by Daniel Price
“Oh my God! Should I call the police?”
“No. Call Martin. Get him and his son to come as quickly as possible. Then call the fire service and tell them it was a false alarm.”
Beatrice peered anxiously at the little weapon in his hand. “You’re not seriously going out there with my chaser, are you?”
“If I had my pistol, love, I’d be wielding that.”
“Don’t go! You’ll get killed!”
Czerny caressed her cheek. The two of them had come together six weeks ago, under the influence of red wine and scientific exuberance. They’d been together almost every night since. It was the worst-kept secret in the building. Even the Silvers knew.
“Stay here,” he told her. “Stay hidden. Don’t come out until I tell you it’s safe.”
“But what if they come looking for me?”
With a heavy sigh, Czerny opened the door. He had the strong urge to tell Beatrice he loved her. Instead he remained ever practical.
“I don’t think we’re the ones they’re after.”
—
Thirty seconds after the alarm stopped, the two oldest Silvers emerged from their suites. Zack had taken the time to get decent in a shirt and sweatpants. Amanda was content to let her T-shirt hang down over her underwear. As Zack’s higher functions pondered the circumstances behind his rude awakening, his sleepy id admired her long and shapely legs.
“Hellooo, nurse.”
Amanda threw him a cool squint. She had yet to forgive him for his impending exit.
“What was that? The fire alarm?”
“Sounded like it,” said Zack. “It’s probably a glitch.”
Or a trick, he mused. Though Zack knew Quint wasn’t his biggest admirer, the little man had been far too cavalier about losing one of his alien specimens. He must have had something up his sleeve.
David stepped out of his room, fully dressed in a T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers. He glanced around the hall, his handsome face lined with worry.
“Where are the others?”
Zack shrugged. “Still in bed, I guess.”
“Lovely. Why get up for something as trifling as fire?”
“I don’t think it’s a real fire,” Amanda said.
David knocked on Mia’s door three times before pushing it open. He scanned the room.
“She’s not in there,” he said.
“What?”
Amanda rushed across the hall and thumped on Hannah’s door. David hurried to the stairwell.
“Where are you going?” Zack asked him.
“First floor. She might be in the kitchenette.”
“Amanda’s right. It’s probably a false alarm.”
“It can’t hurt to see if she’s okay. And it won’t hurt you to check on Theo.”
As David disappeared down the steps, Amanda opened the door to Hannah’s room. She looked inside, then checked the bathroom. Her sister was nowhere to be found.
—
Three minutes earlier, just as Erin Salgado finished her sweep of the rear property, Hannah stepped out to the patio and stretched her calves. Her inner clock had become muddled from all the time-shifting she was doing. For the fifth day in a row, she woke up at the crack of dawn with no hope of falling back to sleep.
On Thursday, Charlie Merchant suggested that she try something called exertion therapy, a tight regimen of exercise and catnaps, all strategically timed to loosen the body’s circadian rhythm. Hannah wondered if it would be easier just to get her exertion from Charlie himself. He was kind of cute for an egghead.
Once her limbs were sufficiently loosened, she straightened her tank top and trotted along the path that looped around the property. She made it only fifty feet before the building alarm sounded. Hannah could only guess that she’d triggered it somehow, since no one else was awake at this ungodly hour.
Wincing at the thought of all the apologies she’d have to offer, she dashed back to the patio. She caught a quick gleam in the reflective glass of the door, then spun around. No one.
Something in the air felt strange, the same smoky aura that Hannah had come to associate with speeding. Once the alarm stopped, Hannah heard a noise that sounded like a flat and heavy drumroll.
The hairs on her arms stood up. A tiny voice in her head offered urgent advice.
Shift.
She flipped the switch in her mind. Once again the world turned blue and sluggish. The drumbeat slowed to the sound of hurried footsteps. She turned around in the shadow of a six-foot man in a motorcycle helmet. Another half second of hidden advantage and his sword would have lopped her head off.
As it was, Hannah had just enough time to scream and duck.
The man overshot, stumbling over a patio chair. White-eyed, Hannah jumped back. Unlike everything else around her, the man existed at a normal speed and color. She could see every glistening red speck on his blade, his clothes. Her throat closed when she considered the notion that she was looking at her sister’s blood.
Hannah fled, and the Motorcycle Man followed. He’d been walking at a brisk pace until his quarry decided to shift. Now he was forced to run.
—
Czerny paused in the stairwell, debating his next move. Should he go up and warn the others or go down and help Mia? The girl was safely barricaded in the security room, but there were also tools in there that could help the situation—weapons, surveillance monitors, a building-wide intercom system.
He went down.
Five steps into his descent, a tall man popped around the corner and stepped onto the landing. He and Czerny jumped at the sight of each other, then reflexively raised their hands in battle. Unfortunately for Czerny, his trigger finger was delayed by two perplexing observations about his opponent: his rubber Teddy Roosevelt mask and the fact that he’d aimed nothing but his bare palm. For a crucial split second, Czerny took it as a stop sign, a call for mercy to the man with the upper hand. It wasn’t.
A tempic tendril burst from the stranger’s fingers, snaking ten feet up the stairwell and embedding itself in Czerny’s gut. The physicist screamed as the Roosevelt Man twisted his thoughts, causing the engorged end of the projectile to expand and bloom thorns.
Half-blind with agony, Czerny raised the electron chaser in his hand and fired.
Temporis and electricity had a complex relationship. While one could be used to generate the other, electric current proved stubborn to most forms of temporal manipulation. It couldn’t be advanced, reversed, sped up, or slowed down. It could, however, be steered through the air with laser precision, a development that made power cables a thing of the past. It also allowed for some interesting new weapons.
The moment the invisible bolt struck the Roosevelt Man, his tempic tendril disappeared and he stumbled backward over the railing. He fell nine feet, cracking his skull on the reception desk before crumpling into a motionless heap on the marble.
Czerny dropped the chaser and examined his bleeding stomach. He knew from battlefield experience that abdominal wounds, while painful, were typically slow to kill. With the proper triage, he’d have hours to get himself to a reviver.
His legs grew weak. He teetered backward. In his feeble attempt to gain balance, his heel slipped on a patch of his own blood.
He went down again.
—
The Motorcycle Man moved faster than Hannah. He gained yards on her every time she looked back.
Their high-speed foot chase took them past the front of the building. As soon as Hannah passed the entrance, she felt the man’s cool glove on the strap of her shirt. He’d been running too fast to swing his katana. His goal now was to pull her down.
Frenzied, Hannah broke to the left, toward the green van parked in the driveway. She spied a pair of heavy boots on the far side of the vehicle, toes pointed upward. Beyond them, Erin’s freckled arms lay pro
ne on the asphalt.
The last working piston in Hannah’s brain registered the sight as two dead Salgados, until she turned the corner around the van and saw just one woman in two places.
Suddenly her mind and limbs all quit in synch. She fell to the lawn.
The actress wriggled away on her stomach, gasping in panic. The Motorcycle Man de-shifted and approached her at a leisurely pace. His sword swayed idly in his grip.
Hannah flipped over and scuttled backward out of his shadow. “Why are you doing this? What did I do to you?”
The Motorcycle Man stood over her, pointing his blade at her stomach. All he had to do was lean in and she’d be impaled through the gut, stabbed on the grass like park litter.
It was at that moment that Hannah discovered something hard beneath her. As the Motorcycle Man leaned into his stab, she screamed into velocity. She rolled over, grabbed the rock from the grass, and then hurled it with all her strength.
It flew from her hand at 205 miles an hour and careened off her aggressor’s helmet. The visor cracked. His balance teetered. He toppled back to the grass.
Hannah climbed to her feet and lunged toward him in a furious streak, thumping his chest as he made his slow-motion fall.
“You asshole! You killed her! You cut her to pieces!”
Hannah hit him five times before he collided with the ground. On her final punch, she felt something snap inside his rib cage. She chucked his sword over the gate and then watched him writhe from a safe distance. She knew she should go inside and check on the others, but she couldn’t seem to work her muscles. A cruel little voice in her head insisted that the people she cared about were already gone. Everyone dies, Hannah. You should know that by now. Every friend. Every sister. Everyone under the sky.
The actress crumpled to her knees at the base of the fence. She wept at high speed.
—
Mia cursed her future self for not teaching her the security console. In her frantic button-mashing, she’d somehow constrained her surveillance images to the second-floor cameras—six in test labs, two in the hallway, one in Theo’s room. The former prodigy was awake and fully dressed. He nervously paced the rug with a wooden post in his hand, a leg he’d unscrewed from his desk chair. He’d been on high alert since 5 A.M. without having any idea why.
Through the monitors, Mia saw a very good reason for him to be scared.
A bald-headed gunman patrolled the hallway at a methodical pace, as if sniffing for prey. Though Mia couldn’t tell his height from her bird’s-eye vantage, he carried the thick frame of a wrestler. His sleeveless black T-shirt advertised every bulge of his powerful arms. His face was concealed by a bandana mask and sunglasses.
Mia didn’t know if he was moving farther or closer to Theo. All she could see was that his revolver looked powerful enough to shoot through walls.
For the third time, she grabbed the public address microphone and furiously hit its buttons.
“Theo? Theo, can you hear me?”
He kept pacing, oblivious. Mia cursed again.
The intruder suddenly ducked into a lab. He placed his back against the wall, aiming a vigilant gaze through the door crack. He was ambushing someone. Who?
On the second hallway monitor, Zack popped into view. Mia blanched.
“Oh my God . . .”
—
The cartoonist stepped off the landing with a listless yawn. He wasn’t fully awake yet, and he was nervous about all the wrong things. His mind was still trying to predict Quint’s next move.
He saw the door to Quint’s office and fought the temptation to reverse the lock. Maybe his parting cash was already in there. Or maybe he would find some smoking-gun evidence that would convince the others to leave with him. The closer Zack got to his departure with Theo, the worse he felt about splintering the group.
Sighing, he abandoned his burglary scheme. Odds were slim he’d find anything useful in there. And knowing Quint, he probably trained his mice to attack.
He continued down the hall, glancing in perplexity at the many unmarked doors. He cupped his hands around his mouth and projected his voice.
“Uh, hey, Theo? It’s Zack. Just thought I’d play fire marshal and see if you’re okay. The thing is, I don’t know which room is yours. Can you give me a yell? Or better yet, come out?”
After ten more seconds and two more calls, Zack reeled with fresh unease. Three of his friends seemed to be missing in action. Half my world’s population, he bleakly mused.
“Okay, Theo, I’m at orange alert now. Last chance to speak up before I get twitchy.”
Theo kept his back to his door, his face trembling. He couldn’t bring himself to move. His higher functions and lower instincts seemed united in the fear that Zack would die if he made a sound.
Frustrated, Zack began testing locked doors. He soon noticed one that was open a crack.
As he touched the knob, a tinny squeal filled the building, loud enough to make him wince. Mia’s high voice blared down from the ceiling.
“—AWAY FROM THERE! THERE’S A GUY WITH A GUN IN THERE! ZACK!”
The door flung open. A large man shoved Zack across the corridor, pinning him against the elevator doors. Hot air escaped his lungs.
The intruder pressed his gun to Zack’s temple. Mia screamed through the speakers.
“NO! I ALREADY CALLED THE POLICE! THEY’LL BE HERE ANY SECOND!”
The man kept his gaze and his muzzle fixed. He spoke in a deep graveled voice, peppered with the unmistakable inflections of a native New Yorker.
“Would you please do something about the girl?”
Zack shook his head. “I don’t know what you want me to—”
“I wasn’t talking to you.”
Zack could see a small microphone clipped to the man’s collar.
Mia debated extending her bluff. In truth, she had no luck reaching anyone on the phone. The concepts of 0 and 911 were purely old-America. There were no signs, no stickies, no wisdom again from Future Mia on how to reach the authorities.
She suddenly felt a deep chill on her skin. She saw the steam of her own breath. Mia turned around, just as the door to the security room grew white with frost. It creaked. It splintered.
—
The moment the gun touched his skin, Zack lost his foothold on time. He existed in a breathless state of suspension, in which every sensation and detail was exponentially magnified. He could feel each bead of sweat on his skin, count every peach-fuzz hair on the scalp of his assailant. He could see through the man’s sunglasses, into his dark brown eyes. Early thirties. Italian. Maybe Jewish. Doesn’t look crazy. Doesn’t even look angry.
For all his hyperclarity, Zack couldn’t reach the trigger to his own special weapon. His weirdness rested deep on the other side of his mind, behind a cyclone of fearful distraction. He didn’t want to die here. Not like this. Not without knowing why.
“Who are you? Why are you doing this?”
Without taking his eyes off Zack, the large man fired his gun at two different parts of the ceiling. Zack grimaced at the booming gunshots, then noticed the new glass fragments on the floor.
He shot the cameras. He shot both cameras without even looking.
The gunman pulled down his bandana. He had a wide and bumpy nose that had clearly been broken more than once, plus several tiny scars along his cheeks and chin. Zack could only guess that he’d been picking fights from the moment he left the crib.
“Folks call me Rebel, but that doesn’t matter. All you need to know is that this is my world and you ripped a hole in it.”
Zack spotted a hint of movement in the corner of his vision. He fought to keep his gaze on Rebel. “You think it was my choice to come here?”
“Doesn’t matter either. The longer you people live, the worse the problem gets. I’ve seen the future, brother. I’ll
do whatever it takes to stop it from happening.”
He pressed the gun to Zack’s chest. What was once a cool muzzle now burned like a stove.
“No!” Zack yelled. “Just go! Go!”
“Sorry. This is how it’s gotta be.”
Zack wasn’t talking to Rebel. Ten feet away, Theo continued his sneaking approach. He’d crept out of his room, chair leg in hand, then deftly skirted the broken glass on the floor.
Sadly, none of his stealth mattered. The moment he got within eight feet of Rebel, the man’s muscular arm swung like a hinge.
He shot Theo without even looking.
—
Five seconds and fifty-one degrees ago, the microphone dropped from Mia’s numb fingers. It crashed at her feet, among the shards of Eric Salgado’s coffee mug.
She knew exactly how he died now.
A gloved fist struck the door, knocking away a frozen patch of wood. The blonde in the hall was barely an inch taller than Mia. The lines around her sharp blue eyes revealed her as an older woman. Mia could see from her thick white parka that she was also much, much warmer.
She registered Mia through a wide, unblinking stare. “God. You really are just a kid.”
Mia desperately scanned her memory, trying to recall the note she’d received about the Winter Blonde. Her future self had given her the woman’s full name and advised Mia to use it as a stalling tactic. For the life of her, she couldn’t remember it now.
“I didn’t do anything to you! Please don’t kill me!”
The blonde’s voice cracked with anguish. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to do this. But I have a daughter your age. She has to live.”
“What does that have to do with me?”
“I’m afraid it has everything to do with you. All of you. I’m so sorry. There’s no other option.”
The blonde took a step back. Thick tears ran under her mask.
“This’ll be quick. I promise.”
As Mia felt her entire future whittle down to milliseconds, she closed her eyes and thought about her family. If there was truly justice in the multiverse, then she would travel back across the great divide and rest in the afterlife with her dad, her brothers, and Nana. She didn’t want to end up in this world’s Heaven, where she’d only know one or two Salgados.