“She’s defected,” Hauser says.
“That’s impossible,” Andrews says. “I spoke to the Director this morning. She’s busy training with Agent Rom.”
So, for them, this is happening before the Paris mission, I think.
“This defection is in Agent Gardner’s future.” Hauser says, echoing my own thoughts. “That changes things.”
“I think you’re right,” Andrews responds. “Let’s keep an eye on our own Agent Gardner. Maybe transfer her to the Los Angeles Station. I had a feeling discovering the Interlopers’ base would come at a cost. This must be it.”
“And what do we do if they return?” Hauser asks.
“We engage,” Andrews says. “But we try and capture them. Especially Gardner.”
Hauser stands and turns, searching the room. Is he looking for me? I duck back down behind the fallen palm tree. I hear Hauser say something into his radio, but he’s walking away now and his voice is too distant to make out.
I lean back against the tree trunk. Is Molly really one of these bad guys? I struggle to remember the finer points of Ellis’s notes. The ISD. The Order of the Perpetual Dawn. The Elementalists. Molly had joined with the Elementalists, hadn’t she? Did the ISD lump them in with the Order? It wouldn’t surprise me. A troubling thought pushes through my confusion. What if some or part of Ellis’s notes had been wrong? What if Molly really was with the Order? Was I wrong to try and escape from the ISD? They had saved my life, after all.
No.
I’m on Molly’s side regardless of what side she has chosen to be on.
There’s a flash of light, and the tunnel appears again. This time, it appears in front of me, just above the fallen palm tree. I glance around the room, waiting for the onslaught of bullets. But it doesn’t come. Molly stands in the shimmering light, flanked by the blonde man and Quincy.
“James,” she says, and my hear lurches.
Molly holds out a hand, palm up. She wants me to come with her. I rise to my feet and take a step forward.
“Do you have it?” Molly asks.
I freeze, immediately understanding what she is asking for. The flash drive. My mind scrambles to make sense of everything. I had thought after my interrogation from Andrews that the flash drive was a tracker like the rings, and the tooth that had been ripped from my mouth. What were they called? Magnets. If so, did that make me some kind of bait? But why then would Molly be asking for it? No… The flash drive must actually contain something they desperately need to keep safe, just as I’d been told so many years ago. Whatever the reason, that flash drive had brought me to Ellis, had sent me to the Vandermeers, and had eventually brought me here, to her… I decide in this moment that it doesn’t matter what is on that drive or why, only that she gets it back.
Meeting her gaze, I reach into my pocket and take out the drive. At that same moment, something presses against my side. I look down to see the muzzle of Hauser’s rifle against my ribs.
“Let him go!” Molly says.
“Him for the drive,” Hauser growls.
“How about you let him walk over here with the drive and we let you all live,” Molly responds.
That’s my wife? I think. And then laughter bubbles up inside of me, because of course it. This is the Molly I’ve always known.
“What the hell are you laughing at?” Hauser growls.
This is probably that kind of moment where an action star would respond with the perfect quip—there are plenty of those lines in Ellis’s film Time Patrol. Too bad life isn’t scripted for me. Instead, I do the first thing that pops into my head.
“Catch!” I shout, and I toss the drive. The blonde man reaches his hand into the air to catch it, and as he does I feel the gun shift from my side.
“Look out!” I yell.
Muzzle flashes light up the room on all sides. There’s a burst of light behind me and a second tunnel appears. The black woman lobs something into the air out of the tunnel and toward the open gate. A grenade. There’s a boom, and one of the large palm trees falls over, collapsing in front of me and throwing up a cloud of dust. Bullets strafe across the domed glass behind Molly, moving toward her. A bullet strikes the blonde man in the shoulder and he drops the flash drive. Molly dives out of the way, just as the gate blinks out of existence, leaving her on this side of it.
“Get that flash drive!” Andrews yells.
Molly leans down to pick up the drive, but looks up as a man steps out of the dust a few paces in front of me, training a gun on her. It’s Hauser. The man who stole my wife from me is about to take her from me again. Does she know he’s there? It doesn’t matter. There’s no time. I leap up, sprinting toward Hauser, and grab his arm, pulling it aside just as the gun goes off.
The two of us fall to the ground. I look up, searching for Molly, just as something incredible happens.
Light wraps around her. Not a tunnel, but something else. She leaps, disappearing into the light as it closes around her a moment later. And in that same moment, another gate opens near the roof of the dome, and Molly flies through it, mid-leap, firing in the air. Another flash and she’s gone. And then she reappears again as a third gate opens up behind me. Molly falls to the ground in a roll, tucking the gun in her holster, and snatching the flash drive from the ground.
Hauser’s gun falls to the ground and I bend, snatching it up. I look up to see Molly, standing just a few feet away and holding her hand out toward me.
“James…” she says, her voice trembling.
Behind her, I see Colonel Andrews stands, advancing on Molly, his gun trained on her.
This time I’m certain that she doesn’t know he's there.
I tighten my grip on Hauser’s gun.
Could I even kill Andrews? He was still supposed to build that lab under the Cedar Springs Dam. The dam that would kill Vance on the same night Ellis had been able to see Molly sent safely into the future… to me. But I don’t care, because in this moment he is trying to kill my wife, and for that he will die.
I pull the trigger.
Click.
And nothing happens.
I pull it again and again. And each time I’m only met with more empty clicks.
Am I out of bullets, or is it jammed?
Something bright and hot cuts through my shoulder. I look down to see Hauser, lying on the ground with Downing’s gun aimed right at me. I become aware of Molly shouting my name. Through the smoke and muzzle flashes I see Colonel Andrews, several soldiers behind him, running toward me.
I step back, swinging my gun toward Hauser.
Another shot rips through my side.
I pull the trigger again, and this time it fires. Hauser’s jaw disintegrates in a cloud of blood and bone, and I drop my gun.
I take a stumbling step backward, falling toward the ground. But as I fall, a warm light surrounds me, seeming to envelop me. I glance up to see the curve of a gate behind me. It pulls at me, drawing me in with its magnetic force.
“James!” Molly screams again.
“Go!” I shout to her.
Reality swims around me. The light pools over me, subsuming my vision. Through the light I can see Molly, running toward me, arms outstretched. But her image fades just as the apartment—my old apartment—comes into view. Superimposed over my apartment is the still-fading scene of the domed pool with Molly running toward me. The soldier that had been firing at the control panel for the gate, now realizing that his job was never finished, turns back and fires again. This time the console erupts in a shower of sparks. Molly turns back and sees the approaching soldiers. She takes one last look at me, then crouches down and disappears in a flash of light. A moment later, the console explodes in a shower of sparks. Reality seems to flicker. The shouts in the room fade, becoming whispers.
And I remember the whispers in my old apartment, and the ghosts that had haunted me in those weeks of grief after what I thought had been Molly’s death, though I know now that the whispers had always been in that buil
ding, and that I had simply never noticed them before those weeks of grief, and now, as time stretches around me and the image of the apartment spins, and contorts, and people stream past, a parade of visitors from year after year, I know that I was always here in this apartment, watching, calling, calling, calling out to Molly, whispering and waiting—but there’s a flicker, and the light around me dims, and I am screaming against the darkness, and begging for it to stay, because this isn’t what happened when I went through the tunnel in the airplane, this isn’t what happened at all, and images of my wife are streaming past, but the world keeps dimming, and the darkness is spreading inward, closer closer closer until
the light is gone and all
sound is gone
and I am
gone
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About the Author
Brian J. Walton is an author and screenwriter who lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two sons. THE RECURSION EVENT SAGA is his first series.
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Incursion: Book Three of the Recursion Event Saga
Copyright © 2018 by Brian J. Walton
All rights reserved.
First Edition – January 15, 2018
Proofread by Grace Hansen
Camton House Publishing
Incursion: Book Three of The Recursion Event Saga Page 19
