Chrono Spasm

by James Axler

  A set of double doors waited at the end of the corridor, painted in yellow and black stripes with a red plaque at their center. Noises issued from beyond the doors, the crackling sounds of sparking electricity. Doc stopped before the doors, turning back to face Ryan and Krysty, his face taut with determination.

  “I can sense my Emily as if she were waiting around the very next corner,” Doc told them. “What if the Chronos people brought her here? What if she has been waiting for me all this time?”

  Ryan looked at his friend, feeling his dilemma as if it was his own. He had been with Doc for several years now, and in that time he had lost other friends, even lost his own son, Dean. To prevent the old man finding out what lay behind the door would be cruel.

  “Keep your blaster ready,” Ryan said, turning from Doc to Krysty. “Both of you.” He raised the SIG-Sauer in his own hands, taking a step back from the doors and targeting them over Doc’s shoulder. “Go ahead, Doc. We’ll follow.”

  Warily, Doc pushed at the double doors, slipping between them with Krysty and Ryan a step behind him, their blasters poised. They found themselves on a railed catwalk overlooking a vast control area filled with sparking machinery and flashing comp screens. The machinery of the operations center was arranged along three walls of the room in the middle of which stood the figure garbed in a thick radiation suit made of bright yellow fabric. The figure’s protective hood hid his features behind a plate of tinted plastic.

  “Who—?” Doc began and stopped himself.

  The lone figure on the deck below turned to face them. “Come in,” he said, “fellow traveler.”

  Gingerly, Doc strode down the metal steps of the room with his companions just a few paces behind him. Reaching the floor below, the team saw two familiar people—Jak and Ricky—bound hand and foot against the jutting machinery that lined the wall beneath the stairs.

  “Those are my friends,” Doc said without hesitation. “We are here to—”

  “Rescue them?” the hooded figure suggested. “No, perhaps these others came for that, but you came here for something else. You heard my call, didn’t you—brother?”

  * * *

  J.B. AND MILDRED joined Piotr, Marla and Graz as they stormed outside to face the swarming cloud of chronovores.

  “Looks like your End Day is finally coming to its end,” J.B. remarked as the dark swarm oozed toward them across the darkened sky.

  The swarm was made up of hundreds upon hundreds of shining teeth, each one a foot long and as sharp as a knife. Behind those gnashing teeth, the chronovores were beginning to take shape, great snaking bodies that wound in and out of existence, curling through time itself.

  “We can’t fight these things, John,” Mildred insisted. “Look at them.”

  J.B. eyed the approaching cloud as the locustlike creatures began to eat through the rogue energies of the Operation Chronos facility. “Then we’ll die the way we lived,” he told Mildred, “fighting for our lives every step of the way.”

  Mildred and J.B. hunkered down as the cloud of time-eating monsters swarmed toward the buildings, chomping great swathes of reality out of existence, leaving nothing but the bubbling wounds of shattered time in their wake.

  * * *

  “BROTHER?” DOC SHOT back. “What are you talking about?”

  “They dragged us through time,” the yellow-suited figure replied angrily. “Placed us here in the desolate future against our will. When I stepped out of the time window, I couldn’t even remember my name—can you believe that?”

  Doc nodded. His own journey through time had been so traumatic that he had physically aged more than thirty years, and his mind had been almost broken, his memories like a jigsaw puzzle that he had slowly pieced back together. “Who are you?” Doc asked.

  “My name was Don Nectar,” the man in the radiation suit said. “That was the best I could remember of it.

  “The men in white lab coats launched me here like a firework, blasting me through time,” Nectar continued. “I staggered from this facility into the cold out there and I could barely stand, so much of me had broken away in the time stream.”

  “You lost bits of yourself?”

  While Doc kept Nectar’s attention, Ryan and Krysty took the opportunity to check on Jak and Ricky where they had been affixed to the wall by insulation tape. They were unconscious but still breathing. “Jak?” Ryan whispered. “Come on, snap out of it.”

  Jak’s eyelids flickered for a moment. Beneath them, Ryan saw the albino’s familiar ruby orbs but he seemed unable to focus. Whatever had happened here, he had taken a punishing blow to the skull.

  A few steps away Krysty was reaching the same conclusion with Ricky. Her own body still rocked with the Gaia power, her hair tangling and untangling with phantom energy.

  “I have strived all these years to find the way back home,” Nectar told Doc.

  “I...” Doc began uncertainly. “I don’t understand.”

  Nectar took a step away from his equipment, his tether line swaying as it spooled out from the machinery. “This place is a backup facility for Operation Chronos. You remember Operation Chronos, don’t you?”

  Doc nodded. “I suspected as much as soon as I entered,” he admitted.

  “We came through time together, but while you lived your life I was stuck, tethered here like a shade, unable to function,” the man in the hood said.

  Doc took another step forward, peering at the man’s features through the darkened pane of his suit. “Who are you? I cannot see.”

  “I told you—my name is Don Nectar,” the man told him. “We were—we are—friends.”

  Doc shook his head. “No, I know of no one of that name.”

  But Nectar ignored him. “If you could only know the struggles I had been through to open the tunnel through time,” he said. “If only you could feel the agony I have felt.”

  Behind him, the machinery was flickering with light as some function reached its crescendo.

  “It’s taken years,” Nectar said with bitterness. “There was a part of the equation missing, you see. No matter what I did, one piece of the puzzle remained tantalisingly unreachable. You.”

  Doc took a step back. “I’m not responsible for—”

  “Yes, you are,” Nectar snarled. “You always were. Without you, I’d still be at home with my wife and children. I was dragged in your wake, caught up in the chronal energies that sent you through time.”

  “I played no part in that experiment,” Doc told him. “I am as much a victim as you are, Mr. Nectar.”

  “I lost everything,” Nectar growled. “Even myself. I am a man who barely exists. I cannot step outside of this facility. Once I go beyond the reach of the time equipment my body begins to break down. I have been trapped here for years, trying to fix things, trying to reset the equipment so that I can go home.”

  “You’re destroying this whole area,” Ryan growled, reappearing from beneath the stairs, blaster in hand. “Your experiments in time travel have created a sinkhole in the very fabric of time itself. It’s slowly consuming everything.”

  Nectar’s head moved beneath the hood as he identified Ryan and Krysty. “You think this place matters to him?” he asked, indicating Doc. “You think he wouldn’t leave you in an instant if he had the chance to?”

  Ryan and Krysty turned to Doc. “Doc?” Krysty asked.

  The old man’s face was screwed up as he wrestled with his conscience.

  “No one could blame you if you found a way home,” Krysty said.

  “No, not at this cost,” Doc insisted. “This whole bubble of broken time will only expand, consuming everything. And if not, then those awful chronovores—”

  “Don’t be so naive,” Nectar growled. “You want... I have dedicated my whole existence to this.”

  “To what?” Doc snarled.

  “To be home,” Nectar replied, slamming his fist against the control toggle that powered up the machinery, sending it into overdrive. “To be with you
r...with my...my wife...”

  “Her name is Emily,” Doc said through clenched teeth, realization finally dawning on him.

  “Yes,” Nectar said. “Emily. My darling Emily.”

  * * *

  J.B. WATCHED IN HORROR as the cloud of grinding teeth hurtled through the air toward the buildings. They had already destroyed the landscape behind them, ripped through it like it was soggy paper, turning the snow and trees into fiery ruins, alive with unrestrained energy.

  The cloud front was almost upon them now, and Piotr ordered his people to stick close as he began firing, sending bullet after bullet into the creatures’ gleaming teeth. Their bodies popped and fizzed as they winked in and out of time, guzzling at every piece of matter they touched now as chronal energies poured from the distant building.

  From their hiding place in the supermarket, Symon, Nyarla and Tarelya watched terrified through the dirt-smeared windows, wondering if anything could possibly stop these monsters. They watched as J.B. tossed a compact charge into a swarm of the impossible creatures, saw it explode and turn a dozen chronovores into flaming forms that crisscrossed in and out of time. It wasn’t enough. Their numbers were endless.

  * * *

  “SHE IS NOT YOURS,” Doc said, feeling suddenly sick. “She was never yours.”

  “Ours then,” Nectar said.

  “No,” Doc stated. “Emily is her own woman, and that was why I loved her. And why I love her still. You—an abomination, a murmur from the time stream—couldn’t understand.”

  Nectar stepped closer, cupping Doc’s chin in his hand. “I am you,” he said. “We are one, you and I. Alpha and Omega, twin sides of the same equation, balanced perfectly. Brothers fighting for the same woman.”

  “Not brothers,” Doc told him. “You are me. A broken sliver of me that those irresponsible lab jockeys managed to foul up into existence when they tossed me so carelessly into the time hole. That’s it, isn’t it, Don Nectar? I should have realized the very moment I heard your name. Don Nectar—it’s an amnesiac’s remembrance of ‘Doc Tanner,’ is it not? Of my name. You should not exist, foul curse from my heart. That is why you could never—can never—go home. You never existed.”

  “And yet, I stand before you, a man complete,” Nectar said.

  “No, you do not!” Doc growled, lunging forward and grabbing Nectar by the mask. In one swift movement, the old man pulled the radiation hood away, revealing Nectar’s face for the first time. It was his own face, but insubstantial, like a reflection in dark glass. He was a shade of Doc, a shadow come to life. “You are a ghost who has not even died.”

  Nectar bared his teeth at Doc, but in his face they were as black as night. “Together we can depart this Hell and return home, return to Emily. We have suffered enough. You out there and me trapped here, unable to leave the time machinery or I’ll cease to be. Come with me, brother.”

  “Learn your place, shadow man,” Doc replied, driving his balled fist into Nectar’s chin.

  Nectar swayed in place, his faint eyes narrowing in his indistinct face. “I hit me,” he muttered. “You... I...”

  “Your life is forfeit,” Doc told him. “You are nothing but a dream thing brought fleetingly to life while the dreamer tried to awaken. But this, all you are doing here—all you have done—is destroying everything. Destroying the world.”

  “A world neither of us belong in,” Nectar replied angrily. “The chronovores, those things out there, are attracted to the time dilation. The only way to halt their progress is to shut down the experiment, close the time window.”

  “Then shut it down,” Doc insisted. “Cease these experiments.”

  “And what then?” Nectar growled, his hands grasping the comp equipment, sending a final command to open the time window. “Leave both of me stranded here, leading a hand-to-mouth existence in this Hell on Earth? I...we are meant for better than that, Doc Tanner.”

  Doc watched as Nectar wrenched free his umbilical cord. Behind him, a green button pulsed with illumination. “We’re live,” Nectar growled. “There’s no turning back now. One of us shall return home.”

  “Don Nectar,” Doc growled, shaking his head. “Am I really so selfish? I do not think you know you at all.”

  Before Nectar could respond, Doc leaped forward, grasping his swordstick and snapping the hidden blade from its sheath. In a moment, he had the blade free, turning on his heel and lunging at his shadow counterpart.

  Nectar stepped back, pulling himself just fractionally out of reach of the sword’s tip. It was as if he had anticipated the move, could judge the sword’s path to the nth degree.

  Doc issued an angry noise, sweeping the blade in a broad arc, drawing it through the air toward his agile foe. Nectar stepped back then forward, wobbling on his heels just barely out of the path of the swishing blade.

  Behind them, Ryan and Krysty watched, weapons raised but mystified as to what to do. To them, Doc and his foe were talking in riddles.

  As Nectar came back toward him, Doc saw him clasp his hands as though gripping something, right thumb to left knuckle. Then he pulled his right hand up...in an eerily familiar move. Doc recognized it as the same move that he had performed himself to pull the hidden sword from his walking cane. Something was forming between Nectar’s hands, a blade like Doc’s own, but this one was made of something insubstantial. It looked to Doc like a ripple in the air and everything behind it seemed to be seen as though through rushing water.

  “Though unsuccessful, my experiments have generated certain interesting by-products,” Nectar stated as he brought the blade up toward Doc’s face.

  Doc parried, his own sword clashing with the strange nonblade with a low tolling clang. “Do tell,” Doc said as he forced Nectar to retreat a step.

  A sinister smile appeared on Nectar’s ghostly face. “My blade is made from solid time,” he told Doc. “You feel its passage with every stroke, cutting at the eras, hacking at your days.”

  Doc’s gaze flicked to the shimmering blade and he saw things in its depths: grass and trees and the bombs that set the world on the path to wrongness. Something else was there, too—a face, beautiful and all too familiar. Doc gasped. “Emily,” he said.

  “My Emily,” Nectar corrected. “The blade cuts so much from us. So much we might never retrieve.” He lunged again at Doc, slashing with the blade of time.

  Ryan prepared to shoot the man in the radiation suit but Krysty stopped him. “Ryan, look.”

  Behind them, the machines were toiling, a window forming in the air like an opening mouth.

  With a grunt of effort, Doc brought his own blade to meet Nectar’s, barely holding it away from his face. “You have...discovered something here,” Doc said with effort. “You have...tapped into...something...that could be...great.”

  “Yes,” Nectar hissed. “A way home. For one of us.”

  “And leave the other here, while the chronovores you have unleashed destroy the world?” Doc asked, parrying another clash of the blades. “Is that your plan?”

  “No,” Nectar snarled, kicking out with his right foot and knocking Doc to the floor. Doc lay there, gasping for breath, his hair clinging to his face with sweat. Nectar strode toward him, bringing the shimmering blade of solid time down toward his throat. “Only one of us can exist. You were right. The other is a disembodied shadow, detached from the whole. Reassembled, we shall travel back to Emily.”

  Behind Nectar, between the twin pylonlike structures, the time window had taken form. Its edges were insubstantial, wavering in the air like a mirage. Between them it looked like a great tunnel reaching through space, its ripples running back toward a distant street as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope. Doc recognized the street. It was a street he had walked a thousand times before, the place where he had been walking with his family when the Eye had taken him, wrenching him through the time stream. It had been the last place he had ever been with his family.

  Doc felt the blade of time pushing at his throat
, pricking against his skin. He comprehended Nectar’s plan in its entirety now—the blade would knit himself and Nectar, the rogue facets of time, back together. Once fixed they could hopefully survive the chrono jump where Nectar alone had failed. He was a splinter of Doc come detached from him during the original time trawl. The time machinery had spit him out here, at this way station for Operation Chronos, but he was nothing more than false data blurted from the machine. But still, that false data could take Doc home, to see Emily again....

  And leave his friends, his companions, here to die in a world consumed by predators who ate time itself. No, Doc could never do that. He could never doom a world, even one as ruined and broken as this one. Not at the expense of his friends.

  Who was to say that the chronovores wouldn’t follow them—the joined being of himself and Nectar—through the time hole and into 1896, his world, his home? Who was to say that in dooming one world he wouldn’t have doomed it through eternity, present and past? There were too many variables, too many unknowns, too many risks. It was an uncertainty he simply couldn’t ignore.

  This much he knew for certain: whatever Don Nectar was, whatever he had started life as, be it a blip in the data or something more significant, he was no longer Theophilus Algernon Tanner. He was Doc without a moral compass, left with nothing but the vaguest memory of what he had once desired. Don Nectar was Doc Tanner freed from all of the things that made him Doc, a tiny slice of Tanner cut so thin it no longer resembled Tanner at all.

  I am facing the darkest aspect of my own soul, Doc realized as the time blade cut deeper into his neck, and I am losing. And that is quite simply something that I cannot suffer to endure.

  * * *

  OUTSIDE THE REDOUBT, the lightning storm had become a full-blown meltdown, sheets of electricity blasting across the ground like a marching army. Each time Doc and Nectar touched, the lightning had fired out with more intensity than ever before. The area known as Yego Kraski Sada had suffered terribly at the hands of the time manipulation, generating the ever-expanding bubble of broken time. But now, that self-contained disaster zone was becoming worse as time contorted beyond human comprehension.