by Jaxon Reed
“Right. You could start out here, before the Flood. Stick around and corrupt things for a few thousand years, then come back to the menhir and jump to the next alternate in 2500 BC, or whatever time this is.”
Rick said, “Well, alright! But now we’ve got all that figured out, and nobody to share it with.”
Nancy looked around the isolated field. Wind blew softly around the black obelisk. Trees behind them waved their branches gently.
“This is nice,” Nancy said. “We need a break anyway. Come on, I bet this is how Adam and Eve felt, back in their day.”
“Always making lemonade out of lemons, aren’t you, Nance?”
“Let’s go exploring.”
She smiled, grabbed his hand and walked away from the obelisk, toward the grove of trees in the distance.
Rick followed, dutifully.
He said, “Just don’t talk to any serpents.”
-+-
Booker stood bent over, hands on his knees, trying to slow his heart rate.
When he straightened, Cait handed him a mug of tea. He sipped on it and realized he could hardly hear a thing.
“The blasts from the bombs must have damaged my eardrums,” he said without hearing his own voice.
Cait nodded.
Halfway through the mug, he began feeling better and the roar in his head subsided.
He glanced around and saw Niko and Toya sitting in a bed of flowers, drinking their second cup of tea. They looked much worse than he felt, he decided.
Jason stood nearby, keeping an eye on all of them. He looked to be in the best shape.
“Cait grabbed me before the bombs got too close,” he said, as if reading Booker’s mind and answering the question before he could ask.
The words came in faintly to Booker, fighting with the roar in his ears. But at least he could make them out now.
Jason took a sip of his own tea and said, “Pressure blasts are a pain, though. Even at a distance.”
He looked back at the women on the ground. They glanced up at him, still in misery from their experience in outer space.
He said, “That’s what killed the crew of the Hunley. You know the story? On most alternates, it’s the first submarine to sink a ship in war. It was the American Civil War. The Confederates stuck a bomb on it, on a pole sticking off its nose. The crew rammed a Union ship in the waters off Charleston.”
No one replied to his comments, but they all took more sips of tea.
“No one understood much about pressure blasts in those days, or waves or whatever you want to call them. The angle of the bomb’s explosion sent a huge blast wave back into the sub, killing everyone onboard instantly. Most people think they simply drowned, but it was the force of the blast that killed them.”
He looked around at Booker and the women again.
“Everyone feeling better?”
Toya stood up, shakily.
She said, “It’s not fair that you boys didn’t get tossed into orbit like we did.”
Jason smiled and said, “Well, we got bombed.”
“It’s not the same.”
Toya walked away slowly, heading down the path toward the rowan door.
Over her shoulder she said, “I’m going to bed.”
Niko stood up, too.
She placed her empty mug on the ground and said, “At least we were somewhere Cait could reach us easily. If we were sent into space off a world with no sensors . . .”
She shuddered, unable to finish the thought. Then she shuffled after Toya, intent on heading to her own bed and gaining some recuperative sleep.
Jason turned to Darius, who stared stony faced after them.
The Walker said, “Speaking of worlds without sensors . . . I take it Nancy and Rick were sent somewhere like that, Cait?”
The computer’s plain-faced human interface turned to him.
She said, “Yes. Eb and I ran calculations and have narrowed our estimates down to a handful of possible locations. I have some sensors here if you wish to get started. They will need to be planted on each one.”
“Okay. Yeah, I can do that while everybody else recovers. Since I didn’t get thrown into space or anything.”
He looked at Darius and clapped him on the shoulder.
“You okay?”
The noise in Booker’s head subsided from a dull roar and tinnitus kicked in. The ringing in his ears slowly lowered in volume as he took another sip of Tree of Life tea.
He said, “I was so close. I could see her, Jason. Or at least, I could see what they have her trapped in. It’s some kind of container. She can’t get out of it.”
“We’ll get her, buddy. Don’t worry.”
Booker glanced at the other man sharply. His eyes narrowed.
“How can you say that? How can you act so blasé? She is trapped, Jason!”
“Relax. They can’t kill her. The worst they can do—”
“The worse they can do is trap her and torture her! They are doing their worse right now!”
“Look, now we know where she is. I mean, they’re moving her all the time, but we understand things better. This was a trap. It was designed to take out however many of us came looking for her. But it didn’t work that well for them. And we learned an awful lot today.”
“What, how useless we are against them?”
Jason paused and took another sip of his own tea, studying Darius carefully.
Instead of answering directly, he asked the other man a question of his own.
“Have I ever told you how I got into this whole operation? How the Fae Killers started?”
Booker shook his head. He wore a glum expression on his face, consumed with worry about Tiff.
Jason said, “I am the only person in this whole outfit from Original Earth. I grew up in Missouri, born 1867. Ever read Mark Twain?”
Booker nodded.
“That was my life. Or at least, certain parts of Tom Sawyer were my life. I actually grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, which if you know anything about Twain, that location served the inspiration for a lot of his work.
“I never met him, of course. Twain, or Samuel Clemens, had long since moved away from Hannibal before I was born. But the Mississippi, and the town . . . that was my life.”
Booker said, “Clements.”
“Hm?”
“Clements. On my world he had a T in his last name.”
“Ah. Well, the original did not. It was just ‘Clemens.’”
Jason sipped his tea again and smiled.
“I’ll make a long story short. I got into law enforcement as a career. I don’t know if your alternate had the Pinkerton Detective Agency, but I was in the original one. We were known as ‘dicks.’ That word morphed into another meaning altogether over time, but back in those days we were known as ‘private dicks,’ or ‘Pinkerton dicks.’ It was just a shorthand term for ‘detective,’ but that meaning fell away later. Pesky language changes, you know. But I digress, and I promised to keep this short.
“I was on the tail of a robber who used trains to get out of town after hitting banks. I confronted him after one of his scores and he got the jump on me, shooting me on the train. I was 25 years old.
“Short life. I didn’t do much, other than get shot by a bank robber. You can probably relate. I know you were murdered by your alternate’s Al Capone.
“So there I was in the afterlife, in heaven, and Michael approaches. The archangel educates me about alternate realities and fae, and the fact that they are out there corrupting things. He asked if I would help. And that’s how this whole thing got started.”
Booker tossed back the last of his tea as the ringing in his ears trailed away. He felt much better.
The Walker continued talking.
“Darius, I have been at this assignment for well over a thousand years. Almost fifteen hundred. In the early days, killing fae was easy. I’d show up in an alternate, find them and kill them. Easy peasy. They didn’t know what to do about a blond haired dude m
urdered in the original 19th century coming back to take them out. It freaked them out, because up until then nobody else walked around the alternates like that. I went from being known as Jason Walker to ‘The Walker.’
“Don’t get me wrong, I made lots of mistakes. If you talk to them too much, they can usually weasel out of you killing them somehow. Sneaky bastards. A lot of them got away the first time I tried to send them to Judgment. That took a lot of work, tracking down the ones I missed and taking them out.
“But they made mistakes, too. I dispatched hundreds of them before they developed more effective tactics for evasion and fighting. That’s when I started recruiting talent from the alternates. I found some people willing and able to help, and brought them onboard.”
Jason sipped the last of his tea and smiled at Booker before tossing the mug away.
“I don’t plan on this mission continuing forever, Darius. And we’re getting near the end. Or at least, we are way past the middle, at this point. You are likely the last person we recruit to help. Do you understand what I’m getting at?”
Booker shook his head. Jason sighed.
He said, “They set a trap for us, and brought everyone they could muster. Now, the fae are not known for cooperation, so that alone is a significant development. But look how many they gathered. They were only able to bring 85 souls to fight us.”
“It was enough. We failed. Tiff disappeared again.”
The Walker stifled his irritation at this statement, and Booker’s sour mood.
He said, “We learned, Darius. We learned a lot. After all this time, a millennia and a half of multiple people taking them out, and their numbers are likely down to less than a hundred. They are finite, and we have made a serious dent. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”
Booker considered this statement.
He said, “There could be more that didn’t show up.”
“I’m sure there are. But, I’m also sure more would have shown up if they weren’t dead already.”
Jason grinned and said, “And here’s some even better news. We took out at least two dozen today, in a single encounter. That’s a record. You almost never find more than one in the same place at any given time.
“That is a cause for celebration, buddy. And when Tiff rejoins us, she’ll be happy at the number of casualties we inflicted, too. The only thing she’ll regret is she was not here and able to help us kill more.”
“We still didn’t get her back,” Booker said, glumly. “I was so close.”
“We will get her back, Darius. I promise. And when we do, she’ll probably go out and kill the rest of them for us.”
Booker looked up and realized Jason was serious.
The Walker smiled back at him and nodded.
He said, “She could do it, too. She’s that good.”
8
Pierre Fontaine walked home to his flat. The Parisian streets bustled with people and cars. France, Europe and the rest of the world thrived in a postwar economic boom.
In the distance, he could make out the top of the Eiffel Tower, which had survived the war intact along with most of the city’s other landmarks.
He stopped at a newsstand and glanced at the evening headlines. Radio and television had eroded the significance of newspapers, but they still flourished. They would remain flush with ad revenue for the foreseeable future, not that he concerned himself with the economics of mass media.
He did not pick up the paper because doing so would obligate him to buy it. So, he just looked at its headlines over the fold.
Nonetheless, the seller frowned at him. The date on the paper read June 9, 1962.
Satisfied nothing in the world was going on this evening requiring his attention, Pierre waved at the grumpy vendor and continued to his flat.
He jangled a key in the building’s outer door and walked in, taking the stairs up three floors to the apartment he shared with his wife Sherri and their three children.
Sherri stood an inch shorter than he did, which was a blessing he supposed. Pierre was a small man. But in many ways, she was tougher than him, despite her shorter stature.
Sherri had a Jewish grandmother, and she got caught up in the Nazi racial purge when they examined French census records. She had been sent to the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp during the war.
There, her youth and beauty resulted in her being selected to serve as a sex slave for German officers. A Nazi doctor cut her open and tied her tubes. She was raped almost daily for 19 months before escaping in the final weeks of the war.
When Pierre found her, she was distrustful of men in general. He remained patient and kind, and loving. A year later, she finally kissed him, the first physical affection she had ever willingly shown a man. She was 19 years old.
In the early 1950s, as Europe recovered, newlyweds Pierre and Sherri visited a doctor to see if the procedure performed in the concentration camp could be reversed.
The doctor patiently explained to them that tubal ligation was permanent. Sherri would never bear children.
A month later, while recovering from that emotional impact (although an expected verdict, having the doctor say it out loud served as a blow nonetheless), Pierre suggested they adopt.
Europe was awash in orphans following the war.
Some children were left behind while parents were swept up in combat or concentration camps. Others were simply abandoned as babies.
When the Soviet Army swept into German territory toward the end of the war in the early 1950s, Russian soldiers and their eastern allies raped any and every German woman they could find.
Many became pregnant, and in the hard months and years ahead, tens of thousands turned their babies over to orphanages.
Pierre and Sherri adopted three adorable girls. Pierre insisted on naming each one: Angela, Nancy, and Sherri.
His wife accused him of unoriginality.
“You only name babies after women you know,” she said one time, with a smile.
He agreed with her and said, “But, mon cheri, these are the very best women I have ever known.”
She accepted his name choices, and the baby girls grew into little girls.
He pulled out his keys once more at the door to his flat, slid back the bolt and opened it.
“Papa!”
Petite Sherri, the youngest, jumped up from the living room floor where she had been playing with a doll. She ran to hug him as he came inside.
The other two girls rushed out of their bedroom to join in a big group hug. Soon they were all jumping around him in a circle.
“Papa’s home! Papa’s home!”
He smiled and carefully made his way to the flat’s kitchen where Sherri stood waiting for him.
He kissed her, leaning over the little dancing girls to do so.
His wife said, “Enjoy this stage of life, Pierre. When they are older and sullen teenagers, and have discovered boys, they will no longer be so happy to see you all the time.”
“Non! Never! My wonderful girls will never marry. They will stay with me and become old maids. Am I right girls? You will love your papa forever!”
He bent down and gave all three a fierce hug.
Nancy, the second oldest at eleven years and the most serious of the three, said, “We may get married someday, Papa. But we will always love you. At least, I will.”
“I love him more!” Twelve year old Angela said, pushing her sister away.
Sherri said, “Girls, girls! Are your chores all done? They need to be finished before supper. Go.”
Reluctantly, Nancy and Angela returned to straightening up their room.
Petite Sherri, the ten year old, smiled sweetly at her father and whispered, “I don’t have any chores, Papa. I finished them earlier.”
“You are such a good girl,” he said, kissing her on the forehead. “Now go into the other room so Mama and I can talk.”
“Okay, Papa. I love you.”
She trotted back into the living room to
find her toys and resume the story she had been concocting about her doll’s adventures in a faraway land.
The older Sherri smiled at her namesake. Then she turned back to Pierre.
She said, “It still concerns me you have not found Nancy Chance after all these years. French intelligence is not so great, hm?”
Pierre smiled at her gentle jab. He in fact headed up the Bureau, as it was called. The French external intelligence organization that he controlled was equivalent to the Texan’s OSS.
He said, “We know quite a bit. Angela Dorn returned home after the war. She lives in a large house on acreage outside the town of Hutto. Her husband is an airman we rescued, a former pilot who now works as an executive in a large Austin electronics company. They have two children, a boy and a girl. She teaches literature at Southwestern University, in Georgetown. All of these towns and cities are within easy driving distance. You know how Texans like their cars. It is not unusual for them to live in one town and drive to the next for work.”
Sherri smiled again at his recitation of the facts. She had heard them before.
She said, “The Angel of Death, feared so by the Nazis across Occupied France, is now a literature professor? It seems so boring.”
He shrugged and said, “Everybody went back to a normal life after the war. Normal is boring, and for the most part boring is good. Boring is especially good for raising children.”
“Tell them that,” Sherri said. “I think Angela wants to follow in her namesake’s footsteps and become a spy. She asked me today what you really do for a living. I told her you work for the government and we should leave it at that. But that answer won’t hold forever, you know. And Petite Sherri is always making up stories about adventures. Even Nancy wants to hear stories about the war years.”
Sherri made a face about that. Most of her experiences in the war were not at all pleasant, and she did not like to remember them.
Pierre said, “It seems glamorous to the young, I admit. But most of the time, during the war, we were all miserable and afraid for our lives.”
“But then Nancy Chance showed up, along with her paramour Rick.”