by Cam Rogers
* * *
A gunshot rang out across the front garden.
Disbelief. “You bastard.”
“Monarch Actual!”
Paul warped across the room, away from Jack’s gun. “Monarch Actual!” Then zipped from the kitchen and up the stairs.
Jack warped after him, overdid it, slammed into the back of the sofa, and flipped over it. Paul was shouting from the bedroom upstairs, which was when Jack realized he’d left the attic ladder down.
* * *
Gibson was over it. “You fucking missed?” This was bullshit. Up at sparrow-fart to lie in the dirt with some overequipped self-shitting paramilitary neckbeard only to have him completely fuck up the one thing he was here for.
There was a short zip and the shooter’s head snapped back. He slumped, lifeless, over his expensive rifle.
Gibson shouted, “Yes!,” tossed off his netting, grabbed his rifle, and threw himself down the slope toward the farm. Maybe the morning wasn’t a dead loss after all.
* * *
From outside: a second gunshot from the barn. Beth was still alive and armed, evidently.
Zipping and angling up the stairs Jack stopped short of the bedroom door, then swung in with weapon raised. No Paul. “Fuck.” He could feel his capacity for folding into the moment diminishing like a kind of soul-breathlessness. He moved into the hall, took a moment, and summoned enough energy to flash up the ladder, to the attic.
He found Paul in the middle of Will’s life, waiting. A slapping sting in Jack’s gun hand and, suddenly, the gun was in Paul’s. “Let’s talk about this.”
* * *
Back behind cover, Beth unzipped her jacket and checked the charge on her rescue rig: a lightweight belt-and-braces-style harness made of segmented plates attached to a power source distributed about her waist. A quick click revealed the chronon pack on the back of the belt was at full charge.
Slipping out of her jacket she took a mesh drawstring pouch from her leg pocket, unrolled it, and drew out a neatly tied roll of wires. Two sets. One end had a rudimentary series of plugs, the other a series of five cups: four for fingertips, one for the thumb.
Slipping the cups over her digits, Beth Velcro-strapped the thin cord to her forearm and bicep, and then slotted the five plugs into five jacks on her shoulder harness. She repeated for her other arm.
The rescue rig was good to go.
* * *
“You could have searched this place anytime you liked. Why now?”
“We did. There was nothing here at the time, but this”—Paul glanced about—“much of this is new.” He opened the nearest box, dug deep, pulling aside papers and folders. “Have you seen any diagrams or schematics of a device like a twelve-sided sphere? I need you to think: this is very important.”
Jack let himself rest against the desk. “Sure,” he said. “Yeah. In the corner over there.”
“Where?”
“Far corner. Near the stuffed elephant.”
Jack had loved that house. It wasn’t much without a family in it, though. “Y’know, Paul,” Jack said. “You dropped a building on my brother.” Reaching behind the flat-screen, he found the panic button: a palm-sized metal box with a plastic idiot shield covering a fat red detonator. He flipped it up.
Paul shifted sideways, peered deep into the stacks of magazines and papers.
Saw the gallon jug. Knew immediately what it was. Reacted accordingly.
“Seems fair that he return the favor.”
The detonator went click.
There were two hearts in that attic. Both stopped for an instant. From behind a stack of plastic storage tubs something popped, then hissed. Concealed wiring along the ceiling join blackened and fritzed. That was it.
Jack rolled back his head, exasperated. “For Christ’s sake, Will.”
Paul went for his sidearm, Jack reacted.…
Then the attic exploded.
* * *
Gibson vaulted the fence in time to see the attic window spit glass, unrolling a tongue of thick flame across the yard.
Then the stutter hit and the whole of the Lord’s Creation … stopped: sounds Randall Gibson hadn’t even noticed—the rasp of leaves in a morning breeze, the distant hush of traffic, the trill of a lonely bird trying to get laid—all drew out, alien and discordant, beneath a boom turned to a roar turned to a whine turned to nought but the tinnitus pinging in his ears.
That rolling column of glass-speckled flame hung absurdly, like a mistake, across a bright-blue sky.
The chronon gauge on his rescue rig read a full charge, all good. Designed by the Merlins at Monarch, the rig was a brace across his waist and shoulders that fit neatly beneath his jacket. It afforded him a discreet profile, better than the ’roidy NASA-looking crap the Strikers wore. Downside: the charge sucked.
If Paul Serene was still alive in there he’d be mobile; moving unassisted through a stutter was just one of the things that cold-eyed freak could do.
Nah, the Consultant would be fine. Best check on that little hardbody in the barn.
* * *
A God-clap vanished Jack’s past beneath an all-consuming tidal wave of flame. It lunged from all corners, the attic filled and gone in a roaring instant. From within his bubble of suspended time Jack watched as all that was left of his former life died in less time than it took to blink.
The flames hesitated, paused, backtracked, resumed.
Within a thermosphere of frozen time even the dust on the boards beneath his feet remained undisturbed, as was the section of wall caught in the bubble.
All else: Hades.
On the far side of an immobile wall of flame something shimmered through the suspended smoke and haze.
A man-sized dome of suspended time.
Within it, shaken and furious, Paul Serene stood up.
* * *
Gibson slipped into the barn, strolled to the ladder, and climbed on up. What a dump: cans, shelves, crap. All of it older than he was.
There she was: back pressed to the rusty shelf by the hayloft doors, rifle in hand, still as a statue.
“Hey there. You waitin’ for me?” He liked the way her T-shirt hugged her, beneath that canvas jacket that was spoiling the view. Her head was down, focused on the rifle, red hair tied back in a ponytail. He ducked his head, angling for a peek of her face beneath that cap.
He noted the ShotSpotter taped to her weapon. An unusual piece of equipment. That told Gibson she knew what she was getting into, but taped to a cheap old deer rifle? Couldn’t be civilian, the way she zeroed in on the Guardian squad shooter. So who was this warm little slice of pie?
Examining the rifle meant Gibson noticed her hands—specifically her fingers, which were capped with rubberized thimbles.
Like the ones he wore, attached to his rescue rig.
The hardbody glanced at him from beneath the rim of her cap.
She put her shoulder into a swing straight at the bridge of his nose, but Gibson was ready, shifting his weight and angling away. That put a big old smile on his face. She spun with the wasted momentum and he leaped on her for the split second her back was to him. He grabbed the rifle and yanked it like a crossbar for her throat.
She surprised him. She let go immediately and dropped. Weight displaced, Gibson lurched backward, rebounding off a rack of flimsy yet unmoving iron shelves.
Turned out she had a pistol. That figured. He—
Holy shit. It was Washout Wilder.
“Drop the rifle,” she said.
“You have got to be fucking kidding me.”
“Drop it!”
“You have fucked your life up masterfully, Wilder. I stand before you in awe.”
He tossed it away. Ten feet out the rifle lost whatever chronon charge it had picked up from either of them and froze, suspended in mid-air.
“Spare me. I know all about you, Gibson.”
“Want me to sign your tits?”
“I want you to deactivate your rig.”
She cut him off with a barely tolerant, “Don’t.” And a very slow shake of the head.
Gibson racked up a checklist of things to work through once he got that gun off her.
“Deactivate it,” she said.
“Why? You on a clock?”
“You have a kid.”
“So? You just shot Larry, his sister’s got diabetes.”
“Lorelei doesn’t have to grow up without her dad. Three.”
“Or what? You’ll murder me?”
“Killed Larry. Two.”
“Okay. Okay.” He took that moment to catalog her: height, weight, complexion, hair, eyes, build, accent, distinctive features. “You should have shot me.” Gibson slapped release plates on both hips, the power supply disconnected. Gibson froze.
She lowered her weapon, hands shaking.
Gibson was frozen, no longer a threat, rig deactivated. Even immobile, locked into that self-dividing moment, his expression told her this wasn’t over.
This was a mistake. Once the stutter broke Gibson would radio in and blow her cover. Or kill her. Or worse. If he could.
She should kill him. He wouldn’t be the first, or the last, but killing him meant killing the love and joy she had seen in Lorelei’s eyes. Beth knew it meant condemning that little girl to becoming someone too much like herself: wounded and robbed, full of questions that would never be answered.
* * *
“You shouldn’t have done that,” Paul said.
The stutter rolled forward, slowly, excruciatingly, seething.
“It was worth a shot.”
Paul looked at the stolen gun in his hand, like he had never seen it before. Then he checked the mag. “We recover quite quickly, don’t we? From injuries. Our relationship to the chronon field constitutes a kind of secondary immune system—one that keeps us alive, protected not from infection but misadventure. But it still allows us to feel the pain of our mistakes; permits them to scar us. I myself have many scars.” The bullet impacted against Jack’s stutter shield before he registered that Paul had raised the gun. “Some injuries our privilege cannot save us from.” The bullet hovered, impatient, two feet away from Jack’s head. “Do not confuse your new state of being with being invulnerable, Jack. You are anything but.”
Jack’s shield quivered and expired. He jagged left, the bullet snapping past his ear to spark off the time-locked wall behind him.
Oxygen vanished, shockingly—chewed up to feed the slow-motion flames. Mouth working uselessly, Jack felt his chest tighten—fast and painfully.
The stutter lost its grip, heat kicked off, Jack’s chest burned from the inside, and then, downstairs, the secondary charges blew.
Jack’s ankles bit as the floorboard punched upward. He was airborne—and then causality quit. The stutter kicked back in, guillotining the roar to silence. He and Paul crashed back to earth on floorboards halted in the moment of splintering and heaving upward, gouts of flame spitting up through gaps in wood right across the attic. Jack’s hand came down through one such gap, hand and forearm disappearing into flame. With a yelp he snatched it back, just before the stutter rewound and the splintered jaws of the floor snapped shut, resealing. He toppled, and then the boards reerupted a second time, knocking him sideways. With a yell he rolled with it, batting the side of his face as his hair briefly caught fire.
Time lost track of itself again, slowed abruptly … then froze.
Paul didn’t hesitate: he warped across the room and out of the attic—down into whatever was left of the second floor.
Gulping uselessly, vision dimming, Jack folded into a moment—floor and attic and flames slipping past him in an instant. His hip connected with the desk, spinning him past the flaming ruin of the trapdoor and almost flipping him through the blown-out window. He spied movement at the gate to the property, out by the road.
Impossibly, Monarch troops were moving through the stutter, onto the property, where they divided into two large groups: one continuing down the drive, the second breaking off to loop around the rear side of the barn. No sign of Beth anywhere.
The floor and walls pounded, expanding and retracting, rupturing and resealing. His home had become a superheated heart in the grip of complete arrhythmia.
* * *
Paul flashed to the trapdoor and leaped down, transferring his weight and movement into a roll that was intended to propel him down the hall and toward the staircase. He hit the boards hard, ducked, tucked his shoulder, and came up running just as the door to Jack’s bedroom blew off its hinges on a superheated cloud. With a yell he transferred the run into a slide, getting under the twirling blade of the door, but too late to avoid singed skin and hair—just before the explosion had second thoughts and took it all back.
Pause.
Paul scrambled to his feet, batting at his clothes—nothing was burning. Whether it was luck or nostalgia, either way Paul spent a second glancing into a room he hadn’t visited since he was a child. Through the open door, on a desk, waiting for him, was the answer to an obsession.
A small wire-framed replica of a twelve-sided geodesic. This was a shape, a design, that had resided inside Paul’s brain for the last six years. This was the shape of the thing he had tasked the greatest scientific brains with unraveling, understanding, replicating, implementing.
This was the shape of the thing that rested at the heart of Monarch Tower. The thing upon which all of their discoveries had been based, yet was so poorly understood. A masterpiece of arcane design, created by the genius Paul had to kill.
“The Regulator.”
A 3-D model, perched atop a stack of yellowing documentation.
He lunged forward, channeling his chronon flow to influence the door, allowing him to release it from the stutter, shoving it open. Paul flung his hands forward to protect the model, clutching.…
Play.
The bomb in the wall behind the desk redetonated, catching Paul in the face just before the shield erected, the shock wave slamming him into—and through—the frail door. Yellowed papers flew like burning birds as he crashed into the opposite wall, face in agony, his clothes aflame.
Shrieking and screaming, he flipped over and rolled to suffocate the flames, narrowly avoiding being killed as the safe in the attic above fell through the weakened ceiling and cannoned through the floor two feet from his thrashing head.
And pause.
Time struggled against that constraint, tumbling forward slowly as hesitant causality continued to tear the place apart—with agonizing fussiness: erupting boards, wallpaper blackening and curling and flaming. Framed photographs tumbled as the cords that held them incinerated, the glass snapping and crazing with thermal shock as the images they contained turned dark and died.
Scrambling upright he wheeled toward the bedroom—the smashed door suspended in mid-air, the interior an inferno. Everything in the room was lost.
The Regulator model was destroyed, but Paul held something that gave him hope.
Scorched and torn papers were bunched into his balled fist: remnants of Will’s design for the Regulator, charred and half-destroyed, but it was something.
The stutter would collapse any moment. Half-blind and agonized, Paul Serene propelled down the stairs, through the kitchen, and out the back door.
* * *
In the attic, Jack spun away from the window as the far side of the roof collapsed in a thick rain of burning beams, shingles, and insulation. Ceiling had parted from wall, kindling shrapnel spraying wide across the property. A blown-back flap of roofing allowed the sky to peer through the ceiling’s rib cage.
Directly ahead of him the floor bottomed out completely as the weight of the safe killed the boards, sending it plummeting down to the hallway below, punching through the floor and shattering a downward runnel through kitchen cabinets.
A searing plume of flame jetted upward through the trapdoor—then froze. Somewhere below Paul screamed in pain. The conf
lagration paused and juddered, partially rewound, then leaped forward, repeat, as though undecided about what should happen next.
The scene abruptly leaped into a rapidly escalating shudder. Things could burst back into real time at any moment.
Against his better judgment, Jack let his feet propel him toward the massive hole in the floor. The lips of the wound vibrated steadily upward, closing, before trembling downward again. The cycle accelerated, up and down, flame and sparks and debris jetting in and out, jabbing at eyes and skin.
Forearm across his face, the floor trembling and snapping, Jack slipped—skidded—and tumbled through with a yell.
Pause.
He tumbled through a cloud of time-locked debris. Shreds of unmoving ash, wallpaper, shrapnel slashed at his hands and clothes as he plummeted downward, hit the second-floor hallway and tumbled backward through the wound in the floor which the falling safe had left behind. Shoulder blades clipped shattered kitchen cabinets as he tumbled feet first to the debris-laden kitchen floor—where the safe lay facedown in the wreckage.
The kitchen ceiling was a crumbling mess, wreathed in rolls of static fire. Curtains, blackened and blazing, framed a snapshot of the front garden on an otherwise perfect autumn morning.
Groaning he rolled to his hands and knees, scanning for any way out. The back door out of the kitchen had collapsed. In the opposite direction flaming debris was filling the living area as it rained from the conflagration in the attic. Vacillating between falling and rising, curling one way or another, it was a raising and lowering curtain of death. He ran for it. Palming away skipping sparks and cinders, diving under a crossbeam that rose and fell like an axe blade, Jack sped through the living area, shielding his face. Leaping across the flaming dining-room table he tripped on the back of a time-locked chair, hit the ground, rolled with it, and—shoulder aching from impact—belted through the screen door on the far side of the house and into the greenhouse.
Dull heat gave way to muted cold. Jack skidded to a stop, hip banging hard into a rusted planter rack. Aching all over, he took a second to assess the next course of action. Once this place had been full of life. His mother had made of it a verdant womb, a place that had once brought her happiness. Jack had loved it in winter, when the world was ankle-deep in frost and this sweating glasshouse had been close and warm and alive. Orchids had been her passion.