Corrigan pulled himself to his feet and headed for the door. “Where are you going?” Maggie asked.
* * *
Officer Harry Kupchak hated working the night shift, hated even more working the night shift when the assignment in question required him to be attentive the entire time, and absolutely despised beyond all words any assignment that stuck him on a chair in the hospital for the night. It was even worse than working as a security guard—something he did for five years before he was accepted to the force—because at least in the mall there were perks. Especially in the summer, when half the young women in the city of Cambridge dressed like off-duty hookers, or so it sometimes seemed. Here, he had nurses to look at, but it appeared that all the attractive nurses in the hospital were elsewhere, possibly worked only days, and maybe not even in this hospital. The girl he was guarding was pretty cute, but he’d only gotten one glimpse of her a couple of nights ago when she was still in a coma, and, well, being attracted to someone in a coma meant there was probably something wrong with you, so he didn’t dawdle in that regard.
He didn’t even fully understand why he was there. When he checked in with Clancey, he was told that the FBI chick and some other consultant were in the room and he wasn’t to disturb them. It seemed to Harry if they were inside there, was no reason for him to be out in the hallway at all. Granted, Clancey’s description of how the FBI chick was dressed whetted Harry’s interest, but as she had not stepped out at all since his arrival, he wasn’t holding out on the hope that she would any time soon.
It was well into his fourth hour in the chair when he heard some sounds coming from the room. It was early morning and the floor was quiet, so noises weren’t difficult to pick up on. He’d already heard two of the nurses discussing psoriasis in embarrassing detail from the front desk a good thirty feet away and around a corner. This noise was somewhat like the sound of a foul ball on a bare hand.
Harry stood and faced the door, debating whether to open it. He looked down the hallway in both directions—he was there, ostensibly, to make sure nobody entered, rather than worry about someone exiting—and then listened some more to see if the noise repeated. There was talking in the room, but Harry couldn’t pick up what was being said.
He unclipped the holster for his handgun, possibly more because the coffee he’d been drinking for the past couple of hours was making him edgy than because of any real danger. Then something hit him in the chest. His first thought was that he’d been shot, except that he had heard no gunshot ring out, which one should rightly expect to hear first under these circumstances. Still, the blow felt an awful lot like he always imagined it might feel to take a load in the chest while wearing his vest. Basically, his whole ribcage was shoved toward his backbone. He hit the wall gasping for breath and was facedown on the floor before he fully realized it.
Clutching his chest and feeling around for a bullet hole—there had to be one—he managed to crawl up onto his knees when someone came barreling out of the room—a big dude Harry had never met before. The guy stumbled over him, and Harry ended up on his back with the guy on his knees on top of him. Having no breath to speak of, Harry didn’t have anything to say to the big guy, who looked down at him, apologized, and then stood up and sprinted down the hall toward the elevators.
“Corrigan!” someone shouted from in the room. The FBI chick flew out—Clancey’s description didn’t do her justice—and saw Harry lying on the floor. She knelt down beside him.
“Are you hurt?” she asked.
“M’okay . . .” he rasped. His lungs seemed to be developing a rhythm again, which was good. But he thought maybe one of his ribs was busted. This was bad, as he still didn’t know what had hit him, and that would make for one very embarrassing incident report.
“Nurse!” she shouted. “This man needs assistance!” To Harry she asked, “Where’d Corrigan go?”
He pointed. She nodded. “Call for backup. I think you got nailed pretty good there, officer; you need to get someone else down here as soon as you can. She cannot remain unattended. Understand?”
He nodded and started fumbling around for his radio, which was attached to his belt beside the butt of his gun . . . which, he suddenly realized, was no longer there.
“. . . gun . . .” he whispered.
She was getting to her feet and about to walk away. She couldn’t hear him.
“Hey!” he said, louder and, oh, that hurt.
“What?” she asked.
“That guy . . . tripped . . . took my gun.”
She stared at him for a second. “He didn’t trip,” she said. “He couldn’t have.”
“Then . . .”
“He did it on purpose.”
She ran off, muttering something as she went. Harry couldn’t quite catch all of it, something about McClaren.
* * *
Corrigan checked the safety with his thumb as he ran down the hospital corridor toward the elevators. It was a slow night in the ICU, which was a very good thing as he had quickly discovered that he wasn’t nearly himself yet, despite the short nap and the ingestion of a number of candy bars. The faster he ran, the more there was to take in, until he had a serious overabundance of input to have to cope with, and his ability to filter out the future in favor of the present was quite clearly still broken. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see the back of his own head running in front of him. Just keep going, he thought, shoving the gun into his pocket.
Ahead of him—temporally and spatially—the front end of his hypothetical Corrigan centipede caught sight of Kilroy rounding the corner of the central elevator and ducking into the stairwell. Corrigan hit the door for the stairs shortly thereafter. No, that wasn’t right. He hadn’t even reached the door yet.
“Wait, dammit!” he heard Maggie shout. He looked back to see her running, running, running even as he reached the door, while on the other side of the door he was already trying to figure out which way Kilroy had gone. Too much going on.
Since the ICU was on one of the hospital’s middle floors, the stairs went both up and down. He was nearly positive Kilroy would have gone down, as he looked hell-bent on getting away from Corrigan. But he wouldn’t put it past the thing to head up a couple flights, find a different stairwell, then double back down and take out Erica while Corrigan was somewhere below. So rather than choose, Corrigan decided to go both up and down.
This turned out to be easier than one might have imagined. By favoring neither direction, he ended up choosing both. Had he been well rested, this approach would have never occurred to him, but his head was so muddled and his sense of reality so bent, it seemed like a perfectly reasonable option.
And it worked, so he was not about to question how he was doing it. His going-down self spotted the Kilroy a flight below, while his going-up version found only an empty landing. He abandoned the latter future and continued down.
Downstairs, the very edge of his future self spotted his quarry exiting onto the second floor of the building, while at the same time he heard Maggie enter the stairwell and shout his name again. She seemed to be extremely agitated. He couldn’t imagine why.
Reaching the door and jerking it open, Corrigan discovered the main hospital lobby, which confused him for a second until he recalled that the lobby was supposed to be on that floor. It was a long, thin expanse centered on a vast desk area manned by exactly one person, for whom at least a dozen people were waiting. A few looked over at him, surprised, as adults only rarely run through buildings without a good reason, yet he had clearly arrived at that point after a fair amount of running.
Corrigan was fortunate in that nobody was moving much, so the future distortions were slight and easy enough to parse. It also helped that he had stopped running long enough to figure out where Kilroy had gone. That didn’t turn out to be too hard.
The creature was standing still behind the queue near a man in a suit. It was an odd effect, seeing him hovering behind a row of blurry people because with no future bl
ur of his own, Kilroy was the only one in focus. It was like seeing a black and white movie with one character artificially colorized.
Noting that he had Corrigan’s full attention, Kilroy smiled and raised his bat into the air, meaning to club the fellow in the suit with it. Corrigan knew it would come down to this. The consequence of chasing Kilroy was that it put everyone nearby at risk.
But that was why he’d taken the gun.
Dropping to one knee, Corrigan drew the handgun from his pocket and took aim. Behind him Maggie was screaming something, but he ignored her; he knew what he was doing. He fired.
Corrigan was always a pretty good shot. It was one of the things he prided himself on. He even owned two guns and on weekends liked to drive out to a private shooting range in Medford for target practice. A couple of times this proficiency came in handy, most spectacularly in the bank robbery he’d helped foil the first time he worked with Maggie Trent.
But it didn’t help this time. He watched in horror as the head of the man in the suit disappeared in a cloud of pink dust. The woman behind him in line shrieked in horror, even as the remnants of a human head coated the front of her face and clothing.
Kilroy—who had used the bat to bump the dead man into the path of the bullet—smiled satisfyingly.
What have I done?
Harvey, I understand now.
“Corrigan, no!” Maggie screamed. He looked down and realized he was still kneeling, the gun was just coming to bear, and he was about to take aim.
I’m in the future, he realized. I haven’t done this yet.
He lowered the gun, and the death of the man in the suit vanished, as did the rest of the future. This was jarring for Corrigan, but considerably more so for Kilroy, as when the future vision reinstated itself, Corrigan could see that Kilroy was clutching his head in pain.
“It hurts him,” Corrigan realized.
“Give me the gun!” Maggie screamed.
The people waiting in line noticed for the first time that Corrigan was waving a firearm about emphatically. This caused a mild panic, not nearly as bad as when one of them had had his head vaporized, but still. Everyone scattered, and Corrigan’s sense of the present went all to hell again.
“Give me the gun!” Maggie screamed.
“You said that, didn’t you?”
She leaned down to swat the gun free from his hand, but Corrigan saw it coming and moved his arm out of the way. “Fine,” he said, “I’m fine. He’s getting away.”
And he was. Kilroy had recovered quickly from the shock of having his present pulled out from under him, altered, and shoved back into place. He was making for the side exit, which led to the top floor of the parking garage.
Maggie was still shouting at him. “. . .shoot you,” she had just finished saying.
“What?” he asked. Kilroy stepped out through the sliding doors, preceded by the future version of a young pregnant woman who looked terrified of Corrigan. He wondered what could possibly have dragged her to the hospital at one thirty in the morning that didn’t involve the emergency room, but his speculation was cut short by the fact that Maggie was pointing her gun at him.
“I said you have to let go of the gun, Corrigan. I don’t want to shoot you.”
He stared at her. “You’re not going to,” he said.
* * *
Corrigan was out through the sliding door before Maggie could properly ruminate on her actually having to shoot him, deciding that if she really had to think about it, she obviously did not have it in her. She hated him for knowing this before she did.
“FBI,” she declared loudly, for at that moment everyone who was still in the lobby had seen her gun. She held up her badge for emphasis. It would have been better overall if she looked like a professional law enforcement officer instead of like another type of professional, but she’d been saying a variant of that for most of the evening, especially the parts of the evening that had her running in three-inch heels. “Everything’s okay. We’re . . . uh . . . we’re chasing down a fugitive.”
This sounded mad, but whatever. Let them figure it out for themselves. She followed Corrigan out the door.
He was already at the far end of the garage, heading down the ramp to the ground level and probably toward the street, where he would surely find more civilians to accidentally terrorize. Not knowing what else to do, she headed in the same direction. It was insanity, thinking she could help him bring down an assailant she could neither see nor affect in any real way, but it seemed equally wrong to let him run off alone and hope for the best.
There has to be some way I can help, she thought. And just then, she thought of one such way.
The front corner of the parking garage afforded her a view of Mount Auburn Street a good quarter of a mile in both directions. Directly below her was the outlet through which anybody—on foot or driving—would ultimately have to emerge if they wanted to exit the garage without also breaking a leg. It was a twenty-foot drop onto a steep hill on the other side. From there, she should be able to see where Corrigan was heading.
She slipped the gun into her jacket pocket and then pulled a much more useful device from the same pocket—a cell phone.
“C’mon, c’mon,” she muttered, listening to the ring. Finally, he picked up. “Professor Calvin? It’s Agent Trent. Listen, I don’t have much time . . .”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Now
Sir Isaac Newton appeared to be ringing. This was certainly odd, but it was not the very oddest thing about Newton. The very oddest thing about Newton was that he was roughly fifty feet tall and appeared to be wearing a trout on his head in lieu of a powdered wig. The fish was making a disturbing sucking noise in order to remain atop Newton’s head—for he was mouth-first—and that noise had been distracting them both throughout the entire conversation. Newton had apologized a couple times already for this. “Terribly sorry about the fish, good sir,” he’d said. “But if I took him off, I’d never finish with the recoinage. You understand.” Archie did not understand but had the good sense not to ask for an elaboration.
Archie Calvin, who was—as far as one could tell such things—still completely normal sized, sipped his tea and tried not to think about the fact that he was sitting at the same table as Newton and that the table accommodated both of them handily, despite being a normal table—and despite Newton’s gargantuan size.
“What did you say?” he asked Newton politely. One must always be polite to Newton.
“Ring,” Newton repeated.
As Sir Isaac had been in the middle of a lengthy treatise on the nature of time as a thing independent of observation and perspective—a viewpoint that no longer aligned with the modern understanding—ring did not fit in well with the rest of his argument.
“I see your point,” Archie said. Which seemed like the thing to say, really.
“Ring,” Newton said again. His nose trembled slightly.
“Um . . .”
“It’s the phone,” said the fish, which had removed Newton’s head from its mouth and was now perched sideways, dangerously close to sliding off Newton’s head and onto the table. “Wake up and answer it before Ronnie has to.”
“Ah. Thank you.”
“No problem.”
Archie lunged for the nightstand in the dark, the remnants of the fifty-foot Newton and his talking-fish wig still darting about his unconscious like fireflies under a porch light. There—but lost in the background. He could still taste the tea in his mouth. Darjeeling.
The phone was to the right of the alarm clock, which had a red LED display that was annoying when trying to sleep but extremely useful when looking for the phone. He picked up the receiver. It was wireless, so he didn’t concern himself with the possibility that the cord might knock over something he may wish to keep.
“Hello?” he said.
“Professor Calvin?” said a woman on the other end of the line. “It’s Agent Trent. Listen, I don’t have much time—”
&
nbsp; “Agent Trent?” he asked. He rummaged through his brain for a one-to-one match but found only more of Newton’s Principia Mathematica.
“Look, I’m kind of in a bind here. It’s about Corrigan.”
This name he recognized. And having made that connection, he knew who was on the phone. “Yes, Agent Trent. Of course.”
Ronnie rolled over and snorted. She had been a loud snorer for every day of their married life, and he’d never found a way to tell her, preferring instead to swaddle his head in pillows in order to muffle the sound. Interestingly, through a down pillow, the snoring noise sounded very much like a trout might if sucking upon a head.
He climbed out of bed a tad unsteadily and walked to the hallway, closing the bedroom door behind him. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
“We found out why these people have been dying,” Maggie said. “There’s a . . . well, I don’t know what he is. A being. He lives in the future.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, wondering if he was still dreaming. “Did you say, ‘lives in the future’?”
“Yeah. That’s what Erica—Oww!”
“Are . . . are you all right?”
“Just twisted my ankle. I’m running in heels.”
“Oh. Right.” Archie started heading down the stairs toward his study. He kept expecting a talking fish to pop up and tell him he hadn’t answered the phone yet. “Erica—you mean Erica Smalls. The student you’d led me to believe had been killed.”
“We led everyone to believe that. Look, this guy lives at the other end of the chrono-thingie. They saw him by accident—he got pissed off about it and started killing people one at a time. Are you with me?”
“Sure,” he said, although his mind was still trying to catch up.
“Corrigan, who can see him, is chasing him down, and I’m running after Corrigan and completely ruining a great pair of Manolo Blahniks in the process.”
He reached his office and sat down in his desk chair, wondered what the heck a Manolo Blahnik was, and decided it was probably not important. “There is a sentient being living in the future, is that what you’re saying?”
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