Time Bandits

by Dean C. Moore

  Monty turned and looked at him as if he was quite mad. Carl just stared back at him until it sank in. Finally, Monty said, “Shit, you’re right. I really must be drunk. Hold this, will ya?” he said, handing over the power wrench.

  Never one for theatrics, Monty skipped making the sign of the cross over himself, the “Time to die, mo-fos” and just tossed himself into the wind. He dropped down a floor and just hung in the air like one of those parachutists jumping out of a plane getting ready to link up with a teammate. Then he righted himself, coming to vertical, manifested a flaming spear in his hand and threw it at one of the crabs.

  The creature, shafted through and through, short-circuited, sputtered, and fell off the girder to the street below. Being as this was rush hour, Carl figured it was a fifty-fifty chance any one of the falling fuckers would take out a commuter.

  Monty went all Thor on their asses next, manifesting the big man’s hammer and smashing the shit out of one robo-bastard after another. He just flew himself to where he needed to be and bam! Bam! Bam!

  He was down three levels now and working his way inexorably to street level, taking out more and more of the little buggers as he went, as more and more of them were needed on the stories which were moving on to filling in the metal rectangles framed by the girders. But then it was as if he just ran out of gas. He started falling, as if the magic was gone. “Help me!” he shouted back at Carl.

  Carl reached out his hand, palm up, as if he had the magic to levitate him back to his level, snatch him right from the yawning jaw of the abyss. But he didn’t have shit. He just looked on in horror as Monty continued to fall. Then it dawned on him, he used to teach sky jumping, before he showed up to work drunk one day. So he leaped after Monty, figuring he’d angle his body in the wind to reach him in time, grab hold of the crazy bastard, and steer him to safety. Hope to God they landed on one of those stories with some actual flooring in place to cushion their fall a little.

  It went pretty much as Carl saw it going inside his head. But by the time he’d grabbed hold of Monty and steered them towards a potential landing site, it didn’t much matter what they landed on, not with gravity being the uncompromising shit that it was. Of course they would both be unconscious on impact, hopefully that meant dead. This was turning out to be one nightmare he’d just as soon not wake up from.

  ***

  Carl woke up to find two preternaturally beautiful people staring down at him. A female one with long flowing auburn hair. And a male one with a mop of dirty blond hair. “Angels wear matching trench coats?”

  The guy smiled at him, giving him a moment to catch his bearings. But the woman was all business, as if she just didn’t have the time. “You’re in the hospital, Carl, you and your friend over there. You’ve had a nasty fall. I’m Kendra.” She showed him her badge. “And this is Torin. We’re investigating what the hell happened up there on the hundred fifty seventh story of that building.”

  “We fell,” he said, averting his eyes.

  “You’re Native American,” Torin said. “Native Americans don’t fall off skyscrapers.”

  “They do when one of them gets drunk off his ass, and the other one is stupid enough to try and save him when he takes a fall.” He looked over at the bed beside him. It was Monty. Only it wasn’t. He was just a head and a piece of torso. The rest was all robotic replacement parts. “Oh, man, Monty is going to freak.”

  Torin panned his head to his friend. “Yeah, I’m guessing that’s going to be a bit of an adjustment.”

  “You don’t get it, man. He hates robots and cybers. He’ll take one look at himself and jump off a building all over again.”

  “Only, he didn’t jump the first time, did he?” Kendra said. She was burning her eyes into him the same way he’d done to Monty before he jumped.

  Carl averted his eyes again.

  “Tell me,” she said, “and maybe I’ll see to it that your friend gets another option.”

  “A little late for that,” Carl mumbled.

  “There’s a genetic retrovirus on the market that can regrow his body parts. He’ll be part salamander but I’m guessing that’s preferable to being mostly cyborg, him being the fine upstanding, AI racist that he is.”

  “You can do that for him?” Carl said, meeting her eyes again.

  “Only if you start talking.”

  He stared at the wall and for the longest while said nothing.

  “Suit yourself,” Kendra said. He heard her heels tapping out his plea for help in Morse code on her way to the door.

  “I told him he could fly,” Carl said. When he looked back at the ceiling, he saw Torin scowling at him. Kendra walked into the blank spot in the ceiling overhead. “You told him he could fly? What, are you nuts?”

  “The soda I was drinking, I guess it was making me kind of high. Really high, I guess, considering how much I believed what I said at the time. The weird thing is he looked into my eyes and he believed me.”

  “That’s not the weirdest thing though,” Torin said leadingly, as if he was looking into his mind.

  “No, it wasn’t. The weirdest thing is for a while he really did fly, and he was pulling things out of thin air, weapons, to use against the robos. A spear. Then a hammer. Not just any hammer. Thor’s hammer. Just like I told him he could do.”

  “I have no doubt that’s what you thought you saw, as high as you were,” Kendra said.

  “No, that’s what really happened,” Carl and Torin said at the same time. He grabbed Torin’s arm, frantic to make sure he believed. “You, you can see into my mind somehow.”

  “Well, that in itself wouldn’t prove you weren’t hallucinating,” Torin said. Carl released his hand and sank back into the bed, deflated like a water balloon dropped on the floor. “All the same, I believe you.”

  “Keep this up,” Kendra said to Torin, “and I’ll get a room for you too.”

  “No, it makes sense.” Torin scratched the stubble on his face.

  “I tell you what makes sense. They were both high on the same drug, which made them open to suggestion, lowered the threshold where people suspend their disbelief,” Kendra said. “I’m sure the toxicology reports will bear me out.”

  Carl shook his head vehemently. “No, Monty wasn’t drinking the energy pop. He was drinking beer, just plain old beer.”

  “The field is called psychobiology,” Torin said. “If you believe strongly enough, you can affect your cellular physiology. People have healed themselves from cancer on belief alone.”

  “Yeah, one in a million, which means it could just as soon have been dumb luck,” Kendra balked.

  “Except in this case,” Torin said, ignoring her and looking at Carl, “I think the drug opened your crown chakra, the seat of divine knowing, made you see the truth. But in your friend’s case, it opened his third chakra, or power center, with your help, of course. When he looked into your eyes he was hypnotized by you for all intents and purposes, you were so centered in that moment; it’s called the guru effect. He got from you what he needed, the how-to along with the radical belief. Only the psychic connection between you was broken when he fell out of range. And by the time you went after him, the drug was starting to wear off.”

  “I don’t know anything about chakras, but as to the rest of it, yeah, that’s what I thought was happening to, that’s what I knew was happening.”

  “You may be the closest thing I have to the divine oracle,” Kendra said to Torin, “but this time I’m going to need the scientific tests to back up what you’re saying.”

  “Of course,” Torin said, “I’ll get on it as soon as we’re back at the station. Assuming there are more samples of that soda in the machine. And if not, assuming I can find that can he was drinking out of. And if not, I can always hope I can reverse-engineer the drug to test from the metabolites floating about Carl’s system.”

  “Why can’t I feel my legs?” Carl said.

  “Oh, you’re paralyzed from the waist down,” Torin said gai
ly. “Small price to pay if you ask me for the ride of a lifetime. People can go hundreds of lifetimes without ever being able to pull back the veils of Maya like you did. Rejoice, my friend,” he said, patting Carl on the shoulder before taking his leave.

  Kendra shook her head. “Sorry about him. He’s not exactly wired like the rest of us. I gather your insurance policy wasn’t as extensive as your friend Monty’s.”

  Carl took a deep breath then let it out. “No, it wasn’t.”

  She checked his chart. “Well, if it makes you feel any better, your spine was too shattered to be operable. They might be able to fix you with an exoskeleton, so you can continue to do construction work.” He kept his eyes to the wall. “You could try the retrovirus to regrow body parts. Might work. I’ll let the doc know about it. There’s so much breaking tech news these days, you, as the responsible patient, often has to inform the doctor of the available procedures that pertain to you.”

  “You needn’t bother. I always made out that Monty was the big bigot of the two of us. But we’re both just a couple rednecks at the end of the day. Neither of us wants to be Salamander-Man any more than we want to be Robo-Man. I guess my world is just a little smaller than yours, and my options fewer.”

  “Not that much smaller,” she said, then tapped her heels out of the room. This time he swore the SOS he heard of dits and dahs from the heels she was wearing was a cry for someone to come and rescue her.

  TWENTY-TWO

  “How are you coming with the Soda Pop Serial Killer case?” Kendra asked, throwing her trench coat across the back of her desk chair.

  “Dead on arrival, I’m afraid.” Torin swiveled away from his laboratory work space smack dab in the middle of their precinct to face her. She was still trying to get used to the change. He’d fancied the idea of a miniaturized lab and work station so much after running into their counterparts in the other timeline that he’d adopted the idea for himself. Just what they needed; muddling of the timelines wasn’t her idea of how to fix this one. “Couldn’t find another soda can in that machine with the drug in it. Couldn’t find the infected can. And as to the metabolites in both patients systems…”

  “The drug breaks down too quickly.”

  “That’s about the size of it. You make any progress at your end?”

  “I interviewed the other survivors.” She pinned their pictures to her evidence board. Bulletin boards took up too much space, and didn’t help with connecting the dots nearly as well as modern software. But she remained forever old school. “Nothing came of it that can break our little impasse over whether this is just a threshold drug that diminishes the subject’s critical faculties, or if it’s the wonder drug you say it is.” She fished through her drawers for colored string to help her connect up the dots on her cork board.

  “So you’re saying we’re both at a dead end?”

  “Not quite.” She slammed the drawer shut, calling a halt to the search. “Whichever one of us is correct, the fact is the drug makes the victims more impressionable. So I’m thinking our killer has pretty much my psychology, only…”

  Torin was nodding before she could finish explaining. “Instead of coping by chasing down criminals, they just became one.”

  “Someone with my hate of pedophiles, adults who take advantage of children for the power trip it gives over them. Whether or not there’s sexual abuse involved, they make the most of how impressionable kids are.”

  “Who’s maybe giving the adults a sense of what it feels like to be the impressionable one. So does that track? Is Carl a pedophile?”

  “No, but Monty is. At least in a manner of speaking. He was charged with the care of his younger sister when both parents went missing one day. On a tear at Atlantic City. Lost everything, including the desire to raise kids penniless, which is why they never returned.” She lowered her head to look at the sister’s picture on her desk, which she still couldn’t bring herself to pin up. That meant her hair was now providing an effective curtain between her and her emotions and Torin. Probably for the best.

  “So what did he do that was so horrific other than try to care for his younger sister?”

  When she glanced up she had to look at a hazy version of him through the tears welling in her eyes. “He prostituted her, acted as her pimp, so they could get by. And when she needed consoling, he took to sticking it in her himself.”

  “Who’d think simple blue collar types could be that twisted? Usually you need to fish in white collar waters for that kind of sickness. But I still don’t get how the killer could know who would take the drink.”

  “Carl’s drinking proclivities are pretty clear, as are Monty’s. But even if the spiked soda got switched, same lesson gets taught whether you’re on the giving or the receiving end.”

  “Same with all the others?”

  “Yep.” She went ahead and pinned the sister’s picture up; it was time for a little distance.

  “So, the guy has a high life-sciences acumen, and now we have a psychological profile to go with that. That definitely helps. The question is, is it enough?”

  Kendra sighed. “Not by a longshot. Who doesn’t feel victimized by someone in authority? We’ll have to narrow our search a hell of a lot more than that.”

  “Maybe there’s a way I can help.”

  “Ordinarily I’d grab at any lifesaver someone threw me, but, in your case…” She broke eye contact and hung up her coat properly, freeing up the chair.

  “No, hear me out. What did we learn from our recent forays into parallel universes? There are a million copies of us out there right now working on this very same problem. Some of them had to have hit on a solution ahead of us. I just have to sleep on it. Use my psychic abilities to probe those timelines, trust that my higher-self will find the needle in the haystack for me.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  Davenport walked up to the two of them, chuckling. “Where did you come from?” Torin asked.

  “Dude, I’ve been at my desk no more than twelve feet from the both of you the whole time. I’ve heard of lovers getting this intense kind of tunnel vision where the rest of the world just falls away into darkness, but really?”

  They averted their eyes guiltily. “Yeah, sorry about that,” Torin said.

  “Well, forgive me for shining a light on the situation,” Davenport said, “but it’s pretty clear to me that both of you are lost without me.”

  “What’s with the hair sculpting, buddy?” Torin asked. “It’s not just your hair anymore, now it’s the ornately trimmed five o’clock shadow. I had scrollwork borders done like that once to help separate my ceiling from my walls.”

  Davenport sighed. “My stylist says my face is too round.”

  “And the bleached skin?” Kendra asked. “You’re getting whiter by the day.”

  “She says now that America is browning, suddenly fair, white skin is more en vogue than ever. I was going to pull the plug on the liposuction until she told me that I could use the fat to make my ass look all that.”

  Kendra and Torin stifled smirks in two part harmony.

  “If you want to save us from ourselves, Davenport,” Kendra said, “you’ll need more than witty one liners.”

  “Your seriocomic descents into your own personal Dantean hell of low self-confidence, notwithstanding,” Torin said, finishing the thought for her.

  “Tell me about it.” Davenport held the file in front of him as if a waiter bringing a dish to their table. “I ran an algorithm that combines your two criteria, only one of which his zeal for pseudo-science and all that opening of chakras crap,” he said glaring at Torin.

  “So you were monitoring the exchange at the hospital too?” Torin gave him the evil eye.

  “I live to be a fly on the wall. Came from a family of twelve, so I learned to blend into the woodwork pretty fast to survive, let all the prima donna personalities like yourselves steal the limelight. Came away defective and protective at the same time, know what I mean?”

&n
bsp; “Yeah, we know what you mean,” Torin said smiling.

  “And I factored in Kendra’s psych profile, and voila,” he said, holding the file a little further out from himself.

  “How many suspects did you narrow it down to, Davenport?” Kendra asked.

  Davenport brought his eyebrows together. “Is it me or does she sound more annoyed than appreciative?”

  Torin reached for the file. “You’re a stepping stone to an end, so expect to be stepped on.” He opened the file and saw nothing but blank paper. “The folder’s empty.”

  “It’s a Zen thing, as in you have to be empty before you can be full of the truth. Thought you’d appreciate the in-joke, Torin, you of all people.”

  Torin made a sour face at him. “Okay, fine,” Davenport said, going to his desk and keying at his keyboard, bringing the images up on the big monitor on Torin’s desk.

  “This was the initial pool of candidates. Like you said, everyone feels victimized by someone, and there’s no shortage of science and technology nerds, when you consider they’re the only ones making any money in this sorry economy. But rank them by the most traumatic childhoods and factor in the most Eastern thinking of the lot, the ones who find little difference between quantum mechanics and Sufi and Buddhist spiritual teachings, and like I said, voila. The pool drops to four who far outpace the others on both counts. And these four in turn are ranked by the same criteria. I’m guessing you won’t have to go much past candidate number one.” Davenport highlighted him from the four with another keystroke.

  Torin read the finer points aloud. “Ritualized rape from infancy?” He grimaced. “I’d say whatever he’s done since then, he’s earned a pass.”

  “Yeah, right.” Kendra was already throwing on her trench coat. “Pipe his coordinates to my car’s GPS nav system.” She didn’t even wait to see if Torin was in tow. But he was.

  ***

  Once inside the unmarked police vehicle, Torin said, “You think we could let the car do the driving this once? I’m sensing your mood isn’t conducive with getting there in one piece.”