Richard folded his hands in his lap. He was back in the chair, but this time it didn’t bother him as much as it would have before.
He offered to push himself, but Duncan had refused. The titan took up position behind him as soon as he pulled himself into the seat.
Naomi marched along beside them. She wrung her hands in front of her, looked at the ground. “Can we speed up, please?”
Duncan’s voice was Richard’s his head, but it still sounded like it came from behind him. “To what end?”
Naomi dropped her hands and stomped her feet. “I told you. Gum is gonna be there.”
Richard held his hand up. “Look, I don’t doubt that you heard his voice and saw his ghost.”
“It wasn’t his ghost,” Duncan said.
Naomi pointed at the titan. “See. It wasn’t a ghost.”
Richard flapped his hand. “Whatever -”
Duncan patted Richard’s shoulder. “It was a temporal projection.”
Richard growled and turned in his chair to better face the girl at his side. “This is what I was trying to avoid. Whenever he and his brother start talking, my fucking asshole twitches.”
From his other side, Bobby laughed. “You can’t even feel your asshole.”
Richard turned to confront him. “It was a figure of speech.”
Bobby shrugged. “It didn’t make any sense.”
Duncan joined back in. “He is correct. In this entropic mutuality, there isn’t quite enough historical data to provide for the probability that your spine is whole. The possibility exists, but then—”
Naomi threw her head back in a wordless cry. She took a deep breath. “It doesn’t matter. Can we just go?”
Richard swept his hand s down to indicate his rolling chair. “We are going.”
“Can we go faster?”
Duncan repeated himself. “To what end?”
Naomi sighed. “I know it sounds … well, no more ridiculous than anything else that’s happened, but he told me where he was gonna be in a dream.”
Bobby held up his hand. “Was this a real dream or a vision kind of dream? Like, was it a result of idiomatic time or sleepy time.” He looked up and flashed Duncan a grin and a thumbs up.
“I don’t know,” Naomi said. “I think it was just a regular dream.”
Richard nodded. “So, he may not have actually told you anything. You just dreamed that he told you something, and now we’re going to meet him?”
She spread her hands out. “I don’t know, okay. It’s just the direction they were going.”
“The ghosts?”
Duncan tapped his shoulder again. “Now, Richard—”
“Fine! The projections. The projections were going toward the Makers building.”
She nodded. “Right.”
“And not just generally east or anything, but to that specific building.”
“Right.”
“Because your boyfriend told you in a dream.”
“Right.”
Richard nodded. “That sounds all right to me.”
Naomi slumped. “I know how it sounds. Can we just go?”
“Naomi, we are going.”
She tipped her head back. Kept up with Duncan’s leisurely pace. Like he was out to see the sights.
Richard leaned back to enjoy the ride. “You know, Duncan, you never really answered us.”
“How so?”
Richard shrugged. “You didn’t tell us where Jerry is. What he’s doing. What we’re doing.”
“Jerry is in Hollow Hills. He’s hiding. We’re walking.”
Richard threw the titan’s words back at him. “To what end?”
He felt Duncan’s sigh on the back of his neck. “I am unsure. I held the field around the shuttle for so long, I was left out of his machinations. I’m afraid he is too far into his plans for me to predict what is next. But I believe he has trapped the Dark Father here. As to why he would bring us here as well, that is a question I can’t answer. I sensed fear and regret from him.”
Bobby jogged a few steps to catch up to the chair. “What about when the Dick Father brought that fireball out of the trailer park?”
“He didn’t.”
Bobby held up a finger. “I was there, man. He, like, waved his hands, then the shit exploded.”
Duncan’s shadow rippled as he shook his head. “That is incorrect. The explosion had already happened on a higher level of temporality. He simply mutualized this one with that one.”
Naomi nodded. “He said it was a secret.”
Bobby frowned. “Who? Jerry?”
She looked like she came to from a dream. “What? No, that’s what Gum said. He told me it was a secret.”
“What’s a secret?”
“Where he’s going.”
Richard held out his hand to silence them. “So, the Dick Father — good one, Bobby — he followed us here after … what? Jerry put us here to keep us safe or something? From what?”
Bobby shrugged. “This sucks. I’m going back.” He turned on his toes and kicked into a jog.
Richard watched him run back to the bar until Duncan’s shoulder hid him from view. He turned back around. Twisted the ends of his mustache out. Felt like making it a habit.
When he had seen other men preening like that, he always laughed. How pompous. He was shocked to learn how well it helped him think. He could get used to sitting and thinking. He could say inscrutable shit like Jerry and Duncan and people would think he was smart.
He looked up at Naomi. “You wanna turn around or keep going?”
She looked at him like he had grabbed her ass. “Let’s keep going.”
Richard nodded. He pointed ahead and tipped his head up to address Duncan. “About five blocks up where the trees hang over the street, turn left at the money hedge.”
“What is a money hedge?” Duncan asked.
Naomi snickered into her hands.
Richard settled back. “The Southern Ohio Makers Association has a fee. A hundred bucks a year gets you access to all their tools. From band saws and hammers to weather drones and blood analyzers.
“A lot of artists, too. Just a big community of folks who wanna make shit. They helped me with a bunch of stuff at the bar — tap setup, basement bunker door, Fi-Max system for taking passive payment and inventory tracking. A bunch of stuff.
“Anyway, there was an old boy named Jay Robert. Did body work and bragged about his bench press. He managed to pass off payment for a couple of years, and Gabe Anders was just too nice to say anything.”
“Who is Gabe Anders?”
“He’s the guy who started the Makers ten or fifteen years ago. Old guy. Real dignified. Anyway, he finally had to tell Jay Robert to pay what he owed, and Jay threw a fit. Called Gabe a money-pounding faggot, whatever that means.
“It dragged out a little, and Gabe had to sue ’im. Of course, he won. Everybody knew Gabe was going broke keeping that place what it was. Even NASA and Astral used that building for them STEM kids.
“So, Ray had to pay up, and he did, but he did it in all pennies. Just a vindictive asshole. A little over forty thousand of ’em. About two hundred and fifty pounds worth.
“Gabe took it all and sat out under the summer sun, and he built a hedge out of fifty thousand strands of twisted stainless steel, then he welded a penny to the tip of almost every one.”
The timing was perfect. They passed into the shade of the maple branches, and there was the hedge. It sparkled as it swayed. Rustled with metallic music. Rose out of mulch made of shredded tires. The stainless stems were black at the bottom. Full of moss and algae in the twisted strands. The single pennies were copper leaves. Or fruit. It was incredible, and Richard often thought it was a shame the people of this town took it for granted.
Experiencing someone seeing it for the first time was always satisfying, though Duncan seemed underwhelmed.
He walked around Richard and stood with his hands behind his back. “It is quite lovely.”
Naomi brushed her fingers along the pennies. “It’s beautiful.”
Duncan nodded and extended a hand up the asphalt drive. The colorful building sat at the top of a rise. “Shall we?”
Richard held his hands up in surrender. “If you’re done looking. I don’t want to rush you.”
Duncan smiled. “Don’t be sarcastic, Richard. I feel it’s a talent you lack.” He took his position behind the chair, then they crossed into Makers territory. The air changed. Like it was harder to draw breath because of a sudden increase in altitude.
The light dimmed to a dirty blue. A wash of illumination came from a storefront in the middle of the night.
Duncan slowed. “I don’t like this.”
Richard saw flickering movement in his peripheral. He jerked his head to follow it, but it disappeared only to show up on the opposite side.
His neck cramped, and he looked down at the ground in front of him. Rubbed the base of his skull with both hands. Sensation flooded back into his legs.
Naomi veered toward the chair. He looked back at her as she took the right handle from Duncan. She wriggled in to be as close to the titan as she could.
He heard giggles, and his balls drew up. He waved them to a stop then jumped out of the chair before they could comply. His paralysis was left behind in the frozen town at the end of the driveway.
He looked above him. Spun to get a view in every direction. He stopped when he faced Naomi and Duncan. They stared at him from behind the chair, each still holding a handle.
Richard held his hand up. Pointed to the sky. “Can you see them?”
Naomi nodded.
He held his hands out at waist level. “This place is not right. It’s not.”
Duncan dropped his hold on the wheelchair, took a step.
Richard backed away from the titan. He heard the sounds of ripping fabric and more giggles. Then he smelled the rotting fire of Willis Kemp’s alter ego.
His mind was rushing to nowhere. Just running in place. Naomi’s face was pale. Her eyes looked as wide as his felt.
Duncan put his hands over his heart. “There is localized mutuality here. Someone is trying to get out of the temporal well.”
Richard’s heart pounded. Every sound at the edge of reality ramped his pulse up another notch. He couldn’t get a breath deep enough to provide his body with enough oxygen. “Someone's trying to get out, huh?”
The metal roll-up door on the front of the building rattled. Naomi squealed and jumped away from the chair. It rolled back down the drive. When it passed the boundary around the Makers property, it froze as if it had become a picture.
Richard heard the ripping noise again. Like a wet towel pulled apart into strips. The door clanged as if someone had run into it at full speed. He looked at Duncan. “Someone or something.”
Duncan drew his eyebrows down in thought. He looked up, his eyes wide in horrified realization.
The expression on the Titan’s face froze Richard’s bowels. He didn’t think he could face anything that scared him.
Duncan moved with terrifying speed, like he was in his own little sped up reality. Naomi’s head whipped to the side when Duncan grabbed her then launched himself in a leap that carried them all the way to Richard.
The alien pulled him in with his other arm and was two steps toward the wild honeysuckle drooping over the edge of the driveway when the garage door cracked like it had been hit by a bus.
Duncan pulled them down as he dropped to his knees. They rolled into a tangled pile. Crushed the branches and flowers as they worked their way inside the jumble of shrubs.
The plants been growing here as long as Richard could remember. It was a whole other world in the shade of these old bushes so close to the ground.
He pressed his nose to the dirt. Duncan’s broad back smashed him against the bones of the honeysuckle’s body. As thick as his wrist, they supported the soft fall of the limbs they hid under.
The roll-up door crashed with another impact. Again and again. The ripping sound filled the air. Like the frenzied purr of a dragon ready to burn the villagers.
Richard craned his neck to see past Duncan’s bald head. The titan shivered. Effort or fear, Richard couldn’t tell. Naomi grunted at his feet as she struggled to get a view of her own.
Duncan’s voice felt like a knife of ice in his brain. “Be still!”
Through the trembling honeysuckle, Richard watched the door explode out into the driveway. The inside of the Makers building was filled with a swarming nightmare. Creatures from a madman’s imagination crowded into the doorway. Black and silver, with the sheen of metal — like scales or the exterior of a beetle.
They moved like frames were missing from their film, in fits and starts of blurred motion. Their eyes glittered like Duncan’s and Jerry’s. The black of gravity with blue and gold swirling in their depths.
The ripping purrs were their collective voices. They rose into a combined roar. He winced, worked deeper into the bush. Then the creatures charged as one down the driveway. Shimmering heat shot from their mouths, lit by blur fire deep in the gullets.
Like a flock of demon birds, they flowed out of the Makers building. A golf cart parked in front of the side door flipped on impact when the mass sideswiped it on their way out.
A black flood streaked by, and he clamped his teeth shut to keep from screaming.
Naomi’s voice rose in a squeal to join the ripping howls of the stampede, and Duncan forced himself back even deeper into the bushes.
Richard’s ribs creaked under the pressure.
When the herd hit the boundary in front of the wheelchair at the bottom of the driveway, the light brightened, and the sound outside returned. Like they burst the bubble of time as they passed.
Into the street they ran, then they spread out in all directions. There were far more creatures inside than the building could have possibly held. It seemed like minutes before it was empty.
Richard’s mind was no longer charging downhill. It was frozen with shock, and he was surprised he couldn’t feel piss soaking through his jeans. But then, he couldn’t feel anything down there anymore.
He was paralyzed again.
He pushed against Duncan’s shoulders. “They’re gone, okay? Get off me. You weigh a fucking ton.”
Naomi struggled to free herself. “What the fuck were those things?”
Duncan moaned as he crawled out from under the honeysuckle that filling the air with the sticky sweet aroma of summer. He dropped his head into his hands as if he was about to weep. “They are the Unity. Something was trying to get in.”