When the shooting started, Magus let out a smug little laugh. As he suspected, his adversaries were hardly worth that title. So predictable. The radio call had been a fake, the bait for an ill-advised trap.
He leaned toward the limo’s privacy window and addressed the driver. “I want you to get out now,” he said. “And then open the trunk.”
There was fear in the man’s eyes as he looked up in the rearview mirror. Would he obey or wouldn’t he? Which did he fear the most? The thundering roar of full-auto blasters or the steel hand that could break rock so close to his neck?
The driver made the right choice, the wise choice. He opened his door and got out. Magus exited, too, then waved the man around to the limo’s popped trunk lid.
Magus guessed that snipers were in position on the rooftops across the street and that their longblasters were already aimed down at them. A simple trap designed by simple people. When the riflemen didn’t immediately open fire, Magus knew they had no green light and the person who could give the command to turn them loose on targets in the street was probably tied up in the ferocious battle with enforcers.
Magus leaned over the man huddled in a corner of the trunk. “If you struggle, I will crush your windpipe,” he told him.
Then to the driver he said, “Get him out of there. He’s coming with me. Take off the gag, but leave his wrists tied.”
When the driver pulled Nudelman over the bumper, Magus reached into the trunk and took out one of the M-16s. He dropped the magazine into his hand, then tapped its bottom against the steel plate on the side of his head. The weight and the sound—solid not hollow—told him it was full up. The rest of the stolen blasters he had to write off as the cost of doing business. There was no one to carry them all, with the enforcers handling another task, and they didn’t matter in the long run. What was locked in Nudelman’s brain was worth far more to him than a couple of dozen predark blasters.
“Follow me,” Magus told the driver and the hostage, whose wrists were still bound. “If either of you try to escape, I will shoot you down.”
The din of blasterfire from inside the building suddenly stopped and screaming could be heard. Shrill and seesawing, it sounded like a cat fight. Magus limped up onto the sidewalk, past a charred tree, then down the steps of the basement apartment of the brownstone next door.
He wasn’t concerned about the snipers reporting his movements to their superiors or leaving their posts to hunt him down. They were number two on the enforcers’ to-do list. And even if they did sound an alert, he planned to be long gone before the cavalry arrived.
Magus opened the door’s lock with a key from his hoodie’s pouch pocket. He made the driver and Nudelman enter ahead of him. The dark apartment was empty, stripped of furnishings. There was nothing to trip over, but Magus turned on the lights anyway. For any number of reasons, illumination didn’t matter.
The other apartments in the building were empty, too. No one lived there. Except for the mysterious balladeer, of course. That had been a rumor Magus had started through one of the unwitting human minions. He had found it most amusing. And the perfect cover for strange goings-on inside.
The first clue that something had gone amiss on this time jump was the alarming shift in the terminus of the exit hole. It had moved approximately seventy feet to the north from its normal position in the second-floor apartment next door. That apartment was where the time hole had always spit them out before. That’s why Magus had purchased the entire building and left it empty.
“Stop there,” he told the two men. He opened a closet door, touched a catch inside the jamb and the back of the enclosure swung inward, revealing wooden steps leading up. As part of “Bob Dylan’s” remodel, he had installed a hidden passage that led from the basement apartment to its counterpart on the second floor, the time hole’s terminus.
Magus turned on the stairway lights, then ushered the men up ahead of him. They climbed quickly past one landing; the top of the next ended in what looked like a blank wall. Again, a touch on a catch and the wall popped inward. They faced the back of another closet door.
There was noise coming from the other side. Magus put his surviving human ear against the door in order to hear better. One individual was talking in a grating, metallic voice.
His own voice.
The second clue that something had gone seriously awry had been the apparition on the opposite metro train at the West Fourth Street station. Because his comp-enhanced brain could recall in great detail every transit he’d ever made to the past, every route taken and the timing of the same, he’d known there was the remote chance of a near crossing of paths on that particular subway platform at that time of day. Under different circumstances, he would have avoided it like the plague, but they’d been taking fire at the time from Cawdor and his cohorts.
Sure enough, the unlikely had happened.
Two identical ships had passed in the night.
That meant the erosion of temporal barriers and its anticipated consequence was no longer simply a theoretical possibility. The distinctly separate action lines of adjoining, parallel universes had merged to the point that from the present universe one, the others had become visible and real.
Too much monkey business in one time and place; that was on him.
From the moment he’d set foot in the past, he had always known there was a chance of such a thing happening, but he hadn’t expected it to come without warning. There was no going back, no reset button after the delamination of universes on January 19, 2001, had begun. The temporal traffic jam he had created was now a permanent fixture of the time hole’s jumping-off point, as were the event and timeline mergers.
The only way he could ever safely return to loot the past again was if he could recalibrate the time-hole controls, arrive, say, a day or two earlier—or a month. There was no point to arriving the day after Armageddon. He hadn’t tried to adjust the controls before because it had seemed unnecessary—there was plenty of plenty on the date in question—and misguided tinkering risked destroying the link altogether.
To accomplish the recalibration he had to get back to Deathlands and quickly, because the year 2001 was about to come to a violent and premature close.
The other end of the time hole remained fixed positionally in the desert redoubt but not temporally. He had used this route to the same point in the past many times. The only variation that existed in the New York past was the time of day he chose to leave for the hellscape—something he had been very careful not to duplicate.
Magus opened the closet door and limped into a brightly lit room with the M-16 held hip high. Through the rain of falling sparks he could see the time-travel unit. It was sitting right where it was supposed to be, which was understandable as he was looking through a blurred curtain into the past. Next to it was the room’s only other furnishing: a silver boom box.
The occupants of the room didn’t notice the door opening or three people stepping in with them. They were unaware of the grinding noise, too. Magus’s present viewpoint was like a one-way mirror. He could see the past, but the past couldn’t see him because it was still intact; it had a separate beginning, middle and end. Only when the failing barriers were breached did all events and beings and timelines fully merge, like two connected soap bubbles becoming one.
Eight enforcers were loading oblong crates through the time unit’s door, overseen by a carbon-copy Magus. He presumed they had used the same entrance he had, because apparently no one on this side of time—meaning the police—had seen them enter.
No, not a carbon copy, he corrected himself. It was the same Magus. He was looking at himself. A disorienting perspective. Because he had already lived the next few months back in Deathlands, he knew what was going to happen and the other version of himself didn’t. To the earlier Magus, the future was still a surprise.
He had always thought of himself as taller, too.
A man in a lab coat with bound hands sat on the floor beside the time unit. Magus recognized the electrical engineer he had taken prisoner a while back. The matériel being moved into the unit was equipment and construction parts taken from his university lab. The whitecoat’s subsequent rewiring of circuitry had given Magus full command and improved function of his right hand.
From that kidnapping, he could easily calculate the date and time of his earlier version’s upcoming return to Deathlands. As he had hoped, the arrival in the hellscape wasn’t too far in the past—only eight months. Not too long a lifespan to live all over again.
And eight months would give him ample time to prepare a proper welcoming committee for Cawdor and his compatriots in the redoubt, should they escape the fires of nukeday and manage to jump back to their own time. This was a golden opportunity to end their interference once and for all and to pull off the ultimate, soul-crushing surprise. Either way, he would be rid of them forever.
There was just one intervening obstacle: another Magus already existed in the target timeline. He was looking at him. The explosion he had just survived was ample evidence of what happened when one time-traveling being made physical contact with an identical counterpart. He had no doubt that’s what had happened back at the storage site—the need for touching was hardwired into enforcers, a fundamental urge. Nature abhorred a vacuum, but what it abhorred even more was double occupancy: two versions of the same entity in the same space and time.
Magus found himself strangely elated at the prospect of the unthinkable thing he was about to do.
When the adjacent universes ground together in the small, Victorian living room, it sounded like a bulldozer shovel blade scraping across concrete. Standing well back from the blurry curtain and spark shower, Magus flipped the M-16’s charging handle, dropped the safety and, from the hip, fired a single shot in the direction of the anomaly. The report shook the room, the hull leaped from the ejector port, but the bullet never made it to the other side. It vanished somewhere in the seam between tightly pressed realities. Like shattering glass, the visual and aural effects fell away, leaving the living room and two universes undivided.
When the curtain dropped, Magus and his captives became visible to the enforcers, who took a step toward them, automatically moving to defend their master. They stopped in their tracks when they realized who had appeared before them. Long tongues flicked out between pointy teeth and nostrils flared as they tasted the air.
The metal jaw of Magus-from-the-past dropped when he saw his double; it dropped even lower when he took in the longblaster. As his steel eyes tightened their focus, they made a low, whirring sound. Then a figurative light went on behind them.
Magus-from-the-present admired his former self’s critical intelligence. It had taken only a second to realize what was about to happen and why.
“Kill it!” earlier Magus cried.
“You can’t kill the master,” Magus told his knobby minions.
“Kill it quick!”
“Not the master.”
The enforcers looked at Magus. Then they looked at his doppelgänger. Both smelled and tasted the same, because they were the same. Hooded heads swung back and forth as they tried to unravel the mystery. Meanwhile they were rooted to the floor. Clearly they didn’t know which version to follow.
Magus put a merciful end to their dilemma. And to himself.
He shouldered the M-16 and aimed at Magus-from-the-past’s head. It was interesting and gratifying to see how his other self reacted to impending death. Not with protests or whimpering, not with a desperate attempt to flee. His former incarnation tapped a steely fingertip on the still-human part of his temple as if to say “Put it right here, pal.”
And Magus did just that. The M-16 bucked hard into his shoulder, making the side of his face capable of doing it wince. A wet slurry of brains, shattered circuit boards, skull bone and the flattened, through-and-through 5.56 mm round smacked into the wide chest of the enforcer standing behind him.
Magus watched the familiar knees buckle and a lifeless corpse crumple to the floor.
For good measure he leaned over and put two more point-blank shots into the nonmetal part of the skull.
The enforcers stood frozen, unable to grasp what had just happened.
“Continue loading the gear,” Magus told them. “And when you’re finished put these two in the unit with the third captive.”
The familiar command from the familiar voice set them at ease. They obeyed him without hesitation.
“Why me?” the driver asked in a voice breaking with emotion. “Why are you taking me? I’ve done everything for you that I can. Why don’t you just let me go now.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I’m not a doctor or a scientist. What good am I to you where you’re going?”
“Spare parts,” Magus said.
The driver’s face went pale. He opened his mouth but no sound came forth.
Dr. Nudelman chose that moment to speak up. “The one you killed looks just like you,” he said.
“No, it was me. I just killed myself.”
“Avoiding a time-paradox crisis?”
Magus smirked with half his face. One of the bonuses to kidnapping predark whitecoats was that they made interesting conversationalists. A Deathlander wouldn’t know a time paradox from a bag of rocks.
“Obviously,” he said. “And now there is only one of me in this little corner of the universes.”
Nudelman nodded toward the enforcers. “Who are they, then?”
“They are themselves, the same creatures you have already met, only as they existed eight months in the past.”
“What happened to the ones who kidnapped me?”
“They’re out in the world, doing my bidding.”
“That raises the possibility of another critical paradox. The two groups could cross each other’s paths.”
“Not really,” Magus said. “The other ones are going to disappear along with everyone and everything else in less than fourteen hours.”
* * *
NATHANIEL LOOKED IN the direction of the frantic shout. The corridor was still lined with ESU personnel—those who had stood their ground while the others fled. Through the gaps created by the deserters he saw a small black object hurtle out of the target doorway. It hit the wall and bounced off onto the floor.
The bottom dropped out of his stomach.
A quick-thinking ESU officer threw his curved riot shield over the grenade and then threw himself belly down on top of it.
Three tightly spaced explosions ripped the air. The blast and flash made the officer and his riot shield jump from the floor, dark smoke billowed around them, then they both came down hard.
For his part, Nathaniel felt as if he had just been snap-kicked center chest. It left a dull ache under his breastbone.
The brave-as-hell ESU officer didn’t get up off the shield. He didn’t move at all. It was impossible to tell how badly hurt he was or if he was dead. The concussion alone of a grenade detonating that close would be enough to knock a person unconscious.
Two had gone off inside the apartment, though.
They shouldn’t have been thrown unless the men inside were already dead.
As Nathaniel was entertaining that grim thought, another officer primed a pair of grenades and two-handed them through the apartment doorway.
No warning shout this time.
The officer chucked and ran.
Instinctively Nathaniel counted down the fuse time in his head. Before he got to three, both grenades flew back into the hall. They had a low-to-high arc, as if they’d been drop kicked. They hit the ceiling, ricocheted off the wall and fell to the floor.
Too far away for the remaining ESU men to reach. A couple of them made it through the nearby doors to the other apartments; the rest sprinted for the building entrance.
Holmes grabbed Nathaniel by the arm and pulled him into a crouch just as a matched pair of deafening whacks shook the walls and sent sharp bits of steel slicing through the air. The pair of ESU men closest to the grenades were cut down in midstride, hit in the back by the spray of shrapnel and slammed onto their faces on the floor. Boiling clouds of dark gray smoke rolled over them.
Nathaniel heard a rumble of heavy footfalls, then the purple hoodies burst through the caustic smoke, apparently unharmed.
They moved remarkably fast for their size and weight. Fast enough to catch up to the rear of the fleeing officers before they could reach the front door. Two of the ESU men were pulled down from behind. Then to Nathaniel’s horror, it was tear-open-the-piñata time. Thumb talons and raw power made short work of the body armor and clothing, then the perps slung stripes of gore across the ceiling. The speed with which they killed was astonishing. It was as if they shifted into another gear once they had hold of a victim.
As in the precincts earlier in the day, there was nothing anyone could do to stop the slaughter. Three more officers were dragged down before the others made it out the front door.
The operation’s chain of command had been broken. There was no time to alert the snipers. No time to regroup the troops. The remaining survivors were fighting for their lives.
Holmes was below him as they backed up the stairs, firing steadily with his Glock. Nathaniel could see his slugs plucking at purple satin. Holmes was like a machine, a hit with every shot.
But the bullets had no visible effect.
Not so for the grenades.
When one of the creatures came up the staircase after them, Nathaniel saw that half of its face had been de-hided, stripped clean. The short snout was without hide, as well. Shiny blue bone showed underneath. It looked as though the grenade had gone off right under its chin. The shrapnel wounds were devastating, but the creature seemed to be in no pain. And there was no sign of blood.
Holmes continued to fire as the monster mounted the steps, and they moved backward, shooting it over and over, full in the face. The bullets zinged off the blue bone, taking loose chunks of hide with them. When Holmes’s slide locked back, Nathaniel tried to pull him aside so they could switch positions and he could hold the monster at bay with more close-range gunfire. But the creature had already grabbed the ESU leader by the front of the armor vest. A tug of war ensued as Holmes tried to reload from his combat harness. Nathaniel couldn’t get off a shot because his brother officer was smack-dab in the way.
The standoff ended when the purple bastard raised Holmes with one hand, lifting his boot soles two feet off the ground. Nathaniel hung on for all he was worth while trying to bring his gun muzzle to bear, but he lost his grip when the perp twisted away and slammed Holmes face-first into the wall. The chinstrap on the lieutenant’s helmet broke, and it went flying over the bannister railing. The impact punched a face-shaped hole in the lathe and plaster.
The hoodie let the limp body slide down the stairs, feet first.
Nathaniel put bullet after bullet into the side of the bastard’s head. The slugs ricocheted off, cutting holes in the wall and ceiling.
Again they had no effect.
The creature didn’t even look mad as it followed him up the stairs. Nathaniel dropped to a knee on the edge of the second-floor hallway and put five quick shots dead center in its massively bulging groin.
Effect.
A pair of new expressions lit up the monster’s ruined face. First surprise. Then pain. As much as the bone structure would allow, it grimaced. The hoodie was stopped cold.
It was only a temporary reprieve, Nathaniel knew. The low-aimed bullets had zinged off without penetrating. He jumped up and dashed through the first open door, which led to the apartment of Veronica Currant, the place where it had all started.
The hallway behind him quaked from the footfalls of his pursuer. Because it was the closest cover, he considered diving into the strange machine and closing the door, but that looked too much like a dead end—what if the lock didn’t work? What if the monster knew how to open it from the outside?
As the enforcer burst through the doorway, Nathaniel ran for the nearest, emptied front window. He didn’t stop when he jumped onto the sill. He launched himself into space, legs churning.
* * *
WHEN ESU SNIPER Matt Carter first looked down on the kill zone from a rooftop across the narrow street, he saw the mission ahead as a chance for Team Alpha’s redemption. He knew his fellow sniper, Pete Balwan, and their spotter, Joe Gaspers, felt the same way. Their unit had been embarrassed earlier in the evening by a different group of perps who had managed to slip out from under their guns without taking so much as a scratch. Lieutenant Holmes had rubbed it in over the com link, too. That still stuck in Carter’s craw.
Three minutes into the operation, after a frenzy of autofire inside the building, Carter still had no targets. No one had exited, and the standing order was to hold fire until suspects tried to leave. The limo that had brought them to the scene sat double-parked in the middle of the street with its doors wide open and courtesy lights on. There wouldn’t be a quick getaway, not with him and Balwan behind a pair of Barretts. But shooting an engine block wasn’t what he had in mind. They all had friends in the Eighteenth and the other precincts that had been hit.
He wanted some .50 caliber payback.
Carter pulled back from the night scope’s eyepiece and blinked. An annoying flare of light was coming from the second-floor window of an apartment next door. The infrared sight magnified it. Gunfire continued to roll out of the target building and then a cluster of grenades detonated. He had seen the CCTV video from the precincts. That the shooting hadn’t slowed down by now was starting to make him nervous. And nervous was the last thing he wanted to be.
When he tucked back into the rifle butt and scope, he saw some of Team Beta stumble out the front door, jump down the steps and hightail it down the street. A second cluster of grenades went off, and more ESU officers poured out onto the street. A moment later a man in an NYPD windbreaker jumped out a second-story window. He dropped behind a hedge, and Carter lost sight of him.
There were no hostile targets in pursuit of the officers. The shooting continued inside the building.
“What the hell’s going on down there?” Balwan shouted at him.
“How should I know?”
“I’ve been trying to get a com link to command,” Gaspers said. “Nothing back. No answer. I think the shit has hit the fan.”
“We have to stay put until we get the call to stand down,” Carter stated.
“The entrance!” Gaspers shouted.
Carter swung his sights to the left. Four purple-hooded suspects were running down the steps of the building. They filtered between the burned-out cars and started to cross the street in their direction.
“Shoot ’em! Shoot ’em!” Gaspers said.
Carter took a quick, settling breath, then squeezed off a round. The Barrett boomed and bucked. Balwan’s gun and the other fifties along the line of rooftops joined in.
Through his scope Carter saw the impacts. The heavy slugs stopped their targets in midstep and drove them to the pavement on both knees, but they didn’t go all the way down. There was no plume of blood and guts. And after a second, they hopped up and kept on coming.
He felt a flutter of panic in the pit of his stomach as he worked the bolt. No one got up after taking a fifty center mass. No one. It should have made a hole big enough to stick a fist through. He led his target and fired again.
And got the same nonresult, but with a ten-ring head shot this time.
On either side of him, the Barretts along the rooftops were rapid firing.
“Bullshit,” he said to himself. “Bullshit!”
He got a third shot off before his target reached the ground floor of their building. He saw the slug spark as it ricocheted off the hooded head, then spark again as it skipped off the pavement.
There was a loud crash from directly below as the suspect broke through the entry door. And there was similar din from the buildings on either side.
“They’re coming for us,” Gaspers said, drawing his sidearm. “Fucking A, they’re coming for us.”
Balwan swung around his Barrett to cover the lone entrance to the rooftop. As Carter picked up his weapon and got to his feet, a flurry of gunshots erupted from the neighboring building, then a howling scream that ended abruptly. Through his nightscope he saw a hoodie throwing a sniper off the roof, in pieces.
* * *
EXPLOSIONS PUNCTUATED THE wall of gunshot clatter from next door. The end was near, Magus knew. Panic had set in. In this place and time, frag grens were the weapon of last resort.
“Pick me up,” he told the driver. “Hurry!”
When the man took a step toward him with open arms and a pained expression Magus said, “No, you idiot, that me.”
The driver squatted beside the corpse, slipped his hands under the shoulders and behind the knees, then straightened with his burden. The ruined head hung drooped over his forearm trailing long, swaying strands of congealed gore.
“Where do you want me to put it?” the driver asked as he looked around for a suitable resting place in the empty room.
“Out the damned front window. Step on it!”
Big bore blasters boomed from across the street. They sounded like Fourth of July cannons going off. The ricochets plowed through the brownstone facade, as if it was made of cardboard. A stray round zinged through the room, into the interior wall and kept on going. The near miss made the driver freeze. He looked back over his shoulder, pleading for a reprieve.
“I don’t like giving orders twice,” Magus said.
The man lowered his head and rushed up to one of the emptied window frames. After swinging the corpse back and forth a few times to gain momentum, he hurled the limp form feet first through the opening.
With a metallic clunk the body landed in a wrought-iron flower box bordering a tiny street-level courtyard.
“How rich was that?” Magus asked.
It was a rhetorical question.
“Get the captives in the unit,” he told the enforcers. “Take your positions inside. We’re out of here.”
Magus always made sure he was the last to leave 2001.
He reached down and hit the on switch of the boom box on the floor. The CD started spinning, and between the booms of heavy caliber weapons outside, Frank Sinatra began the quavering strains of “New York, New York.”
Magus cut a joyous, awkwardly veering, little dance turn, then limped into the unit and closed the door.