by James Axler
They left the trashed apartment and its strange contraption and joined the ESU officers waiting in another apartment just down the hall. Because its windows weren’t visible from the street, all the lights were blazing. The SWAT team was lined up in preparation for the assault. A second unit was in position on the ground floor. Their Plan A was to trap the perps on the marble staircase. They had minicams set up so they could see the kill zone and its approaches and synchronize the two prongs of the attack. Once all the perps were on the stairs, they would spring the trap from above and below. The walls would backstop the torrent of bullets, and there was nowhere to run.
“One more time, team,” Holmes said. “If necessary you have the green light to use the fragmentation grenades you’ve been issued to bring down these suspects. Necessary is the operative word. That means all other options have been exhausted. And be damned sure no one else is in range when you pull the pin.”
The use of antipersonnel explosives on criminal suspects was in no way SOP for the Metropolitan Police. Not even as a last resort. The negative publicity for a militarized law-enforcement unit aside, there was too much risk of injury to bystanders. When a grenade blew, the flying shrapnel had no brain aiming it. The top brass at One Police Plaza had seen the video feeds of the attacks on the precincts; they knew what they were up against and had decided to let the dogs out—the dogs of war.
A voice crackled in Nathaniel’s earpiece. It was a spotter on a rooftop around the corner.
“Confirm five targets now exiting suspect vehicle,” the officer said. “They are crossing the sidewalk and approaching your entrance. I see no sign of weapons, just empty hands.”
Nathaniel had seen what they could do with empty hands; they all had. The images were burned into their brains. They were past the point of no return. Nothing could stop the trap closing. It was all downhill, like an avalanche.
Holmes gave a curt final order for silence on the com network. No verbal commands but his, no talking unless he requested specific information or had determined the mission was complete.
Because the ground-floor entrance’s door was already broken down, the only thing keeping out the perps was a few yards of yellow plastic tape.
He couldn’t hear footfalls from the story below but saw, watching over an ESU tech’s shoulder, stout figures appear on his laptop screen. In the eerie, green-tinted, infrared minicam picture, they looked menacing, powerful, merciless and not entirely human. Nathaniel felt a wave of pure hate sweep over him. He didn’t know what they were and didn’t care. He just wanted them smeared in tiny pieces on floor, walls and ceiling.
He did notice that the littlest perp was missing. What that absence meant he had no idea. And it was too late to do anything about it anyway. He removed his com earpiece and let it dangle on its cord. Then he thumbed in a pair of ballistic earplugs. What was going to happen next was going to be loud.
The five hooded perps crossed the glass-strewed foyer, looked up the flight of marble steps and paused. Nathaniel watched as they tasted the air with long, ribbonlike tongues. Not even close to human.
Just when the jaws of the trap were about to slam shut, everything turned to shit.
Instead of climbing up the stairs, the suspects turned away from them and headed for the apartments along the ground-floor hallway.
Holmes didn’t have to warn the team on that floor of the sudden change in direction. They were all watching the same video feed. The downstairs hall wasn’t nearly as neat a kill zone as the staircase. It had some real drawbacks, but they had gone over that possibility along with several others and had a contingency plan in place. Before the engagement commenced, they had to be in position to back up the ESU team on the floor below.
Holmes growled one word into his headset. “Go!”
On that order the first man in line swung open the apartment door, and the men behind him stormed past, racing down the dark hall toward the top of the staircase. Holmes and Nathaniel brought up the rear.
Before they reached the stairs, automatic gunfire erupted from below. And there were screams sandwiched between the long bursts; Nathaniel was sure of it. Holmes hit the room’s lights, and the stairs and hall below came into view. Because it was a cross-fire ambush, they couldn’t rely on their night-vision goggles to separate targets from fellow officers.
By the time the first officers reached the bottom of the stairs, the corridor where they had hoped to trap the perps was empty except for two bodies in black. Looking down the hall from a position just below the landing, Nathaniel could see dark blood still pulsing from the neck stumps, spraying the foot of the white wall. The heads were nowhere in sight. Gunfire and screaming continued, also out of sight.
One reason the lower hallway had been a second choice of kill zone was because of the doors to the apartments on either side. Unlike the stairway, the perps had flat ground to run on and a choice of places to scatter to. Given the direction of the screams and shooting, though, they had gone straight into the apartment after the second unit of ESU.
Then the shooting stopped, and there was only screaming.
The sound of it made Nathaniel’s skin crawl.
Because he was at the back of the pack of wide-shouldered men in body armor, some carrying riot shields, when he reached the ground floor he couldn’t see very far ahead, and what he could see kept getting blocked by bobbing black helmets. He kept shuffling forward as the SWAT unit filled the hall and moved toward the breached doorway on the left. As the line of men continued to advance, he assumed officers were pouring into the target apartment. Gunfire roared again, an unbroken torrent of it, confirming that assumption. The noise rattled inside his head, despite the ballistic plugs he wore.
The men in front of him kept advancing steadily, which was reassuring. In his mind he envisioned them overwhelming the five perps with sheer numbers and firepower. The clatter of automatic weapons continued unabated, hundreds of rounds ripping off. Were the perps already down? Was ESU taking turns emptying their mags into the fallen bastards’ heads until they turned to a puddle of red mush?
Nathaniel had no idea how far-to-shit things could go until the shooting at the other end of the hallway abruptly stopped. There was a piercing scream. Then two. Then three. All at once. A second later a handful of the men in the corridor closest to the target doorway turned tail. Not all, but enough.
They reversed course 180 degrees and started to run, knocking the men in front of them out of the way.
Holmes tried to hold them back with his bare hands but couldn’t. They wouldn’t stop. Their eyes were wild with panic. And they were in full retreat mode, charging three abreast.
Along with Holmes, Nathaniel found himself forced to back up to the foot of the stairs.
As the stampede swept past them and out the front door, something bounced out from between their running feet. Something dark. It rolled erratically, like a lopsided volley ball, and came to rest against the wall.
It wasn’t a volley ball.
It was a head.
And it looked as if it was still screaming.
From down the hallway, someone shouted, “Fire in the hole!”
Chapter Twenty-Four
When the shooting started, Magus let out a smug little laugh. As he suspected, his adversaries were hardly worth that title. So predictable. The radio call had been a fake, the bait for an ill-advised trap.
He leaned toward the limo’s privacy window and addressed the driver. “I want you to get out now,” he said. “And then open the trunk.”
There was fear in the man’s eyes as he looked up in the rearview mirror. Would he obey or wouldn’t he? Which did he fear the most? The thundering roar of full-auto blasters or the steel hand that could break rock so close to his neck?
The driver made the right choice, the wise choice. He opened his door and got out. Magus exited, too, then waved the man around to the limo’s popped trunk lid.
Magus guessed that snipers were in position on the roofto
ps across the street and that their longblasters were already aimed down at them. A simple trap designed by simple people. When the riflemen didn’t immediately open fire, Magus knew they had no green light and the person who could give the command to turn them loose on targets in the street was probably tied up in the ferocious battle with enforcers.
Magus leaned over the man huddled in a corner of the trunk. “If you struggle, I will crush your windpipe,” he told him.
Then to the driver he said, “Get him out of there. He’s coming with me. Take off the gag, but leave his wrists tied.”
When the driver pulled Nudelman over the bumper, Magus reached into the trunk and took out one of the M-16s. He dropped the magazine into his hand, then tapped its bottom against the steel plate on the side of his head. The weight and the sound—solid not hollow—told him it was full up. The rest of the stolen blasters he had to write off as the cost of doing business. There was no one to carry them all, with the enforcers handling another task, and they didn’t matter in the long run. What was locked in Nudelman’s brain was worth far more to him than a couple of dozen predark blasters.
“Follow me,” Magus told the driver and the hostage, whose wrists were still bound. “If either of you try to escape, I will shoot you down.”
The din of blasterfire from inside the building suddenly stopped and screaming could be heard. Shrill and seesawing, it sounded like a cat fight. Magus limped up onto the sidewalk, past a charred tree, then down the steps of the basement apartment of the brownstone next door.
He wasn’t concerned about the snipers reporting his movements to their superiors or leaving their posts to hunt him down. They were number two on the enforcers’ to-do list. And even if they did sound an alert, he planned to be long gone before the cavalry arrived.
Magus opened the door’s lock with a key from his hoodie’s pouch pocket. He made the driver and Nudelman enter ahead of him. The dark apartment was empty, stripped of furnishings. There was nothing to trip over, but Magus turned on the lights anyway. For any number of reasons, illumination didn’t matter.
The other apartments in the building were empty, too. No one lived there. Except for the mysterious balladeer, of course. That had been a rumor Magus had started through one of the unwitting human minions. He had found it most amusing. And the perfect cover for strange goings-on inside.
The first clue that something had gone amiss on this time jump was the alarming shift in the terminus of the exit hole. It had moved approximately seventy feet to the north from its normal position in the second-floor apartment next door. That apartment was where the time hole had always spit them out before. That’s why Magus had purchased the entire building and left it empty.
“Stop there,” he told the two men. He opened a closet door, touched a catch inside the jamb and the back of the enclosure swung inward, revealing wooden steps leading up. As part of “Bob Dylan’s” remodel, he had installed a hidden passage that led from the basement apartment to its counterpart on the second floor, the time hole’s terminus.
Magus turned on the stairway lights, then ushered the men up ahead of him. They climbed quickly past one landing; the top of the next ended in what looked like a blank wall. Again, a touch on a catch and the wall popped inward. They faced the back of another closet door.
There was noise coming from the other side. Magus put his surviving human ear against the door in order to hear better. One individual was talking in a grating, metallic voice.
His own voice.
The second clue that something had gone seriously awry had been the apparition on the opposite metro train at the West Fourth Street station. Because his comp-enhanced brain could recall in great detail every transit he’d ever made to the past, every route taken and the timing of the same, he’d known there was the remote chance of a near crossing of paths on that particular subway platform at that time of day. Under different circumstances, he would have avoided it like the plague, but they’d been taking fire at the time from Cawdor and his cohorts.
Sure enough, the unlikely had happened.
Two identical ships had passed in the night.
That meant the erosion of temporal barriers and its anticipated consequence was no longer simply a theoretical possibility. The distinctly separate action lines of adjoining, parallel universes had merged to the point that from the present universe one, the others had become visible and real.
Too much monkey business in one time and place; that was on him.
From the moment he’d set foot in the past, he had always known there was a chance of such a thing happening, but he hadn’t expected it to come without warning. There was no going back, no reset button after the delamination of universes on January 19, 2001, had begun. The temporal traffic jam he had created was now a permanent fixture of the time hole’s jumping-off point, as were the event and timeline mergers.
The only way he could ever safely return to loot the past again was if he could recalibrate the time-hole controls, arrive, say, a day or two earlier—or a month. There was no point to arriving the day after Armageddon. He hadn’t tried to adjust the controls before because it had seemed unnecessary—there was plenty of plenty on the date in question—and misguided tinkering risked destroying the link altogether.
To accomplish the recalibration he had to get back to Deathlands and quickly, because the year 2001 was about to come to a violent and premature close.
The other end of the time hole remained fixed positionally in the desert redoubt but not temporally. He had used this route to the same point in the past many times. The only variation that existed in the New York past was the time of day he chose to leave for the hellscape—something he had been very careful not to duplicate.
Magus opened the closet door and limped into a brightly lit room with the M-16 held hip high. Through the rain of falling sparks he could see the time-travel unit. It was sitting right where it was supposed to be, which was understandable as he was looking through a blurred curtain into the past. Next to it was the room’s only other furnishing: a silver boom box.
The occupants of the room didn’t notice the door opening or three people stepping in with them. They were unaware of the grinding noise, too. Magus’s present viewpoint was like a one-way mirror. He could see the past, but the past couldn’t see him because it was still intact; it had a separate beginning, middle and end. Only when the failing barriers were breached did all events and beings and timelines fully merge, like two connected soap bubbles becoming one.
Eight enforcers were loading oblong crates through the time unit’s door, overseen by a carbon-copy Magus. He presumed they had used the same entrance he had, because apparently no one on this side of time—meaning the police—had seen them enter.
No, not a carbon copy, he corrected himself. It was the same Magus. He was looking at himself. A disorienting perspective. Because he had already lived the next few months back in Deathlands, he knew what was going to happen and the other version of himself didn’t. To the earlier Magus, the future was still a surprise.
He had always thought of himself as taller, too.
A man in a lab coat with bound hands sat on the floor beside the time unit. Magus recognized the electrical engineer he had taken prisoner a while back. The matériel being moved into the unit was equipment and construction parts taken from his university lab. The whitecoat’s subsequent rewiring of circuitry had given Magus full command and improved function of his right hand.
From that kidnapping, he could easily calculate the date and time of his earlier version’s upcoming return to Deathlands. As he had hoped, the arrival in the hellscape wasn’t too far in the past—only eight months. Not too long a lifespan to live all over again.
And eight months would give him ample time to prepare a proper welcoming committee for Cawdor and his compatriots in the redoubt, should they escape the fires of nukeday and manage to jump back to their own time. This was a golden opportunity to end their interference once and for all and t
o pull off the ultimate, soul-crushing surprise. Either way, he would be rid of them forever.
There was just one intervening obstacle: another Magus already existed in the target timeline. He was looking at him. The explosion he had just survived was ample evidence of what happened when one time-traveling being made physical contact with an identical counterpart. He had no doubt that’s what had happened back at the storage site—the need for touching was hardwired into enforcers, a fundamental urge. Nature abhorred a vacuum, but what it abhorred even more was double occupancy: two versions of the same entity in the same space and time.
Magus found himself strangely elated at the prospect of the unthinkable thing he was about to do.
When the adjacent universes ground together in the small, Victorian living room, it sounded like a bulldozer shovel blade scraping across concrete. Standing well back from the blurry curtain and spark shower, Magus flipped the M-16’s charging handle, dropped the safety and, from the hip, fired a single shot in the direction of the anomaly. The report shook the room, the hull leaped from the ejector port, but the bullet never made it to the other side. It vanished somewhere in the seam between tightly pressed realities. Like shattering glass, the visual and aural effects fell away, leaving the living room and two universes undivided.
When the curtain dropped, Magus and his captives became visible to the enforcers, who took a step toward them, automatically moving to defend their master. They stopped in their tracks when they realized who had appeared before them. Long tongues flicked out between pointy teeth and nostrils flared as they tasted the air.
The metal jaw of Magus-from-the-past dropped when he saw his double; it dropped even lower when he took in the longblaster. As his steel eyes tightened their focus, they made a low, whirring sound. Then a figurative light went on behind them.
Magus-from-the-present admired his former self’s critical intelligence. It had taken only a second to realize what was about to happen and why.
