“I’m sure your car is luxurious and all—a nice bright target for the lizards to fire on—but I think we’ll use that ‘68 Caravan Traveler over there.” Jessica pointed to the brown behemoth that towered over the rest of the cars. Jessica turned to Kildere. “Not your car, by chance, is it?”
Kildere shook his head.
“Still useless, Kildere,” Jessica muttered.
“These are the board’s vehicles,” Thorpe said. “We don’t have access to those.”
Jessica ran toward the Traveler’s left-side door. “Delta, Gabe.” She watched them take up positions flanking the car, pointing their purifiers toward the elevator they had just exited.
Kildere, then Thorpe—begrudgingly—joined Jessica at the slot car.
“This is a waste of time,” Thorpe growled. “These cars have state-of-the-art sentinel security on top of the normal Guardian tech.”
Jessica ignored him as she took her U-Board from her backpack. She swiped and navigated to the open command screen. She tapped a couple more times to sync her commands with that of the car and booted the system.
The doors unlocked.
“Everybody in,” Jessica said. “Let’s go.”
“How in God’s name did you do that?” Thorpe stared at her.
“The lizards took down your precious monitoring and security systems first thing, Thorpe. I can pretty much hack into anything now. I should actually thank them.”
The old man started to walk toward the passenger’s-side door.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Jessica asked, pointing her purifier at him.
“I’m getting into the car.”
She shook her head. “No, you’re going to get into your car, Thorpe. You’re going to be our diversion.”
Thorpe stared at her, his baggy blue eyes open wide in surprise. He lunged for the door, but Jessica’s fingers were faster. She tapped on her U-Board, and the doors locked.
“Damn it, woman, you said not five minutes ago you needed information from me.”
“And I reminded you sixty seconds ago that Kildere can give me that same information.” Jessica felt her smile of satisfaction melt away. “I’ll bet that shot was meant for you, wasn’t it?” She felt her hands, her arms, shake. “I’ll bet you let Travis take that shot, didn’t you, Thorpe?” She gripped the metal rod of the purifier so tight she could feel the scratched grooves of age worn into it. “I swear to Christ, if I didn’t need you, I would put a hole right through your withered belly with this thing.”
Jessica took a deep breath. In the distance, she heard plasma blasts and the metallic rip of a wall breaking. The lizards were through and had just entered the corridor. They had, perhaps, forty seconds.
“Our rendezvous is Massadona. Two hundred miles northwest from here. Heard of it?”
Thorpe nodded. He looked as if he had peed his pants.
“Take your car. You go west, then north. I’ll go east, then circle around. First one there waits for the other.” Jessica watched Thorpe turn, and before he ran off, she added, “Thorpe, you had better be there.”
And then he was around the corner and gone.
Jessica jumped into the hacked slot car and closed the door as quietly as she could.
“Where’d Damien go?” Kildere asked.
“Why did you let him live, Alpha?” Her new teammate asked from the back seat.
“I told you, Delta, he had information I need,” Jessica said. She started the slot car’s driving system and whispered, “Manual,” as the car slowly left its stall.
“Then why did he go off alone?” Gabe asked.
“We need a diversion,” Jessica said, her eyes darting left, right, then in front of her as the car lurched forward. No Lizards crawling around. This really was its own secret pocket of the campus. Jessica briefly wondered how many other hidden pockets there were and what secrets Thorpe hid in them. “I told him to meet us at the rendezvous point.”
“What?” Delta exclaimed.
“You know he’s not going to be there, even if he does manage to survive the Guardians’ capture,” Gabe said.
“I’m afraid he’s right,” Kildere added.
Jessica shook her head. “You didn’t see his face. He’ll be there.”
“All due respect, Alpha, Damien Thorpe is the man who gave the order to slaughter thousands of innocents—our family. He deserves none of this mercy.”
“I’d hardly call the Anarchists innocents,” Kildere said. Jessica watched in the rearview mirror as Delta flicked her purifier flat across Kildere’s stomach. Kildere doubled over.
“Why did you tell that monster where our rendezvous point is?” Delta asked.
“I told him to meet us in Massadona.”
The car was silent for a moment. Jessica could hear the soft hum of the slot car battery.
“But...but we’re not going there,” Delta said. “That’s northwest. We’re going to Grand Junction.”
“Isn’t Massadona near where we spotted that Guardian outpost?” Gabe asked. “One of their larger ones.”
Jessica glanced back at Delta. “It is, as a matter of fact.”
Delta laughed softly. “You are Alpha,” she whispered. “And we will follow you through hell.”
“Well, let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” Jessica muttered.
“It seems we all underestimated you, Miss Waters,” Kildere said, rubbing his stomach.
“It seems you did, Kildere,” Jessica agreed. “Now, you do know where Kaylan Smith is, don’t you?”
Jessica caught Kildere’s stare in the rearview mirror.
Jessica spotted the exit, fifty yards ahead. Nothing fancy like the entrance she remembered when she first came here. This was a simple hole in the concrete wall that led to...the sky? They were still thirty-one floors up. Last time she checked the technical specs on slot cars, none of them had propulsion of any kind. Did she miss a step? Was there a platform somewhere to lower them to the ground?
She brought the car to a stop.
“Um, Alpha?” Gabe spoke up.
The opening was there though. And Kildere wasn’t freaking out like Gabe was about to.
Glancing at the rearview mirror, Jessica saw Thorpe running toward their car.
“Gabe. U-Board.”
Gabe flipped it over, and Jessica played the board as if it were a piano, tapping furiously. She pulled up the service manual for their slot car. What she was looking for was buried under eight levels of navigational menus for all-terrain mode.
“There you are,” she muttered and resumed driving.
“Alpha?” Delta’s voice was louder than Gabe’s.
The glass and sturdy concrete surrounding them receded quickly.
“Everyone hold on,” Jessica yelled and pressed a small button under the steering wheel.
For one agonizing second, it felt as if the car was just going to fall like a rock to the ground. The front snapped to the side of the ivory building. Jessica felt her stomach try to escape through her mouth. She struggled for breath as her seat belt strained against her chest.
“Oh, my God,” she whispered as the car silently drove down the skyscraper’s side. The ground was coming up fast, and when they drove past the eleventh floor, she could see two lizards—one to the left and one to the right—patrolling, but not looking up. Why would they? Whatever research they’d done regarding humanity and their advancements, Jessica was sure it didn’t include cars rolling down sides of buildings.
“Gabe.”
“I see them.” Gabe struggled to aim his purifier.
“Shoot through the window,” Jessica said, taking a deep breath and aiming her purifier. “We need the element of surprise. They’ll hear us lowering the windows.”
When the car reached the second floor of the building, Jessica quietly said, “Now.”
Both of them shot their weapons, and the car lit up like a light bulb. The windows remained intact, and the car sprung off the wall and onto the ground.
/>
“Lower windows,” Jessica yelled.
The lizard she was staring at turned toward her as the window lowered enough for Jessica to stick her purifier out and fire. Once. Twice. Three times and the lizard fell. She turned in time to see the other fall as well.
“Bulletproof glass,” Gabe said, rubbing his eyes.
“Of course,” Jessica added. “Board member’s car, I suppose that comes standard?” She glanced in the rearview mirror.
Kildere nodded, smirking. “It seems you might have forgotten who you were dealing with,” he said.
Delta smacked the butt of her purifier against the side of Kildere’s head.
“Damn it, woman! You keep doing that, and my brain will be too damaged to tell your leader what she wants. Is that what you want?”
“Let me be crystal clear, Kildere. You have until we get clear of these lizards to tell me where Kaylan Smith is, or I will shoot you in the head and dump you on the side of the road.” Jessica continued looking in the rearview mirror until she caught Kildere’s eyes and saw he understood.
“Nothing’s changed. That would still be preferable to what the Guardians had planned for us.” Kildere smiled.
“Oh, Kildere, still trying to sound like Thorpe, but it just comes off flimsy.”
Jessica input their destination into the navigation system and manually altered some sections of the route, trying to take remote roads that would have few to no lizards present. When the car took off in the opposite direction of the front gate—toward the range of foothills behind the campus—Jessica turned to face Kildere.
“You’re not an expert in theoretical physics, Kildere. That’s why you brought Kaylan and me to TPC, remember? What makes you think the lizards had any plans for you at all?”
She watched Kildere shift in his seat. “We were told by Kyle and...someone else...exactly what would happen to Thorpe and me. It wasn’t pretty.”
“OK, first, I’m going to assume the other person came from the same future as Kyle.”
“That’s right.”
“From the other Earth, that is now different from our Earth, because those chumps came back and changed our present. Which brings me to my other point. How many times do I have to remind you, Kildere? What happened in their past is not our future.” Jessica laughed. “For all you know, the lizards might not lay a green-scaled claw on you. But I will definitely shoot you in the head and leave you on the side of the road if you don’t answer my question.”
Kildere folded his arms in defeat.
“Time to stop living your life based on someone else’s stories and get with the program, Kildere,” Gabe said.
Jessica smiled as their stolen slot car hummed down the small two-lane road, away from TPC.
2
It was a beautiful morning—alien invasion notwithstanding—in northern Colorado. The sun was out, and the winds were calm, which meant it wasn’t too terribly cold. Jessica allowed herself a brief moment to reflect on what she’d be doing if she were just an average person and no lizards were out to exterminate her, along with all other life on the planet.
Jessica frowned as she realized she would still be working for TPC. Maybe not as a would-be time traveler, but something in their R&D division.
OK then, if TPC didn’t rule half the world, where would she be? It’s a good bet that without that monster, there would be no Anarchist group. Where would Timmy be? She remembered asking her parents about him just before she started her advanced education track. Jessica was packing to travel to North Central District 05 Advanced Education Campus. She was not the most cooperative teenager and knew Timmy was a button to push. Thinking about it now, she blushed.
“Figured out where my brother is?” she had asked her mother.
“Why do you insist on hurting me?” her mother had replied.
“Don’t even know if he’s alive,” she had said, and her mother had slapped her. And that was the last conversation they had before she left for school.
Now, of course, she knew the answer to her question. She shook her head violently, as if to fling the memory out of the car.
“What’s wrong?” Gabe said, reaching for her hand, which rested on the storage console between the seats. She quickly jerked her hand away.
“No matter how I wish things were different, it all comes back to me killing my brother and Kaylan Smith fucking sitting on that information.” Jessica wiped away her tears and looked in the rearview in time to see Kildere’s astonished reaction. Of course he didn’t know. Kay had told no one, most likely some sort of bullshit burden she would feel she had to keep. Goddamn idiot.
Jessica thought they’d make it to Grand Junction without incident. She really thought traveling clockwise, parallel to the old highway bypass that encircled Denver, and making it to Highway 285 would put them in the clear. She planned to travel through the Rockies until they arrived at the border to Northwest Division 02, and even there she expected only a few lizards at that gate.
Hearing Kyle talk back at Dorothy’s house, Jessica assumed that the only way an advanced scout invasion force like this one could purge the planet would be by taking over the large urban areas first, then moving on to the outlying rural areas.
But here they were, two miles east of Fairplay, when Delta perked up from the back seat.
“Lizards,” her voice rose. “Looks to be just about a mile ahead, around that bend.”
Jessica slowed the slot car to a stop and looked in the rearview mirror. She saw Kildere leaning over to peek at Delta’s U-Board—the one that Jessica had hacked and altered into a long-range infrared scanner. Delta smacked Kildere over the head with the board.
“Hey,” Jessica snapped. “We need that.”
“Apologies, Alpha.” Delta sat back in her seat.
Jessica saw that the road was empty behind her all the way to the horizon. Maybe there was time to rethink her strategy?
She looked up at the roof of the car as if it weren’t there.
“What are you looking at?” Gabe asked.
“How many lizards do you think are in one of those floating black triangles?” she mused.
Gabe shook his head. “I don’t know. A thousand maybe?” he said.
Now Jessica shook her head. “No, no,” she said. “We should have measured the shadow one of those things cast while we were on our way to grab them.”
“What?”
She grunted a response to Gabe as she calculated. Assume those crafts are high enough so their anti-gravity unit doesn’t have to be the size of a city to keep them in the sky. Guessing...ten thousand feet in the air. That makes their real size...three miles long by...how many miles wide?
“One and a half,” Jessica muttered.
“Agent Waters, you really need to get this car moving,” Kildere said from the back.
“Delta, remind the man sitting next to you who I am,” Jessica said dismissively.
Jessica listened for the thump of Delta’s fist hitting Kildere’s gut as she finished calculating.
“She is Alpha, sister to a murdered brother. Member of a family that you had a hand in making all but extinct. Upon her orders, I will take great pleasure in slicing you from groin to neck.”
We haven’t seen a lizard taller than twelve feet and shorter than nine. Say, ten feet tall for an average...
“I remind you, you need me, Agent...Alpha.”
“Doesn’t feel good when you have to keep reminding someone of something, does it?” Jessica gave a half-glance toward Kildere. Then she turned to Gabe.
“Five to six thousand per ship,” she said. “And there are, what, five that we can see in the area?”
“Say six. It only works out great for us if it’s less,” Gabe said.
“There are different shaped ships, but they all look relatively the same size. So, ballpark, thirty thousand troops here. Not a one-to-one ratio. It wouldn’t make sense to send your entire force down in a heavily populated area. If you lose, that’s a heavy hit to
your forces.” Jessica rubbed her chin. “How many did you say, Delta?”
“I didn’t.” Delta looked down at the U-Board. “Looks to be just two.”
They were posting lizards at all the access roads out of town. Turn anyone who flees back to town. That would work with anyone else.
But they had purifiers.
“Two?” Jessica smiled.
“Uh-oh,” Gabe muttered. “I know that smile.”
“So do I,” Kildere added miserably.
“We can take two,” Jessica said. “Bottom line: Any lizard we take out now, quickly, gives their commander a reason to pause, thinking we might not be the docile sheep they assumed.”
Jessica instructed the slot car to advance five hundred yards slowly.
“We’ve been told plenty of stories from people who have had an intimate experience with this race, people who you would have met had you stayed where you were supposed to and not run away like a child having a tantrum,” Kildere said. “The weapons they have, the military might they bring to the table, we have no chance.”
“Then why are you in this car?” Delta’s tone was snarky.
“Look, I’m tired of saying this, so I’m going to say it one more time,” Jessica said. “Then I’m just going to let you whine on like a baby. Things are different now. Our timeline, our unfolding present, is different from Kyle’s graphic description of his past.”
“So put a smile on that pouty face,” Gabe said. “You’re still alive. Things could be worse.”
“It wasn’t Kyle who told me about life in the future,” Kildere said.
“Ah, well, Gabe told me the older me came to pay you guys a visit,” Jessica said. She shrugged. “I’m sure at this point I don’t have to tell you it follows that the experiences that made her the person she is will be different than the experiences I’ll have going forward. I’m sure she didn’t mention to you that she was the leader of the Anarchists. I am a different person than her.”
“She wanted to hurt Kaylan, as you seem to want to do.”
Jessica glanced one more time at Kildere, saying nothing, as the slot car came to a stop just before the bend in the road.
“Around the bend, one hundred feet,” Delta whispered, as if the lizards were about to appear on the road.
Minutemen- Parallel Lives Page 3