Authors: Cam Rogers
Jack’s shield quivered and expired. He jagged left, the bullet snapping past his ear to spark off the time-locked wall behind him.
Oxygen vanished, shockingly—chewed up to feed the slow-motion flames. Mouth working uselessly, Jack felt his chest tighten—fast and painfully.
The stutter lost its grip, heat kicked off, Jack’s chest burned from the inside, and then, downstairs, the secondary charges blew.
Jack’s ankles bit as the floorboard punched upward. He was airborne—and then causality quit. The stutter kicked back in, guillotining the roar to silence. He and Paul crashed back to earth on floorboards halted in the moment of splintering and heaving upward, gouts of flame spitting up through gaps in wood right across the attic. Jack’s hand came down through one such gap, hand and forearm disappearing into flame. With a yelp he snatched it back, just before the stutter rewound and the splintered jaws of the floor snapped shut, resealing. He toppled, and then the boards reerupted a second time, knocking him sideways. With a yell he rolled with it, batting the side of his face as his hair briefly caught fire.
Time lost track of itself again, slowed abruptly … then froze.
Paul didn’t hesitate: he warped across the room and out of the attic—down into whatever was left of the second floor.
Gulping uselessly, vision dimming, Jack folded into a moment—floor and attic and flames slipping past him in an instant. His hip connected with the desk, spinning him past the flaming ruin of the trapdoor and almost flipping him through the blown-out window. He spied movement at the gate to the property, out by the road.
Impossibly, Monarch troops were moving through the stutter, onto the property, where they divided into two large groups: one continuing down the drive, the second breaking off to loop around the rear side of the barn. No sign of Beth anywhere.
The floor and walls pounded, expanding and retracting, rupturing and resealing. His home had become a superheated heart in the grip of complete arrhythmia.
* * *
Paul flashed to the trapdoor and leaped down, transferring his weight and movement into a roll that was intended to propel him down the hall and toward the staircase. He hit the boards hard, ducked, tucked his shoulder, and came up running just as the door to Jack’s bedroom blew off its hinges on a superheated cloud. With a yell he transferred the run into a slide, getting under the twirling blade of the door, but too late to avoid singed skin and hair—just before the explosion had second thoughts and took it all back.
Pause.
Paul scrambled to his feet, batting at his clothes—nothing was burning. Whether it was luck or nostalgia, either way Paul spent a second glancing into a room he hadn’t visited since he was a child. Through the open door, on a desk, waiting for him, was the answer to an obsession.
A small wire-framed replica of a twelve-sided geodesic. This was a shape, a design, that had resided inside Paul’s brain for the last six years. This was the shape of the thing he had tasked the greatest scientific brains with unraveling, understanding, replicating, implementing.
This was the shape of the thing that rested at the heart of Monarch Tower. The thing upon which all of their discoveries had been based, yet was so poorly understood. A masterpiece of arcane design, created by the genius Paul had to kill.
“The Regulator.”
A 3-D model, perched atop a stack of yellowing documentation.
He lunged forward, channeling his chronon flow to influence the door, allowing him to release it from the stutter, shoving it open. Paul flung his hands forward to protect the model, clutching.…
Play.
The bomb in the wall behind the desk redetonated, catching Paul in the face just before the shield erected, the shock wave slamming him into—and through—the frail door. Yellowed papers flew like burning birds as he crashed into the opposite wall, face in agony, his clothes aflame.
Shrieking and screaming, he flipped over and rolled to suffocate the flames, narrowly avoiding being killed as the safe in the attic above fell through the weakened ceiling and cannoned through the floor two feet from his thrashing head.
And pause.
Time struggled against that constraint, tumbling forward slowly as hesitant causality continued to tear the place apart—with agonizing fussiness: erupting boards, wallpaper blackening and curling and flaming. Framed photographs tumbled as the cords that held them incinerated, the glass snapping and crazing with thermal shock as the images they contained turned dark and died.
Scrambling upright he wheeled toward the bedroom—the smashed door suspended in mid-air, the interior an inferno. Everything in the room was lost.
The Regulator model was destroyed, but Paul held something that gave him hope.
Scorched and torn papers were bunched into his balled fist: remnants of Will’s design for the Regulator, charred and half-destroyed, but it was something.
The stutter would collapse any moment. Half-blind and agonized, Paul Serene propelled down the stairs, through the kitchen, and out the back door.
* * *
In the attic, Jack spun away from the window as the far side of the roof collapsed in a thick rain of burning beams, shingles, and insulation. Ceiling had parted from wall, kindling shrapnel spraying wide across the property. A blown-back flap of roofing allowed the sky to peer through the ceiling’s rib cage.
Directly ahead of him the floor bottomed out completely as the weight of the safe killed the boards, sending it plummeting down to the hallway below, punching through the floor and shattering a downward runnel through kitchen cabinets.
A searing plume of flame jetted upward through the trapdoor—then froze. Somewhere below Paul screamed in pain. The conflagration paused and juddered, partially rewound, then leaped forward, repeat, as though undecided about what should happen next.
The scene abruptly leaped into a rapidly escalating shudder. Things could burst back into real time at any moment.
Against his better judgment, Jack let his feet propel him toward the massive hole in the floor. The lips of the wound vibrated steadily upward, closing, before trembling downward again. The cycle accelerated, up and down, flame and sparks and debris jetting in and out, jabbing at eyes and skin.
Forearm across his face, the floor trembling and snapping, Jack slipped—skidded—and tumbled through with a yell.
Pause.
He tumbled through a cloud of time-locked debris. Shreds of unmoving ash, wallpaper, shrapnel slashed at his hands and clothes as he plummeted downward, hit the second-floor hallway and tumbled backward through the wound in the floor which the falling safe had left behind. Shoulder blades clipped shattered kitchen cabinets as he tumbled feet first to the debris-laden kitchen floor—where the safe lay facedown in the wreckage.
The kitchen ceiling was a crumbling mess, wreathed in rolls of static fire. Curtains, blackened and blazing, framed a snapshot of the front garden on an otherwise perfect autumn morning.
Groaning he rolled to his hands and knees, scanning for any way out. The back door out of the kitchen had collapsed. In the opposite direction flaming debris was filling the living area as it rained from the conflagration in the attic. Vacillating between falling and rising, curling one way or another, it was a raising and lowering curtain of death. He ran for it. Palming away skipping sparks and cinders, diving under a crossbeam that rose and fell like an axe blade, Jack sped through the living area, shielding his face. Leaping across the flaming dining-room table he tripped on the back of a time-locked chair, hit the ground, rolled with it, and—shoulder aching from impact—belted through the screen door on the far side of the house and into the greenhouse.
Dull heat gave way to muted cold. Jack skidded to a stop, hip banging hard into a rusted planter rack. Aching all over, he took a second to assess the next course of action. Once this place had been full of life. His mother had made of it a verdant womb, a place that had once brought her happiness. Jack had loved it in winter, when the world was ankle-deep in frost and this sweating glasshouse had been close and warm and alive. Orchids had been her passion.
Jack Joyce, twenty-eight years old now, sprinted through the fragile mausoleum to his dead mother, feet pounding across mold-encrusted concrete, past racks and beds gone to rust and ruin, and shoved wide the frail, grime-darkened glass door to stumble, gasping, into morning sunlight.
The black eyes of a dozen assault rifles awaited him.
Without pausing, he translated himself into speed and flew forward as the Technician squad unloaded—missing by a wide margin, bullets sparking off the time-locked greenhouse. The delicate bones in his hand cracked as his fist met the face of the first trooper square below his nose, spun, and booted his compatriot in the back of his knee. He didn’t bother with the assault rifle, which was strapped to the man, but went for the sidearm while the rest of the team oriented and reacted. The first trooper punched the gravel, back first. Jack snatched the weapon and warped back toward the momentarily bulletproof greenhouse as the squad opened up and the second trooper hit the dirt, covering his head.
Jack popped back to regular speed behind a row of moldering planters stacked flush next to the greenhouse wall, the bones in his hand already mending. He popped up fast, and his healing hand lost grip, and the pistol flew from his fist.
Jack had enough time to belch out a disbelieving, “For fuck’s—!” when Beth opened fire from the hayloft.
Caught in the open, the rescue-rigged Technicians scattered fast. Chronon tech, just like the art-killers at the university but far less polished.
Retrieving his weapon as the Technicians scrambled for cover, he noticed the second unit: a crew flanking the barn. They had put together what was happening and were looking to kick into the barn from the rear, taking Beth by surprise. Jack blatted off three shots, catching one man on the hip and causing the rest to rethink their plan. Jack fell back to the rusted planters as a swarm of shots sought him out, every round sparking off—rather than penetrating—time-locked earth and glass.
The house was in a terrible state, rolling slowly outward in pieces from the attic and second floor, stopping, winding back a little, only to roll forward again toward the inevitable.
It was hard to focus. The light-headedness was back. Warping and shifting was costing him. He needed to regroup.
Four troopers clustered together behind the garage across from the house. Jack popped up and blasted out a stutter shield. The localized self-dividing moment popped to life around the four grunts, locking them into place—“Ha!”—for about a second before the tech they wore to keep them mobile tore the shield apart. “Crap.” Jack zapped forward, closing the distance … and his abilities ended there.
The ground seesawed. Jack forgot where he was.
A trooper fired a blind spray around the corner of the garage. Slugs zip-fanned above Jack’s head. He flinched, translating his forward momentum into a knee-skid across the drive’s white gravel. Righting himself as fast as he could, instinct then sent him scrambling—not for the blind side of the garage, but onto the porch and into the front door of the dying house.
Literally into the front door. In his panic he didn’t extend his chronon field, to make the door active, and Jack rebounded off it as if it were concrete.
The garage squad regrouped, crept along the south-side wall. Beth kept them back by kicking up a wall of dirt in front of them with a three-round burst.
Jack got to his feet, eyeballed Beth. Framed by the upper hayloft doors she pointed to herself and then at the crew behind the garage. Then she pointed to Jack and jerked a thumb toward the crew circling the barn. Jack gave the thumbs-up, took a deep breath, and rabbited toward the barn—gun up and firing. From her elevated position Beth opened fire with Gibson’s carbine.
* * *
Paul had crashed out the kitchen door, half-blinded, onto the porch that curved around the north and east sides of the house. The occasional clap of gunfire made him jump, reflexively dropping a stutter shield. No bullets came; the threat was not to him.
He sped from the shield, west, into the forest-fringed back garden, jagged south to put the house between him and the firefight that was taking place in the front. His chronon field was already working to restore his vision, the lacerating caustic sting of his facial injuries fading to a livid mottling of his flesh.
The gunfire at the front of the house escalated from a smattering of pops to a full-on multipointed fusillade. Jack was still alive. Paul wheeled, prepared to translate himself at speed around the southern side of the house to attack and apprehend his unskilled friend—to put an end to this madness.
But stopped. What he saw made the strength flee from his legs.
They existed. Five of them, south of the house, near the tree line. Flickering, hulking, twitching.
Then it was there, in the morning light, dark and glittering and monstrous, as though it had a right to be in a world that held Paul’s happiest memories. That thing of …
It moved.
The ground belted him in the ass before his inner ear had the chance to realize he had toppled. The Shifter with the shining palm came for him, unhurried, like every button-pushing nightmare because it
could,
because he couldn’t get away. Because the universe itself knew Paul Serene was so much worse than
dead.
The thing raised its black, shifting hand to display the killing star at its palm.
He froze; he was an animal trapped in the barrow of his own skull, with death at the entrance.
Chanting. The same syllable, repetitious, forever. In time it penetrated and the sound became a word.
Paul listened as his throat coughed up the word “go,” over and over and over.
His boots kicked against the cold ground, carved runnels in damp soil. His body twisted, fingers clawing at grass, and he was stumbling, chest grinding into the sod. Paul picked himself up and then he was running—straight for the woods.