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

by Lee Bond

The boxes did their job lightning quick. Garth watched Evan Hernandez Junior fist bump Darren Devete goodbye before climbing into a beat up pickup truck driven by Wylanda Jenkins. Boring –to anyone but him- stats about their physical health as recorded seconds before their GPS trackers were handed back in to … Gagachuk was on usher duty … confirmed yet again that everyone working on his site had the heart rate and physical attributes of normal human beings.

  Not to say that the fine men and women working on Changetech and the Arcade of Awesomeness didn’t have their fair share of … habits. There were dozens of alcoholics, at least three serious abusers of narcotics in their pill form –Garth had already given those names to Rommen and the others with a stern ‘keep an eye out’ warning for regular, petty crimes- and quite a few people who partook of marilized leguijana.

  Garth spun his predators up higher, then ordered them to slowly move off property. “Now, I don’t want to say Mary Jane is a gateway drug because that’s just fucking stupid, but the Baron’s in town, and who knows what the hell is, uh, goin’ on? Right? Anything could be laced with that stuff.”

  Still, it wasn’t like he could swing on down to the local pot shop and be like ‘hey, dudes, I need some samples of all your stuff to check for drugs from the future’.

  Mostly because the guys running the dispensary would undoubtedly be baked all the way through from their fine selection of brownies, and Garth somehow felt that he wouldn’t be able to handle being laughed at by a bunch of dudes who got high and watched cartoons.

  The scene from the predators switched to a four-split. Garth marked everyone and everything in the individual screens and commanded the boxes to their work. Data began streaming in, then bounced up to the big monitor. Hundreds of names. A river of personal data. Individually tracked motion patterns throughout the day, cross-referenced with each day preceding. Everything fell within acceptable patterns, with the expected outliers; here, a dude deviated for five minutes to take a piss against a wall instead of hustling to the potty, there, five guys sneaking behind a shed to smoke a doobie.

  The usual, accepted thing.

  No sign of the missing fifth. There had to be a fifth. Packs didn’t work on even numbers. Only ever odd.

  There was a Zigg-head on his property and he’d find him. Or her.

  “In like, five minutes, I hope.”

  Garth checked the flight paths of the predators. They were en route to their target destinations, which was five hundred feet past his property line, and in randomly chosen directions; if the Baron didn’t deal with the suddenly dead bodies, the local PD certainly would, and the last fucking thing he wanted –even if he could figure out a way to deal with that kind of situation the next time around- was to waste any time dealing with extraneous matters.

  “Or, worser case scenario, Baron Samiel does deal with his dead cronies. Right around the same time as Officer Friendly and his Friends, the Blue Coat Regulars show up on the scene.”

  That was a nightmare scenario; Rommen and his friends were all prepped and ready for shit to go down Wild, Wild West Style and they were committed to keep their employer safe, even if that meant doing so while cops Keystoned their way around the premises.

  The predators signalled they were where they needed to be. Garth checked their vitals and saw that they were green across the board. Hell, the only thing of note was Predator Four was fighting a little heavier winds, which wasn’t a worry at all. That was it.

  Garth dialed in the four Zigg-heads and looked at each split-screen for a moment, trying to decide if –at the end of the day- these people had ever really been real in the proto-Reality. It was so hard to say. Certainly impossible to tell from these images; each one of them –Cherry, Slinkydog, Senator, Frigget- they each of them had their own quirks and tics and weirdnesses that screamed they were real.

  And that was the thing that was really bothering Garth. Unseen, unnoticed, if the four Ziggs weren’t real, theoretically they’d fall into some kind of default mode to preserve processing power. Didn’t matter if that processor was the temporal incongruity or not. All that mattered was the level of presentation, and with this kind of high-definition, all-inclusive rendering going on … there had to be some kind of hardware failure happening.

  Somewhere.

  The other possibility was that Etienne was watching. All the time. That he was –regardless of his pretensions otherwise- aware of the next-level semi-cheating that was happening all around him and was merely waiting to spring some form of trap.

  Garth shook his head bitterly. Too many possibilities, too many answers, not enough data. The world was still as real and unreal as it’d been nineteen days ago.

  “Maybe this action’ll break the simulation.” Garth cleared his throat while his fingers flew across keyboards. “All right boys, you’ve been given your targets. Take aim and fire at your leisure.”

  Each of the predators signalled acceptance of the orders and the split-screens blossomed with targeting and tracking data. Aiming reticules sprouted around the heads of three of the intended victims and around Cherry Cristal’s heart.

  Countdowns popped up.

  Garth held his breath and counted down with the machines.

  ***

  Granger lay half on his bed, half off it, feeling morbidly embarrassed for both himself and for the young Filipino housemaid-type woman who’d walked in on him just a few seconds ago. Mostly because he was naked as a blue jay, with one old man ass cheek aimed right at the door to his room like a particularly vile and unkind cannon, but also because –and this, really, was the key to the whole thing- he was a grown ass man.

  “Hah.” Granger grabbed hold of the furthest end of the bed spread as he could and heaved with all his might, convinced this might be the moment when he finally managed to, you know, be on the bed. “Grown ass man. More like just asshole.”

  The worst part of the encounter hadn’t been his embarrassment at all, but her lack of such, and the way her eyes had just … taken all of him in and written him off as ‘just another night in the hotel’ when Granger would swear on all the ill-gotten gains he had in his accounts that she was still shy of twenty years old!

  No one should be that jaded and bitter. Not when you were that young. When you were that young, you should still be out with your friends, being the ones getting drunk and mistakenly showing your asscheeks to people you didn’t know. It was how you made friends and memories. How you made mistakes and learned from them.

  There! Oh, he was getting onto the bed properly now, yes he was. The tenacity that’d led him down the rabbit hole –not to Alice’s Wonderland, but the Baron’s Wasteland- was serving him very well indeed at the moment, yes it was. That keen wit, that driving intellect, that insidious perspicacity, all of that had led him to this moment, this moment right here, where he was –he supposed- trying to joust with his very own demons.

  “I shall have you know,” Granger informed the empty room, “that before I joined the Federal Bureau of Indignation, I was the belle of many balls. Wait. No. What? The male version of that, though before the drink, I suppose I could’ve rocked the finest sweet sixteen gown known to mankind. Ahah! I have you now, bed!”

  Granger pulled with all the strength he could whilst simultaneously humping his body upwards, fully intending to combine the two motions into one overall and efficient deft maneuver that’d see him on the bed in no time at all. Whereupon he would pass out until he woke up and did it all over again.

  Because that … that was what needed to happen right now. And probably for the rest of his life, in all truth. He definitely had the money for it. Baron Samiel’s financial support for those who worked both sides of The Line was nothing if not gratuitous.

  “One … more … time.” Granger pulled and heaved and …

  Succeeded in pulling the corner of the bed sheet completely loose from the mattress, which in turn sent him reeling backwards, legs in the air, twig and two berries visible for the whole world to see –should Sa
miel be fool enough to be peeking at this particular moment, the man deserved all the fresh nightmare fuel he got- Special Agent Delbert Granger hit the ground with enough unkind force to knock all the wind out of him.

  The tail end of the blanket pulled everything on the nightstand off with a tumultuous clatter; the in-room phone, most notably, bounced off the back of his head in a most unkind manner and lay off to one side somewhere behind him, repeating the same message over and over.

  Two other things fell forward after taking their respective jabs at both his body and his dignity.

  One, of course, was the phone. It lay there, seemingly aware that it’s owner was a miserable, wheezing, shaking, trembling mockery of a man who was at the moment so drunk he probably couldn’t remember his own name.

  “Granger. Del-Del-Delbert Granger of the Foolish Bellends of Inculcation.” A sour burp worked it’s way out of his mouth and for a long, precarious moment –one eye watering so badly it sealed itself shut, with both nostrils joining in a few seconds later- Granger thought he was going to throw up all over the phone.

  “Baron Samiel wouldn’t like that, I don’t think.” Granger remembered being told the phone would survive anything this time zone had to offer, and he’d certainly tested those waters a few times early on in his service, but never with anything radioactive as an old man’s sour gut exhaling spoiled rye whiskey all over it.

  A drunken nightmare of ODDities being deployed to the Motel 6 so that they might deal with an errant time-agent who’d done the Master of Time an egregious wound by vomiting all over a piece of high-tech equipment played out in Granger’s mind, ultimately winding up with the entire area being transformed into the radioactive wasteland that was destined to be precisely as described to him by Baron Samiel one fine morning when a younger-ish Special Agent had demanded to know why the game was being played so roughly.

  As the world ended –roughly similar to Sarah Connor’s nightmare as filmed in Terminator 2, though not quite as cinematic- Granger reached out for the second thing to fall so graciously towards him: a three-quarter full bottle of rye whiskey.

  Barely able to move, barely capable of proper thought, Granger nevertheless knew two things with utter, utter certainty.

  One, he was going to finish the bottle. That was as definite as anything in the knowable and observable Universe. The liquor inside called to him. Not even a siren’s song. Nothing so glamorous as that. Granger wasn’t melancholy enough or fool enough to ascribe anything romantic to his alcoholism. No, no. Never. What he was though, was a fool.

  Second, changes were on the way. Not little ones, not even big ones, but changes all the same. He could feel them vibrating through the ether that very moment. Had felt them this morning when he’d woken up, ready to head back out into the field to see how his deployed Zigg-heads were faring in the field. Had felt the endless sheaf of riffling changes hovering above his head, waiting to slam into him over and over and over and over again until he’d practically burst into tears right there in the liquor store. The look on the cashier’s face was one Granger prayed he didn’t take with him to the grave.

  Changes. Changes like when Baron Samiel had tried killing his target with an endless cycle of failed predator drone attacks.

  Changes that’d nearly torn him apart.

  “Forewarned is fore-armed.” Granger licked his lips and reached outwards with numb fingers.

  ***

  Garth watched three heads and one heart receive their final payment with mixed emotions. He'd just jumped head on into a fight with a man who had literal control over time itself. The only thing preventing Baron Samiel from going overboard was ironclad determination to follow through with a timeline that remained as 'pure' as possible, for as long as possible; the Kin'kithal knew very well that if he so chose, Samiel could bring the entire planet to a shuddering halt at any time, without warning.

  The only thing working to Garth's advantage was Samiel's ignorance concerning his relative 'immovability' in the time stream; the moment that bastard realized that his opponent had little to no ability to handle any changes made to the timeline after he'd personally moved forward in time from any given timestamp was the moment the game was officially over.

  On-screen, Cherry Cristal struggled back to her feet, gore-soaked hands clutching her shattered sternum. The look in her eyes as she sought to find the source of her death was chilling; eyes wide, panting furiously, struggling to stay alive, the drug-addled Zigg-head was transformed into the ultimate epitome of Scream Queen.

  “Come on come on come on.” Garth tapped the screen irritably. “Just die already.”

  Regardless of the fact that the wound was a kill shot, Garth began programming the drone to take another if she didn’t drop in the next few seconds. The last thing he –or anyone else, for that matter- needed to deal with was a woman shot through the heart with a high caliber rifle round refusing to die as quickly as any decent person should.

  Also –and this made him feel a bit on the weird side- he was eager to see what it was that the Baron would bring against him. Would it be more blatant attacks coming at him vis a vis Zigg-head style, or would he roll out some of his more earthly contacts?

  The drone quickly and quietly reoriented itself until it found a better angle for the next shot and took it. The screen barely jostled. The second and fatal round took Cherry Cristal high in the forehead, splitting her skull open along the cleanly divided rows of her tight ponytails.

  A grotesque thing for the people of San Francisco to wake up to, to be sure. This wasn’t the sort of crime they’d ever seen before. Even the SFPD would find it difficult to go through the motions on this one, but go through them they would.

  Rommen and his team were professionals. They’d say only what needed to be said, they’d deflect everything else until the police arrived on property with warrants to search the premises, and it’d be days before they got anything remotely approaching grounds to request one from any judge in the city.

  “By then,” Garth commanded his drones to return home, “this whole place will look different and really, I’m hoping Samiel and I will reach the same kind of détente as last time. Oh hey, shit, time for X-Files. Cool.”

  ***

  Baron Samiel clamped down hard on the rage bubbling up inside of him. Today was not a good day to let the blackness flow out of him; he’d had to add another round of tight leather clamps and bindings to keep him right where he was and he didn’t have the energy to deal with the repercussions that might happen if he lost his temper in the manner he was familiar with.

  The thought of accidentally breaking free from his moorings, that he might finally find himself floating through the never-ending abyss that was the temporal void, was more than enough to soothe his savage consciousness.

  But barely, oh, just … barely. All the effort he’d undergone, the danger, the risky maneuver of personally depositing Ziggurat-Aleph into the pockets of those … degenerate addicts … undone. In a heartbeat.

  “But how is he doing it?” Samiel demanded irritably. “How?”

  All of his selves, both past and any theoretical future, remained mute, and not for a lack of hunting. All of him were doing their best now, to dig into the life that was Garth Nickels. It was a task they were eminently suited for and yet they were all coming up blank. Casual and polite enquiries into the man’s life –perpetrated both through private and law enforcement contacts in many different times throughout the history of the world, through agents similar to Delbert Granger in that they were easily manipulated but different in that they didn’t know everything- revealed essentially the same as his temporarily rogue agent.

  Garth Nickels was who he claimed to be.

  “Only there are no pictures of him.” Spittle, blackened with dark dots, flecked his lips and the monitors closest to him. “Ever. At all. Anywhere. ANYWHEN!”

  If Nickels was a time traveler, he was the cagiest voyager Samiel could imagine; the very moment he’d discovered hi
s ability to travel through time, Samiel had immediately begun altering events to arrive at the best possible outcome first, for himself, and then later, for the entire world.

  It’d been the work of hundreds and then thousands of years, with him, toiling through the long, arduous steps of each moment until he’d arrived at the point where snipping himself out had been one of the easiest things in the world.

  There were no signs that Nickels was doing any of those things. At all. Excluding the first and most blatant appearance –and that first zero sum battle - there were no other indications that Nickels was doing anything to the time stream.

  Who could resist using the ultimate power on a regular basis, even if it was only to make their own lives more comfortable? Samiel was unashamed to admit that before he’d removed himself from the world’s most basic level, he’d rather taken advantage of things, setting himself up in lavish style because who wouldn’t?

  Even now, with hundreds of thousands of years of experiential living under his belt, Samiel looked upon those few decades of easy living with fondness. He’d eaten the best foods, lived in the best places, enjoyed … the best of everything, really. Of course, all of those particular moments were gone, smoothed out of the timeline, erased or otherwise dismissed because they were –at the end of the day- unessential. Their erasure hadn’t even needed minute corrections to counterbalance hiccups later on down The Line.

  That was how unimportant him playing the rich and wealthy man had been. Excised out of the timeline, not even a single ripple tossing the overall world out of balance.

  Yet this Garth Nickels –curiosity mingled with trepidation flitted through him at the accidental similarities in names- was apparently better than that. Content to live in the now, fascinated only with improving ‘local’ technology by –in some cases- a mere matter of weeks. He made no far reaching steps, made no efforts at unseating the only other time traveler in the area, chose only to attack when moves were made against him.

  It was infuriating.

  “Only one left, now.” Samiel ran a bloated, leather-bound hand across the temporary tracker that followed the life of the only remaining Aleph near the Nickels compound. He didn’t even know which one it was, except to say that it wasn’t the leader of that particular cluster. The beat of his life was still strong, which told Samiel that whoever it was, he wasn’t in any danger at all.