The Deadlock Trilogy Box Set

by P. T. Hylton

  “It’s not a bad likeness,” Vee said. He turned to Zed and looked him up and down. “You’re in a spot of trouble, and I’m trying to figure out how to deal with you. Wilm would say to bring you home. She’d argue this display of initiative proved you were worth reforming. Rayd would demand satisfaction. He’d consider it an affront to his honor. San would probably just rip your face off.”

  “And you?” Zed asked in his strange, weak voice.

  Vee shrugged. “I’ve always seen eye-to-eye with San in most respects. I’m not above being persuaded though.”

  “How’d you get here?” Zed asked, partly because he wanted to steer the conversation in another direction and partly because he was genuinely curious.

  “You’re not the only one who can manipulate time a bit. I noticed the stutter when you stopped time. I kept myself in that moment until I could muscle my way through.”

  Damn. Zed thought he’d corrected that problem. If things had worked properly, Vee and the others shouldn’t have been able to even tell he was gone. He had been so sure he was safe here.

  His heart was racing. He eased his hand into the satchel hanging from his shoulder.

  “Weren’t expecting that, were you?” Vee didn’t smile, but the way the skin wrinkled around his eyes gave Zed the vague impression that he was pleased. “After I tore myself free, it was simply a matter of following the bird creatures. They’re drawn here. Though you’ve hidden the town from them, they still feel the pull of it now and again.” He ran his hand over the calf of the statue of Zed. “And here I am.”

  Zed asked, “What about the others? Will they find their way here?”

  “Perhaps. But I wouldn’t count on it. You bound us up tight.”

  “And you always were the strong one.”

  Vee was staring up at the sun now. “Even though time is stopped, the sun keeps moving. Days and nights move here. But outside the town, it’s always dusk. I crossed half the country with the setting sun in my eyes.”

  Zed held up the pocket watch. “I’m very good with this thing.”

  Vee chewed on that for a moment, as if trying to work it out. “What’s it going to be, then? You want to take us back to the others? Start time again and let Wilm try to protect you? Or should I handle this here?”

  Zed licked his lips. “I’d like to propose a third option.”

  Vee said nothing, but he was listening, which was a good sign. Zed was beginning to get the feeling the bearded man was more impressed with Zed than he let on. Impressed, and perhaps intrigued.

  “I take it you can feel that?” Zed asked, indicating the air around them. There was no need to clarify what he was referring to. Zed could feel it whenever he touched the pocket watch. The energy in the air. It had been a long while since he’d used his powers of persuasion. It was comforting to see how fast they came back.

  Vee nodded stoically.

  Zed took that as another good sign and continued. “The other towns we took weren’t this ripe. Not by half. The energy here crackles.” He paused for a moment, looking off into space as if he could see the power hanging in the air. “You gave me a choice, so now I’ll give you one. We can go back to the others. I won’t resist. Or, if you prefer it, you could keep all this energy for yourself.”

  Vee’s eyes betrayed nothing. The man was stone. “We don’t have the compass. Finding the book would be…difficult.”

  Zed released his million-watt smile, the one he reserved for his moments of greatest need. “That won’t be a problem.” He pulled the book with the broken world symbol out of his satchel.

  Vee drew in a sharp breath. It was quiet, but Zed heard it. And when he did, Zed knew he had won.

  “You found it,” Vee said. It may have been Zed’s imagination, but Vee’s voice sounded a hair weaker than normal. “Without the compass. That must have been some search.”

  Zed shrugged. “I had three hundred years and a town of adoring people to help me. You’d be surprised what can be accomplished. It was hidden under a pew at the Lutheran church. A janitor found it. I rewarded him with three wives and the ability to read minds. I can share my powers now. Did you know that?”

  Vee’s eyes were on the book, a look of hunger on his face.

  Zed casually flipped the book open. It sprang to just the page he’d needed. Of course, it had. God, he loved this book.

  “This book is the embodiment of the power of this town,” Zed said. “It’s a thing of wonder. And it could be yours.”

  Vee seemed to come out of his daze. The big man took a step forward.

  Zed ran his finger over the page, tracing the illustration drawn there. “But it never will be.”

  Vee tried to take another step but was jerked backwards. It looked as if something was holding onto his foot. He looked down and his eyes widened. His foot was changing, burying itself in the ground.

  “What are you doing?” he groaned.

  “I’m using the book,” Zed said. “All these years, all this power, and all you idiots thought to do was consume it? You didn’t stop for a moment to consider that it might be more useful in its current state than as fuel?”

  Vee’s body was lengthening now. It was truly something to behold. The book had said what would happen, but Zed hadn’t fully believed it would work. Seeing it with his own eyes was something different.

  Vee groaned as he transformed.

  “Tell me,” Zed said, “does it hurt?”

  But he’d waited too long to ask. Vee’s mouth was gone. A few moments later, there was a tree standing there. It looked no different from the dozen others throughout the town. Zed noticed with slight dismay that the statue had been knocked over during Vee’s transformation. It lay on the ground in a dozen pieces.

  But it didn’t matter. This tree was the tribute to Zed’s power now. He’d done the unthinkable. He’d beaten one of his former masters.

  He hoped the rest of the Exiles would show up here so he could do the same to them. But they didn’t. So he waited almost a thousand years, until the trees were thick and every trace of the town that had been was gone. His clothes fell apart and he forgot to replace them with new ones. He sometimes forgot his own name. But the book always reminded him.

  Over time, the book faded. It still worked, but it had lost the crackle of power it had once had. Even the words on the page seemed to fade in and out.

  When the white bird creatures stopped coming and the Larvae began to appear, Zed knew this place was done. His former masters wouldn’t be able to siphon any energy from it. The town had stopped producing the power, and the power had devoured it. The place no longer existed, at least not in the world it once had.

  He used the book one last time to open a portal in a tree, and he traveled through time and space to the next town on his list.

  He stepped out, naked and barely remembering how to speak, and looked at his new home. Rook Mountain, Tennessee.

  2.

  Rook Mountain

  Sometime after March 27, 2014

  Frank moved the knife toward Zed. “What happens if I open it?”

  Zed looked at the box, the one with the lock on it. The Cassandra lock. But he wasn’t paying attention to that. He was barely paying attention to the conversation. He was attempting, not for the first time, to look inside Frank’s mind. It was a maze in there. No, that wasn’t quite right; it was a lock. A lock without a key.

  They were in Rook Mountain City Hall. Frank had come here in the night seeking the box that now sat in front of him. The box that Zed used to store the bubble that kept the Unfeathered away. It was a mental trick and nothing more, a bit like a more extreme version of the memory palace technique orators had been using for centuries to remember seemingly impossible amounts of information. The box was Zed’s mental trick, but opening the box would destroy the bubble nonetheless.

  Zed tried to worm his way into the cracks in Frank’s mind, but it wasn’t working.

  “What?” Christine asked. “Frank, don’t open
it. We don’t know what will happen.” The good Doctor Osmond had burst into the room a few moments before. Zed had barely noticed.

  Something about Frank’s mind, the lock without a key, sparked an idea in Zed. A lock with out a key. A box that had a bubble.

  “Yeah,” Frank said. “That’s why I’m asking. So how about it, Zed? What happens if I open it?”

  With that, it came to Zed. What if the box couldn’t be opened? Not by anyone at all? “If you open that box, I leave. You are on your own. I’ll leave this town to the Unfeathered.”

  “That’s all I get?” Frank asked.

  “That’s all you get.”

  “How about if I start cutting you?”

  Zed shrugged. “I might say a few more things, but would you believe them? You already know the important stuff. That box keeps the Unfeathered away. What else do you need to know?”

  Zed waited, knowing what would happen, knowing Frank would open the box. He’d created the Cassandra lock after he’d seen it at the top of Frank’s mind that day so long ago when they’d first met. Zed had put it on the box as a precaution because it would be so difficult to open. But it could be opened. What if there was a lock that couldn’t be opened at all? Imagine what he could do with such a thing.

  “Frank, no,” Christine said.

  Frank reached for the lock and twisted it, squeezing in exactly the right place and pulling at just the right angle. The lock snapped open. He lifted the box’s wooden lid.

  The four sides of the box collapsed outward onto the desk. The box was empty.

  “That will be very difficult to replace,” Zed said. It wouldn’t. But he wanted to see how Frank would react if he put the potential death of the town on his head.

  The room was silent for a long moment.

  Christine put a hand to her mouth. “Oh, Frank. What have you done?”

  “He’s killed you all,” Zed said.

  Frank turned to Christine.

  “No, it’s okay,” Frank said. “There was nothing in the box. That couldn’t be what was keeping the Unfeathered away.”

  Zed twisted his face into a grimace. “It wasn’t what was in the box. It was the box itself.” This was true, after a fashion. It was the box that allowed Zed to hold two bubbles in his mind at once.

  Christine looked at Zed. The gun hung from her hand. “You can fix it, right? You can fix the box?”

  Zed picked up one of the pieces of wood and turned it over in his hand. “No,” he said. “I can’t. Whatever power it had is gone.”

  Frank looked at Christine. “Listen, it’s all going to be okay.”

  “No, you listen,” Christine said.

  The sound came again. The sound of singing.

  “The Birdies,” Zed said. “Isn’t that what you call them, doctor?”

  Christine didn’t answer.

  “First they’ll come in the night for people who happen to be outside,” Zed said. “But then they will grow bolder. It won’t be long before your homes aren’t enough to protect you. Then they’ll start attacking in the daytime.” He turned the piece of wood in his hand over and over.

  Zed set the piece of wood on the desk. “I’m leaving.” He held out his hand to Frank. “Give me the knife. I need it where I am going.”

  Frank hesitated, then said, “No way.”

  Zed stood up. “That’s what I figured. I suggest you two stay here for the night. It’s going to be ugly out there.”

  He took one last look into Frank’s mind. And there, right at the edge of things, he saw something that truly disturbed him. It was a still image and nothing more.

  A book. The Rook Mountain book. And it was burning.

  The image made no sense. Zed felt the power still building in this town. It had to be gathering somewhere. Had this man actually destroyed the book? Seemed impossible, but…

  He marched across the room, giving Frank and Christine a final frown as he slipped through the open door. There was a flash of blue light as he shut the door behind him and transported himself across town.

  Zed appeared a moment later in the basement workshop of his large home. He worked for a few hours, ignoring both the song of the Unfeathered and the screams of the Rook Mountaineers they were devouring. He crafted three small square boxes, an inch wide and tall, by soldering together scraps of metal. They didn’t have to be strong. They just had to be without an opening. That done, he drilled tiny holes in them and ran a string through each, making them into necklaces.

  He let the necklaces dangle from his fingers and surveyed his work. It was a rush job, that much was clear from looking at it, but it would do. He wasn’t out to win any awards for craftsmanship. What he needed was functionality.

  Zed drew a deep breath. He wasn’t looking forward to transporting himself so far, but it had to be done. And then he could finally be at peace, for the first time in over a thousand years.

  He materialized moments later outside a cabin deep in the Rocky Mountains. He kept his eyes shut for a few long moments, taking slow breaths and steadying his stomach. Traveling so far made him a bit ill.

  Zed opened his eyes and was momentarily surprised to find it was dark. He’d forgotten it had been night when he’d taken Rook Mountain out of time. For the rest of the world, it still was nighttime.

  His stomach flipped and flopped, twisting and cramping painfully, but is was nothing he couldn’t manage. Back when he thought about such things, he’d wondered what traveling such long distances actually did to a person. His selectmen could travel, sure, but only across town. And even that had the strange result of melting and reconstructing their bodies. To travel as far as Zed just had…he wondered if the stomach pains he was experiencing were a sign of something much worse happening inside of him. He wondered if maybe his invulnerability was the only thing that kept him alive through the process.

  He walked toward the cabin, enjoying the cool air on his face. If he hadn’t known time was stopped, he could have thought this was just another night at Wilm’s cabin. He’d spent many such nights like this back when he’d been in her good graces. He’d spent hours just sitting on the porch, the pocket watch in his hand—just being. Unlike those nights, it was silent now. The Unfeathered were far from this place. He was likely the only animated being in a thousand miles in any direction.

  He pulled open the screen door and walked inside.

  Sure enough, there she was, sitting in her favorite chair, an open book in her lap. Something non-fiction, undoubtedly. She worked so hard to understand this world, both her source of power and her adopted home. She learned about the science and the history. But never the people. She never made an effort to understand what really made them tick. They were beneath her notice unless she needed something from them. Then she would bribe or coerce them as needed.

  That was what made Zed better than her. He might not love the people—even the ones who loved him—but he did understand them. And that made all the difference.

  Still, this woman had made him what he was. Without her, best-case scenario, he would now be a very old man, looking back on a futile life and trying to find the meaning in it. He owed her something for that, didn’t he?

  He put a hand on the woman’s rock-hard shoulder, and he was reminded of the statue that used to stand in the center of Sugar Plains before Vee knocked it down while changing into a tree. That statue and this woman were both equally as useful. Items that served only to remind him of past glories.

  Nostalgia was all well and good, but Wilm’s time had passed. She’d lived a long life. How long exactly Zed didn’t know, but surely as long as anyone could expect. She’d spent it consuming power. It was Zed’s time now. And he didn’t intend to just consume power. He intended to cherish the power. Wield it. Put it to good use.

  He put one of the necklaces around her neck. The tiny metal box thudded against her frozen chest.

  He admired it there for a moment, admired the idea of it.

  The question of how to deal with his
remaining three former masters had long weighed on him. He could send them deep in time, as he had with his fellow Toolsmen and Toolswomen, but he would have to remain with them. And unlike his fellow Tool bearers, his former masters would certainly find and kill him.

  But if he created a bubble of time and put it in a box, a box that could not be opened, a lock without a key, if you will, he could allow the box to function independently. He could stay here while sending them there. He could even create another bubble to make the box slightly out of sync with their timeline so they couldn’t destroy it. It was genius.

  Even after a thousand years, Zed still managed to impress himself now and again.

  He looked at Wilm one last time. He considered bringing her to life for a moment so they could talk. So she’d know who’d done this to her. But that was madness. Vanity. She might crush him in the few moments he spent talking to her. Anyway, she’d know who had done this to her. She’d know.

  He reached out and tapped the box, mentally activating the bubbles inside, and she disappeared.

  She’d live out the rest of her existence in a deep hole in time, the type of place where the Ones Who Sing lived. They might not kill her, but she wouldn’t be able to escape, either. At long last, he was safe from Wilm.

  Now all that remained was to find San and Rayd. He had some ideas where they might be. They too were creatures of habit. But finding them could potentially take a while. He decided he’d better get started.

  As it turned out, finding and disposing of San and Rayd only took seven days. They were both in their favorite haunts, St. Louis, and Seattle, respectively. He sent both of them to the Away without so much as a word to them, same as he had with Wilm.

  Then he returned to Rook Mountain. He had an idea for another way the boxes could be used. He could use them to punish people. Enough of brandings and maimings, from now on whenever anyone broke Zed’s rules he would send them to the Away to serve out their sentence. It would be a new rule. He’d call it Regulation 19.