“Damn it,” she said, her voice tight with tension. “I need coffee.” Skid started walking down Baltimore Avenue.
4
Sunlight didn’t willingly shine through the dusty front windows of Dan’s Daylight Donuts as much as it showed up for work because it had to. Dan sold them coffee and crullers in the shadowy shop interior and came from behind the counter later to top off their cups with mediocre coffee. He took no special notice of Brick; the big man just another customer.
“Dan and I don’t get along,” Brick said.
Skid’s eyes followed Dan as he walked behind the counter to fish out two jelly doughnuts for a new customer, his face all smiles. “I don’t think he knows you.”
Brick sipped his coffee from a Styrofoam cup. “No, he doesn’t. But whatever dimension we’re in, he still makes shitty coffee.”
Dave had calmed somewhat. He took a long, probably uncomfortably hot drink of his coffee and sat the cup down next to his cruller. “I can’t get over those Klingons back there.”
Skid took a bite of the doughnut. Bits of sugar glaze broke off and fell onto her napkin. “We need to focus. You said we need to turn off this BAB thing, right?”
Dave rested an elbow on the table and rubbed his temple. “Yeah. It’s going to be difficult. It’s a government facility, so there’s security everywhere.”
“But you have a key?” Brick pointed his half-eaten cruller at Dave, who reached a hand into his shirt and pulled out a key card on a lanyard.
Brick brushed off the bits of glaze. He wanted to know if that exact key card on that exact lanyard, the one the other Dave gave him in front of Tammy’s Tanning Oasis, was still in his pocket. His fingers grazed the metal lanyard hook and hard plastic underneath.
“This will get us in,” Dave said. “But—” He bit off a quarter of his doughnut and chased it with coffee.
“But?” Skid asked.
“But,” he said. “I’m not exactly stable, am I? I keep popping in and out. Here.” He tossed the key toward Skid. She didn’t move. It slapped against the table. “You were supposed to catch that.”
“Can we get in without you?”
He nodded. “Normally no. No chance in hell, but now, maybe. The lab is the launching portal of the Miller Waves. Things are probably more messed up there than anywhere else. We may see soldiers with machine guns or we may see sunflowers, and if we see soldiers, we just wait for the Miller Wave that turns them into sunflowers. I don’t know. It’s just—”
Dave shoved more fried, sugary dough into his mouth as Dan made his way to their table with a coffee pot.
“Anyone need more coffee?” he asked, a smile still on his face.
Skid motioned toward hers and he topped it off.
“Say,” Dan said, nodding toward Brick’s backpack on the floor next to the table. “You going camping?”
Brick didn’t look at him. “No. It’s a standard explorer’s pack with a bedroll, mess kit, tinderbox, ten torches, ten days of simple rations, a full water skin and fifty feet of hempen rope.”
Skid buried her face in her hand.
Dan stood next to Brick for a moment, rocking back and forth from his heels to the balls of his feet. “Weh-ell,” he said, his laugh forced. “Good luck with that.” He turned and took coffee to the next table.
Skid slapped Brick’s arm, the back of her hand striking a bicep like a rock. “A full water skin and fifty feet of hempen rope? Seriously? Where does anyone get that?”
He hefted the backpack and bedroll. “It’s standard equipment for Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition.”
She opened her mouth to say something, then closed it. Then opened it again and closed it.
“We’re getting off track.” Dave waved at Dan and motioned toward his empty napkin. Dan grinned and moved toward the counter for more doughnuts. “If everything’s normal, I’m going in myself, but in case I don’t make it there—” He plucked the key card and lanyard from the table and tossed it toward Skid again. This time she caught it. “—you have to get into the lab and complete the mission.”
Skid didn’t look at the key card; she shoved it into her pocket. “Mission? Mission? Is this—”
Brick’s hand fell on Skid’s arm, and her eyes went to his. “Yes. It’s a mission, Skid. It’s an adventure, it’s a dungeon, it’s a campaign.”
“Are there going to be dragons?” she asked, her voice not nearly as sarcastic as she’d planned.
“I freaking hope so.” Brick handed Dave the Sharpie from Cord’s fridge across his sugar flake-covered napkin. “Draw the map,” Brick said, with the excited voice of a fourteen-year-old. “Draw the goddamned map.”
The layout of Lemaître Labs seemed simple enough. It was a long low building set 100 yards off a rural highway south of Belton and west of Peculiar. Skid called BS on the name of the small town but dragged out her phone and Googled it. Peculiar, Missouri, population 4,979 as of the last census.
“That’s so odd.” Skid started to slide the phone back into her pocket but stopped and typed in ‘Sanderson Murder House.’
“And that’s even before the BAB-C went online,” Dave said. “I used to go to Johnny’s American Tavern there for lunch once a week. The pork tenderloin’s worth it. Wing night’s not too shabby either.”
Skid ignored him while she texted the murder house phoneline. We’re at Dan’s Daylight Donuts. Be here. She set the phone on the table.
Brick’s finger traced a dotted line Dave had drawn a good distance around the building. “What’s this?”
“This,” Dave said, “is the three-and-a-half meter-tall perimeter fence. It is 11-gauge chain link, the links 3.8 centimeters square with a top guard strung with 12-guage barbed wire. A security camera is stationed every six meters. There are roving patrol guards inside the fence that are always visible to one another.”
Skid set aside her phone. Sitting back in her chair, she gripped her coffee cup in both hands. “If this building’s so well protected, why’s the fence so far away from it?”
“Explosives,” Dave said. “There’s a 60-meter buffer zone between the fence and the building in case someone tosses a bomb.”
“That building’s not the lab.” Brick rocked back and forth in his chair. The energy wasn’t from coffee. His nerd level had spiked. “Where’s the lab?”
Dave moved Skid’s napkin in front of him and started to draw. “You’re right. The surface structure is reception, a conference room, human resources, accounting and a warehouse accessible only through Area 51-level security in the back. Now this—” He pressed the Sharpie to the napkin and drew a much larger structure. “—is underground. We have three layers. The first holds offices and a cafeteria.”
“I thought you said you went out for lunch?”
Dave shrugged at Skid. “I didn’t say the cafeteria was any good.” He sectioned off the level. “Here’s my office, Karl Miller’s office, the offices of three other physicists, conference room and lunchroom. If Miller’s still there, he will give us trouble.”
“Will he be armed?” Brick asked.
“I don’t know,” Dave said. “Maybe. He angers quickly and this is his baby. Now—” He took Brick’s napkin, unfolded it, and drew on both halves. “The second level is engineering labs and the infirmary. A lot of sensitive stuff happens in engineering, so it can be locked up tight. You probably won’t have to go there, so don’t sweat it. However—” He made an X in the hallway down from Human Resources. “These are elevators. If the elevator in the hall is disabled, no way you’ll get to the one in engineering. It goes to a section sealed off from the rest of the lab with one exit—into the Bridge. You’ll have to use the stairs.” He marked the stairwell entrance with an O. “But you probably don’t want to do that.”
Skid leaned toward the table to get a better look at the map. “Why not?”
Dave twisted the Sharpie in his fingers. “S
ecurity. If the complex is compromised, one switch shuts down the elevators forcing unwanted elements to take the stairs. Once the invaders are in the stairwell, another switch locks the doors and floods the three-story chamber with chlorobenzylidene malononitrile—tear gas.”
“What’s that do?” Brick asked through the last of his cruller.
“Best case scenario: you cough a lot. Worst case: you die vomiting blood.”
“You government types don’t mess around.” Skid tapped the clean section of napkin. “What’s left?”
The Sharpie scraped across the napkin to create a shape the same as the second floor. “We’re getting closer to the BAB-C. It’s three more stories below the second floor, but nothing’s in that space but concrete. Enough concrete to withstand a MOAB.”
“Wha—” Skid started.
“Mother of all bombs. I told you the government likes acronyms.” He started sketching again. “The MOAB is the biggest explosive shy of an atomic bomb.”
“Your BOBBIT is that important?” Skid asked.
Dave looked at her for a second before he spoke. “We conduct experiments that can tear the fabric of time and space. Yeah. It’s that important. The Bridge is in the center of the collider, which itself is in a twenty-seven-kilometer-long circular tunnel 170 meters underneath the entire town of Peculiar and then some.”
“Holy shit,” Skid whispered.
“What I don’t understand,” Brick said, “is why you’d want to tear the fabric of time and space in the first place. I mean, don’t you guys watch movies? This never ends well.”
Daylight Dan stopped at the table with a tray of crullers, a basket of doughnut holes, and a stack of napkins. He winked at Skid. “The holes are on me,” he said.
“Thank you.” She grinned at the round, balding man as he walked to attend another table, and Brick wondered why she’d never smiled when she went to Manic Muffins.
Her phone chirped; she keyed in a few more words and sat it back down. Brick and Dave stared at her.
“It was Cord. He said he wasn’t coming.”
“And?” Brick asked.
“And I told him if he didn’t, I’d travel back before he was born and kill his parents.”
“Would you?” Brick asked, the words of Not-Dave echoing in his head. He picked up another cruller.
“I’m skilled in self-defense,” Skid said, meeting his gaze, her eyes soft. “I’m no killer.”
Brick took a bite of doughnut and chewed through a thought. No one knew he’d met Dave. Another Dave. He opened his mouth to speak—
Dave coughed, dragging their attention back to him. “The BAB-C,” he continued, “is behind heavily fortified blast doors that you can get into with the card key. Once you get to this floor—” He drew an X by the elevator and O by the stairs and made arrows to a door. “—go to this room. It’s the Bridge. It’ll look like the command room of the Death Star.” He pulled napkins from the tray and drew a board with lights and switches. “This is the master key, it’s on the far-left portion of the board; right next to it is a big red button. Turn the key and mash the button.”
Skid glared at Dave, who shifted a little in his seat. “And the machine will, what? Just turn off? What’s going to happen when we hit the red button?”
The table fell silent, the murmur of other conversations seeping in. “Well,” Dave said, “best case scenario—”
Skid slapped her hand on the table and the rest of the shop fell silent. She looked around at the faces staring back at her and mouthed “sorry.”
“Please stop saying that,” she said to Dave. “Just tell us what happens when we push the button.”
The physicist stretched a hand to the back of his neck and rubbed, his face clenched in verbal constipation.
“One of two things. First—and this would be awesome—the power goes off and everything’s back to normal.” He paused and leaned forward on his elbows. “Second—and this is the sinker—hit that button and whomever is on that floor will probably be sucked into the hole in the universe they just created.”
“Is there a third option?” Skid asked.
Dave took a long drink of his mediocre coffee and set the empty Styrofoam cup on the table. The bell over the door chimed, but no one at the table seemed to notice.
“Yes,” he said. “We could choose to do nothing, allow Karl Miller’s experiment to run its course and watch everything we’ve ever known and loved disappear and reappear again and again and again.”
They were still sitting there in silence at Dave’s words when the chair next to Skid pulled away from the table and Cord dropped into it. He grabbed a doughnut hole and pointed it at Skid.
“You,” he said, taking a bite, “are a charmer. What did I miss?”
5
The darkness was complete. David woke on a cold, hard floor, his body beaten and ragged as an old sock. Am I dead? The words pushed from the deep recesses of his mind before consciousness pulled it back. David was in too much pain to be dead. Besides, he had to go to the bathroom. If he were dead, nature would have taken care of that for him. The small room smelled awful, a combination of ammonia and rot. He thought the rot might be him.
The ambulance had been so close to the farmhouse. The flashing lights of the emergency vehicle and sheriff’s department Crown Vic had bathed the yard in reds and blues. The Miller Wave came next, engulfing the scene David watched from the kitchen window. He was the only one there who saw it; then the wave swept him away.
“Where am I?” he said. His voice, rough as a smoker’s, shrank the room he was in considerably. David started to reach out a hand to feel around him when something moved outside the darkness.
A skittering, quiet at first, grew louder as something outside approached what David could only assume was a door. The footsteps clicked and shuffled as they grew closer, like tap dancers that couldn’t decide between a shuffle and ball change. David laid his hands flat and pushed himself backward, away from the sound. His elbow hit a mop bucket, the impact sloshing dirty water onto the floor. It soaked into his pants, but he didn’t notice.
“Cree?”
The sound from outside the door almost sounded like a rusty hinge, but it didn’t come from anything mechanical; it came from something alive.
“Cree? Krrkrrrkrrrkrrrk, cree?”
David’s bladder went, the warm urine mixing with the dirty mop water on the floor. Oh shit. It’s talking to me.
The handle clicked and the door swung open a crack, the bright white light of a bright white room stabbed into the darkness. Then the door opened wide and David screamed. A bright green praying mantis filled the doorway. David screamed again.
The monster hissed and skittered backward, bumping against a hospital bed in the lab’s infirmary.
David tried to push himself further into the wall, but couldn’t because, well, physics. The insect, at least six feet tall, picked itself off the bed and rubbed its triangular head with the backs of its hooked front legs, smoothing out its antenna. Then it straightened its clean, white lab coat.
“Cree? Krrkrrrkrrrkrrrk, cree?” it said again, stepping cautiously closer.
David’s bowels threatened to go next.
“Cree?
The monster’s jagged feet clicked on the tiles. A nametag pinned to its coat read Chet. David’s heartbeat began to slow, his breath deepened.
“Dr. Hahn?”
Then a memory, a brief mention, filled David’s head. Oh, shit. This is what they warned me about.
His scream was deafening.
6
“No. Nope. Not happening.” Cord walked on the outside of the sidewalk as they made their way back to the Sanderson Murder House. Because if anyone was going to get hit by a car, he hoped it would be him. “This is dangerous, this is not well thought out, this is illegal and it’s—it’s—did I say it’s dangerous?” He shoved his hands in his pockets
in case someone wanted to grab one. “I get why you’re doing it, Skid. You’re a control freak and all this ooga-booga stuff has made you uncomfortable. Or, or maybe it’s a family issue.”
Skid ignored him.
“Okay, maybe not.” He turned to Brick, taking in his explorer’s pack. “But you, your business is gone, your girlfriend is gone, and you hope this is all over by the time you get finished camping.” Brick started to say something but didn’t. “No. That’s all wrong.” Cord pointed at Dave. “You smell like rotting fish sandwiches from All-National Burger and—hey, why are you wearing my yard shoes?”
“You don’t understand,” Skid said, her eyes never leaving the sidewalk before her. Cord’s house was half a block away.
“But me? I have something to lose,” Cord continued. “Whatever this BAB thing is, it’s caused my business to explode. The past two nights I’ve run tours, I made $1,400 a night. That’s high-end stripper money. I feel like Bill Gates with a better haircut. But this? This is insane.” He pulled his hands from his pockets and waved them around his head. “You people actually think it’s a good idea to try and break into a heavily-guarded secret government facility? Fine. I’ll read about your trial in the paper.”
Brick stepped in front of everyone and stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. He turned around and loomed over Cord.
“You’re part of this,” he said, his voice too gentle for a man that big and hairy. “You went to 1984 and profited, you profited from the murder of a wife, a son and their dog. Even though you did nothing to start the destruction of multiple universes, if you do nothing now, you’re as complicit as those who caused it.” He leaned toward Dave and whispered, “No offense.”
A frown creased Cord’s normally smile-afflicted face. “That is a dick move,” he said. “I’ve prided myself on a clean police record, my life post-car salesman is close to making me feel as cool as I felt in high school, and Tamara Hooper’s already paid for tonight while her hot vampire boyfriend is too scared to come. But overall, what you’re suggesting we do might not get us arrested. We may be shot first. We can’t do this. I wish someone would listen to me.”
So You Had to Build a Time Machine Page 14
