Nightmare's Edge

by Bryan Davis

  “C’mon,” Daryl said as she scooped up her shoes. “Let’s get out of the cold.”

  Keeping his stare fixed on Mictar as he slinked away, Nathan felt for the mirror and picked it up. It was better not to focus on Daryl. Her thermal underwear covered her modestly enough, but he wasn’t sure he could keep from laughing. “You’re right. Let’s go.”

  He offered Kelly his elbow. As she curled her arm around his, he looked her in the eye. “Thanks. You saved me again.”

  Kelly gave him a tired smile. “Amber said you saved me first.”

  “Well . . .” He paused, searching for the right words. “You’re worth it.”

  Her bottom lip trembled. She seemed ready to say something, but Daryl barked, “Cut the schmaltz! I’m freezing!”

  While Daryl hopped on her socked feet, pulling up one foot at a time to slip on her sneakers, Nathan hustled to the door and pulled the handle. It wouldn’t budge. “It’s locked!”

  Daryl moaned. “Are you telling me I have to parade around to the front of the building in my long johns?”

  Nathan punched a couple of strings of numbers into the nearby pad, but the lock didn’t make a sound. “I don’t think we have a choice.”

  She stooped and tied a shoe. “Well, I’m not exactly a modest maiden, but . . .” She looked up, tugging the material on her leg. “Why didn’t I wear my camo thermals? At least I wouldn’t look like a girly girl.”

  Suppressing a grin, Nathan held out his hand. “C’mon. If we hurry, we’ll be back inside in no time.”

  After pulling upright, Daryl glanced at Kelly, then, smiling, kissed Nathan on the cheek. “Thanks for rescuing me.”

  Warmth surged through his ears. “No problem. I just wish we could’ve hung on to the codes.”

  “Oh, we have the codes.” Daryl began marching toward the side of the building. “The problem is that he has them, too.”

  Nathan and Kelly caught up and matched Daryl’s quick pace stride for stride. “What do you mean?”

  Daryl tapped the side of her head. “I memorized them, both the card and the page.”

  “You did?” Kelly said. “That’s amazing!”

  “Yeah.” Daryl tossed her head back in mock conceit. “I am pretty amazing.”

  Pushing up a slight incline, the trio followed a gravel-covered path that led around the observatory’s circular building. A few seconds later, they approached a footbridge that spanned a deep ditch leading to a pipeline protruding from the lab’s basement. As they crossed it, a memory flowed into Nathan’s mind — driving a Camry across this bridge in another world while Kelly literally rode shotgun.

  He smiled at her. She smiled back. Obviously they were on the same wavelength. As they continued walking, he looked at her out of the corner of his eye. The shoulder of her sweatshirt again showed a dark splotch, blood from her wound. And with her eyes sure to go bad again when, or if, they ever returned home, she had suffered much more than he had. His hands would heal, but would she ever get her eyesight back?

  She looked at him. “What are you thinking?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I’m not a mind reader,” she said.

  “Could’ve fooled me. You’re always probing my brain.”

  “Not really. If I could always read your mind, I wouldn’t have so many questions.”

  “Questions?” He arched his brow. “Like what?”

  “Questions I really can’t ask. I mean . . .” She shook her head and looked away. “I’m sorry. I can’t explain right now.”

  Firming his lips, he nodded. “I think I understand. Maybe I can answer the questions without being asked.”

  She looked at him hopefully. “When?”

  “Soon.” With another nod, he added, “As soon as possible.”

  15

  VIEW OF A KILLING

  When they neared a tall tree, stripped of leaves for the winter, Nathan ran ahead and crouched behind its forked trunk, peering through the gap. With the parking lot and the lab’s front portico in view at the bottom of a grassy slope, he scanned the path leading to the entry. He caught a glimpse of Gunther’s van as it zoomed from the lot. Then, back at the building, someone hurried out the door holding a cell phone to his ear.

  As the girls joined him, Nathan whispered, “Is that who I think it is?”

  Daryl pressed close to his side and squinted. “Solomon Yellow?”

  “That’s what I thought. Maybe he’s running to his car to get first aid or something.”

  “Not for me,” Kelly said as she huddled with them. “I just fainted because I couldn’t breathe. I was okay after that.”

  “How about the others?” he asked. “Did you see them?”

  She nodded. “Tony showed up with Molly, and they took Francesca and the babies out. They said it was getting too dangerous for the little ones.”

  “So,” Nathan said, “they must have called Gunther to come and get them. I just saw them leave.”

  “Tony seemed real nervous. He said something about Flash staying behind to help with the equipment, and he looked really annoyed.”

  Nathan rolled his eyes. Solomon Red wouldn’t leave Francesca under such dangerous conditions, especially in a room by herself where Mictar could attack her in her sleep. This version of Flash was getting on his nerves.

  He laid a hand on each girl’s shoulder. “Come on. Let’s try to catch him before he gets out of the parking lot. We’ll find out what’s going on.”

  “The way I’m dressed?” Daryl shook her head. “No way, buster. I only show my long johns to close friends.”

  Nathan looked at her, trying to keep his focus on her green eyes and frazzled red hair. He couldn’t leave her by herself or even with Kelly, not with Mictar possibly looking for someone to reenergize him. He stole a quick glance at her long johns.

  He wanted to match her quips but everything he came up with was just too lame. Finally, he huffed, a little harder than he intended. “Okay, we’ll wait till he’s gone.”

  As they continued watching, Solomon jumped into his old Volkswagen, started its noisy engine, and puttered out of the parking lot. With a screech of the tires, he buzzed away.

  “Coast is clear,” Nathan said.

  They hurried down the slope and stopped on a walkway that ran under a portico from the parking lot to the front door. Nathan listened to the Volkswagen’s motor fade in the distance. Apparently, Solomon Yellow hadn’t seen them.

  As a cold breeze buffeted their bodies, Daryl bounced in place. “Let’s go! I’m freezing my bunnies off!”

  Still carrying the mirror, Nathan jogged to the front door and held it open for the girls.

  Once inside the warm lobby, Daryl stopped, her teeth chattering. “So, after Tony and company left, where did Amber go?”

  “I don’t know,” Kelly said. “She told me to stay in that room, then she took off.”

  Nathan raised a finger. “I say we visit the telescope room. That was the center of activity. Whatever happened, happened there.”

  After a final shiver, Daryl narrowed her eyes. “Yeah. Come to think of it, isn’t it strange that none of those brave men charged outside to help us?”

  “Good point. Courage is kind of hard to find in these parts.”

  “Don’t dis Tony,” Kelly said. “He was probably torn between protecting us and protecting those babies.”

  “Another good point.” Nathan nodded toward a stairway. “The telescope room, but quietly.”

  Daryl shivered again. “As they say in Star Wars, ‘I have a bad feeling about this.’ ”

  Nathan tucked the mirror under his arm and led the way up three flights of stairs. When they reached a closed door at the landing, he peeked out the small, eye-level window. “No one in sight,” he whispered.

  As he slowly opened the door, it let out a slight squeak. He cringed, but he couldn’t stop now. He pushed himself through the expanding gap, then waited for Daryl and Kelly to squeeze through.

  He look
ed down the curved corridor. The entry to the telescope room wasn’t in sight, but it had to be only twenty or so steps away. He handed Kelly the mirror and used sign language again to spell out “Watch from door. Wait for signal.”

  He waited for their nods, then skulked toward the door, glad to see it come into sight after only a few steps. He glanced back to check on Kelly and Daryl. They tiptoed behind him without a sound.

  When he reached the door, he turned the knob and peeked in through the smallest of cracks. Inside, the lights had been dimmed, so opening the door any further would brighten the inner room, giving away his presence.

  Daryl ran to a bank of switches and turned off the hallway lights. When she returned, she whispered in his ear, so close, her breath moistened his skin. “Don’t leave us here long. Remember my phobia.”

  He grasped her hand and pulled it into Kelly’s. He signed “Trust me” in her palm but, in the darkness, he couldn’t tell if she understood.

  Again pulling the door just enough to slide through, Nathan squeezed into the room. Ahead, the floor was clear; the big telescope was still in its hideaway under the floor.

  Walking on the balls of his feet, he headed straight for the computer desk where a solitary man sat staring at a screen. Shorter than most men and wearing ovular glasses, he looked like one of the Dr. Simons, probably the younger of the two.

  Nathan crept closer, watching for any sign that Dr. Simon had seen him. It would be perfect if he could just read the screen, figure out what was going on, and then get out without anyone knowing he had been there. But would he show up in the screen’s reflection? Would Simon notice?

  Holding his breath, he took a step, but his shoe slid in something wet. He lifted his foot, eased to a crouch, and touched the dark puddle. Pulling his finger close, he studied the splotch on his finger. Could it be blood?

  Jumping up, he lunged toward Dr. Simon and grabbed his chair. The scientist’s glasses slid down his nose, revealing a bullet hole between his closed eyes. The desk lamp highlighted his face, pale and unmoving.

  Nathan swallowed hard and began to shake. He backed away and looked from side to side. Who could have done this? Was he still around? And where were the others — Simon Blue and Gordon Yellow? Were they safe?

  Again he gazed at the limp body, now a perforated shell. Simon Yellow had devoted his career to stopping catastrophes in his world, saving the lives of people who had perished on Earths Red and Blue, and now he had been repaid with a bullet.

  Nathan averted his eyes. He couldn’t stand to look at that face any longer. With nausea churning his stomach, he might vomit at any second.

  He turned toward the door. He couldn’t call Kelly and Daryl. Without knowing who might be watching from the darkness, it was too dangerous. But who would figure out what happened? Maybe Daryl could check all the computer settings and see what was going on when —

  “Hello?”

  He jerked toward the voice. It came from the computer.

  Still queasy, he tiptoed around the puddle and searched for a microphone, but none of the dozens of pieces of equipment resembled one. Clearing his throat as quietly as possible, he whispered, “Someone call me?”

  No one answered. The computer’s hard disk whirred, and several meter readings, both numerical and graphical, pulsed with constant change. As he leaned closer to try again, a speaker let out a sputter, then a voice.

  “This is Dr. Gordon of Earth Red. Is that you, Nathan?” A quiet static interrupted the transmission but quickly died away. The voice seemed mechanical, but it still sounded like Dr. Gordon.

  “Yes. This is Nathan Red. Your speech is normal speed. Are the two worlds traveling through time at the same rate now?”

  Again, a long pause ensued. As he waited, he drummed his fingers quietly on the desk. Finally, after almost a minute, the speakers came alive again.

  “No. The computers are buffering our transmissions and replaying them at the right speeds. Since I’m much slower, you have to wait to hear me, so after this I will make my communications as short as possible, perhaps even terse.”

  Nathan scanned the readouts on the computer screen until he found a loudness meter, a vertical line that bounced slightly with the fluctuations in static. Above the meter, a graphical switch was set to digital instead of analog. “Dr. Gordon, Simon Yellow has been shot. He’s dead. Were you listening in? Do you know who did this or where he went? Do you know where the other Simon is, or the other Gordon?”

  Making sure to avoid looking at Simon Yellow, Nathan sat on the desk and watched the meter rise and fall. When it stopped moving, a horizontal white bar appeared beside it and quickly filled with blue from left to right, obviously the translation procedure Dr. Simon had mentioned earlier when talking about the IWART devices.

  When the blue struck the right-hand side of the bar, it disappeared, and the speakers clicked on. “I heard male voices, then a female voice, then a gunshot. Silence after that.”

  “Solomon Yellow left in a hurry,” Nathan said, “but he didn’t have a gun, at least not one I could see.”

  The voice meter rose and fell several times, then the buffer bar reappeared, filling with blue a little faster this time.

  “You think your father’s double is a murderer?” Dr. Gordon asked. “That doesn’t seem likely.”

  “Your double helped Mictar kill quite a few people, didn’t he?”

  This time, the delay was much shorter.

  “Touché.”

  Nathan shook his head. This conversation was taking too long, and they really weren’t getting anywhere. “I’ll be back in a minute. I have to do something.” Avoiding a direct look at the body, Nathan crossed Dr. Simon’s arms over his chest and rolled him and his chair near the wall. He found a panel of switches and turned them on, flooding the room with light. Daryl and Kelly hustled in, Kelly with the mirror in hand.

  “Someone murdered Simon Yellow,” Nathan said.

  Kelly covered her mouth. “That’s awful!”

  “Ewww!” Daryl lifted her foot, grimacing at the blood dripping from her shoe. “A messy murder, too.”

  “Yeah. I pushed his body out of the way, ’cause it’s really gruesome. Dr. Gordon’s on the audio link, but he doesn’t know who did it or who went where, so I thought maybe Daryl could check the computer to see if she can find some kind of log.”

  “I’m on it.” Daryl rolled up another chair and pecked at the keyboard. “Dr. Gordon? You listening?”

  After a few seconds, his mechanically altered voice snapped on. “I am here, Daryl.”

  She huffed. “Stupid translator. He sounds more like R2-D2 than Dr. Gordon.” As she slid her finger across the touchpad, she scanned the screen. “Would the data log be in the system maintenance directory?”

  The voice meter lifted again. After a few seconds, Daryl clicked on something with her mouse, apparently halting Dr. Gordon’s transmission. “Never mind,” she said, “I found it.” Her eyes shifted back and forth for a few seconds. “It’s too complicated. I’m going to run the stream through demo mode and see what happened.”

  “What’s demo mode?” Nathan asked.

  Her fingers flew along the keys. “If the recorders captured all the images, the system will use the mirror to display everything that took place here, and the monitor will show me every command that anyone entered through the computer. But since it’s demo mode, it won’t actually create portals or zap anyone to another world.”

  After tapping a final key, she slid her finger down the touch-pad, dimming the overhead lights. She rolled the chair back from the desk until she could easily look back and forth between the screen and the ceiling. “Okay, let’s see what she does.”

  The mirror above flashed once, darkened for a few seconds, then displayed the telescope room. Dr. Gordon Yellow and one of the Simons stood next to the computer while the other Simon sat in one of the rolling chairs with his elbow on the desk. Gordon seemed to be shouting, apparently angry, while Solomon stood with
his arms crossed, staring at him with a stern expression.

  “Can you turn on sound?” Nathan asked. “Looks like an argument.”

  “Let’s see. It’s a little different here.” Daryl searched the screen, moving her finger around on the touchpad. “What’s this gizmo?”

  As soon as she tapped on the pad, the mirror flashed again. The hologram lights shot multicolored beams into the room, but this time, instead of focusing on a central cylinder, they covered one end of the floor to the other. Images appeared — Simon Yellow sitting in his chair, Gordon Yellow and Simon Blue standing next to Solomon Yellow. All four seemed to be physically present in the room, though Simon Yellow’s chair fizzled in and out, proving that the computers had limited their reproductions to the main players’ immediate surroundings.

  Nathan passed his hand through Solomon Yellow’s body. He was nothing more than a realistic ghost.

  “Got the sound,” Daryl said. “Here goes.”

  The speakers erupted with Dr. Gordon’s shouted voice. “So you just sent them without consulting me? I wanted to see that place, maybe even go there. At least give me the secret to why ‘The Moonlight Sonata’ doesn’t work, even on the piano.”

  Solomon tightened his crossed arms. “Patar’s instructions were clear. Only he and the Red Shepherds were allowed to go, and no one may follow.”

  “He’s a stalker!” Dr. Gordon’s face blazed scarlet. “Those fiends have been terrorizing our world for years, and now we have a chance to strike. Next you’ll be siding with Mictar himself!”

  “I am no ally of Mictar.” Solomon’s jaw quivered, but he kept his cool. “Patar told me his evil twin is near. We’d do better to stop fighting and get ready.”

  “Ready?” Gordon slid out a desk drawer and withdrew a revolver. “I have this ready for any stalker.” He paused and glared at Solomon. “Or any stalker’s friend.”

  Simon Blue touched Gordon’s shoulder. “Please, if you will just — ”

  With a quick elbow thrust, Gordon knocked Simon Blue to the floor. “I am finished with you so-called scientists who want to sit around and wait for your salvation concert to begin.” As his finger slid over the trigger, his face flushed again. “Interfinity will collapse the cosmos in days, not weeks or months. If you’d just tell me how to open the portal, we could send the Navy Seals into the stalkers’ world and clear them out. We can’t hope that three musicians will somehow enchant the powers that be by sawing their fiddles at random points that we don’t even know yet.”