The Push Chronicles (Book 3): Incorruptible

by J. B. Garner

  Reaper, for his part, seemed to be in heaven, despite the blood running down from his nose.

  "Yes, yes, come on, you little idiots," he roared. "Let's have some fun! You can't stop me, not this time."

  Mind's Eye replied by dropping a chunk of concrete on Reaper's head, followed by a concentrated blast of cold from Ex's hands as he spiraled down towards the murder scene. It was a momentary distraction, but it let me get my head back in the game, at least enough to assess our position while Quentin and I moved in on Reaper's side.

  I didn't see most of the Crusaders among the standing, though from the constantly swirling breeze I had to assume Twister was somewhere. It would be smart of me to not count on Tank or Polymer, at least not until I had gotten an update over the com. Alma was still in her prison, if Reaper was to be believed, and he had no reason to lie. He would have gladly claimed another victim.

  Epic, well, I didn't see him and, as far as I knew, he was still lying in his bed of rubble. Part of me wanted to break away, to get him on his feet and try to bring back at least the godlike asshole we had before on our side at the Battle of Washington. A far larger part of me wanted to get my hands on Reaper and snap his neck, murder be damned.

  Voltage crashed down as a literal lightning bolt, coursing down Reaper's form with minimal effect, just before Quentin and I hit him. I went high, hoping to get my hands on his meaty neck, while Quentin went low to take him off-balance before he starting flying again. At worst, if he took off or teleported, I would be going with him.

  Initially, it seemed like a good plan as we both plowed into him, pushing through Reaper's shell and impacting squarely with poor Gerald inside. The puzzle finally solved in my head as Reaper staggered a step but recovered instantly.

  I had hurt Reaper before through Schuller just as I usually breached most Pushed with super toughness. That was still possible but the real trick was Gerald Schuller wasn't unconscious but he wasn't quite awake either. Up close to his head like this, I could see through Reaper's red orbs the half-lidded ones on Gerald's face. With the rapid eye flutters and moving lips, he was in some sort of semi-conscious stupor and that was the source of the problem.

  Gerald was awake enough for Reaper to manifest himself but dead to sensation. I could only assume it was yet another brilliant military idea. Maybe they had some fail-safe in place that would put Gerald fully under and blink Reaper out of existence. Fat lot of good it would do us though in the here and now.

  The end result was that Quentin and I could break that body, but no real pain transferred from that drugged form to the outer shell of Reaper. Because at the heart of that thing was an innocent man, our morality was a deterrent. Even if we were willing to take that final step, our very natures would fight us the whole way, making us hesitant and sloppy. In a way, Reaper was like a far more dangerous form of the vampires we had fought before. At least those were corpses we could fight with disregard.

  Before I could secure a grip around Reaper's neck or Quentin could take him off his feet, Reaper laughed and spun once in place, though I doubt anyone but I or Quentin noticed at the speed he whirled. I couldn't hold on; I didn't have the reflexes to react. The pure acceleration of his spinning body threw us both off him like deadweight. I hit the exterior wall hard and flat on my back, falling into a heap on the floor. All the wind was knocked out of me and my body refused to respond to my commands. A moment of fear made me wonder if the impact had broken my back outright, but no, it was just the shock of the hit.

  The effect was the same though. I was a sitting duck as I weakly tried to move. The coms were filled with so much cross-talk I thought I would go deaf, but the salient fact I pulled out was that Reaper was about to smash me like a bug.

  "Away for her, blackguard, knave, foul beast!" The challenge was punctuated by a series of rapid-fire twangs as Archer's crossbow fired repeatedly, seemingly without end. I looked up to see the almost comical site of Reaper collecting bolts in his side and back like a pincushion. The wounds were bloodless, having only barely penetrated Reaper's shell, but the fact they penetrated at all seemed to enrage the monster, who spun towards the source of his annoyance.

  "Very well, little man, you've earned my attention," Reaper said as he floated with deliberate slowness at the brave bowman, standing motionless on the edge of the stairs between floors, the only motion being the mechanical loading and firing of his crossbow. "Want to die like a hero? I can help you with that."

  My lungs started to work but my arms and legs were still rubber. As Reaper was about to pounce, I got to my feet, only for my knees to waver, sending me staggering once more against the wall. I wanted to close my eyes, but I couldn't turn away. Archer, well, he didn't back down. Points for effort as he aimed what would probably be his last arrow right for Reaper's head.

  Hexagon intervened, like a six-armed guardian angel. I didn't see where he had leaped from, but the result was the important thing, crashing down like a jackhammer between the two. Reaper actually seemed a bit surprised. Hex, though, was pure fury.

  "No one else!" He punctuated that with a shattering punch, followed immediately by another. And another. And another. Then two more, just for good measure. Each blow was punctuated by a sharp retort as tremendous power met invulnerable flesh. Reaper staggered back from the machine-gun onslaught.

  "Never again!" Hex seemed to collect himself as he shouted and unleashed one last blow, striking with all six fists nearly simultaneously. The shockwave from the unnatural crash almost deafened me, louder than any explosion or gunfire I had ever heard before. Reaper flew back as if shot out of a cannon and shattered through the remains of one interior wall to come to rest cratered in one of the exterior walls.

  I seemed to be coming back to myself, ignoring the damage reports my nervous system was trying to warn me about, though that last peal of thunder had sent my inner ear for a loop. As I tried to keep my balance through the ringing in my ears, the entire world seemed to be bleaching out and things started to move in slow motion.

  From above, Twister finally came back into view, but he wasn't alone, carrying a confused but living Alma Gutierrez in his arms. The crystalline woman seemed no worse for the wear and, to my surprise, Epic was back up, alongside him. There was some of that lost light in Eric's eyes. Had seeing another murder at Reaper's hands stoked some fire in him? I couldn't be sure.

  The thing was that Epic, Twister, everyone and everything I saw was moving in slow motion now. So was I, even if my brain seemed to be going at full speed. This wasn't Epic's doing, like before. Something else was going on.

  Slower and slower. Like a film run at quarter speed, Extinguisher called out something I couldn't understand through the slurring of sound. Alma stood on her feet and nodded some assent. I tried to move but I was just as slowed as everyone else, if not more so. The thing was that they didn't seem to notice.

  Even slower. Epic and Voltage both turned to Alma and unleashed all of their energetic fury into the faceted woman. Even the energy they unleashed seemed sluggish as it lurched through the air, then danced, focused, and rebounded through the infinite panes of crystal that was Alma's body. Reaper leisurely flew out of his crater, barely scratched, just as the burning column of combined energies erupted out of Alma at a pace best described as a leisurely stroll.

  Stop.

  Everything stopped except for my thoughts. Had the grief, the pain, the stress finally snapped my brain and I was in some crazy delusion? Maybe. Maybe not, because at that moment of thought, I felt hands grab me and yank me back a step.

  It was only a single physical foot at most, but it seemed to break my body of its paralysis. Shaken, I could see now that the world around me hadn't exactly stopped. No, not stopped, but so slowed down that even the energy pulsing at the speed of light was barely moving at all. How was I able to move and who had grabbed me? It was ... impossible.

  "Impossible, you have to be thinking," Ian Mackenzie's grandfatherly voice echoed behind me. "I only conjecture th
at because that is the exact thing I thought when it happened to me."

  I spun on my heels, hands up and ready to fight. I didn't know how Mackenzie had survived or how he was doing this (though I had my immediate suspicions on both) but I wouldn't hesitate to end whatever his scheme was in a moment.

  "Oh please, not that," he said, "I've had enough of that. Besides, you've done more than enough with those fists as it is."

  Ian Mackenzie, the first Natural I had met outside myself, former FBI agent in charge of investigating the Whiteout, and, most recently, terrorist organizer, stood before my eyes. While still recognizable as the man I had known, there had been vast changes wrought upon him. His red-gray hair was gone and his entire scalp seemed like one piece of blackened flesh. His entire form was gaunt, still dressed in the same Atlanta Police commander's uniform he had been disguised in when we last clashed. Even the caved-in backpack that had once contained a miniature reality-altering device, much like what Eric had used to create the Whiteout in the first place, was still on his back.

  Most importantly, Ian Mackenzie was almost monochrome to my eyes. Only shades of black and white, with a translucent appearance. I would have guessed he was a ghost of some kind, but I wasn't quite ready to take that leap in to the afterlife quite yet. Wisps of white energy, the same kind of energy that permeated Epic and produced by the reality machine, wafted off of him like smoke.

  I lowered my fists. He was probably right. I had done enough to him already.

  "Welcome to the in-between, Dr. Roman." He gestured grandly as he walked a circle around me. The hanging dust in the air, fragments of debris blown away by the frozen elemental tempest just a few yards away, it all passed through his form as if they were incompatible entities.

  "In-between?" It only took a moment to catch on. "In between seconds. We're experiencing time so slowly it's practically stopped."

  The throbbing in my head and the curdling in my stomach told me even more. Somehow, Ian Mackenzie had slid from being immune to the Whiteout like me to being a Pushed. A powerful one at that. I focused my stare and saw the real Ian Mackenzie, prematurely aged a decade or more, in the midst of the ghostly form.

  "Well, at this moment, anyway." Ian rubbed his temples. "You have to apologize, no, wait, you have to excuse me, that's it, if I seem ... disjointed." He cackled, but quieted himself just as quickly. "I have been here, in one sense or another, for, well, I have no clue how long it's been for you. For me, it has been far, far too long."

  "When I smashed the machine when you were escaping, it did this?"

  "Gold star, but only under duress. The answer was so pathetically obvious." Ian shook his head, his eyes dancing wildly in his head. With each shake, white wisps of pure God particles shook with him.

  "Sorry, my dear, erratic, I know. Time doesn't stay still in this state. My personal time frame slips in and out of synch with the real world. Most times I am either moving too swiftly or far too slowly to interact with anything out ... there." He waggled skeleton-like fingers at the stilled confrontation in the rest of the room.

  "So you can interact then when things align just so." I arched an eyebrow. "It was you, wasn't it? You figured out how it cycled -"

  "Oh, but you see, Irene, there was power to be had for the price I inadvertently paid." If Mackenzie had heard my accusation, he ignored it in his rambling. He drifted in an erratic circle around me, gesturing madly. "I may not be like you anymore, but I learned that there was more to be had by embracing what had changed around us. Though I suppose having this monstrous machine fused with my body may have had something to do with it." He shook his torso and sparks flew from the machine that was now a permanent part of his Pushed shell.

  "Why, Ian? Why did you create that video? Why did you set me free? Why do any of this?" I grabbed him by his lapels. For now, at least, I seemed to be sharing his fate, synched to his shifts through time, and that rendered me more than able to touch the gibbering madman. A change came over his face and, for the moment, it was once again the serious, tired face of the man I had known.

  "The purpose has never changed, never wavered. Even if I am, technically, Pushed now, they are the same dangerous force I described to you before." He looked behind me, at the barely-moving scene of violence taking place there. "You, of all people, have to see that now. Epic took over the entire city and then let it fall apart, picked to pieces by his various lackeys. It's only the start. So I made sure that it would also be the finish."

  "With Reaper? He won't stop here. He'll ..." I saw the twinkle in Ian's eyes. That wasn't it.

  "Reaper was always just the motivation. Certainly, I made certain that specific bits of information made it into the proper hands, files in the right places. After all, I needed to ensure they made Reaper unbeatable this time, at least by any means you and your merry band could come up with." Another bout of irrational giggles came on, but I cut them off with a shake of his jacket. "The real calculated risk was that the military wouldn't just resort to the nukes." He glanced at the ground. "Now, could you please put me down?"

  I blinked and couldn't think of a good reason not to. All hurting him would do was shut him down. Talking, even as crazy as this all still sounded, gave me information. Maybe even a chance to pull this out if I played my cards right.

  "Thank you." Ian straightened the fraying lapels of his jacket.

  "You said Reaper was the motivation? For what?"

  "Come now, Doctor, I certainly needed you to understand the real stakes of all this. I need you. You are the real lynchpin here, the person who can make all of this better." He rubbed his claw-like hands as if he were fighting off a tremendous chill.

  Pieces started to click together. Ian had told me the last, well only, time we had a serious conversation that war and death were his last resorts. His rebuilding of Eric's original reality-altering device had only been the first step to recreating the Whiteout or, more importantly, rewinding it. That had been his true goal. Why wouldn't he try that again with who knows how much time he had on his hands, how much power? The onset of insanity probably helped Ian go down that same dead-end path.

  "You want me to finish a new device so this can all get changed."

  "What? No! I mean, I already built the new one." He snapped his fingers, much like Epic would, and an exact replica of the device I had seen in Eric's laboratory that fateful day shimmered into existence. "I did have a lot of time on my hand and little else to do aside once I had sabotaged everyone's nice little stalemate. You would be amazed how the mind can wander if it remains unfocused."

  I narrowed my eyes. Mind's Eye's insights had been frightfully accurate once again.

  "You did more than just sabotage things for the Crusaders. You sabotaged us too. It was you that brought the dome down."

  "Well, someone had to or this wouldn't go anywhere, would it?" His lips twitched between a grin and a sneer. "You probably would have won if I hadn't and, well, that wouldn't push things to the level of crisis I needed. You wouldn't listen to me until things were just so desperate you had no choice."

  I caught him off-guard with the jab to the face. My hand screamed from the fractures but the joy of watching Ian's head snap back from the blow made it all worth it. I grabbed his staggering form by the jacket and yanked him vertical, another fist ready to strike.

  "You bastard! You killed Medusa! Every death today, human and Pushed alike, it's all your fault!"

  "Now hold on, Irene, if you kill me, you never get out of here. God, woman, if you just make me angry, I'll let you sit in this time bubble forever, moping like a kicked puppy." He let out a short chuckle. It wasn't funny. "Only I can push you back into your proper time stream. Or ... there's always option B." He pointed in the direction of the reality machine. "You can fix it. You can make it all go away."

  I couldn't help myself. My eyes followed his pointing as I set him back on his feet once more.

  "As you know, not even Epic or Reaper, as godly as they are, can bring back the dec
eased. The only way to save your friend, stone dead out there, no pun intended, is to use it. Turn back the hands of time, wash our hands clean, and save us."

  "Why haven't you already done so yourself?" It was an excellent question.

  "Don't you think I tried?" He let out a miserable sigh. "The horrific accident you caused seems to leave me ineligible. It would seem I am always meant to be the architect but never the builder."

  I walked over to where the device sat and picked up the electrode studded crown. It was real enough, not a bit of fantastical Pushtech in it. Like myself, it wasn't washed-out in color, something I assumed meant that it belonged in the same bit of time I was from, unlike Ian. It was insanity that I was even contemplating using the thing but what other choices had Mackenzie left me?

  My best friend was dead. It was pretty likely that Brooks and Choi were dead as well. The rest of my friends, well, if Reaper didn't finish them off, the military probably would. How many innocents had already died in these past four months? How many more would in the aftermath of this calamity? What other choice could I rationally make?

  "Before I do this, Ian, I have to know one last thing." I looked at the madman as he loomed over me like the proverbial devil on my shoulder. "How did you do it? What did you do to Schuller?"

  "Again, I can only take credit for the concept. The military boys, well, they deserve the true credit." An irrational snigger came over Ian which he cut off with a hard slap to his own face. "Ugh, there. My apologies. Where was- oh right!" That professoral tone returned to his voice.

  "Reaper. It was simple. All it took was devising the right cocktail of anesthetics to put the conscious mind of Gerald Schuller into a trance, leaving his subconscious free and clear. That tortured part of Gerald's mind we call Reaper was then free, unhindered by Gerald's waking mind and the sympathetic link they shared." Mackenzie smiled at my expression of understanding and continued on.