Chrono Spasm

by James Axler

  “When was that?” Mildred asked. She sat wrapped in a blanket now, the color coming back to her cheeks.

  The rugged ex-fisherman shook his head. “It’s so hard to tell,” he admitted. “Time here has no meaning.”

  As he oiled his blaster, J.B. asked about the moving corpses they had discovered in the mess hall.

  “We call them Wakers,” Graz told him. “Dead people. We avoid them.”

  “Where do they come from?” J.B. asked.

  “Time’s in flux here,” Piotr told him, “in case you didn’t notice. We figure the Wakers get caught up in time’s dilation and bounced from wherever they were to here. Like echoes.”

  “Are the Wakers always dead like that?” Mildred asked him.

  “We’ve never seen a live one,” Piotr confirmed.

  “And we’ve seen a lot of them,” Marla added. “End Day throws up a lot of repetition.”

  Mildred looked pensive. “End Day,” she said. “What does it mean?”

  “It’s a day without end,” Marla said. “Time’s glitching and twitching here but it never seems to go forward.”

  “Time travel experiments...?” J.B. mused.

  “I didn’t say that,” Marla corrected.

  “You didn’t have to,” J.B. told her. “But this kind of hubbub could very likely be the result of someone experimenting with forces they oughtn’t to. Time travel and shit.”

  “And Doc’s been acting weird ever since we got here,” Mildred said in realization. “J.B., you don’t think...?”

  J.B. nodded solemnly. “Someone’s jazzing with the time stream. Whatever they’ve done, it’s going way off course. This place is evidence of that. I’m figuring this whole pesthole is the fallout of an experiment gone wrong.”

  “It’s still going wrong,” Graz said miserably. “The bubble expands and the crows’ numbers are getting higher. They’re feeding off every iota of displaced time.”

  “You ever seen what these crows of yours do to a person?” J.B. asked.

  “Once,” Graz told him. “They strip a man to his essence, leaving nothing but a trailing spume of soul.”

  * * *

  PLACING THE ANIMAL CAGE before Ryan, Doc and Krysty, its four bearers stepped back, taking up positions at the four corners of the raised dais. Each man had a knife strapped to the belt of his loincloth. Ryan looked from one to the other. They were rugged men with flat faces and wide brows, their flesh blue from cold. Whatever this environment had done to them was inexplicable, but it had left them able to survive the cold to some extent. Their flesh looked thick and blubbery, like the flesh of a seal. They were some kind of muties, Ryan reasoned, who had developed a primitive culture based around the one driving force in their lives—the unchained chronal energies that plagued this tiny region of Alaska.

  The pale-faced minister took a step forward and bent toward the catch on the cage, keeping himself at the same side as the hinges so that the door would swing back to cover him. “The chronovores choose their victims,” he explained. “Once you have been consumed, we are left with your immortal souls, the one thing that cannot be corrupted by time’s influence.”

  “Sounds great,” Ryan told him, “but I think we’ll pass.” With that, the one-eyed man pounced forward, batting aside the thrusting knife blade of his nearest guardian as he reached for the minister’s throat.

  The minister moved fast, too, yanking back the cage door even as Ryan leaped at him. The two men went down in a tangle of limbs, Ryan’s fingers closing around the pale man’s throat as the cage door swung open.

  Behind Ryan, the creature in the cage emerged, leaping at Doc in a clatter of gnashing teeth. And gnashing teeth was all it was. The rest of its body remained bizarrely unseen.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The chronovore rushed through the air in a rage of snapping fangs. Though Doc had been disarmed he still had his swordstick. He drove the ebony cane at the beast, knocking its lower jaw upward in a swift motion. The chronovore’s jaws clashed together with a loud crack, and it seemed to dance in the air for several seconds as it tried to recover.

  Beside Doc, Krysty closed her eyes and began to summon her Gaia power.

  All around them, the surprised congregation was reacting, drawing weapons—knives and clubs—and hurrying to the raised area of the church. To see the sacrifices fight back was sacrilege!

  His hands fixed around the minister’s throat, Ryan saw the congregation rushing toward him. With a grunt of effort, he hefted the minister up and launched him headfirst at the closest of his would-be attackers. The minister shrieked as the crown of his skull slammed into the chest of his blue-fleshed colleague, and both men tumbled to the floor with a crash.

  “Time to move,” Ryan shouted to Doc and Krysty as he got back to his feet. Ahead, the first of the blue-fleshed figures had just reached the stage. Ryan kicked out, driving his boot into the mutie’s face and forcing him back.

  From the back of the stage, the minister’s assistants had drawn their knives and were rushing the strangers. While Doc parried with the chronovore, Krysty turned her attention on the armed assistants. Her red hair crackled around her head and her emerald eyes seemed almost to glow as she channelled the Gaia power, tapping the Earth itself to grant her a brief burst of incredible strength. She slammed into her nearest opponent, driving the heel of her right hand into his face with such force that the mutie’s jaw shattered. But Krysty was already moving on, bringing her elbow up and around in a harsh blow to the next figure’s windpipe. He sagged to the floor, gasping for breath.

  The third guardsman slashed his knife through the air at Krysty’s face. She sidestepped it with ease, bringing her left hand up and striking the mutie’s forearm where he held the knife. The mutie’s arm snapped, forearm bending to an acute angle as he staggered away.

  The power surged through Krysty in enormous waves. It was as if the force was unrestrained now, no longer held back to the constraints of time.

  * * *

  RYAN HAD DEALT with several of the blue-fleshed muties, but it was taking too long. He leaped to the nearest pew and, with long-legged strides, began running across its back, his feet glancing across their crossbars as he swiftly made his way to the rear of the church, avoiding most of his potential attackers.

  Two muties remained in the pews as Ryan hurried past. The first he stepped on, using the head as a springboard to launch himself across the room. The second one Ryan simply kicked hard in the face, driving his boot with such power that the blue man was knocked back into his seat even as he endeavored to stand.

  A moment later, Ryan was at the rear of the church, reaching for his weapons atop the unguarded font. “Sacrifice this,” he snarled, grabbing his SIG-Sauer.

  * * *

  THE CHRONOVORE WEAVED through the air as if sizing Doc up. With a long-practiced move, Doc slipped the sword from its hidden sheath in his walking cane, brandishing the blade with a flourish. The chronovore’s double set of teeth snapped at the air again, foot-long incisors clipping down in a blur of cruel motion. But the out-of-time beast seemed unable to fully focus on Doc, it snapped where he had been or, stranger still, where he would be, Doc realized. As long as he kept moving without retracing his steps, Doc figured he could avoid the strange creature—or, at least, what he could make out of it.

  He stepped aside again and the disembodied mouth swirled in place, bumping back into the wall with the stained-glass window. Doc powered the point of his sword into the creature’s mouth—the only part he could see—forcing it between the thing’s snapping teeth.

  * * *

  EMILY, JOLYON AND RACHEL were already in their chairs. Rachel had made a ribbon for her dolly’s hair, and she was showing it to Doc. “Look, Daddy. Becca’s dressed for church,” Rachel said with childlike glee.

  Doc looked at the doll, the pink ribbon drawn into a bow through her hair. Then he looked at Rachel—beautiful at three years old, having thankfully taken after her mother—and he smiled. �
�I agree. She looks splendid,” Doc said.

  From the doorway of their dining room, Emily Tanner, with her lustrous hair pulled back from her face to reveal her beautiful eyes, entered the room with a fresh-cooked chicken on a covered plate. “Come now, Rachel,” she said, “no toys at the dinner table.”

  Rachel began to whine in complaint, so Doc shot his daughter a conspiratorial wink. “You must do as your mother says,” he told her gently. “There will be ample time to play after dinner.” Then he sniffed the air. “Which smells wonderful.”

  Emily smiled, resplendent even in her apron with her hair tied back from her face for cooking. “Mmm, someone is hoping for seconds,” she said, “before he has even had his firsts.”

  Doc laughed. The roasted chicken did indeed smell wonderful. But there was another smell mixed in with it. One he remembered from a journey he had taken...

  * * *

  FOR A MOMENT, the chronovore swayed there, shimmering in place as Doc’s blade pierced it. And in the center of the church’s raised dais, Doc’s body seemed to glow as he held his sword in the monster’s mouth, swirling energies misting from his form like smoke. He could smell his wife’s roast chicken, the way only she could make. And something else, too—the smell of that terrible journey he had taken through time.

  All around, the blue-skinned clockwatchers had stopped fighting, pausing to admire the spectacle of Doc’s glowing form.

  * * *

  AT THE REAR OF CHURCH, Ryan raised his SIG-Sauer pistol and fired a single shot into the rafters, blasting a great chunk out of one of the stalactites that depended from the ceiling.

  “Nobody move!” he ordered.

  But there was no need. The whole melee had stopped moments before. Rubbing at his bruised head, the white-robed minister led the members of his weird congregation toward where Doc stood over the shimmering remains of the chronovore, his body racked with multicolored energies. For a moment the minister stood and watched the spectacle, an astonished look on his flat face.

  Doc could still see Emily and the dinner table in their home, could still smell the roast. But the church was re-forming before him with the ice-pale figure at the forefront of the congregation, watching Doc with something akin to awe or reverence. At the end of Doc’s sword, the chronovore was dying, its body finally materializing, a ridged wormlike form the color of an overcast sky. Then, to Doc’s surprise, the thing spit forth a rising gout of energy that crackled through the air in a purple-and-blue array like a budding violet. And finally, Doc recognized the smell of the dying chronovore. It was the same smell he had scented before, when he had been shunted through time by the whitecoats of Operation Chronos. It was a smell he had almost forgotten.

  “You chilled it,” the minister said, smiling broadly. “You chilled it, dead.”

  Doc looked up at the pale-faced man, seeing the wonder in his eyes. “I do believe I did,” he remarked. Its dying energies had passed through Doc, toying with the fixed points of time.

  Behind Doc, Krysty had stopped battling with the guards. Only two remained standing, and one of those was clutching the snapped remains of his blade in his blood-drenched hand. Krysty’s bright hair still stood out around her head like a halo of flame, and her body tensed as she tried to hold back the incredible power surging through it.

  “You have done the impossible,” the minister said before bowing before Doc on one bended knee. “You are a man without time.”

  From the font at the back of the church, Ryan could only stand in wonder at what he saw. Somehow, Doc had outmaneuvered something these people considered impossible to outmaneuver. And in so doing he had become something akin to their savior. But what was happening to Krysty?

  * * *

  THE CLOCKWATCHERS let Doc and his friends go, accompanying them to the edge of the icy river. They would find the source of the disruption there, the minister told Doc, where the great bird had died in the ice.

  Utterly bemused, Doc thanked them for their aid and he, Ryan and Krysty watched as the blue-skinned muties returned to their hiding places beneath the snow, back to hibernation until their next unwary prey awakened them.

  “What in the nuking hell did we walk into?” Ryan asked when the last of the figures was finally out of earshot.

  “A self-contained area with its own ecology and social systems,” Doc said, watching the blue figures depart. “Everything here is new and different. But I will tell you this—whatever is happening here, I have grave suspicions it involves experimentation with the forces of time.”

  “You were glowing like a radzone, Doc,” Ryan said. “You all right now?”

  Doc nodded. “I...have a lot to consider.” Things had been moving so fast he had yet to really process what it was he had experienced when he stabbed the time eater.

  “Stay alert. We aren’t out of the woods yet,” Ryan said, glancing over to Krysty. The red-haired woman stood a few paces from the men, her prehensile hair still poised about her head as if she were being jolted with electricity.

  “Krysty, are you okay?” Ryan asked.

  “The power of the Earth is still churning inside me,” Krysty explained. “It’s never been like this before. It won’t subside.”

  “Is that so bad?” Ryan asked.

  “Not now,” Krysty said, “but what happens when it does fade? A burst of power like this could chill me, Ryan.”

  Ryan reached forward, placing both his hands very gently over Krysty’s. “I’ll be here for you.”

  Doc stepped away, granting the two some privacy while he pondered what had happened in the church. He was a time traveler, although that term suggested he had done so of his own volition or that he could do so again at will, and that certainly wasn’t the case. But for an instant there, while the chronovore’s energies raced along the metal of his swordstick, Doc had leaped back in time to a meal he couldn’t even remember. How many times had Rachel brought one of her dolls to the table? How many times had he eaten Emily’s roasted chicken? No man could be expected to recall every meal, every familial conversation.

  But there had been something about the vision, if that indeed was what it was. Doc had the distinct impression that the chronovore’s energies had sent him back through time, albeit just for a moment. When you open up the belly of a beast, you’ll smell part-digested food. In piercing the chronovore, could it be that Doc had smelled the scent of that creature’s last meal—the smell of fractured time?

  He was a man displaced in time and this region seemed somehow unhinged from time, too. Could there be a connection? Doc stood beside the icy water’s edge at the riverbank and wondered if, somehow, this place held the key to his return home to the 1800s and the family that loved him.

  “My dear Emily,” Doc said, shaking his head, “please let this be the miracle we’ve hoped for.”

  Without a sound, something emerged from the icy water, whipping around Doc’s ankle in a second. “What the deuce—?” Doc gasped, and then the thing pulled him down. Ryan and Krysty turned as Doc disappeared beneath the surface.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  “Doc!” Ryan shouted. “Doc!” He was hurrying along the edge of the icy stream, his SIG-Sauer poised to shoot anything that emerged from the water, his Steyr longblaster slapping angrily against his back like the Grim Reaper’s scythe.

  The water churned for a moment before settling. There was no sign of Doc in its fast-flowing depths, as thick chunks of ice bobbed along the surface obscuring almost everything.

  “Fireblast!” Ryan cursed, bringing up his blaster. “It’s moving too quick. Doc could be anywhere by now.”

  “Did you see what it was?” Krysty asked. She, too, had her blaster in her hand. She scoured the water with narrowed eyes.

  “Saw it for less than a second,” Ryan admitted. “Looked like a tentacle, gray and rubbery.”

  “Octopus?” Krysty suggested. “Squid? Kraken? What could live down there, amid the ice?”

  Ryan shook his head, his eye still
fixed on the churning river of ice. “I don’t know, but if Doc doesn’t reappear quick he’ll freeze to death.”

  * * *

  BENEATH THE WATER, Doc felt a cold so intense that it was like the wrong side of the grave. His eyes burned when he opened them—he had closed them automatically when he had first struck the water—the temperature of the water was so low.

  He was moving. Everything around him was churning, great white slabs of ice rushing past him as he was dragged along the riverbed. The water itself was clear and cold. He was spinning so violently that it was hard to gather his thoughts, hard to make sense of anything. The stones of the riverbed loomed into view for a moment before rushing away, like some manic fairground ride.

  Automatically, Doc’s hand reached for the LeMat blaster he wore at his hip, yanking it free of its holster.

  For scant seconds, Doc’s mind raced, hurrying to piece everything together.

  This much he knew for certain: he was dragging behind something, being pulled feetfirst. Or footfirst, more accurately, for the thing had snatched him by his left ankle, leaving one leg wavering in the freezing waters as he was dragged deeper into the river. Doc spun as he was pulled ahead, the LeMat almost slipping from his grasp as he tried desperately to bring it up to target this predator.

  The thing was swimming beneath the great floes of ice like a guided missile, pulling Doc along in its wake as it plunged toward its unknowable destination.

  Momentarily, Doc caught sight of the creature’s bulk, a dark shape in the water above—was it above?—him. He snatched at the LeMat’s trigger, sending a .44 slug into the belly of the creature, whatever the hell it was.

  In the freezing water, the blaster’s report sounded like an undersea quake, the sound carrying in a muffled kind of echo. All around him, blisterlike bubbles blurted to the surface as the shell was expelled.