Quantum Break

by Cam Rogers

The hallway would have been beautiful a year ago. Now dust gathered against the molded skirting boards, the two-tone floors strewn with discarded insulation and wiring. The hallway ended, open-mouthed, onto the library’s main room, bracketed by frosted glass panels. Light stands were arranged evenly around the cavernous space. Shelf-lined mezzanines overlooked the main room, lined with wrought-iron railings. The long oval of the information desk remained in place, but most everything else had been ripped out. Serried lines of chrome lugs patterned the checkered floor around the info desk: the footprints of vanished Internet cubicles.

  Jack tried to pick up Will’s trail, feeling for another vision, scanning the main hall.

  He was so preoccupied that he didn’t notice the two smiley-faced troopers guarding an archway in the north wall, until it was too late. He realized his mistake as soon as they clocked him.

  Jack didn’t think. He warped forward and grabbed the first trooper’s weapon, failing to notice that it was strapped to him. The mask smiled at him and then Jack was struck in the face for his trouble. He recovered in time to be staring down the barrel of the gun he’d tried to snatch.

  Jack warped, the trooper fired, and his partner keeled over dead—three ragged holes stitched through PEACE.

  The surviving trooper’s awareness disconnected for a moment as he took in what he had done. He snapped his rifle toward Jack as Jack cannoned into him at warp speed, blasting both of them into a pile of dilapidated wooden bookshelves stacked seven deep against the wall.

  The trooper didn’t move, smiling vacantly at his own lap. Jack pulled himself to his feet, stepping away from the slack-bodied trooper he’d just used as an airbag.

  The northern room, which the two troopers had been standing watch in, was circular and just off the main room. It used to house the stacks, judging from the signage and the ghostly rectangular footprints that fanned the space. Jack heard generators thumping from a small room off to the side, from which cabling snaked.

  “Jack?”

  It was dim in the stacks chamber, the light from the main hall lighting that gutted room like dusk: clear surfaces, deep shadows. Will was there, quiet and pressed against the wall, hands zip-tied at his waist and clearly terrified. Jack searched the trooper, took his combat knife, and popped the binders off Will.

  “Are you okay? Answer me later. You got a bunch of shit I want explained.”

  “Jack. Look.”

  Against the curved wall, near the body of the crumpled trooper, was a foot. Sneakered. Chuck Taylors.

  “They brought them in here,” Will said. “Some of the students from the camp.”

  The kid wearing the Chucks was propped slack against the wall, hair spilling from beneath his hoodie across the floor, his chest a bloody ruin.

  Jack exited, shielded his eyes against the glare of the lamps and moved past their perimeter. Forward was the wide, doorless exit. To the right was the corridor through which he had entered. To his left was a long hall once used for shelves and periodicals.

  Now it was a mortuary. Bodies lay strewn across the chessboard floor, not killed here but dumped. Not one of them would have been out of their twenties. Amy, the girl that accosted him in the quadrangle, would be here, Jack realized. Somewhere. He still had her flyers in his jacket pocket. RESPECT EXISTENCE OR EXPECT RESISTANCE. He couldn’t bear to look.

  “We gotta go,” Jack said, marching back to the light. “C’mon, Will, we gotta go.”

  Two men with the familiar round-faced PEACE silhouette flanked Will. One had a carbine pointed at Jack, the other had his weapon aimed at Will’s head.

  Jack cursed his stupidity. They had been in the generator room.

  He needed to be sure that if he made a play, here and now, that he could warp fast enough to kill the two men in less time than it took to pull a trigger. He didn’t know. His powers had been coming and going. But he had to do something.

  Then someone said, “Stop. Just … stop.”

  Jack squinted in the light. An avuncular hand rested on Will’s shoulder, briefly, before the third person stepped forward: unmarked urban fatigues, broad-shouldered, hair in a buzz-cut. Military type.

  This was wrong. This was terribly wrong. Jack was washed through with the nauseating chill of déjà vu.

  The figure stepped into the light.

  “Paul?”

  Jack’s lifelong friend emerged from the shadows, familiar features traced with unfamiliar new details: worry lines now creased Paul’s forehead, and his hair had stippled salt-and-pepper at the temples. His build was no longer that of a project coordinator; his was the economically muscled body of a career soldier.

  Paul Serene, the passionate idealist, had been replaced by an older man. Excitability did not vibrate beneath this lean individual’s skin, gone was the easy smile. This man’s form was his function, and his function was the imposition of a will that glittered sharply and certainly from behind clear eyes.

  This couldn’t be real.

  “I’m sorry,” Paul said, and vanished. A hard cannonball of pain impacted the small of Jack’s back, collapsing him to his knees. Will, thoughtless of his own safety, broke free and dashed forward to protect his brother.

  Space buckled around Will. Within that depression time inverted and snapped. A stutter popped into existence around him, immobilizing Jack’s brother in a posture of panic.

  Jack was numb, body and mind. Paul was alive. Here. Older. And …

  Paul looked down at him. “I’m sorry, Jack. Tonight’s events were not to my taste. But they were to my orders.” Cold words uttered in a warm voice from a young friend now very much Jack’s elder.

  Jack got to his feet. Paul turned, unconcerned, and strolled closer to Will.

  Jack couldn’t accept it. What had happened to transform the change-the-world idealist he had known into this?

  “It was meant to be a two-minute hop to the future,” Paul said. “What I got was a ride to the end of the world. The world I killed, when I activated the machine.”

  “The world doesn’t look that killed, Paul.”

  Paul faced Jack, tucking his hands into the pockets of his fatigues. The adolescent gesture took ten years off him for a moment.

  “When the end comes years of escalating horror will build to a moment of perfect, unimaginable insanity and then … that moment never ends. Ever. That’s what the end of time is. But I found a way out,” Paul said gently. “I knew I had to do something, Jack. That’s what kept me alive there.”

  He took an earnest step toward his friend.

  “I traveled back as far as I could. To 1999.”

  “You told me the machine can’t take a person back beyond the moment it was first activated.”

  “I just told you I found a way out. Now listen to me, and understand: I wanted as much time as possible to build something that would help us defy the end of the world—the end of time—by surviving it.” His face lit up at this, clearly expecting a stronger reaction from Jack.

  “Paul,” Jack said. “It’s good to see you. I was worried.” Then, pointedly: “Can we have this conversation without an assault rifle pointed at my brother’s head?”

  Paul chose to ignore the request. “I’ve done seventeen years of living since I saw you last, Jack, but I still remember what you were like.” Paul spoke with a warm smile, but taking no pleasure in what he said. “If you were a reasonable man, a level-headed man, my actions now would be very different.” Paul held out a gloved hand to one of the troopers. Obediently the soldier unclipped a Taser from his belt and placed it in Paul’s hand. “I can’t take risks, Jack. I’m sorry.”

  Rage.

  The world slammed forward, taking Jack with it as he shouldered into the trooper on the right. Fully armored, the yellow-faced killer flew across the length of the archives, met the wall hard, and dropped ten feet to the floor.

  The air pressure pulsed as Paul manifested before Jack. “Stop.”

  Jack’s boot came down hard for Paul’s knee. Paul s
idestepped it.

  “Let us go,” Jack hissed. “Whatever the fuck happened to you, let us go.”

  “I can’t. Will knows too much, and now you’re too dangerous.”

  Jack looped an arm for Paul’s head. It didn’t work.

  “Will’s too valuable, and you’re my friend.”

  “Let us go!”

  Paul dodged another punch with a flick of his head. “Jack.”

  “What’s Monarch to you? Why are all those kids out there … why are they … why did you…?”

  Paul drew a line under this exchange with a short intake of breath. “Now’s not the time. We can talk later.” Paul smiled, a familiar detail. He had smiled like that at bad jokes, little victories, and Team Outland.

  Déjà vu.

  Paul’s shoulder flinched, snapping his fist into Jack’s face. Jack’s senses had an argument. Nothing made sense. Then all was darkness.

  * * *

  Stone, cold and wet and flat against his face. Skull-ache, as if someone had taken a screwdriver to a bone suture and twisted. Blood in his mouth, like old dirt.

  Somewhere in a hidden corner of the room Will was pleading in frustration. “We can’t let this happen!”

  Black tile. White tile. He raised his face from the lobby floor and the unpleasantly adhesive spill his cheek was resting in. He spat blood and dust and lifted his ringing head.

  Jack was still in the library.

  Forty feet away Will was frantic, desperate for understanding and out of ideas. Paul stood over him with no intention of engaging.

  “I can stop this event! I have the data, I’ve done the research…!”

  “No risks. No—”

  Paul winced, abruptly and painfully, tight lips pulled back from white teeth. His face flushed red, every cord in his neck standing out, and then … the spasm passed. Faded. Paul breathed.

  Whatever had happened inside him had hit hard—his voice was a rasp. “No chances,” he said. “We both know what’s coming, Will. We both know too well that it can’t be changed, negotiated with, or avoided.” He took a deep drink of air, tightly muscled chest expanding beneath the uniform. “Now, Will, for the final time, as your friend: come with me, help us to survive what’s coming, or this has to end here.”

  Jack heaved himself upright. His inner ear was failing to distinguish up from down, left from right. Heavy headed, he watched the room slide sideways. He sensed Paul’s hand as a brotherly weight on his shoulder, before it pushed him to his knees.

  Will processed. “You’re threatening me?”

  “Would you risk the universe by leaving one problem unattended? I can’t have you running loose, Will. Come with me. We need your expertise.”

  “You’re wrong. This can be fixed. I can fix it.”

  “William. You babysat me when I was eight. Please, don’t make me—”

  “I can fix it!”

  Paul’s silence communicated everything.

  Jack shot to his feet, and this time Paul shoved him to the dirt without love or care. The exertion seemed to trigger something within him and Paul screamed, the space about his frame trembling for a second and then snapping fractal—a distortion field, glittering and crazed, sheathing him for half a moment. Then it was gone.

  Paul gasped like a man with a perforated lung.

  Jack had no clue what had just happened. The distortion was similar to the effect that had emanated from the time machine. The two had to be connected.

  Paul appeared suddenly very old to Jack, very frail.

  “I can’t bring myself to shoot you, Will.” Paul drew a reassuring breath, spine straightening. “It took me years to understand what has to be done.…” He was recovering quickly, far quicker than Jack was. “But we don’t have years for you to come to the same conclusion. We have moments.” Pressing a finger to his ear, Paul intoned, “Monarch Actual. This is your Consultant. Trigger.”

  And then to Will, “I never wanted this.”

  Something passed from Paul to Jack in single conscience-struck glance: an apology, and a futile hope for understanding.

  The first charge detonated, flooding the archives with flame. Standing helpless and alone, Will understood that his time on Earth was over. Paul seized Jack, accelerated impossibly, and warped them both through the open front doors.

  The last Jack Joyce saw of his brother was as the Riverport University Library folded into itself, corners and columns blown out by thunderclaps. Framed in the vacant doorway of a barren storehouse of knowledge, the inferno reached for William Joyce as the heavy, crashing curtain lowered on the story of his life.

  Gone.

  Paul skidded to a halt, using his body to shield Jack from the rolling cloud of dust and debris slammed out and across the yard.

  “Easy,” he said. “It’s over.” Jack snapped his arms up, broke Paul’s grip, and drove his fist square into Paul’s face. Staggered, Paul shook his head and refocused only to find himself staring down the black eye of his own dully chromed .45-caliber pistol. He was disarmed. This close to the barrel, the degree of vibration in Jack’s hand was pronounced. Paul looked away from the death dispenser to the face of the man who held it. The redness of his friend’s streaming eyes made them seem twice as blue.

  Jack snorted back a nose full of snot, but had no hope of keeping tears from flowing.

  “Why?”

  Paul’s expression darkened. “No.”

  That was not an answer Jack could accept. He shoved the pistol closer to Paul’s face. Closer again. He had to drag a hand across his flooding eyes. “What have you done?”

  Paul repeated the word over and again: “No. No. No.” And …

  Paul Serene’s body ignited, flashing bright, his form bursting into geometry at once impossible and humanoid, mirrored and reflective. Beneath it all, in glimpses, was Paul’s screaming face.

  The howl crashed and infiltrated and burst, colonizing the mind with doubt and fear. In that single moment, Jack felt both the impossible breadth and scope of Creation, and his own insignificance. Paul screamed a scream in a language beyond language, of an age older than God’s.

  And then he was Paul again, and his expression was as helpless and frightened as Will’s had been moments earlier. The night was silent. Paul sank to his knees and toppled senseless to the lawn.

  This was the tableau: by the light of his brother’s burning tomb, Jack Joyce stood over Paul Serene, gun in hand. Jack was now in the role of executioner, as Paul had been moments before. It was hard not to feel Will’s spirit watching over this, approving. The gun in Jack’s hand felt heavy and correct, five feet from Paul’s head.

  The world had gone mad.

  There came a tapping on Jack’s shoulder. He turned his head. A familiar face smiled at him, ducking sideways to get a better look at him.

  “Hey,” she said.

  This was it, Jack knew. This was the very last thing he could take. No more.

  Her smile grew more beautiful.

  “Zed?” he said.

  She had let her natural hair color grow back. Red. Her tattoos were gone. But it was Zed. She even smelled right.

  “Hey, Trouble,” she said. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  He hadn’t noticed her pressing something into his arm until she had done it.

  A hiss, a sting, and the night ended.

  7

  Saturday, 8 October 2016. 5:01 A.M. Riverport, Massachusetts. Two minutes after library demolition.

  From inside the Riverport University BearCat Gibson watched fire crews roll up and start arcing water and retardant into what was left of the library.

  “Donny, you there? Get the others. That second target is chronon-active. We’re going hunting.”

  “Uh, we can’t, boss. Hatch’s Priority One was to secure the lab. Chopper’s inbound to extract the core from this thing. We’ve already changed into uniform.”

  A new voice came on the line: “Chronon-1 this is Monarch Actual. Standing orders are for radio silenc
e. Clear the air.”

  “Chronon-1 to Monarch Actual, keep your shirt on. We’re encrypted.”

  “Clear the air, Gibson. I won’t say it again. Though, since you’re on the line¸ you’re wanted back at the Tower. Immediately. Monarch Actual, out.”

  Saturday, 8 October 2016. 5:23 A.M. Monarch Tower.

  Gibson took the elevator up to the top floor, back in his uniform, hands gripped behind his back to keep from punching the wall. That kid had escaped from him. That couldn’t stand. Four years’ hard training and fieldwork to get qualified with a chronon rig, top of his game, best in class, and some jack-off undergrad gets dosed right and … Gibson strategically withdrew.

  Ran is what he did. From the first chronon-active target he’d encountered in the field.

  Four years waiting for a chance to flex his material and who the fuck was that kid to look at him like that? Eye-fucking Gibson like Gibson wasn’t the meanest motherfucker in the whole Valley of Death.

  “We’ll get him, Donny,” he said to empty air, nodding. “Take him apart like a chicken dinner.”

  The elevator chimed and the doors hushed apart.

  Mr. Hatch’s place always blew his mind. Polished mahogany floors, and a view of the world that’d make anyone believe in God. Glass wall, glass ceiling. Helipad just outside. Someone waiting to fly Mr. Hatch wherever, whenever. Years of good decisions. Mr. Hatch knew the shit. Clear head. Crystal vision. Smarts. Knew how to direct the people under him. Best commander Gibson had ever had and the bastard had never been military.

  “Mr. Gibson.” Hatch smiled. “Thank you for seeing me so soon after the operation. Do you need to decompress?”

  “No, sir. I’m energized, sir. Present and clear.”

  “Excellent.” Hatch gestured to one of two Victorian leather club chairs positioned before his desk. “Sit.”

  Gibson did. Hatch didn’t. Hatch didn’t move from where he stood, behind his desk.

  Hatch didn’t say anything, just looked at Gibson, still smiling.

  Gibson cleared his throat.

  Nothing about Hatch changed.

  “Sir, I—”

  “We first met in 2003. One of Monarch Security’s first recruitment drives. Your dossier caught my eye, and I traveled to meet you personally in Baghdad.”