The Deadlock Trilogy Box Set

by P. T. Hylton

  The shed was quiet. It seemed so dark now after the blinding bright light was gone.

  “There now,” Zed said. “We’ve done it. We’ve killed one of them. That is our first step toward victory.”

  Five minutes later, they learned what a terrible mistake they’d made.

  4.

  Alice was walking behind Wilm when suddenly a man fell out of the sky and landed in the middle of the road.

  For once, Wilm looked as shocked as Alice felt.

  Wilm ran to the man and crouched down next to him. His skin was a strange green color, and his limbs were twisted at all sorts of unnatural angles. He had broken bones, a lot of them. Even Alice could tell that much.

  Wilm touched his face, brushing his neatly trimmed beard with her fingers. And suddenly Alice recognized the man. It was the man from the shed. The one who’d seen what she could do.

  Had he been the cause of all this? Had he somehow sent her here?

  “Rayd,” Wilm said. Her voice caught with emotion.

  Rayd looked up at her. His eyes were large, too large, and there was dreamy, far off look in them.

  “I had them send me here,” Rayd said. He spoke slowly, as if each word was an effort of concentration. “I thought you could use me. Sorry I didn’t do more.”

  “No,” Wilm said. “You did well.”

  “I just wish it wasn’t that boy with the watch who got me. He was always so smug.”

  Wilm leaned forward and kissed his forehead. “You’ll be revenged. He will pay. His whole world will pay.”

  Rayd nodded contentedly and closed his eyes. He let out a great wheezing breath and breathed no more.

  Wilm choked out a sob. “Forgive me,” she said to Alice. “It’s been a long time since one of my people have died. ”

  Her gaze was a little too intense. “Now you’ll see something,” she said. “Something none of your kind has ever seen before.”

  As Alice watched, Rayd began to melt. It happened quickly and smoothly. One moment, he was a corpse, and the next he was dissolving into a pool of metallic liquid.

  Alice drew in a sharp breath. “What’s happening to him?”

  Wilm watched the pool grow. “Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Didn’t they teach you that in school?”

  “I’m in third grade,” Alice said.

  Wilm grunted. “At any rate, it’s a fact of science. And my kind contains a hell of a lot of energy.”

  A thought occurred to Alice. “You keep saying our kind and your kind. Aren’t you a person?”

  Wilm shook her head, her eyes still fixed on the metallic pool. “Not remotely. We’re from somewhere very far away.”

  “Like…aliens?”

  Wilm looked at her sharply. “That’s a rather geocentric description, don’t you think? Come on, I’ll show you something cool.”

  The older woman walked to the pool and knelt down next to it. She put a finger to her lips for a moment, thinking. “We’ll need a compass. That much is certain.”

  She scooped up a handful of the metallic liquid and squeezed.

  Alice should have been grossed out—she knew she should have been. But she wasn’t. Not in the least. There was something about this liquid that drew her. Something that made her feel happy.

  Wilm opened her hand, and in it was a perfectly shaped compass. She turned it over for Alice to see. It had a strange symbol on it: a mountain with a crack running through it.

  “Rayd always did want to destroy the Earth,” Wilm said, a hint of sadness in her voice. “Now then, I’ll make something for you. What would you like?”

  Alice thought for a moment. She would like something made of that liquid. She’d like it a lot. But what?

  “A sword.” The words just popped out. For some reason, a sword felt right.

  Wilm smiled, clearly pleased. “Good. Very good.”

  This time she scooped up two handfuls of the stuff and shaped it. A moment later, she handed Alice a beautifully thin sword. It had the same broken mountain symbol on the hilt.

  Alice took it and held it proudly. She didn’t think she’d ever held anything half as cool, even her baby cousin Ben.

  “Thank you,” Alice said, her voice weak with gratitude.

  “You’re welcome,” Wilm said. “I can’t wait to see what you can do with it.” She suddenly snapped her fingers. “I have an idea.” She took another handful and shaped a pair of scissors.

  Alice was a bit disappointed, but she didn’t let it show. There was nothing very cool about scissors.

  “Now follow me,” Wilm said.

  She led Alice through the streets to the library. As they walked, they passed a few people, but they were all frozen like statues. Alice wanted to ask about it, but this didn’t seem like the time.

  Inside the library, Wilm pulled a large United States atlas off a shelf and set it on a table. She flipped pages until she found Wisconsin.

  “Can you show me where King’s Crossing is?” she asked Alice.

  The girl looked to the far left side of the page and found her home town.

  “Good,” Wilm said. “Take these and press the broken mountain.” She handed Alice the scissors.

  Alice pressed the broken mountain and felt it click, like a button on her PlayStation 4 controller. Suddenly it was as if the scissors were buzzing in her hand. It was the power Wilm had been talking about, Alice knew. She felt it.

  “Now,” Wilm said. “Cut out King’s Crossing.”

  Alice raised an eyebrow. “Out of a library book?”

  Wilm nodded. “Trust me. It’s okay.”

  It was hard to trust someone she’d just met but…it was as if the scissors wanted to cut. And Alice wanted to use them.

  She cut carefully, feeling the power in each clip as she squeezed the scissors closed again and again. In a moment, the piece of the map that represented King’s Crossing lay on the table, a sad little scrap.

  But it was more than that. Alice could sense something bigger had happened when she’d used the scissors.

  “What did I just do?” she asked in a quiet voice.

  Wilm smiled, “My dear, you just removed King’s Crossing from the Earth. Now what do you say we use these scissors to cut our way back into time?”

  THE BOY WHO FOUND THE WATCH (PART FIVE)

  Santa Cruz, California

  December 1956

  The car that came to pick up Zed was a faded yellow Chrysler. It pulled up to the curb, and the driver rolled down his window.

  The driver was a square-jawed man with a few days’ stubble. He chomped noisily on some chewing gum. His face was devoid of emotion. Just a man doing a job.

  “You Zed?”

  Zed indicated he was, then held his hand out to the man.

  The driver glanced down at it, then looked back up at Zed’s face. “I’ve been told not to talk to you, except for this here conversation.”

  Zed lowered his hand to his side.

  “You’re to sit in the back. There’s a cooler with some beers and sandwiches back there. Water, too. Make it last. We’ll be in the car about twenty-four hours.”

  “Where we going?” Zed asked.

  The driver ignored the question. “You have to use the restroom, you knock on the back of my seat. You don’t like what I’ve got playing on the radio, well, tough luck. I’ll pull over to catch forty winks in sixteen hours or so. We sleep in the car.”

  With his speech concluded, he rolled up the window.

  Over the past eight years, Zed had learned Wilm had a fairly large network of people working for her. He’d come into contact with many of them. He’d passed messages to some of them, and some of them had passed messages to him. But in his experience, none of the workers were keen on sharing any more information than they had to. If Zed had to guess, he’d have said they all knew as little about the organization as he did.

  The driver was just another one of Wilm’s worker bees. Now that Zed had been invited to visit her, he couldn’t he
lp feeling superior to this man. He wondered if this guy had a pocket watch, or something like it. He highly doubted it.

  Because the driver hadn’t popped the trunk, Zed carried his bag into the backseat with him. The windows were blacked out on the inside, and a divider separated the backseat from the front. The dark windows made Zed reconsider how much Wilm trusted him.

  Zed felt the car lurch forward as soon as he’d shut the door. Apparently the driver was in a hurry to get Zed to his destination.

  For the next twenty-four hours, they drove. Zed sat in the dim backseat, bored out of his mind. Even holding the watch didn’t help, and that was something that comforted him in nearly all situations. He wished there was a way to speed time up using the watch, but he hadn’t figured out a way. Whenever Zed knocked on the partition, the driver pulled off the road and Zed got out to answer the call of nature. It was always in a field, never in a gas station. Though the driver did stop at gas stations, Zed knew instinctively he wasn’t allowed to get out at those stops. He didn’t know what the punishment would be if he did, but he wasn’t eager to find out, not when he had finally won Wilm’s favor.

  As the time passed, the landscape changed. Near sundown, Zed saw mountains in the distance when he left the car to urinate. They were moving into the Rockies.

  Eventually, the driver pulled over and slept for six hours or so. Zed heard his gentle snores through the barrier. When he woke, he started driving again without a word to his passenger.

  Zed was sitting in the backseat, having let his mind go blank. He may have been dozing—the difference between awake and asleep was purely academic in that darkened car. He was startled to attention when the door opened and pale sunlight streamed into the darkness. The driver, once again chomping his gum, stood out there holding the door. That same bored, blank look on his face.

  This, Zed realized, was it. He had arrived.

  He grabbed his bag and stumbled out of the vehicle. His legs felt weak, though whether it was caused by the lengthy car ride or his nerves, he didn’t know.

  He blinked quickly, his eyes adjusting to the midday sunlight, and looked around. They were high in the mountains. Pine trees dotted the landscape of the peaks. The smell of pine was heavy in the air. The only signs of humanity were the dirt road he stood on and the modest house that stood twenty yards in front of him. The house looked like something you might find in the country in Kansas, the type of home where you’d find Ma and Pa and the three kids gathered around the breakfast table for some freshly scrambled eggs and some newly smoked bacon. The house was well-kept, but there wasn’t much more to say about it.

  Could this be Wilm’s house? He didn’t see any other possibility. Disappointment crept up within him; he’d expected something grander.

  He turned to thank the driver, but as he did he heard the door shut and saw the car roll down the dirt road. The man’s job was done and he was anxious to get on to whatever Wilm had planned for him next, apparently.

  Zed sighed and walked across the rocky soil toward the house.

  A man sat in a rocking chair on the porch, his right foot perched high on the railing. Zed hadn’t noticed him until now, which seemed impossible. The man had jet black hair slicked back and a neatly trimmed goatee.

  He didn’t move as Zed approached, but he watched him with suspicious eyes.

  When Zed reached the porch, the man said, “You’re the new boy, then?”

  Zed had long ago stopped thinking of himself as a boy, but he nodded. “I’m Zed.”

  “I know,” the man said.

  Zed felt his frustration growing. After three days in the car with the silent driver, he’d about had it with people who didn’t shake hands or offer their names. These people obviously hadn’t been raised in Kansas.

  “I hear she gave you the watch,” the man said.

  Zed knew he should be polite. Whoever this man was, he surely had higher standing in the organization than Zed. But he couldn’t help himself. “She didn’t give it to me. I took it.”

  The man took his foot off the railing and leaned forward, a smile playing across his face. “Is that what you think? And you don’t think any one of us could take it back at any time?”

  Zed realized he’d gone too far. “I didn’t say that.”

  “Go ahead. Stop me.” The man stood up and began walking toward Zed.

  Zed didn’t want to have an altercation with this man, but he certainly wasn’t going to let him take the watch. He reached into his pocket and pressed the broken clock symbol, freezing time. And the man kept coming.

  “See what I mean?” the man asked.

  Zed’s hand was shaking, whether from fear or anger he didn’t know. But he was not letting this man take the watch. He imagined the bubble that surrounded him, the thing that kept him moving while the rest of the universe was stopped, and he pulled it away from the man.

  The man kept coming, but he was moving more slowly now. Zed pulled harder, and it was like the man was moving in slow motion. A look of surprise came across the man’s face in comical slow motion.

  “Enough!” The voice came from the doorway. Wilm.

  Zed clicked the symbol on the watch, restarting time.

  She looked at the man. “Rayd, stop harassing the boy.”

  The man nodded. He glared at Zed.

  “And you,” Wilm said to Zed, “need to be more careful. You’ll get yourself killed before you walk through the door.”

  She waved him inside, and he carefully stepped around Rayd.

  The house looked for all the world like the interior of the dozens of farmhouses he’d seen as a kid. Even the knickknacks were spot on. He had the strange feeling this was all for his benefit.

  Wilm showed him to his bedroom, a modest room with a twin bed, a small dresser, and nothing else. She followed him into the room and sat on the bed.

  “Now,” she said, “we can talk.”

  He wasn’t sure how to respond, so he just nodded.

  “We like your work,” she said. “You have initiative, but you can also follow instructions. That’s a rare combination. And you’re skilled in using the watch. You figured it out on your own. So I’ve decided it’s time to tell you some things. But you have to agree to ask no questions. I’d rather you find the answers yourself than have me give them to you. This is just the baseline of what you need to know right now. Understand?”

  He understood well enough to simply nod rather than answering aloud.

  Wilm looked pleased. “Good. Would it shock you to learn your world is not what you think it is?”

  Zed thought for only a moment before shaking his head.

  “Of course it wouldn’t. You’ve been playing at the edge of the truth for eight years now. You’ve seen how frayed the borders of reality really are.” She leaned forward and put her hands on her knees. “You and your kind consider yourself the highest form of intelligence. You pride yourselves on your scientific discoveries the way a baby prides itself on being able to find its own feet. But your kind will never learn the truth of existence. You don’t have the tools to prod at reality, and you don’t have enough sense to know the right questions to ask.

  “But this world is a special place. Parts of it are, anyway. Think of the Earth as a mountain. It’s mostly rock and dirt, worthless rubble piled on top of more worthless rubble. It exists only to support itself.” She smiled now, and there was a glint in her eye. “But within this mountain, there are jewels! Special places. They can’t be used by your kind. But for us, these places contain something necessary for our very survival.”

  Zed desperately wanted to ask what she meant by us. If she and her people weren’t human, what were they? Who had he been working for the past eight years? But he couldn’t ask those questions. Not now. She wanted his silence.

  “These special places can, for lack of a better word, feed me and mine. But we have to wait until they’re ready. Perhaps a better analogy is that of a fruit rather than a jewel. We have to wait for it to
ripen.”

  Wilm paused a long moment before continuing. “But there’s a problem. The power we need is hidden away from us. It’s locked in books, and that makes these special places very difficult to find. That’s why we created the Tools. Your pocket watch is one of them, but there are others. We put a bit of our kind’s power into them so that very special people sympathetic to our cause could use them to help us. Sadly, most of those people haven’t worked out. You humans are not built to handle that kind of power, not for long. But we sense that you might be different.

  “You are a special young man. We had to find all the others. Not you. You found us when you stole the pocket watch. Charlie was our best prospect in a long time, but at age eleven you showed us what a real prospect looks like.” She reached out and took Zed’s hand in her own. “We can offer you so many things, Zed. All we ask in return is that you help us find these towns and prepare them for their destruction.”

  CHAPTER SIX: SEVEN YEARS IN KING’S CROSSING

  1.

  King’s Crossing

  May 2015

  The edge of town was gone, replaced with a thick murky fog, a fog that pushed back. Walking, driving, running into the fog all brought about the same result. After a few feet, something in the mist gently but firmly pressed you out of the fog and back into the town.

  Once the residents of King’s Crossing realized they were cut off from the outside world, word spread quickly. People knocked on doors making sure their neighbors and friends knew.

  Frank heard about it shortly after he and his friends left the shed.

  They’d stayed in the shed nearly an hour, talking and wondering about the implications of what had happened with Rayd. Zed had regained a bit of his old swagger, and he let them know he’d be moving on. He had other towns to go to, to use in his fight against his enemies. Frank had grown angry, asking about Zed’s promises, about his vows to save Jake and Logan and Heather. Zed had essentially said, “Tough luck,” and walked out.