Authors: Cam Rogers
Good memory, weird timing.
Stop. Think.
These were the facts, as he understood them.
Paul oversaw a time travel project for Monarch. Will was hired to consult, but was kept largely out of the loop. Nonetheless, the machine was clearly based on Will’s research. Then Monarch either hired mercenaries or used their own troops, dressed in weird gear, and had them attack the lab
they own
. They were supposed to “steal” the core of the machine and kill a bunch of innocent people in the process.
Why?
Kill a bunch of people, but they wanted Will alive. Why? He was valuable to them. Which probably meant they weren’t done with the machine.
But none of this would have happened if Paul hadn’t turned on the machine. The attack kicked off almost immediately after, as if the machine’s activation had been a signal.
There had to be an answer but Will was the one with the brains.
Had Jack’s involvement been planned? What about his abilities? Were they intended? Had Paul been in on it?
Was Paul even alive? If he was trapped at some kind of end-of-time point, could he be saved?
An hour ago everything had been fine. Now the world—the universe, maybe—was falling apart.
Will.
He had to get Will away from these people. He dragged his face along one filthy sleeve, shook his head again, blinked, did what he could to banish the killing sense of grief that threatened to undo him, and stood up.
Will first. Then, once Will was safe, Jack would come back. He was getting back into that lab, and he was going after Paul. End of time or no, he was bringing Paul back. Nobody he loved was dying this morning. Nobody.
Will was taken to the library, Gibson had said. The library was near the protest camp. The protest camp was by the entrance to the university. The entrance was at the start of Founders’ Walk. Okay. Jack oriented. Looked around. The library was east. Whoever had taken Will west must be headed for the parking lot.
A university security BearCat tore out from the parking lot behind the dome, along the nearest treelined avenue, headed east, straight for the library.
Jack willed himself into the space between moments, and while the world wasn’t looking, he ran.
* * *
The entire city was alert to what was going on. Crowds pressed against Monarch-erected barricades two blocks from campus. Police flashbars turned anxious faces into a neon flipbook. The media were issued canned statements. Civilian drone pilots reported their toys suddenly dropping dead once they got within two miles of the campus. Bloggers screamed blue murder; phones and tablets turned to fritzing junk. Families wanted answers. People were missing. Cops yelled at Monarch troops. Monarch troops followed a policy of total non-engagement. An event had occurred, the company had state sanction to contain the event, local law enforcement and the community would be briefed shortly.
The situation made it easy for Jack to blink toward the western face of the library unseen and get inside. Particleboard fencing had been erected around the site. Signs with
DEMOLITION IN PROGRESS
—
DO NOT ENTER
were nail-gunned to each one, by order of Riverport Council and Monarch Construction. Every fourth fence panel had a four-by-five-foot employment infographic, actors in hard hats flashing I-got-mine smiles. Most of these were plastered with unflattering graffiti and anti-Monarch stickers.
The squawk and bark of Monarch bullhorns told Jack the scene two blocks away was intensifying.
Jack climbed the hood on an unattended BearCat, leaped over the fence and made for a rear door. He hit the ground on strong legs, head still spinning but eyes clear.
Fixtures and fittings had been stripped from the library, leaving a shell and the lecture theater without a door. He walked in.
It was dim inside the lecture theater, hollow-bodied and sulking. Racked tiers had been stripped of seating, the oak paneling to be consigned to landfill and history. Slack six-foot-long tubes of plastic wrap hung limply from banisters, littering the floor, along with a thick coat of dust. No fittings and no power meant no illumination. Small, gas-powered generators burbled throatily from deeper in the guts of the old place, someplace better lit than here, judging from the glare spilling from the hallway.
“Please. Let me go. I…!”
“Will?” Terror had happened here, in this room. He could feel it, his new sense alive to the agitation and fear. It was imprinted upon the chronon flow in the room as clearly as tracks through snow.
“Please. Let me go. I…!”
Jack’s attention gravitated toward a space at the foot of the racked tiers, in front of an antique oaken podium. His senses pulled toward that point, like iron filings toward a magnet.
Will had been here. Every cell in him knew it.
Figures leaped into existence, no more substantial than the thin light that leaked into the hall from the world outside: Will, flanked by two Monarch troopers.
“Please. Let me go. I…!”
Jack watched the trooper on the left elbow Will in the stomach, dropping him. Then they dragged him toward the hall, where they evaporated into shadow. Gone.
An after echo … or a brush with the future?
Echo. Jack didn’t know how he knew, but he trusted it. He had so many questions for Will. He needed to know what the fuck was happening to him.
The hallway would have been beautiful a year ago. Now dust gathered against the molded skirting boards, the two-tone floors strewn with discarded insulation and wiring. The hallway ended, open-mouthed, onto the library’s main room, bracketed by frosted glass panels. Light stands were arranged evenly around the cavernous space. Shelf-lined mezzanines overlooked the main room, lined with wrought-iron railings. The long oval of the information desk remained in place, but most everything else had been ripped out. Serried lines of chrome lugs patterned the checkered floor around the info desk: the footprints of vanished Internet cubicles.
Jack tried to pick up Will’s trail, feeling for another vision, scanning the main hall.
He was so preoccupied that he didn’t notice the two smiley-faced troopers guarding an archway in the north wall, until it was too late. He realized his mistake as soon as they clocked him.
Jack didn’t think. He warped forward and grabbed the first trooper’s weapon, failing to notice that it was strapped to him. The mask smiled at him and then Jack was struck in the face for his trouble. He recovered in time to be staring down the barrel of the gun he’d tried to snatch.
Jack warped, the trooper fired, and his partner keeled over dead—three ragged holes stitched through PEACE.
The surviving trooper’s awareness disconnected for a moment as he took in what he had done. He snapped his rifle toward Jack as Jack cannoned into him at warp speed, blasting both of them into a pile of dilapidated wooden bookshelves stacked seven deep against the wall.
The trooper didn’t move, smiling vacantly at his own lap. Jack pulled himself to his feet, stepping away from the slack-bodied trooper he’d just used as an airbag.
The northern room, which the two troopers had been standing watch in, was circular and just off the main room. It used to house the stacks, judging from the signage and the ghostly rectangular footprints that fanned the space. Jack heard generators thumping from a small room off to the side, from which cabling snaked.
“Jack?”
It was dim in the stacks chamber, the light from the main hall lighting that gutted room like dusk: clear surfaces, deep shadows. Will was there, quiet and pressed against the wall, hands zip-tied at his waist and clearly terrified. Jack searched the trooper, took his combat knife, and popped the binders off Will.
“Are you okay? Answer me later. You got a bunch of shit I want explained.”
“Jack. Look.”
Against the curved wall, near the body of the crumpled trooper, was a foot. Sneakered. Chuck Taylors.
“They brought them in here,” Will said. “Some of the students from the camp.”
The kid wearing the Chucks was propped slack against the wall, hair spilling from beneath his hoodie across the floor, his chest a bloody ruin.
Jack exited, shielded his eyes against the glare of the lamps and moved past their perimeter. Forward was the wide, doorless exit. To the right was the corridor through which he had entered. To his left was a long hall once used for shelves and periodicals.
Now it was a mortuary. Bodies lay strewn across the chessboard floor, not killed here but dumped. Not one of them would have been out of their twenties. Amy, the girl that accosted him in the quadrangle, would be here, Jack realized. Somewhere. He still had her flyers in his jacket pocket.
RESPECT EXISTENCE OR EXPECT RESISTANCE
.
He couldn’t bear to look.
“We gotta go,” Jack said, marching back to the light. “C’mon, Will, we gotta go.”
Two men with the familiar round-faced PEACE silhouette flanked Will. One had a carbine pointed at Jack, the other had his weapon aimed at Will’s head.
Jack cursed his stupidity. They had been in the generator room.
He needed to be sure that if he made a play, here and now, that he could warp fast enough to kill the two men in less time than it took to pull a trigger. He didn’t know. His powers had been coming and going. But he had to do something.
Then someone said, “Stop. Just … stop.”
Jack squinted in the light. An avuncular hand rested on Will’s shoulder, briefly, before the third person stepped forward: unmarked urban fatigues, broad-shouldered, hair in a buzz-cut. Military type.
This was wrong. This was terribly wrong. Jack was washed through with the nauseating chill of déjà vu.
The figure stepped into the light.
“Paul?”
Jack’s lifelong friend emerged from the shadows, familiar features traced with unfamiliar new details: worry lines now creased Paul’s forehead, and his hair had stippled salt-and-pepper at the temples. His build was no longer that of a project coordinator; his was the economically muscled body of a career soldier.
Paul Serene, the passionate idealist, had been replaced by an older man. Excitability did not vibrate beneath this lean individual’s skin, gone was the easy smile. This man’s form was his function, and his function was the imposition of a will that glittered sharply and certainly from behind clear eyes.
This couldn’t be real.
“I’m sorry,” Paul said, and vanished. A hard cannonball of pain impacted the small of Jack’s back, collapsing him to his knees. Will, thoughtless of his own safety, broke free and dashed forward to protect his brother.
Space buckled around Will. Within that depression time inverted and snapped. A stutter popped into existence around him, immobilizing Jack’s brother in a posture of panic.
Jack was numb, body and mind. Paul was alive. Here. Older. And …
Paul looked down at him. “I’m sorry, Jack. Tonight’s events were not to my taste. But they were to my orders.” Cold words uttered in a warm voice from a young friend now very much Jack’s elder.
Jack got to his feet. Paul turned, unconcerned, and strolled closer to Will.
Jack couldn’t accept it. What had happened to transform the change-the-world idealist he had known into this?
“It was meant to be a two-minute hop to the future,” Paul said. “What I got was a ride to the end of the world. The world I killed, when I activated the machine.”
“The world doesn’t look that killed, Paul.”
Paul faced Jack, tucking his hands into the pockets of his fatigues. The adolescent gesture took ten years off him for a moment.
“When the end comes years of escalating horror will build to a moment of perfect, unimaginable insanity and then … that moment never ends. Ever. That’s what the end of time is. But I found a way out,” Paul said gently. “I knew I had to do something, Jack. That’s what kept me alive there.”
He took an earnest step toward his friend.
“I traveled back as far as I could. To 1999.”
“You told me the machine can’t take a person back beyond the moment it was first activated.”
“I just told you I found a way out. Now listen to me, and understand: I wanted as much time as possible to build something that would help us
defy
the end of the world—the end of time—by
surviving it
.” His face lit up at this, clearly expecting a stronger reaction from Jack.
“Paul,” Jack said. “It’s good to see you. I was worried.” Then, pointedly: “Can we have this conversation without an assault rifle pointed at my brother’s head?”
Paul chose to ignore the request. “I’ve done seventeen years of living since I saw you last, Jack, but I still remember what you were like.” Paul spoke with a warm smile, but taking no pleasure in what he said. “If you were a reasonable man, a level-headed man, my actions now would be very different.” Paul held out a gloved hand to one of the troopers. Obediently the soldier unclipped a Taser from his belt and placed it in Paul’s hand. “I can’t take risks, Jack. I’m sorry.”
Rage.
The world slammed forward, taking Jack with it as he shouldered into the trooper on the right. Fully armored, the yellow-faced killer flew across the length of the archives, met the wall hard, and dropped ten feet to the floor.
The air pressure pulsed as Paul manifested before Jack. “Stop.”
Jack’s boot came down hard for Paul’s knee. Paul sidestepped it.
“Let us go,” Jack hissed. “Whatever the fuck happened to you, let us go.”
“I can’t. Will knows too much, and now you’re too dangerous.”
Jack looped an arm for Paul’s head. It didn’t work.
“Will’s too valuable, and you’re my friend.”
“Let us
go
!”
Paul dodged another punch with a flick of his head. “Jack.”
“What’s Monarch to you? Why are all those kids out there … why are they … why did you…?”
Paul drew a line under this exchange with a short intake of breath. “Now’s not the time. We can talk later.” Paul smiled, a familiar detail. He had smiled like that at bad jokes, little victories, and
Team Outland.