Bodies. Living beings. Every single person is a battery. We produce energy. Zig Zag can use it whenever his area grows and he becomes weak. And that means...
It meant that the next attack could come anytime. It didn't matter if Zig Zag was Elisa, Carter, or him—the rest of them would all die, too. Suddenly, that mathematical possibility seemed incredibly real. If he were right, not only the four of them, but everyone on New Nelson, was in danger. He had to warn Elisa, but he'd also have to tell Harrison. He'd have to...
"Professor." A booming, unfamiliar voice.
He turned and saw death in the face of the man aiming a gun at him. It was a pistol with a silencer. No, not now. I have to know, first...
"Listen!" he cried, raising his hands. "Listen, you have to..."
Blanes was glad to be shot in the chest. It let him think for a split second longer. He forgot about pain, and fear; he closed his eyes and saw—in the utmost depths of blackness— his brother. He went to him, knowing that his lips would enlighten him by answering Life's Great Question.
100 seconds.
"That's decent enough resolution," Elisa said, loading the first image.
Victor stood behind her, leaning over her shoulder, staring at the screen. They could each hear their breathing in tandem: a tense, panting duo. On the screen before them appeared a clear outline of Ric at the computer, disfigured by the Planck time.
"My God," Victor murmured behind her.
The objects surrounding him were clearly defined, too. And that tiny detail—the thing she couldn't put her finger on earlier, the thing that had bothered her so much—now irked her more than ever.
Suddenly, she thought she knew what it was.
"The controls..." She pointed to the screen. "Look at that row of lights. On our console, they're not lit up. See?" She pointed to a series of little rectangles on the keyboard. "That was what I noticed before. Looks like Ric did something he hadn't done on other occasions: he used a satellite transmission."
"From New Nelson? Why?"
"No clue."
It was absurd. Why complicate matters by using a telemetric image to open time strings from the recent past when he had a dozen live video streams to choose from? There was only one possible explanation.
The image he wanted wasn't from New Nelson.
But, what else could it be?
For a second, she was paralyzed by fear. The possibilities were endless, if the image could come from any place and any time in the recent past. And that meant that whoever had given rise to Zig Zag could be anywhere on the planet.
On-screen, the image jumped to the next open time string: Ric and Rosalyn, standing on the left. What he'd been looking at was now clear and well defined. Elisa zoomed in and centered on Ric's screen. She held her breath while it focused in and the new image appeared on the screen.
The most earth-shattering one imaginable.
94 seconds.
He heard a noise and opened his eyes. The helmet of the soldier on duty had disappeared from the peephole. When he stood up, the door opened and the barrel of a smoking gun with silencer was aimed at his head. He saw the boots of the fallen soldier in the hallway and raised his hands, eyeing the man with the gun.
"Do you know who I am? Look at me, Carter."
The hollow, perverted voice worried him far more than the weapon trained on him. For almost the first time in his life, Paul Carter had no idea what to say.
"Don't you recognize me?" the voice asked. "It's Jurgens."
He swallowed. Jurgens? Frantically, he put two and two together and thought he knew what was going on. Comprehension did nothing to quell his fear, though at least he could react now. He tried to keep his cool and speak calmly. Don't make him jumpy, whatever you do.
"Listen, put that thing down and let me talk to you."
"I'm your grim reaper, Carter."
"Listen. 'Jurgens' is a code word..." Carter was trying not to rush, to make sure he pronounced everything carefully, enunciated every word clearly. "My God, don't you remember? 'Jurgens' is the code word we used at Eagle to say that a situation had to be resolved by any means necessary. It's not a person, Harrison, it's a code word!"
But the sickening expression on Harrison's face let him know that the man was not listening. This isn't Harrison; this is something Zig Zag created.
"Can't you see? Can't you see who I am?" Harrison grunted, using that unnatural voice. "Look at me, Carter! Look at me!"
And then he fired.
54 seconds.
Victor was babbling behind her.
"It must be an image from the past. There are ... signs ... aren't there? The time strings have opened, right?"
It was a rustic, outdoor setting, but it was clearly not New Nelson. What appeared to be a small creek ran down the right side of the screen, and toward the top, on some boulders, under a tree (but not covered by it), were three small, white silhouettes, with a larger, dark one at the bottom. Despite the irregularities due to the Planck time, Elisa could tell that the large one was a stocky man, standing by the creek. He held something she couldn't quite make out in his hand (a hat? a cap?), and beside him on the grass was a long pole and some kind of basket that made her think it was fishing gear.
The other three figures were of a different size and build. She zoomed in on them and enlarged the image by 30 percent.
Judging by the long, black hair on one of them, it was probably a girl. She and one of the other figures both appeared in the same uniform sepia hues, which might have indicated that they were naked. The other figure was clothed, though it looked like it wore only a T-shirt and shorts. She couldn't be sure, though. Besides, it wasn't his clothing but his posture that intrigued her. The figure seemed to have fallen onto the rocks. His feet were higher than his head, as if the picture had been taken as he fell. And the position of the other figure's hands seemed to indicate that... All of a sudden, Elisa understood.
"One of the boys pushed the other... This must be some event from Ric's childhood."
Her mind was like a whirlwind. Suddenly, things were starting to add up, to fit in with the Ric Valente she knew. Marini was wrong. He thought Ric had risked it all, used himself, but really he never dared. Ric was ambitious, but he was a coward, too. He was afraid to use videos of people who were asleep because of the splits, so he chose another path: one from his very own past that he probably thought of as innocent, trivial. But what was it? He had always kept a detailed diary, ever since childhood. He told me so himself That's how he knew exactly where and when...
"From Ric's childhood?" Victor mouthed hoarsely, barely audible.
His change in tone made Elisa glance away from the screen for a second and look at him instead. Victor had grown deathly pale and looked drained. His dirty glasses reflected the computer screen, so she couldn't see his eyes.
Suddenly, she recalled a conversation they'd once had. Didn't Victor once tell me, years ago, that... the fight over that English girl he was in love with... Ric pushed him and...
She looked back at the screen and noticed something else: the image of the boy who'd fallen on the rocks was less well defined. There seemed to be shadows around him.
Shadows.
Her mouth ran dry, and her temples were pounding. Her pupils dilated.
She turned slowly, but Victor was no longer there: he'd backed up against the wall and stood there trembling. He wore the expression of a man who has suddenly learned that there's no such thing as life after death.
"Kill me, Elisa," he sobbed. "I'm begging you ... I... I can't do it myself. Kill me. Please..."
"No..."
Victor stopped begging and shouted, in a mixture of terror and determination, "Elisa! Do it before he comes back..."
She just kept shaking her head, not saying a word, just shaking her head.
The door burst open.
At first, Elisa didn't recognize Harrison: he had blood on his hands and clothes, and his face was red, crazed, his eyes bulging out of t
heir sockets.
"Look at him..." He was aiming the gun at Victor but speaking to her, frothing at the mouth. "I want you to watch him die, slut..."
"No!" Elisa cried, while another voice inside her screamed, desperately, Shoot him! Shoot him!
Her cry was drowned out by the sudden buzzing of machines all around her. The floor shook as if an earthquake had struck. The computer began sparking and a burned, bitter stench filled the air.
After a few seconds frozen in shock, Harrison fired.
And everything came to a halt.
0.01 seconds.
It was like being deaf. And yet she screamed, and she heard herself. And she felt the chair against her buttocks, and touched the table and keyboard.
Victor and Harrison were still frozen in the same position, one awaiting the bullet and the other aiming the gun, but their figures had changed: a vertical gash ran down the length of Victor's cheek and his stomach was a red hole through which she could see his spinal column; Harrison had lost part of one arm and his facial features.
And between them, almost in the middle, lay a dead bug. Elisa stared at it in horror. The bullet. My God. It didn't hit him in time.
She jumped back and pushed the chair without managing to move it. When she pressed the computer keys, none of them moved, as if they were just symmetrical bumps carved into stone. She noticed something different about herself, too. She was completely naked.
Her face was drenched in sweat.
She knew where she was. And she knew who was there with her.
It was still the control room, but there were certain differences. It looked like it had been decorated by a surrealist. The wall to her right was full of strange, oblong holes, and she could see the beach through them. That's where the only light was coming from. Everything else was darkness.
She felt something else, too. She couldn't have said how, because she couldn't see him, but somehow she felt him.
Zig Zag. The hunter.
Her mind, overrun with panic, seemed to disintegrate. Rational thoughts floated to the surface and remained coherent and observant; the rest sunk into the depths of helplessness, into the memory of her fears and fantasies of the last several years.
She rushed to the wall as she stared through the gap in that odd mix of horror and marvel. I can think, feel, move. It's me, but I'm not really here, I'm someplace else. She remembered that a few days ago—or a thousand years ago, there was no telling—she'd spoken to her students at Alighieri about the possibility of different dimensions being interconnected (I put a coin on the overheard). And now here she was, stuck in the most inconceivable example imaginable.
She touched the wall. It was solid. No way out there. But one of the openings was wide and almost at floor level. She stuck her hand through it and felt nothing.
For a second she wavered. The idea of escaping through one of those openings, somehow, made her slightly nauseous, like the idea of walking through the earth.
Then she noticed the hole in the generator room. It was a huge, elliptical hole in the door. She realized that Rosalyn had managed to run through it trying to escape Zig Zag, and that's how she'd ended up touching the generator, receiving that shock after Zig Zag attacked her. If Rosalyn had gone through one of those openings, she could try it, too.
No matter what, she wasn't just going to sit there waiting for him to attack.
She heaved one leg over, then the other, trying not to rest her weight on the opening's edge, though it was totally smooth. And then she was outside.
Elisa couldn't hear the sea, or the wind, or even her own footsteps. She couldn't feel the warmth of the sun on her skin, though she was nude. Eve in paradise. It was like walking though a film set: virtual nature. But the sunlight hit her retinas as always. It must have something to do with the theory of relativity, which stated that the speed of light was one of the absolute constants of the physical universe. Even in a time string, light still traveled, unchanging.
There was a huge hole in her path, a ditch with polyhedral walls, the ground packed into it in neat layers. She looked down, skirting it.
And then she stopped.
In that enormous chasm, thirty feet away, lay a motionless figure.
She recognized him immediately. Forgetting everything, including her own panic, Elisa crouched down at the crater's rim. She could see his head, his pointy face smashed into the earth, fossilized, porous, like a tree root. A milky-white tube imprisoned in the dark earth. He's been on the island this whole time. He fell through a hole in the matter, trying to escape Zig Zag that night. But he was dead, or he certainly looked to be. She hoped, for his own sake, that he was.
He wasn't Zig Zag.
Ric Valente stared up at her from the abyss, his eye sockets empty.
In a flash, a vile sense of dread made her turn her head. Zig Zag was behind her.
Just seeing him staggered her. All those years of terror, nightmares, that nest of vipers that had continued to grow in her subconscious ... it all split wide open inside her, the contents spilling over, almost drowning her.
There was only one thing that kept her from losing her mind at that instant: the lacerating pain in her left thigh. She writhed on the ground, shrieking like a little girl, and saw five symmetrical, parallel gashes on her midthigh. They weren't bleeding at all. Her blood hadn't had time to flow, but the cuts were deep.
Zig Zag hadn't even needed to touch her. She realized immediately that he was in total control of the situation. Nothing hindered him. He could destroy her at will. And the torment she felt now made her wonder what it would be like, to die at the hands of that creature.
Elisa stood, stumbled, and fell, reaching her hands out for support, and then stood again. She ran without looking back, limping. She intuited that this was what he wanted. He wants me to keep running. Even the idea that maybe Zig Zag didn't want to catch her was horrifying.
She rushed through the gate and kept on toward the beach, her feet leaving no prints in the sand, skillfully dodging holes in the matter beneath her. The thought of falling into one and getting caught (where? how far down would she plunge before the atoms could return and plug the hole again?) filled her with panic.
When she got to the beach, her jaw dropped. It was like seeing God.
The sea had frozen. Its time had stopped just as a wave came crashing to shore. Now it formed a green brick trench crowned with snowy peaks and filled with endless caverns. Another wave had been frozen as the tide pulled it back out to sea.
Where to now? She stopped and steeled herself up to turn around. No sign of Zig Zag.
Still, she kept going. She stepped tentatively onto the wave and found no discernible difference between it and the sand. She climbed, avoiding a hole in the matter, and reached the curved crest where it swelled. Touching the foam that came up to her chest, she had to snatch her hand back quickly; it hurt. She felt pricks on her palm and a sharp pain on the soles of her feet. The atoms, clustered and crammed into spaces smaller than they were in solid matter, must be what made the water feel like broken glass. In Zig Zag's universe, the sea could cut her and bleed her to death.
The wave wasn't that high, but trying to scale it would be like rolling naked in a patch of brambles. Besides, where would that take her? The horizon was a mass of enormous gorges and deep pits. One looked as big as the island itself, and there were black bodies suspended in midair above it (what were they? dolphins? sharks?) that must have been desiccated as they swam. The bumpy surface of the ocean extended all around, full of frozen swells and crests that would slice through her like razors.
Panting, she backed down onto the shore and found that the sand was not safe, either. It didn't shape and mold to her feet but stayed totally stiff, like a sheet of corrugated metal. The narrow dunes felt like blades. Up in the sky, the clouds sat like motionless smoke rings and scattered clusters, and the emerald edge of the jungle looked like origami gone wrong. She realized what was happening. The time string has extended it
s area. But that takes a lot more energy, so it should incapacitate Zig Zag.
Elisa didn't know where to go, or if she should even bother trying. She fell to her knees on the hard, metal sand, whimpering in pain from her thigh. She waited. Was she waiting for him? Or was there a way to get free, or at least to ensure that her demise was as short as possible?
She realized what the only possibility was, but the idea of hoping for it sickened her.
Curled up on the sand, she tried frantically to think. The area has become so big that he'll need more energy to keep going. He could draw it from human beings. She felt a glimmer of hope. When he's used up all the energy, he'll have to stop, even if it's only for an instant, and then the bullet...
She couldn't bring herself to hope for that, not saving her own life at the expense of...
And yet, even as she thought it, she was hoping for it.
Then she looked up and saw it was too late. It was her turn now.
Zig Zag was ambling lightly. He didn't seem to be walking but floating, propelled by some imperceptible wind. Elisa stared at him with the fascination that anything that causes death brings.
She wondered if he were aware, if he felt anything, had emotions, or was capable of rationality. And realized suddenly that he was not. She didn't even think he got pleasure by satisfying his desire to destroy; maybe it wasn't even desire, per se, that urged him on, maybe it was nothing like desire. Gazing at him, Elisa was sure that Zig Zag was beyond the distinction between living being and inanimate object. He wasn't an object, but he certainly was no living creature, either. Even in motion, he seemed like an illusion. She decided that he wasn't even closing in on her, wasn't even moving. That was what it looked like, but Zig Zag was really already there with her, in front of her, the two of them immobilized in that time string. And as far as volition went, he possessed it only to the degree that a magnet placed by an iron does. That wasn't really volition; it wasn't free will or determination; that was a physical phenomenon.
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