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

by Lee Bond

  And he’d protected enough high-value teenage targets to know precisely what those signs, even the most subtle ones, looked like.

  Garth waved his hands in the air. “Okay, so, like, this is gonna seem all kinds of weird, but I can totally tell you again because the odds say it’s extremely un-fucking-likely that I'm gonna fix shit this time around.”

  Rommen grabbed a piece of pizza for himself. Garth had a bad habit of saying that he was ordering for everybody and then doing his level best to plow through enough food for six people before the delivery hit the table. Around a mouthful of mushroom and pepperoni, he said, “Okay. It’s not like I have any clue what you’re talking about yet, right?”

  “Right.” Garth took a breath, held it, then let it out in one quick puff. “Okay. So. Here’s the thing, the guy that’s trying to kill me is a time traveler.”

  “A time traveler.” Maybe the guy wasn’t on drugs. Maybe he’d suffered some kind of schizoid break, working down there in his basement for twenty hours at a pop. Or more likely, that initial fight with those three up on the parkade had done something to him. Rommen suspected that was most probable thing. “Like the kid with the car.”

  “Oh, Rommen, if it was like the kid with the car, stopping him would be pretty fucking simple. A temporal roadblock? I could whip one of those up no problems. Christ, I could track the emissions from his Mr. Fusion generator. You know how hard it is to navigate when you’re coming out of the time stream? Like, so hard.” Garth waved his hands again, a little less radically. “But no, not like the kid with the car, but yes, a time traveler. And … he keeps killing me.”

  Rommen digested Garth’s statement slowly, chewing on the edges of it with his many years of training and skill. “Then you’re a time traveler as well. If I even accept the possibility that something like this is even possible.”

  “Pretty shrewd for a boy from Kansas.” Garth ate a few more wings. “But no. I’m not a time traveler. I just, like … can’t be properly killed. Like, he can kill me all he wants, but I keep coming back to a specific point in time.”

  “So like that other movie. The one with the guy. The running guy. Mission Impossible guy, with the teeth and the hair.”

  “Are you watching these things on your own, to keep up with my references?”

  Rommen shook his head firmly. “Nosir, I don’t have the space in my brain. But Birchcreek has all this stuff on rotation, and we’re bunked together. You pick stuff up.”

  Garth thought back to the movie being referred to and nodded slowly. It was as close to the truth as possible and it was imperative that Rommen, who was turning out to be the kind of guy who could handle all kinds of next-level weirdness with no problems, be on the same page. “Yeah, okay, like that movie, only, like, with no super space bugs and glow in the dark blood or anything.”

  “So he keeps killing you and you keep dying but coming back.” Rommen grabbed a can of Pepsi and popped it open. He took a swallow to wet his tongue, bemused all over everywhere that he was having a completely rational conversation about things that were supposed to be entirely impossible. Part of him wished he’d taken a job protecting some rich guy’s asshole son, but another part of him pointed out how imperative it was that he stayed right where he was. “Is he aware of this?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “I’m guessing the trigger is you killing Cherry Cristal and the others.”

  “You guess correctly.” Garth sighed. “I know what I said about not doing it, but then I thought about it, and I realized that no matter what I did or didn’t do, they were always going to be out there. Waiting to cause mayhem, so I jumped at the chance. And now I’m fucking stuck.”

  “If he’s a time traveler, why aren’t you already dead? Why don’t you die right away? Seconds after you pull the trigger? Triggers.” Rommen drank more Pepsi. “Seems to me that’s what should happen, right? That’s what I would do if I could travel through time. Sure, you’ll always come back to the same moment in time, but why in the heck would I give you any kind of opportunity to prepare a counter-time-travel attack? That’s just nonsense.”

  Garth opened his mouth, then shut it. He opened his mouth again, but no words came out. He raised a finger to assist in the counterpoint that was trying to come out of his mouth, but he had nothing.

  "Has this sort of thing happened before?" Rommen inquired mildly.

  "Yeah, yeah it has. He tried doing me in with a predator drone and a Hellfire missile." Garth scratched the back of his head. "Had about five minutes or whatever. Killed me hundreds of times before I figured out how to get outta that situation. Only reason I had that grace period was because it took time for the drone to get set up."

  "Four hours seems excessive, then." Rommen was pleased he'd finally managed to come up with an answer that his wildly intelligent boss had failed to see. "What could cause something like that? To slow a time traveler's response to your actions? From a strategic point of view, I couldn't even imagine something like that."

  Garth put on his serious thinking face as he munched on a piece of pizza. Rommen wasn't wrong. There weren't many things that could keep Samiel from operating precisely as the Securicorps commander had just pointed out; in the 25th century, there had been a few different pieces of technology that could temporarily blanket a very small zone from suffering the Baron's wrath, but not for very long, and with very little efficiency.

  Here in the 21st century? There wasn't a goddamn thing in existence -yet- that could counteract Samiel's grip on the temporal incongruity, and not for a lack of wanting to; as awesome and badass as he was in the creative technology department, the actual mechanics behind temporal manipulation was something far, far beyond his reach. Mostly because in his Reality, time travel in any way shape or form had been impossible, but Garth wasn't one to make excuses.

  "There is," Garth coughed as a mushroom worked it's way back up, "precisely nothing in this frame of reference that I personally have access to that has anything to do with …”

  And then it struck him. He was missing something. Something important.

  "You." Garth pointed a finger at Rommen, who had the decency to look confused. "You told me a thing. About a guy. Some old guy. In a car. I forget what. I don't have a lot of time. Speak quickly."

  Rommen knew precisely who Garth was talking about, and for no other reason than that he'd always been quite displeased that they'd all been ordered to ignore the guy. "Older Caucasian male, between the age of 45-50. Very overweight, old suit. Seemed like he was engaged in surveillance of this location. Possible connection to the initial Ziggurat addicts attack in the parkade. Dropped on your orders."

  "Fuck my fucking life. Delbe..."

  After the conversation they'd just had, Rommen was not at all surprised to see Garth disappear in a flaring burst of light.

  "Well." The ex-serviceman said to himself. "That was a little different."

  ***

  "Rommen."

  "I'm a little busy with the officers responding to reports of shots fired in the neighborhood, sir." Rommen gestured to the ear bud in his ear and the officer nodded knowingly, which was nice; they'd covered the nature of the work being done on the premises, the legality of it all, and the type of security they were providing and were just getting to the part about everyone on Changetech's staff being completely unaware of anything or anyone being dangerous enough to warrant being shot even being in the area.

  "Yeah, I see you. But, I need you down here. Real quick. We gotta have a very strange conversation that will leave you feeling very weird, but it can't be helped. Then we prolly gotta figure out a way to sneak out of here without the cops seeing us. You got five minutes. I'm in the usual place."

  Rommen hung his head, but only briefly. In even the most negligible of interrogation settings, body language was everything. "My employer is extremely concerned about what is going on across the street and needs a situation report on what we have so far. If I could get one of my subordinates to finish
up here, Officer Friendly?"

  Officer Friendly made a notation in his book that he was being handed off to a second party before nodding to Rommen. As far as security officers went, Friendly had the feeling that everyone in Changetech’s employ was a step beyond their already admitted level of skill and ability and could possibly very well be responsible for the four homicides, but he’d already been told by the people upstairs that this situation needed to be handled quickly and quietly.

  Which basically meant 'not our problem anymore, take the notes, bury them'. That seemed to be happening more and more often, lately.

  “By all means, Mister deShure. Who will I be speaking with?”

  Rommen looked around, caught sight of Birchcreek just sort of lounging around, ogling one of the female officers speaking with Sam, so he waved the Aussie over with a quick hand signal that also announced that they needed to stretch things out until another signal was given. Birchcreek –like every one of the officers working- had heard the call over the radio and understood immediately, though he did roll his eyes before breaking off from his lounging position.

  “You’ll be talking with my colleague, Birchcreek, Officer. Thanks again for being so accommodating.”

  Friendly nodded farewell to the Kansas farm boy turned soldier turned high profile security provider before introducing himself to the burly, scarred man identified as Birchcreek.

  ***

  “I hope you know how risky it was to pull me away from that, boss.” Rommen said before he’d even crossed the threshold into Garth’s office.

  “Nah.” Garth dismissed the other man’s concerns with a wave of the hand. “Friendly is as friendly does. He’s a solid guy. Got me a ride once to a place I needed to be. Didn’t need to. Swell fella, really.”

  Rommen took the news and discarded it, as he did with everything coming out of Garth’s mouth that wasn’t entirely truthful. “So you need to have some kind of weird discussion with me, and then we need to sneak out of here in the middle of a police investigation and do something? Why don’t I like the sound of that?”

  “You don’t like the sound of much, Rommen, and you are one consistent sumbitch when it comes down to it, but you’ve also got a pretty damned open mind when it comes to thinking outside the box, so you’re okay in my books either way.” Garth spun around in his chair, holding a fluorescent red tissue to his face. Rommen immediately got a look on his face that said he was calling for first aid, and his hand literally leaped to the call button. “No! No, uh, no need. This is … typical of the current condition I’m in.”

  “Is it the eye thing?” Rommen couldn’t take his eyes off the blood-soaked tissue. From the look of it, his boss’d sprung a leak somewhere in the neighborhood of fifteen minutes ago and had been going on strong since then.

  “You know about the eye thing?” And here he thought he’d been sneaky as hell.

  “Everyone knows about the eye thing, boss.” Rommen replied dryly. “Running around trying to be sneaky but squinting like Mister Magoo without his glasses every few minutes. Also, you rub your temples a lot, like you have terrible headaches. We think you have …”

  “Yeah, well, no, I don’t. It’s something else.” But in a few months’ time, the actual nature of his condition would play well to the people who were suffering from ODD, and the institutions dedicated to working on a cure for the ailment.

  Regardless of his sincerity, there was a definite gleam of disbelief in Rommen’s eyes.

  “Look, it really ain’t ODD. I’d know if it was and it isn’t because no matter what you think, I haven’t come into contact with the necessary vectors.”

  “You know what the vectors are.”

  Garth drilled tissues firmly up his nostrils and stood. “Look, man, there’s a fuckton of stuff I know and although I definitely do like the sound of my own voice, I … we … are operating on an incredibly limited time frame here and there is some shit we got to cover that will quite possibly blow your mind even more than it’s going to be blown in a few minutes.”

  Rommen crossed his arms. Garth was being more … Garth-y than usual. In fact, he was –minus the bloody nose- wound even tighter than usual and fairly vibrating in place. “All right, let’s hear it.”

  “The old guy in the car…”

  "Older Caucasian male, between the age of 45-50. Very overweight, old suit. Seemed like he was engaged in surveillance of this location. Possible connection to the initial Ziggurat addicts attack in the parkade. Dropped on your orders. That guy?” Rommen couldn’t tell where they were headed with this particular conversation, but he did feel a small bit of relief that Garth was finally bringing the older man up; even though they hadn’t seen him near the property in the last few days, he’d always felt uncomfortable with Garth’s decision to disregard the man’s existence.

  “Yeah.” Garth nodded. “Him. Do you know where he’s bunked?”

  “No. We would’ve if you hadn’t told me to ignore the man. I’d already assigned Gagachuk to that duty when you cut me off at the knees.” Rommen couldn’t keep the disappointment from his voice. It was one of the things that he disliked about working for Securicorps. The customer wasn’t always right, and it mattered absolutely zilch that yes, at the time, the man in question hadn’t been doing anything more threatening than sitting in a car, looking positively miserable. “What does he have to do with anything?”

  Garth pressed his lips together in concern. This version of Rommen was slightly less open to the weird world outside his own skull than the one in the common room, discussing time travel over pizza.

  That was the trouble with time travel. Experiences made all kinds of changes in a person’s worldview, and if you took shortcuts –as he was doing now- you ran the risk of messing things up.

  It was plain he'd ruined his chances at having that same discussion a second time, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it now. He needed Rommen to be on board with everything, from here until … things resolved themselves. Which could turn out to be anywhere from the next few minutes until the turn of the goddamn century.

  Fucking time travel.

  “Oh. That crusty old fuck has everything to do with everything, but in order for you to properly understand exactly how and why, I need to tell you something. Weird. Very.” Garth desperately wished for some pizza to make things a little smoother, but it was going to have be him, talking with a bloody tissue shoved up his nose.

  Hopefully, all that blood would force Rommen to take things seriously. Garth didn’t want to have to go through another back and forth session with him being doubtful enough for a roomful of atheists confronted with indisputable proof that Yahweh was a real guy. If he failed to get Rommen on board with the encroaching hijinks, Garth wasn't entirely certain how future events would play out.

  And, frankly put, Garth needed things two months from now to be exactly as they'd already been, time and time again.

  Which was unfortunate, but when two time-travelers go to war, all things were permitted, nothing was off the board.

  “Okay.” Rommen agreed, arms still crossed. “Hit me with it.”

  Garth shot Rommen a look that he hoped said ‘hey, bro, don’t be so antagonistic’ and started in. “The guy I’m fighting is named Baron Samiel, and he’s a time traveler…”

  ***

  "You sound like a damn lunatic, begging your pardon." Rommen pinched the bridge of his nose and tried to get around that particular fact, but he kept coming up against a very solid wall of insanity.

  It was clear that Garth believed every word he said based solely on the passion with which he spoke, but Rommen couldn't get over the matter of Garth's passion.

  There was little doubt that the Zigg-addicts did indeed possess speed and strength but that was more easily explained when you used the idea of combat stims as your starting point.

  Tossing time travel into the mix made things more complicated and … insane.

  "I totally do, I get that, but at the same time
, I ain't lying." Garth resisted the urge to grab Rommen by the ears so he could shout acceptance right down the man’s throat. "Previous You was way more tolerant and accepting of what I'm telling Current You. I think it's the pizza and pop party we were having in the common room."

  "You're asking me to believe the impossible." Rommen said calmly. Well, as calmly as possible when you were suddenly confronted with the fact that your employer was completely bonkers. "You're asking me to believe that a man named Delbert Granger is a Special Agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and that he in turn works for your enemy, someone called Baron Samiel. And Baron Samiel travels through time."

  "Well, technically he doesn't travel through time, I don't think. He's doing something really similar, though. The point is, he does shit in the future and it happens in the past. And I've gotta get out from under this whole live, die, repeat bullshit. It's driving me fucking insane." Garth pointed a blunt finger at Rommen before the man could even open his mouth. "Don't even. And we don't have the time to bicker back and forth like this. Granger is the focus."

  Rommen nodded, glad they were back on to the one actual, salient point in the whole conversation. "You want to find the man we believe was surveying Changetech."

  "Oh yeah, no, that's gonna take about three seconds once I get crackalackin' on that. It's gonna be super easy." Garth caught and held Rommen's blue eyes. "There’ll be just under an hour to get to the man and find what he's got on him that keeps him in contact with Samiel. If I'm right, it's got a piece of Samiel's power inside. His close proximity to me may be causing a kind of temporal skitter, giving me these four hours. Kinda like … a temporal feedback loop. Every time Samiel tries some shit, Granger's doodad makes things all awkward. I dunno for certain. This is the first time anything like this has ever happened. Last time around was different altogether. What I need to know from you is if you're gonna assist. I dunno what's out there. I haven't left the building since I got started. Samiel's minions could be everywhere and ... we gotta get to Granger. That crusty old kidnapping, Vegas-threatening assclamp's gonna give me what I need or ... there's gonna be trouble. You in?"