nightfall. Then go home. Is that understood?”

  The woman nodded.

  “You must latch me into this cage first.” She climbed into the makeshift prison and pulled the gate closed. “We’ll be eight again.”

  PART III: THE RAPTURE

  CHAPTER 23

  Virtus, nearing his destination

  The great desert’s scrubby nothingness gave way to an increasing number of shacks and lean-tos. Quintus Laskaris had gotten within a few miles of the capital at last. But the end of his journey did little to lift his spirits.

  He dismounted beside a stream. While his horse took water, he pulled Adala’s sketch pad from his pack and gazed at the beautiful stranger who teased him with vague longing every time he examined the drawing. Who was she? Why did the striking image evoke a reaction?

  He set the pad aside and regarded the simple clay vessel Adala had been killed for. He’d been grinding his teeth all day over this. The poor woman had nothing of value in her pack when the thieving bastard Gaius took her life.

  What a kingdom his brother ruled! Yet the nation across the western border was little better. The inventors of an amazing machine, a locomotive, practiced slavery, killed innocents in the arena, and slaughtered prisoners captured in battle, just as those in Virtus did. And the Mystics to the east? He’d heard tales of this tribe’s complicity in the capture of their own women to be sold as brides in Virtus, not to mention their branding of witches.

  Oh, to find a people as noble as the pilgrims he’d met three years earlier! Worshipers of the one true God, disciples of a girl who never aged. Perhaps one day he’d cut across the border to Sanctimonia and track this Gabriella down. If she’d share with him the secrets for tolerance, kindness, and peace, he’d abandon his station in life and devote his final years to a higher purpose.

  Quintus looked down at his feet. Who was he kidding? Gabriella would find him wanting. God would, as well. He could have protected Adala, but he hadn’t.

  He dipped the pitcher into the rushing brook and brought it to his lips. Gritty desert water filled his mouth.

  Unsanctified.

  So unlike Adala’s wine.

  * * *

  Brewster shifted up and glanced around the bedroom. A tall oak dresser stood in exactly the right place, a foot from his window, across from his closet, and all in his Northbrook home. He sagged back down against his pillow.

  If Carla had driven to Northbrook to change his past, something would be different by now. She’d be sleeping at his side. Loneliness wouldn’t be sucking the oxygen out of the room.

  Two days had passed since their amazing meeting in the snowy wilds of Upstate New York. Had the cosmic merry-go-round stopped spinning for good?

  No way. Either she’d visit him or he’d be whisked back to her again, and soon. To believe otherwise would be to believe an ordinary suburban existence complete with too much house, an unfulfilling job, and an unsuccessful stab at a writing career was all fate had in store for him. That couldn’t possibly be the destiny of a man linked to a woman as extraordinary as Carla or teased by a ponytailed imp who could twist time and space like a pretzel.

  So…despite the pang of separation and the still unanswered questions about dangers looming at subway stations, the Virtus frontier, Sanctimonia, or wherever a puppet master might send either one of them next, he dragged himself out of bed to give life another shot.

  A wonderfully hot shower breathed buoyancy into his soul. Afterward, he emailed Heather to let her know he’d be coming to work late. That way, he could take his time with breakfast, maybe enjoy a walk around the neighborhood, and perhaps finish off with a pilgrimage to the very spot in the street where he first met the woman of his dreams.

  After a round of bacon and eggs, Brewster headed out of the house and down the block. The weather had turned colder, reminding him of the icy wind he’d endured hundreds of miles away and a year earlier. Or two days ago, depending on how he looked at it. Falling leaves paint-gunned the lawns in a variety of autumn colors. He caught a whiff of burning brush, a seasonal fragrance saying trick or treat. And so did the decorative pumpkins on streetlamps and stencils of witches and goblins in a few windows. Someone had even constructed a pirate ship and manned it with skeletons. Halloween loomed in the near future.

  Or did it? He rounded the corner and came upon a house already decorated for Christmas. The sharp change in weather worried him. He couldn’t be sure whether he’d just finished touring a pre-Halloween neighborhood or one not fully dehaunted during the limbo of time stretching from that holiday to the big one. He didn’t even know the proper year.

  With Gabriella and her wormholes always lurking, Brewster couldn’t simply assume anymore which page of the calendar or even which calendar he might have stumbled into. As he neared his house again, the dizzying sense of disorientation compelled him to seek reassurance, and fast. He snuck onto a neighbor’s porch and stole a quick peek at a newspaper waiting on the welcome mat. Whew. No less authority than the Chicago Tribune verified he was fine—right where and when he was supposed to be.

  He glanced up at his own porch a few houses down. A policeman flanked by two other guys stood at his doorstep. Brewster swallowed. Maybe he wasn’t as fine as he’d been thinking.

  Trespassing didn’t seem a good strategy anymore, so Brewster left the house he didn’t own and ambled over to the one he did, sizing up his three visitors along the way.

  The cop was the same freckle-faced, starry-eyed young man who’d issued a warning several days earlier when Brewster cheated around a corner despite the no-turn-on-red sign in clear view on a lamppost. The friendly kid seemed like he’d just graduated from the local police academy and probably hadn’t seen any real action yet. Grizzled veterans, like the crew-cut, stony-eyed men now flanking this kid—plainclothes cops for sure—never gave warnings when a ticket would do. Not in his experience, anyway.

  Tough as they seemed in some respects, those other two men could have won a Laurel and Hardy look-alike contest. The one on the left was shorter than average, red-faced, and about fifty pounds overweight. His thinner and taller pal on the right seemed to be favoring his side. The poor guy moved his hand to the appendix area and grimaced, first while chatting with his companions and then when all three of them trained their sights on the time-traveling clown they’d apparently come to see.

  Brewster climbed his porch. The three cops shifted over to make room for him.

  “Hey.” He tried sounding nonchalant, but the presence of police on his doorstep burned his cheeks, even though he hadn’t done anything wrong.

  “Brewster DeLay?” the local cop asked.

  “That’s me.”

  “I’m Officer Fred Burton of the Northbrook Police. These two gentlemen have flown in from New York City to ask some questions about an accident out their way.” He motioned to the short, heavy guy. “This is Detective Ethan Jones.” Then he nodded toward the slim, wounded soldier on his other side. “And this is Detective Samuel Barnes.”

  Brewster shook hands all around. He didn’t have a clue about any accidents, but his mouth had gotten twitchy over the news that two detectives had traveled all the way across the country to give him the evil eye. Could he come across any guiltier?

  The nearest neighbors damned him, too, and why wouldn’t they, what with the police on his porch and all? Emily Saunders, a gray-haired retiree living on the other side of the cul-de-sac, rushed out of her garage with rake in hand, no doubt foraging for gossip fodder. She made an unconvincing show of clearing the leaves from the perfect vantage point in
her lawn to stare at his porch. Another neighbor watched from a few doors down, until Brewster turned in that direction and the man ducked inside. Didn’t these people have a life?

  The wind gusted. The thin cop tightened his jacket.

  Brewster leapt at the opportunity to get his embarrassing guests out of view. He grabbed a ring of keys out of his pocket and fumbled one into the door lock. “Come on inside where it’s warm, fellas.”

  * * *

  Brewster offered coffee, but all three men declined, so he steered them away from the kitchen and into the living room. They grabbed the couch—fat cop, rookie cop, thin cop lined up in a row of solemn faces and probing eyes—leaving him to sit in a chair in front of them like a kid dragged into the principal’s office. Only worse. These were cops staring him down, not Sister Mary Josephine. He tried not to fidget, racked his brain for a reason he’d attracted the attention of the NYPD, came up with the city’s status as a well-known target of terrorism, and settled on a conclusion that set his knee bouncing.

  Crestview Finance loaned money to truckers, and a big rig could haul a huge bomb. His staff was supposed to use various loan application screening techniques to weed out identity thieves and other lowlifes, especially the dangerous ones whose names popped up on watch lists. He hoped to hell his team had been following the protocol. Still, even if a terrorist had slipped through the screen and financed a truck with Crestview, Brewster hadn’t heard about an attack in the recent past. Also, the FBI would have come, not the police, and they would have tracked him down at his office, not his home. Wouldn’t they?

  The Northbrook cop spoke first. “Mister DeLay, I’m just going to fade into the background and let these other two gentlemen talk.” He’d already done a pretty good job of that, having sunk into the cushions in the middle of the couch between the out-of-town heavies. The poor kid didn’t have any room for his elbows and knees.

  “What’s this all about?” Brewster tried to control a knee threatening to twitch again.

  “We’re looking into an accident from a while ago,” the bigger cop said. His glare left no doubt whose fault the accident might be.

  “This is probably no big deal,” the guy’s gaunt pal added, apparently assuming the good-cop role.

  “An accident?” Brewster cursed the tremor in his voice. He reminded himself he couldn’t possibly have caused an accident a thousand miles away. But these two New Yorkers had damned intimidating stares.

  The bad cop leaned forward and scowled. “Let’s cut to the chase.”

  “Okay.”

  “Were you in New York City last year?”

  Whew. This had to be a case of mistaken identity. “I haven’t been east of the Skyway in ages.”

  “The Skyway?”

  “A bridge. It goes from Chicago to Indiana.”

  “And you haven’t gone east of there.”

  The big cop’s expression had disbelief written all over it, but these guys had the wrong man. Brewster’s twitchy knee steadied. “Look, I run a company that finances trucks. I used to travel east for dealer visits, but times are tough and—”

  “Pulaski, New York. It’s right on the inscription.” The skinny cop couldn’t keep his hands to himself. He’d found Carla’s snow-globe on the coffee table—the one she’d hoped Brewster would carry home through a wormhole.

  And he had.

  The cop had turned it over, base up. “This has a date from last year stamped right on it. Are you sure you haven’t been out east lately?”

  Brewster gripped the arms of his chair. Having three cops barge in on him and insinuate his involvement in an accident was one thing, but picking his stuff up, especially that particular item, crossed the line from annoyance to outright violation.

  A measure of anger also stemmed from the embarrassing realization he’d been caught in a lie, although he hadn’t intended to tell one. His mind-boggling trip to Tug Hill seemed in retrospect to have little connection with any real time or space. He might as well have gone to the moon, and he hadn’t made the connection he’d actually traveled east when asked the question. Brewster looked the cop in the eye—Barnes or whomever. “A friend gave that to me. Would you mind setting it down and telling me what the hell you guys want?”

  All three of them kept their calm. The good-cop-turned-bad returned the globe to the coffee table, the Northbrook cop stayed squished in the middle, and the bad-cop-still-fat spoke up. “Look—”

  Barnes cut his partner off with a wave of his hand, then turned to Brewster. He flashed an easy smile, leaping onto the good-cop saddle again. “Can I call you Brewster?”

  “Whatever.”

  “Brewster, we can clear this whole matter up in the blink of an eye. We’re investigating an accident that occurred on October twenty-third of last year, in New York City. If you can provide proof you weren’t there at the time, we’ll apologize for bothering you and be on our way.”

  “Or I could ask you to get out and come back with a warrant.” Whatever tremor Brewster had heard in his voice before was now replaced by the steely tone of an insulted man. He reached for the cell phone in his pocket. “Who’s your boss?”

  The Northbrook cop sprang to life, clasping his hands over his pressed-together knees and leaning forward. “Yes, you could ask us to leave, and we do understand your right to do that.” The second those words escaped his lips, Laurel and Hardy turned to glare at him from either side with a silent but obvious speak only when spoken to instruction.

  Enough of this nonsense. Brewster went ahead and pulled out his phone, opened the calendar, and scrolled backwards twelve months. An office appointment on the date in question would chase all three bozos back to their circus.

  He hit pay dirt. October twenty-third of the previous year happened to fall on a Saturday. He’d been on a weekend trip out of town that day—a trip supported by all kinds of documentation and proof, from travel itineraries to hotel registers to… He fought the urge to taunt the cops with a victory dance but couldn’t keep from busting into a wide grin. “I met with an agent that day, in Seattle.”

  “An agent?” the bad cop asked.

  “Yeah, I was at a writers’ conference, and I met with a woman to pitch a book I’ve been working on.”

  “I thought you financed trucks.”

  These cops were really getting on his nerves. “Don’t you have any hobbies? Now do you want to hear this or not?”

  All three men fished little notebooks out of their pockets and flipped them open.

  He provided the details of his trip, scrolling through old emails and notes to come up with names, addresses, phone numbers…the whole nine yards. The cops seemed friendlier after that—even the fat one—and Brewster stifled the urge to pump his fist or do anything else that might win a yellow flag for taunting, having lifted the burden of false accusation from his shoulders. When he finished divulging all pertinent information, he waited for the three intruders to say something in apology and leave.

  The Northbrook cop actually did start getting up, but the gaunt one stopped him by settling a hand on his shoulder. The heavy cop spoke again. “You’re probably wondering what this is all about, huh?”

  “Well, I—”

  “And our apologies for barging in on you like this,” his partner cut in, embracing the role of good cop with gusto.

  The willingness of two New York detectives to tell a story he probably had no business hearing stirred Brewster’s suspicions, and even brought the hint of a twitch back to the surface. He’d been watching old Colombo reruns on TV lately while on the treadmill at the health club. Peter Falk always closed in for the kill by pretending to leave and then stopping mid-stride to turn back. “Oh, one more thing.”

  But Brewster was an innocent man, a guy with an alibi, and someone sufficiently relieved to act magnanimous. Not to mention a man now burning with curiosity. “I’ve got to admit you guys have me wondering why you strayed so far out of town over an accident. Are you sure you don’t want some coffee
?”

  The body language of all three men said they might.

  “I picked up a blueberry pie at the grocery on the way home from work yesterday,” he added.

  * * *

  The four of them sat at the kitchen table. The kid from the Northbrook PD faced Brewster, and the two New York cops flanked him on either side. Brewster dug into his pie and listened to the heavy one, Jonesy, bitch about how accidents and suicides that got reclassified as homicides a whole frigging year later were a royal pain in the ass, because the evidence at the scene gets totally obliterated and even the forensic stuff scooped up by the cops before the stomping feet come along can get lost or mishandled or tainted. “You don’t wanna know how often that OJ Simpson stuff happens.” And the witnesses get on with their lives, unable to remember a goddamn thing anymore.

  “What sort of accident was it?” Brewster asked when a pause in the man’s diatribe gave him a chance to work in a question.

  The cop rolled over him and kept on going, but his rant became more focused. “If that ain’t bad enough, here’s a case dumped in our laps because of a couple goddamn dreams.”

  Dreams? The taste of pie went flat in Brewster’s mouth. He stopped chewing and listened up.

  “The operator had a blackout just before it happened. Train almost jumped the station.”

  “It did stop, but a little too late,” Barnes, the thin cop, chimed in.

  “Ain’t that a bitch?” Jonesy said. “At the time, the operator claimed this woman was standing alone out there, but he checks in with a different story last week and says he remembers it better, because he just had a dream about it.”

  “Slow down,” the Northbrook cop said. He caught Brewster’s eye. “We’re not following you.”

  Jonesy ignored him and plowed on. “Then some chick who’d been on a train heading the opposite direction, and who’d made herself scarce after the thing went down, comes into the precinct house three days ago and says she glanced out her window when it happened. She saw a man standing with the victim, too. Wanna guess why she came in?”