by James Axler
Vee hit the high beams after they passed the first block. They lit up the empty street, the empty cross street and the wall of big trees beyond, which was coming up fast. There was no sign of their quarry anywhere.
“They really covered a lot of ground, didn’t they?” Krysty said from the front passenger seat. She was practically shouting to be heard over the roar of the engine. “Were the enforcers carrying Magus?”
“Like a fifty-pound bag of shit?” J.B. added.
“No,” Ryan said. “Magus was on foot, too. And hauling ass.”
“Magus?” Mildred asked over his shoulder.
“It was stranger than strange,” Ryan said. “Magus ran like a jackrabbit.”
“That is not possible,” Doc argued. “Magus is horribly crippled and has been since the day we first crossed paths.”
“That’s what I thought, too, until I saw it happening,” Ryan said. “I’m telling you I saw it.”
Without slowing, Vee blasted across the perpendicular street, then jumped the curb to the sidewalk bordering the park. For a second, they were airborne, all four wheels off the ground. They landed with a crash on the far edge of the sidewalk. The front tires hit first, then the back ones slammed down even harder. The impact staggered Ryan; it also opened the rear compartment’s cabinet doors and drawers and sent the contents flying every which way.
“Nukin’ hell, woman,” J.B. bellowed, “are you tryin’ to chill us back here?”
“Sorry,” Vee said. “Did you break a nail?”
Then she cut the truck a hard left, its four wheels sliding across a wide stretch of wet lawn and onto a walking trail barely wide enough for the wag. With paved ground under the vehicle, again she put serious pedal to metal.
“They could have just as easily gone right,” Krysty said as the truck slingshot-accelerated down the gently curving path. “Why did you turn this way?”
“Because those aren’t joggers,” Vee said, taking a hand off the wheel to point with her finger.
At the extreme limit of their range, the high beams picked up three figures running ahead.
From the shrill scream of its engine, Ryan guessed the wag couldn’t go any faster. That was probably a good thing, because they were already doing better than one hundred miles an hour on a narrow path designed for pedestrian traffic. The stately trees on either side of them blurred into a wall of solid black as they rapidly gained on their targets.
“Run down the nukin’ bastards!” J.B. shouted.
“I think you are on to something there, John Barrymore,” Doc chimed in. “Three birds with one very heavy and fast-moving stone.”
Ryan had no problem with squashing the enforcers and their master. Quick and messy worked just fine for him if they could chill them all in one go.
Vee seemed okay with the idea, too, but before she could close the distance—and the deal—the trio crossed a two-lane street ahead and took off down another path that bordered what looked like a small pond or reservoir.
“Hang on!” she shouted.
By now Ryan knew better than to ignore his driver’s warning. He grabbed a handhold as the wag left the path, flew off the curb, crashed onto the street and, an instant later, jumped the curb opposite, again going four-wheels airborne. They came down hard and at high speed. If Vee touched the brakes once they’d landed, he didn’t feel it; when they slammed down the second time, she locked them up good, stomping on the pedal with both feet and pulling up on the emergency brake to keep the truck from skidding off the path and going headfirst into the lake.
It was a memorable moment, for sure.
The violence of the final swerve cost Ryan his grip. He flew across the compartment and ended up in a tangled heap with J.B., Doc, Mildred, Ricky and Jak, on top of the bound and gagged paramedic.
Feathering the emergency brake and accelerator, Vee somehow regained control of the wag and got them pointed in the right direction. Ryan regained his feet just in time to see the high beams light up their quarry ducking to the right, off the walking path, away from the shoreline, and disappearing into a dark, thick stand of park trees.
Vee roared across the lawn and skidded to a stop beside the edge of the forest. The trunks were too closely spaced for her to enter and follow with the truck.
“How big is this grove?” Ryan asked her.
“Pretty big. Maybe an acre. It’s longer than it’s wide.”
“Can you drive this wag around to the other side of it?”
“Sure, no problem,” Vee said.
As she started to pull away, he put a hand on her shoulder and stopped her.
“No, no, we’re going to split up first,” he said. “Jak, J.B., Ricky, you’re coming with me. Grab those.” He pointed to flashlights on the floor that had jumped out of the cabinets along with assorted first-aid and medical gear.
“Everybody else rides to the far side with Vee,” he continued. “Use this wag for cover, and set up an ambush there. If we’re lucky, the four of us can drive them out of the woods right into your guns. Watch where you’re shooting, though. Make sure you have clear targets and background.”
“What if they won’t come out?” Mildred said.
“Then I guess we’ll have to fight the bastards in the trees,” Ryan said.
“And the dark,” J.B. added.
As Ryan hopped down from the rear compartment, Vee cheerfully called out to his back, “Hey, running them down would have been way too easy anyway.”
Chapter Eighteen
Leaning against the limo’s front fender, arms folded across his chest, Angelo McCreedy stared down at the spit-shined toes of his black uniform shoes. It appeared that God Almighty had had other, more pressing concerns than answering his too-little-too-late prayers.
Though he had strained his brain attempting to telepathically transmit a convincing plea for mercy, no lightning bolt arced down from heaven to free him from his homicidal, crocodile-headed captors and their insane, half-metal leader. A Greater Power hadn’t reached out to confuse the minds and speech of his enemies; they hadn’t fallen into fighting among themselves like the builders of the Tower of Babel—allowing him to slip quietly away.
Simply put, nothing the least bit biblical had happened—except of course the unthinkable slaughter in the police station, which was like a George Romero version of Revelation.
McCreedy’s last desperate hope had vanished. He wasn’t going to escape. He wasn’t going to survive.
If the purple hoodies didn’t tear his head from his neck, the NYPD would shoot it off when they finally closed their net and sent in the SWAT team. He had assisted in a horrible massacre of their fellow officers. He had provided perpetrators with luxurious transportation to and from the crime. In the eyes of the metropolitan police, he would be as guilty of the crimes committed as the purple hoodies. No way would they let him get out a word of explanation before triggers were pulled. And even if they did let him speak, who would believe what he had to say?
No, there was only one way this mass-murder spree was going to end: with more flying bullets than he could count. Since his captors had proved themselves immune to alloys of lead, that problem was entirely his. He saw himself caught in the middle of the fray between cops and monsters, shot a hundred or more times, doing the Bonnie-and-Clyde shimmy and shake.
He had followed the little one’s directions back to the Village and the underground parking garage, where they had dropped off the poor guy with the ruby birthmark. This time he had been ordered to stay by the limo with one of the crocodile people while the little guy and the other monsters went inside.
He hadn’t asked how long they would be. It would have been a waste of breath. And every breath he took from now on was precious to him.
In the distance he heard explosions and long strings of rapid gunfire. The city was under siege. At this point who was responsible was no mystery.
Then a trio of cop cars with sirens screaming and lights flashing roared past the building and on do
wn the street. They were driving in such close formation that it looked as if the first car was towing the other two. Hope resurfaced to the beat of his pounding heart. If he could separate himself even a little bit from his lone captor, if he could get the attention of a passing squad car...
McCreedy tried to glanced surreptitiously over at the purple hoodie who was guarding him. But the hoodie caught his movement and glanced back.
The expression in the yellow eyes seemed to say, “Please, just try to run away. Pretty please.”
* * *
THROUGH THE CURTAIN of distortion and the accompanying grinding sound, James Nudelman watched as the reptilians came and went on the other side of the room. He couldn’t tell if they were the same monsters coming and going; they all looked identical to him. There was no sign of the littlest one, though. The creatures took away a prisoner; they brought in a new one. They didn’t say word. Some of the captives struggled in their grasp; others were tossed, as limp as dish rags, into their cramped cells. Some yelled for help; others were mute, almost catatonic with horror.
Though the screaming and echoes of screaming continued in the long concrete room, it had become just a highly irritating background noise. The initial impact had been all about a sense of empathy—a human connection and a shared plight. But he couldn’t sustain compassion for people who refused to recognize his existence. The fact that he was alone in this had sunk home.
Perhaps because he had finally lost his voice, Dr. Ransom had stopped yelling and was curled in a fetal ball on the floor of his cage with both hands cupped over his face, covering his eyes. Nudelman had given up trying to get his attention. It was a waste of effort.
Apparently the brain surgeon was brain damaged. How was that for irony?
Then the room’s lone door opened, and a purple entourage swept in, led by the limping little guy. He hadn’t seen it walk for any distance before that moment. It shambled along unevenly, alarmingly, not quite dragging the left leg, but there was a lift and roll to the hip on that side as it swung, then planted the artificial metal foot. When it put down its weight, there was an accompanying upward thrust of the bent-at-the-elbow opposite arm to maintain balance. The foot made a sharp, clanking sound on the concrete.
When the entourage walked right up to the door of his cage, Nudelman realized he was being singled out and took it for a bad sign.
Through a gap between the wide hips in black track pants, he could see Dr. Ransom lying on the floor of his cage. The neurosurgeon hadn’t budged from the fetal ball. Even though the newcomers were impossible to miss, like a herd of rhinos, he didn’t seem to notice them, either. So perhaps what Nudelman had taken as a personal slight wasn’t that after all. It appeared he wasn’t the only living creature Ransom couldn’t see or hear.
The first thing the little guy did was address its lumbering minions. In a voice like a blender grating ice cubes, it said, “Stay on this side of the room. Do not go near the other side of the room. Do not even look at the other side of the room. I know you glanced at it coming in. That was only natural, and no harm was done. But it is not what you think it is. It is dangerous beyond your ability to understand. We are at a critical juncture in this mission. You must follow my orders to the letter.”
Though the reptilians were huge, alien and terrifying, and Nudelman sensed them capable of bottomless violence, they seemed meek and docile in the little guy’s presence. It wasn’t fear—more like a calming effect. Their foreshortened crocodile faces had a limited range of expression because of the thickness and toughness of the hide—and perhaps the rigidity and morphology of what lay beneath—but they shot sidelong looks at one another, tongues darting in and out between rows of very sharp teeth. None of them so much as peeked at the other side of the room. Their strange-looking feet remained rooted to the concrete floor.
To Nudelman it seemed a very odd thing for the little guy to order.
What harm was there in looking across the room? And what on the other side was so dangerous? To him that area looked pretty much the same as his, with the exception of the blurring and spots that divided them. When he looked around his half, the visual anomalies weren’t there. If the captives on the other side could see them, too, and felt and heard the grinding, he had no clue.
Telling a human not to look at something would only arouse a deeper curiosity, witness the lesson of Lot and his daughters leaving Sodom. Perhaps the reptilians had no curiosity to arouse. But when he thought about it, even chameleons had a spirit of inquiry. It was bred in the bone of all living things.
“It’s time to go,” the little guy told him in that awful voice of doom.
He found it difficult to hold the creature’s gaze. The way its steel retinas whirred as they opened and shut, like a pair of autofocus camera lenses, was very disturbing. And yet it was even harder to look away.
“Go where?” Nudelman asked.
“The future.”
Two words that meant nothing to him.
“I don’t understand...”
“You’re a whitecoat. You already have the necessary theoretical background, so I will cut to the chase. I am called Magus. I have come from the near future to pick up a few things that aren’t available there. Your expertise being one of them. I’ve been here many times before on similar missions. You have a lovely city.”
“Time travel? You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Trust me, Dr. Nudelman, I’m not kidding.”
“Time travel is impossible,” he protested. “It’s been calculated that to make a single jump forward or back in time would take the entire energy output of the sun. So after a single journey was completed, the sun would go cold, and every planet in the solar system would look like dead, frozen balls of rock.
“The calculations are wrong, I assure you. I am living proof of that.”
“And you built this time machine?”
“Not really. Let’s say I just stumbled onto it in my travels. And it’s more of a time hole or tunnel than a time machine. It exists as a single, fixed corridor, accessible in both directions, future to past, past to future. It only has one entrance and exit in the future, roughly one hundred years from now, and one entrance and exit in the past, located in New York City on January 19, 2001. That’s why I’ve visited you here and now so many times. But for all I know, there may be other time tunnels.”
“Why that date and this place?”
“You would have to ask the people who designed and built it. But I’m afraid they are all long dead. They didn’t leave behind an operation manual. And current fixed settings could be the result of the control machinery succumbing to the age of its components, or accidental damage.”
Nudelman sagged as his mind tried to create a web of logic that could contain all of what he had just been told. Objectively, it was one absurd proposition heaped upon another, leading to an inevitably absurd conclusion. Subjectively, he was staring at a face that he knew could not possibly exist in his own time. He kept as up-to-date as anyone on the latest developments in nanotech and bioengineering. It was his profession and his life’s passion. If that unnatural melding of flesh and metal was real and not a hallucination brought on by prolonged exposure to pee-battery chemicals, it hadn’t been perfected yet.
He decided to try another tack that might lead to valuable information or at least settle growing concerns about his own sanity.
“Mr. Magus, why can’t the people over there see and hear me?” he said. “And what is that grinding noise I keep hearing?”
“Don’t worry about that,” Magus told him. “Worry about what you’re going to do for me.”
“And what exactly is that?”
“You’re going to perfect your urine-powered battery for me and then integrate and incorporate that power supply into my existing biological and mechanical systems. We’ll start small at first, working with the ancillary subsystems, then gradually expand to the macrolevel. My kidneys are fully functional, so a urine source shouldn’t be a prob
lem.”
“You could always import it,” Nudelman said. “That’s what I had to do.”
“My sec men and slaves will meet all your experimental needs,” Magus said. “My primary goal is developing an integral power source. It’s very inconvenient to have to plug myself in and wait for the charge to build. An internal, self-sustaining power supply would make me independent. Biological and mechanical systems could be fueled simultaneously and with the same organics. I would eat and drink as I normally do, and when I urinated, it would power my servos. The two types of system, biological and mechanical, would mesh seamlessly. And if my existing human biology continues to fail, I can install inanimate replacement parts and additional urine-powered batteries to run them.”
A light went on in Nudelman’s head. Maybe there was a graceful way out of this after all, he thought. He chose his words as if his life depended on it— because it surely did.
“The urine-powered battery concept is still in the early experimental stages,” he said. “You saw the weight and volume of the equipment in my apartment. Dragging a ton of processing units around behind you isn’t much different than plugging into a wall socket or a generator. You’re going to be tied down the same either way, unless you and the batteries are always riding around in a semitrailer.
“To be honest, I’m a long way from microminiaturizing the batteries to the point where they could be installed in a human-size body and produce efficient, reliable results. And the lifetime of the existing bulky batteries needs to be extended considerably for them to be worth surgically implanting. Which may ultimately mean finding and using a different chemical medium of pulling energy from pee. In other words, starting over from square one.”
Nudelman paused a second to let that sober news sink in, then went on to what he hoped would be a viable alternative and let him off the hook. “Have you considered using a nuclear power source for your internal systems? Or solar, for that matter?”
“I’ve not only considered those ideas, I’ve gathered experts to work on developing them. So far, the solar panel hat does not seem promising. In a high wind, the downsides are all too evident. And at this point the risks of radiation leakage and further damage to my biological systems seem insurmountable. You are not the first volunteer, by a long shot. I’m not putting all my eggs in one basket. I want as many options as possible for solving the problem.”