Authors: Cam Rogers
* * *
Beth cornered around the rear of the stage in time to see Paul Serene drag Sofia toward one of the two western elevators. The second elevator opened and twenty heavily armed and rigged goons poured out.
Paul glared at his security and shouted, “
Stop her!
”
Beth dove under the stage as two of them opened fire, three-round bursts chipping craters out of black Italian marble.
“Hey chicken.” Irene was back.
The blade came out of nowhere, sliced the top of Beth’s right shoulder—a line of white pain dangerously close to her carotid. The space was tight and low under the stage, interlaced with diagonal supports. Irene went for a second strike, Beth reflexively fired—no target, but the sound was enough to make her opponent flinch.
Beth twisted away from Irene’s messed-up second strike, aiming her left shoulder toward the floor, firing twice as she went over. But Irene had followed through on the momentum of her aborted strike and used it to roll clear and vanish into the mass of shadow, half-formed shapes, and scaffolding. Beth sent two more shots after her, hoping for the best.
Adrenalized and breathing hard Beth rolled back to her knees, ignoring the blood on her hands and legs and headed for the audience side of the platform. Slipping out from under the black cloth, she kept low and got back among the statue-crowd—equidistant between the two Juggernauts who were now moving into the open space on either side of the stage.
Hatch was still frozen onstage. A Striker was paused behind him, mid-explosion, as was the Technician he had slammed into. Above Beth’s head a second Striker was airborne above the first row of the crowd, his back unit rupturing. Jack was onstage, breathing heavily.
“Jack!”
He saw her. She motioned:
get after Paul
, then ran deeper into the unmoving crowd, firing her pistol twice into the air. Every unit present, save the Juggernauts, went after her like it was their mission.
Jack ran into the wings, headed for the elevators.
* * *
Beth bolted through the reception area—open bar, servers, trays of champagne—and beyond that into the far third of the atrium. It was all business here. The area was divided into nine islands, each island showing off a subsidiary or two of Monarch Solutions: Innovations, Industrial, Pharmaceutical, Multimedia, Technology, Business, Energy, Financial, Security, Childcare, Aerospace, Agricultural, Human Resources, Protective Services, Automotive, L&T, Consumer, Construction, Entertainment, and Communications.
Even passing the displays at a run it was easy for Beth to see how Monarch was becoming ubiquitous. Hatch and Serene had a finger in every pie going. Superpowers and foreknowledge went a long way.
Her pursuers entered the reception area as she jagged behind a giant display for a gaming console Monarch Entertainment was releasing next fall. They opened fire on her, rounds fragmenting and sparking off frozen bystanders and objects. Those bullets that sailed past eventually slowed to a halt. When the stutter broke they would continue on their deadly course.
“These people are
investors,
assholes!” she shouted.
Thankfully Hatch’s demo had pulled almost every person in the atrium toward it. The display area was mostly people-free and she was running away from bystanders.
Her pursuers weren’t listening. She caught glimpses of twenty Technicians fanning out, Chronon-1 bringing up the rear—monster-faced Gibson super pissed.
* * *
Gibson knew what Wilder was up to. She was falling back to the eastern elevator bays, pulling attention from Joyce’s pursuit of Mr. Serene and Dr. Amaral.
He rounded on C-1, headed double-time back the way they’d come.
“Top floor. Now.”
* * *
The reinforcements fired at Beth with little fear of hurting anyone, but Beth’s firing line included the demo crowd on the other side of the atrium—directly behind every asshole that was coming after her.
Fuck it. She’d been telling Jack she couldn’t die. Time to put her money where her mouth was.
Three five-man squads crept down an aisle a piece while the fourth hung back covering. Beth waited behind the Medical display at the far end, leftmost aisle. In moments fifteen armed men would be in her firing line as they passed the final displays.
She swung out when she heard the nearest squad just around the corner.
The stutter broke.
A Striker in front of the stage arced out over the audience, back unit exploding, before flailing heavily to smash through tables and glassware. Onstage, a Striker detonated as he flew into that nice Technician lady in the jumpsuit. Gunshots rang out simultaneously onstage and beneath it. Reanimated bullets whipped to life in the display section and blew a Monarch GMO display to pieces.
Hatch, however, was gone.
People freaked the fuck out.
Beth shot five goons in the legs and ran for the nearby eastern elevator bays. The middle squad moved to assist their injured comrades while the third and most distant squad opened up, perforating a 3-D-printed concept car as she fled.
* * *
Jack felt the stutter quit as his elevator arrived on the fiftieth floor.
The elevator purred: “Good night, Dr. Amaral.”
Jack pocketed Sofia’s ID. “I’ve had better.”
A security door was pneumatically swinging shut as he exited. A short dash and he was through, the door clicking behind him.
Down a corridor to his left he heard Sofia cry out.
* * *
Paul booted through a security door into Martin’s thousand-square-foot private garden: an open-air platform, green and pathed, with a bird’s-eye view of the city. A series of stone steps led to Martin’s office dead ahead. The branching path also led right, toward the chronon operations for the building. When the Tower was designed Martin had been clear: he wanted to be close to the most critical elements of Project Lifeboat.
“Faster,” he said. “We’ve got to make it to the helicopter before—”
His hand tore from Sofia’s grasp as her soft flesh turned to stone. The stutter had kicked in again. Sofia stood, static, movement captured in her pose, the expression on her face perplexed and anxious.
Behind her: monsters.
Shifters. The ones from the Joyce farm, the same ones he always saw. He was sure of that now. Ahead, foremost and advancing, came the Shining Palm.
* * *
Jack caught sight of them as Paul open the door to a rooftop garden at the end of a long enameled wood hallway. Jack folded, propelled forward, but not fast enough.
He felt the stutter kick back in, a pulse throughout his entire body.
With a desperate surge he wedged a hand in the door, tore it open, and got through.
The tight, enclosed hallway led to a green expanse open to a night sky, slashed by the slow beams of spotlights positioned on every corner of the Monarch Tower block. A Y-shaped path divided flat green lawn, one path branching left toward the pillared, glass-fronted façade of what had to be Martin Hatch’s apartment. The other cut right, toward a doorway in the building proper. Had to be the chronon labs, like Beth said.
The apartment was fronted with a pillared open-air deck. An L-shaped gantry led from that, over a fifty-floor drop, to a suspended helipad where a helicopter waited, lit bright—polished and sharklike. Paul had stopped running, Sofia having deanimated for a second time as she stopped cold and the stutter settled in.
A wall of Shifters stood between himself and Paul. Paul was pinned, terrified. That was the kid he remembered from Bannerman’s Overlook.
The phalanx of Shifters recoiled, shrieking with something like rage—or pain?—as Jack had thrown the door open. As if his very appearance had sent a wave of fire rolling through them all.
As one they forgot poor, terrified Paul, and rounded on Jack.
* * *
Jack was a closer potential-generator than Paul and, because he was making this up as he went along, generated more Shifter-agonizing variables. He was an excruciating presence to these monsters and, as such, a thing to be destroyed.
The only one who did not turn was Shining Palm.
Sofia remained between Jack and Paul—as potential- and causality-dead as stone. Safe, invisible to the Shifters, and unable to be harmed.
The Shifters roared, fritzing and flashing, and Jack bailed, running hard, back the way he came. They were too close, there were too many, and he had nowhere to lose them.
Paul backed away. Shining Palm hesitated, head whipping from Paul to the pursuing horde and back. With a final glance at its sweating prey the Shining Palm turned and bounded after its hunting kin.
Paul remained, stunned into disbelief by his continued survival. The creature had him right there. Why had it chosen to…?
Run, you idiot.
Paul fled toward the security door, and into the Tower. The chronon research labs would have stutter generators. He would be safe there until the stutter broke. When it was over, when Jack was dead, he would return for Sofia.
* * *
Monarch Tower’s chronon response had kicked in, channeling particles to the elevators and keeping them active. Beth was grateful for that.
As she stepped out onto floor fifty, an overeager fusillade of automatic gunfire sparked and flashed off the time-locked glass wall opposite the elevator.
“Fight back, bitch!”
Gibson. He’d circled back and cut her off.
Another spray came her way, angled for the door frame. Beth threw her hands up, shielding her face from hot fragment sprays.
She didn’t think. Double-pumping her free hand she pushed off against the elevator’s wall, and leaped across the space between the elevator and the glass wall in front of her.
Christ, did the high-pitched
vip
of incoming rounds always have to sound so goddamn
happy
? None of them connected. In a single fluid move she hit the carpet, rolled, pressed her free hand to the glass, unlocking it into vulnerability, and put two rounds through it. The wall dropped in a single, sparkling sheet of cubed safety glass and Beth leaped inside, clear of Gibson’s line of sight.
Meeting room. Glass wall with door opposite her. Hallway outside—cube farm beyond another glass wall.
Horatio had walked her through this level. Helipad outside Hatch’s office. Office on opposite side of garden. Garden was …
that way.
She double-pumped her hands, opened the door, and took off left down the hall.
At the four-way corridor junction fifty feet ahead, Gibson rounded the corner—assault rifle leveled at the hip.
“Hold up, punkin’ butter.”
One barking shot lanced across the space between them.
Pain.
Beth’s legs went out from under her.
She hit the floor, face-first, hard. The pain took her breath away.
“That’s more like it.”
A piece of her outer left thigh had been blown away. With one hand clamped to the wound she grabbed for her lost weapon.
Gibson opened up. Rounds sparked and fragged inches from her fingers. She whipped her hand back.
“Leave the hand there, darlin’.” Gibson walked forward. C-1 brought up the rear—all eight of them. “I’m gonna shoot that fucking thing right off.” He spat to the side. “For starters.”
“Boss,” Donny piped up.
“Not now, Donny.”
“Boss.”
“I said
not…!
” Gibson stopped.
Howls.
“Shit.”
Jack Joyce came sprinting around the corner, bringing a shrieking, tumbling wall of clawed, fractured madness with him.
“Shifters!”
Gibson, Donny, and Reeves saw them coming and split back the way they came, to the mezzanine. Irene and Voss jagged opposite, heading deeper into the warren of cubicles—toward the fortified chronon labs behind that.
Mully had been covering the curving wooden hall leading toward Hatch’s private garden—and had the most ground to cover to make an escape. Bristol watched as reactive thinking short-circuited Mully’s ability to adapt. He could have blasted the glass wall, as Beth had done, and sidestepped the tide. But he didn’t.
A paw, flickering and phasing and hooked, swept up and through Mully’s shoulder from behind. Without slowing, the Shifter lifted the screaming trooper over its shoulder, tossing him back into the pack. Bristol saw a roiling, fractal head rise from the back of the surge, along with two crackling arms, to pile drive Mully out of sight.
Bristol saw all of this—when he should have been running.
A prone Beth saw two Shifters do things to Bristol’s geometry as the screaming trooper was smashed underfoot—things that would stay in her head forever.
Jack skidded to a halt and hauled her up, the horde thirty feet behind. “Up up up!”
No hope. The Shifters were already on them.
Beth closed her eyes.
Howls.
Jack turned, shielding her, and—
One Shifter flew left, through the shattered office wall. Another was grabbed by the head and pulled backward to the ground. A third Shifter—the largest—drove a crackling foot into the creature’s chest, pinning it to the floor. Chronon flow arced off the flailing body, played off the walls.
Jack saw flashes of the same hallway, decorated and designed a dozen different ways as the slowly collapsing M-J field sliced the place up along different timelines. Sometimes it wasn’t decorated so much as destroyed. Alternate hallways, alternate outcomes, alternate presents.
With his own eyes Jack watched reality inch closer to falling apart completely.
The big Shifter threw its arms wide and
screamscreamscreamed.
Eyes wide, hands wide. Shining Palm.
The pack held back behind it, cowed. The Shifter on the floor thrashed infinitely, simultaneously.
Jack stumbled backward.
Beth was on her feet, hauling him now, hobbling heavily on one good leg. “This way. Run.” Blood flowed thick between the fingers clamped to her wound.
“Beth, what’s happening?”
Without warning the stutter collapsed, every still bullet flew free, glass walls shattered and the Shifters abruptly … vanished.