Ryan watched the EMT truck’s taillights disappear around the far end of the grove. Then he waved the others toward the tree line. “Let’s go,” he said. “Fan out. Keep noise to a minimum, but move quick as you can. There are a million rat holes out of this stand of woods. We’ve got to get on their trail fast, Jak, and run them down. The enforcers will protect Magus first and fight second. That means we can drive them ahead of us, make them go where we want. If you see targets, open fire. Don’t wait for the rest of us to join in.”
“And don’t forget to aim for Magus first,” J.B. said, pushing his spectacles up the bridge of his nose and screwing down his hat. Take out that walking junk pile, and it’s game over.”
When they turned on their flashlights, the bright beams didn’t penetrate more than a yard past the first row of trees. The grove beyond was as black as pitch.
Ryan put a hand on Ricky’s arm. “Stay alert and watch your field of fire,” he said. “We’re going to be just fine.”
The youth nodded, squinting at the light in his face.
On Ryan’s signal they filtered into the tree line. Right away the one-eyed man could see it wasn’t a natural grove. The trunks were evenly spaced and in staggered rows four feet apart. What that meant was there was no straight course: if they walked between two trees they had a third directly in their path, so they had to detour around it. What with the light bouncing back off the trunks, it was hard to see very far ahead.
Having fanned out in a skirmish line among the trees, they couldn’t see one another, only the dancing beams of their flashes. J.B. was on the far side of Jak, who was on Ryan’s left; Ricky was on his right. As he advanced, he held the flashlight in his left hand and the Steyr in the right by the pistol grip, safety off, 7.62 mm round under the hammer.
Magus and company didn’t have much of a head start on them. They had no lights, and he figured the staggered trees and close spacing would slow their progress. The unnatural layout was a double-edged sword: it made it harder for the enforcers to get to them but also harder to hit the enforcers with bullets or grens.
A shout of triumph rang out to his left.
“Got ’em!” Jak said
“Keep on the trail,” Ryan advised. “Let’s move it. Let’s close on them. Pick up the pace!”
On either side of him pure white flashlight beams bounced wildly up into the branches as they ducked around tree trunks, zigzagging back and forth to stay on course.
Then Ryan caught an odor riding on the winter-night air. Not wet trees or dead leaves. It was unmistakable. Cat piss on steroids.
Ten feet ahead, at the extreme limit of his vision, he caught a glimpse of shiny purple in the beam of his flashlight. Then darkness closed in, and it was gone.
“Dead ahead of me!” he yelled. “Don’t let them flank us or double back!”
He couldn’t hear the heavy footfalls ahead, because of his own, or the sounds of snapping branches over the noise from the ones he was breaking. The pounding of his heart and the rasp of his breathing blotted out everything else.
From the darkness to the left came the resounding boom of J.B.’s M-4000 scattergun. A high-brass load of double-aught buck slammed into tree trunks.
He only got the one shot off.
“Jak, Ryan, they’re coming back your way!” J.B. cried.
The albino’s .357 Magnum Colt Python blaster barked twice. Muzzle-flashes lit up the undersides of the branches, and sharp reports echoed through the grove.
They were fighting blind, Ryan thought as he ran, but dammit, they were gaining ground inch by inch. It was just a matter of time...
He fully expected to see the wide backside of an enforcer pop into view ahead of him. Instead what appeared between the trees was the front side, and the enforcer was charging right at him, grazing alternate massive shoulders against the staggered trunks to shorten the distance between them. The glancing impacts dropped a shower of dead leaves and twigs in its wake.
Ryan stopped, shouldered the Steyr, and when the enforcer rounded the next trunk, he fired. The hooded head snapped back. The enforcer staggered sideways a couple of steps before it recovered its balance and kept on coming. The momentary pause gave Ryan time to dig out a thermite gren and pop the fuse. He threw the gren but couldn’t make it break in a curve around the trunk. It hit the bark with a thunk and bounced off to the side, sputtering like a miniature volcano. Three seconds later, when the full four-thousand-degree heat blasted forth, the tree burst into flames.
At a safe distance from the conflagration, the enforcer’s yellow eyes gleamed at him in the dancing light.
Ryan realized what Magus had done: divided forces so it could easily escape. Four humans vs one enforcer in dense forest was no contest. The companions didn’t stand a chance. They couldn’t kill it with bullets, and they couldn’t corner it and take it out with thermite; to make that option work they’d have to go toe to toe with the monster and hold the gren up against its ball sack.
Magus’s vulnerability was their only strategic advantage. And by now Steel Eyes was putting as much distance as possible between them.
The De Lisle roared five times in rapid succession as the enforcer darted around a tree. Five .45 ACP rounds slapped into the side of the hooded head. Ricky might as well have blown it kisses.
“Run!” Ryan shouted as he dipped a shoulder and darted past the enforcer’s outstretched hand. “Run for the far side of the trees. Get out of the woods!”
Slinging the Steyr in midstep, he switched the flashlight to his right hand as he sprinted. They couldn’t stand and fight. Not here. Even though the open space beyond the grove of trees made the thermite grens just as worthless, there was still a chance they could outrun the monster.
Or maybe the others in the EMT truck could divert its attention before it caught up to them. If they could get into the back of the wag or hang on to the sides, they could get safely away.
Close behind them the enforcer crashed through the trees.
Ryan struggled to maintain his pace as he wound around the trunks. He couldn’t fall or drop the flashlight.
Doing either meant a horrible death.
As he burst through the last row of trees, an open field stretched out in front of him. The EMT wag was nowhere in sight. J.B., Jak and Ricky joined ranks with him, legs pumping, flashlight beams swirling on the grass ahead.
No one spoke. They needed every breath of air to keep running.
Ryan could hear the enforcer approaching them from behind; it sounded like an oncoming freight train. It was hard to imagine how something that massive could move that fast. Without the tree trunks to slalom around, it was pouring on all the straight-line speed at its disposal.
An angry roar erupted from Ryan’s right, out of the pitch darkness. It rapidly grew louder and louder.
Then the high beams of the EMT wag flashed on, flooding the field and the runners in blinding light. It wasn’t slowing.
“Oh shit! Oh shit!” J.B. groaned.
One second the enforcer was right on their heels, the next it was gone, swept away.
Metal and glass crashed behind them, and against his back, Ryan felt the whoosh of the wag as it rushed past. As he turned, his flashlight lit up an enormous figure cartwheeling high in the air, presumably hit by the bumper, then the cab roof, then the top of the rear compartment box like a series of steps, each taller than the last.
The taillights of the wag blazed as Vee slammed on the brakes.
The enforcer landed in a stiff heap, forehead and bent knees resting on the ground, arms tucked behind it on either side. Like a tipped-over statue.
The wag’s transmission screeched as Vee shifted gears; the white backup lights flashed on and the reverse warning noise began to beep. The rear tires spun on the grass, then the wag picked up speed. When she hit the enforcer the second time, it didn’t go flying; it was driven under the back bumper. The back wheel on the right plowed over it, making the wag lurch to the opposite side, then snap back. She kept reversing until she had the prostrate figure in her headlights, then braked and shifted again.
The third time Vee ran over it, she rolled a rear wheel onto the middle of its back and stopped there.
“Santa mierda!” Ricky exclaimed.
The wag’s doors opened and everyone inside piled out.
“Wow,” Vee said, “that was way more fun than I’d thought it would be.”
They trained their flashlights on the still form trapped under the back wheel. There was no sign of blood on it or the grass.
Ryan nudged its head with the toe of his boot. It moved easily back and forth, as if it was no longer connected to the neck bones.
“Is fucker dead?” Jak asked.
“We’d better make sure,” Ryan said. “Vee, drive the wag off it and move a safe distance ahead.”
When she’d done that, he pulled out another thermite gren, primed it, then set it on the creature’s swayback.
“Everybody stand clear,” he said.
When the gren flared, so did the enforcer. A towering column of flame lit up the field.
Returning to the EMT wag, Ryan noticed the heavy front bumper had acquired a deep, V-shaped dent in its center and the windshield was cracked at the top—from an impact with flying lizard butt. After they had all climbed in, Ryan leaned into the driver compartment and said, “We’d better put some distance between us and the bonfire in case someone gets curious.”
Vee dropped the vehicle into gear and drove back the way she had come, around the end of the grove of trees and onto the pedestrian path. When she reached the shore of the pond, she stopped and turned off the headlights.
“We’re never going to find Magus in the dark,” Krysty said from the front passenger seat. “What are we going to do now?”
“I still can’t get my head around how different ol’ Steel Eyes was,” Ryan said. “Not only could it run but it had a real, human eye. I don’t see how the injuries to Magus’s flesh and bone could have been repaired between leaving Deathlands and arriving here. And why didn’t it recognize me?”
“You told me it had made more than one trip back to this time and place in the past,” Vee said. “Do you have any idea how many trips?”
“Could be dozens, maybe more,” Mildred said. “Like Ryan said, until now it was all just unconfirmed rumors.”
“I have an idea,” Vee said. “Fair warning, it comes from the plot of one of the early Clanker novels. I had to research time travel to straighten out the author’s facts. There’s a theory in physics that there are an infinite number of parallel universes, each separated from the others by a kind of insulating, invisible fabric. When Magus makes an incursion into January 19, 2001, it creates a new offshoot of time, a new, separate universe with its own unique arc of destiny. The overlay of so many offshoots in one place and one time could cause them to compress against one another, which in turn could cause friction on the fabric separating them. According to the theory, when the material dividing parallel universes is worn thin or torn away, when the natural separation of proximate timelines ceases to exist, contiguous events become simultaneous and potentially catastrophic.”
“Although your command of language is most admirable,” Doc said, “I must admit I am not entirely following you, my dear. Perhaps you could expand that a bit?”
“Magus has traveled to the here and now one too many times,” she said. “The separation between the new universes that were created on each visit has been destroyed by their sheer number and temporal weight. With barriers removed, those unique offshoots are in the process of coalescing—or have already done so. That’s why there is more than one Magus in New York City on this night. That’s why multiple attacks are happening all at once. It’s the same Magus coming here from different times in your future. The Magus you saw running away wasn’t miraculously recovered. It had yet to be injured.”
“An earlier version of it then?” Ryan said. “And the reason Magus didn’t recognize me on the street was that that particular version of Steel Eyes had never met me before?”
“You got it.”
“Dark night!” J.B. said. “This makes my head ache.”
“What did you mean by ‘catastrophic’?” Mildred asked Vee.
“Again theoretically, when an object, living or otherwise, moves forward or back in time, the act of traveling builds up a store of kinetic energy in its physical mass.”
“You mean like a static charge?” Mildred queried.
“Uh, no,” Vee answered. “More like a thermonuclear bomb.”
No one spoke for a long moment as that sank in.
Then Ryan broke the silence, “I need some time to think this through and come up with a new plan. I’m going to take a walk.”
“Don’t be too long, lover,” Krysty said. “Remember, we’re on kind of a short leash here.”
* * *
WHEN VEE OPENED the truck’s driver door, Doc was outside waiting for her. He gallantly offered her his arm. “Would you care to stretch your legs a little, my dear?” he asked.
“Sure, why not,” she said.
They started a slow, stately stroll around the still pond. But for the intermittent crackle of gunfire in the distance, it could have been the idyllic setting of a romance novel.
She wasn’t concerned about Doc misbehaving with her. He seemed a perfect, dignified gentleman. Besides, she knew how to take care of herself.
He patted her lightly on the arm and said, “Veronica, my dear, I know it is difficult, but you must come to grips with what is about to happen. The nukecaust cannot be ignored in the hopes that it simply goes away. This world is going to end tomorrow, and if you remain here, you will end with it.”
Doc stopped and turned to face her. “Come back with us to Deathlands when we leave. You will love the challenge and rawness of the place. I sincerely believe you were born for it.”
As they continued to walk, Doc began to tell her about his world and the strange things that inhabited it. He talked at great length and animatedly about the radiation zones. The swamps. The desolate plains. The villes. The barons. The blackhearts. The doomies. The stickies, scalies and cannies. The scagworms and water-bug people. And the hard-nosed Deathlanders, like the companions, who fought every day for survival against long odds and with scant reward for their efforts. He painted her a picture of a poisoned land teetering on the edge of oblivion. Blessed with absolute freedom and very little justice. Where blaster and blade ruled and mercy was far too often a stranger.
“Sure enough,” he went on, “the hellscape lacks some of the niceties of the twenty-first century, but those flourishes of culture and technology are going to vanish at high noon tomorrow anyway.”
Doc paused in his speech and took a deep breath, seeming to summon his courage. Then he said, “I assure you, Veronica, I am not nearly as old as I look. When I was time-trawled against my will, it caused a superficial, premature aging. In a strictly chronological sense, in terms of sunrises and sunsets on the planet, I am in my thirties, not that much older than you.”
“Gee, Ricky doesn’t look his age, either,” she said. “He told me he just turned twenty.”
She expected Doc to berate the teenager for lying about his age, for he was clearly nowhere near twenty, but instead he said, “I think you are a remarkable young woman.”
She suddenly knew where the conversation was headed. It was a turn she intended to cut off before it picked up speed.
“You’re not really going to propose to me, are you, Doc?” she said incredulously. “You’ve known me for all of six hours.”
“Not a proposal of marriage, but to propose that you accompany us back to the future, where we could have the time to get to know each other better. The world is going to end tomorrow. There is precious little time left to get acquainted.”
“I think we should go back now,” she said with finality. Then it was her turn to pat him gently on the arm. “After all, we still have a homicidal, time-traveling cyborg to chill...”
Doc looked at her and laughed, and the uncomfortable tension of the moment dissipated. “Yes, indeed, chill. You are a quick study, my dear.”
* * *
AS RYAN CLIMBED back into the rear of the truck, the others were all there, hunched over and listening to the chatter on the radio. He could tell from the body language something had happened. “What is it?” he said.
“Vee says the cops have just been pulled off her apartment,” Mildred told him.
Krysty craned her head around from the passenger seat and smiled up at him. “The way home is clear, lover,” she said.
“You’re sure?”
“They’ve already started to pull their forces out,” Vee said. “Sounds like they’re relocating manpower to reinforce precincts that may still come under siege.”
“That’s our cue, Ryan,” Krysty said. “Our ticket out.”
“In this truck we can pull right up to the front of my building,” Vee stated. “Lights and siren are the perfect cover. If any cops are left behind, they’ll think we’re picking up the bodies from earlier in the day.”
“What do you think, Ryan?” Mildred asked. “Are we all on the same page here?”
“Yeah, only I figured we’d have to fight our way in to reach the unit,” he said. “It’s clear we’ll never catch Magus now, and even if we do, we can’t catch every version of it. My plan was for us to return to the time hole and get the heck out. The sooner the better.”
“We still have enforcers to deal with at the other end of the pipe,” J.B. said. “A lot of enforcers.”
“We’ll just have to take our chances with that,” Ryan said.
“At least we have a chance that way, J.B.,” Mildred said. “If we stay here, we’ve got nothing.”
“The only way to destroy our Magus, the most recent version, once and for all,” Ryan said, “is to trap it here in the past. We can do that by closing the Deathlands end of the time hole.”
“Let Magus learn firsthand what hell on Earth is all about,” Mildred asked.
In the next instant everything went white, the details of the truck interior vanished. Before his eye could recover from the blast of superintense light, a terrible explosion followed—the loudest boom he had ever heard. Two heartbeats later a shock wave jolted the vehicle on its springs, then it was slammed by a blast of hurricane-force wind. Through the windshield to the south, beyond the end of the park’s darkness, an immense orange fireball blossomed. As the companions watched spellbound, from its roiling apex, a churning, dark mushroom cloud rose.
“My friends, it appears Armageddon has come a day early,” Doc said.