by Cam Rogers
“Sofia,” Jack said. “Where do they keep the Countermeasure?”
She fixed her eyes on him, anger sweeping away infirmity. “Floor 49. There’s a security door in Paul’s office. I’ll draw you a map.”
* * *
The Riverport swimming hall sheltered beneath the overpass. Rain slashed crazy, blasting down out of a night sky that couldn’t make up its mind. The world outside was a chopped-up madness of lenses: myriad stutters popping up, lingering and vanishing at points across the city.
The elevated line above began to sing. A train was incoming, not far away now.
Monarch Tower was his destination, that train his ride.
Nick had gotten him a backpack from the cab. Riverport Raptors. Jack slung it, tightened it.
The stairs to the elevated platform were a block away. Jack warped.
The platform was dark, every lighting tube blown out. Jack was the only living thing stupid enough to be there. The freezing, wind-lashed platform offered a 180-degree panorama of a world tearing itself to pieces.
The bridge across the Mystic River was a smashed wreck, having risen too slowly to avoid a cargo ship stuttering right through it. The boat itself was a smoking, flaming ruin, sitting idle in a river thrashing upon itself as multiple stutters threw its motions out of synch with itself. Alien-colored lightning leaped from earth to sky, clouds roiling like an off-black special effect. Entire sections of the city had blacked out. The soundtrack to all of this was alarms, sirens, horns. The platform’s loudspeaker system was still running, piping Riverport Radio, the nighttime DJ rattling off disaster updates and urging people to stay in their homes.
That’s not going to help anyone, Jack thought. Nowhere is safe once the rules go out the window.
The only solution now was Will’s: Jack had to find the Countermeasure and, somehow, use it to fix all of this. To make things right.
The train was barreling its way toward the platform. Maybe it was automated, or maybe the driver couldn’t see the blacked-out platform, or maybe they were just flooring it in the hope of getting clear and getting out. Whatever the reason, the train wasn’t slowing.
He ran down the platform, climbed to the top of the rigid iron safety fence that protected commuters from a straight drop to the overpass below, grabbed the gutter of the shelter, and bounced himself onto the pebbled roof.
Jack took three steps back from the edge, angled himself to match the train’s approach as best he could, waited.…
The train was three blocks away.
Waited …
Two blocks, moving fast.
Waited …
One block.
And warped.
In less than a second he sprinted forward, covered the gap between the roof of the platform and the top of the train, and kept running forward, covering enough space within that folded second to match the train’s speed. As quickly as he could he decelerated, before that second expanded, got low, dug in, and held on tight to the lip of the carriage he was atop.
The second unfolded and tossed Jack face-first into a hurricane, his fingers almost snapping off at the joints as the train’s speed outmatched his by orders of magnitude.
He had to get the fuck off that train car.
He pulled himself forward, slid down into the gap between cars, and shouldered through the door, gasping.
His arrival was met with wide eyes and a few alarmed screams.
Passengers. Of course there were passengers. A handful in this car, and he could see others in the car down the line.
He felt that now-familiar pulse in his blood that said a stutter was coming.
This was the third-to-last car. Glancing behind him it looked like the others had been blacked out for the night. No other passengers. Small mercies.
An old man sat with a young woman. His eyes were fixed with sad concern on the world outside, while his pale paw of a hand patted hers.
A young guy in a suit was stabbing furiously at his phone while a middle-aged woman glanced at him with contempt.
A broad-shouldered father in a flannel overshirt held his small son tightly to his chest, glancing frantically from one window to another.
Another pulse kicked through Jack, harder this time. Stutter incoming harder and faster than any he had felt before.
Jack held on to a chrome support as the train’s frame jostled and kicked. “What’s the deal with the driver? Where’s this train headed?”
The woman with the old man said, “Whoever’s driving isn’t answering the emergency intercom.”
“Worcester,” shouted the man with the child. “All stops Riverport, then express to Worcester. You from the company?”
“No,” Jack said. “No. I’m not from the company.” He let go of the support, leaned across a seat, and opened the window. Sticking his head out into the wind and rain he saw Monarch Tower slide around the bend, just a few miles away. He’d planned on getting off at the nearest platform, but if the train wasn’t stopping then the train wasn’t stopping.
The elevated line curved away to the east, shooting above what should have been busy nighttime streets. Jack saw very few people out there, a lot of trashed vehicles, and windows lit from deep within by flame. He could see the domed distortions of stutters dotting the landscape like pimples. As one popped another emerged. Conflict emerged wherever these new borders sprang up.
One mile from Monarch Tower the elevated line curved to the east. A big rig was making good time, horn blasting, looking to get out of town as fast as possible. Its trajectory would take it directly beneath the elevated line. As it got close a stutter snapped down, trapping the front of the cab, bringing it to a halt in a microsecond. The articulated trailer attached to it did not.
The trailer rear-ended the back of the cab, flipped forward like a giant blade, and became trapped in the stutter. When it broke the entire vehicle would smash into the elevated line … and that stutter didn’t look like it’d be around for long, flickering as it was.
Jack pulled in his head and shouted: “Last car! Everyone into the last car!”
Nobody moved. Half a mile.
Jack pulled his pistol, fired a shot into the ceiling. People screamed and ran. Jack moved forward, fast. “Move! Everyone! Last car!”
The crowd surged into the back, the old man struggling to get out of his seat.
“I’m sorry about this,” Jack said. “But we have to move.”
The woman didn’t question. Together they got the old man upright, looping one arm each around his shoulders, moving as fast as they could.
The few people in the second car were with the program, and almost nobody was in the third.
“Bunch up tight against the back wall! Tight as you can!” The old guy was doing okay. “Can you get him down there?”
The woman nodded. Jack removed the man’s arm from around his shoulder to catch a glimpse out the window.
The stutter holding the truck in place broke, the trailer descending on the elevated line like a knife. Whatever it contained was big, heavy, and there was a lot of it. The rig went up in a fireball.
Jack whipped his head away, turned, and warped toward the terrified huddle of twenty-odd people at the back of the last car. Squeezing in close and tight he said, “I’m real sorry about this,” and threw down a stutter shield.
The stutter shield anchored their tiny island of car and track in a bubble of frozen time, locked the rear of the car they were squeezed into solidly in place. The rest of the train was not so constrained.
They watched as the rest of the car deformed at seventy miles per hour, metal screaming, glass shattering, lights sparking and going dark as electrics were severed. The engine and every other car pulled away from that one violently, the line of cars straining and snapping their connections, fishtailing wildly. Then half their car tore off completely. Jack watched as the passenger train whip around horizontally, bolo-like, once. The engine seemed to remain stationary in space as the car-tail whipped around it
, and then the centrifugal forces swung the engine around to smash like a mace through the front face of Monarch Tower.
The engine cleaved through the bottom two floors of the building, tearing open the black mirror to reveal the honeycomb of its innards. The tail followed up, slashing through and around the building like a whip.
“Last stop, I guess.”
Jack’s stutter had anchored the final car, the momentum now dispelled. He put his gun away.
Monday, 10 October 2016. 12:28 A.M. Twenty-eight minutes after Jack’s return.
Jack had walked the passengers down the elevated line to the platform across from Monarch Tower. He left them there, with advice to stay put, as it seemed to be one of the few places that wasn’t being pummeled by violently vacillating causality.
The thick, black cloud cover roiled and unroiled and reroiled. Violet lightning froze, rewound, reflashed. The passengers watched as the train whipped back up from the wound in the Tower, reassembled mid-flight and seamlessly reattached to the car from which they had just escaped. Then it let go once more, tearing itself apart and brutally lacerating the Tower’s face. Freezing. Back-stepping. Letting go. Superstructure sloughing down the Tower’s chest, drooling shattered black glass. Sometimes the Tower front shattered without the train impacting at all. Sometimes the truck rewound and was delayed, yet the train flew free anyway.
It was more than just the world that was falling apart: it was the rules that bound the world together, the principles that gave meaning to the flow of time. Causality was becoming porous and weak, falling apart like a wet cake.
Jack took the stairs down from the platform at a run, reached the street, timed his crossing, and warped toward Monarch Tower before the truck could tumble past again. The train completed its arc, smashing through the building, and destroying the security doors and most of the facade.
The woman and her grandfather stood on the lip of the platform and waved to him. Jack almost waved back, when they stepped back from the edge, paused, stepped forward again, waved. Paused. Stepped back.
Science was even less his thing than Beth’s, but Jack guessed that if he were standing next to them his subjective causality as it pertained to them would be fine, but at a distance his causality disagreed with theirs. In short, stutters were no longer separate and distinct things. The breakdown was becoming far more granular, finicky. Dangerous.
If it kept degrading at this rate, the universe’s chronon levels would flatline and there’d be no coming back. He had to stop that from happening.
He ran for the shattered entrance.
The engine had separated from the line of cars, frozen in the act of wrapping themselves through floors three to five. The engine had paused halfway through the act of smashing through Monarch’s lobby, the vast, open space that it used to showcase the successes of its various subsidiaries. The lobby was a museum to corporate achievement, a glossy space illuminated tastefully to better draw the eye to the contents of cases and displays.
Or rather it had been tasteful before a ninety-five-ton passenger locomotive had scythed diagonally through it all. The air was filled with concrete dust, glass shards, and flying shrapnel.
Jack ducked under the frozen train and out the other side, pulling his handgun.
The way out of the lobby and into Monarch’s atrium had been shuttered by two-inch-thick steel security doors: bomb-proof.
Jack looked at the train. Looked at the doors. Looked at the train. Against his better judgment, he reached out and laid his palm flat against the overturned side of the vehicle.
He remembered how it had worked, under the Quantum Physics dome, reanimating Will. He had done it again, pulling Sofia into their hijacked chopper fifty floors above Riverport.
He imagined everything in black and white, while from his hands flowed Technicolor.
With alarming suddenness Jack felt his blood surge, his hand tingled sharply, and the locomotive trembled.
The security doors hissed apart, heavily. Two Monarch goons, strapped into the white half shells of prototype power armor, stood framed in the doorway. Auto-cannons slung under their arms sat ready; targeting lasers probed from shoulder-mounted micromissile pods.
They spotted Jack.
Jack held up his free hand, smiled, and gave a little wave.
The train launched right into them.
* * *
Jack climbed over the wreckage of the locomotive, shaky from the exertion of freeing the train from the stutter. He climbed through the shattered wall, avoiding fritzing electrics and past the tangled, half-buried remains of a security scanner that beeped forlornly in the haze. The train had tumble-chewed through the security station and clear into the atrium—the space that had, just a short while ago, played host to Monarch’s night of nights.
Nobody had bothered to clean up. Raised stages, lighting rigs, bunting, videoboards, smashed glassware, programs sat there covered in concrete dust. Jack climbed out of the trench plowed by the train.
Overhead the atrium’s clear ceiling let in all the mad light of a universe sundered by torsion. Dust, papers, and debris fell from forty different mezzanines, none of the wreckage conforming to gravity with any sense of unison or regularity. The acoustics carried the sporadic bark of gunfire, the occasional lonely shout or scream from the street. He saw the sporadic otherworldly flicker of Shifters prowling and vanishing along the mezzanines.
Floor thirty-four vomited a gout of flame, a Monarch trooper falling, screaming, to the atrium floor—stopping before impact—rewinding, pausing, falling, and screaming again. The man’s high-pitched scream slurred into a drawn-out howl as he pinwheeled upward toward a tongue of boiling flame that was quickly retracting into one of the upper levels. He merged with the flame in time to be drawn out of sight by it, the concrete balustrade over which he had flown piecing neatly back together behind it.
The elevator bays were transparent geometric tubes, all shattered, behind the circular reception area. Two contained the wrecks of elevators. The third was rendered opaque by smoke and burning debris.
Jack wasn’t alone there: he shared the ruined space with kinetic statuary that had once been living people. Moving, jigging, and back-stepping all about him were dead people continually reenacting their final moments of life—all of them violent, all of them screaming as hideously as the man forever tumbling from the thirty-fourth mezzanine.
Jack felt weak, detached. Unleashing the train had taken it out of him. He was going to need a few minutes to regenerate his charge. It seemed to be taking longer, now that the world’s chronon levels were a thin, spasmodic mess.
He made for the reception desk, hoping to find a stairwell door, moving and turning to avoid flailing arms, airborne droplets of blood, flying glass, flying bullets. It wasn’t just Monarch troopers meeting their end there, but the workers needed to keep a place functioning. People who’d turned up to earn a paycheck.
The elevators weren’t an option—they weren’t rewinding far enough back to be usable.
Howls. A whole fucked-up choir. Shifters, up there, prowling the mezzanines. Jack figured he had no choice but to take the stairwell, but he didn’t like his chances if he was caught in a narrow space with one of those things.
He moved to the reception desk, hoping to find a floor plan.
One of the creatures was waiting on the other side of it, maybe fifty feet away, writhing, flashing. It yowled softly, curiously. Its contorted body language, the cant of its flickering, flashing head, was that of something wanting something it was not allowed to have.
Another stood to the left, by the wrecked train.
Three more were off to the far right, hovering in the shadows. They saw him. Screamed. Flashed forward, close. Flashed again, closer.
Two more blinked in, flanking the Shifter fifty feet from Jack. Roared.
A third blinked in behind them, spread its arms, and the three Shifters flashed aside.
He recognized this one. It threw its head to the sky a
nd loosed the sound of a hundred horses with slashed throats. Shining Palm.
“Hey,” Jack said, very carefully. “You brought me here.”
Every single Shifter lost its shit completely. The three to the right charged, flashing in and around the frozen, jigging corpses, on a killing path straight for him.
Shining Palm wheeled on them, shrieked. The three braked, rounded on him, and screamed right back.
Jack took his chance and ran.
He sprinted right, then warped past the reception area, giving the three clustered Shifters a wide berth. The exertion took it out of him, dropping him almost back to zero.
The three reacted, spun. Shining Palm leaped, slamming into their cluster, sending them scattering.
Jack pivoted, facing them.
Shining Palm retargeted.
“Hey now,” Jack said, reasonably. “Back off.”
It charged.
Jack leaped boots-first onto the bent knee of an inanimate Monarch trooper who was arched backward in death—
“Ugh.”
—and jumped up, clawing for the falling trooper as he hurtled at half speed for the atrium floor.
“Time to be lucky,” he gasped. “Please be lucky.”
Jack’s fingers scrabbled against cloth that was utterly immovable, managed to loop one arm around the man’s midsection, the back of his flailing legs punching Jack in the face.
Froze. Jack almost came loose with the jarring stop.
Shining Palm swept both killing paws upward, as the trooper rewound.
At speed.
For Jack the next ten seconds were a lot like falling off a cliff while being punched in the face. When the flailing trooper hit his parabola, Jack’s grip slipped. He continued upward, briefly, while the trooper redocked with his past. Jack missed the thirty-fourth floor entirely while sailing toward a slow-approaching thirty-fifth.
He grabbed for the glass-and-steel balustrade as if it were all he had ever wanted. Got his forearms across, fell, bashing chest against the flat of it and his chin against the rail.
Stars. Flailing. Didn’t let go. Felt nothing beneath his feet. A terrible and total nothing.