Reverberations

by Aaron Frale

  Reverberations

  Aaron Frale

  The second book of the Tuners trilogy

  Copyright © 2020 Aaron Frale

  Other Books by Aaron Frale

  Comedy

  Time Burrito

  ORION

  Othello and Zombies

  Xmas Elf: Secret Agent

  Science Fiction

  Atmospheric Pressure Series

  The Robin Hood of Couches

  The Teristaque Chronicles

  Time Agency

  Horror

  Playlist of the Ancient Dead

  Desert During Day of the Dead

  Short Story Collections

  Cowboys and Drones

  Consider supporting me on Patreon!

  To my son Oliver, who reminds me every day to find joy in the small moments of life

  1

  DeAndre and Meathook rode an elevator to the top of the New Orleans World Trade Center Tower in Universe 87c. The South had won the Civil War in this universe, and New Orleans outpaced New York as the largest city in the world, all on the backs of people who would be mistaken for DeAndre’s ancestors if it wasn’t for the fact that he was from 152g where world events had played out differently. He was disgusted by the concept of a person owning another person and felt a twinge of pain to play the part necessary for the infiltration of this universe. For him to even be allowed in the skyscraper, he needed to appear as Meathook’s manservant.

  Luckily for both of them, a disguise was all they needed. Technology progressed at a slower pace in this universe. Slavery caused people not to innovate. When there was cheap, abundant labor, there was no reason to invent computers or smartphones. People didn’t need to build automated factories, robots, or anything because they could just buy more people. For those at the bottom, life was brutal and short, and DeAndre, disguised as the secretary of a wealthy businessman, was one of the lucky ones who didn’t break his back every day under the sweltering sun.

  “Why’d they build a safehouse in this universe anyway?” DeAndre asked, pulling himself out of the glum reflections of a place he couldn’t wait to leave.

  “I don’t know, bro.” Meathook shrugged. “Maybe the outdated technology would make it easier to hide from the people in this verse.”

  “Yeah, but come on. I feel dirty in this thing.” DeAndre motioned to the blue jumpsuit and collar around his neck. It mimicked the shock collars the residents of 87c used. It was considered the humane disciplinary action compared to whipping.

  “Bro, how do you think I feel? I look like a turd basket!” Meathook said, referring to his suit that seemed a mismatch of Victorian and 1950s styles.

  “Oh, come on!” DeAndre said and smacked Meathook on the shoulder. “At least you get to wear a suit! I’m dressed like your freakin’ puppy!”

  They didn’t realize that the door had opened, and two white guys in similar clothes as Meathook were staring at him aghast. Meathook frowned and made some half-baked attempt to sound like a person from this universe. “Touch me again, man person, and I’ll have your legs flayed on a spit with potatoes and cauliflower.”

  DeAndre kicked Meathook when the two guys had turned back to their conversation with each other. After a few more floors, the dudes left, and he really let Meathook have it. “What the hell was that!”

  “Dude!” Meathook cried. “I was just playing the part of a turd basket.”

  “Remember what Hector said. Low profile. Get in. Get the stuff we need and get out. The cultists are looking out for people who stick out.”

  “Those two dudes don’t look like cultists.”

  “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean they don’t work for them.”

  Meathook frowned and said, “The cultists have Tuners HQ now. I don’t see why they don’t just keep sending cultists over to every known universe and pop them one by one until they know we’re all dead.”

  “The cultists don’t have unlimited people, just like us. Every time they tear the fabric of a universe to shreds, all their people over there die too.”

  The elevator dinged on the 101st floor, and Meathook smiled. “It’s showtime.”

  They stepped out onto a floor that said WORLD BANK with a company logo of two hands lovingly embracing the planet. DeAndre wanted to laugh, considering the dark trajectory this place had taken. A black woman with an orange jumpsuit and a shock collar sat at the front desk. She smiled and greeted them as if she wasn’t chained to the counter. Literally; DeAndre noticed a chain around her ankle when they got close.

  “Welcome to the World Bank, where we treat you like you treat you,” she said with a smile.

  DeAndre wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. This mission was almost too much for him, but Hector was right about one thing. People didn’t pay attention to him in this universe. It was almost as if he was a part of the furniture. While Meathook bungled through an explanation that he was here to take out a loan for a sizeable international shipping business, DeAndre used his super-speed to swipe a set of keys from her desk without anyone being the wiser.

  It was lucky that Patel had managed to forge them up some fake credentials because Meathook sounded like a kid who had just got a hold of his daddy’s credit card, and the woman would have thrown them out the moment he opened his mouth. Instead, after looking at the fake document, she told them to wait while she called a loan officer.

  The wait in the lobby was even longer than the time Meathook forced DeAndre to listen to this heavy metal band that made songs so long, it seemed like they would never end. They were friends to the end but never could agree on music. It was a good thing a person could load their own playlist on their TF3. Rashaun, their defacto 42 guide, had introduced DeAndre to a group called Wu-Tang Clan from universe 42, and he’d been hooked ever since. If he had to suffer another one of Meathook’s epic-est of metal, he’d turn himself into the High Priest of the Flame himself.

  While they waited, they were on the lookout for the familiar purple flash and the crack of displaced air when cultists would punch through the barrier between universes. The safehouses that hadn’t been decimated and looted by the cultists were under close surveillance. The only reason that this one was so special was that it was in a very public place in a city where a cultist would stick out.

  They had attempted a raid on the safehouse in U-12k. It was located in a bunker in the woods well out of the city. The cultists had already had a dozen guys on the outside, and who knows how many waiting on the sidelines for them to show up. It was too risky, and they had aborted the mission. Mainly because the nearest tuning spot was miles away back in the city.

  If something went wrong here, they could find a place to tune quickly. Ludie was the wild card of the plan. He was smart and knew all their tricks. In fact, he had even invented a few of them himself. The kid probably had a trap set for them. The key to the success of the mission was to access the safehouse without anyone knowing they were there in the first place.

  After the endless minutes ticked away, they finally saw a personal banker walking down the hallway. Meathook asked the front desk lady for water, and once she was bent over leaning towards a minifridge under her desk, DeAndre darted off to the bathroom when he was sure no one was looking. It had a white man on it, and a black man with a circle and a line going through it. The image disgusted him, but he didn’t have time for social justice.

  He used the key and let himself inside. He stripped off the jumpsuit and the fake shock collar and stuffed them in the trash. Underneath, his body was transparent as he had the invisibility cloak on. He put on the mask and disappeared completely.

  He left the bathroom and hoped that no one would notice the door that had just opened on its own. He saw Meathook walking down the hall with the ban
ker and the secretary just pulling water from underneath her desk. She saw that no one was around and shrugged. She spat in the water and put it back in the fridge. DeAndre wanted to shake her hand and cut her chains, but he kept going through the office.

  He brought up the layout of the building on the display of his suit. All the safehouses had documents and maps that would be useful if they needed them. However, without HQ, it was like drawing a map of New York City on a cocktail napkin. They didn’t have the real-time 3D mapping equipment HQ provided or the access to the scholarly archives about each universe. There wasn’t a team of people supporting him. It was just Hector, and the guy kept silent in fear of Ludie listening in.

  DeAndre crept down a hallway and turned the corner. Two portly men in suits similar to Meathook’s almost ran into him. He used his heightened agility to dodge them. All they felt was the puff of wind from his wake. In his native universe, he moved like everyone else. In most others, he ran faster than any other human. Ludie had explained it once as something to do with a change to the time-gravity differential constant or some other complex tweak to the laws of physics, but the result was that when the Tuners first recruited him, he had to learn how to slow down to the pace of almost everyone else. Moving fast was easy; slowing down so he didn’t look like a blur to everyone else took a bit of time to master.

  One of the men glanced around for the source of the draft and went back to their conversation. Hopefully, neither was connected to the cultists. While a cultist was easy to spot by the way they mutilated their bodies in commitment to their dark arts, people working for them weren’t. After Ludie’s betrayal, who knew what universes were infiltrated and what they were promising to people. Either way, it came as a surprise to everyone, even Hector, who had mistaken them as brutes who left a path of destruction everywhere they appeared. A cunning Priest of the Flame was far scarier than a murderous rage-filled one.

  DeAndre slowed back to the speed of everyone else and continued down the corridor. He took two more turns and came to a wall where a door should be. “Crap,” he said aloud and glanced around when he realized that he would sound like a disembodied voice. They must have remodeled the floor. The vault should be in the room beyond. He turned around to try a different direction when he saw one of the two men he had passed earlier blocking the entrance to the corridor.

  “I know you’re here, Tuner,” the man said and opened his shirt. The star that was customarily carved into a cultist’s forehead was cut into the flesh of his chest. He pulled his shirt down further, and what DeAndre thought was a gut was really explosives. The man slipped a handheld trigger from his pocket and armed it. “I am prepared to die for the Flame. Are you prepared to feed it?”

  DeAndre took off the hood of his suit.

  The acolyte grinned and said, “They sent the black one. A curious choice, considering the heresy of this world. Trust me when I say that slavery to a false god is disgusting and this world reeks of injustice. They will all be purged in the Reckoning Fire, and this world too will come to an end.”

  “Isn’t doing the High Priest’s bidding a form of slavery?”

  “My service to the Flame will be rewarded in death. There is no greater purpose.”

  “You got me there,” DeAndre said and inched his way towards the man. “Pull the trigger. The Flame will get an afternoon snack, and you get your big screen TV in the afterlife or whatever they promise you.”

  “The priests want the Tuners alive. You serve a greater purpose in life than in death.”

  “Oh, right,” DeAndre exclaimed and closed the gap between them, “That brain-sucking machine or whatever poor excuse you have for a TF3.”

  DeAndre took another step closer, and the man put his thumb on the trigger.

  “You see,” DeAndre continued. “I think you would have pulled that trigger by now if you were really going to die for the Flame.”

  “The priest wants you al—”

  “Don’t interrupt me. You see, I think you are scared witless and don’t want your life in this world to end. To even be in this bank, up this high in the tower, you probably have a pretty good life here, and a good job. Maybe you even have a pretty wife and some kids. The price of this life is one day maybe having to intimidate some teenager into coming with you. How hard can that be? No, I think your reward is now because you were stolen from your world just like everyone else and forced to join this crazy organization. Rather than live in a hot cesspool of a planet, you got lucky, and they put you here. All you have to do to keep this good thing going is to deliver me. Am I getting this right?”

  “I—I—” the cultist sputtered, and before he could say another word, Meathook clocked the guy aside the head, and the guy went down. DeAndre swiped the detonator before the hand holding it touched the ground. Since the tech available in the world was basic, he was able to disarm the bomb without begging Hector for support.

  After the explosives were no longer going to take out a couple floors of the building, Meathook wandered down the hall.

  DeAndre slapped his friend and said, “What took you so long?”

  “The guy wouldn’t stop talking about numbers and weird things like ROI. What is that even?” Meathook asked.

  “Excuse yourself to the bathroom or something next time.”

  “I did, bro. Those documents Patel forged really worked a little too well. They think they are going to be rich.”

  “That’s the point.”

  “Yeah, bro, but I don’t know anything about business. Maybe some fat bass licks. Why couldn’t we infiltrate a record label or something?”

  “An idiot and his money are soon parted.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Never mind. Let’s just say you played your part perfectly. Now, according to the map, the vault should be in a room over there.”

  “That’s a wall.”

  “Right, this safehouse was built long before Hector could tune; there were bound to be some renovations to the building between now and then.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “Go back to your meeting,” DeAndre said. “Make up some excuse to see the vault. Find out where it is, and I’ll take care of this guy.” He kicked the foot of the unconscious cultist.

  “What do I say?”

  “Make up an excuse. Tell them you want to store a family artifact. I’ll follow you in the suit.”

  “But—”

  “Go! Before someone comes around the corner!”

  Meathook turned back, and DeAndre began hefting the guy toward a door that should be a utility closet. Hopefully, there wasn’t too much renovation, or he was about to have an awkward moment dragging a body into a board meeting.

  ∆∆∆

  DeAndre was waiting in the invisibility cloak outside of the meeting room were Meathook made his pitch. After he had entered what thankfully still was a utility closet, he had bound and gagged the guy for good measure. The man’s life was over, no matter what happened next. Either the High Priest of the Flame would flay him for letting the Tuners get away or the authorities of this world would find him with the explosives and put him away for terrorism. Hopefully, it was the latter. From what he had heard about the cultist’s universe, no one would want to be on the wrong end of that regime.

  DeAndre glanced into the room through a long thin vertical window. Meathook was standing on his chair performing an air guitar while the bankers hooted with laughter. It was like watching a train wreck in slow motion. At least the financials were forged well enough to have the loan sharks overlook the quirky side of the bass slapping Tuner’s personality. If the safehouse had been in a world where computers existed, they would have chucked both of them onto the street. For now, he had a room full of greedy men thinking he was the billionaire dimwit son of a dead railroad tycoon.

  And somehow, the plan worked. The door to the room opened, and Meathook roared, “Oh yeah, my grandfather’s bass is the most precious thing to me. He was one of the foun
ding members of The Black Sabbath, you know. At least where I come from.”

  DeAndre slapped his head. While the best lies had some truth in them, this was overkill. While Meathook was indeed the grandson of Tommy Two Fingers, a bassist missing all but two fingers on his right hand and frontman of the heavy metal gods, that was only true in one universe. Black Sabbath, without the “the,” from their current base of operations, was fronted by a guy named Ozzy Osbourne, a profoundly unsettling fact to Meathook considering his homeland no longer existed because of the Order of the Flame. To add insult to injury, his grandfather’s bass was now in a place overrun with lunatics. While they all had their reasons to keep up the fight after suffering the worst blow Tuners had ever been dealt, DeAndre’s best friend had made it personal.

  They made their way through several locked security doors to the vault. While it was located in the same physical location, the path toward it had changed for security reasons according to the two guys. The ultrarich of this world probably didn’t like that the secretary in the front was in the vicinity of their precious objects, even though she was chained to the desk. DeAndre’s hatred for this place grew by the minute.

  Once he could see the thick iron door to the vault, DeAndre clunked one of the businessmen on the head, and Meathook socked the other. While these two dudes were innocent to the affairs of the multiverse, it felt good to rough one of them up because they were part of the system of oppression. DeAndre pulled his hood down, and Meathook asked, “Now what?”

  “Didn’t you read the mission briefing?” DeAndre said and pulled out a tool from his backpack. It was an old tech item for an old tech world: a magnet that he could use to fool the lock into thinking he had the key. It was useless with electronic ones, but they were lucky that even the elevators in the building were still low-tech mechanics.

  While DeAndre fidgeted around to convince the pins inside the lock to do what he wanted, Meathook said, “You know, they were going to let us in.”