Chapter 39

  Eric Walker

  “Walker? What’s wrong?” McFinn, after a single glance at Eric’s face, stopped what he was doing.

  Eric didn’t have to say he’d lost Heidi’s body. McFinn could see that. And he didn’t want to talk about how he might have just traded away Kate’s life. Especially not to her uncle.

  Feelings boiled in Eric’s chest that he didn’t understand. He didn’t want to think about them, didn’t want to take the time to examine them. Mainly he was angry, and he allowed this to fuel him, to push him forward. He had a goddamn job to do. Everything else could wait.

  “Leah,” he said. “Now.”

  McFinn’s lips pursed in a vexed, thoughtful expression that pissed Eric off. McFinn opened his mouth, hesitated, visibly changed what he was going to say. “Just here, Mr. Walker. I’ve got it right here.” He was standing in front of a door that looked just exactly like any other fucking door in the whole place, except that he had affixed some kind of tablet computer to the front of it. Chunks of incomprehensible data flickered and scrolled on the screen.

  “I have calibrated this door to one I installed on the ALL-Rover. Actually, this process is a prototype that Nicholas…” He glanced again at Eric and trailed off. “Ah. Of course. Very soon, Mr. Walker. How is it, Clara?”

  A female voice, barely discernible as computer-generated, spoke from the tablet on the door. “Connection established. Variance 19%.”

  “Does that mean there’s an eighty-one percent chance that this door opens onto the ALL-Rover?” asked Eric. His own voice sounded harsh in his ears.

  “That is the wrong question, Mr. Walker,” said Riley, distracted by something on his watch. “In just a mo—”

  Eric opened the door.

  McFinn cried out in alarm behind him, but the sound died as he recognized the environment on the other side.

  A powerful hand took Eric by the shoulder, gripping him hard. Riley McFinn, for the first time Eric had seen, looked pissed. “You clearly have no conception of what might have been on the other side of the door, Mr. Walker,” he said through gritted teeth. He wasn’t just mad. He was nervous. There was sweat on his forehead. The realization that Riley Goddamn McFinn had been nervous was like a bucket of cold water on Eric’s frustration. It cooled him right the fuck off. Eric could not be acting like a fucking idiot if he wanted to help Leah.

  McFinn was quick to recover. “My fault,” he said as he rapidly unpinned the computer from the door. “I should have kept it locked until I was sure. And in case nobody had yet informed you, Mr. Walker, it is unwise in the extreme to open the doors without knowing for certain what lies on the other side.”

  Voices rose nearby in the Museum. October Industries. McFinn stepped through the door to join Eric and shut it. Eric thought he could detect the alteration, just barely, the moment that the door latched. The tiny click of the doorknob catching severed its connection to the Museum.

  “Now see,” said McFinn. He opened the door again. Behind it was only a white plastic wall. He swung it shut again and brushed past Eric. “Welcome to the ALL-Rover.” He led Eric out of the short, narrow hall and into a living area something like the interior of an extra-wide RV. It didn’t smell great. Stale food and old clothes. A few rounds of ammunition dropped on the carpet. Coffee smell, which actually seemed really good to Eric at that moment.

  “Welcome back,” said that female voice from overhead. “You just missed them.”

  “Who?” asked McFinn as he scanned the area. He looked a lot like Kate just then. Eric knew that later on McFinn would be able to recall every detail of this room if asked.

  “The Whyte and Eddison siblings. And before them, Dwayne Hartman and Leah Walker.”

  “Hmm,” said McFinn, musing as he tapped his staff on the floor. “Why did they leave? They should have…” His eyes fell on Eric. “Leah Walker. Yes. We can do that. Clara!”

  “Yes?”

  “Locate Leah Walker. Take us to her.”

  “Suppose,” she said, “that I am obstructed by some obstacle?”

  “The time for subtlety has passed. Weapons systems?”

  “All green.”

  “Go. And make us coffee.”

  Eric swayed and caught himself on the table for balance as the vehicle lurched forward, picking up speed. “Come, Mr. Walker,” said McFinn. He disappeared through a door at the front of the room.

  Eric followed, but became distracted by what he saw scattered on the low table in the far corner. Crayon drawings, the workmanship unmistakable. Leah and Jim. The sight warmed him. He was this close to seeing her again, this close to being able to be there for her, to be her big brother. He never wanted to admit to himself how much he missed her, but looking at her silly drawings…

  One crayon sketch showed a colorful butterfly along with something big and dark and scary, something with wings and red eyes, and rainbows all around.

  One drawing had something that looked like an astronaut in a black-scribbled outer-space, with a big red and blue tree.

  One showed a red snake, red because it was on fire, fighting a black cat with eight legs, which also looked on fire, though the fire was purple. Eric didn’t know about that one. But next to it there was one with a big suit of armor holding a big sword, and there were bugs all around. Eric could practically smell this drawing. He still hadn’t quite gotten the scent of the damn bug guts off his cape.

  A nearby explosion jolted him out of his inspection of Leah’s drawings.

  “Mr. Walker!” McFinn shouted. Eric shelved the question of whether Jimothy and Liz had described these things to Leah or whether she’d drawn them herself. He ran to the front as the ALL-Rover heaved itself up and over something.

  McFinn sat back in the driver’s seat and watched placidly as something exploded directly ahead, illuminating the front cabin through the fog. “Coffee’s done, lad,” said McFinn.

  “What’s going on?” Eric asked, bewildered.

  “Just clearing a path.” McFinn tapped one of the screens on the dashboard. It showed a vehicle in the middle of a circle with a scattering of dots ahead, like a radar scanner. One dot was green instead of yellow. A zig-zag green line, flickering back and forth as it traced and retraced a path, connected the vehicle to the dot.

  The ALL-Rover swerved sharply, trundled ahead. A wall loomed out of the mist into the view of the ALL-Rover’s bright headlights. Eric saw the rocket fly from somewhere above, watched it crash into the wall and detonate with a brilliant flash and a concussive force that rocked the vehicle.

  “Leah,” said McFinn, pointing to the green dot. “Looks like they got split up. She’s on her own, poor thing. Only one level down, luckily. We’ll be on her in a moment.”

  “So you’re just fucking blowing up everything in the way?”

  “Thought you’d appreciate the direct approach,” said McFinn. “Fast. Expedient.”

  “You’re gonna fucking blow her up!”

  “I will be careful,” said the voice named Clara. “I will employ precision laser drilling to tunnel to the lower level when we are close.”

  Eric glimpsed a person fleeing frantically through the fog as the ALL-Rover rumbled by. He thought he heard a few pings from one side. Was the ALL-Rover taking fire? McFinn didn’t appear concerned, so Eric decided that he shouldn’t be either. Honestly, McFinn was supposedly like the smartest fucking guy in the world. He probably knew his shit. Eric should probably trust him. But on the other hand, being smart didn’t always equate to making good decisions. Kate, McFinn’s niece, was proof of that.

  But he didn’t want to think about Kate.

  They did tunnel down to the next level. Four dim red lasers carved a neat hole in the floor ahead and the ALL-Rover just dropped right on through.

  From then on, it lasered its way through any obstacles on an angled path toward Leah so that there was no chance of a laser accidentally hitting her.

  They were very close, within twenty meters, when the ALL-Rover busted through a wall fucking Cool-Aid Man style. The ALL-Rover’s lights flooded the place with illumination.

  If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  Leah was in the room, sure enough, but Eric didn’t see her at first. All his attention was on the figure directly in front of the ALL-Rover. It was Black, Abraham Black, only he looked different than Eric remembered.

  Black had been facing Leah and the other guy next to her, but he swiveled as the ALL-Rover ground to a sudden halt. He appeared taken aback, surprised so see a huge vehicle burst through the wall right next to him.

  Eric didn’t know what to do, but McFinn had no such difficulties. “Get her, Eric,” he said. Then, “Kill him, Clara.”

  “Target reads negative for vita—”

  “Fire!”

  Eric slowed time. He ran to the door while everything else moved in slow motion. The door was already open for him. (Thanks, Clara.) He hopped out and scrambled across the debris toward Leah and the mystery man.

  The room went red with lasers before Eric had taken two strides from the ALL-Rover.

  The beat hit when he reached Leah, and in that moment, a rocket detonated. Then he was back in speed, picking up Leah, who was clutching at the guy’s leg and probably hadn’t even registered his presence yet. Eric chanced a look behind as he grabbed the guy’s hand. Nothing but brightness and a visible shockwave approaching him at a casual walking speed.

  He carried Leah and dragged the guy, racing the shockwave toward the cover of a nook in the corner of the room, which he vaguely recognized as some kind of firing range. The guy he was dragging, he couldn’t help but notice, was wearing orange and grey. But Leah had been clinging to him, so maybe he wasn’t bad. Maybe he was an ally Eric didn’t know, in disguise. Who fucking knew?

  He barely beat the shockwave to the cover. He allowed time to resume its normal tempo and gasped for breath because the not-actually-real-but-still-kind-of-fucking-real pendulum of his own heartbeat had been real heavy that time.

  They were confused, of course, but for Leah it didn’t last long. She fixed him with an expression of mild surprise, then simply closed her eyes and hugged him as hard as she could. She did not let go.

  The other guy was panicking. He was tall and black, and he’d been hard to drag, and the disorientation of being moved in slow-time overwhelmed him for a few seconds.

  Eric peeked around the corner. Lasers, missiles, and who knew what else. Was that enough to handle Abraham Black?

  The answer, unfortunately, appeared to be no, not even fucking close.

  Black laughed, or at it least that seemed to be his intention. It was the worst sound that Eric had ever heard in his entire life. It was so wrong, so horribly wrong, like a disgusting and terrifying mockery of a human laugh, that Leah whimpered loudly in terror as she clutched Eric.

  Black stood there, unharmed, shedding darkness like fog falling from dry ice. The blackness swirled around him, clung to him in gory clumps like strands of rotten phlegm, washed over the walls like spiky waves creeping up a beach.

  The ALL-Rover tried again, but Eric saw McFinn bailing out the back door, knowing it wouldn’t work.

  The dim red lasers, which had so easily burned through metal plating and concrete walls, could not penetrate the swirling shell of shadows that rose to conceal Black. Thunder resounded—terrible, sickly thunder—and the next round of missiles exploded before they even left their tubes. Waves of blackness surged forward, paper-thin, and sliced the ALL-Rover into sections moments before it all exploded. Eric clapped hands over his ears and felt Leah do the same behind him.

  McFinn, shielded by some glimmering protective barrier, resisted the explosion from behind the ALL-Rover. He retaliated with something that was hard to see in the sudden haze of smoke, but had to do with a lot of thin threads of blue light suddenly coming together and pulsing in a quick stutter.

  “Nishe try,” said Black. It was impossible to tell if he was actually impressed. His voice was far from human.

  Thunder resounded, and Eric couldn’t tell what had become of McFinn through the smoke. The fumes of the explosion made it hard to breathe, and suddenly the room was warm, very warm. He couldn’t see shit.

  He whispered as loudly as he dared. “We have to go, Leah.”

  “What,” said a voice above and behind them. “Leaving sho shoon? We have bushinesh.”

  Eric didn’t think. He sped up his heartbeat as much as he could, slowing the world, slowing everything. With an arm around Leah, he planted a foot and launched the both of them aside. His instincts proved correct, for a silver bullet made a crater in the floor where he and Leah had been the instant before.

  Another pulse of light emerged from the toxic haze. An emerald glow suffused the smoke in the room. It seemed to move slowly, but Eric was losing track of what speed different things were moving at. It all seemed harder here, more difficult than in the Narrative.

  The green light forced Black to react. He turned and raised his twin revolvers so the barrels crossed. This blocked whatever attack McFinn had thrown his way, and it gave time for Eric to pull Leah and the tall guy, in slow time, toward the source of the light. If anyone could get them out of this, it had to be McFinn.

  “Foolish,” said Black, sounding truly amused, as Eric dropped Leah and the other guy beside McFinn. Eric coughed, gasped for breath. He’d been breathing this shitty air several times as much as the others; he had to get out of it. “There ish no eshcape.”

  “McFinn,” said Eric, his voice choked. “I’ll stall him. I can give you…a minute.” Eric hadn’t been aware, until he was actually saying it, that this had been his plan. This was how he could, maybe, at least for the moment, protect Leah. He definitely couldn’t kill Black. But he could slow him down.

  “You sure?” said McFinn. His tone of voice suggested that he knew exactly what was going to happen to Eric if he tried to stall Black.

  “No worries,” said Eric. “Unlike you guys…I got a spare.” He tried to put some fuckin bravado into his voice, but that was hard when you were gagging on toxic fumes, and anyway, he wasn’t really feeling it. He really didn’t want to fucking die, even if he knew he’d just wake up on the Hollow Moon. Maybe, just maybe, he’d wake up with a dead Kaitlyn Carter in front of him.

  Again.

  “A shpare?” asked Black, who was suddenly very close. He couldn’t be seen in the smoke, but it was easy to tell where he was. The blackness writhed in that direction.

  Eric shouted as he launched himself at that darkness. Anger consumed him, a formless frustration with everything that had happened, all the bullshit, all the nonsense, the fact that his god damn evil dragon Guardian was toying with him, and the vague sense that his entire life had been manipulated for some ineffable reason that no one had bothered to fucking share with him.

  It was good that he was so angry, because it was a buffer against the fear. That was where he went when he dove into the black: into the cold oily embrace of Fear itself. He understood, when the deathly face of Black appeared before him in the dark, cracked and oozing and grinning, that if Black had ever been human, that time had passed. The eyes, especially, weren’t like any eyes that should ever exist in a world Isaac’s God had created. The gaze should have petrified him. He should have been a deer in the fucking headlights. But Leah Walker and Kaitlyn Carter filled his mind.

  Whether or not Clara had detected it as a sign of life, Black did have some kind of heartbeat. It was really fast; it stuttered and skipped like a broken record at 500 rpms.

  The pendulum was there, Black’s metronome, ticking wildly in Eric’s mind, overlaying the sight of Black’s silver revolver, suddenly two feet from Eric’s face.

  Eric slowed Black as much as he could, and he slowed himself too because he was about two breaths from passing out in the fumes. He was already dizzy, his vision blurred. He needed to last. He needed to remain conscious for as long as possible.

  Black moved at a crawl now, as did Eric, while second after second ticked by for the rest of the world. But Black didn’t have to move very much for his finger to tighten on the trigger.

  To someone watching, if anyone could have penetrated the smoke and Black’s darkness, Eric and Black would have both been standing still, frozen in place.

  For Eric, at a much faster tempo than Black, he could only watch as the hammer of the revolver flicked forward, slowly, the speed of a drop of water sliding down a dry window. Around them, the smoke billowed in rapid fast-forward. Eric tried to hold his breath, but his hold was slipping.

  Eric had figured it out early on: when he changed a person’s tempo, he also changed the tempo of things they were directly touching. He could, for example, speed himself up and fire off some shots, and the gun in question would work at normal speed, but the bullets would be slow like everything else. This, here with Black, was the reverse case. Black and his revolver were moving slowly, but the bullet would fly in real time, too quick to see.

  Eric fell out of the way just in time. His faster tempo allowed him to clear the path of the bullet before it fired. The sound of thunder was there and gone in a second, a sharp blow of noise on Eric’s ears. The smoke still thickened around him, but it churned more slowly now. How much time had Eric bought? A minute already? Two? He couldn’t tell. For the first fucking time in his life, he had no idea. His vision was graying out; his hold on the metronomes slipped. He had to breathe.

  He inhaled, coughed, and he noticed that Black was grinning more fiercely now than he had been before. And his eyes were turned down upon Eric. And the revolver in his other hand, unseen by Eric before, was poised at the hip, aimed directly at Eric. Eric tried to do a few things at once: further slow Black’s tempo, increase his own, and roll aside. He mostly failed, but it was enough that the shot tore through his side instead of his heart.

  But that was it; that was the last gasp. He was done.

  “A shubshtantial effort,” said Black. “You have inconvenienshed me.”

  Eric looked up at Black. Something was wrong with his eyes; he could barely see. But he saw Black’s hand clearly, and the gleaming revolver. The hand was skeletal, the skin paper-white, the knuckles cracked and bleeding black. There was a dark ring on the index finger of that hand.

  He was looking at that ring, thinking oh, so this is the one, when the revolver thundered, and a bullet passed through his brain.