End Day

by James Axler

  “No, I just pick up odd, interesting tidbits in my job,” she said.

  A very steep stairway led up, so steep there were support rails along both walls. When they shut and dogged the hatch door, it muffled the racket from the station. They ascended in silence, except for the sounds of their breathing.

  Ryan could feel the strain in his thighs as he put one boot in front of another. They had done a lot of full-out running and fighting in a very short time span. Not to mention the aftereffects of the chron jump. J.B.’s comment about their sacrifice being all for nothing tried to go around and around in his head, but he shut it off.

  The game wasn’t over yet, not by a long shot.

  Not while they still drew breath.

  At the top of the stairs, they found a long, darkened hallway with broad puddles of standing water on the floor. Steam pipes and conduit hung low above them; what looked like banks of generators and transformers, and their controlling circuit panels, stood behind locked cages of heavy wire. When Vee opened the exit door to an alley, the grinding din was back—wag horns, the steady growl of engines, sirens, now mixed with unintelligible bullhorn commands. They moved quickly between high, windowless brick walls, around a hard right corner to the mouth. The street leading to the subway entrance was now blocked off with police and emergency vehicles and flashing lights. Helicopters zigzagged across the sky overhead. No one had time to marvel at what was going on outside.

  “Our position appears untenable,” Doc observed.

  “Then we go back to her place,” Ricky said, nodding in Vee’s direction. “We get in the machine and go back home to Deathlands.”

  “That isn’t possible,” Vee told him. “What you see happening on this street is what’s happening on my block. That’s the response when people get killed and cars get blown up. The whole area will have been cordoned off by armed police with helicopter overflights. No way in or out.”

  “We shouldn’t have chased Magus onto the street,” J.B. opined. “We should have just followed at a distance until we had a chance to chill him, with no witnesses. Now we’re as dead as everyone else in this city. That apartment is our only way out.”

  “Even if we could get back into her building, J.B.,” Ryan said, “even if we figured out the mat-trans’s controls and somehow made it to Deathlands, I think we’d arrive at the same redoubt with enforcers clawing at the door.”

  “So,” Krysty said, “if the city sec men don’t kill us, the enforcers at the other end of the chron jump will. And if we survive here until the twentieth, the nuke strikes will take us out anyway.”

  “That doesn’t leave many options,” Mildred stated.

  “Except to have one hell of a send-off,” Krysty said.

  “The mistake was all mine,” Ryan told them. “I brought this down on us. We should have waited outside the redoubt for Magus to come back. From the moment we set foot inside that place, we were fucked.”

  “Stuck between a rock and another rock,” Doc said soberly.

  They had been caught in countless tight spots in the past—or more correctly in the future—but they had always been able to figure a way out. This time perhaps not. A question occurred to Ryan: Could a person really die a hundred years before he was born? He kept it to himself.

  “We still have some time left,” Vee said. “Can’t we change the future somehow? Avert this nuclear attack? What do you know about it?”

  She sounded remarkably calm for someone who’d recently learned the world was going to blow up in a matter of hours, Doc thought.

  “Precious little that would help that cause, my dear,” Doc said. “An all-out missile exchange between the United States and the Russians on January 20, 2001, created a global, nuclear holocaust that ended much of civilization. That conflagration and its aftermath necessarily complicates the unraveling of the whos, the wheres and the whens. Which one, if either, started it is unknown. It could have been initiated by a third party or a computer glitch—or misinterpreted data. Miscommunication, even. Because we don’t know the precise chain of circumstances that triggered Armageddon, altering the course of those events becomes difficult if not impossible.”

  “If you’re thinking of warning someone about nukeday,” Krysty said, “who would listen?”

  “You’re right,” Vee agreed. “No one is going to listen.”

  “You believe us?” Ricky asked.

  “After what I’ve seen with my own eyes today, I’d believe anything you told me.”

  “What’s happened to us is triple bad luck, and there’s no way around it,” Ryan told the others. “But it doesn’t change why we’re here. Or what we can do in the time we have left. One way or another we can still make sure Magus never leaves this place.”

  “Chill half-metal bastard,” Jak spit.

  “We need to get off the street and figure out how,” Ryan said.

  “We can go to my office,” Vee told. “It will be closed for the night by the time we get there. I have the keys. No one will bother us. We can cut through the alleys and stay out of sight.”

  As they trooped single file down the sidewalk, away from the subway station and the police barricades, a man in a peacoat stepped from a doorway and, smiling broadly, accosted Ryan. “Snake Plissken!” he exclaimed. “I thought you were dead!” Then he laughed like a mutie hyena.

  Ryan kept walking. It wasn’t the first time he had heard that line.

  To his back the man shouted, “Hey, Snake, Escape from L.A. blew chunks!”

  Chapter Five

  Angelo McCreedy lowered his copy of the Daily Racing Form as people poured up the steps from the Thirty-Fourth Street–Herald Square Metro station. In his classic black chauffeur cap, black three-piece suit and tie and black leather gloves, he leaned against the stretch limo’s front fender. If his pickup didn’t show soon, he was going to have to move the limo from the taxi stand and start circling the block—the cabbies lined up behind him were starting to get restless. Exiting subway travelers seemed in an extra big hurry this afternoon, maybe because of all the sirens going off. A major accident was the cherry on top. It could louse up traffic for the rest of the day.

  As he folded his Form and tucked it under his arm, a mass of shiny purple appeared at the top of the subway stairs.

  Man, those are some big dudes, he thought.

  They looked almost identical, like octuplets. They were in matching outfits and had the same height and build. The tight hoodies kept their faces in shadow. They all sported what from a distance looked like very expensive alligator boots. All except the littlest one, who was being carried like a child.

  Some kind of cripple, he thought. Poor thing had metal feet.

  McCreedy’s heart did a skip-tee-doo when the purple bunch turned and came right at him. His face flushed with fight-or-flight hormones. He wanted to retreat around the front of the vehicle but couldn’t make his legs move quickly enough. He didn’t notice the assault rifles they carried until the two-horned, front sight of one was jammed up under his chin.

  The eyes shadowed by the hoodie top were yellow. Not yellow brown or yellow green. Yellow yellow, as in a daisy. And the pupils were elliptical slits that ran vertically, like a reptile’s. The double-wide holding the gun had on a rubber, alligator Halloween mask; it and the daisy eyes had to be some kind of prank. Then the mouth opened, and he saw the rows of small, pointed teeth and the flicking tongue.

  As he sagged back against the fender, the creature holding the cripple leaned the little one’s head close to his ear. McCreedy opened his mouth to cry for help, but no sound came from his throat.

  It had only half a human face, the rest was metal. The eyes were both metal. As the fan-bladed pupils opened wider, they made a whirring sound like the aperture of a cheap video camera. Guy wires and grommets connected its cheeks and jaw. Where living flesh abutted the stainless steel it looked angry and infected. It shouldn’t have been alive, but it was.

  In a voice that sounded like wing nuts rattli
ng in a tin can, it said, “You will drive us.”

  As McCreedy was bum-rushed around the front bumper to the driver door, he kept thinking that this couldn’t be happening. In desperation he looked to the slowly passing cars for help, which was absurd—it was Manhattan. No help was forthcoming.

  The limo sagged heavily, springs squeaking as the purple crew began piling into the rear compartment, invisible behind the black-tinted windows. Rough hands shoved him behind the wheel and slammed the door. The monster who got in the front passenger seat carried a very short, very deadly-looking assault rifle. It was only then he noticed the wicked amber hooks on both thumbs.

  “Keep the privacy screen down,” the little one said. “Do exactly as I say, or your brains are going to end up on the hood like three pounds of bird shit.”

  “Yes, sir,” McCreedy managed to croak. “Where do you want to go?”

  The grating voice rattled off the address of a university hospital on the East Side. The bigger ones hadn’t made a peep. He wondered if they could even speak. Without signaling, he pulled away from the curb and forced his way into the sluggish flow of traffic.

  As they crept forward, he considered cracking a joke to break the ominous silence: “Hey, how ’bout those Mets?” But the eye-watering, cat-piss smell wafting from the limo’s passenger compartment made him change his mind.

  Like a meth ho’s thong, he thought.

  He glanced warily back in his rearview. They sat as still as statues on the white leather upholstery. If, in addition to being armed, stand-on-two-legs giant reptiles, they were tweakers, no telling how they would take a joke. Screw it, he needed to bail on the limo. Just get the heck out and quickly, before things got even worse.

  McCreedy studied the traffic ahead. If he had a sufficient gap in front or on either side, he could floor the gas, open his door and roll out. To shoot at him, they’d have to get out on the opposite side and fire over the roof or around the bumpers. By the time they did that, he would be running against the direction of traffic, keeping his head down, using the cars for cover. He’d seen the same scenario pulled off lots of times on TV and in the movies. And what choice did he have anyway? He was fairly sure if he didn’t do something, he was going to end up dead.

  As he crept his fingers down to unfasten his seat belt, a horn of the assault rifle’s front sight hooked under his nose. As if the monster had read his mind.

  “Drive!” said the voice from the back.

  At one point during the twenty-minute trip, he thought he heard snoring coming from the back. When he turned up the entrance ramp to the hospital complex’s parking lot, the limo was riding so low the frame scraped on the concrete. Metal face directed him to the main building, which covered half a city block and was at least thirty stories tall.

  McCreedy stopped in a patient-loading-and-unloading zone. He wondered what the heck they were doing at a hospital. If the little one needed an oil change and filter, Jiffy Lube had faster service.

  A reptilian hand seized his neck and squeezed. The amber thumb hook rested against his jugular vein.

  “You’re coming with us. Get out slowly.”

  All of them piled out, the little one moving on its own in front of him in the middle of the pack. With an odd, herky-jerky gait, it passed through the automatic double doors.

  The entourage drew immediate attention from staff and patients. Like a circus act. Or a rap ensemble.

  “Wait just a minute, please.” A pair of uniformed, armed security guards stepped up to block their path. “Are you here for medical services or to visit someone?” one of them asked.

  “Out of the way,” the little one rattled.

  The guards exchanged quick, concerned looks but did not budge. Their hands dropped to the butts of their holstered sidearms.

  McCreedy started to shout a warning about the assault rifles, but before he could get a word out, the scaly hand tightened on his neck, shutting off his air and the flow of blood to his brain.

  The reptilians didn’t need guns to handle the situation.

  One of them simply reached out and grabbed the big, burly men by their faces, gripping eye sockets and chins in either hand, pulled them over double and hauled them squealing through an open doorway. The door to the side room slammed shut. From the other side came violent, crashing sounds. It was over in seconds.

  When the monster reappeared, McCreedy saw, inside the hood, below the slitted yellow eyes, a toothy smile.

  Seeing them coming four abreast, hospital workers and civilians cleared a path, flattening against walls or slipping out of the way into rooms and alcoves, in some cases abandoning patients on gurneys and in wheelchairs to their fates.

  They turned into the first elevator in a bank of four. The car groaned under their combined weight. One of them—maybe Metal face, he couldn’t see who—pushed a button on the control panel. The doors closed; the car jerked, then began to smoothly drop. It was a tight fit; it smelled really bad and something was leaking from somewhere—puddles were spreading underfoot.

  McCreedy looked up from his shoe tops and kept his eyes focused on the back-lit indicator above the door. They passed P for parking, then B—for basement, one through four, before stopping at B5.

  The doors opened onto a windowless, drop-ceiling hallway lit by overhead fluorescents. The reek of formaldehyde made a nice change from the aroma in the elevator. A rainbow of color-coded stripes on the facing concrete-block wall indicated the routes to various departments on this level: Pathology, Medical Records, Maintenance, Central Disinfection, as well as others.

  They trudged down the corridor, made a hard right and filed through a doorway placard-labeled Bioengineering and Nanotechnology.

  On the other side of a floor-to-ceiling glass wall, people in white face masks, hair covers and sterile suits were bent over rows of workstations. Everything was white on white.

  One of the workers looked up from a binocular microscope. When he saw the mob standing on the other side of the glass, he rose and stepped to a sliding door. He cracked it back a scant couple of inches, pulled his face mask down under his grizzle-goateed chin and said, “Yes, how can I help you gentlemen?”

  “Where is Dr. James Nudelman?” Metal face said.

  “Jim went home sick today,” he said, his eyes darting from one purple hoodie to the next. “He left before noon. He probably won’t be back until Monday. Can I take a message?”

  “And where is home?”

  The goateed man opened the door wide enough to step through and slid it shut behind him. “Who are you, exactly?” he asked.

  One of the reptilians reached out, caught the man’s right forearm in its hands and, with sickening ease, snapped it in two. Goatee let out a piercing scream and dropped to his knees, chin lowered to his chest. Masked faces on the far side of the glass turned to stare.

  “Where is home?” the little one repeated with impatience.

  Through clenched teeth, the man gave up the address. McCreedy recognized it as a building near Central Park.

  “Good thing you work in a hospital, eh?” Metal face said.

  “You mean because you broke my fucking arm?”

  “No, because there’s a morgue handy.”

  A purple-hooded monster loomed over the kneeling man.

  McCreedy shut his eyes. He had a pretty good idea what was coming next.

  Chapter Six

  A person of unidentifiable sex and age, swaddled in many layers of cast-off, filth-blackened clothing, smelling pungently of his or her own bodily waste, pushed a shopping cart packed with assorted reclaimed rubbish—discarded toilet seat, lengths of rusty pipe, stacks of cardboard, rags, bottles, unmated shoes—into Doc’s headlong path down the alley.

  Whether the lunge was meant to simply attract his attention or to cause him some kind of injury, he reacted without breaking stride, long legs nimbly sidestepping the front of the cart. As he did so, his silver-handled sword stick hissed through the air and cracked the cart pusher a
modest blow across the right cheek.

  As if he was flicking a fly out of midair.

  “Bas-tid! You bas-tid!” the him or her shouted in outrage.

  Doc kept running. The complaint barely registered over the cooing, achingly familiar, female voice in his head.

  “Theo, Theo...”

  As he sprinted alongside the companions, fragments of his past were coming at him like a hail of rifle bullets, zinging into the front of his head and out the back. A razor-sharp jumble of agonizing been-there, done-that’s, memories that spanned the two-hundred-plus years of his unique existence: walking the grounds of Christ Church College with his Oxford dons in the late 1880s; picnicking with his family in Omaha on the Fourth of July, 1896; being trawled against his will to an underground prison in the late-twentieth century, then being cast forward in time beyond the coming Armageddon to Deathlands, and there, further degraded, forced to service hogs for the amusement of Baron Teague’s head sec man, Cort Strasser.

  He had a bit of a memory of later, chilling stickies by the dozens, as they hung in mating chains on the side of a ruined, predark highway overpass, until all he could smell was burned cordite and aerosolized blood.

  And then there was the present existence.

  His experiences in late-nineteenth-century London, England, and various cities of the United States hadn’t prepared him for Manhattan in 2001. He had usually been kept sequestered in ultrasecret redoubts after being trawled to the 1990s. Though he had access to printed and digital media during that confinement, he never had been directly exposed to the realities of civilization in the twenty-first century. The surrounding noise, the wags, the smells, the tall buildings, the sea of pavement, all the people, added up to a full-sensory scour that grated his every nerve end raw.

  “Theo, Theo...”

  His dear wife Emily’s voice vibrated softly inside his head. It was the voice of a ghost. She had died two centuries before, as had his beloved children, Rachel and Joylon. He knew it wasn’t real, but he couldn’t make it stop. He had traveled through time on three occasions now. A human body could endure only so much of it, he thought. He knew that the shock of transit did fundamental damage to the workings of the human mind. He had succumbed to insanity’s embrace many times in the past, but of late, he had remained fairly lucid. Perhaps this occasion was the straw that finally broke the camel’s back.