Emperor-for-Life: DeadShop Redux (Unreal Universe Book 6)

by Lee Bond

  Ten minutes.

  “Forget about it.” Garth waved the cop’s apology away. If he was planned on operating in this capacity, he‘d undoubtedly be running into people directly affected by the recession and everything that was happening all day, every day. If he took offense to their offense, it was gonna be a long haul. “Anyhoos. I’m here inspecting the property, y’know, like, tryina figger out what I’mma do with it and all that, I’m thinking some kind of dope-ass arcade like in Tron, right, with all the neon and stuff and I’m upstairs in the math room here, on the third floor, right behind me, and I’m like, hey, let’s take a peek outside and BAM! There’s this fucking predator drone, hanging out on the ground, looking like it’s gonna knock on the front door. And that’s when I panicked.”

  Nine minutes.

  “You panicked.” Brutowski nodded, pen a scribbling blur. “Sensible, all things considered.” Up until this minute, he’d been more or less on board with the drones being in the sky providing support to the few of them that remained on the ground, but until this whole mess made some kind of sense, it looked like something had gone screwy with the drone. “And you did what? Exactly?”

  Garth shifted from foot to foot nervously. As far as ignominious takedowns were concerned, bringing down a predator drone with an Algebra textbook hardly even counted. “Uh, well, I uh, you see. I threw a book at it. Like the witnesses said. Into it’s stabilizers. Lucky thing I did, too, on account of …”

  Eight minutes.

  “Missile.” Brutowski nodded. He’d already seen preliminary footage of that colossal fuckup from one of the cameras confiscated by those very chatty witnesses. While he was certain they’d gotten most of the cameras and phones, he was also certain that they’d missed one or two and the whole thing was going to be on the evening news, with the seller of that footage being able to rest easy for at least three months. “From the looks of this, Mister Nickels, it appears as though you were luckier than you had any right to be. A second sooner or later and your building would be rubble. And you…”

  “Charcoaled Garth Nickels. Yeah, I … I been running that scenario through my head nonstop.” His ears picked up a definitively different siren whine streaming through the streets, and a scant second later, Brutowski’s walkie-talkie erupted in chatter. “Official officials are officially on the scene?”

  Brutowski nodded. “Yep. Gonna have to give them everything. Going to be a formal inquest and everything. Drones,” he jerked his thumb at the flipped over beast, “aren’t supposed to get close to the ground like this one did, and for obvious reasons.”

  “I expect they’re also not supposed to start barfing missiles all over the place without probable cause, right? Doubly so if they’re being telepresenced by a living operator? I’d say we're also super lucky the flechette cannons didn't just spray razor sharp needles into the crowd of stooges, too, amiright?" The Kin’kithal winced at his glibness because it got Brutowski’s eyebrow all Spocked up. “Like I said, officer, I’m a programmer and inventor type person. I am not unfamiliar with the technology going into these things.”

  Six minutes.

  “I’m going to need your PIDpak now.” Brutowski held his hand out.

  Brutowski started recording data into his book, making certain to highlight the depth of the foreign kid's knowledge of American mil-tech.

  ***

  Baron Samiel sighed miserably. Reacquiring the prime location was either impossible or would require such a phenomenal outlay of assets that the other option –using a secondary location- wound up becoming the better choice by default.

  He just didn’t like the second-best spot.

  It wasn’t as well situated, would demand infinitely more effort to make it attractive to social mayflies like Drake and Sparks and his cadre, the underground n-space facility would be hampered by a sever tapering of the substrata fracturing and the bribes needed to get the whole thing rolling were positively stratospheric.

  But … with effort, and patience, the second locale would put everything back on track.

  Behind him, the incongruity released a groan that rippled through the continuum deep and low enough to have Baron Samiel feel as though he were at the top of a roller coaster, hanging above that perilous moment just before the car went down that long, stomach-flopping descent. Various iterations of himself down The Line quivered.

  “Screw it.” Samiel said to himself. He sent a message down The Line to the moment he’d gotten Granger to find some way of misappropriating that predator drone and told himself to cancel the order immediately.

  There was no point in giving the man who was presumably at the center of the now-fixed and stable point in time any awareness that there was someone at the other end of The Line, trying to do him in.

  A heartbeat later, memories of canceling the order filtered through his conscious mind.

  Samiel smiled. The joys of being a time-traveler.

  Then he told his younger –not by much- self to follow the new commands.

  Then he released the temporal incongruity from it’s stasis lock and everything started flowing properly again. Inside the cavernous walls of his immense intellect, Samiel felt the other versions of himself undergo historical recursion before the machines properly tracked the changes. The old timeline -where he'd owned the school- shifted into the background and became a part of the tapestry.

  Anxious, biting his lips with nervous anticipation, Samiel watched those red lights like a hawk. Nothing was happening!

  Could it be that his memories were being falsified?

  Had his projections had been wrong?

  Was it possible that the new location wasn’t good enough … wait!

  There.

  A tiny glimmer of green sprouting through all that nefarious red.

  He grinned. Wonderful. Not as perfect as before, but … perfect enough for time travel and war.

  ***

  Garth ‘Nickels’ N’Chalez opened his eyes and found himself standing in the third floor math lab. “Hm.”

  Preparing himself for the inevitable, he scooped up Algebra Book, Slayer of Predator Drones +3 and took a wander over to the window. Expecting to see the drone there in all it’s murderous glory, he was gratified to see … nothing.

  Cars drove down the street, the over-eager witnesses who’d spilled their collective beans the moment cops had shown up did whatever it was future snitches did when they weren’t planning to snitch. The idiot young adults in their stupid clothes and stupider haircuts were goofing around being … idiots.

  That as it. That was all.

  “No drone in sight.” Garth put the algebra book on the window sill. He picked a spot on the opposite wall to stare at and put on his biggest smile. “And that, boys and girls, is how you fight a time traveler. Looks like I get a free waypoint, wouldn’t you say?”

  Two Metaphorical Peas in a Temporal Pod

  Special Agent Delbert Granger –thirty year veteran with a sterling record of service to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and with considerably more gray hair and a rounder stomach than when he’d started- was a tired, tired man.

  All the time.

  Try as he might, he just couldn’t sleep like he used to, back in the glory days when he’d been a hot young agent out to prove himself. He’d slept like a baby, back then, secure in the knowledge that everything was on the right track. The good guys were the ones with the badges and the guns and the bad guys were the ones with the guns. His moral compass had been as unwavering and as sure as a signpost.

  But then, of course, the dark times had begun. None of his friends in the department or his contacts in other agencies talked about it much anymore, but people like him had been there on the ground floor and on the front lines when the United States of America –once the only world power worth mentioning- had started … failing. They used to talk about it, him and his friends, in hushed tones and whispers, and always outside the office and away from their gear, putting their heads together in a despe
rate attempt to figure out what it was they were seeing.

  They’d tried for years. Almost a decade, now Delbert did the math. An entire decade of whispered and hurried conversations, aging lions and lionesses trying to decode the weird feeling curling through everything. It wasn't just the criminal element they’d been running into, either, but it was worth mentioning that their crimes grew more elegant, their devices more sophisticated, their rage more violent, their tastes darker, their destruction harder to ignore.

  No, Delbert and his friends had first noticed strange things going on inside their own house, as it were. Random investigations rubberstamped and cleared off the books, random perpetrators shuffled around until they disappeared, certain –and almost always unconnected in one way or another- crimes that should’ve been handled by the FBI pushed back onto local law enforcement plates. Weird things, inconsistent things, things that hadn't made a lick of sense, taken wholly or singly.

  Delbert and his cadre -all lost to him now, one way or another- had done a lot of snooping, cautious digging into records. Nothing overt, nothing that'd violated anything serious.

  Had it been illegal? Sure, because back then, none of them’d been special. Only, to be honest, it wouldn’t have mattered either way, because when you spent years of your life being loyal to a cause, with the people who held the same convictions and you wake up one morning and your whole entire everything had been shuffled while you slept, you’d need answers, right?

  So that old guard, they'd collaborated. Hunted. Snooped. Begged, borrowed and stolen information. Dug into the graves of Diminished America in search of moldy corpses buried beneath filthy secrets.

  Well, one by one, bit by bit, piece by piece, his friends had given up, gone away, moved on with their lives. Some had taken promotions, moved to other parts of the country. Some had jumped to new branches of the government, making names for themselves in Homeland Security or the Department of Internal Securities and Protection. Some had quit, found love, had had babies. Some had been killed in the line of duty, and that was okay, because that was what happened in the real world.

  But not him.

  He’d stayed Federal. He’d lost a wife to the job, had a kid out there somewhere in the world doing Lord knew what, so he’d stayed, working his way up the ranks, pushing himself to get to the point in his career where he might be able to ask the right people the right question:

  What was really going on?

  Delbert stared gloomily out his window, watched people move on with their lives. The older men and women out there had finally come to terms with the 'new' US of A was these days.

  There'd never really been an option, but for a long while there –just recently, in fact- it’d seemed as though everyone over forty had been gearing up to take to the streets like their hippy grandparents, shouting down the new restrictive laws and everything that was being put in place to make certain the entire country didn’t capsize.

  Thank God they hadn’t. Thank God. Delbert had seen the plans to deal with that kind of Hippy Dippy uprising.

  They weren’t pretty. In fact, with a single call, the US of A would be transformed into a very different world.

  The young people out there, goofing around enjoying themselves, they’d been born and bred into this strange new world of PIDpaks and continual, invasive scrutiny from cameras on every corner and in every building and they didn’t care. They were creatures of their environment and they accepted the unblinking lens into their lives just as readily as early 20th century folks had accepted the boob tube into their living rooms.

  A knock on the open door brought Granger’s attention back to the present and out of his gloominess. Granger grumbled something and the door swung all the way open.

  Special Agent Sally Jensen, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, as fresh faced as a soap commercial, stood there, a big smile on her face. “Some of us are going to Tallahasker’s for drinks, Granger, thought you might like to get in on it. Drooby’s buying. Had a big win today, he’s feeling generous. Said if you came, he’d splurge on some of that top shelf stuff you insist is the only thing worth drinking.”

  The thought of heading over to Tallahasker’s and listening to Drooby go on and on about his ‘big win’ –a respectable truth, for his task force had finally caught the Slipway Strangler, literally moments before taking the life of a pregnant mother- while sipping on some Johnny Blue did indeed sound great, but …

  What if the phone rang?

  There was a thinness in the air that said it might do just that, and if it's shrill tone split the air in a public venue and … and with what happened to him …

  So instead of saying yes, Delbert Granger motioned to the mountain of paperwork he kept on his desk as a perfect excuse for having no social life. “Sorry, kiddo, gotta make a dent in this pile.”

  Sally frowned. “Well, we’re probably going to be there for a while, so if you do make that dent, come on down. It’s been a long time since anyone saw you having fun.” She rapped on the doorframe a couple times then disappeared.

  Delbert stared unthinkingly at the empty door for a good long while before switching his attention back to the outside world.

  Now he’d thought about the phone he took with everywhere –into the bathroom, into the shower, into bed, all day and all night and for the last twenty years- he couldn’t stop thinking about the it's weight.

  About what it represented. About what it’d cost.

  He’d worked long and hard to become Associate Deputy Director. Had played the whole political thing. Sabotaged coworkers, shot the dirtiest of pool for the noblest of reasons, reasoning that if he could acquire real power, he could use that power to find the right person, that all the dirty tricks and broken friendships would be worth the effort.

  And he’d done it.

  Associate Deputy Director.

  The youngest one in history. And after that? Less than three days to find the man. He hadn’t even hesitated. Because even though he’d become jaded and bitter there'd still be signs of that younger man, that altruistic man who'd dreamed of fixing the world.

  Asking had lost him his position but had won him the phone hanging from his neck like an albatross.

  The funny thing was, the sad thing was, he didn’t regret it, not even now. The weight of his knowledge was oftentimes too much to bear, but better him than someone else. He didn’t even mind the loss of his wife or his friends.

  Hell, even his inglorious fall from grace all the way back down to the ground had been well worth it. Because he knew what was out there, in the dark spaces, in the cracks and in the corners.

  Waiting for them. He’d seen them. He knew. And what was coming …

  Better to know than not.

  It was worth it to know that the man on the other end of the line was willing to do what it took to prevent that awful future from destroying everything.

  After decades in the Bureau while secretly working for Samiel, Granger understood precisely one thing; the man’s methods were cruel, the man’s methods were bitter, the man’s methods were oftentimes bizarre and made no sense, but the luxury of ignorance wasn't something Granger could accept.

  What matter if -from time to time- that knowledge meant you worked directly for the man? That every now and then you had to sully your hands?

  That if you didn't, the punishment was both swift and unkind.

  That was the price you paid for knowledge. Granger knew he wasn't a wise man, wasn’t Odin dangling himself from a tree in a desperate bid to gain understanding, no, he was just a regular old guy who’d had the top of his world pulled off so he could see the future.

  What an awful…

  Delbert Granger’s heart froze solid when a phantom vibration from inside his jacket pocket tickled his chest; The Man had explained that the more often the phone was used, the more likely it was that he'd become aware of a call before the connection was made…

  Delbert fished the clunky thing free and held it in one clammy hand,
waiting for it to actually ring. It obliged a moment later.

  Delbert opened it and put it to an ear, dreading this next part more than anything; something about The Man’s voice leaked through the speaker, a cold, clammy, ghastly concordance of hisses and whispers that was a ghostly stick of chalk across his spiritual chalkboard.

  No bit of undigested bit of potato, this.

  “Delbert Granger…”

  “I’m here.”

  And then the awful thing happened, the reason behind why Delbert Granger truly didn’t like answering the phone.

  It –and he- shivered and shuddered back and forth, a personal earthquake that made him feel as if the whole of the world was trying to rip him apart at the same, a violence threatening to spill his atoms across the desk and down onto the floor, leaving his workmates to wonder just what in the hell Old Granger had gotten himself up to.

  It didn’t even matter that this moment, this … changing of the ways, as The Man had termed it the first time it’d happened, usually ended after a few seconds. Those seconds lasted a goddamn eternity and were getting harder and harder to shake off.

  This … this wasn’t ending.

  Delbert felt his eyes widen as far as they could go and his mouth curl into a rictus of horror.

  This wasn’t ending!

  It was going on forever and ever. He wanted to do something –anything- whether it be a scream or a shriek or to simply fall from his chair. Anything was better than this rippling agony that slowly but surely turned his nerves into lava while his blood grew colder and colder and colder.

  This changing of the ways … was going to be the …

  Death …

  Of …

  “Never mind. I’ve gone another way.”

  Delbert lurched free of both the shuddering sensation and his office chair, eagerly collapsing to the ground. He pressed his forehead tightly against the short-weaved carpet with the government mandated awful pattern, Samiel's phone still clamped tightly to his ear. He let a long, thin stream of spittle fall from his mouth. His joints were ablaze, breathing normally was a fantasy and every time he opened his eyes to stare at the ugly earth-toned carpet, they ticked back and forth like he had alcohol poisoning.