Jared walked over, pausing only to kick the unconscious Bishop hard in the face, fracturing the man’s nose. Blood sprayed against Jared’s pant leg.
“Leave them,” Seth said.
“They will hunt us.”
“The Creator is our priority, and time is short.”
Jared nodded and helped Seth lift Richard Ridley up. They dragged him toward the door. By the time they reached it, Ridley was waking up.
Seth and Jared carried Ridley through the door, and he began to take some of his own weight. They guided him to one of the chairs in the room, easing him down. Ridley raised a hand and rubbed it on his forehead, as if he were waking from a long slumber.
Seth moved to a nearby locker, pulled out a black zip-up security jumpsuit and handed it to Ridley.
The man stood and stepped into the legs of the suit, then pulled it up on his body and yanked the zipper up to the middle of his broad, hairy chest. Then he started to lace up the boots Seth passed him. “Thank you, Seth. Where are our enemies?”
Jared pointed his thumb over his shoulder at the still open door to the room full of unconscious bodies. “What would you have us do?”
Ridley looked at his bare wrist, as if a lifetime of habit was driving him to check the time. Seth handed him the limited edition silver and black Rolex Submariner from his own wrist. Ridley smiled and donned the expensive wristwatch. “What’s the situation?”
Seth replied before Jared could. “Your brother Darius has amassed a sizeable force. He was poised to attack the facility any day now. We didn’t see him on the way in, but the last I heard from our informant, he was near. We’ve taken precautions. We used Chess Team’s resources to get to you, but King is apparently dead, as is Alexander Diotrephes. The rest of the building is empty.”
“And the Chest?” Ridley asked.
“We were unable to locate it, but we have some leads and—” Jared began.
“Never mind. I know where it is.” Ridley smiled at his two duplicates.
Jared flipped on three security monitors, adjusting the reception on the CCTV cameras hidden around the installation to show the large garage filled with vehicles heading down the ramp to the loading dock and armed soldiers stationed outside the amphitheater. There were men at the foot of the stairs leading to the surface as well.
Ridley’s smile evaporated. “Looks like they’re here already. Disappointing.”
“The timing could not be helped,” Seth said.
“We are so very close. Let’s leave Chess Team and Darius to squabble among themselves. I want the prize.”
Jared pointed at the monitor showing the stairs to the amphitheater, behind the secret janitorial closet door. “This way.”
Seth turned to the cell door and slammed it shut, listening to the lock tumble.
THIRTY-ONE
Security Office, Manifold Omega Facility, 2013
Peter Machtchenko held his breath. He raised his hand up to Lynn, behind him in the small supply closet filled with uniforms hanging on pegs and cardboard boxes filled with three-ring binders. She was already being silent though. They were out of practice, but training like theirs, despite being forty years old, was impossible to forget, even if the body wasn’t always up to the task. When the bio-seal door had begun to open, Peter obeyed the rising hairs on the back of his neck and had leapt into the security room’s closet with Lynn.
Now inside the cramped space, listening to the voice of the man he knew to be Richard Ridley, Peter was hoping desperately that his daughter was still alive. He had already lost one child this day, and two over the course of his lifetime. Losing the third would destroy him.
He overheard something about a chest, a sizeable force and a man named Darius. That was all Peter needed to hear to know things were going to go from bad to worse. After a minute, the voices receded on the other side of the door. Lynn reached around him for the handle. He grabbed her hand and held her there for a few seconds more, just to be sure. They might be ex-spies, but neither of them were armed, and Peter wouldn’t feel better until he had a 9mm in his hand.
He let go of Lynn’s hand and she turned the handle on the dark wooden door. It opened smoothly and slowly. No squeak. They stepped out into the empty security room and quickly scanned the area. Ridley was gone. One of the monitors on the desk showed a view of the nearby loading dock. Vehicles were pulling in, one by one, and an army of soldiers were getting out.
“Not good, not good,” Lynn said.
Peter moved to the locked door in the corner. He had tried to scope out the facility earlier in the week, when Alexander had brought them here, but the man was always unexpectedly around whenever Peter had tried to creep through the place unnoticed. Peter had made it down to this security room, but he hadn’t seen inside the closed door, which he assumed led to some kind of a holding cell.
They had come looking for Asya, only to unexpectedly see someone emerging from the locked door. Peter and Lynn had ducked into the supply closet just in time. But now all the old alarm bells were ringing in Peter’s head, and his hackles were on high alert. He didn’t know what was behind the door, but he guessed it was connected to everything.
Peter scanned the edges of the door quickly, noted the un-inflated rubber biohazard seals around the edges, and then ignored the threat they implied. Now was not a time for caution. Now was a time for action. And that meant opening this door, risks be damned.
Peter glanced around the room and saw a security officer’s belt hanging on a peg. The belt was glistening black leather with pouches. It held a radio and a ring of keys. More importantly, he found a variation of what he was looking for. He wanted a wooden police baton, but what he found was a 16” telescoping steel and chrome baton in a holster. It was better than no weapon, so he snatched it from the belt and turned back to the door. He knew Lynn was behind him monitoring both the door and the video feed of the loading dock.
He unlocked the latch as Lynn spoke, “Hurry. No time left.”
Peter whipped open the door and was ready to swing down with the baton.
Instead, a hand shot upward, restricting his downward thrust, as a blonde woman’s face plunged through the door.
Peter staggered back, dropping the baton, slipping and falling backward on to the floor. His head connected with the hard concrete and he unconsciously shouted out. “Fuck!”
The blonde woman’s hair was sweaty and plastered to her face as she staggered into the room. “Sorry,” she said.
Asya came out of the room next, supporting a beefy man with a blonde goatee. Asya looked ill as well, while the blonde man just looked weak.
Then came a small unhappy Korean man, followed by a mountain of an Arabian man with a broken nose and a bloodstained face. Each of them was armed with rifles and wore tactical battle armor. Peter recognized them as the rest of his son’s team.
“No time!” Lynn shouted, picking Peter up off the floor. “Must go now.”
Already the blonde man was at the outer door with Asya. Despite the fact that they were not armed, Lynn shoved Peter after the two, ahead of the rest of the team.
They turned right outside the door, heading past the door to the loading dock, Lynn shoving Peter the whole way, so that he was pushing against Asya and the blonde man.
The blond man turned around, annoyed. “What’s the rush?”
Behind them, the blonde woman and the other two men had just emerged from the security room. The door to the loading dock, now between Peter’s group and the stragglers, burst open and three metallic objects flashed into the air.
Peter saw the blonde woman recognize the aerial objects and turn about on her comrades, forcing them back into the security room. Lynn was shoving him through a door, as Asya pulled his shirt from the front. They all landed in the room with a split second to spare. A thunderous crack sounded, filling the corridor behind them with light and smoke as the door to the room slammed shut.
Peter raised his head, looked at the room they’d fallen inside, and smiled.
“You chose the right place for a standoff, dear,” he said. The others turned their eyes from the door to the room behind them, taking in the rack after rack of military hardware, explosives, rifles, handguns and grenades. An armory.
“I think I just got a Manifold stiffy,” the blond man said, smiling, as he reached for a strange looking rifle with three barrels.
THIRTY-TWO
Campania, 795 BC
“You never said anything about lions, damn it!”
“True,” Alexander grunted, as he wrestled a four-hundred-fifty pound lion to the ground and then head-butted the creature. “But I did tell you the Oscans would eventually lose to the Samnites. You were the one that said we should help out the little guys.”
King stalked across the marshy ground in a slow circle, his crude iron sword up, the thick-maned brown lion snarling as it kept pace with him. He found himself wishing he still had the Sig Sauer — or the damn AK that Alexander had lost at sea four years ago, when they had first travelled backward in time. The lion stopped moving suddenly and leaned back, but King knew it was preparing to spring and not retreating. He squatted, making himself an easier target, the blade held close to his side, and the tip extending just past his hunched body.
Although Alexander had bestowed him with eternal life, pain was still pain, and being eaten alive created the very unpleasant possibility of being a long meal. Plus, while the larger Greek had an otherworldly strength in addition to immortality, despite King’s newfound healing ability, he still possessed only the strength of a normal man. Against an angry, underfed lion on a battlefield in rural Villanovan-era Italy, he stood only a slim chance.
The creature sprang at King, its mouth opening up in a toothy roar, ready to devour him, just as the invading Samnites had planned when they had fired bloody chunks of mutton at the Oscans from makeshift trebuchets. Once again, King had been surprised at the inaccuracy of historical accounts, as he had read that catapults and trebuchets hadn’t been common place until the third century BC. Once the bloody meat began to fall from the sky, the Samnites had loosed five lions as their vanguard. The starved beasts had wasted no time racing toward the crude defenses King and Alexander had helped the locals build around their village.
Now the deadly lion was airborne for King’s position, and he needed to time things just right. The creature closed the distance with its huge lunge, and at the last second possible, King shoved upward, throwing the full weight of his body behind the blade, and then sidestepping the incoming mass of fur and claws. King rolled over backward on the ground, landing in a crouched position on his feet, his balance having become much better after years of living outdoors and engaging in frequent hand-to-hand battles.
The lion impaled itself on the broad blade of King’s iron sword, landing without grace on its head and snapping its own neck in the process, as the full weight of its attack came pounding down to the ground. Even if the sword hadn’t ended the lion’s life instantly as it ripped through fur and flesh and muscle, the broken bones might have finished the creature off. King stepped cautiously toward the beast, but it was done. Its huge chest no longer moved. King could see the animal’s ribs clearly, and once again he raged at the thought that men had tortured and abused this majestic animal, training it for war against a mostly unarmed and peaceful people. King knew the history. He and Alexander had spent long hours discussing the ways things went down. He knew his actions wouldn’t change the historical outcome, but he intended to take as many of the Samnites with him as possible, before the fight was over.
He pulled the bloodied sword from the lion’s chest-wall, and bid the creature a safe passage to its next life.
When King turned, he saw Alexander extracting his meaty fist from the shattered head of the lion that had attacked him. Yellow fur was matted with blood and bone across his knuckles. King knew Alexander, like him, took little joy in killing animals, but sometimes it was the only way.
“That’s the last of them,” Alexander said, standing up and wiping his hands down the front of his already filthy robe. “The spears will come next.”
“We’ll be ready for them, then,” King said with a lopsided grin.
“Or we could just move on. We know the outcome,” Alexander replied, but from the smile on his own face, King knew the man was just playing Devil’s advocate and he had no intention of leaving the fight now. Over the years, they had found a common ground. Despite King’s continued anger at being temporarily trapped in the past — if twenty-five years could be called temporary — his painful longing for Sara and Fiona and his continued concern for the fate of his team and family, he could not turn away from people in need. And to King’s surprise, neither could Alexander.
“Who’s to say whether one of the Oscans we save today won’t go on to father someone important? If we stay and fight this losing battle, then we always stayed and always fought this fight. That’s your theory on time travel, right?” King walked back toward the crude wooden battlements he and Alexander had built. They had discussed their working theory on time travel dozens of times over the years, but without any further evidence of their actions from King’s time, and knowing the vagaries of inaccurate historical accounts, the issue was truly moot.
“Who is to say,” Alexander parried, “that we didn’t always leave this fight in the middle, abandoning the Oscans to their fate?” The big man followed King, and they put on jovial smiles for the worried locals, both of them knowing they would fight and both of them knowing that in the end, they would lose. But the locals — kind people who had sheltered and fed them, who loved songs and lived simple farming lives — had no such knowledge. So the men would show them brave faces and teach them radical battle techniques.
“Who is to say?” King grimaced. “My conscience.”
Alexander nodded. “Your conscience has gotten us into more scrapes…”
“Not just mine,” King said. Alexander had gone to extremes in his pursuit of time travel. He had put a lot of people in harm’s way. Maybe worse. But now that he was here, in the past, moving toward saving the woman he’d missed for thousands of years, his true self was showing. Hercules had been a hero, or at least, he was now. King decided to let Alexander off the hook. “Besides, it’s not like we have anything better to do. How is the practice coming along?” King asked.
Alexander frowned.
For months and months he had been practicing the simple phrase he had tortured out of Richard Ridley. A single expression in a nearly extinct language. The mother tongue. Alexander didn’t want the whole language. Just one sentence. The one that would allow him to create a lifeless human body out of inanimate clay. A body that would completely pass for human. The body of his wife, Acca. For five years, Alexander had been practicing the sentence, first in the safety of the Omega facility in 2013, and now creating inert bodies that the two men would leave buried all over Italy. With each attempt, Alexander’s work was more and more perfect, with one exception.
“I still can’t recall her face. It’s maddening, Jack. She was the love of my life, and I’ve spent centuries looking for a way to save her. Now that I nearly have it, I’m frustrated by the fact that I can’t remember her face clearly enough to recreate the corpse accurately.”
King had examined several of the faces Alexander had created over the years. Each was slightly different. Eyes spaced a bit farther apart than the last or a bit narrower. Brows higher or lower, mouth pursed slightly more or less. He understood the depth of Alexander’s love for Acca, and he didn’t fault the man. When he had first heard that Alexander was having trouble recalling Acca’s visage, he tried to recall the image of his dead sister Julie, and found it hard to picture just how her nose looked. Even worse, he was starting to have trouble picturing Sara and Fiona, who he hadn’t seen in years. He couldn’t imagine how tarnished his memory might have been after centuries.
King placed his hand on his friend’s shoulder. “You’ll get it. And even if you don’t, we can always get a good l
ook at her before you need to.”
Alexander smiled, accepting the advice. “You’re right.” He turned his eyes to the field ahead of him. Five thousand soldiers with long spears ran across the marshy ground, screaming incoherently. “We’re outnumbered four to one. Still like our chances?”
King grinned. “Of winning? No. Of making them work for it? You bet your ass.”
As a pair, they leapt past the defensive wall and rushed out to meet the enemy.
THIRTY-THREE
Sub Level 1, Manifold Omega Facility, 2013
Jared, the more naturally militant personality of the three men, led his Creator and his duplicate-brother out of the stairwell and into the hallway of Sub Level 1. He moved slowly into the hall, glancing down its empty length, and peering cautiously at the doorways leading into the opposing Cold Lab and the Microbiology Lab. Darius’s forces hadn’t entered this level yet.
“He’s probably hoping to flush them from the loading dock upward. We’ll spring the trap behind the janitor’s closet before they’re expecting it,” he told Ridley and Seth.
He approached the door to the Microbiology Lab and opened it slowly, expecting a hail of gunfire. When none came, he moved in and the other two men followed. The lab looked untouched.
“They’ll be on the other side of the closet, or down the tunnel at the Amphitheater stairs. Either way, they have a defensible position. They’ll—”
“It makes no difference,” Seth interrupted.
Richard Ridley walked over to a security panel on the wall. It had a 6-inch LCD screen and a few buttons next to a numerical keypad. Ridley typed in a security code and the LCD came to life showing two soldiers stationed in the hall outside the janitorial closet’s secret door. They looked bored as they lounged against the tunnel walls, completely unaware they were being monitored by the camera in the security plate next to the door.
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