Authors: James Axler
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.
* * *
R
YAN
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.
* * *
T
HE
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.
* * *
E
MILY
, J
OLYON
AND
R
ACHEL
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...
* * *
F
OR
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.
* * *
A
T
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?
* * *
T
HE
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.”
* * *
B
ENEATH
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.
Doc flipped and spun, trying to keep sight of the bullet as it disappeared. Below him, he saw the telltale kick of riverbed where the bullet impacted uselessly; his aim had been thrown by the movement and he had wasted the shot.
He had been under the water for almost thirty seconds now, barrelling beneath the freezing waves as the creature hurtled onward. It was moving at a decent clip, Doc surmised, difficult to tell with the light-dark flash of sunlight through water. His chest cried out for air, his eyes ached from the water pressure and its punishing temperature. He needed to get out of the water, and get out fast.
He brought the blaster around again as he spiraled through the water, timed more carefully to try to snag the creature. It loomed ahead of him, pushing through the water, one thick tentacle wrapped around his ankle as it hurried through the ice, a dark shape at the edge of his vision. It had a rounded body and moved with a kick of limbs, propelling itself with a sort of thrust-brake, thrust-brake movement. Some kind of mutie, Doc guessed, didn’t matter what. The thing wanted him for lunch; that’s all that really mattered right now.
Gritting his teeth, Doc fired the LeMat again, sending another .44-caliber slug through the water. He heard it dreamily, muffled by the cool medium, then watched as something began to leak from the creature’s flank.
The creature’s grip slipped fractionally. He fired again, feeling the pressure rising in his lungs, seeing the dark spots before his eyes that either meant the sunlight was being obscured by ice, or he was running out of oxygen. The bullet hit home, slamming again into the creature’s body somewhere among that cluster of writhing tentacles.
* * *
W
OUNDED
AND
LEAKING
dark, inky blood, the creature surfaced, batting great chunks of ice aside. At the river’s edge, Ryan and Krysty spotted it—fifty yards downstream—and brought their weapons to bear without a second’s hesitation.
The side of the river erupted with the sounds of blasterfire, the grim cough of Ryan’s SIG-Sauer sending four 9 mm slugs at the creature in a flash, Krysty’s .38 driving two rounds into the creature’s side. They chased along the river, sending more shots into the wounded creature as it thrashed in the icy waters. It looked massive. Limbs seemed to spew from everywhere, trailing behind the beast like great swirling snakes, their flesh as gray and shiny as a seal’s pelt.
The thing was pinned against the bank, struggling among great hunks of ice where it had been forced to surface by the wound Doc’s blast had dealt it. Ryan rammed his SIG-Sauer into his waistband, bringing the more powerful Steyr Scout to bear. He had the weapon up to his shoulder in a matter of seconds, centered the mutant creature in the center of the crosshairs. Beside him, Krysty reloaded her blaster and sent another burst of fire at the horrendous beast.
Ryan aimed and fired, feeling the familiar kick of the Steyr as it pumped against his body. A 7.62 mm slug drilled into the creature’s face where one milky black eye was sunken in place, staring out at the sky and the riverbank. The shot turned the eye into so much jelly, spurting gunk and mist into the air.
Doc emerged from the water a moment later, Krysty’s bullets spitting great gobs of water all about him as he thrashed amid the ice. He had his own blaster in hand, the replica LeMat, and he brought it around even as he heaved for breath, squeezing the trigger and sending another blast at the creature’s writhing form.
The mutie squid-thing hissed like a burst tire, sending a jet of dark inky liquid up into the air.
Icy water poured from Doc’s hair as he struggled to take another breath before the mutie submerged him again. His shoulders struck against the water as the creature thrashed, flipping him up and back. The water felt hard, striking Doc with the forgiveness of brick.
On the riverbank, Ryan calmly reloaded and aimed the Steyr at the creature’s other eye. Before he could fire, the mutie disappeared under the surface, dragging Doc with it.
“No!” Ryan shouted as his colleague disappeared under the ice once more.
Beside him, Krysty was a blur of hair and rushing limbs. She had removed her fur coat and she threw it and her Smith & Wesson aside as she leaped into the water in a graceful dive. Ryan watched her go, all too aware of how bitterly cold that freezing water was.
* * *
A
DRENALINE
PUMPING
, Doc switched barrels as the creature dragged him beneath the water again. He didn’t think about it, just brought the LeMat around to where he was certain the beast was. Then he pulled the second trigger, which activated the 18-gauge shotgun barrel. Even beneath the water, the weapon sounded like a thunderclap as it sent its deadly cargo through the waves and into the creature’s body.
The mutie squid rocked as a huge chunk of its flesh was torn from it by Doc’s blast. A great gout of inky blood filled the waters around it, and the monster began to sink.
Doc gazed up his spinning body, trying to see what it was that was pulling him through the water. The dark shape loomed lower now, dragging him by his foot toward the bottom of the river.
Blaster still in hand, Doc reached down to snatch his foot away. His boot slipped back and forth against his ankle but he couldn’t pull free. Once again his chest was aching, burning with pressure as the need to breathe threatened to overwhelm him.
Then, suddenly, something pulled Doc away, dragging him by his shoulders and yanking him out of the mutie’s grip. For a moment, the world seemed to spin, flashes of light and dark—
and heaven help him, was that Emily?—
as he swam away from the plummeting creature in the river.
Doc surfaced a second later, gulping down a single great breath as soon as he saw the sunlight. Beside him, Krysty was gripping his waist, holding him up above the shimmering surface of the water, bobbing there with swishing feet. Her hair was soaked through and it trailed about her in jagged lines. Her Gaia power was still with her, Doc realized, turning her into a human weapon, a fantastical capacitor filled to brimming with the power of the Earth Mother.
He thanked his lucky stars. “So good to have friends,” Doc muttered as Krysty coasted with him back to the shore, where Ryan was still watching the water through the rifle’s scope.
Momentarily, Ryan spotted the beast surface amid a spume of ink, its black tentacles thrashing in the water. He squeezed the trigger again, sending another 7.62 mm slug into what he assumed was the creature’s head. The bullet struck in a great burst of exploding flesh and Ryan sent a second bullet that hit home a moment later. The creature reared from the water before diving back beneath and disappearing from view.
At the side of the river, Krysty had recovered her coat and wrapped it around Doc’s shivering body. She had to be cold, too, Doc realized, and he offered her the coat.
“Just get yourself warmed up,” Krysty said. “I don’t feel cold at all.”
Doc pulled the coat over his shoulders, staving off the freezing temperature that had dug into his core like a burrowing dog.
How much time had he been down there, under the water with that thing?
Minutes?
Hours?
It was so hard to tell. Time, that great cosmic joke, seemed so fluid, so unreal here.
“You’re losing it, Theo,” Doc chastised himself, mumbling the words.
He looked up, confirming that no one had heard him. Krysty was standing with Ryan, looking powerful and determined, her body displaying none of its usual signs of post-Gaia fatigue. Was it still coursing through her, that incredible power? Could it be that Krysty had tapped a wellspring so deep that she could remain superstrong for hours—or perhaps even longer?
And Emily. What was she doing, watching over him, whispering in his ear all the while? “I hear you, my darling,” Doc whispered, shaking his head. He wanted her to go, yet he feared she might never come back if she went this time. It was all in his head—wasn’t it? All some grand delusion, played out because of the cold, the mat-trans jump scrambling his mind so badly he was still suffering its aftereffects the way Ricky had suffered the stomach cramps.
Reason it away all you like, Doc told himself, she was still there. The smell of her perfume, the sound of her voice. He might be able to apply cold logic, but it didn’t change the reality he felt.
His dear Emily was there, more now than ever, as if she was closer—perhaps not geographically, but chronally, the ages reaching out for her, pulling her to him.
The eras folded and unfolded like origami, making new patterns, new days of the old.
* * *
R
YAN
LOOKED
AT
Krysty now, the worry clear on his face. “You’ve been channeling Gaia too long,” he said. “No question.”
Krysty looked strong, her hair still crackling around her head. “It won’t stop,” she explained. “I’ve never really had a way to shut it off. It wasn’t a problem before n—” She stopped, her eyes flicking from Ryan’s face to something behind him. “Ryan, look!”
He turned, saw the disembodied mouths—the things that the minister had called chronovores—moving in a pack across the fields of ice. Not just one this time, but a hundred of them, with more emerging from the ether even as he watched. Doc was still huddled in Krysty’s coat, shivering as he tried to warm up from his impromptu dip.
“Doc,” Ryan called, “we have to move.”
Looking up, Doc nodded. “Time is coming for us,” he said. “Sending everything it has to force this aberration out of existence. And us with it.”