by Barry Lyga
Mission accomplished. The cop, gurgling, went down on one knee, clutching his throat. He wheezed but still managed tortured breaths.
As his partner turned back to help, Khalid took advantage of the situation and broke free. The cop growled and lunged at Khalid just as a heavy, meaty hand clapped onto Moira’s shoulder. The cop she’d punched was purple and panting, but he had the presence of mind to reach out to her. She shrieked involuntarily and scrambled backward, but he already had a lock on her, and now his weight was tipping toward her, threatening to fall on top of her.
Khalid, meanwhile, took a jog step out of the reach of his own cop, who drew his stun stick from the holster at his side. The stick arced in the air, spitting blue sparks that danced for moments before burning out. Khalid remembered Officer Cheong’s bellow of pain when he’d zapped him back at the park. He wanted no part of that pain. But he wasn’t sure how long he could dodge. With every swing and swipe, the cop got closer and closer, and if Khalid turned to run, he would be struck down from behind for sure.
At the same moment, Moira was struggling with the cop who’d grabbed her. Teetering and off-balance on one knee, still choking out each breath, he managed to hold her in place with one hand, no matter how much she kicked and thrashed. She realized that he was about to collapse on her, and then, with that weight pinning her, she’d be caught for good.
“Khalid!” she yelped, not knowing if he could hear or help, but desperate.
And just then the building shook.
SIXTY-FOUR
The ghosts were still shouting, but Zak couldn’t allow himself to focus on them. All his attention was on the control panel before him. Beads of sweat slid down his face and dripped from his chin onto the panel, smearing on its surface.
Suddenly his plan to ram the building with the train seemed really, really stupid.
The animation of the air cushion and the train’s trajectory had changed, but the cloud at the end was still an orangish yellow, and it still had an exclamation mark in it. He was going to hit. Hard.
Tommy—whichever one of you is Tommy—I hope I’m doing the right thing.
He slammed down on the engage button, knowing it was too little, too late, but praying he was wrong.
No!
Yes!
On the control panel, the train was almost atop the air cushion graphic. Zak looked up into the windshield, through and past the ghosts, and saw nothing.
The cushion was invisible after all.
And then he hit it.
* * *
Above, the building shook all around Khalid and Moira.
And below …
* * *
The alarms disappeared for several protracted moments, replaced by the shriek of rending steel and the pebbly rain of broken ceramic falling on the superway. Zak was picked up bodily as the superway whipped to the left and then the right; he fetched up against the bulkhead and screamed silently, the breath knocked out of him. Then the train shuddered in the opposite direction, and he stumbled toward the other bulkhead, catching himself on the operator’s chair at the last second.
He clutched it for dear life as the train zigged and zagged, bashing against the walls on either side of the tube. He had the sense that the train had jumped the tracks, or whatever guidance system it had, and that it was bouncing back and forth in the tube.
The windshield—already weakened by the rounds fired by the police back at the last stop—splintered, then finally shattered into thousands of shards, blown into the cabin by the wind force from the tube. Zak shielded his face with one arm while holding on to the chair with the other. Studs of glass slashed at him.
He risked peeking ahead as the storm of glass ended. Through the windshield, he saw a twist in the tube, but the superway was moving too quickly and still jogging back and forth. It wouldn’t make the turn. No way.
He bit down hard on a scream as the train plowed right into the wall of the tube. The last thing he saw was a chunk of ceramic peeled out of the wall, flying toward him, and then he saw nothing at all.
SIXTY-FIVE
Both cops paused and looked at each other as the building tremor subsided. Dust filtered down from the ceiling, and lighting fixtures up there swung from side to side. Some of the glass at the front of the building had spiderwebbed.
Khalid took advantage of their moment of confusion to dive at the cop in front of him. The stun stick sizzled as it sliced the air by his ear, narrowly missing his shoulder. A bug-zapper smell permeated the air, and he head-butted the cop, then spun around and grabbed the stun stick.
The cop was bigger, stronger, tougher. There was no way for Khalid to pry the stick loose.
Until he sank his teeth into the man’s hand, just below the cuff of his shirt.
The cop’s fingers loosened and Khalid snagged the stick, then immediately reversed it and jabbed it into the hand he’d just bitten. The cop yelled and jerked his hand back but didn’t go down. Khalid figured the farther away from the brain, the less the impact. So he took advantage of the cop’s moment of pain and distraction and thrust the stun stick at the man’s neck.
That did the trick. The cop’s shout of pain ended with the clack of his teeth slamming together as he bit down. His body stiffened and he stumbled backward, then dropped bodily onto his partner, who lunged forward and collapsed on top of Moira.
“Khalid!” she bellowed.
“Sorry! Sorry!” He zapped the still-moving cop in the back of the neck. The man slumped forward, his head thumping down on Moira’s chest.
“Not better!” she yelled, trying to wriggle out from underneath.
“Sorry. Really. Sorry.” He helped her get out from under the unconscious cop and—without a further word between them—they hugged. Tightly.
“Good to see you,” Khalid murmured.
“Can’t believe you made it,” Moira replied.
“We’re, like, on a crime spree or something.” Khalid tilted his head toward the cops on the floor.
“I guess I’ll get to be the Bonnie Parker of this universe,” Moira said without a trace of regret as she broke the hug. “I’ll take it.”
“Where’s Zak?”
“I think that explosion answers that question.”
“I have to tell you something about Tommy. And Godfrey.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, and you’re not gonna like it.”
Moira blew her hair out of her eyes. “I don’t like much of anything these days.” She took the stun stick from “her” cop’s holster. “Let’s go find Zak.”
* * *
Together, they took the frosted glass door on the left and made their way deeper into the building. Alarms screamed and flashed every few feet along the corridor, and the PA voice kept reminding them to evacuate the premises.
The hallway branched off, but they kept going straight. There was a map on one wall labeled EMPLOYEE LOCATION that refreshed Moira’s memory as to the contents of the plans she’d stolen from the Dutchmen. The map ended with a door and a label that read SECURE FACILITY/NECESSARY EMPLOYEES ONLY.
“How are we gonna get in there?” Khalid asked.
“We’ll worry about that when we get there,” she told him, and checked over her shoulder for the millionth time.
“They’re not coming after us,” he assured her. “They’ll get up and they’ll go for backup.”
“Oh, good. More of them.”
“With all the chaos out there, by the time they reach someone and get help, we’ll be done.”
Moira laughed, short and harsh. “Done. Yeah, one way or another.”
The lights flickered overhead and died. Only the spinning red alarm lights provided illumination, filling the corridor with bleeding shadows. They’d been running before, but now they slowed down.
“Hold hands,” Moira said, and he felt into the murk until he found hers. “We won’t lose each other this way.”
“Good call.”
They crept along. Now that they’
d slowed down, Khalid suddenly had time to realize what he was doing. Sneaking through some kind of combination of electricity plant and magical oil refinery. With all the cops in the world massing outside. And who knew how many security guards still lurked within, looking to help people trapped inside? What about magic protection gizmos? He imagined alchemy guns that could change him to a statue, voodoo electric eyes that would trip him up ten feet past where he’d walked through them.
He told Moira about Godfrey and Tommy and Dr. Bookman’s theory as they went, resisting the urge to add a note of haughty self-satisfaction. They rounded a corner—slooooowly—and started making their way down another corridor.
“Are you sure this is the right way?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said shortly. “Still here. Still okay. I thought we were in for some sort of massive explosion that was gonna rip holes in the universe.”
“Don’t be snotty,” he said. “Dr. Bookman said there might be an explosion. And it’s probably still to come.”
Her hand went looser in his, but a moment later she squeezed tight. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I’m angry. At this place. At Zak for kicking me out of the superway. Sacrificing himself. Either way, if he survived what we just heard, we have to help him. If you’re right, he’s doing it for nothing.”
“Worse than nothing.”
“Don’t remind me.”
Up ahead, a cloud of something filled the hallway, glimmering red in the half light. They stopped. “Can we go around?” Khalid asked.
Moira thought for a moment. “No. The secure part of the facility is right through there. And we don’t have time to go around another way.”
So they dropped to their bellies and crawled through, sipping shallow breaths. The stuff in the air tasted like dust, and Khalid soon saw its source—a wall had crumbled off to their left when a ceiling beam crashed through it, and the air was filled with pulverized wallboard.
A small fire burned in the room visible through the hole. An overhead sprinkler rained down on it, containing but not quenching it.
Khalid’s eyes stung as he and Moira crawled on. Next to him, she coughed a hard little cough every second or third breath, and Khalid’s own throat burned. His eyes watered at the assault of the dust in the air.
They had to pick their way over some fallen chunks of ceiling and buckled sections of wall. The door at the end of the corridor was swathed in a thicker cloud of dust. Khalid took in a deep, gritty breath and risked standing up long enough to try the door. Nothing. Of course. They couldn’t get that lucky, that someone would leave a security door open while fleeing. The doors probably locked automatically.
There was a curved black chunk of something plasticky jutting out of the wall next to the door. Khalid rubbed at his burning eyes and hoped his breath would hold out. He inspected what turned out to be a sort of hard plastic sleeve into which he could insert his hand and arm almost up to the elbow. He did so and felt something smooth, glassy, and spherical at the end. He grabbed it, squeezed it, tried rolling it between his fingers. Nothing. Some kind of identification system. Something that used alchemy or astrology or voodoo or Wicca combined with a computer, probably, to identify people. Mirror, mirror, on the wall for the digital age.
He dropped back down to his belly. Moira was coughing harder now.
“No way in,” he said.
“Always a way,” she said. “Back.”
Before he could respond, she shimmied backward, rolled onto her side, then turned around and headed back the way they’d come.
Khalid cleared his throat and spit up something that glowed a rotten brown in the red light that filtered through the dust and smoke in the air. Then, of course, he followed her.
SIXTY-SIX
Zak. Zak, get up.
Get up, Zak!
Two voices, but one voice, but two voices. He heard the same voice, saying different things, and it was his own voice.
Behind it all, alarms.
Zak groaned and rolled over. His body ached as though he’d been stuffed into a trash can and sent careening down a steep hill. Every movement caused him pain. He tasted blood, and his face was wet with what he assumed to be more of it.
Get up! There’s still time!
Zak! Zak, are you okay? Can you hear me?
Can you hear me?
He pushed himself up to his knees. The world tipped and swayed, just like on a boat, and for a moment he was back on the boat again, back where it all had started. An eighteenth-century ship from a different version of the eighteenth century. A scared boy from an island, making his way to America, caught in a storm, then plunged into another reality.
And then trapped underground. For so long. Alone. Alone and lost. Dreaming only of himself.
Help me!
Help yourself!
You can do both, Zak! You can save everyone! Trust me!
SHUT UP, BOTH OF YOU! Zak bellowed in his mind, and was somewhat surprised to find that it worked. The voices fell silent, and he could think again.
All around him, the cabin of the superway was devastated. The control board had cracked across its area, with only a single flickering light remaining. Ironically, it flashed the word SAFETY over and over.
Through the broken windshield, he spied the wall of the tube, crushed and breached by the now-crumpled and dented nose of the superway. Lights flickered sporadically in the tube and in the distance, through the wall. Zak braced himself between the chair and the control panel and levered himself to a standing position. His head swam in a fog, and he held tight to his anchors to keep from falling down.
He tested his legs. Nothing broken, it seemed. His body ached, but the only sharp, insistent pains came from the multitude of cuts along his body. Flying glass. Glass on the floor. He’d been struck by it, had rolled in it. He was lucky not to be bleeding to death.
At least, he didn’t think he was bleeding to death.
Get out of here. Got to get out of here.
His own voice, from his own mind; he was sure of it. And yet it recalled to him those easier, more innocent days, when he’d imagined a guardian angel watching over him. The good old days, when he’d worried only about his sanity, not about spirits and universes and life and death.
Life was so much simpler when I was just crazy.
He dragged himself over the control panel and—carefully avoiding the jagged edges—through the gaping windshield. Pushing debris out of the way, he slid down the nose of the superway and onto the floor of the building. He was in a hallway that was lit only by the rotating red blare of emergency lights. Staggering, he leaned against a wall to rest for a moment.
Zak …
Shut up. Whoever you are.
You can still—
Don’t listen to him!
Shut. Up!
Using the wall for support, Zak inched down the hall. A chunk of ceiling fell right in front of him, and in the blink of an eye, he saw Tommy standing before him, but then the image vanished.
Close. So close to death just then.
Up ahead, a sign that had once been mounted to the wall lay on the floor. There were arrows pointing in different directions. One said RECLAMATION. Another said RECHARGING. He didn’t know which way the arrows were supposed to guide him, because he didn’t know which wall the sign had fallen from.
Did it really matter, though? He just had to keep moving. Find help. Figure out the rest of it later.
This way, said the voice, and he blinked sweat out of his eyes, and a light appeared in the air, faint and glimmering for a moment before petering out.
Yes, said the voices.
They were in agreement. For the first time.
Zak followed the path of the light into the darkness.
He stumbled down the hall, stepping around fallen beams and collapsed chunks of ceiling. Through doors and holes in the walls around him, he saw other areas, some of them devastated from the impact of the superway, some of them burning. But he walked straight ahead to a la
rge pocket door that had partly crumpled. It had no hinges, so he pushed it to one side, straining and grunting until he’d shoved it far enough into the wall that he could pass.
Beyond was a large chamber, two stories high. Balconies ran in a ring around the second story, some of them collapsed, some of them dangling overhead from their support structures. At the bottom, where he stood, he spied several desks clustered together, obviously workstations for the evacuated personnel. But the desks didn’t interest him. He cared only for the large tanks and drums arranged around the room. The big tanks were bolted to the floor and had wide, thick hoses running in and out of them. The drums were mostly stacked in corners, though many of them had fallen over and rolled hither and yon. A series of Wonder Glass–looking computer terminals were wired together in the center of the room, most of them cracked or sparking with electricity.
One of the drums had split and spilled. A familiar, viscous ooze glowed there. Electroleum.
This is the place, Zak, Tommy or Godfrey said. You can still use the electroleum to save us.
Don’t do it, said Godfrey or Tommy. Rescue workers will come here first, to lock it down. Just sit down and wait. You’ll be safe soon.
Zak lurched over to the broken drum of electroleum. He spied another one just past it that had cracked as well; a glowing trickle spilled down one side.
This would do it, he realized. He could still salvage something from this debacle. He could dunk himself in a tank of the raw stuff and let it work its magic. Would that suffice? Is that all he had to do to bring Tommy back? Could it be that easy? No need to plow a train through the place and blow it up. Just … take a little dip in the electroleum pool.
Or maybe that would do nothing.
I don’t know what to do.
He dropped to his knees before the puddle of electroleum. What should he do?
The two Tommys manifested then, one of them wavering and weaker than the other.
It’s time, said the more stable one. I’m so sorry it has to be this way, but it does. If there were another way, I’d tell you. I swear.
Zak was exhausted. He wanted to lie down and sleep, but if he did that, he feared he would wake up and the opportunity would be gone. He would be in whatever passed for juvenile detention in this world, and he would spend the rest of his life haunted not just by his twin but also by the knowledge of what he hadn’t done.