by James Axler
“Kill it!” earlier Magus cried.
“You can’t kill the master,” Magus told his knobby minions.
“Kill it quick!”
“Not the master.”
The enforcers looked at Magus. Then they looked at his doppelgänger. Both smelled and tasted the same, because they were the same. Hooded heads swung back and forth as they tried to unravel the mystery. Meanwhile they were rooted to the floor. Clearly they didn’t know which version to follow.
Magus put a merciful end to their dilemma. And to himself.
He shouldered the M-16 and aimed at Magus-from-the-past’s head. It was interesting and gratifying to see how his other self reacted to impending death. Not with protests or whimpering, not with a desperate attempt to flee. His former incarnation tapped a steely fingertip on the still-human part of his temple as if to say “Put it right here, pal.”
And Magus did just that. The M-16 bucked hard into his shoulder, making the side of his face capable of doing it wince. A wet slurry of brains, shattered circuit boards, skull bone and the flattened, through-and-through 5.56 mm round smacked into the wide chest of the enforcer standing behind him.
Magus watched the familiar knees buckle and a lifeless corpse crumple to the floor.
For good measure he leaned over and put two more point-blank shots into the nonmetal part of the skull.
The enforcers stood frozen, unable to grasp what had just happened.
“Continue loading the gear,” Magus told them. “And when you’re finished put these two in the unit with the third captive.”
The familiar command from the familiar voice set them at ease. They obeyed him without hesitation.
“Why me?” the driver asked in a voice breaking with emotion. “Why are you taking me? I’ve done everything for you that I can. Why don’t you just let me go now.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I’m not a doctor or a scientist. What good am I to you where you’re going?”
“Spare parts,” Magus said.
The driver’s face went pale. He opened his mouth but no sound came forth.
Dr. Nudelman chose that moment to speak up. “The one you killed looks just like you,” he said.
“No, it was me. I just killed myself.”
“Avoiding a time-paradox crisis?”
Magus smirked with half his face. One of the bonuses to kidnapping predark whitecoats was that they made interesting conversationalists. A Deathlander wouldn’t know a time paradox from a bag of rocks.
“Obviously,” he said. “And now there is only one of me in this little corner of the universes.”
Nudelman nodded toward the enforcers. “Who are they, then?”
“They are themselves, the same creatures you have already met, only as they existed eight months in the past.”
“What happened to the ones who kidnapped me?”
“They’re out in the world, doing my bidding.”
“That raises the possibility of another critical paradox. The two groups could cross each other’s paths.”
“Not really,” Magus said. “The other ones are going to disappear along with everyone and everything else in less than fourteen hours.”
* * *
NATHANIEL LOOKED IN the direction of the frantic shout. The corridor was still lined with ESU personnel—those who had stood their ground while the others fled. Through the gaps created by the deserters he saw a small black object hurtle out of the target doorway. It hit the wall and bounced off onto the floor.
The bottom dropped out of his stomach.
A quick-thinking ESU officer threw his curved riot shield over the grenade and then threw himself belly down on top of it.
Three tightly spaced explosions ripped the air. The blast and flash made the officer and his riot shield jump from the floor, dark smoke billowed around them, then they both came down hard.
For his part, Nathaniel felt as if he had just been snap-kicked center chest. It left a dull ache under his breastbone.
The brave-as-hell ESU officer didn’t get up off the shield. He didn’t move at all. It was impossible to tell how badly hurt he was or if he was dead. The concussion alone of a grenade detonating that close would be enough to knock a person unconscious.
Two had gone off inside the apartment, though.
They shouldn’t have been thrown unless the men inside were already dead.
As Nathaniel was entertaining that grim thought, another officer primed a pair of grenades and two-handed them through the apartment doorway.
No warning shout this time.
The officer chucked and ran.
Instinctively Nathaniel counted down the fuse time in his head. Before he got to three, both grenades flew back into the hall. They had a low-to-high arc, as if they’d been drop kicked. They hit the ceiling, ricocheted off the wall and fell to the floor.
Too far away for the remaining ESU men to reach. A couple of them made it through the nearby doors to the other apartments; the rest sprinted for the building entrance.
Holmes grabbed Nathaniel by the arm and pulled him into a crouch just as a matched pair of deafening whacks shook the walls and sent sharp bits of steel slicing through the air. The pair of ESU men closest to the grenades were cut down in midstride, hit in the back by the spray of shrapnel and slammed onto their faces on the floor. Boiling clouds of dark gray smoke rolled over them.
Nathaniel heard a rumble of heavy footfalls, then the purple hoodies burst through the caustic smoke, apparently unharmed.
They moved remarkably fast for their size and weight. Fast enough to catch up to the rear of the fleeing officers before they could reach the front door. Two of the ESU men were pulled down from behind. Then to Nathaniel’s horror, it was tear-open-the-piñata time. Thumb talons and raw power made short work of the body armor and clothing, then the perps slung stripes of gore across the ceiling. The speed with which they killed was astonishing. It was as if they shifted into another gear once they had hold of a victim.
As in the precincts earlier in the day, there was nothing anyone could do to stop the slaughter. Three more officers were dragged down before the others made it out the front door.
The operation’s chain of command had been broken. There was no time to alert the snipers. No time to regroup the troops. The remaining survivors were fighting for their lives.
Holmes was below him as they backed up the stairs, firing steadily with his Glock. Nathaniel could see his slugs plucking at purple satin. Holmes was like a machine, a hit with every shot.
But the bullets had no visible effect.
Not so for the grenades.
When one of the creatures came up the staircase after them, Nathaniel saw that half of its face had been de-hided, stripped clean. The short snout was without hide, as well. Shiny blue bone showed underneath. It looked as though the grenade had gone off right under its chin. The shrapnel wounds were devastating, but the creature seemed to be in no pain. And there was no sign of blood.
Holmes continued to fire as the monster mounted the steps, and they moved backward, shooting it over and over, full in the face. The bullets zinged off the blue bone, taking loose chunks of hide with them. When Holmes’s slide locked back, Nathaniel tried to pull him aside so they could switch positions and he could hold the monster at bay with more close-range gunfire. But the creature had already grabbed the ESU leader by the front of the armor vest. A tug of war ensued as Holmes tried to reload from his combat harness. Nathaniel couldn’t get off a shot because his brother officer was smack-dab in the way.
The standoff ended when the purple bastard raised Holmes with one hand, lifting his boot soles two feet off the ground. Nathaniel hung on for all he was worth while trying to bring his gun muzzle to bear, but he lost his grip when the perp twisted away and slammed Holmes face-first into the wall. The chinstrap on the lieutenant’s helmet broke, and it went flying over the bannister railing. The impact punched a face-shaped hole in the lathe and plaster.
Nathaniel put bullet after bullet into the side of the bastard’s head. The slugs ricocheted off, cutting holes in the wall and ceiling.
Again they had no effect.
The creature didn’t even look mad as it followed him up the stairs. Nathaniel dropped to a knee on the edge of the second-floor hallway and put five quick shots dead center in its massively bulging groin.
Effect.
A pair of new expressions lit up the monster’s ruined face. First surprise. Then pain. As much as the bone structure would allow, it grimaced. The hoodie was stopped cold.
It was only a temporary reprieve, Nathaniel knew. The low-aimed bullets had zinged off without penetrating. He jumped up and dashed through the first open door, which led to the apartment of Veronica Currant, the place where it had all started.
The hallway behind him quaked from the footfalls of his pursuer. Because it was the closest cover, he considered diving into the strange machine and closing the door, but that looked too much like a dead end—what if the lock didn’t work? What if the monster knew how to open it from the outside?
As the enforcer burst through the doorway, Nathaniel ran for the nearest, emptied front window. He didn’t stop when he jumped onto the sill. He launched himself into space, legs churning.
* * *
WHEN ESU SNIPER Matt Carter first looked down on the kill zone from a rooftop across the narrow street, he saw the mission ahead as a chance for Team Alpha’s redemption. He knew his fellow sniper, Pete Balwan, and their spotter, Joe Gaspers, felt the same way. Their unit had been embarrassed earlier in the evening by a different group of perps who had managed to slip out from under their guns without taking so much as a scratch. Lieutenant Holmes had rubbed it in over the com link, too. That still stuck in Carter’s craw.
Three minutes into the operation, after a frenzy of autofire inside the building, Carter still had no targets. No one had exited, and the standing order was to hold fire until suspects tried to leave. The limo that had brought them to the scene sat double-parked in the middle of the street with its doors wide open and courtesy lights on. There wouldn’t be a quick getaway, not with him and Balwan behind a pair of Barretts. But shooting an engine block wasn’t what he had in mind. They all had friends in the Eighteenth and the other precincts that had been hit.
He wanted some .50 caliber payback.
Carter pulled back from the night scope’s eyepiece and blinked. An annoying flare of light was coming from the second-floor window of an apartment next door. The infrared sight magnified it. Gunfire continued to roll out of the target building and then a cluster of grenades detonated. He had seen the CCTV video from the precincts. That the shooting hadn’t slowed down by now was starting to make him nervous. And nervous was the last thing he wanted to be.
When he tucked back into the rifle butt and scope, he saw some of Team Beta stumble out the front door, jump down the steps and hightail it down the street. A second cluster of grenades went off, and more ESU officers poured out onto the street. A moment later a man in an NYPD windbreaker jumped out a second-story window. He dropped behind a hedge, and Carter lost sight of him.
There were no hostile targets in pursuit of the officers. The shooting continued inside the building.
“What the hell’s going on down there?” Balwan shouted at him.
“How should I know?”
“I’ve been trying to get a com link to command,” Gaspers said. “Nothing back. No answer. I think the shit has hit the fan.”
“We have to stay put until we get the call to stand down,” Carter stated.
“The entrance!” Gaspers shouted.
Carter swung his sights to the left. Four purple-hooded suspects were running down the steps of the building. They filtered between the burned-out cars and started to cross the street in their direction.
“Shoot ’em! Shoot ’em!” Gaspers said.
Carter took a quick, settling breath, then squeezed off a round. The Barrett boomed and bucked. Balwan’s gun and the other fifties along the line of rooftops joined in.
Through his scope Carter saw the impacts. The heavy slugs stopped their targets in midstep and drove them to the pavement on both knees, but they didn’t go all the way down. There was no plume of blood and guts. And after a second, they hopped up and kept on coming.
He felt a flutter of panic in the pit of his stomach as he worked the bolt. No one got up after taking a fifty center mass. No one. It should have made a hole big enough to stick a fist through. He led his target and fired again.
And got the same nonresult, but with a ten-ring head shot this time.
On either side of him, the Barretts along the rooftops were rapid firing.
“Bullshit,” he said to himself. “Bullshit!”
He got a third shot off before his target reached the ground floor of their building. He saw the slug spark as it ricocheted off the hooded head, then spark again as it skipped off the pavement.
There was a loud crash from directly below as the suspect broke through the entry door. And there was similar din from the buildings on either side.
“They’re coming for us,” Gaspers said, drawing his sidearm. “Fucking A, they’re coming for us.”
Balwan swung around his Barrett to cover the lone entrance to the rooftop. As Carter picked up his weapon and got to his feet, a flurry of gunshots erupted from the neighboring building, then a howling scream that ended abruptly. Through his nightscope he saw a hoodie throwing a sniper off the roof, in pieces.
* * *
EXPLOSIONS PUNCTUATED THE wall of gunshot clatter from next door. The end was near, Magus knew. Panic had set in. In this place and time, frag grens were the weapon of last resort.
“Pick me up,” he told the driver. “Hurry!”
When the man took a step toward him with open arms and a pained expression Magus said, “No, you idiot, that me.”
The driver squatted beside the corpse, slipped his hands under the shoulders and behind the knees, then straightened with his burden. The ruined head hung drooped over his forearm trailing long, swaying strands of congealed gore.
“Where do you want me to put it?” the driver asked as he looked around for a suitable resting place in the empty room.
“Out the damned front window. Step on it!”
Big bore blasters boomed from across the street. They sounded like Fourth of July cannons going off. The ricochets plowed through the brownstone facade, as if it was made of cardboard. A stray round zinged through the room, into the interior wall and kept on going. The near miss made the driver freeze. He looked back over his shoulder, pleading for a reprieve.
“I don’t like giving orders twice,” Magus said.
The man lowered his head and rushed up to one of the emptied window frames. After swinging the corpse back and forth a few times to gain momentum, he hurled the limp form feet first through the opening.
With a metallic clunk the body landed in a wrought-iron flower box bordering a tiny street-level courtyard.
“How rich was that?” Magus asked.
It was a rhetorical question.
“Get the captives in the unit,” he told the enforcers. “Take your positions inside. We’re out of here.”
Magus always made sure he was the last to leave 2001.
He reached down and hit the on switch of the boom box on the floor. The CD started spinning, and between the booms of heavy caliber weapons outside, Frank Sinatra began the quavering strains of “New York, New York.”
Magus cut a joyous, awkwardly veering, little dance turn, then limped into the unit and closed the door.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Ryan watched the fireball dissolve on the horizon behind the silhouetted park trees, like the last embers of the world’s biggest campfire. As the light faded, the underside of the mushroom cloud became less and less distinct, until it blended into the overcast sky and disappeared.
> Then silence closed in.
No traffic sounds. No sirens. No blasterfire. No screaming. In the wake of the unthinkable, the city had stopped breathing.
“Is it coming?” Ricky asked in a shaky voice.
No one had to ask him what it was; they all knew; overlapping Russian nuke strikes that would eat the city alive and turn everything in a ten-mile radius to ashes and slag.
It was the end of the world.
If that was the case, there was no reason for them to budge from this spot. Ryan had never put in much thought about where he was going to die. Or where he wanted to die. This seemed as good a place as any, and he was in as good a company as he could hope for.
Seconds passed as he waited for the barrage to begin. Seconds now were precious to him. He reached down into the front compartment and took Krysty by the hand. When she looked up at him, her emerald eyes were shining and there were tears streaming down her beautiful face.
“I love you more than anything,” he said.
“I know, lover. And I love you.”
Behind him in the compartment, the other companions were embracing. Slapping one another’s backs and saying words that had never seemed appropriate until now. Not just “thank you for having my back.”
To one another they said, “You are my brother.”
“You are my sister.”
“You are my steely fucking heart.”
And when the words that needed to be said were all said, they moved apart and prepared to die.
A minute passed, then five, and they were still waiting.
“What’s the bastard holdup?” J.B. finally asked in exasperation.
The remark was so off the wall that it made them all laugh.
“What’s the matter, you got a hot date on the other side, J.B.?” Krysty asked.
“I thought this party was organized,” J.B. said. “But it’s the same old, same old clusterfuck. Hurry up and wait.”
“Or ‘Due to circumstances beyond our control the scheduled end of the world will be experiencing a slight delay. We thank you in advance for your patience,’” Mildred said.
More laughter rang out.
