She had a distraction soon enough. Rosales came back and shoved a folded bundle of clothing under the changing-room door.
“Get changed, and slide your old clothes back under the door,” Rosales announced, sounding bored. “Yes, that includes underwear. Please don’t make me come in there and force you. I have absolutely no desire to see any of you naked.”
“You sure about that?” Daniel asked. “I mean, a lot of people would pay good money to see me naked, and this is your chance to get it for free.”
A low, angry growl echoed from under Nessa’s door. Rosales didn’t even bother responding.
Marie was surprised that they’d gotten her sizes right without asking. Well, mostly right. The band of the bra was about an inch too small, the underwire poked into her ribs, and she knew she’d hate it by the end of the night, but that was the least of her concerns at the moment. At least they’d picked out a nice ensemble for her. Crisp new Converses that she could move in—run in, if she had to—a cream blouse, and black slacks with a matching blazer and a faintly textured belt.
She turned, giving herself a look in the full-length mirror. Professional, she thought. Like she was back on the job, but with more expensive pieces than she ever wore when she was a plainclothes detective, and assembled with an eye for cut and form she’d never quite acquired.
Rosales unlatched her door. “C’mon out.”
She rejoined Nessa out in the hall. Her eyes widened. Nessa’s fingers traced the neckline of her own new outfit. “You like?”
“I like,” Marie said. “A lot.”
Nessa’s blouse, midnight black, sported cuffs and a Peter Pan collar in stark white. Beneath a broad leather belt with a pilgrim-style buckle, a breezy skirt emblazoned with pale stars and moons drifted down to her Victorian ankle boots. Nessa pushed her glasses up and flashed her lopsided smile.
“A bit on the nose, perhaps, but I do like this look. And you…you are both presentable and scrumptious.”
Daniel had traded his suit for a black turtleneck sweater, matching jeans, and running shoes. Simple and clean. He stretched his arms behind his back and glanced at Rosales.
“So what now?” he asked her.
“Boss wants to meet you,” she said and beckoned them to follow.
A long table cluttered with lab equipment took up a chunk of the former women’s-wear department. A couple of men in urban camo and surgical gloves, their gas masks slung over their shoulders, were going through the trio’s discarded clothes. Marie watched, in passing, as one man plucked a single strand of her hair from her old blouse with a pair of tweezers. He carefully deposited it inside a plastic bag and sealed it tight.
The next stop was back outside, through the biohazard wall and into the desolate halls of the mall.
At the heart of the food court, beside the now-empty playground, a trio of square tables had been pushed together and draped with an ivory tablecloth. A pair of pewter candelabras offered flickering, warm light, casting soft shadows across china place settings and crystal glasses. Masked soldiers stood in silent attendance, their rifles slung, muzzles pointed to the grimy tile floor.
At the head of the table, a man rose and lifted his hand in greeting. He was in his fifties with ruddy, weathered skin and whiskers and windswept hair the same color as his snowy-white three-piece suit. There was something elegant but rough about him, like a claim-jumper who had struck gold and tried to reinvent himself as a wealthy man. He’d traded in his shovel for a cane—ivory, with a silver tip and a handle sculpted like the sweep of a raptor’s talon—that rested against the table at his side.
“O fortuna,” he said as his gaze passed over them. “Like the moon, you are changeable, ever waxing and waning.”
“‘Hateful life first oppresses, and then soothes,’” Nessa said, continuing the poem.
“Ludo mentis aciem!” Their host grinned and tapped a crooked finger against his temple. “As the sharp mind takes it.”
He swept his hand across the table, the flickering lights, the waiting chairs.
“Please, friends, won’t you join me for supper? It’s been too long since I’ve had the pleasure of dining with others of my kind.”
Thirty-Three
Nessa took the chair on the opposite end of the table. Marie on her right hand, Daniel on her left. As Marie sat, she thought she saw movement in the corner of her eye. People crossing the food court, a line of people standing at the McDonald’s counter. But there was no one there, no one but their host and his silent, gas-masked guards. She must have given a little jolt; the man in the white suit noticed it and chuckled.
“You may see some…odd distortions around us. Perfectly harmless, I assure you, so long as we’re back inside the Sears by ten o’clock. That’s closing time, you see.”
“What happens at closing time?” Nessa asked.
“Mall security comes out. And given that the walls of reality are a bit fractured here—a fact I’m sure you’ve already ascertained, and almost certainly the reason that drew you in the first place—it’s not healthy to catch their eye.”
Rosales strolled up with a bottle of wine in her gloved hands. She turned the label to their host. He nodded his approval and she poured, a burgundy stream splashing down into his crystal cup.
“This is a Rene Engel Clos-Vougeot,” he said. “My favorite pinot noir, 2002 vintage, an excellent year.”
Rosales carried the bottle from glass to glass, playing sommelier. Nessa fixed their host with a steady gaze.
“We’re looking for Carolyn Saunders,” she said.
“I thought as much. She’s a guest of mine, but not here. Had her relocated.”
“A guest,” Marie said. She gave a pointed nod toward the gas-masked soldier standing on his right. “In the same sense that we’re your…‘guests’?”
“She’s safe and sound, I promise you that, Detective Reinhart. She’s working with us now, happy as a clam. And as you can guess, her research has been very helpful. I know about you, about the recently widowed Professor Roth—or do you prefer Fieri these days?”
“Fieri,” Nessa said. “I’ve disowned my husband’s name, considering how that side of the family is trying to kill me.”
“Understandable. And…ah.” He broke into a toothy grin. “The master thief himself, Donatello Faustus—slayer of ice dragons, wooer of vampire vixens.”
Daniel scooped up his wineglass. “I hate those fucking novels.”
“Oh, let Carolyn have her fun. But I’m being rude, I haven’t introduced myself. My name is Ezra Ulysses Talon. Or, in terms of this inconvenient cosmic drama we’ve all been hauled into very much against our will, you can call me the Salesman. And I’d like to make a deal with you.”
Marie thought back to Carolyn’s secret closet, her clutter of scraps and rumors.
“Talon,” she said. “As in ‘Talon Worldwide’?”
“Quite so, young lady. We manufacture the gear that keeps America’s armies—and a few other places, more or less allied—in fighting trim. It’s a side hustle, really, just a little hobby that keeps the money rolling in so I can focus on my true calling.”
“Which is?” Nessa asked.
“Same as you, same as Carolyn,” he said. “Finding a way to get us off the proverbial hook. I have died…I don’t know how many times, on how many worlds. And thanks to our author—may he burn in eternal hell, if there’s anything resembling justice in this universe—I do not die well.”
“Apparently none of us do.” Nessa sipped her wine. She eyed her glass. “If I hadn’t found a way to send myself a warning from a previous life, Marie and I would already be dead.”
“That makes two of us,” Ezra replied.
* * *
At fourteen, two outfits hung in Ezra’s closet: his regular clothes, and his Sunday suit. Both wire hangers dangled empty that afternoon, as the family had come home from church just an hour before. He’d changed back into patched and scuffed denims while his mother labored over a was
h bucket out in the yard, stringing linens along a line to dry in the crisp autumn air. It would be harvest time soon, time to strike down the wheat that lined his father’s land like a sheet of rippling gold.
Somewhere along the way from the scythe to the market, the gold turned into tarnished copper. He’d spent countless nights perched at the top of the rickety stairway, listening to his parents down in the kitchen as they pored over bills and tried to make ends meet. Ezra’s father was a loving man, but not a gentle one. His own daddy had raised him with a belt in his fist, and he assumed that was how a man was supposed to teach his children right from wrong. Still, the only thing that could really drive him into a rage was seeing his sons slack off in their studies.
Ezra had found him late last night, slumped alone at the kitchen table with a long-necked bottle of Bud in one hand and a letter from the bank crumpled in the other.
“Good book doesn’t say a man goes to hell through no fault of his own,” his father mumbled. “Damnation’s like salvation. Supposed to come through works. What you earn in this life is what you get in the next one. Isn’t that right?”
Ezra studied him, uncertain. “Yes, sir.”
Bloodshot eyes fixed upon him from across the tiny kitchen. “You got a talent, son. You got smarts, more than your brothers, more than I ever had. I know I’m going to die on this farm, just like my daddy did. Gonna work until I drop. The dirt’ll swallow me whole, and the wheat’s going to rise from my grave. You need to get gone before it happens to you, too.”
He took another pull from his bottle. It clanked down against the scarred wood of the table.
“You don’t have to die on this land. And if you do…damn you to hell.”
Now, sitting on his sagging mattress after church, Ezra was thinking about that. His father hadn’t said a word about it, the memory of their talk obliterated in an alcohol haze, but his words weighed as heavy on the teenager’s shoulders as the fire raining down from Preacher Tom’s pulpit.
Fire, like the violent flash of light he saw from his narrow bedroom window.
He charged down the stairs two at a time, barreling out the back door and sprinting across the yard. His mother’s transistor radio was sitting out on a stump, playing a Gordon Lightfoot song as she tended to the wash. He didn’t have time to stop, to warn her, and his father was off buying supplies in town. This was all on his shoulders.
A fire in the field would cost them the year’s harvest. And they were one bad harvest away from losing everything for good. The farm, the house, the truck—it was all in the bank’s name. Stalks of wheat whipped against Ezra’s face as he tore through the field, lungs burning, calves aching, making his way toward the flash.
He jolted to a stop. Instead of a fire, he found a perfectly flattened circle, ten feet from edge to edge. In the dead center, nestled in a bed of crushed wheat, lay a canister of blue steel. It was warm to the touch, tingling against his curious fingertips.
Up in his room, door shut tight and the shade pulled down, he unscrewed the cap. Visions of flying saucers and bug-eyed Martians from the comics danced through his mind’s eye. A flat, round disk of plastic, like a miniature record, tumbled into his outstretched hand. Then came a heavy sheaf of papers, carefully rolled up and folded to fit. He spread them out on his writing desk, gaze wandering across elaborate schematics and mechanical designs. He was only fourteen, but he knew exactly what he was looking at.
Blueprints.
* * *
Rosales returned to the food court, wheeling in a chromed serving cart. A roast, cooked rare and bathing in a puddle of its own juices, joined the table along with bowls of fingerling potatoes and broccoli. She brandished an electric knife with a flourish, the metal catching the glow of her turquoise eyes, and carved into the meat.
“The disk was a DVD,” Ezra explained. “Which, considering this happened back in 1974, was quite a mystery for some time to come. I was ahead of the game, though. When the first LaserDiscs hit the market four years later, I more or less knew what I had. It was simply a matter of biding my time while the optical technology matured, educating myself—and, eventually, writing a codec from scratch that could play the damn thing.”
“And the blueprints?” Marie asked.
“A head start,” Ezra said. “Inventions, nine in all. I’d always been a studious lad—my father’s belt made sure of that much—but now…now I had a focus. After all, I couldn’t build these wondrous gifts if I couldn’t understand them. I threw myself into my work. Mechanical engineering, electronics, early computing. Tech evolved fast, and I evolved with it. More importantly, I had a natural knack for the art of the deal—which, as we know now, is my particular ‘gift.’ My role in this cursed story of ours. I learned as much as I could, and when I reached the limits of my own brainpower, I hired the best of the best to support me.”
Rosales layered slices of roast onto Ezra’s plate. He unfolded a cloth napkin, spread it across his lap, and brandished his fork.
“Those inventions—and the patents I registered to exploit them—became the backbone of Talon Worldwide. The fastest-growing military conglomerate in modern history, thanks to a little help from the great beyond. Then came the day I finally got that damned DVD to play.”
* * *
Ezra watched himself on the screen. Almost himself. Twenty years older, maybe, with a deep-lined face and eyes that had seen war.
“I don’t know you,” his older incarnation said. “I don’t know your circumstances, don’t know your name. If you did like you were supposed to, you parlayed those blueprints into a fat wad of working capital—and you’re savvy enough to turn cash into more cash. You’re probably, hopefully, sitting on top of the world right now.”
His doppelgänger leaned against the arm of a tall, leather-backed chair and fixed his gaze on the camera lens.
“But you’d better buckle up, son, because I’m about to ruin your life.”
* * *
“You know what he told me,” Ezra said. “The first story, my true nature, the doom that was coming. The treasure at the end of my rainbow was nothing but a pot of…well.”
Nessa speared a stalk of broccoli on her fork. “Indeed.”
“My older twin was trying to crack the barrier between worlds, using cutting-edge tech—which was decades beyond anything we could muster on our planet—mingled with magic. That’s how he sent me that care package. He saw his own clock running out fast, and he wanted to make sure his work would go on.”
“Hold up,” Marie said. “How? If he’s a past incarnation of you, how did he send a package to you when you were fourteen years old?”
He chewed on a bite of roast and wagged his fork at her.
“Ah,” he said, washing it down with a sip of wine, “there’s the part that’ll bend your noodle. You know about the multiverse, yeah? Hundreds, thousands of parallel worlds out there. Some just like ours and a whole lot that aren’t.”
“Sure,” Marie said.
“Turns out, time isn’t linear between worlds. It moves at different speeds, different directions even. Time is, ultimately, a subjective concept. Which means, in practice, it’s sometimes—very rarely, needle-in-a-mountain-of-hay rare—possible to find a world that has another incarnation of one of us, still alive and kicking. I say that my older twin was a former version of me, but in reality, it’s just as likely that I’m his past life. That someday, once I shuffle off this mortal coil, I’ll reincarnate as him. Maybe a dozen lifetimes from now.”
“At which point you’ll send yourself the package you got over forty years ago.” Daniel eyed his empty wineglass. “I could use some more of that pinot.”
“And I’m not the first to make that discovery,” Ezra said.
Marie put it together in a flash. She had suspected it from the start, but thought it was impossible; what they’d just learned about the flow of time between worlds proved her wrong. She met Nessa’s eyes and they said it at the same time.
“Carlo is C
arolyn Saunders.”
“Another incarnation of the Scribe,” Nessa said. “No wonder they were sharing information. But she lost contact with him years ago. She was hunting for places where reality went thin, places like this, hoping to regain contact.”
“Which brings us to our current work,” Ezra said, “thanks to my generous twin and the contributions of—the sadly, deceased—Carlo Sosa. Under my direction, the skunk-works division of Talon Worldwide has been hard at work for years. We’re not just learning about parallel worlds anymore. We’re visiting them.”
He laid his fork down and dabbed at the corner of his mouth with his cloth napkin. He gave them a sly smile.
“Want to see?”
Thirty-Four
“We did all right, starting with the extra schematics my twin left on that DVD. He wanted to make sure I didn’t get hold of them until I was good and ready to accept the truth. Unfortunately, he also assumed our world was exactly like his own. The plans were prototypes to start with, and they required a few innovations that didn’t exist on our Earth yet—and a couple of heavy metals not found in nature. Our real breakthrough came five years ago. I dubbed it ‘Project Ziggy.’”
The silver cap of Ezra’s cane tapped along the Sears showroom floor. He ducked, one of his hips frozen stiff, under a twisted braid of orange electrical cable. The dead escalators were just ahead.
“Ziggy,” Nessa said. “As in ‘Stardust’?”
He chuckled. “I was born in 1960, but musically, I’m a child of the seventies. We were working the same theory as Carolyn: hunting for thin spots around the globe, hoping we could use them for our interdimensional research. Places like this one. Our scouts found a roadside attraction, out in Montana, where they charged five dollars a head to witness ‘the man who fell to Earth’—a mummified astronaut in a space suit unlike anything of this world.”
Detonation Boulevard (The Wisdom's Grave Trilogy Book 2) Page 23