Brick clicked on the Maglite and held it under his face. “I—”
“Jesus, Brick,” she interrupted. “Don’t.”
She couldn’t tell if he frowned under all that beard, but he huffed and walked about twenty feet down the hall to the nearest door marked “Accounting,” ran his key card over the sensor and walked inside. Skid didn’t understand Brick, but she couldn’t say she tried hard either. Business owner, giant, nerd, giant nerd, a man she witnessed slaughter the last inhabitants of a village of Orcs, but most probably the nicest guy she’d ever met.
Something crashed inside the room, maybe a computer colliding with the floor. A long, high scrape screeched through the air and the door opened again. A metal office desk flew into the hallway and rolled to a stop against the wall. Brick stepped out after it, unshouldering his explorer’s pack and dropping it to the floor.
“So much for stealth,” Skid said, wondering just what the hell that was about. “What’s the desk for? Your taxes?”
“Nope, and stealth is irrelevant. Hans Gruber’s locked up nice and tight, and whatever thing made that dent should have been on top of us by now.” The big man reached into the backpack and pulled out a something dangly that could have been an enormous lasso of licorice. “You know what this is?”
“A really big Twizzler?”
He uncoiled the lasso, ignoring her. “It’s fifty feet of hempen rope from my explorer’s pack, which, by the way, has come in handy more than once.” Brick looped the rope around the center of desk and pulled slack on the loose end. “Do you think I should tie a two-half hitch or a bowline knot?”
Skid shook her head. “What am I? Popeye? I don’t know how to tie knots.”
“You should learn; they come in handy if you’re moving, packing, or breaking into a top-secret government lab.” He flipped the rope and pulled it tight, grunting as he lifted the desk gently off the floor to test it. “Bowline it is.”
“So, what’s the plan?”
He shouldered his pack and carried the desk to the elevator before he set it on its side and pushed it against the open maw of the shaft. What used to be a desk was now basically a piton that anchored the rope solidly against the wall on either side of the opening. He smiled at Skid and tossed the remaining coil of rope into the darkness.
“What’s so funny?”
Brick scratched his beard with one thick, dirty hand. “We can’t use the stairs. We can’t use the elevator. We can’t apparate.”
Jesus. “Appawhat?”
“And I could never climb the rope in gym class.” He held out the Maglite.
She snatched the flashlight from his meat hook. It was heavy in her hands. “That elevator shaft better not be deep.” She leaned over the desk, shining the high-powered beam into the pit. Light reached the bottom. It was more than fifty feet down because the rope didn’t quite reach the top of the elevator car. Skid pulled back and stepped away from what looked like the lair of something wicked.
“It doesn’t reach the bottom, Brick,” she said, trying to force strength into her voice. “My dad tried to get me to do the tightrope before he settled for the motorcycle. I don’t do heights, which made me kind of a failure at the circus.”
“It’s just an elevator shaft,” he said over her shoulder, leaning forward to look into the depths. Brick took the rope and began pulling it up. “Tell you what, I’ll lower you down. I’ll just tie the rope around your waist with a highwayman’s hitch.” He pulled up the last of the line and looped the end around Skid’s wrist using some kind of witchcraft. “When you get to the bottom, all you have to do is pull the end—” He tugged the last few inches of the rope that stuck from the knot and it fell free of her arm. “—and drop the last four feet—”
“It’s at least ten.”
“—six feet to the bottom.” He gave her a gentle smile that didn’t comfort her. “You have nothing to worry about.”
She folded her arms over her chest. “And why can’t you do it?”
“Like I said, I can’t climb ropes. Besides, if I run into trouble, you wouldn’t be able to pull me up.”
Trouble? She suddenly had difficulty catching her breath. “What kind of trouble?”
“With what we’ve been through,” he said, sliding the rope around her waist and cinching it tight with the knot, “it could be anything.” He tried smiling again. It had the same effect as before—nothing. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the other David’s key card to dangle it in front of her. “You’d better take this. We still don’t know what dimension we’re in.”
She took it and hung it over her neck, face down, shoulders slumped. Brick bent a knuckle under her chin and gently lifted her face to his. “You’re going to be okay.”
Why doesn’t that sound true? she thought, staring into his kind, hairy, blood-splattered face. She hated to admit she cared for him. Her stomach felt watery, her knees weak. She wasn’t in control again, and she hated it. “We’re out of options. I don’t really have a choice.” She threw a leg over the desk. It hung over about sixty feet of nothing. Her eyes shot to Brick. “You have to promise not to drop me.”
He opened his mouth, but she cut him off.
“Promise me now.”
He threw the rope behind him and pulled it tight across his back, holding the end near Skid’s belly in one huge hand, the part that emerged from behind him in the other. He tugged, and she leaned toward him.
“I promise. I will not drop you.”
The Maglite in her hand clicked off, and the shaft fell back into darkness. She didn’t want to see anything.
“I can’t get any more ready for this.” She brought her other leg over to sit on the center desk drawer, trying to breathe slowly to keep her heart rate down. “Watch your back for our friend. I think you’re right, Marty Martin McClure is Hans Buber.”
Brick didn’t correct her. “Everything will be fine,” he assured her as she slid off the desk and into the pit. The knot held. “Try to face the wall and use your feet to keep you from smashing your face.”
Great.
“What was Hans Gruber trying to get his hands on?” she asked, attempting to get her mind off the dark, sixty-foot drop, and the fact that her clothes were still dripping wet and there was a weird guy in the building hiding something from them. The rope lowered slowly. She reached her feet out and bumped into the wall. “You said in Die Hard, Gruber used a fake name because he was trying to get his hands on something. What was it?”
She went farther into the pit, the darkness closing in on her like a blanket. A scary, scary blanket.
His voice echoed down the shaft. “A gun.”
That doesn’t help.
The rope stopped moving, and her still mostly pink shoes came to rest against the wall of the shaft. She looked up from the black cocoon that engulfed her, the dim gray glow of the open doors above doing absolutely nothing to comfort her. She couldn’t see Brick, not even his shadow.
“Brick—” she started to say, but it was cut off by a scream.
About that time, Karl vanished again.
Chapter Fourteen
September 7, now with more marshmallows
1
The trespassers to Karl the Dimension King’s domain were still standing by the useless elevator door staring into the black depths of the shaft about the time something stirred in the hallway, an indistinct, undulating shape that seemed to move like a jerky 1970s cartoon.
The shifting in the darkness rose through the floor, growing as it came, then sprang at Karl as if it were alive, a Miller wave. He tried to whip Gillian’s key card over his head, but it caught on his right ear, the sudden pull leaning him to one side as the dimensional-temporal storm struck him.
This wave was different. There was no rush that pushed Karl’s suddenly non-corporeal body through the solid metal and concrete. He couldn’t count the layers of earth he ascended
through before the wave left him standing in a field. He wasn’t in a field, and this time he didn’t pee. One second he stood in the dark hall on the first floor of the lab complex, the next he stood in a shower as the dull thud of music came from somewhere.
A mildew-stained vinyl curtain hung limply from a sagging aluminum rod. It was as sad as a beach towel in North Dakota. Shampoo and conditioner bottles, none full, but none quite empty, lined the shower shelf, separated by small chunks of what had begun their existence as bars of Ivory and Irish Spring soaps. There was one razor in the shower, a pink Bic in a plastic cup with the words In-B-Tween faded and chipped.
What now? And why do people play bad music so loudly? He almost thought, Why don’t people listen to Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam anymore? but suppressed it from the childhood fear that people could read his mind.
Karl reached a hand toward the shower wall stained with soap scum and leaned against it, his stomach clenching and unclenching like ab exercises. There were little more than two hours left before the soldiers came back with those monsters, and Karl needed to be at the lab. He had to be at the lab. There was much to do, and Oscar was still loose. Oscar should have been locked in engineering, but then who trashed the lobby? Could HR do that much damage, even without opposable thumbs? He tried to calm himself but didn’t know how.
A body shifted slightly outside the shower and Karl flinched, sinking back into the dirty tiled wall as much as it would let him. He peed again, only a droplet, enough that he considered scheduling an appointment with a urologist.
“Bleeecchhharrrrff.”
Something wet spattered against something else wet.
“Bleeecchhharrrrff.”
Then came the smell. Karl pinched fingers over his nose before he threw up, too. Alcohol, that was for sure, mixed with, what? Taco Bell? He slowly pulled the curtain back.
The drunken puker was a man, or more specifically a boy, who might be mistaken for Shaggy on Scooby-Doo if his face wasn’t in the toilet.
Shaggy let loose again. “Bleeecchhharrrrff.”
Karl stepped out of the shower, tiptoeing around the boy’s feet. The kid, a college student probably, either didn’t know he was there or didn’t care.
“Bleeecchhharrrrff.”
The gag reflex, present in almost all mammals but rats and horses, kicked in and Karl coughed. He never could stomach someone else vomiting. He lunged for the door, but for an instant his eyes grazed the mirror mounted on the rusty tin medicine cabinet over the sink, the letters TKE and AΣA stuck to the glass.
I’m in a college house. And it was familiar. Those letters—he knew them. Once upon a time, he saw them almost daily on shirts of people he knew. Karl opened the door and stepped into a short hallway with darkened openings to bedrooms. What had been a dull thud in the bathroom was now full-on blaring 1980s German techno mixed with laughter. There was a party in this house. Karl took a step into the hallway. Peeling flowered wallpaper was decorated with wrinkled posters of Real McCoy, La Bouche, and Mouse on Mars. Marty and Suzie loved that music.
“You’ll never have this day again,” Marty had told him more than thirty years ago.
“No way,” he whispered. “This can’t be happening.”
“Hey, dude,” a shaky voice said from behind him. “Shut the door.”
Karl walked down the hall, leaving the bathroom wide open.
2
Oh, shit. Ohshitoshitoshitoshitoshit. Without warning, the rope swung outward and to the left, slamming Skid into the metal wall of the elevator shaft. The wind shot out of her. She clung to the rope, now impossibly thin to her, and fought to pull air back into her lungs.
Oxygen dragged through her trachea, the air burning as it went in and out. From above, Brick screamed again, followed by the sound of metal striking something hard.
Skid pulled her body into a ball as the rope swung outward again; in what direction, she couldn’t tell.
“Brraaaaaa,” came from overhead, but not a scream this time, a bellow. Like in the orc world. Brick wasn’t alone.
The rope twisted her in circles, and Skid wondered if she might shit herself. Her feet instinctively thrust themselves out and her shoes struck the side of the elevator shaft. Skid winced at the pain, but the spin slowed as she dragged the shoes along a flat metal surface once, twice, three times. She stopped, her breath not coming any easier.
Brick growled. Berserker Brick was back. His sword clanged off armor again and something hissed.
“Watch out for my fingers, man,” another voice yelled before an airy scream echoed down the shaft, then the world fell silent.
Cord’s back.
3
When Karl reached the stairs, he knew where he was—Marty and Suzie’s graduation party.
This was thirty years ago.
He stood with a hand on the rickety second floor newel post to keep himself upright. It was 1984, and he was back at college. Chuck and Tommy hovered by the keg, probably talking about Advanced Dungeons and Dragons as Marion fixed herself a drink at the makeshift bar on the dining room table. Three people he didn’t know sat with sixth-year senior Matt the Rat at the opposite end of the table, playing Quarters. Bobbylicious stood behind the turntable flipping through Marty and Suzie’s record collection, his long blond mullet hung behind him like a cape for his head. Karl even remembered the song Bobbylicious spun, “Don’t You Forget About Me” by Simple Minds. Not German techno, but at least European. It was playing when—
Karl turned toward the door, and there he was, Young Karl holding a half-filled cup of warm, flat Diet Coke listening to Marty bitch about grad school and computer entrepreneurs. Suzie pushed Marty, and he walked toward the keg, flipping off Karl’s twenty-one-year-old, not-yet-Ph.D. self.
This is why I’m here, he realized. I have to warn myself about Collison. Young Karl set down his cup and walked out the door. I have to stop him.
“Whoa, dude. What happened to your face?” Chuck said as Karl reached the ground floor and turned to follow himself out the door. “Marty. Hey Marty. Old guy alert.”
Marty turned, then Suzie, then every face in the room. Karl’s step slowed as he took in the house. He remembered this place with the crappy furniture, the crappy sound, the crappy smell. It was awful. All of it.
“Oh my god,” Suzie shouted. “You look like—”
“Karl Miller,” he said. “That’s because I am.”
Marty stepped in front of Karl, moving with him as he tried a sidestep. “Dude. Karl just left, but you’re, you’re—”
“Injured? My face? Yes, I know.”
Marty shook his head. “No, old. I mean, you’re still dressed the same, and your hair’s the same, but—” His drunken eyes finally focused and grew wide. “—you’re just old. Who are you, man? This is either going to be really funny or I’m going to hit you.”
“Are you Karl’s dad, or something,” Suzie asked, pushing her way in front of her boyfriend to get a better look.
Karl softened for a second. He’d always liked Suzie. She was nice and smart and funny and too good for Marty. Way too good.
“No, I’m not Karl’s dad. I am Karl Miller.” He paused and looked around. Everyone’s attention was on him. Bobbylicious potted down the music. Karl raised his hands like somebody had a gun on him, although he just wanted to strengthen the attention he already had. “I’m Karl Miller from the future.”
One of the guys playing Quarters laughed.
“Whatever. That’s not possible,” Marty said. “Seriously, who the fuck are you? And it better be good. I’m just drunk enough to call the cops to my own party.”
A painful smile danced around Karl’s mouth. “Do you remember when you told me, ‘You’ll never have this day again’?”
Marty took a drink of his fresh beer before answering. “Yeah, I just said that.” Confusion leaked over his face.
Karl’s arms folded across h
is chest. “How would I know that?”
“Just, I dunno, whatever.”
“I know a lot of things, Marty,” Karl said, delight now washing over him. This was going to be fun. Just like everyone else he’d met in life, Karl didn’t like his undergrad friends much either. Marty had been his best friend since the first day of freshman year, but in the grand scheme of things, what did that really mean?
“I know you cheated on your college entrance exam,” he said. Marty’s mouth dropped, but Karl held a hand up in front of his old friend to keep anything from coming out of it. “I’m the only one who knows that, buddy boy. I also know you’re afraid of deep water, you caught your folks in your bedroom smoking the pot they found under your mattress when you were a junior in high school, and you had—or maybe still have—a secret crush on your first cousin Karen. You know, the one with the enormous tits.”
Karl finished and the room fell silent. Bobbylicious leaned over the turntable glaring with fisheyes at Karl as the album underneath him played through.
“But,” Bobbylicious said, his voice too small for his body. “If you’re from the future, dude, do you know what happens to us?”
His eyes went to the door. Young Karl was out there, walking home, but Karl knew where home was. His smile came back.
“Sure,” he said, raising his voice so everyone could hear. “Chuck, you’re going to have a drug problem when you’re thirty. Heroine, I think.”
The red Solo cup fell from Chuck’s hand and hit the floor with a flat clank; cheap foamy beer pooled around his feet. “What?”
Karl turned, pointing at people. “Marion is going to be a third-grade teacher. Tommy will spend a semester abroad and disappear in Romania. You three, I don’t know. Matthew the Ratthew Simington is going to sell advertising for a failing small-town newspaper—” His finger lingered on Bobbylicious who looked genuinely frightened.
“What? What man? What about me?”
So You Had to Build a Time Machine Page 30