Chrono Spasm

by James Axler

  J.B. turned away from it, batting away the grasping hand of another corpse, sending a short burst of fire at another attacker. As he did so he spotted Mildred and Nyarla still crouched in the lobby. “Move,” J.B. shouted. “Get her out of here.”

  Mildred glanced back at the door. J.B. was right—they had promised to protect the young woman. But Mildred was reluctant to leave J.B. behind.

  “No way. We’re doing this together, cowboy,” Mildred shouted as she darted into the room, her Czech-made ZKR 551 pistol spitting bullets at the deathly soldiers.

  J.B. had no time to react. He was already disappearing beneath a mob of long-dead people.

  * * *

  SYMON TURNED to Piotr and the others in the hovel they shared. “I heard a blaster,” he said.

  Outside, the chronovores had dissipated, leaving a great chasm where they had eaten displaced chronal energy from the very atmosphere.

  “I heard it, too,” Marla said. She was playing solitaire with a deck of cards, teaching the simple game to Symon’s daughter.

  Piotr grabbed his climbing gear, cinching the rope around his middle and looping it over his shoulder while Graz checked their blasters. “We’ll check it out,” he said. “You stay here, where it’s safe.”

  “No.” Symon shook his head. “My other daughter could be out there. She would follow us if she could.”

  Piotr nodded. “Then pray she is not the one being shot at.”

  * * *

  RYAN, KRYSTY AND Doc continued downslope toward the icy river and the distant lightning storm. The snow was falling in spots, swimming through the air like a shoal of fish.

  As they descended the gentle slope, Krysty’s foot snagged on something and she dropped to her knees.

  “Krysty?” Ryan asked, turning back.

  “I’m okay,” Krysty began. “I must have—”

  But when she looked back, Krysty saw something reaching through the ground, grasping for her foot where she kneeled. Snow fell from the creature’s limbs as it emerged from the icy soil—its twin arms a hideous blue like a long-dead corpse.

  “Get back,” Ryan shouted, whipping his SIG-Sauer blaster from its holster in an instant. Beside him, Doc was reaching for his own weapon.

  Krysty scrambled across the snow on hands and knees, urging herself out of the path of the grasping thing. Ryan stepped forward, bringing his weapon to bear as the thing emerged from the ground, its head and chest following the hands in a tumble of caked snow. It looked human—or at least semihuman—naked with bloated blue skin. Utterly hairless, the creature had wide-set, bloodshot eyes in a flat face. From a pace away, Ryan stroked the SIG-Sauer’s trigger, sending a single Parabellum bullet through the thing’s forehead, right between those blood-red eyes.

  Caught in the tunnel it had channeled through the snow, the creature just swayed in place, its head lolling on its shoulders, a single black hole marking the kill shot.

  Ryan didn’t know what it was; it reminded him mostly of corpses left too long above the ground.

  “Looks rather like it was already dead,” Doc said helpfully.

  Ryan nodded. “Dead but alive,” he said. “Whatever’s going on here, it’s—”

  “Beyond reasoning?” Doc suggested as Krysty wiped the snow from her clothes.

  Ryan nodded his agreement. “Let’s keep moving. And keep our eyes open. There could be more of these things under the surface.”

  There were. As the companions jogged down the slope, the ground beneath them burst open and another blue-gray figure emerged, followed by another. A whole community of the molelike things appeared drawn by the movement above their home.

  Ryan watched as another creature burst from the ground a dozen yards ahead of them like some demented jack-in-the-box, snow falling from its naked body. Without slowing, Ryan aimed and fired, shooting the thing on the run. Beside him, Krysty and Doc were picking off the creatures even as they emerged, the crack of their gunshots echoing across the snowy ground.

  * * *

  IN THE MESS HALL, Mildred scrambled across a table and dived toward the scrum that had descended on J.B. Her blaster fired shot after shot, each bullet taking chunks out of the skulls of the nearest corpses. One corpse turned as Mildred’s latest bullet ripped a wound across the left-hand half of its skull, peering at her with its remaining sunken white eyeball, its lips peeled back in a sneer.

  Mildred squeezed the trigger again, sending another bullet into the dead thing’s face, leaving little more than a stump of neck and a jawbone in its wake. The man-thing toppled back, doing a spastic death dance as it crashed into a table. Plates and cutlery careened from the table, spilling their dried-up contents to the floor in a clatter.

  The animated corpses were beginning to react to Mildred’s presence now, a whole gaggle of them turning to face her, striding down the aisles between the tables, knocking chairs over in their wake.

  “Okay,” Mildred told herself as she pumped the trigger of the ZKR, “bad move.”

  A moment later, like J.B. before her, Mildred felt herself fall beneath the weight of the animated corpses.

  Nyarla watched helplessly as Mildred and J.B. disappeared beneath the mob of living death. She had a blaster on her and a knife but she knew it wouldn’t be enough, knew there was no sense in getting herself chilled, too.

  She turned, shoved the freezing door open and stepped back out into the falling snow. Wasn’t that what Mildred had told her to do?

  * * *

  THE SNOW-COVERED slope was coming apart as more of the blue-skinned figures emerged from their hiding places beneath the ground. Ryan, Krysty and Doc kept running, their legs pumping as they hurried down the slope at breakneck speed. Up ahead, Ryan saw another blue-fleshed hand reaching up through a parting in the snow and he leapt over it, shouting out an alert to the others.

  Behind Ryan, Krysty swerved to avoid the reaching hand while Doc ran straight for it, driving the end of his swordstick down into the wriggling fingers. Something cried beneath the snow and the hand went limp.

  Doc ran on, hurrying after his two companions. They were already obscured by the falling snow and mists that clouded the area. Doc stepped up his pace.

  Up ahead, Ryan came to an abrupt halt as his ankles caught against something, sending him head over heels before crashing down hard in the snow. A few paces behind him, Krysty slowed, looking for what it was that had tripped her lover. As she did so, she heard the whiz of displaced air and something cinched around her neck—a bolo, two weights at opposite ends of a cord. She, too, went down in a tumble of limbs, the .38 Smith & Wesson spiraling out of her grasp.

  “Doc?” Ryan called, pushing himself up from where he was sprawled on the ground. A thin white wire had been stretched taut between two tree stumps, he saw now, wide-spaced and perfectly camouflaged in the snow. It was this that had tripped him and sent him flying, a trap that could have been left weeks before by the hibernating blue things.

  He turned, calling again for Doc. As he did so he saw the figures emerging from the curtain of falling snow, five in total, each with the blue flesh of a frozen corpse. Some wore loincloths and had carved tattoos across their flesh, bloodshot eyes peering from their ugly, hairless faces. They were some version of human, Ryan saw, but had become so far removed from humanity that they were barely recognizable. Muties.

  Ryan raised his blaster, but as he did so a sixth figure appeared, blue-fleshed like the others...and this one held Doc in a death grip, a curved blade held against the old man’s throat.

  “I am sorry, Ryan,” Doc gasped. “They came at me from all sides at once.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Nyarla had taken only a few steps from the mess hall when she spotted the figures moving toward her. There were five of them trekking across the snow, bundled up in material and furs, each one wielding a firearm. Snow fell all about them, billowing in the icy wind.

  “We heard blasterfire,” the lead figure called. His voice was heavily accented, like
Nyarla’s own.

  “My friends—” she said breathlessly. “We were trying to shelter from the storm and—”

  “Nyarla?” another of the figures called. “You made it?”

  “Papa?” Nyarla asked timidly. Her gaze swept across the mismatched group, searching for a familiar face. They were so bundled up it was hard to even tell who had spoken.

  One of the well-wrapped figures hurried the last few paces in the snow, rushing to take Nyarla in his arms. A shorter figure traipsed through the snow beside him, and Nyarla realized it was her sister Tarelya.

  “You’re alive,” Symon Vrack cried. “My goodness, child—you made it!”

  Nyarla looked from her father to the others. They had halted at the lip of the slope that led down to the mess hall doors.

  “You must help my friends,” Nyarla hastily explained. “We tried to shelter, but there were dead people inside and they came back to life. My friends are still in there.”

  “Wakers,” Graz said, spitting the word out like a curse.

  Piotr and his allies didn’t hesitate. They scrambled down the slope and through the doors of the mess hall. They slammed open the doors and surveyed the scene within.

  Over forty figures in drab olive uniforms were piling around the center of the mess hall amid the strewed remains of tables and chairs. Mildred and J.B. struggled beneath them, but it was like swimming against a strong tide—for each corpse they shifted another took its place.

  Piotr, Graz and Marla charged into the room, pulling a rope from the possessions they wore strapped about their thick clothing. “Surround and drag them,” Piotr instructed. “Swift as air now.”

  Graz had one end of the rope and he whipped it over the heads of three moving corpses from behind. The corpses seemed only now to become aware of the newcomers and they turned to face Graz and the others. With Piotr securing the far end of the rope, Graz yanked the other, snapping the rope like a whip and dropping the three corpses to the floor. Nearby, Marla was using her own climbing gear to similar effect.

  From somewhere amid the pile of moving figures a blaster rang out, its death song echoing around the mess hall. A second later, J.B. was standing, gasping as corpses were dragged away by Piotr and his team. “Need air,” he muttered. “Need to breathe.”

  Mildred emerged a moment later as more of the corpses were snagged by the ropes and drawn away.

  “You people alive? Need help, yeah?” Piotr called across the room.

  J.B. nodded. Now just who the hell was this guy? he thought.

  “Get to the doors,” Piotr commanded. “Run and don’t look back. We’ll hold them off until you’re safe.”

  “You need help?” J.B. asked as he sent another burst of semiauto fire into his nearest opponents.

  “We have this one, friend,” Piotr told him. “Go. Git.”

  Living corpses plunging to the floor all about them, J.B. and Mildred ran for the doors.

  * * *

  “THERE WAS NOTHING I could do,” Doc explained. Along with Ryan and Krysty, he had been disarmed and taken to one of the tumbledown buildings down the slope, close to the river where great chunks of ice shuddered on the current.

  Standing next to him, Ryan shook his head once in understanding. “Ambushed twice in almost as many days,” he stated. “We’re getting soft.”

  “No, we’re tired,” Krysty said, correcting Ryan’s assumption. “We’ve been running too long.”

  The three companions were marched under armed guard into the main room of a vast old church dating back to predark times. The church was simple inside, with wooden walls and a large stained-glass window showing an abstract, modernist design. The design was of a large white circle like the sun, around which someone had carved numerals, like the numbers on a clock dial. Close up, the window appeared to have been patched together from two or more. There had been other windows once, but they were now covered with metal sheeting. Ryan and his companions eyed the sheeting and the remaining window warily, alert for possible exits. There were several doors, including the main one—a double door—through which they had entered.

  The walls of the church dripped clear water and when the companions looked overhead they saw stalactites had formed in the rafters, great pointing struts like sharks’ teeth aimed down toward the church’s congregation. The air felt sullen with the cold, each breath expelled in a great plume of misty water vapor.

  The blue-fleshed muties who had captured them had been joined by a dozen or so more figures, and all of them went shuffling to their places in the pews while Ryan, Doc and Krysty were led to the front of the church. Two figures stood behind the companions, brutal-looking knives in their blue hands, their bare flesh looking like something that had died too soon. The companions’ own weaponry had been laid out across the church font at the rear of the room, like some strange offering to the gods of war.

  The captives were made to wait in silence until a figure wearing a hooded white robe emerged from one of the side doors. Beneath the robe he had pale skin like the others, but his flesh was more of a gray-white than the dramatic blue that so many of the congregation sported.

  “You are honored, brothers and sister,” the hooded figure said as he strode up the steps toward Ryan and his companions. His voice was accented with a lisp that made him hiss like a snake. “You have come at the ideal time.”

  “Do tell,” Ryan growled in a tone dripping with sarcasm.

  The robed figure pushed back his hood to reveal a pale, bald head carved with intricate designs that turned his features into those of the dial of an old-fashioned timepiece, his eyes become the three and nine of the clock’s face. Though his skin was whiter than the others’, his eyes displayed that same red-ringed ferocity, as if he had been in the cold for too long. “Time is loose here,” the man explained, “freed from the bonds of Swiss precision, left to idle its own path.

  “Once time tamed man,” the pale figure continued, addressing his eager congregation, “but now we have been freed from its cloying grip. We, the clockwatchers, shall instead tame time.”

  At the front of the church, Krysty leaned over and whispered to Doc and Ryan, “What the hell is he talking about?”

  “Beats me,” Ryan admitted, “but he wouldn’t be the first whacko we’ve had to chill.”

  “Once, time followed a straight path,” the minister continued, “circling the same points of sunrise and sunset. But after the great change, once End Day came, we were left to shape time in new ways. With our mastery shall come dominion of all of history—past, present and future. We need only become one with the chronal energies in flux, imbibe them and so become beings who sit outside time’s stream.”

  The congregation was warming to its leader’s words. They were the only things that were warming in the great church space—the minister’s breath could be seen clouding the air with every word, and slowly melting ice dripped like some awful rhythm section to his speech.

  “But the chronovores amass to consume our bounty,” the minister cried, “and their numbers double at every turn. The crows must be appeased.”

  The congregation took up this chant, cheering and applauding. “Appease the crows! Appease the crows!” they howled.

  Ryan spoke to Krysty from the corner of his mouth. “I’m not liking where this is going.”

  “I’m guessing this is the part where we get sacrificed,” Krysty replied.

  Four more blue-fleshed muties strode through the same side door where the minister had appeared, balancing a large cage between them. The boxy cage had wire mesh sides and was obviously used to contain an animal. Something was moving inside, bashing against the cage walls with such fury that the bearers were having trouble keeping it upright.

  The minister turned back to the three figures on stage, a wicked glint in his eye. “You shall be fed to the chronovores,” he commanded, “and in the aftermath we shall absorb their expulsions and become time’s arrows, the promised children of Old Father Time.”

&
nbsp; Ryan gave Krysty a sideways look.

  “Nailed it,” she told him.

  * * *

  PIOTR AND HIS ALLIES had locked the mess hall doors. “They won’t follow,” Marla explained. “The force that animates them won’t reach far enough.”

  J.B. accepted that on faith. These people seemed competent and experienced, and they had dealt with the creatures swiftly and decisively. It seemed the trick was not to try to kill them—how did a person kill the dead, anyway? No, the secret was to restrain them.

  “You know what those things were?” Mildred asked.

  “Yes,” Piotr told her. “End Day produces a lot of...curiosities. They take strategy to stop. We’ve had some practice. You couldn’t have known.”

  J.B. and Mildred were relieved to see Nyarla had been reunited with her family. They had entered His Ink Orchard to find Symon Vrack and his other daughter, but it seemed that Symon had instead found them, along with the group of survivors, drawn by the gunshots.

  “Piotr kept us alive,” Symon told J.B. and Mildred after he had been introduced. “But I understand I have you to thank for doing the same for my dear Nyarla.”

  “Little of both, really,” J.B. said, downplaying his role. “Your daughter’s smart, thinks quick when her ass is backed against the wall.”

  They trekked across the unforgiving landscape to the clutch of buildings where Piotr and his allies had made their home. The disconcerting mouths of the chronovores snapped at unleashed energies in the distance, the noise of their feast like a swamp cricket rubbing its legs. J.B. checked over his shoulder, watching for the corpses and the things that Piotr and his team referred to as crows.

  “You’ll be safe here,” Marla assured J.B. and Mildred, leading them inside the supermarket building that they had made into their base.

  “Those things out there—” J.B. indicated the feasting chronovores “—they look hungry.”

  “We’re all hungry,” Marla told him. “No way to change that on End Day.”

  Within the building was cold and dark, but at least the walls kept the wind at bay. That was something, J.B. concluded. Together, the group sat around a pockmarked wooden garden set and introduced themselves. Symon explained how he and Tarelya, his younger daughter, had been caught in the snows beyond the barrier of the Tall Wall, and how this team had rescued them.