Gingerbread Man: A Marlow and Sage Mystery (A Nursery Rhyme Suspense Book 1)

by Lee Strauss

  The weight on her heel lessened. She bent over and stared at my face. “Except for the hair and clothes, you kind of look like him.” She laughed. “A wimpy, hipster version of Henry.”

  I took offense. I wasn’t a hipster.

  She roughly forced my arms behind my back and bound them with plastic tie-ups. Then she poked the back of my neck with her gun. “Get up, soldier.”

  I grunted and groaned as I twisted from my stomach to my back. I bellowed as I did the sit-up necessary to pull myself to my knees and then to my feet.

  “What is wrong with you?” Sage asked. I eyed her as I got my breath. She looked like a wild-child version of Laura Croft: boots, weapons, tough-guy stance. No braid, but something close to dreadlocks.

  “I hurt my ribs.” My shirt had popped open in the effort, and I caught Sage staring at the bandage wrapping my torso. I almost told her she had been my nurse but thought it wise to keep certain things to myself.

  She raised her chin in acknowledgement. “Walk.”

  “I don’t know where I’m going.”

  “Where were you headed?”

  No reason not to tell her the truth. “The science lab.”

  “Perfect. Keep going.” She opened the door for me when we reached the scorched building and prodded me to go down the steps.

  “It’s dark,” I said, pausing at the top. “I don’t want to fall.” I sounded juvenile, but my hands were tied behind my back. No way I could break a fall, and it was nearly pitch black.

  I felt her hand on my elbow and the nose of her gun in my side. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

  “I just want to make it to the bottom of the stairs alive.”

  “Good goal.”

  I followed her lead, stepping down when I sensed she did. She had obviously made this journey in the dark many times. I felt as blind as I was when the ophthalmologist lifted my cornea.

  I nearly lost my footing on the last step, and Sage tugged up on my arm, saving me from a face plant. My ribs screamed out but I bit my lips to keep from joining in.

  “You don’t happen to have any painkillers here, do you?” I asked.

  “Sorry, those are rationed.”

  She pushed me into a room, and I pinched my eyes shut to the light. “Ouch! I just had my eyes done!”

  “Shut up!” She pushed me hard from behind, and I stumbled forward. “You are such a baby!”

  “Sage…”

  “Stop calling me that!”

  Her volatile response surprised me. I guess I’d be a little high strung if I’d survived a holocaust. “What should I call you?”

  “Farrell.”

  “OK, Farrell.” My eyes automatically squeezed shut against the light. “There’s a pair of sunglasses in my pocket. Would you mind putting them on my face?”

  She grunted, but I soon felt her hand sift through my pocket. She pushed the glasses onto my face. I glanced at her in relief and was about to thank her, but she wasn’t looking at me. She had my eye drops in her hand.

  “Don’t take those, okay? I don’t want to go blind.”

  “Oh, stop whining already. I’m not going to take your stuff.” She shoved the drops back into my pocket.

  We entered a hallway and walked past many labs to a door halfway down. I recognized the room. It was where Blaine Tucker from the green world had been testing his theories on multi-universes. This third version of him turned as he heard us enter. His hair was greased back behind his ears. He wore a soiled lab jacket.

  “Is there something you need to tell me, Tucker?” Sage asked.

  Blaine Tucker’s jaw dropped, and then his face broke into a satisfied dimple-bearing grin. The coyote who caught the bunny. “Where’d you find him?”

  “Snooping around the science buildings. Does Henry have a twin he never mentioned, or a cousin?”

  “I don’t believe this is Henry’s twin,” Blaine said with an amused twinkle in his eye. “More like Henry’s double.”

  “What are you talking about?” Sage demanded.

  “Henry and I, our experiments. We were supposed to go there, but it looks like he came to us instead.”

  Sage slapped her hands down on the table and glared at Blaine. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “When we tease photons and stir up the light particles, we can redirect the quantum energy to create a gateway to a parallel universe.”

  “You’re telling me that your experiments actually… worked? That this guy—” She waved a hand in my direction.“—is a second Henry from another realm?”

  Blaine laughed and two big dimples popped up on his face. “Yes! This is great!”

  I decided to jump into the conversation. “I’m glad you’re having such a good time. I’m actually not.” I turned to Sage and hoped she could see my imploring look through my glasses. “By now you must know that I’m no physical threat. And I’m unarmed. Could you please cut these binds?”

  “Tucker, what are we going to do with him?” she asked, ignoring me. “What’s going to happen when Henry returns? Will there be a split in the universe or something? Because, a bombed-out city with millions of dead people is enough for us to deal with right now.”

  Blaine hesitated. “I’m not sure. I doubt it, but for insurance, we should keep them apart. Fortunately, Henry’s not due back for some time.”

  “Sage?”

  Her attention finally returned to me. “Farrell.”

  “Farrell, please.” I turned and attempted to wiggle my fingers. My shoulders burned from the tension, and my hands had fallen asleep. I was ready to beg and plead, but I hoped that she’d spare me the humiliation. She branded a knife, and I held my breath. With the hard look in her eyes, she could just as easily slit my throat.

  She reached behind me, and in seconds my arms slumped to my sides. Razor blades ran up and down my arms, and I rubbed them frantically to encourage the blood flow. I felt sick.

  “Is there a chair?” I asked. “And water?”

  Sage pushed a wooden chair my way, and I collapsed into it, lowering my head to my knees. Breathe. In and out. Sage left the room—hopefully to get me something to drink. My throat felt like rope.

  Sage returned with a glass of tepid water, and I almost drowned myself gulping it back. Blaine watched me with continued amusement. Sage didn’t share his good humor. She had produced a device the size of a cell phone, and she waved it over my body. I knew what the instrument was: a dosimeter. She was measuring my radiation levels.

  “He’s hot,” she said, shaking her head. She nodded at Blaine, and he strode toward me quickly, each of them taking one of my arms.

  “Hey!” I shouted.

  “I’m afraid you need a decon shower.”

  “What?” I knew what that was, naturally. I watched TV. They were going to high-pressure wash me. It was going to hurt. Worse, it was going to humiliate me because Sage demanded I strip down to my birthday suit.

  I sputtered, “With you in here?”

  She shot me a look. “This is no time for modesty.”

  They ushered me into the staff room. It existed in my realm too, but I’d never entered it before. It had been carefully closed to students, so I hadn’t known that there were shower stalls inside. One of them had two decontamination sprayers set up on either side.

  Blaine opened up a garbage bag. “All your clothes in here.”

  Sage pulled off my glasses and tossed them into the bag. She ripped off my shirt while Blaine unzipped my pants.

  “Hey! I can undress myself.”

  “It’s imperative that we accomplish this as soon as possible,” Blaine said. I was stumbling on one leg as my socks were pulled off. Sage removed the gauze around my ribs and I laughed out loud at the irony.”

  “Please stay calm,” she said.

  Seriously? How could I be calm, standing completely naked in front of her and Blaine while they power-hosed me? The soapy solution stung like a million bee stings. The spray against my ribs dug deep like a gunshot b
last. I pinched my eyes shut and covered my nose, and hoped like hell I still had skin left when it was all over.

  Finally, the water turned off. Sage handed me a towel, and I quickly covered up my man parts. Her expression when she looked at me was of complete indifference.

  I didn’t like this version of Sage Farrell.

  Blaine returned with what amounted to hospital scrubs. “Sorry, dude, that’s all we have for clothing in a pinch.”

  Blaine escorted me back to the lab. My eyes had adjusted to the light, and another poke to my forehead reminded me that I no longer needed glasses. Thank God for small mercies.

  “So, Tucker,” I began. I wasn’t so daft to see that last names were “in” around here. “How about you bring me up to speed? Looks like your weenie roast got away on you.”

  Blaine settled into a chair behind Professor Garvin’s desk. He leaned forward and threaded his fingers together. “Your world is different?”

  “If you mean, have we blown ours to smithereens like you have yours, then yes, it’s different. So far we’ve managed to avoid World War Three.”

  “Good! That’s great!”

  “Yeah, for them. Why does it make you so excited?”

  “Desolation is a great motivator for science,” he said. “Wouldn’t you want to escape this place if you could?”

  Actually, I did want to escape this place, but I knew what he meant. “Most people would look at ways to colonize other planets.”

  “That involves technology and finances beyond the scope of this civilization,” Blaine said. “But what if there’s another universe out there, parallel to ours but not destroyed—why not go there if you can?”

  “Well, because of the whole parallel thing. There’s already one of you in each of them.”

  Blaine studied me with a confused look. “You mean both of them.”

  “No. I mean each of them.”

  “No way! There’s more than one?”

  “I can safely say there’s at least three.”

  Blaine clapped his hands. “This is great!”

  “If you say so. Except, why am I here?”

  Blaine leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head. “Well, I’m actually not sure. Henry and I have been experimenting on ways to manipulate quantum matter for some time, since long before the bombs fell. It was my hope that we’d be the ones going to you. Not the other way around. Obviously, we haven’t mastered directional activity.”

  “Obviously.”

  Despite their lack of control I had to give Blaine Tucker credit for trying. And the other Marlow Henry. I had a hard time wrapping my mind around the fact that this was a world where I was a friend and partner of Blaine Tucker. That we’d developed an experiment that was responsible for my jumping universes. I didn’t even take my own physics course that seriously. I just wanted a passing grade.

  I snorted.

  “What?” Blaine asked.

  “I just think this is all so crazy.”

  Sage returned and another heat wave of mortification rushed over me as I recalled the decon shower. I tried to act nonchalant, leaning back in my chair and stretching out, but it was hard to pull off cool wearing baggy, mint-green pajamas.

  “Who’s crazy?” she asked.

  “Not who,” I returned, though I suspected maybe this version of Sage Farrell was crazy. “Just everything. This. Me here.”

  I cut a quick look to Sage and then to Blaine. “Where is everyone, anyway? Can’t be only the two of you here?”

  “No, there’s more,” Sage said. “But not many.”

  Sage and Blaine shared a look.

  I leaned forward, feeling awash with new anxiety. “Can you tell me what happened?”

  Sage’s eyes actually welled up with tears. She looked away, her expression hard, as if crying was a sign of weakness or something.

  Blaine started and what he said sent shivers down my spine. “We lost the war on terror.”

  I nodded wanting him to go on, but dreading what he’d say.

  “Just like with the towers and the Pentagon, they had a one, two, three plan. First DC, then New York, then Chicago. Each city obliterated by a single ‘small’ nuclear bomb. The initial attacks were by citizens of Arab countries, but they didn’t act alone. Russia and China attacked from the north with incendiary missiles hitting Seattle and Detroit, and from the west, hitting Los Angeles and Houston. Their collaborative goal was to incapacitate America’s democracy. It looks like they succeeded.”

  I assumed the cell towers were out. “How do you know all of this?”

  “The lab is equipped with a ham radio,” Blaine said. “We get the emergency broadcasts. A contingency government is trying to rule, but no one has even heard of the acting president, he’s so far down the chain of command.”

  Sage added solemnly, “The whole cabinet was wiped out in the DC attack.” She crossed her arms. “We weren’t prepared. We lived life like everyday would be the same as the previous one: went to class, studied, partied.”

  “It wasn’t like we didn’t have a clue. The news about the unrest on the other side of the world went on ad nauseam,” Blaine said. “We just didn’t think it was something we’d have to deal with now. Professor Garvin knew we were in trouble, though. He was the brains behind this makeshift bunker. He was the one who’d acquired the decontamination showers, the gas masks, dried food rations, guns.”

  “Is he here?” I asked. I was curious to see this Rambo version of Professor Garvin.

  Blaine’s eyes washed with sadness. “That’s the irony. He was in Chicago for his sister’s wedding when it happened.”

  “No one in Chicago survived,” Sage added, “and very few in Detroit. Not just from the fire bombs, but also from the fall out cloud from Chicago that blew over the city.

  “You and Teagan are from Chicago,” I said.

  Her eyes welled up again. “Her parents and mine are gone.”

  “Teagan’s okay, though?”

  Sage nodded. “She’ll arrive with the others.”

  “What about Ben?” I asked.

  Sage blinked. “How do you know about my brother?”

  “You have one in the realm I came from. I just met him yesterday.”

  Her jaw dropped. “He’s alive?”

  “Yeah,” I said, stretching the word out.

  She choked out a small laugh. “He died when I was ten. He had a peanut allergy and went into anaphylactic shock.”

  “I’m sorry. He’s a nice guy. And a good brother to you.”

  Sage couldn’t stop the tears this time. She wiped her face on her sleeve with a loud sniff. My heart went out to this softer version of Sage. I could see why she had to go all tough-guy just to survive emotionally.

  “So how did you guys survive the attack?” I asked.

  “Luck?” Sage said. “Providence?”

  “Henry and I were working late in the lab,” Blaine said. “Professor Garvin was our biggest fan and he gave us permission to work whenever we wanted.”

  Sage sighed. “Teagan and I were out with Jake and Nora. We’d been up all night partying and we were looking for coffee, but it was too early for the coffee shops to open. Then we saw Zabinski walking out of this lab with a coffee in his hand. We charged the door thinking we’d get one here.”

  My heart leaped at the mention of Zed’s name.

  “Zed’s alive?”

  Sage nodded and continued. “That’s when we felt the earth shake. At first we thought it was an earthquake, but Zabinski suspected it was something more. Detroit’s not exactly on a fault line. He rushed back into the lab and we followed him in.

  “By this time the cell towers along the East Coast were down, and Tucker had set up the ham radio. That’s when we heard about the three explosions that had taken place at dawn, each ten minutes apart.”

  “Then the bombs dropped on Detroit. It all happened so fast. Henry—” Her eyes caught mine. “Uh, our Henry, ushered us into the shower room where we huddled toget
her until the noise stopped.”

  “That was three weeks ago,” Blaine said. “Welcome to our nightmare.”

  Before I could ask any more questions, we were interrupted by the return of the others. Several gas masks were dropped on the stainless-steel table closest to the entrance, along with numerous other items—canned food, flashlights and batteries, black garbage bags filled with soft items. A couple gasoline containers sat by the door.

  Jake Wentworth, a redhead I assumed was the Nora chick Sage mentioned, Zed and Teagan, all stripped off the scrubs they’d been wearing over their clothes. Blaine walked around with a garbage bag as they tossed their discarded items in. Sage followed with the dosimeters. “Clear,” she said after scanning each one. Obvious relief settled on their faces once it was confirmed they didn’t need to get their skin scrubbed to a thin layer.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off Teagan. This was the girl with whom this whole adventure started: art4ever.

  Her blond hair was back in a long ponytail, mussed from removing the gas mask. She didn’t have a blue streak. Her face was drawn and tired, nothing like the happy profile picture I’d stared at for weeks.

  “Syphoned eight gallons of gasoline,” Jake said, breaking my reverie. “Should keep the generator going for a while.” He removed the winter coat he’d been wearing under the scrubs, revealing a tight long-sleeved T and fitted designer jeans.

  “Blankets and more clothing that should fit,” Nora said. “It’s creepy looting empty homes.” She flung red hair over her shoulder. “I keep thinking I’m going to stumble over a dead body or worse, a half-dead one.”

  “Zombies, baby,” Jake teased. “The zombie apocalypse is next.”

  She pointed a finger. “Don’t even joke!”

  Zed and Teagan stared at me. Jake and Nora finally noticed my presence and the room got quiet.

  “You cut your hair?” Teagan asked. She continued to scrutinize me. “Why are you dressed like that?”

  Zed stroked his beard. “He’s not Henry.”

  Teagan’s eyes flashed with confusion. “What?”

  “This is Marlow Henry,” Blaine started, “just not ours. He’s from another realm.”

  The wind sucked out of the room as everyone took a disbelieving breath.

  “Are you saying,” Zed began, “that your experiment worked?”