Deadlock Trilogy

by P. T. Hylton

  That caught his attention. “Tonight? Oh, yeah, sure. That should work.”

  There was an awkward pause. She was tired of awkward pauses. “Just to be clear, so there’s no misunderstanding, I’m asking you on a date.”

  His eyes grew wide. “A date-date?”

  She groaned. “Yes. An actual, adult date. Like where two people hang out together in order to gauge their compatibility and their mutual interest in pursuing a relationship. You up for that?”

  He smiled, suddenly back in the moment, and he looked at her as if he really saw her. “Yes. I’m very much up for that.”

  4.

  King’s Crossing

  2018

  Sophie laughed hysterically when Frank came down the stairs in his ill-fitting brown shirt. He took the criticism well enough. He let her have her laugh, then showed her the dress she was meant to wear. That took the smile off her face quickly enough.

  They were going to the opening night of a local production of The Music Man. Hell, why call it a local production? Why not a world premiere? As far as Frank knew, The Music Man had never been performed in this strange new reality. Local productions had become quite the rage in King’s Crossing, and Frank and Sophie had been lucky enough to score some tickets. The only catch was the Rough-Shod Readers had decided it would be a nice gesture if they were to wear some clothes by one of the less experienced tailors in town.

  Clothes had been in short supply for years, but with a combination of the stock at the various stores, three truly talented seamstresses, and Frank’s careful resource management, they’d been able to keep the town dressed. Time was pushing the limits on that now. Demands greatly outweighed supply. They’d had an apprenticeship program in place for a while, but even that wasn’t keeping up. So Frank and Sophie were nominated to demonstrate the trend of wearing clothes that were less traditionally…good.

  “At least it’ll be dark in the theater,” Sophie said.

  Frank smiled and gave her a kiss. “You look pretty good to me.”

  “Shut up,” she said and returned his kiss.

  The Hollywood, a hundred-year-old theater in downtown King’s Crossing, seated six-hundred. Most of the attendees showed up on foot or bicycle, cars having gone the way of gasoline a few years ago. In fact, the problem of what to do with old cars was a big one. No one wanted the old-fashioned, heavy, useless things in their garage, but there wasn’t much else to do with them. Someone had offered up a field to park them in, but the Rough-Shod Readers had shot down that idea. They needed to preserve all the farmland they could. The food supply was holding steady so far, but the population was growing. It turned out making babies was an even more popular form of entertainment than the library and local theater.

  Sophie and Frank walked the half mile to the theater hand-in-hand. They didn’t say much—that was often the way with them. But they were content to be with each other. Everything else aside, this had probably been the happiest year of Frank’s life. He’d had a huge crush on Sophie for years, but he hadn’t imagined she felt the same way. Why would a smart, pretty young woman like her be interested in a man with gray in his hair and a face scarred by the Ones Who Sing? But, for reasons he didn’t understand, she was. He was so glad she’d asked him out last year.

  The production of The Music Man was top notch (all things considered) until the third act, when Willis stumbled out onto the stage.

  “Get off!” he yelled, wildly swinging a bottle of moonshine until the actors cleared the stage. The man playing Henry Hill tried to stand his ground for a moment, but Willis knocked him over with a bottle to the head and then kicked him square in the ass, sending him stumbling off the front of the stage and into the arms of the people in the first row.

  Frank, Sophie, and six others were halfway to the stage when Willis pulled a revolver out of his belt and waved it at them, causing them to back off quickly.

  “Everybody have a seat!” he shouted. His voice carried well throughout the theater. Frank remembered Willis had been in last summer’s production of King Lear. When he had silence, he looked out over the crowd and shook his head. “You’re a bunch of sheep. A bunch of damn sheep without a shepherd.”

  He walked to the front of the stage and shielded his eyes with his hand, looking out into the crowd. “We had a shepherd once. Where is he?” He looked left and right. “Where’s Zed?”

  “I highly doubt Zed’s one for musical theater,” Sophie muttered to Frank.

  Frank agreed, but to his surprise, a man in the back stood up and walked toward the stage.

  “I’m here,” Zed said. His voice carried even better than Willis’, as well as it had in downtown Rook Mountain the day he’d sent Frank Away.

  “Get up here,” Willis said.

  Zed complied. He crossed his hands in front of him and stood calmly next to Willis.

  Willis pulled up his sleeve and thrust it in front of Zed’s face. “What’s this say?”

  “Five,” Zed replied.

  “That’s right! Five! I went back in time five times! I relived years of my life again and again. And do you know why?” He didn’t wait for a reply. “Because I trusted you! Because you said you’d save us. But you haven’t saved us, have you?”

  He raised his revolver and held it to Zed’s head with a quivering hand. “You failed us all!”

  He pulled the trigger, and Zed collapsed.

  The crowd gasped.

  Willis looked out at them, as if just remembering they were there. He let out a harsh giggle. “There is no escape. No matter what they tell you, there is no escape.” Then he put the gun to his own head and pulled the trigger.

  The gunshot was still echoing through the theater when Zed sat up. He struggled his way to his feet. Blood ran down his face, but his head appeared to be intact.

  He spoke in a calm, quiet voice that somehow carried through the theater. “We will not give up. We will never give up. We’ll find a way to escape.” He stared into the stage lights for a long moment before continuing. “And then we will take our revenge.”

  Frank felt Sophie’s shaking hand slip into his.

  5.

  Boulder Creek, Colorado

  2019

  Alice was thirteen years old, damn it, and she could do a simple mission without a babysitter. Granted, this was a tad more vital than some of the ones she’d been on in the past, but still. She hadn’t liked the way Vee had whined about it. The way he’d tried to insist he should come along. He was jealous of the way Wilm was starting to rely on Alice now, that’s all it was. Alice was still a kid—his words. But this kid had been the one to find Gavin Point, Pennsylvania, right? The source of the power they’d feasted on last year? The reason they were strong enough to do what they were doing now. So, yeah, maybe it was time to stop looking at her like such a little kid. She wore a bra and had her period and everything, which was more than she could say for him.

  That was how she’d laid out her case to Wilm. A little emotional and overly dramatic? Of course. But Wilm, Alice had learned, responded to shows of force. To strong powerful arguments and emotions. She wanted people who would scrape and claw their way to what they wanted over people who could make a calm, solid request.

  So here she was, sans Vee. She didn’t feel gloaty about it. She felt vindicated that her reading of Wilm and what she would respond to was accurate, but not gloaty. It was all an act. She would prefer to do the job alone. She liked her alone time. But she didn’t feel strongly about it. Actually, she didn’t feel that strongly about much of anything these days. Sometimes she felt like the better part of her emotions had been cut out by the scissors when she’d cut King’s Crossing out of the map. As the scrap of the paper drifted to the ground, so had her humanity. It wasn’t that she didn’t have emotions, it was more like she experienced them at a distance, as if through a fog.

  Boulder Creek, Colorado was a small town in the southern part of the state. Little grew here. Five minutes off the train and Alice already felt dus
ty. It was certainly beautiful, the way the mountains jutted up in angry, rugged crags. No place she’d ever been so perfectly captured the way she felt. Barren. Jagged. Withered.

  She made her way through the streets, using her phone to guide her. She wasn’t in a hurry. She was about to make a man’s greatest ambition come true. Might as well savor it.

  Her lack of hustle had at least a little to do with the object in the long duffle bag she carried over her shoulder. She had her sword, yes, but she also had something else. And having two of the Tools at once? Man, that was some kind of rush.

  She reluctantly found the man’s house, a beat up old bungalow, and rang the doorbell. The guy was renting the place, she knew that much. No employee of Wilm’s organization was allowed to own a home. But it looked like he was pretty embedded. Alice wondered how he’d react to his new, more mobile lifestyle.

  It wasn’t for everyone. Alice wasn’t sure it was for her, but what was she going to do about it? It wasn’t like she could quit and go home.

  After the third time she rang the doorbell, Alice got a sinking feeling. This guy Clyde had received a note she was coming. No way he’d go out and risk missing her.

  Of course, there was always the possibility he’d gone AWOL.

  She reached into her duffle bag and pulled out the sword. Many times she regretted having requested this particular Tool. She could have named anything. But she’d picked an unwieldy weapon that forced her to carry a giant duffle bag and made it so she couldn’t walk through metal detectors. It came in handy now, though, as she used the handle to smash through a window. She wiped at the sill with a spare sweater from her bag to clear off the loose glass.

  As soon as her head was through the window, she knew Clyde hadn’t gone AWOL. Well, technically he had. But permanently. His remains were propped up in an easy chair in the corner of the living room. God, what a smell. Alice didn’t know how he’d died, but it had happened a while ago.

  Great. Wilm was going to flip out.

  Alice pulled out her cell phone and was about to tap it to initiate the call when she saw something on the coffee table that made her pause.

  A United States atlas.

  For a moment, she forgot about the dead body and Wilm and the Tool she was supposed to be delivering.

  She generally avoided maps. She usually just told her phone where to go, and it took her there. Paper maps had made her queasy.

  Still, she flipped the atlas open and began turning pages. She didn’t stop until she reached the W’s. Wisconsin. The green spot on the map where she spent her first nine years.

  The sword in her hand began to buzz in that peculiar way it did when it wanted to be used.

  She gently pressed the broken mountain symbol on the sword and felt it click. Slowly, she pushed the point of the sword through the spot in the map where King’s Crossing should have been.

  She gasped as white light poured through the hole.

  She stared at the light for a long time. Then she tried to poke her finger through, but it wouldn’t go. Then Alice had a great and terrible idea.

  If one of the Tools had cut King’s Crossing off the map, would that same Tool still be able to reach it?

  She began constructing a story in her head. Maybe Clyde had been alive and well when she got here. Maybe she’d delivered the Tool and the message to him just as instructed.

  How often did Wilm and the others check in with their employees? Monthly? If that? How long before they discovered Clyde was dead? And even when they did, would they suspect she hadn’t delivered the Tool?

  It was a risk. A big risk. But over the last four years Alice had learned life was a big risk, one that very rarely paid off.

  She took the other Tool, the one meant for Clyde, out of her bag. The scissors with the tiny broken mountain symbol on the handle. She pushed the scissors into the hole in the map.

  They fell through with an audible pop and the white light went out.

  All that was left was a jagged hole in the page.

  Alice left, taking the atlas with her. That night, she burned it in her hotel bathtub.

  6.

  King’s Crossing

  2020

  Matt Campbell had decided to kill himself months ago. The only thing he couldn’t settle on was the method.

  It had been five years since Alice disappeared. Since everything went to hell. His daughter would be fourteen now, if indeed she was still alive. Frank had told him the story a dozen times, but Matt still had a hard time believing it. Frank and the others had a choice: save Alice or save the world. They’d chosen the second option. And Matt and everyone in town had paid the price.

  He wasn’t angry at Frank. He never had been, really. He was angry at God, at the world, at the physics that drove the universe and led all of existence to the moment when he would lose his only daughter to an unknowable group of monsters.

  It had been hard in the days and weeks after Alice disappeared. So hard. To everyone other than Matt and Helen, those hadn’t been the days after Alice’s disappearance; they’d been the days after Isolation Day. Everyone had lost people on the outside. People weren’t sympathetic in the way they would normally be to someone who’d lost a child. Because she was still on the outside, right? Still alive?

  Matt didn’t know. That’s what he tried to tell everyone. That’s what no one seemed to understand. They didn’t know what was on the outside. For all they knew, the rest of the world was gone and their little town was the only thing left in the universe.

  Helen and Matt had tried to hold it together for four years after Isolation Day. No, not Isolation Day. Screw Isolation Day. To Matt, it would always be Alice Day.

  They’d tried, they really had, but it had been too difficult. They were constantly seeing reminders of Alice everywhere they looked, especially in each other. So they stopped talking, stopped having sex, stopped spending time together. It didn’t even surprise Matt when Helen told him there was someone else, that she was leaving him. A huge part of him was angry, of course. A smaller, more reasonable part was actually happy for her. Good for Helen. At least someone would make it out of this.

  Still, it stung when he saw her in town. So he stopped going out.

  Frank still came over fairly often. They had a weekly card game scheduled with a few other guys, but it was canceled more often than not. Matt felt a little guilty about leaving Frank behind when he killed himself, but, really, the man had Sophie. He was losing a friend, yeah, but it wasn’t like he was losing a kid.

  Matt had finally decided on how to do it a week ago, and today was the day. He had a little gas stowed away in the garage, and he’d kept the engine maintained. He was fairly certain the truck would start. Yeah, it was going to be overly dramatic and loud, but who cared? If he was going out, he was going to do it big.

  He duct taped large rocks to his arms and legs and got in the trunk. The engine roared to life on the first try. He drove through town, windows down, letting the wind hit him in the face, and for a moment he was happy. People looked at him as he drove. They hadn’t seen a running vehicle in years. There were a lot of mouths hanging open as he passed through town.

  He drove to Volunteer Park and stopped the car at the end of the parking lot right by the small dock where they’d loaded passengers onto the riverboats back before Alice Day. He took one last look around his town and said one final prayer. Then he stomped on the gas, crashed through the dock, and splashed down into the Mississippi River.

  He’d picked the spot because of its depth. The truck hit the water with an impact that momentarily dazed Matt. He watched with detached interest as the truck sank and water poured in through the open windows.

  Damn, he should have closed the windows. Having them open like that gave a man thoughts of maybe living through this.

  He fought off his survival instinct and took a last breath.

  As the car sank, he saw something strange floating in the water. Something that shouldn’t have floated. Sciss
ors. He squinted and saw something on the side of them. A broken mountain. It looked almost like the symbol on Zed’s compass. And the symbol on the book.

  This, Matt realized, was important. It might be something worth living for. He reached out and grabbed the scissors. Then he looked down and noticed with horror the rocks taped to his arms and legs. It would be almost impossible to swim to the surface.

  Thankfully, he didn’t have to. Three people in the park had dove in after the truck.

  It was a near thing, but they pulled him and the scissors to the surface before it was too late.

  7.

  King’s Crossing

  2021

  On a December evening in the seventh year of isolation, the unofficial, unelected leaders of King’s Crossing, the Rough-Shod Readers, met at the library to listen to Zed talk about the scissors.

  “I believe there is a very good chance they can get us out of here,” Zed said.

  This declaration was met with excited babbling around the room. Matt Campbell, the man who’d found the scissors, albeit during a suicide attempt, received a few pats on the back.

  Upon being saved from drowning, Matt had brought the scissors with the broken mountain symbol to the Rough-Shod Readers who had agreed, even Frank, to hand them over to Zed to study. As upsetting as it was to present Zed with one of this new Tools, it only made sense. He was the person with the most experience using one of them.

  As soon as he’d received the scissors, a change had come over Zed. After six years of quiet sulking, he had finally snapped out of it. The swagger returned to his step, as did his Cheshire Cat-like smile.

  Zed continued. “Since Isolation Day, my compass has pointed to one spot anytime I ask it to locate anything outside this town. I believe it’s where the…let’s call it a barrier between us and the rest of the world is at its weakest. Using the scissors, there’s a chance we can cut through.”

  They’d all heard about Zed’s tests. He’d tried cutting in various places, and the scissors managed to open strange holes in reality. The only problem was that it was impossible to tell where those holes went. All that came through were beams of white light. Zed had tried sending objects through the hole, but that didn’t accomplish much of anything. The objects fell through, the white light disappeared, and that was that. There was no telling where the things ended up. According to Zed, those holes could lead to anywhere in time or space. Or even outside of time and space.