by Cam Rogers
Jack Joyce, twenty-eight years old now, sprinted through the fragile mausoleum to his dead mother, feet pounding across mold-encrusted concrete, past racks and beds gone to rust and ruin, and shoved wide the frail, grime-darkened glass door to stumble, gasping, into morning sunlight.
The black eyes of a dozen assault rifles awaited him.
Without pausing, he translated himself into speed and flew forward as the Technician squad unloaded—missing by a wide margin, bullets sparking off the time-locked greenhouse. The delicate bones in his hand cracked as his fist met the face of the first trooper square below his nose, spun, and booted his compatriot in the back of his knee. He didn’t bother with the assault rifle, which was strapped to the man, but went for the sidearm while the rest of the team oriented and reacted. The first trooper punched the gravel, back first. Jack snatched the weapon and warped back toward the momentarily bulletproof greenhouse as the squad opened up and the second trooper hit the dirt, covering his head.
Jack popped back to regular speed behind a row of moldering planters stacked flush next to the greenhouse wall, the bones in his hand already mending. He popped up fast, and his healing hand lost grip, and the pistol flew from his fist.
Jack had enough time to belch out a disbelieving, “For fuck’s—!” when Beth opened fire from the hayloft.
Caught in the open, the rescue-rigged Technicians scattered fast. Chronon tech, just like the art-killers at the university but far less polished.
Retrieving his weapon as the Technicians scrambled for cover, he noticed the second unit: a crew flanking the barn. They had put together what was happening and were looking to kick into the barn from the rear, taking Beth by surprise. Jack blatted off three shots, catching one man on the hip and causing the rest to rethink their plan. Jack fell back to the rusted planters as a swarm of shots sought him out, every round sparking off—rather than penetrating—time-locked earth and glass.
The house was in a terrible state, rolling slowly outward in pieces from the attic and second floor, stopping, winding back a little, only to roll forward again toward the inevitable.
It was hard to focus. The light-headedness was back. Warping and shifting was costing him. He needed to regroup.
Four troopers clustered together behind the garage across from the house. Jack popped up and blasted out a stutter shield. The localized self-dividing moment popped to life around the four grunts, locking them into place—“Ha!”—for about a second before the tech they wore to keep them mobile tore the shield apart. “Crap.” Jack zapped forward, closing the distance … and his abilities ended there.
The ground seesawed. Jack forgot where he was.
A trooper fired a blind spray around the corner of the garage. Slugs zip-fanned above Jack’s head. He flinched, translating his forward momentum into a knee-skid across the drive’s white gravel. Righting himself as fast as he could, instinct then sent him scrambling—not for the blind side of the garage, but onto the porch and into the front door of the dying house.
Literally into the front door. In his panic he didn’t extend his chronon field, to make the door active, and Jack rebounded off it as if it were concrete.
The garage squad regrouped, crept along the south-side wall. Beth kept them back by kicking up a wall of dirt in front of them with a three-round burst.
Jack got to his feet, eyeballed Beth. Framed by the upper hayloft doors she pointed to herself and then at the crew behind the garage. Then she pointed to Jack and jerked a thumb toward the crew circling the barn. Jack gave the thumbs-up, took a deep breath, and rabbited toward the barn—gun up and firing. From her elevated position Beth opened fire with Gibson’s carbine.
* * *
Paul had crashed out the kitchen door, half-blinded, onto the porch that curved around the north and east sides of the house. The occasional clap of gunfire made him jump, reflexively dropping a stutter shield. No bullets came; the threat was not to him.
He sped from the shield, west, into the forest-fringed back garden, jagged south to put the house between him and the firefight that was taking place in the front. His chronon field was already working to restore his vision, the lacerating caustic sting of his facial injuries fading to a livid mottling of his flesh.
The gunfire at the front of the house escalated from a smattering of pops to a full-on multipointed fusillade. Jack was still alive. Paul wheeled, prepared to translate himself at speed around the southern side of the house to attack and apprehend his unskilled friend—to put an end to this madness.
But stopped. What he saw made the strength flee from his legs.
They existed. Five of them, south of the house, near the tree line. Flickering, hulking, twitching.
Then it was there, in the morning light, dark and glittering and monstrous, as though it had a right to be in a world that held Paul’s happiest memories. That thing of …
It moved.
The ground belted him in the ass before his inner ear had the chance to realize he had toppled. The Shifter with the shining palm came for him, unhurried, like every button-pushing nightmare because it could, because he couldn’t get away. Because the universe itself knew Paul Serene was so much worse than dead.
The thing raised its black, shifting hand to display the killing star at its palm.
He froze; he was an animal trapped in the barrow of his own skull, with death at the entrance.
Chanting. The same syllable, repetitious, forever. In time it penetrated and the sound became a word.
Paul listened as his throat coughed up the word “go,” over and over and over.
His boots kicked against the cold ground, carved runnels in damp soil. His body twisted, fingers clawing at grass, and he was stumbling, chest grinding into the sod. Paul picked himself up and then he was running—straight for the woods.
* * *
Jack let the tree trunk take his weight, slid to the ground, jacket biting into his armpits as he found the ground. The emptied and open pistol smoked, cradled loose in his slack fingers. Eight men dead. One of them kneeling beside him, face resting against the selfsame tree, lost to his wounds. Others were scattered about the area, frozen, like this one, at the moment they died: some in mid-pirouette, some on their backs, one in mid-air. Misted blood hung like a spray of rubies. As the stutter slowly inched forward every dead man engaged in the last dance of his life.
Jack couldn’t look at it.
Throat raw and gasping, his head swimming and kill-sick, Jack’s brain tapped out. Beth called his name from the barn. He heard her clack in a fresh magazine.
“Yeah,” he called back. It took all he had.
“Get up, Jack. Right now.”
His tree was east of the barn. It was a perfectly pleasant place to sit on this sunny morning and watch the family home die. Will’s desk had flown out of the shattered attic on a tongue of flame, smashing into the gravel drive. Flaming papers trailed its descent.
It came to him then, the cause of Beth’s alarm: the sound. It made its way across the garden, skipping schizophrenically through sliced-up and compartmentalized submoments. It was the sound of a combustion engine. A big one. Jack had first heard it early that morning, outside Zed’s—Beth’s—empty house, in the dark: the grumbling blat of a Monarch BearCat’s 300-horsepower diesel engine.
Survival instinct got him upright. Extending his chronon field to the dead trooper beside him almost exhausted Jack to the point of blackout, but he managed to snare the dead man’s rifle and two magazines before the stutter rebuked him. The toppling corpse refroze halfway to the ground.
Even before it had cleared the trees the BearCat opened up, livid streams of fire chunk-chunk-chunk-chunk-ing from something patient and furious and roof-mounted. Large-caliber rounds exploded like cherry bombs across the time-locked and invulnerable planking of the hayloft exterior.
Jack shouted Beth’s name and that drew the needle-nosed attention of the double-gripped machine gun on the BearCat. Without breaking fire it swung th
e flashing stream toward Jack, who had no choice but to cut south toward the cover of the garage—no powers available. Boiling red lines of tracer fire stitched the air, rebounded in curling spirals from an environment that wouldn’t budge.
The BearCat gunner tried to lead the fleeing figure but couldn’t rotate fast enough. Fire swept toward and rebounded off the garage, rounds ricocheting madly. Someone cried out, “Whoa whoa whoa! Watch what you’re fuckin’ doing!”
A risky three-round burst from Beth got their attention and the BearCat threw into reverse, angling to net both Jack and Beth inside its firing arc.
Jack caught a glimpse of the vehicle, noting the roof gunner protected on all sides by shoulder-high plating. Something else caught his attention: the bracing applied to the BearCat’s chassis. Segmented, it followed the X and Y axis of the vehicle. The design was similar to the rigs worn by the Peace Movement and Monarch chronon troopers.
That frame was keeping the BearCat active inside the stutter.
Jack shouldered the rifle and squeezed. Recoil sent the first shot high, sparking off the hood. The second shot hit one of the rig’s polished segments square on. The panel took the hit, buckling, to no effect.
The gunner opened up. A .50-caliber round struck the garage, fragmenting. A needle of molten lead slashed across Jack’s forehead.
He threw himself behind cover and fell back, clutching his face.
* * *
Paul’s hands were scraped from tumbles, and from slapping bark to suddenly course-correct. His path had been chosen thoughtlessly and yet, he soon realized, he had always known where he was going.
The mound was easy to miss, constructed as it was with craft and guile. Built into a gentle-sloped hill and masked with deadfall the shelter looked like part of the environment—more so now than when Jack and Paul had played there as kids. The forest had incorporated it into itself. Drifts of pine needles had built up against it, while moss had prospered across the roof of mud and daub.
It was a sign.
No. He was panicking. He …
They were everywhere: on the far side of the shelter, flush between two trees, there!
He ran for the tumbledown shelter, kicked away drifts of soft deadfall, and clawed at the primitive hewn-log door. He wrenched the door, strained it toward himself on fused hinges, rotting wood tearing along the frame, troweling up soft earth in which knots of earthworms writhed furiously, and swung into a foul-smelling twilight. The frail door clattered, warped with damp, into the handmade frame. What light made it in here fell through the gaps in the rough planking. The floor was cold, moist earth.
Eye pressed to a gap in the door’s planking Paul saw two Shifters, monstrosities like Dr. Kim, side by side, not fifty feet away. Fritzing, flashing, snapping, tortured as different versions of their form fought for dominance, staggering for him as though he were the cause of their pain.
A rotten foam mattress decomposed on a raised earthen platform against the wall. Opposite this, a rudimentary wooden shelf had collapsed, just below the shelter’s single long window—someplace to eat and watch the woods, maybe. A heavy wattle-and-daub cover swung down to close it off. Paul approached, peered through the slats, and whimpered. Control was slipping.
Three more Shifters, arrayed unevenly, between thirty and fifty feet distant.
He was surrounded.
* * *
As soon as people stop shooting, Jack told himself, I’m getting on a plane.
Then he remembered that since stepping off his last flight he had rocketed onto the Most Wanted list.
All because Paul wanted to do good. “These people trust me, he said. I’m responsible for their livelihood, he said. They promise this massive unlicensed black-hole-driven motherfucker is perfectly safe, he said.…”
Beth risked a shot, the round snapping harmlessly past the BearCat gunner’s helmeted head, but keeping him low.
Will knew the machine was defective. Said it was obviously defective. The miscalibration had got by everyone on Paul’s team. Was it sabotage? And if it was, who did the work?
Who in Monarch had the expertise to tweak a time machine to cause this kind of damage, and conceal it from a team of experts?
Jack needed an elevated position if he was going to get a shot over the gunner’s shielding. The garage was too low. If he went for the barn that’d put both he and Beth exactly where those Monarch goons wanted them: dead center. He needed another option.
Jack felt the stutter change. Blinking blood out of his eyes, he saw every slow-motion thing stop. There was a different tide within the energy of his body now; and an opposite, subtle momentum to the energy of the world.
The stutter was rewinding, slowly, and picking up speed.
On the driveway, Will’s desk reassembled. Flames fed their own reduction, seeming to fuel the house’s slow reconstruction. Cinders turned to sheaves of paper. Disturbed gravel tidied up as the desk left the ground.
Jack waved to Beth, frantically. He pointed to the BearCat, then to him and her, counted three on his fingers, then mimed firing. She nodded agreement.
The desk was airborne, two feet off the ground and accelerating as the stutter gained momentum. The house began to suck the exploding ether back into itself, planks eagerly flying home. Window frames reassembled as they traveled back to their housings, preparing to self-socket.
Jack swung out blasting as Beth streamed a fusillade overhead. The gunner responded by going full auto even as he ducked behind his shield. Jack kicked in his somewhat replenished reserves and flashed across the gravel, twisted, landing butt first on the unstable desk. Beth scored a few close hits, the gunner yelped, and the machine gun stopped barking for one crucial moment.
The desk angled steeply, quickly. Jack dropped the carbine to keep his grip on his ride, but the desk hadn’t just fallen out the front of the house; it had been blown out. It had come out flipping.
As it rotated beneath him Jack tucked his legs, grabbed the lip of the desk—its four legs now skyward—and scrambled to get his feet onto the underside.
The BearCat driver was screaming, “Shoot, you fuck! He’s right there!” Beth exhausted her mag, which bought a few more seconds, and then the gunner was back at his station.
Jack mantled onto the underside of the desk as it climbed to eye level with the second floor, which was when a reverse-burning 1997 phone book shot up from beneath the desk and smashed Jack in the face.
His head snapped back. His center of gravity held for a moment … but the desk kept rotating. A steel leg came down, jammed hard in his chest, doubling Jack forward as pain exploded below his collarbone. He threw his arms forward as the desk leg shoved him down. His fingertips strained for the desk’s edge, but there was no reaching it. Instead, desperately, his fingers closed on the leg, like an impaled man might grab the spear that was killing him. The rotation was slow enough that he could grasp it with both hands, hanging free, hands over his head and feeling his grip slip.
The desk was the right way up, two floors above the gravel, on its journey to the attic, when the machine gun swung toward Jack.
Hosing tracer fire—aimed too high—swept toward him like a killing whip.
Shrapnel and wreckage flew toward him from below.
“Fuck it.”
Jack leaped off the desk and let the storm take him. A cardboard box full of novels slammed into his chest as a hose of tracer fire slashed downward, angry fireworks pinging and whining among the storm of wreckage. The box abandoned Jack at its parabola, continuing on its way as Jack sailed free, punched around the legs and spine by trash and memorabilia before tumbling through the shattered wall to hit the attic floor.
He gasped, rolling aside as the desk scythed overhead and stopped.
The stutter froze. The attic wall was a half-bloomed flower.
* * *
Silence and a dimness. That dead-thing reek of earth and rotting bedding.
Someone laughed and Paul spun.
Two k
ids were in the shelter with him, standing on tiptoes, elbows resting on the ghost of the bench that had collapsed, watching the woods, though the window was closed to all light.
“No such thing as witches,” the first kid said. His dark hair was fresh-cut and parent-approved. Even here his shirt was tucked into his trousers, his hair neatly combed. The boy next to him, fair haired, was a different story: thrift-store khaki jacket with some big pockets, unwashed blue jeans, and that Riverport Raptors shirt he’d worn to death.
The voices of the things outside used Paul’s own brain as an amplifier. As one, they howled for him—long and broken.
“Who’d live in a place like this if they weren’t a witch,” ten-year-old Jack asked Paul’s younger self. “Look at this place.”
“The disenfranchised,” the neatly dressed Paul responded.
He had always repeated the big words his mother used, had tried so hard to sound much older than he was.
“The wh—?”
And they were gone. The howling ceased.
Something strained at the door, yanked it, the thin shield of it wobbling.
Paul’s gun was up the second the door opened. A single round blasted through the head of the swaddled woman who stood there. She turned, pushed the door wide to let in the air, and lowered her backpack onto the rotted mattress.
The gunshot faded and fluxed, echoing, distorted through the time-locked woods.
Her hands were weathered, and she hummed to herself, pulling earphones free. Unzipping her bag she laid out two dented bean cans, a half loaf of bread, a cold cheeseburger.
This was the Witch in the Woods, the figure Paul and Jack had mythologized. And then she was gone.
Howls. Paul’s hands slammed to his ears, hard, pistol-whipping himself in the process. Crying out, the cry turned to a scream. One breath and the scream turned to a roar. “What? What do you want?” He slammed his face to the cracks in the door, wide eyes scanning.
Oh God, they were twenty feet away. Five of them.
