by Cam Rogers
“No,” Will called back. “You shit.”
“Sir, there’s been a misunderstanding. We have paramedics on standby—”
“Why are you here?” Jack interrupted. “Monarch owns this place. Owns the lab. The research. The people. Why do this?”
“Sir,” the commander said. “Jack—”
“Fuck you.”
“We have paramedics on standby and can get you clear of this incident in minutes.”
* * *
From the top floor of the building Don had a clear vantage down to the lobby. With one finger pressed to the mic in his ear he said: “Dr. Joyce is to the left. His brother is to the right. Aim right, two feet above the deck.”
* * *
Jack, still peering through the gap in the guardrail, saw every trooper shift aim to his side of the barricade. “Sons of bitches.”
Pulling himself into the cocoon of a single second Jack sprang from cover, leaped down the stairs, and slammed into the fourth-floor guardrail. To the eyes of everyone else under that dome, Jack had teleported. From his new position one floor down he watched as time reengaged, Jack’s side of the steel plate was perforated by a sparking fusillade, sending Will recoiling. Jack tried to expand another moment, to make it to the third floor, but it wouldn’t come.
“Will, those powers I had may have been a phase I was going through.”
“Uh…,” Will said. “Possibly you overdid it?”
Jack pulled the handgun from the back of his jeans. The last time he had used it burned like a brand in his memory, shame so real it felt like it might end him. Through the gap in the guardrail, through the glass dome, past the trees of Founders’ Walk, the Monarch logo burned bright atop the new tower that looked over the sleepy, unimportant town he had grown up in—the town they had all grown up in.
In his mind’s eye he saw the dome explode upward. He saw the smile on that bastard’s face as he watched Will fall to his death.
Fuck it.
Jack racked the slide and came up shooting. Three snaps, one hit sending a lone trooper spinning behind cover as the rest of the squad ducked. A volley of semiautomatic gunfire tore Jack’s cover to shreds as he leaped down the stairs, sparks tracking the underside of the stairwell.
Time slowed. Back in business.
Jack zipped for the third-floor guardrail, knocked his hip into it, and rebounded down the next stairwell. He was upright behind second-floor cover and blasting as the moment caught up to him. This time his aim was better. The moment danced with him, movement and responses becoming as predictable as minutes and seconds. He sighted and fired cleanly. Three troopers went down, slugs smacking into chest plates, punching through one leering yellow mask.
The remaining squaddie took cover but the commander didn’t. Jack had lingered a moment too long and Guardian’s CO let his weapon shout itself empty—as predictable as minutes and seconds.
Not quite enough though. A channel of air by Jack’s chest and face pulsed like a hot artery and, as reflex and panic threw him backward down the stairwell, one slug took a piece out of Jack’s left arm. Rotating with the force of it Jack crashed down the first-floor stairwell like a sack of spare parts.
His pistol skidded over the side, clattering to the lobby floor. Guardian’s CO moved forward, unhurried, the yellow mask smiling as he reloaded. His grin twin, the last standing squaddie, flanked around the right side of the information desk, weapon leveled.
The CO motioned the squaddie to advance up the stairs. The squaddie moved up, the CO close behind, when the space around him tremble-snapped, trapping both him and the barrel of the CO’s assault weapon. The CO wasn’t a small man but there was no withdrawing his rifle: it was frozen in space as surely as if the barrel had been set in concrete.
Jack walked down the stairs, holding his wounded arm, blood trailing from his fingers.
The CO abandoned the weapon, drew his sidearm, and backed away. He had learned enough in the last few minutes to know that firing was a waste of time until the bubble popped. Jack stepped into the stutter and took the CO’s rifle for himself.
The trapped CO tensed his arm, smiling face doing a poor job of disguising the panic beneath.
From inside the bubble Jack emptied the mag into him.
The ex-marine disappeared backward over the information desk in a spray of blood, ending his life with feet in the air like bad slapstick.
Jack dropped the rifle, took its replacement from the squaddie’s static hands. The stutter burst, the squaddie almost overbalancing as he lurched forward … then realized his gun had vanished. He took things in quickly: his missing weapon now in the hands of his target, and his CO’s legs sticking up from behind a blood-spattered welcome desk.
“Get out of here.”
The squaddie backed away, hands up, turned, and ran.
“Will! Will, you okay?”
Will was already at the third floor. “No more, Jack. Your abilities are completely untested.” Will made it to the lobby, panting. “I want to go home. Once the adrenaline wears off I intend to throw up.” Still gasping: “Your arm … you’re wounded?”
“I’m okay. It’s not as bad as it looks.” Right now, it was little more than a shallow tear.
“Too much blood for a cut so trivial. You’ve healed, and rapidly. Your relationship to time has changed, there’s no doubt.” Will moved for the western exit and the parking lot beyond. “None of which will save you from massive organ trauma if someone wounds you correctly. Dead is dead. Bear that in mind.”
Will was right about the adrenaline: Jack’s teeth were grinding. Thoughts more complex than “find car, leave” were tripping over each other. They needed to get out of there. He couldn’t keep this up much longer. He had nothing else in him.
Without warning the double doors shredded off their aluminum frames, info desk blowing to shrapnel. The salvo didn’t come close to hitting the two brothers, but it got their attention. Someone on Founders’ Walk cut loose with a roof-mounted .50 caliber.
“Hey! You boys weren’t about to leave?”
It was him, the guy who led the attack on the time lab, the one the others called “boss.” The guy wearing the happy grin as he had blown the roof out from beneath Will.
He dismounted the BearCat, took a cigarette from a sleeve pocket, and snapped open a Zippo. Cupped the light with his hands. Drew a deep, healthy lungful.
“Jack,” Will said. “Come on. The car’s this way. We can—”
“Wait here.”
Will grabbed Jack’s arm.
“Wait here.” Jack shrugged him off.
Will wasn’t accepting it. “Do not go out there! We can fix all of this, but I have to—”
“Fix? You heard them shooting out there. How many people have they killed? You saw what—”
“Jack, it wasn’t your fault.”
The ferocity in his voice surprised Jack. “What wasn’t my fault?”
“The guard. Your school friend. Attacking this man won’t—”
But Jack was gone. Blink.
* * *
The cigarette fell from Gibson’s lips. “Whup. Donny? Go. Go go go.”
The target had separated from the asset, covering ground like Gibson had only seen under controlled conditions. Jack rematerialized outside the dome’s double door—the one Gibson had machine-gunned into art. Looked like the kid had one more burst in him.
Gibson swung the M32, aimed wide.
Foonk.
Jack took off, watched the grenade ride a contrail of propellant off to his right, toward the dome wall behind him. He covered eighty feet, maybe more, before the round detonated. The blast wave almost caught up to him in slow motion, and then time woke up.
The force belted him flat in the back, took him for a short ride, and smashed him chest-first into the BearCat’s antiballistic geometry.
The Joyce kid was lying faceup in the dirt, sucking wind. Gibson took out his sidearm.
“Kid, feel like guessin’ what on
e of my favorite things to do is?”
Choking, gasping: “That dance from The Silence of the Lambs?” He willed time to invert and pop, protecting himself inside a bubble of time-out-of-time.
Nothing happened.
“Nah,” Gibson said. “This.”
The gunshot cracked, a sledgehammer came down, and Jack’s left knee erupted. Jack watched it happen from some cold place above his left shoulder, like it was happening on television. The reprieve lasted two seconds before every nerve and pain receptor in his body lit up and he screamed.
“For starters,” Gibson wondered if his cigarette was still around somewhere. “Actual, this is Gibson. Target is neutralized. Donny, what’s the sitch?”
“We got the scientist, boss. He just about shit when that last grenade hit. You coulda warned us.”
“Get him to the library. Big man wants a word.”
“Copy.”
Jack’s mind was an animal mess: a howling, confused, red-strobed darkness. He wanted escape. He wanted to kill this man. He wanted to go home. He wanted his brother. He and his brother, in their old living room. He was, he realized, never going to use this leg again.
Gibson’s earpiece blipped, the frequency switched remotely.
“Senior Operative, good evening.”
Gibson knew that voice: the face behind Monarch’s face. The Consultant. “Gibson receiving.” If the Consultant was on the line things were almost certainly going to achieve an undesirable level of complication.
“Mr. Hatch tells me you’ve neutralized the target. Meaning?”
“Meaning I was about to help him with his blood pressure.”
Head lolling, Jack tried to take an interest in his surroundings, but the grass felt so good. Will. He’d fucked up. Why hadn’t he listened to his brother? What was it Will had said? “Do not go out there! We can fix all of this.…”
No, before that.
“Do not,” the Consultant said to Gibson. “Secure him. A chronon-containment team will be on scene shortly.”
Gibson did not like that. This kid was chronon-active. Taking him down, unassisted, had been balls and luck on Gibson’s part. He’d only succeeded because the target had no idea what he was doing. A seasoned chronon operative was more than capable of fucking a body up given half a chance.
Jack reached deeper: what had Will said? “You’ve healed, and rapidly.” That was it.
“ETA?”
“Five minutes.”
* * *
The blood-soaked fabric of Jack’s jeans was cleaning itself, the stain crawling back to the hole in his leg, focusing to a point, retreating back into his devastated flesh just before shattered cartilage self-assembled into a working joint. The lips of the wound quivered, vacillated, and closed shut seamlessly.
“I’d say your relationship to time has changed,” Will had told him.
The bullet hole stitched itself shut.
* * *
Jack’s eyes fluttered. “Your name’s Gibson,” he rasped.
Jack locked eyes with him, and Gibson saw a short future of nothing but eye shine and blood.
“Affirmative, sir.” Gibson was already moving, hands gripping the BearCat’s roof before swinging double-booted into the cabin and locking it tight behind him. The engine woke, headlights flared, and the target was right there: staring at him over the hood. Back from the dead.
Gibson flipped him the bird and threw the truck into reverse.
6
Saturday, 8 October 2016. 4:48 A.M. Riverport University campus.
Two Monarch operatives dragged Will, like luggage, out the west-facing doors of the Quantum Physics dome.
Jack lurched back toward the fractured light of the now-vacant lobby. He tried to push himself back into the gaps between seconds, to close the distance in a blink. It didn’t happen. He felt wide and hard and heavy, and could do nothing but lumber. He looked again and Will was gone.
The adrenaline left his system abruptly and the tunnel vision of his focus loosened. The reality of where he was and all that had happened rushed in and knocked him to his knees.
A great, wracking sob burst out of him, a kick in the chest and shoulders so hard his ribs flared with bright pain. They had his brother. Paul was gone. He had killed.
Will had begged him to leave with him. He hadn’t listened. Everything had gone to shit because he did what he had always done: act first, think later. Get it done because nobody else would. He was in so far over his head he’d need a jetpack and a map just to see daylight.
They had Will. Paul was gone.
There was a cartoon series he and Paul had loved as kids: Team Outland. Zed had, too. Six years ago they were on the couch, streaming an old ep. A character had popped onscreen and made the Team’s trademark hand signal—the time-out sign: “Think Before You Act!” They’d chanted it, snarfed popcorn, drank beer, and winced at how badly the series had aged.
Good memory, weird timing.
Stop. Think.
These were the facts, as he understood them.
Paul oversaw a time travel project for Monarch. Will was hired to consult, but was kept largely out of the loop. Nonetheless, the machine was clearly based on Will’s research. Then Monarch either hired mercenaries or used their own troops, dressed in weird gear, and had them attack the lab they own. They were supposed to “steal” the core of the machine and kill a bunch of innocent people in the process.
Why?
Kill a bunch of people, but they wanted Will alive. Why? He was valuable to them. Which probably meant they weren’t done with the machine.
But none of this would have happened if Paul hadn’t turned on the machine. The attack kicked off almost immediately after, as if the machine’s activation had been a signal.
There had to be an answer but Will was the one with the brains.
Had Jack’s involvement been planned? What about his abilities? Were they intended? Had Paul been in on it?
Was Paul even alive? If he was trapped at some kind of end-of-time point, could he be saved?
An hour ago everything had been fine. Now the world—the universe, maybe—was falling apart.
Will. He had to get Will away from these people. He dragged his face along one filthy sleeve, shook his head again, blinked, did what he could to banish the killing sense of grief that threatened to undo him, and stood up.
Will first. Then, once Will was safe, Jack would come back. He was getting back into that lab, and he was going after Paul. End of time or no, he was bringing Paul back. Nobody he loved was dying this morning. Nobody.
Will was taken to the library, Gibson had said. The library was near the protest camp. The protest camp was by the entrance to the university. The entrance was at the start of Founders’ Walk. Okay. Jack oriented. Looked around. The library was east. Whoever had taken Will west must be headed for the parking lot.
A university security BearCat tore out from the parking lot behind the dome, along the nearest treelined avenue, headed east, straight for the library.
Jack willed himself into the space between moments, and while the world wasn’t looking, he ran.
* * *
The entire city was alert to what was going on. Crowds pressed against Monarch-erected barricades two blocks from campus. Police flashbars turned anxious faces into a neon flipbook. The media were issued canned statements. Civilian drone pilots reported their toys suddenly dropping dead once they got within two miles of the campus. Bloggers screamed blue murder; phones and tablets turned to fritzing junk. Families wanted answers. People were missing. Cops yelled at Monarch troops. Monarch troops followed a policy of total non-engagement. An event had occurred, the company had state sanction to contain the event, local law enforcement and the community would be briefed shortly.
The situation made it easy for Jack to blink toward the western face of the library unseen and get inside. Particleboard fencing had been erected around the site. Signs with DEMOLITION IN PROGRESS—DO NOT ENTER were nail-gunned t
o each one, by order of Riverport Council and Monarch Construction. Every fourth fence panel had a four-by-five-foot employment infographic, actors in hard hats flashing I-got-mine smiles. Most of these were plastered with unflattering graffiti and anti-Monarch stickers.
The squawk and bark of Monarch bullhorns told Jack the scene two blocks away was intensifying.
Jack climbed the hood on an unattended BearCat, leaped over the fence and made for a rear door. He hit the ground on strong legs, head still spinning but eyes clear.
Fixtures and fittings had been stripped from the library, leaving a shell and the lecture theater without a door. He walked in.
It was dim inside the lecture theater, hollow-bodied and sulking. Racked tiers had been stripped of seating, the oak paneling to be consigned to landfill and history. Slack six-foot-long tubes of plastic wrap hung limply from banisters, littering the floor, along with a thick coat of dust. No fittings and no power meant no illumination. Small, gas-powered generators burbled throatily from deeper in the guts of the old place, someplace better lit than here, judging from the glare spilling from the hallway.
“Please. Let me go. I…!”
“Will?” Terror had happened here, in this room. He could feel it, his new sense alive to the agitation and fear. It was imprinted upon the chronon flow in the room as clearly as tracks through snow.
“Please. Let me go. I…!”
Jack’s attention gravitated toward a space at the foot of the racked tiers, in front of an antique oaken podium. His senses pulled toward that point, like iron filings toward a magnet.
Will had been here. Every cell in him knew it.
Figures leaped into existence, no more substantial than the thin light that leaked into the hall from the world outside: Will, flanked by two Monarch troopers.
“Please. Let me go. I…!”
Jack watched the trooper on the left elbow Will in the stomach, dropping him. Then they dragged him toward the hall, where they evaporated into shadow. Gone.
An after echo … or a brush with the future?
Echo. Jack didn’t know how he knew, but he trusted it. He had so many questions for Will. He needed to know what the fuck was happening to him.
