An oily, musty smell invaded Brick’s nostrils as he jumped amongst the things, swinging the sword. It clanged off a shell on a downward sweep, his rear leg mule-kicked another in the face. It shrieked and fell backward, but Brick swept the sword up and brought it down, point first, into a joint of the first roach’s natural armor. He grunted and pried; a hairy leg popped and slid across the floor.
The roach squealed and fell to its side. A second later, the sword point smashed through its armor, piercing its brain. It fell dead. The other monsters backed down the hall, cowering in the darkness, chittering at the giant hairy beast covered in their blood. It had a stinger.
Brick started to charge them again, but another shadow appeared in the darkness. Taller, bigger than the HR department.
Brick took a step back, almost slipping in cockroach goo.
The thing stepped closer to him. It was something out of a horror movie.
“What are you?” he whispered.
“Cree? Krrkrrrkrrrkrrrk, cree?” the thing responded.
Oh, hell no. Brick backed up, his pace never faltering, the orc sword tight in his grip.
“Cree? Krrkrrrkrrrkrrrk, cree?” it repeated, the sound like metal grinding together.
Carla’s voice came from somewhere behind him. “Great. Now it’s exactly like home.”
Brick backed into the light, the berserker rage draining from his system. The not-a-roach followed him into the flood lights. Brick’s legs, suddenly weak, threatened to drop him onto the floor. “There’s a praying mantis in a lab coat up here, Skid,” he called down the open elevator. “This is not cool.”
No response from the shaft.
“Cree?” the mantis asked, rubbing its pivoting green eyes with its forearms.
Brick screamed and ran.
11
Fear squirmed in her gut, an annoying tickle she’d learned to strangle and bury with the memory of walking through a bad part of town in her prom dress carrying a gas can. Sixteen-year-old Skid had taken that fear and swallowed it before wrecking the knee of a toothless guy in an Anthrax shirt. “You can do this, Skid,” she whispered into the elevator shaft. “You can do this.”
The fall lasted for less time than it seemed, which was for-fucking-ever. The knot took two tugs to loosen, then Skid dropped eight feet and landed on the roof of the car. “Tuck and roll,” Brick had said. There was no time or space for that. She hit the metal roof with all the grace of a sack of onions. Her left ankle buckled beneath her and pain, motorcycle wreck pain, shot up her leg. She collapsed onto the unforgiving metal.
“Aaaaaahhhhh,” she screamed when her ankle bent. The Maglite clanked across the roof of the car before it came to rest with the high-power beam pointing into her face.
Skid lay on her stomach, her head turned toward the light. I broke it. I broke my ankle. How the hell am I supposed to save the universe with a broken ankle?
She tried to roll over, but a sharp burst of pain kept her down. Her eyes slammed shut. Damn it.
Breathe, said a voice that sounded too much like her father’s when she lay broken and bleeding from her motorcycle accident. Breathe, baby.
Her eyelids pinched tight. One, two, three, four, five—
A far-off clang echoed off the shaft walls from above and made her lose count. Her teeth gritted as she sucked in air. Brick was up there fighting giant cockroaches.
Six, seven, eight, nine, ten.
Skid let the air out slowly and focused on breathing, controlled breathing—in deeply through the nose and out slowly through the mouth. The pain subsided into more of a hot throbbing ache. She opened her eyes and rolled onto her back using her left side as a pivot, keeping her ankle as still as possible. The pain stabbed at her, but there was less of it. Hello Kitty pointed in the direction she was supposed to.
There was no snap, she told herself. If it was broken, you’d have heard it.
Brick bellowed from high above, the sound of his sword crashing over and over into what her mind pictured were giant, sentient anime bugs smoking cigars. He laughed and an almost inhuman scream split the darkness.
“I’m glad you’re having fun,” she said, her voice barely audible, even to herself. “I couldn’t even stick the landing.” The roof hatch lay less than a foot away. “But I can do this.”
She grabbed the hatch and pulled herself to it. Elevators in highly populated buildings had doors in the ceiling that opened so emergency personnel could get passengers out in case of a fire. Hollywood used the trope to get anyone out of a stuck car, but it would never work in real life because the hatch was usually—
Locked. The thing is locked? Skid started to pound on the latch but held back her hand. She’d already made enough noise. Attracting more attention would be stupid.
Unintentional handholds dotted the top of the car. Her hand grasped a crossbeam and she pulled herself nearly on top of the hatch before taking the flashlight and training it onto the lock. The device was simple, just there to keep morons inside the car from trying to be movie heroes. She wiped a sleeve across her face to keep the sweat out of her eyes.
“Ouch,” she grunted; she’d shifted her body and her ankle turned. It had already begun to swell. The cuff of her pants felt tight.
Brick screamed far above her. “There’s a praying mantis in a lab coat up here, Skid. This is not cool.”
No. It’s not. Her hand found her belt and clasped a knife hilt, her last one. She whipped it forward, slamming the steel point into the lock and twisting with stuck-jar lid strength. Something snapped, and lock bits scattered onto the metal roof.
“I’m saving your ass this time, Brick.” She shuffled off the hatch and pulled it open. It moved easily on well-greased, never-used hinges. Easy white light poured from the hole. She leaned over. The elevator car was empty, its door open.
This was it. Dave’s bridge was on this floor. She slipped the blade back into her belt.
“Let’s go save the world,” she said, then shook her head. “World, worlds, whatever.”
Skid grabbed the edge of the opening and slowly lowered herself into the car, her well-toned muscles hardly feeling the weight. She hung by her fingers for five seconds, maybe ten, trying to judge the distance of the fall and how she should land, wishing she’d paid more attention to the Roe Bros. acrobats who did perfect spin jumps off moving horses. Good luck, Brick, she thought the second before Brick screamed from above and she let go.
12
Lights, like the energy-saving lights in the frozen food aisle, switched on every ten feet as Karl descended. He promised himself he’d start going to the lab gym when all this was over. First losing his breath chasing Young Karl, now huffing while climbing down a ladder? Pfft. Come on, Karl. Healthy body, healthy mind. But he would have given all the money in his wallet right then for a can of Coke.
The bottom finally came. He leaned with his hands on his knees panting until his breath returned. The door that would lead him out of the tunnel was inches from his face. This door took a code to open as well. His soldiers would be back soon. Karl stood tall and punched the code into the keypad. The door beeped and slid open.
13
This time Skid tucked. As her right leg touched the tight carpet she collapsed into a ball and rolled over her shoulder, out of the elevator and into a short, dim hallway lined by a bank of windows. Her left leg hit the wall. She bit her lip to hold back a scream.
She lay still, watching for movement, listening to see if anyone or anything had noticed her entrance. Nothing. The only sound in the hall was her short, sharp breath. She rolled onto her stomach and pushed herself to her knees, the injured ankle throbbing like a drumbeat.
“This—finally—is going to be easy,” she said, panting.
Her fingers latched onto the sill of a long window over her head. Arm muscles contracted and pulled her body off the floor, sweat running into her face.
Y
ou can do this. Her elbows hit the sill, and she pulled up onto her good foot. The left hung limply as she looked through the glass.
“Oh, god.” Skid’s heart pounded. Dave. He sat in a chair in this well-lighted room filled with computer monitors and enough buttons and gauges to make the Bridge of the Enterprise feel inadequate. She forgot about the sweat beading on her forehead. Why hadn’t Dave shut down the machine?
If Dave saw her, he didn’t show it. He kept looking to his right, then down at the floor. He said something toward a corner Skid couldn’t see. Someone was in there with him.
She hopped on her right foot to the door, holding onto the window ledge for support. Inside the Bridge, Dave leaned back in his chair, fingers behind his head.
The card reader beeped and changed from red to green at her first sweep, but whether from Dave’s key card or the other David’s, she couldn’t remember. The locking mechanism clicked, and she pulled open the door.
“Hey, Skid,” Dave said, propping his legs on a table, grinning like nothing was wrong.
“Is this her?” another voice asked.
She turned and almost dropped her weight onto her left foot. The other voice was also Dave’s.
14
“You’re Skid, aren’t you?” The standing David Collison crossed his arms and leaned his back against the metal wall. The air in the room seemed heavy, the kind of heavy that comes right after a fight, or right before one.
“Maybe,” she said, pressing her hand in the doorframe to keep upright. “Who are you?”
“I thought that was obvious.” The man’s eyes tried to bore into her. “I’m David Collison, Ph.D., just like your boyfriend.”
“He’s not my—” Skid began to say, but let it go.
Chair Dave slowly stood, one knee popping at the movement. Skid and Clean-David both turned toward him.
“I thought you knew Skid,” he said to Clean-David, his forehead creased in confusion. “You warned Karl about her.”
Clean-David looked at the floor and nudged something with his toe. “Yeah, about that. I ran into myself during a dimensional shift,” he said. “We had a couple beers and dodgy butter chicken at a place called Moe, Larry, and Curry. He told me a woman named Skid was going to kill everybody here.”
Dave threw his hands into the air.
“Am I a douche in every dimension but this one?” he asked.
Skid shrugged. “Now that you mention it—”
He couldn’t stop his grin from making him look like a goofy kid. “I’m happy to see you.”
The pain, the forgotten fear, the fact that two of the same man stood in this room dragged at her mind but didn’t overwhelm it. She had a job to do. Skid motioned toward the control panel. “Are you ready?”
Clean-David bent and picked something off the floor, never taking his attention from her. When he stood, she saw the pistol.
“Well,” she said, her voice without inflection. “That complicates things.”
The man she was sure was the real Dave took a step toward her. “He won’t shoot either of us,” he said. “He’s me, and I wouldn’t hurt anybody.”
Clean-David raised the gun.
“I’m not you,” the man said and waved for Dave to sit down, then turned to face Skid. “Why don’t you come in, Skid, if that is your real name.” He shook his head. “No, of course it’s not. What is it, anyway?”
She grinned. “Blow me.”
“Wow.” He waved the pistol at Dave again. “You have yourself a keeper.” He trained the pistol at Skid. “Please, come in.”
“I’m good here. I—”
The bullet buzzed by her head like an angry insect from Mount Olympus and ricocheted down the hallway. The gunshot echoed in the room like the last breath of the shot. Clean-David’s smile pulled across his face as if he had hooks on both sides of his mouth.
“I spent a lot of my youth on a farm, Miss Skid,” he said. “I know how to shoot. If I’d meant to hit you, I would have.”
Before she could move, gears cranked from inside the walls, and the heavy sliding double doors in the back of the lab groaned and split, the smug figure of Martin McClure who sells insurance coming into view on the other side. Behind him stretched a vast chamber of machinery. A giant metal tube jutted into tunnels in opposite, roughly hewn walls. A platform supporting a metal ring webbed with wires rose from the middle of the floor. Inside the ring raged a purple storm.
“Welcome back, Karl,” Dave said, his butt firmly back in the office chair. “We missed you.”
“Karl?” Suddenly the appearance of Martin McClure who sells insurance made so much more sense.
“That’s Karl Miller Ph.Dickhole.”
“He Hans Grubered us,” Skid said. “Up top.”
“He what?” Clean-David asked.
Skid flipped him off. “He pretended to be someone else. What? They don’t have Die Hard in whatever dimension you’re from?”
Dave barked a laugh. “I knew there was a reason I sat by you that night.”
“I wish you’d stop saying that.”
Karl stepped into the room and a flurry of motion sprang into the window of the engineering door. Skid gasped and shifted her weight as the creature on the other side soundlessly beat on the unbreakable door. Her left foot hit the floor and she let out a howl of pain, falling into the room. The hallway door slid shut behind her.
Karl walked into the Bridge and stood next to Clean-David. “So you’re the Skid I’ve heard so much about.” Lightning crackled around the undulating mass of violet inside the ring in the cavern-like room behind him. It might have looked impressive, if she hadn’t stopped caring. “I thought as much when I met you and the lumberjack upstairs. Welcome.”
This Karl, who had orchestrated a massive universal fuckupery, had walked into the room like Steve Jobs introducing the goddamned iPad. Skid’s brain fingered her ace; she knew something he didn’t.
Concern traveled across real Dave’s face. “Where are Cord and Brick?”
Skid waved him off. “Cord and his 1957 girlfriend are here and there. Brick’s upstairs fighting giant insects.”
“That’s the HR department,” Clean-David said. “And the monster on the other side of the door here is Oscar.”
Skid was only half-listening. Her eyes were trained on Karl Miller. “What time are your soldiers supposed to be here, Hans?”
Karl looked at his watch. Whatever smile had been there fell off in chunks. “Five minutes ago,” he said flatly. “They were supposed to be here five minutes ago.”
She pulled herself across the floor, dragging her injured leg behind. Her hand slapped the top of a control panel, and she climbed to her knees. The other followed, and she pulled herself onto her good foot. A red button under a glass case sat four feet to her left; the sasquatch looming by the engineering door was closer. The beast called Oscar didn’t look evil, just angry. She slid closer to the red button, Oscar’s face now over her shoulder.
“That’s because they’re not coming,” she said.
“What do you mean?” Karl asked, confusion in his voice.
She hopped the last two feet and stopped. The red button under glass, the one that could stop this madness, was within reach.
“I mean I saw them.” Her fingers inched toward the button. “In Orcland, or wherever we were. They’re dead, Hans. Killed by orc soldiers.”
Pink flushed his face, quickly turning to red. Karl the Dimension King’s fists clenched; he looked like he might pop.
“You’re lying. Those were United States soldiers in Humvees.”
The fingers of Skid’s left hand toyed with the glass case that protected the button. She flipped it open. The slot for a key, the one her Dave had drawn on a napkin at Dan’s Daylight Donuts was empty. She pushed the button, but nothing happened.
“You’re looking for this.” Karl’s voice harsh, verging on pani
c. A flat, rectangular key on a short chain hung from his right index finger. “Now, tell me what you know.”
Her hand dropped from the button and slowly lowered the glass shield. “I saw them,” she said. “There were three Humvees, all damaged by what looked like catapults or something. There were no soldiers alive, at least none that we could see.”
Karl had stopped breathing and looked like he might collapse. “That’s impossible,” trickled from his mouth. Then anger flared again, and he pointed a finger at Skid. “Shoot her,” he barked.
“What?” Clean-David turned toward Karl. “Why? She can’t do anything.”
He reached for the pistol, but Clean-David didn’t give it to him.
“Hey, Skid,” her Dave said, ignoring Karl. “Do you remember the night we met?”
Her brain churned, last Friday flooded it like a bad dream.
“We talked about Erwin Schrödinger,” he continued, not giving her a chance to answer.
“You know, the guy with the cat.”
“Give me the damn gun,” Karl shouted, but he seemed far away.
Erwin Schrödinger? Schrödinger’s cat. “Yeah, I remember. You were debating on if you should prevent the zombie catpocalypse.”
A smile radiated from his eyes. “I must have made some kind of impression on you.”
She grinned. “That’s why I punched you.”
“This is all very lovely,” Karl said, but they took no notice.
“What did you decide was the point about Schrödinger no one understands?”
She picked through the memories of that night. The beer, the knife, Dave disappearing in a whiff of ozone, and Schrödinger. That’s it.
“He was a horrible pet owner.”
She turned her head and looked at the beast named Oscar, his rage a heat she could almost feel. There was a button marked ‘Door Release’ mounted in the wall to the right of the metal portal, within her reach. She lunged for it, and the world suddenly stopped.
Karl’s voice died at the sound of a magnetic lock opening. Clean-David stood silently, the shock on his face frozen in a mask. Dave held his breath. Then the door flew open, banging the wall opposite Skid hard, knocking it off one hinge.
So You Had to Build a Time Machine Page 32