Triptych

by J. M. Frey

  “M-mom?” Gwen said. Her grip strangled the handset.

  “Hi, baby,” Evvie said. “I’m so, so sorry about Kalp. I wish I’d met him.”

  Gwen sucked in another breath and heaved it out again in a wrenching sob that Basil could tell surprised them both.

  “Come get your space ship, baby,” Evvie said, so softly that Basil almost didn’t catch it. “Come home.”

  “Yeah, Mom,” Gwen whispered and turned her face against Basil’s neck. “Soon.”

  “See you soon,” Basil echoed, and took the handset from Gwen. He hung it up and wrapped his arms around her.

  They sat that way until Basil’s ass went numb.

  He stood, punching his sleeping butt in an effort to bring back sensation, and Gwen turned away, pretending she wasn’t scrubbing ferociously at her cheeks so nobody could see the salt stains there on the way back to their room. They returned through the lesser-used hallways, Gwen leading the way; Basil followed and didn’t comment on this deliberate choice.

  When they got back, there was a note on the door. Agent Wood had come by. She wanted to tell them that she’d transferred the chickens and their strange blue coop into the Institute’s courtyard that evening, thought Gwen and Basil would be comforted by the sight of their pets.

  Gwen and Basil stood together in the private room, Gwen’s back pressed firmly against his front, her arms clasped backwards across his waist, his like bands around her shoulders. They stared out the window at the chickens two floors below them, fuzzy little fluffballs down in the Institute’s courtyard.

  They were no comfort at all.

  A yawning ache swallowed everything underneath Basil’s skin and even Gwen’s touch felt too cold.

  The chickens pecked at the grass that had gone to seed between the cobble stones, looking lopsided and lonely now that they were just two.

  ***

  “Agent Pierson, report!” came the staticky hiss over the headset. Basil had to resist the urge to tap his own earpiece and demand a response of his own from Gwen.

  Being the smart bloke left behind in the surveillance van sucked.

  It reeked of B.O. and gun oil and overheating electrical doodads. The air conditioning had quit before they’d even gotten past bloody Whitechapel, and being cooped up in a small space filled with whirring computers and twenty geeks and grunts had been no picnic. Basil had envied Gwen and Shelley and the rest of the Agents over in the military transport wagon, luxuriating in the cool breeze of a functioning fan.

  Basil sat back in his chair in the far corner of the van. There were five different screens arranged in an alcove of computer banks around him, each with their own interface keys and ports. One was a radar that tracked all of their GPS tagged ops and military combatants, one was a sort of Google-Earth-on-steroids meant to work in tandem with the first, and one was for Basil’s necessary split second calculations and computations just in case he detected some Flasher activity while en route. One was devoted to the computer chatter between the different units of the operation, and the last was an early warning system for the initiation of a Flash, should one of the targets choose to try to escape in that manner. So far, that station had been silent. On the console beside that screen, the cellular phone that had been altered into a Mobile Flasher Tracker lay waiting, a funny little dog spinning in circles on the screen saver, ready to jump into action to point its user to the centre of the temporal phenomenon.

  Basil clenched his fists on his knees and stopped breathing, waiting for Gwen’s response. After long minutes, she replied with an urgent, “I have an unlocked door. Going in…”

  Basil sighed in relief.

  “No,” came the order from Colonel Wright, the mission leader from the military side. “Wait for the army. I’m sending them around to your position now.”

  Wright was two computer banks down from Basil, standing with purpose in the very middle of the surveillance van, frowning with a practiced air of paternal gravity at the screens, beret at a jaunty angle. Basil thought that all he lacked was a pipe, and had passed several long minutes imagining what type the colonel might prefer.

  “But sir, I can hear them retreating,” Gwen protested, and Basil felt his gut clench. Gwen was going to ignore the order, Gwen was going to barrel in and get shot and Basil was going to have to go to another funeral, another fucking double funeral with chillingly quiet caskets perched side by side. He was going to be left alone, the last one, just like Kalp had been after Maru and Trus. Basil would shrivel up if Gwen —

  “No. That’s an order.”

  On the other side of the radio, Gwen sighed. “Yes sir,” she said, and went quiet.

  Basil knew that tone, that little huff. Gwen had settled down for a good pout and Basil had never been so fucking grateful for her moodiness before in his goddamn life.

  After a few tense seconds, a soldier reported that they had taken up position with Agent Pierson and would send her back to the van on Wright’s order. Basil let out a long hiss of breath between his teeth, his lungs aching with relief — that was it, then. The army was going to take care of the arresting-and-shooting part and Gwen could stop skulking about and come back to where it was safe.

  Colonel Wright surveyed the lay of his soldiers according to their GPS trackers. He waited half a second, frowned at a few shifting dots, scanned the heat cameras pointed at the buildings and snapped. “No time to wait for Pierson, it has to be now.” He lifted his hand to his earpiece and said, simply and without any special inflection, “Okay, boys and girls. Give ‘er.”

  Basil blinked — that was it?

  No grand speeches, no kingly encouragement, no Shakespeare quotations? Basil decided that he needed to stop taking fantasy epics and police procedurals so seriously.

  In the distance, Basil heard the first shout, the first loud, sharp pop of a flashbang round meant to stun the assassins into immobility; then, the quiet prolonged wheeze of a canister of tear gas emptying. He wasn’t sure if the sound was leaking in over the headset or if it was coming from outside of the van.

  He swallowed hard and tried to look calmer than he felt. His hands were shaking. Jesus, Gwen wasn’t back yet. Gwen was out there.

  “Agents, disengage when it is safe and return to base camp,” came Wright’s next command. Shelley and twenty out of his twenty-two agents barked confirmations of retreat.

  Gwen, of course, was not one of them. Basil had not been able to keep track of who the other one had been, too absorbed in straining his focus to catch Gwen’s reply. There was a pregnant pause, and then Wright lifted his hand to his earpiece again.

  “Pierson, Aitken,” Wright snapped, “the rest of the Agents have started reporting in. Get your asses back. You are not trained for intense combat!”

  Aitken grunted that she would comply as soon as it was clear enough for her to run. Gwen said nothing. Basil made a harsh sound in the back of his throat, his whole body stiffening up, waiting for — fearing — that fatal, familiar cry, the sharp rapport of automatic rifle fire that could cut it short.

  God, he really, really needed to watch fewer action movies. Geez.

  A familiar voice by the mouth of the van caught his attention. Basil looked up as Agent Shelley, sweaty from his exertions, his palms and the side of his left arm covered with a fine white layer of gravel dust, bent his head to speak in low tones with the tactical commander seated by the doorway. Then Shelley moved away swiftly to the other transportation wagon.

  The first cough of gunfire rang out. Shelley froze and threw up his hands instinctively, protecting his head. The reserve soldiers shoved him and all the other Agents that Basil could see through the narrow van opening to the ground.

  Basil’s heart shot straight into the back of his throat, expanding, blocking all hope of breath. His chest screamed for want of air, his eyes burned, teeth clenched. “No, no,” he moaned.

  The interior of the van, already sweltering beyond comfort, came alive. The air crackled and sudd
enly everyone was straining over the computer screens, yapping into their ear pieces and relaying orders. It was chaotic, made Basil’s whole body shiver with claustrophobia. He pocketed the Flasher Tracker. Squeezing behind the ridiculously cramped chairs, sucking in his gut, he slalomed around personnel, feet feeling like they weighed a brick’s worth each. He dashed for the door, for the open air, diving around the chairs and the flailing limbs. When he burst out into the world, the cool air slapped him in the face and turned each pearlescent rivulet of sweat arching over his forehead and down his nose into a splash of ice.

  Another soldier shoved him back against the van, and the bumper jammed painfully against his ass. Basil clamped down on the automatic ‘oof!’ that wanted to jump out of his throat.

  He grimaced, and the soldier shot him a glare and Basil raised his hands. Not going anywhere, I get the idea, he said with his expression, and the soldier nodded once and moved away to the far side of the van, towards the sound of the skirmish. The other Agents found their feet and dashed for the relative safety of their own van, parked around a low stone wall by the street.

  Basil sat back on the bumper, ignoring the throb of a building bruise on his butt cheeks, and dragged the sleeve of his shirt across his eyes and over his forehead. He looked around, desperately. The Agents were loitering by the transportation wagon, tense, hands on the grips of the pistols in their thigh holsters or wrapped tightly around their P90s, tracking the progress of the fight over the earpieces, waiting for the order to reengage if necessary. Basil blocked it all out, white noise until he could catch Gwen’s voice.

  No word from her came, and Basil’s neck got tighter. He tugged impotently at the zipper of his jacket, only to realize that it was undone all the way to his navel, exposing the broad black swatch of his tee-shirt, and not done up all the way to his Adam’s Apple like he’d thought.

  He was scared, and he wasn’t afraid to admit it.

  A familiar nipped cry arched over the sound of gunfire and Basil whirled towards it.

  “Gwen.” He started around the corner, heedless, unthinking, knowing only that he had to get to her now. He didn’t pause to check that he had a gun, or even that he was wearing a tactical vest — which he wasn’t.

  Only the swift clap of a hand on one shoulder kept Basil from foolishly plummeting around the protective cover of the vans and into the fray. Shelley yanked him off balance, forcing Basil to sway back, to stop. Basil was surprised — the other Agent must have nearly vaulted over the stone wall to stop Basil that quickly. Either that or Basil’s sense of time was getting thrown all out of whack by the adrenaline surging through his system.

  I told you so, Shelley’s face said, mouth a hard line of disapproval. Too involved.

  “Gwen’s hurt,” Basil shouted, and because he had nothing better to do with them, frustrated and useless, he wrung his hands.

  Shelley looked up, over Basil’s shoulder and his eyes widened.

  Basil blanched. “What?”

  Shelley jerked his chin, and Basil followed the direction in time to see a pair of white-suited military paramedics dragging Gwen past the surveillance van, past the transportation wagon, and to the ambulance waiting on the far side of the warehouse’s low brick gates. Basil had been warmed and worried by the ambulance’s presence; foresight was marvellous, but it left a horrified and cold feeling in the gut of his stomach that they had been expecting people to get hurt.

  By the time Basil had finished his sprint over to her, Gwen was conscious and seated on the rear fender of the ambulance, staring morosely at her empty hands. There were paramedics and latex gloves and someone shining a penlight in Gwen’s eyes, which she didn’t appreciate, if her scowl was anything to go by.

  “Gwen, you stupid…” Basil started, but was too happy to see her alive, swelling gash above her eyebrow and all. “Are you trying to prove something?”

  She blinked at him fuzzily for a moment. Then she groaned.

  “Did that just happen?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Basil said. “I think so. What’s ‘that’?”

  Gwen grimaced in lieu of a smile. The paramedic had just applied a gauze full of bright yellow iodine. Served her right!

  “I think someone tried to brain me with a blackjack,” she confessed. “I saw Aitken when I fell. I guess she scared him off.”

  “I…really? A blackjack?” Basil stopped, all the anger on pause. “That’s sort of…Wow. Old fashioned.”

  “But classic.”

  “Kinda cool?”

  “I wholeheartedly agree.”

  Their eyes met, gazes connecting over shared humour and worry, wry smiles twisting across their lips. Under the paramedic’s swift hands, Gwen looked relieved. She also looked vulnerable. Tired.

  But alive.

  Basil sighed.

  “So that’s it, issit. All over, then?” he asked, hands jammed in his pockets, leaning one shoulder against the shining white metal. It was sunwarmed against his shirt, the heat seeping pleasantly into his pores. His ass started throbbing again at the angle, but he ignored it. He wasn’t about to speak up and end up with his pants around his ankles in front of half of the Specialist Agents as a paramedic checked him over, too.

  “Looks like,” Gwen said and tried not to flinch as butterfly bandages were applied to her temple to hold the gash shut.

  The paramedic slapped some fresh gauze into her hand and said, “Apply pressure for now.” It was a testament to how weary and heart-sick Gwen was that she readily obeyed.

  Someone in the distance shouted, “All clear!”

  Basil felt every sick and twisting nerve in his body abruptly and without warning unravel into gratified noodle-ness. He slumped against the side of the ambulance. The adrenaline that had kept him tense and alert rushed out of him, and for a startling second Basil feared that he was going to puke as it washed away, leaving him shaky and dizzy. He swallowed heavily and it passed. Gwen stood and began walking in the direction of the nearest warehouse.

  “Now wait!” Basil said, pushing off from the ambulance and following right on her heels. “I think there’s been enough fearless heroics for say, like, ever! Time to leave all this to the professional grunts, innit?”

  “I have to see, Basil,” she said. “I need to see what they were doing in there.”

  Basil wanted to protest, but truth be told, he was eaten up with curiosity, himself. Rubbing the spot at the bridge of his nose, just as Kalp used to do, Basil followed her into the building, ducking under the yellow ribbon of warning tape that a pair of dead-eyed forensics experts were erecting around them.

  The door opened straight into a long, low-roofed hall with exposed iron girders in various states of decay and defacement, a ringing cement floor, and row upon row of crude wooden work tables and chairs of every shape and variety. They looked like they were pilfered from kitchens, junk shops, cafeterias, anywhere that someone could get their hands on a seat.

  The number of rows — ten, maybe, possibly even twenty, made the queasiness push against Basil’s sternum again. No, surely they can’t have had that many people working on this project. No, no, it had to have been just a few guys, all their stuff laid out.

  Basil refused to believe that there were enough bigoted fucks to fill all of those chairs.

  The next thing Basil noticed was the smell; if he thought the B.O. in the surveillance van was bad, this was a hundred times worse — blood, loosened bowels, and the coppery reek of fireworks and splattered brains that Basil remembered all too vividly from the garden behind the Pierson house. The floor was littered with at least six corpses in various states of dismemberment. P90 automatic rifles did a lot of damage to vulnerable human organs and limbs, and the military hadn’t been quite as careful at taking the prisoners alive as perhaps their orders had stated they should.

  They too were parents, adults, people with wives and husbands and lovers, kids, maybe. They had been just as outraged as the Agents by the horrors imposed by these t
errorists on those left behind, even if their hatred hadn’t been quite so personal, so connected, as it was for the Institute’s employees.

  “Put a pedophile in prison,” Basil whispered to himself. He forced his eyes away from the gore and onto the tech and plans scattered along the work benches attached to the nearest wall. “Give a widow a gun…”

  Gwen had gone over to stare down at the jumble. She was shaking, the hand holding her gauze to her forehead shivering so violently that Basil feared she was going to rip the butterfly closures clean off her skin. Her eyes were narrowed and glassy with hate.

  This workbench in particular was filled with alien tech: solar panels and engine pods and all manner of devices that had been stripped down and torn apart. A shock thrilled over Basil’s skin as he recognized a smeared blob of fake fur and gears that resolved itself into one of the latex masks with motorized jaw hinges. Some were helmets with faces on them like the one worn by the pilot who had tried to kill Gwennie. Some looked like they allowed for enough vision and flexibility, enough close-skin mobility, that a sniper with his cheek pressed against a barrel would still have a perfect shot.

  Doctor Zhang and his crew were already inside, tagging and dusting, busy with a camera and body bags further towards the centre of the filthy cement floor. Basil studiously ignored them, his stomach still slightly flip-floppy. Instead he watched quietly as Gwen lifted one of the half-finished masks off of a work table.

  “Muppets!” Gwen snarled hatefully, finally dropping the gauze away from her forehead. The revealed skin was an angry pink. Basil couldn’t help but think that she was going to have a wicked lovely scar along her eyebrow to match the one above it. Already the skin around her eye was starting to purple — it would be one heck of a shiner, too.

  “Gwen?”

  “We were fooled by goddamn Muppets!” She kicked one of the animatronic helmets across the warehouse. It skittered sickeningly along the bare concrete, looking nothing so much as a decapitated head when it splashed through a wide trail of drying blood. Basil couldn’t decide if he wanted to giggle or vomit.