by Chuck Dixon
“Renzi!” Dwayne took a step forward, and Jimbo grabbed his arm to stop him. “We have to go back! We can’t leave him!”
A rock sailed from the mist to bounce down the walkway. More followed it, making a metallic racket on the floor plates and railings. Dwayne and Jimbo fired into the Tube field on full auto. Chaz joined them with the Minimi and the barrage of stones died away.
“They overran him!” Jimbo held Dwayne’s arm and turned him so their eyes met. “We’d walk back into a shitstorm and die back there with him!”
Dwayne stared wild-eyed at Jimbo. His mouth worked, but nothing came out.
“Priority one—hold our ground!” Jimbo shouted and increased the pressure on Dwayne’s arm. “Ricky bought us time! We have to use it!”
Stones and spears began flying from the bone-chilling fog again. More humped figures came into view shrouded in the vapor pouring from the coils, bare feet pounding forward on the plates.
The Rangers opened up, pouring fire into the mist, murdering any shape that made itself visible in the narrow confines of the Tube. A heap of bodies grew within the field. Hot blood struck the ice-rimed coils and boiled away. The men kept up the continuous fire, pausing only to slap in fresh magazines.
The deep hum of machinery died away, and the giant fans in the walls and ceiling activated to pull the cold air from the room. The mist dissipated to reveal a pile of bullet-riddled bodies lying whole and in pieces on the frost-covered walkway. All of them were skinnies. The back wall of the chamber was punched full of holes from the Ranger’s final volleys as the Tube shut down and the gateway to the past vanished.
Dwayne dropped to the floor to sit where he was, the last stores of will and the dregs of the amphetamine rush drained from every muscle. In contrast, Jimbo stood pumping his rifle in the air and letting loose a wolf howl that echoed around the big room. Chaz leaned on the railing on the walkway and grinned.
They hadn’t forgotten the man they’d left behind. They just surrendered to the heady elation of having survived despite shitty odds. Exhaustion, fear, and blood loss took their toll. They were left helpless to their own animal physiology. There was plenty of time for guilt and recrimination later if they could still feel those things. For now, there was no room for anything but joy.
They were the baddest motherfuckers in the valley and, damn, it felt good.
Caroline stood and returned her big brother’s hug. The tears came. The harder she cried, the harder she held him to her, as if afraid he might vanish and she would open her eyes to find herself back in that horrible cave.
SIX SHOWERS LATER, AND her skin still felt gritty even though she scrubbed her skin red. Her hair was still stiff though most of the lime had been washed away. For a fleeting instant, she considered shaving her head.
Morris met her as she exited her bathroom wrapped in a thick robe. Her brother sat on the edge of her bunk and held out a cold bottle of Fiji and paper cup filled with capsules and tablets.
“You need to take these,” he said.
“Mo…” she moaned and shooed him from the bunk so she could lie back, propped on pillows.
“It’s your own protocol, Carrie,” he said and handed her the cup. “Antibiotics, antifungals, antiparasitics, minerals, vitamins, and a strong laxative.”
“Ick,” she said, then popped the pills and sipped water.
“I thought I’d lost you,” he said.
“You worry too much,” she said and washed down pills.
“Actually, I knew I lost you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean, Mo?”
He told his sister of finding the cave and, with Parviz’s and Quebat’s help, uncovering a skull that was undeniably hers; a skull with a bullet-sized hole in it.
She shivered and took a long pull of Fiji. “I’m just too damned tired to get my brain around that right now,” she said and laid back. The pill cup was empty.
“It could be a confirmation of string theory,” Morris said. “If we could publish about it. Which we can’t.”
“That doesn’t mean we can’t explore it further. I can already think of some simple experiments.” She allowed herself the luxury of closing her eyes for a few seconds.
“Yeah. It does mean that, Carrie. They’re shutting us down,” he said.
“Who? What did you say?” She sat up. “They’re coming tomorrow. Some corporate hard case named Martin. He says Sir Neal wants us gone. I nearly fried the system getting it powered up this last time to get you all back here before the deadline.”
“This work is mine. Yours. They can’t just take it.”
“Same old story, Sis.” He frowned. “Our work. Their money. We signed agreements. We were both so fixated on seeing your theories realized that—”
“We’ll build our own Tube,” she insisted. “I already have ideas for improvements, ways to make it work more efficiently.”
“Well, unless you’re holding a winning lottery ticket…”
“Where are my clothes?” she asked emphatically and pointed at a trash bag tied shut by the door of her room. “There! Tear that open.”
She stood over Morris as he worked at untying the bag. Caroline grabbed the bag, pried her fingers through the plastic, and ripped it open to dump the stinking mess on the floor. She dug through the sweat-soaked and bloodstained t-shirt and came up with the necklace Old Mother had put around her neck back in that forgotten time.
She held the necklace of black claws up to Morris, and he recoiled at the musky odor of it.
“See that?” she held between her fingers a dull yellow bead set on the necklace thong between the claws.
“That looks like gold,” he said and removed his glasses to squint at it.
“How far back in that cave did you dig, bro?” A broad grin wrinkled her nose.
MEN TROTTED OUT TO meet the helo as it landed. They were big men. Their suits were expertly tailored but could not hide their nature. These were soldiers and moved with the assured confidence of men used to standing their ground when others fled for cover.
“They’ve vacated, sir,” the tallest of them said as Gus Martin stepped from the copter. He changed to cross-trainers on the ride from Vegas. The last trip out here had ruined the custom loafers he bought in Parma last winter.
“Really, Bohrs?” Martin said in mild surprise. “I thought they might stay behind and make me listen to more of their wretched pleading.”
“There are a few unexpected items we found in our initial inventory,” Bohrs said and walked beside Martin down to the compound with a pair of Martin’s aides following behind.
“I hope there’s nothing that will complicate our deal with the Chinese,” Martin said. “They’re coming tomorrow for an inspection of the property and a brief demonstration.”
“There was a considerable amount of spent brass on the floor in the main building,” Bohrs said. “And some minimal damage to the structure, but the mechanism appears to be intact.”
“Brass?”
“Ammunition shell casings, sir. Lots of them. And quite a bit of blood evidence, which led us to the grave.”
“Grave.” Martin felt a migraine building behind his eyes.
“A mass grave with multiple bodies,” Bohrs said. “They used a backhoe. We partially uncovered the remains.”
They reached the compound area and the three black Suburbans that had brought the Gallant security men there that morning. No other vehicles were here, but there were broad, deep tire tracks in the sand.
“A semi-tractor trailer, sir,” Bohrs said as Martin stopped to look at the fresh ruts that led away from the huts down to the service road.
“They didn’t have a truck the last time I was here,” Martin said.
“We think they used it haul the reactor away,” Bohrs said.
Martin turned to the reactor hut and noticed for the first time the ten-foot-wide hole roughly cut through its steel outer wall. He snapped his fingers, and an aide handed him a satellite phone. Martin punche
d a series of numbers and held the phone to his ear.
“Sir Neal, if you please,” Martin said blandly.
A pause as a voice replied.
“Then, you’d better damned well wake him up,” Martin’s voice dropped to a chilling rumble. “He insists on good news fast and bad news faster.”
Blood Red Tide
Bad Times Book Two
1
An Idle Mind
HANDS REACHED FOR her from the dark. All around, faces streaked in red and white snapped at her with sharpened teeth, their expressions feral, their eyes glazed with hunger. She tried to run on the sand, but it gave way beneath her, trapping her legs. She clawed with her hands to free herself as she felt teeth enter her flesh.
She came awake with a crash. Hands steadied her. “It’s just a dream, Caroline,” her brother’s voice, reassuring.
She sat on the edge of the bed with her face in her hands. Where was she? The shabby motel room she and her brother had been sharing for the past week. A dismal little place on the highway north of Moscow, Idaho. Morry filled a plastic cup at the bathroom sink and offered it to her. Caroline Tauber sipped the water, hands shaking.
“Same dream?” Morris said and sat on his own bed. “A wicked variation,” she answered. “What time is it?”
“Almost six,” he said and parted the thick curtains to let watery light in. It was raining again, and the hiss of tires on the highway could be heard through the streaked glass.
“I’m not going to be able to get back to sleep. Let’s have breakfast, the greasier, the better,” she said and made her way to the shower.
IN THE GAILY colored diner, they shared a booth in the back corner. There were a few long-haul truckers hunched at the counter over coffee. Other than that, the place was empty.
“I have to do something,” Caroline said. A plate of untouched pancakes and sausage sat in front of her.
“You need rest,” Morris said. “After all you’ve been through. You need more recovery time.”
“My body is fine, Mo,” she said. “But my mind is another story. I’m still back there. In my head, I’m tied up in that cave wondering what’s going to happen next. Am I a goddess or Thanksgiving dinner? I need to refocus my brain. I need a reboot. I need to get back to work.”
“Work on what? Sir Neal took our project away from us. And we took his nuclear reactor when we left. He’s pissed at us, and his people are looking for us. They’re asking questions everywhere we’ve ever worked. I’ve made calls. You’ve made calls. He’s gotten to everyone in our circle. We show ourselves, and who knows what the hell will drop on us?”
“What’s he going to do?” She poured herself another glass of orange juice from a pitcher. Since she’d been rescued, she couldn’t get enough of it.
“He’s a very powerful man.”
“He can’t sue us. He couldn’t afford the exposure. He had us operating an off-license nuclear reactor at a hidden facility in Nevada. And two Iranian illegals straight off the terror watch list were maintaining it for us. Do you seriously think Sir Neal Harnesh wants to answer all the questions associated with that?”
“He could have us killed,” Morris said, leaning over the table to whisper.
“You believe that?” Caroline said, arching an eyebrow, meeting his eyes with mock gravity. “Kill us?”
“Most everything we did for him was outside the law. Federal, state, and county law. Hell, the laws of physics even! We were running a hot nuke reactor, generating massive amounts of electromagnetic energy and opening holes in the time/space continuum! You think a couple of simple homicides are outside of this guy’s reach?”
“You’re buying into Hammond’s paranoid delusions.”
“And you’re not?” He laughed. “Who’s been motel-hopping through the far west with her brother posing as Mr. and Mrs. Bernard T. Lowe of Brattleboro, Mass for the past month? Who would that be, sis?”
She slumped back into the cushy booth bench with a sullen expression. Lee Hammond got them what he called their “bulletproof” identification. Driver’s licenses and registration for the ’09 Elantra they picked up in Ely three weeks ago. He even supplied them with a Visa card under the same name that he said was good for another sixty days. Using cash drew attention even though they had, literally, a carry -on case full of twenties and fifties in their room safe along with another half-million plus in a safe deposit box at a Wells Fargo in Sun Valley. Hammond insisted that the only people who used cash for a motel room were people on the run.
“I have to work on something,” she said. “I have to get my brain firing on more problems. There are modifications I’ve worked out for the Tube. I think I can fine tune it more closely to open windows in the past with a variable under sixty minutes.”
“And what’s the point of that now?” Morris said. He was tired of this exchange. They’d been over it and over it for weeks. He wished she had a hobby. All Caroline had in her life for the past couple of years was the challenge of building and proving the theoretical device that had been in her head from childhood. And she brought her older brother along to bring it to life. The pair of them spent every waking moment laser-focused on its completion. But Morris could walk away now. Caroline could never do that even if her life depended on it. And her brother was certain that it did.
“This is the point.” She sat forward and spoke to her brother as though speaking to a child even though he was four years older. Even though he had a wall of degrees and awards in a wide array of sciences and engineering. “If our first Tube had the kind of controls that would have allowed you to send Dwayne Roenbach and his team back to just after I ran into those aborigines. The point is that they could have interceded. The point is that Phillip and Miles would still be alive now.”
“You can’t change that now. What happened has happened.”
“You know that’s not true, Mo. You told me about finding that skull. My skull. I died back there with a bullet in my head. But sending the Rangers back changed all that, and they saved me. They changed the events in that cave a hundred thousand years ago, and here I am today back in the twenty-first century in Lottie’s Diner, Highway Ninety-Five, Moscow, Idaho.”
“That’s true, sis. This is the proof of all our theorems; that time is not immutable. But, for whatever reason, we can’t open the Tube within the same window we’ve used previously or at any time before the first field we opened. Creating the open temporal field creates a barrier we can’t breach. We can only go back to times after our last breach. We can never go back and rescue Phillip and Miles. Their fate is written. I’m just grateful we were able to save you.”
Her expression softened, her brow smoothed out, and the flare of irritation in her eyes melted away. She reached across the table to take his hands in hers.
“I know it was hard on you, too,” she said. “All you could do was stay behind and freak out.”
“And, even though you were gone for three days I had a whole month to deal with it,” he said. The Tube blew a hole in time that could remain open for, at most, thirty minutes. And it took a full forty-eight hours between each shot to power up the system. With setup and the time spent finding and recruiting the rescue team, Morris sometimes had almost a week between field openings. The stress was nearly unbearable.
“That’s why, next time, we have more control over the situation and closer, constant communication,” Caroline said. “We can do it safer, with more redundancies built in. More failsafes.”
“Hold on.” Morris yanked his hands from her grasp. “Next time?”
“We’re going to build another Tauber Tube,” she beamed. “A beta prototype, and this time we’re going to do it right.”
2
Widow and Orphans
“HEY, MOM! THERE’S some beat-up guy asking for you!”
The little boy left Dwayne standing on the front step to run back into the house, calling for his mother at the top of his voice. Dwayne stood waiting, aware that the kid was dead o
n about his appearance. He was still showing signs of the recent action. A livid bruise turning to yellow on his forehead. Scratches on his face healing to white scar tissue. The tattoo of freshly withdrawn stitches across his chin. The sunglasses hid the deep set of his eyes. He was still recovering from the punishment he took back in Nevada all those long, long years ago.
It took him a few days to find Rick Renzi’s wife, now widow. She and the three kids were living with her sister outside Cleveland in a neighborhood of split-levels that had seen better days, probably when Johnson was president. He told her on the phone that Rick wouldn’t be coming home. He didn’t offer details, and he was glad she didn’t ask for any. They had some unfinished business, and she told him to come by the next day.
Lynn Renzi’s eyes were red, but she looked all cried out as she unlatched the storm door and let him in.
“Sorry about Ricky,” she said in an off-hand way. It took Dwayne a beat to realize she was talking about the little boy. Richard Renzi, Jr.
“Kids tell it like it is.” He shrugged and entered the pocket-sized living room. “I do look a little used up.”
“You get that way going somewhere with Rick?” When she leaned back on the arm of a chair, Dwayne could see the swell of her belly under her cotton top. She didn’t invite him to take a seat, and he didn’t move to do so.
“Yeah.” He waited, but she didn’t ask for more. “You told me you had something for me?” she said. “From Rick?”
