The War Gate

by Chris Stevenson

She walked to the back to the warehouse room to find the men busy installing an alarm system on the backdoor. Gretchen wagged her tail, tried to bark, but gagged. Avy gave the small dog a loving pat, then motioned for Sebastian to join her.

  “I need a small compass,” she whispered. He went to a chest under the workbench. He dug through it, bringing out a small wrist compass that had a Velcro strap. “It’s a Boy Scout model,” he said. “Shock and water resistant. Are you planning to—”

  “Yes,” she interrupted, strapping it on. She kissed him. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be back for dinner.”

  “Oh, great.”

  Avy walked back into the theater to stand before an exit door. She readied her finger over the stopwatch button, while holding the compass up, noting the direction and degrees relative to her body position. “I’m facing north-northwest,” she whispered. “I’ll return back by traveling south-southeast.” She pulled up her thoughts of Drake Labrador, feeling the heat race across her face. When the inner surge peaked, she stepped through. Like before, the fluttering sound came, replaced by a heavy buzz. While the seconds ticked past, the sound transformed into a high whine. The air crackled around her, flitting specks of light began to run out into a river of colors. The river stretched like strands of taffy. Avy took mental note that the rainbow river was terminal velocity. At least it was her terminal velocity. She concentrated on holding the emotion of hate, trying to keep it consistent. The smallest fluctuation between the forward and reverse trip might be enough to knock her off course. She had to travel with the exact intensity both ways—a delicate balance.

  After what seemed like several minutes passing, she commanded her mind to relax, wiping it clean of all negative thoughts. The cycle wound down. The fluttering came. She took a deep breath. Her world came to sudden stop with an audible snap.

  She appeared in what looked like a parking lot in the dead of night. She hit her stopwatch button then read the tally. Just over four minutes had elapsed. She made a mental note of the time. “My return is south-southeast.” She noted that her head did not spin as badly with this trip. Maybe it did get easier.

  She found herself standing near a warehouse door. She could make out a field of thin broken trees nestled near a fringe of grass on the other side of a parking lot. Her intuition said this looked like some place on the edge of the city. It could have even been in the suburbs. A distant smear of hazy light showed evidence of some type of commercial or industrial area. Her curiosity piqued, she headed in that direction. She followed a street to a T intersection. She made a right, following the street for about a mile. She found a small shopping mall comprised of a grocery, a mail stop, liquor store, and a chicken franchise. The shops held no interest to her. But the small newspaper rack did. She put her face up against the yellowed Plexiglas, looking at the front-page edition of a business journal. It was the right city, she mused. She gulped hard after reading the date.

  Ten months had flown by!

  In spite of the accomplishment, she felt like an alien Pandora’s Box had been opened. A strange panic gripped her with the knowledge that her boyfriend had been left behind. If she continued to remain in this new time jump, he would suffer from the loss of her. She also knew that something could go wrong on the return trip, causing her to get lost in the time flux.

  Avy made a circuit of the small shopping center, taking bearings on the positions of the doors. She found one that pointed SSE, being off about five degrees off her return heading. She would adjust for the five degrees by altering her body position with a slight increment.

  She prepped herself, but this time conjured up thoughts of love. It was easy—she thought of Sebastian then stepped through. Trying to maintain the same intensity of the opposite emotion demanded all of her concentration. She occasionally glanced at her watch, holding it close under her chin. She ignored the distractions, allowing just pleasant thoughts to consume her. When the time was right, she pulled on the emotional breaks and exited.

  She ended up in a small business office. She looked around to survey her surroundings. Judging from the literature on one of the desks, she knew she’d landed in a tax office. It had a large front window that opened onto the street. She recognized the street immediately. She Walked through the front door onto Hillsborough. She looked both ways, the Stadium Theater sat just eight doors down. Relieved, she hurried to the theater and rapped on the rear door. A motion detector tripped overhead, spilling a funnel of light onto her. A screech alarm pierced her ears. Sebastian answered the door a moment later after shutting off the alarms. He pulled her inside.

  “What happened?” he asked. “You’ve been gone for hours!”

  That meant her timing had been off. She looked around to see if they were alone.

  “It’s okay, Chubby went to bed an hour ago,” he said. “Don’t ever do that again.” He gave her a fierce hug, then took some simmering stew off a hot plate. He served it to her after she sat down. She started in on the meal, trying to explain what happened between mouthfuls.

  “I ended up somewhere in the north suburbs, near a warehouse. At first, I didn’t know where I was. Then I found a small shopping center, which told me just how far I had gone. But then I checked the date on a newspaper.” She lowered her voice. “I jumped ten months. Forward.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “Love brought me back—it changes the direction.”

  “Wow. You boomeranged. You found the formula.”

  “Shush! Just part of it. I think I traveled a default distance, almost the same distance when I went to the Crabtree Mall. The distance stops after you hit a peak speed. Then time starts ticking super fast.” She explained the rest of the theory to him, at least the parts she understood. Just reliving the experience left her breathless, with the anxiety showing in her voice. She gave him a desperate hug. “I swear I’ll never try that again. Losing you is a very bad option.”

  “You relax now, finish eating,” he said, smoothing her hair. “It’s starting to upset you. We can talk about it later.” He brightened. “Chubby and I got a lot done. We rigged the theater up tighter than Fort Knox. They’ll have to come through the wall with a tank to get at us without tripping an alarm.” He gave her a tender kiss. “After you’re done you can sleep. ’Kay?”

  “I’m too keyed up to sleep. I still have the address list of those security people, which has got me thinking about some new moves. We still need to trade blows with them for what they did to us. Are you up to it?”

  “You’re kidding.”

  She was not kidding. After securing the doors and setting the alarms, they snuck out of the theater.

  This time it went off without a hitch. Avy knew which households had pets and avoided them. She had memorized most of the home layouts, keeping her travel time to a minimum. They arrived back home just before dawn, tired but fulfilled. They snuggled, wrapped in each other’s arms on the tiny cot. They surrendered to a deep sleep that night. Every so often, they heard the lethargic bark of Gretchen.

  ###

  Drake Labrador would not suffer through another hectic round of wild accusations having to do with ghost hauntings. He’d already been over it once. He told Auggie to solicit written reports from the nine security personnel who had reported for work with the same type of complaints they’d experienced before. The rest had called in sick, offering various excuses, which he suspected were lies.

  When Drake read the reports, he seethed. The incidents had escalated into more frightening displays. Ketchup had been used to write foul messages on floors, pools and saunas had been soaped, doors and windows were left wide open, bathroom mirrors were smeared with deodorant sticks, while lipstick devil faces smiled from refrigerator doors. There were no reports of injuries. But there were many incidents of distraught children and terrified wives who had awoken to the carnival of horrors and screamed bloody murder.

  He dropped the reports in the trashcan and blew a gale force sigh. He glanced at Auggie, but trained his eyes on
Linda Wu.

  She snapped a marble-sized gum bubble between her teeth. “I know, I know. Go to lunch. Even though it’s a quarter to ten in the morning, I am headed for lunch.” She picked up her purse. “Don’t mind me. It’s just my birthday. But what does that matter?” She stomped to the door, jerked it open.

  Drake raised a finger. “Happy—”

  The door slammed with a hard crack.

  “Birthday—go fuck yourself.” Drake stabbed a finger at a chair. “Sit.”

  Auggie sat.

  “Look, boss, I can’t figure it out either. This guy should have crawled up his own asshole after the mess we left at his place. Those kids we hired did a righteous job. It had to be a hell of a kick in the teeth for anybody to come home to that. Just out of curiosity, I drove by the theater. He’s already repainted. The building looks better now than it ever did. What’s left? Hit him again?”

  “That’s a given. We fucked him over—he fucked us over right back.” Something else irked him, for which he needed an answer. “Don’t you think it’s a little strange that we had trouble getting a certain plane to a certain destination?”

  “Yeah, I’ve been wondering about that, too. I think that magic geek had something to do with it. Buck swears that he had an in-flight emergency before he was ready to set things in motion. I leaned on him heavy. Either he’s telling the truth, or he’s hiding something.”

  “He’s not telling the truth. You know how I know this, Auggie? My parents called me. They bitched me out about the cancellation. Besides ripping into me for having flown them in a piece of junk, Emily Chambers told me that she was upset with the in-flight service.”

  “What in-flight service?”

  “There was a stewardess in uniform on that plane. Emily Chambers swore to it. Now when have we ever had a stewardess on one of my private jets?”

  “Never. Well, Linda’s been on a few flights because you like her to service the—”

  “Forget about that. I need to know the identity of this female. She had an ID tag, but my parents didn’t catch the name.”

  “Maybe she was one of Buck’s toys.”

  “One parachute, Auggie? He brings some slut onboard for a little action just to lose her over the Atlantic? Why would he try to complicate matters?”

  After an uncomfortable silence, a few synapses seemed to weld a thought together in Auggie’s mind. “Damn, we had an intruder.”

  “To think I pay you for this. I have a good idea who was masquerading as a flight attendant on my plane. My list of suspects is pretty damn narrow, and all I would have to do is show my parents a picture of Avy and ask if she was the person onboard the plane. I want you to extend a personal invitation to my daughter to meet with me in private. Tell her that I harbor no animosity—that I am willing to resolve our differences. I don’t need Mr. Magic to accompany her. This matter is between the two of us.”

  “I can make the arrangements.” Auggie leaned forward in his chair. “I’m having trouble grasping your daughter’s participation in these attacks. Why would she bring all of this down on her father?”

  “She has some type of vendetta against me. She’s pissed off about being kicked out of the house. So now she shows her displeasure with a teenage fit of angst.” He knew better than that. He had a feeling her persistence in probing his activities reached far deeper into a hidden corner of his life. In particular, his past. No other explanation made any sense. Except one. It had nothing to do with the vengeance of an angry teenager being kicked out of a house. It smelled of an investigation that he wanted no part in reliving—something that dredged up sinister betrayals.

  Drake leaned back in his chair. “How are you coming along with our special guest? Have you located anyone yet?”

  “Two of my men have someone lined up from New York. He’s a specialist of sorts. We had to use some weird channels to find him. Last I heard, they were arranging for his transportation.”

  “Why can’t he provide his own?”

  “Well, he doesn’t have any. I couldn’t tell you how he gets around because we don’t know that much about him yet. I just know he’s never been in one place long enough to be collared. From what I understand, he’s some kind of gypsy assassin. He works cheap.”

  “I told you I don’t need some two-bit thug who is going to step over his own balls. No amateurs.”

  “He’s no amateur, boss. He made a major impression on our boys. We’ll know more about him when he gets here.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “He doesn’t have a name. The boys said he goes by a handle, which is how they found him. They call him Wax Man.”

  Wax Man sounded like something out of a museum, Drake thought annoyed.

  Chapter 16

  Since Avy had checked out of her motel to move in with Sebastian, she’d noticed that his mini-fridge was incapable of holding more than three or four day’s supplies. Unless they purchased something larger, the trips to the store would remain frequent, hampering a low profile. Avy wanted to add a real bed to the shopping list. She’d convinced Sebastian to take a trip to purchase both items. They piled into her Jeep and headed out. Their first stop would be a small appliance store that Sebastian had chosen because it was “off the beaten path.”

  Sebastian glanced in the rearview mirror, mumbling to himself, prompting her to ask him if he thought they were being followed.

  “I don’t know. I keep seeing a black Cadillac, a blue van, and a gold Supra too many times to be a coincidence. I hope it’s not my paranoia working overtime.”

  Avy understood his feelings of paranoia. Sebastian had a remarkable sixth sense for reading a situation that was off center. If Drake’s men were playing tag with them, Sebastian would be the first to know.

  When they pulled around to the rear loading dock of the store to park, it became obvious that neither of them had seen the tails. With a screech of tires, two white vans hemmed them in on either side. Eight men, dressed in dark suits, rushed from the vehicles. None of them wore ties, but all of them had on gaudy sunglasses with silver-mirrored lenses. The couple had no time to jump out of the vehicle. They were surrounded.

  A swarthy overweight man stepped close to Avy’s door, giving her an insincere smile. Sebastian rose halfway out of his seat, poised for trouble.

  “Miss Labrador, I’m Augustus Hollywood, your father’s chief of security. My employer has asked me to arrange a meeting with you for the purpose of hashing over some differences.”

  Avy watched a few men unbutton their jackets, exposing shoulder holsters. They were not in a high traffic area. A lone store employee sat on the loading dock, smoking a cigarette. Things could go sideways very fast with only one witness in attendance, who could be easily dealt with.

  “You guys have a lot of nerve,” Sebastian huffed. “She’s not going anywhere with a bunch of thugs. Back off so we can go about our business.”

  Auggie glared at Sebastian and jabbed a finger at him. “This is none of your affair, magic man. We’ve already sworn out affidavits for your arrest for trespassing and vandalism.”

  “That’s a laugh,” said Avy, smelling garlic on Auggie’s breath. “Did you forget about your own trespassing? Or your terrorism? You’re on Animal Control’s most wanted list for what you did. That was a felony. Care to start again?”

  Auggie stepped back, fixing black little eyes on them. “That’s why we’re having this meeting. I’m sure Mr. Labrador wants to put an end to this.”

  “You could put an end to this by leaving us alone,” said Sebastian.

  “I wasn’t talking to you,” said Auggie. “The offer stands with the young lady. We’ll provide her safe escort. When the meeting is over we’ll furnish a ride back to her location of choice.”

  Avy had no idea why Drake would want to meet with her. Unless he wanted to find out what she was planning or what she knew. It had to be a sign of desperation to want to see her face to face. Which meant guilt, fright, or both. She did have a burning des
ire to know how close to the truth she had come. Maybe he would confess—slip up in some way, or indicate his guilt by offering some type of deal. Did this man even have a conscience? Or was this a trick? She would have to find out. Otherwise, it would nag at her forever.

  “If I go, Sebastian goes,” she said.

  “You’re not serious about this,” said Sebastian. “They wouldn’t think twice about pumping slugs into you, then burying you in a shallow grave out in the hills.”

  “You have our word,” said Auggie. “She leaves in the same condition she arrives. We’ll allow him to wait outside the property line to pick you up, if that suits you.”

  Avy spoke soft words to Sebastian. It took her five minutes to convince him that she had to go. He relented, but not without strained reservations. He had one plea for her.

  “Okay, I’ll be there to pick you up. If things don’t go right promise me that you’ll take one of those therapeutic walks.” He added a last parting shot for the security men. “You bend one hair on her head, so help me, I’ll hunt down every one of you so I can do to you what you did to my animals!”

  She promised Sebastian that she would be all right, then gave him a firm hug.

  Auggie extended his hand, helping her out of the Jeep. They led her to one of the white vans, where she entered through the loading door. The driver backed out of the lot, then onto the street a moment later. She sat stoic in the vehicle, watching four security guards study her. They whispered to each other, a few pointed. Some of them might have been on the receiving end of her night raids. She had to cover her mouth to hide the smile that threatened to crack. She was tempted to blurt out a “Boo!”

  They arrived at Cyberflow fifteen minutes later. They took her through a back entrance door that led down a long hallway. The corridors were vacant on the way up to his office. She had the feeling that Drake would not want any attention from curious employees during this meeting. It would be a closed room session.

  A few moments later, she found herself standing alone across from Drake Labrador’s desk. He offered her a seat. She refused, preferring to remain standing. A coffee thermos and a box of fresh doughnuts sat on the end of his desk—obvious gratuities. She wouldn’t be here long, so why try to make her comfortable?