“I will be. We nearly there?”
Near Future Spider said, “Few minutes, give or take. You up for it, or am I going in again? Please note, by the way, there is only one correct answer to this question.”
Spider heard the tone in his voice. “Yeah, yeah. I’m going in. It’ll only take a couple of minutes, right?”
“Oh, absolutely,” Near Future Spider said. “The times Electra got me, she got me within three minutes of stepping through the door.”
“Shit,” Spider said, trying to focus.
By the time they located the high-end apartment complex in East Perth where the Rutherfords lived their dismal lives, Spider was feeling a little better. He’d had a window open, and, like a dog, had been sticking his face out into the cold, rainswept wind. While he was now a little soggy, he did feel markedly more anchored to the present moment.
Iris said to Near Future Spider as they peered out at the apartment complex, “You coming with us or what?”
He winced. “I feel like I really should, but I’m just…” He shrugged. “I’m kinda ‘been there, done that’, you know?”
“Don’t be such a sissy,” Spider said with a ridiculous cheerfulness that inspired no confidence in his comrades. “Someone’s got to watch our backs.”
“I wonder if the ambulance guys have been yet?” Iris said, and produced a folding compact umbrella from one of her raincoat pockets. She opened the door, jumped down, and popped the umbrella. The rain hitting it was very loud. Spider heaved open the van’s side door and joined her.
Near Future Spider was peering up at the huge apartment towers. “I have got such a bad feeling about this.”
Spider made chicken-clucking noises. Near Future Spider muttered back that he was not afraid. He was just tired.
Iris said, “Mate, you should be afraid.”
In the end, he got out and joined them, all huddling under Iris’s umbrella as they scuttled up towards the gated entrance. Iris got them through the entrance’s security system. Near Future Spider commented that when he was trying this, he had to wait for people coming and going and duck in behind them before the door closed again.
Once inside, they took in the lobby, all very high-end resort-type décor, high atrium ceiling, vast expanses of polished marble flooring and expensive hand-woven rugs. Spider commented that even the air smelled exclusive. He asked Near Future Spider about Molly, if she was okay in his time. Near Future Spider, not looking at him, said, too brightly, “Oh yes, she’s fine, just fine. Thanks for asking.” Spider felt cold and dismal, thinking about it, the prospect awaiting him.
Near Future Spider was taking in the luxurious lobby. He said that he always felt like he was lowering the tone somewhat just being there, and here he was again, same feeling. “Spent a lot of time here, sitting around, trying out the lounges, talking to anybody I could get to talk to me, trying to get some inside info on the Rutherfords. One thing I learned was that James Rutherford, once he was home from the office, never left the apartment if he could help it. Daughter Electra, by contrast, maintained a lively social life, parties, nightclubs, you name it. She and her idiot boyfriend, ‘The Beat’, he calls himself, have been talking about starting up a band.
“The other thing, and this one was useful, was that the Rutherfords are dirty.”
“Dirty as in corrupt?” Iris asked, as they made their way to one of the elevator lobbies.
“No, the other. They live in filth. Especially the daughter. It’s pretty disgusting up there. There’s a big push on amongst the other residents to get them the hell out of the complex.”
Spider, thinking about James, about times they’d gotten together on Friday nights for drinks or whatever, tried to remember if he’d ever known James Rutherford, in person, to be less than fresh. It was a stunning thing to learn about the man. “Really?”
They arrived at the glassed-in elevator lobby, which required another security pass. Iris, armed with her Police Emergency Access card, got them inside and into an elevator. Soon they were zooming upward at worrying speeds. While Near Future Spider stared at the display above the door indicating the floor number, Spider stared and stared at the mirrored walls of the car. In every direction, stretching away to infinity, images of himself. He looked rough and pale, not unlike the way James had looked the last time Spider had seen him. Spider wondered if he, too, was a broken man after everything he’d been through lately. Then it occurred to him, as he decided his near future self was smart in concentrating on the floor number display, that if you are capable of asking yourself such a question, you’re probably not too far gone just yet. Even so, seeing these armies of Spiders all around him was too much, too resonant.
The elevator stopped at the floor they wanted. They got out, and made their way along the passageway. It was quiet, Spider noticed. It freaked him out a little. What? Was everyone out tonight? Was the entire complex holding its breath, waiting to see what Spider and his team would find at the Rutherfords’? At the end of the broad, polished marble corridor, a floor-to-ceiling window provided a view out into the dark night. Rain pounded against the glass.
Near Future Spider was saying, “Now, listen up. Step one is finding and neutralizing Electra.”
“What do you recommend?” Spider asked him.
Iris said, “I’ve got a stun-gun, if that’s any help.”
“You wouldn’t have an actual, you know, real gun, would you?”
Iris glanced at him. “Not on me, no. Rules. I’m supposedly off-duty, remember.”
Spider had one other question on his mind. “I’m a little concerned about the whole ‘crime scene’ thing here.”
Iris said, “In what way?”
“We’ve got two copies of me here, all set to go barging into James’s apartment, no doubt shedding hairs and skin flakes and leaving footprints in the carpet, and all the rest of it.”
Near Future Spider said, “Unavoidable. But if we can stop Sky killing herself…”
Spider saw his point. “Then this whole business never happens.”
Near Future Spider said, “Well, it does, of course. It’s just, there’ll be one timeline…”
Spider saw his point. “Where everything works out.” He was still thinking about what Soldier Spider told him, that he had only a small chance of surviving tonight.
“Right,” Near Future Spider said.
“Okay,” he said, anxious.
“This looks like the place,” Iris said. “God,” she added. “You were right,” she said to Near Future Spider, wrinkling her nose. “The smell!”
Spider, who had never been here before, was similarly shocked. “That is nasty.”
“Wait’ll you get inside,” Near Future Spider said.
Iris banged on the door. “James Rutherford!” There was no response. She tried again. Spider joined in, calling, “James! It’s Spider! You okay?”
As they waited for a response, the door behind them opened. Spider and Iris both gasped, startled, and spun around. A severe-looking elderly woman, her silvering hair pulled back in a rock-like bun, dressed in expensive and tasteful sitting-around-at-home-spying-on-neighbors-wear, leaned out around her door. “Are you the police?”
“Yes,” Iris said, trying on her best public-relations smile, warm but not gleeful, reassuring but not patronizing, and flashed her ID. “Have you heard something?”
The woman glanced back and forth along the passageway, and said, confiding in Iris, just-us-women-together, that the Rutherfords had been incredibly loud lately, as in the past few days. Constant raging arguments, things thrown and smashing against walls, the most appalling language, from that diabolical girl! Then, as of an hour or two ago, silence, just cryptic silence. “I think something might have happened.”
“Something violent?” Iris said.
“I don’t
know,” she said. “It’s just not like them to be so quiet. It’s a bit ominous, if you ask me.”
“Can I take your statement later, if necessary, ma’am?”
“Oh,” she said, “I don’t know what I could tell you.”
Iris worked out an arrangement with her, and all was well. Before they went back to the matter of the door, the woman added, “And please, please do something about that smell! My Donald gets these headaches all the time…?”
“We’ll do our best, believe me,” Iris said, smiling, and the woman smiled back and went back behind her door, listening, no doubt.
After a few more minutes they all agreed there was little further point in waiting for someone to answer James’s door. Near Future Spider pointed out that most of his attempts started like this, too. “Once or twice Electra answered the door, covered in blood — and immediately had a go at me.”
“Shit,” Spider muttered, unsettled, tense and worried. It was good, in a way: stark fear helped anchor his consciousness in the here-and-now. He felt almost fully present in his own head.
Iris worked her lock-bypassing magic once more, and the door into the apartment swung open, revealing a seemingly living darkness, warm and fetid. She shook her head, glanced at the two Spiders, told them, “We just want the disc. That’s it.”
Spider noticed that nobody had tried to kill them just yet. A good sign, he thought.
Iris asked Near Future Spider where Electra might be if she wasn’t dead. He told her, “Could be any bloody where. Once, she was even up in the ceiling crawlspace, and dropped down on me as I was leaving the bathroom. Practically shat myself.”
“I think I’ve seen this movie,” Spider said.
“Where is James likely to be?” she asked.
“Varies. Sometimes the living area, sometimes the main bedroom, sometimes slumped off the toilet, Elvis-mode.”
“God,” she said, covering her face, and led the way into the apartment.
Once inside, with the lights on, several things became obvious all at once: yes, household hygiene had sunk to the point of foulness. No one could see the floor; every step fell with a muted crunch; bugs scattered. Spider wondered how a man like James could live like this and still manage to convey the appearance, more or less, of cleanliness. When they found the laundry area, much of the mystery was solved: unlike the rest of the place, the laundry was clean, almost fetishistically so. He guessed that James was the one doing the cleaning in here.
Another thing that was obvious with the lights on: there were, as police would say, “signs of a struggle”, even in the midst of all this stinking chaos. Iris indicated fresh blood-spatter on two of the walls near the couch, and smeared along the floor leading out of the room towards the bathroom.
Spider was distracted. Up on the huge media wall, stretching across the entire living area at the back, was Sky’s suicide video, currently freeze-framed at the point where the flames first start to catch in her long, dark hair. Her eyes were staring out at them. The resolution, Spider could not help but notice, was amazing. He could see individual strands of hair; he could see the blue and the green in her eyes. There was a sense of immense fractal depth to the image, that he could zoom in and in and in endlessly, and there would always be more detail, coming closer and closer to Sky’s burning flesh, so close he could just about feel the heat coming off her, the heat of revenge burning colder and harder than any mere fire.
Near Future Spider nudged him. “Electra got me several times while I was staring at that.”
Iris had gone into the bathroom. She called to them. “Found the daughter. Shit.”
They joined her. Like the laundry the bathroom had, until recently, also been fairly clean. Now there was blood on the floor, leading to the long, deep, tile-lined bathtub, full of still, dark water. Electra’s pale knees stuck up out of the water, slumped to one side. Iris, careful where she put her feet, crouched and reached into the water, trying to feel a pulse in the girl’s neck.
Electra’s black eyes stared up from under the red-brown water, her black hair swirling around her face.
Near Future Spider stood by the door, on watch, listening.
“She’s gone,” she said. “Damn it all.”
Near Future Spider edged away from the bathroom door to glance into the bath. “Yup. She’s toast.” Spider, watching him, even though he knew that Near Future Spider had been in this room, looking at this dead body, many times now, his lack of feeling was still chilling. He shivered, a little.
Iris was on the phone, shouting at people in Serious Police Tones, trying to organize her team. It appeared that now there was an actual body, they might be inclined to help — but that she was still under orders to bring Spider in for questioning. She hung up in great disgust and glared at both Spiders. She said, after a moment, to Near Future Spider, “So, are we safe now? If she’s dead, we can’t save her, so she can’t go on to time-travel back here and kill us? Is that right?”
“I think so, yeah,” Near Future Spider said, still visibly tense, “but who knows?”
Spider said, “Where’s James?”
“I’m guessing the master bedroom,” Near Future Spider said. “I’ll show you.” He led Iris back out, and added, “Just follow your nose!” Sure enough, at the end of another passageway, through an open doorway, the stench sharpening with every step, was the main bedroom, blood everywhere, even on the ceiling, and, in the center of the grim vista, the mortal remains of James Rutherford, in jeans and an old t-shirt. He lay, arms and legs spread out, as if placed there deliberately.
“Right, then,” Iris said, looking about, taking photos and video with her watchtop, watching where she put her feet.
Spider, back out in the main living area, found himself facing the freeze-frame of Sky Rutherford once more, and he could feel himself falling into the image, practically smelling the burning petrol— No, he told himself. Stop it. Think. We need the damn disc. He turned away from the wall and started looking around. The room, like much of the rest of the house, was filthy from end to end, a mind-jolting contrast with the insanely thorough attitude to cleaning he remembered from the Masada.
That people, even broken people like James, could live like this beggared the imagination, yet he knew this was more common than was generally recognized. Even more or less healthy people sometimes wound up like this, and would swear and declare there was nothing wrong, nothing that a bit of “tidying up” wouldn’t take care of. As it was, he wished he had a toxin protection suit. The sheer quantity of mold in here must be off the charts, and it was hard not to think of all those millions and billions of tiny spores drifting about, getting up his nose, getting in his mouth, his eyes.
The screen controlling the media wall was on the coffee table. It was the most logical place for such a thing, and it only meant relocating a stack of take-away food cartons, some old plates, coffee cups, and dismantling an impressive array of empty Zhujiang beer cans. The former copper in him felt dreadful about interfering with all this crime scene material, even though he was careful to take lots of photos before and after. Then again, exactly who would or could be prosecuted here? It was, most likely, a murder-suicide. There was no villain to catch and charge and prosecute. The entire thing left him with a bitter, hollow feeling, that it was all so pointless. From the point where James met Clea Fassbinder, the rest of the drama unfolded with grim inevitability: the daughter punishing the father, just as the wife had been bent on punishing him.
He glanced up at the image of Sky on the wall, looming over everything, presiding, like she still owned the place. He remembered her letter to James, the way she had laid the blame for the entire thing at his feet, told him that he was the one burning her, as if with his own hand. Not once, Spider realized, had she mentioned Electra. No farewell, no “I love you”, no “look after your old man”. Nothing. She didn’t rate a men
tion. Electra, he guessed, had seen this video, and probably had seen it a good many times. What must she have made of it, seeing her mother destroy herself without even a passing thought for her own daughter?
It gave him the creeps. The more he thought about this family, the more terrifying they became. And yet, he couldn’t help but wonder, how many other families in this city were just the same, or maybe even worse? Surely the doom that came to the House of Rutherford was not unique. He remembered that much from his police days. There were no perfect, happy families — and he suspected the widespread use of time machines had only made things worse. Why had it never occurred to Sky Rutherford to go back in time, perhaps try to intercept Clea Fassbinder before she got to James, and have a quiet word with her. Watch out for James. He’s trouble. Then again, he thought, Clea was looking for her death. Practically anybody would do, he supposed, once she’d taken care of her all-important mission to keep the Kronos probe from blowing the cover of a clandestine Zeropoint operation in the 260th century.
He finished clearing crap from the screen, and felt himself go weak inside. He sagged back on the filthy couch, staring at the shattered fragments of the disc. Releasing a great rush of breath, he shook his head. You know what this means, right? he asked himself, and he did know. It meant he would have to use the bloody Boron downstairs. He would have to come up here while James was still alive and ask him if he’d mind lending him the disc. How a conversation like that might go, he didn’t want to think. Iris and Near Future Spider were still in the master bedroom. He got up, went and told them, trying not to look at James’s body.
Near Future Spider was surprised. “The disc is broken? Really? Never seen that before.”
“Off you shoot, then,” Iris said, distracted by the crime scene, trying to figure out exactly how it must have happened.
Spider went downstairs, through the lobby, and out into the wind and the rain, muttering under his breath. The Boron was still there, up on its trailer, ready to go. He hauled himself up onto the trailer, opened the driver’s side door, and swung inside, closing the door behind him. The unit’s interior smelled unpleasant, which was nothing new for a man in the time machine repair business, but it did make him stop for a moment, trying to figure out what that smell might be, and where it might be coming from. Habits, he thought.
Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait Page 31