Chrono Spasm (23 page)

Chapter Twenty-Eight

A noise drew J.B. to the window of the shack and he peered through it, wiping away the dirt with his sleeve. Something was massing out there, a great cloud of teeth flashing through the air. “What the hell is that?” he asked.

Marla was beside him instantly, staring at the dark cloud of teeth that loomed above the abandoned settlement. “Crows,” she said. “More than I’ve ever seen in one place my whole life.”

“And they’re coming this way,” J.B. observed, his hand automatically reaching for his blaster.

“They can’t come here,” Tarelya insisted. “You promised.”

Piotr shot her father a look. “We’ve hidden from them for all of End Day. But it seems that we’ve hidden for as long as we can. Now all we can do is fight.”

Grimly, Piotr led his companions out into the snow-racked plain where the chronovores were swarming. J.B. followed, turning back to Mildred.

“Come on, Millie. You wouldn’t want to miss the end of the world, would you? You slept through the last one,” he added with grim humor.

Pulling the ZKR-551 from its holster, Mildred followed the Armorer into the freezing air outside.

* * *

R
YAN
, K
RYSTY
AND
Doc raced along the winding path of the river toward where the lightning shot up at the sky. There was a passenger jet in the frozen water up ahead: the minister’s fabled giant bird.

The chronovores were moving, swirling around as they searched for prey. Ryan hurried the group on, checking on the insatiable creatures every few steps, assuring himself that the chronovores weren’t following. The river waited before them, a great, wide line of churning water littered with thick hunks of ice. The ice sat low to the water, which made Ryan fairly certain that the water itself had to be deep. There were what looked like gullies running around the edges of the river, thick rips in the ground that seemed abrupt in their start and end. Some didn’t even reach the river, and Ryan wondered what could have caused them. If he didn’t know better, he would guess a military laser had been used here, but then he remembered the lightning sparking from the bent building and figured that to be the source.

They crossed the river on the aircraft’s wing, using it like a bridge to climb over the freezing water. Doc stopped and peered over the sloping edge of the wing for a moment, using his swordstick to steady himself.

The port-side wing of the crashed airplane veered down into the river, where it dipped below the icy surface just a few feet from the shore. In the lead, Ryan scrambled across to the gap then sprang, jumping the last remaining space in a graceful leap. He turned back, reaching his arms out to catch first Krysty and then Doc. The old man seemed rejuvenated somehow.

On the far side of the jet’s wing stood the crooked building, with concrete walls and the power plant attached to its side like a cyst. The plant hummed, the generators buzzing angrily, and lightning played havoc across the surface of the main building itself. It was old military, Ryan saw, recognizing the style from long experience with redoubts and other army facilities. Yet another hangover from the days before the nukecaust, when the U.S. Army seemed to expand into every corner of the country. Ryan wondered what it had been like a century earlier. It was impossible to guess, of no more practical help to him than trying to imagine himself a pharaoh in ancient Egypt. Just a lot of dead people living dead lives.

Uncontrolled electricity played across the concrete walls of the building, arcing up into the air in forked lines. Doc, Ryan and Krysty balked as a great streak shot out from the building, snapping at the locustlike chronovore swarm and blasting two of their number to a grisly ash.

“We’re not safe out here,” Krysty said, and Ryan agreed. The chronovores were snuffling around again, a whole swarm of them blipping in and out of sight through the falling snow, just their rows of teeth hanging in the air.

The sky above them was charged with electricity and color, a great prismatic wash visible through the falling snow. The companions watched as another streak of lightning, twenty feet wide like a laser beam, blasted from the building in a crackling arc before striking the ground. Where it struck, the lightning left a chasm as wide as the blast and at least ten feet deep, a great trench that ran across the land like a scar. There were other similar rents all around, pits in the ground where the lightning had struck before.

“Inside,” Ryan ordered.

The companions sprinted across the snow-smeared plain toward the building, ducking their heads as another out-of-control burst of electricity zapped from the roof, reaching out in a trident fork of white against the night sky.

The main doors sat in a thick housing at the front of the building. There were two doors constructed from thick metal that met in the center in a striped yellow-and-black line. Reaching them first, Ryan shoved the point of his panga into the gap and twisted. The doors parted easily, their locks long since disengaged. If someone was inside, Ryan thought, why would they bother to lock a place like this? The whole area of His Ink Orchard was so inhospitable that he and his companions had only gotten there by chance.

Inside, the companions found themselves standing in a wide corridor with bland gray walls. The tunnellike corridor stretched a long way into the building, the only sign of color a faded yellow stripe painted along the floor. A desk waited to one side of the entry behind a thick plate of what appeared to be armaglass. The desk featured a comp and a telecommunications setup, but it was unmanned. Ryan tried to peer through the glass for a moment before moving on, leading them deeper into the building.

Behind them, the winds billowed and the lightning crackled, snow smattering the floor as it was blown in through the open doors.

Doc stopped in his tracks. “I recognize this place.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Ryan and Krysty stopped, too, staring at the old man.

“You’ve been here before?” Krysty asked.

Doc shook his head. “Not here, but a place very like this.”

“We’ve been through a lot of redoubts and military bases in our time, Doc,” Ryan reminded him. “They all blend into one after a while.”

“No,” Doc insisted, pawing at the nearest wall. “This is familiar. It’s a facility for Operation Chronos.”

“The people who plucked you out of your own time and dumped you in Deathlands?” Krysty asked.

“Yes. I have not been to this facility, but I have been to one very like it,” Doc insisted. “It is not the design, it is the smell. Unchained energies, chronal energies. Time travel has a smell about it, the facilities that operate it—well, it is something I could never forget.”

Ryan and Krysty sniffed the air, but to them there was nothing. It simply smelled dry after their breakneck passage across the ice.

Ryan started to ask Doc a question. “You sure you’re not—?”

“Imagining it?” Doc finished. “No. Trust me, my dear Ryan. This place has something to do with Operation Chronos. And it is not a dead facility—it is alive.”

Ryan nodded. The generators outside had told him that much, though whether there was a human hand at the center of it all he could only speculate.

Doc stepped forward then, marching down the corridor with newfound determination. Ryan and Krysty hurried to keep up.

“I have been getting flashes from the past,” Doc explained. “They began almost as soon as we arrived here, and they have been getting steadily stronger. I felt the last one when I was plunged under the ice water by that beast.”

“You’ve had episodes before,” Krysty said gently. “Mat-trans nightmares, things like that.”

“I assure you that these are not the dreams I have had before, Krysty,” Doc insisted. “They are not memories that I am reliving. They are something different, a sense of being close to home.”

“It’s your imagination,” Ryan insisted. “Nothing could possibly set that off.”

“Do not be so sure,” Doc told him as they stopped at a closed doorway. He peered through the glass panel in its right-hand side above the doorknob, checking the corridor ahead. It was empty.

“Animals mark their territory,” Doc continued as he pushed through the door. “They come back and they recognize their own musk. And we humans are just animals by another name. Perhaps we, too, lay down trails we recognize, the things we call memories.”

“But you said yourself,” Ryan reminded him. “This isn’t the facility you were held in.”

“True, but this place is rife with chronal energy in flux,” Doc replied. “An old way station perhaps for Operation Chronos, a backup facility to experiment here in Alaska, well away from the hustle and bustle of other, more populous regions.”

A set of double doors waited at the end of the corridor, painted in yellow and black stripes with a red plaque at their center. Noises issued from beyond the doors, the crackling sounds of sparking electricity. Doc stopped before the doors, turning back to face Ryan and Krysty, his face taut with determination.

“I can sense my Emily as if she were waiting around the very next corner,” Doc told them. “What if the Chronos people brought her here? What if she has been waiting for me all this time?”

Ryan looked at his friend, feeling his dilemma as if it was his own. He had been with Doc for several years now, and in that time he had lost other friends, even lost his own son, Dean. To prevent the old man finding out what lay behind the door would be cruel.

“Keep your blaster ready,” Ryan said, turning from Doc to Krysty. “Both of you.” He raised the SIG-Sauer in his own hands, taking a step back from the doors and targeting them over Doc’s shoulder. “Go ahead, Doc. We’ll follow.”

Warily, Doc pushed at the double doors, slipping between them with Krysty and Ryan a step behind him, their blasters poised. They found themselves on a railed catwalk overlooking a vast control area filled with sparking machinery and flashing comp screens. The machinery of the operations center was arranged along three walls of the room in the middle of which stood the figure garbed in a thick radiation suit made of bright yellow fabric. The figure’s protective hood hid his features behind a plate of tinted plastic.

“Who—?” Doc began and stopped himself.

The lone figure on the deck below turned to face them. “Come in,” he said, “fellow traveler.”

Gingerly, Doc strode down the metal steps of the room with his companions just a few paces behind him. Reaching the floor below, the team saw two familiar people—Jak and Ricky—bound hand and foot against the jutting machinery that lined the wall beneath the stairs.

“Those are my friends,” Doc said without hesitation. “We are here to—”

“Rescue them?” the hooded figure suggested. “No, perhaps these others came for that, but you came here for something else. You heard my call, didn’t you—brother?”

* * *

J.B.
AND
M
ILDRED
joined Piotr, Marla and Graz as they stormed outside to face the swarming cloud of chronovores.

“Looks like your End Day is finally coming to its end,” J.B. remarked as the dark swarm oozed toward them across the darkened sky.

The swarm was made up of hundreds upon hundreds of shining teeth, each one a foot long and as sharp as a knife. Behind those gnashing teeth, the chronovores were beginning to take shape, great snaking bodies that wound in and out of existence, curling through time itself.

“We can’t fight these things, John,” Mildred insisted. “Look at them.”

J.B. eyed the approaching cloud as the locustlike creatures began to eat through the rogue energies of the Operation Chronos facility. “Then we’ll die the way we lived,” he told Mildred, “fighting for our lives every step of the way.”

Mildred and J.B. hunkered down as the cloud of time-eating monsters swarmed toward the buildings, chomping great swathes of reality out of existence, leaving nothing but the bubbling wounds of shattered time in their wake.

* * *

“B
ROTHER
?” D
OC
SHOT
back. “What are you talking about?”

“They dragged us through time,” the yellow-suited figure replied angrily. “Placed us here in the desolate future against our will. When I stepped out of the time window, I couldn’t even remember my name—can you believe that?”

Doc nodded. His own journey through time had been so traumatic that he had physically aged more than thirty years, and his mind had been almost broken, his memories like a jigsaw puzzle that he had slowly pieced back together. “Who are you?” Doc asked.

“My name was Don Nectar,” the man in the radiation suit said. “That was the best I could remember of it.

“The men in white lab coats launched me here like a firework, blasting me through time,” Nectar continued. “I staggered from this facility into the cold out there and I could barely stand, so much of me had broken away in the time stream.”

“You lost bits of yourself?”

While Doc kept Nectar’s attention, Ryan and Krysty took the opportunity to check on Jak and Ricky where they had been affixed to the wall by insulation tape. They were unconscious but still breathing. “Jak?” Ryan whispered. “Come on, snap out of it.”

Jak’s eyelids flickered for a moment. Beneath them, Ryan saw the albino’s familiar ruby orbs but he seemed unable to focus. Whatever had happened here, he had taken a punishing blow to the skull.

A few steps away Krysty was reaching the same conclusion with Ricky. Her own body still rocked with the Gaia power, her hair tangling and untangling with phantom energy.

“I have strived all these years to find the way back home,” Nectar told Doc.

“I...” Doc began uncertainly. “I don’t understand.”

Nectar took a step away from his equipment, his tether line swaying as it spooled out from the machinery. “This place is a backup facility for Operation Chronos. You remember Operation Chronos, don’t you?”

Doc nodded. “I suspected as much as soon as I entered,” he admitted.

“We came through time together, but while you lived your life I was stuck, tethered here like a shade, unable to function,” the man in the hood said.

Doc took another step forward, peering at the man’s features through the darkened pane of his suit. “Who are you? I cannot see.”

“I told you—my name is Don Nectar,” the man told him. “We were—we
are—
friends.”

Doc shook his head. “No, I know of no one of that name.”

But Nectar ignored him. “If you could only know the struggles I had been through to open the tunnel through time,” he said. “If only you could feel the agony I have felt.”

Behind him, the machinery was flickering with light as some function reached its crescendo.

“It’s taken years,” Nectar said with bitterness. “There was a part of the equation missing, you see. No matter what I did, one piece of the puzzle remained tantalisingly unreachable.
You.
”

Doc took a step back. “I’m not responsible for—”

“Yes, you are,” Nectar snarled. “You always were. Without you, I’d still be at home with my wife and children. I was dragged in your wake, caught up in the chronal energies that sent
you
through time.”

“I played no part in that experiment,” Doc told him. “I am as much a victim as you are, Mr. Nectar.”

“I lost everything,” Nectar growled. “Even myself. I am a man who barely exists. I cannot step outside of this facility. Once I go beyond the reach of the time equipment my body begins to break down. I have been trapped here for years, trying to fix things, trying to reset the equipment so that I can go home.”

“You’re destroying this whole area,” Ryan growled, reappearing from beneath the stairs, blaster in hand. “Your experiments in time travel have created a sinkhole in the very fabric of time itself. It’s slowly consuming everything.”

Nectar’s head moved beneath the hood as he identified Ryan and Krysty. “You think this place matters to
him?
” he asked, indicating Doc. “You think he wouldn’t leave you in an instant if he had the chance to?”

Ryan and Krysty turned to Doc. “Doc?” Krysty asked.

The old man’s face was screwed up as he wrestled with his conscience.

“No one could blame you if you found a way home,” Krysty said.

“No, not at this cost,” Doc insisted. “This whole bubble of broken time will only expand, consuming everything. And if not, then those awful chronovores—”

“Don’t be so naive,” Nectar growled. “You want... I have dedicated my whole existence to this.”

“To what?” Doc snarled.

“To be home,” Nectar replied, slamming his fist against the control toggle that powered up the machinery, sending it into overdrive. “To be with your...with my...my wife...”

“Her name is Emily,” Doc said through clenched teeth, realization finally dawning on him.

“Yes,” Nectar said. “Emily. My darling Emily.”

* * *

J.B.
WATCHED
IN
HORROR
as the cloud of grinding teeth hurtled through the air toward the buildings. They had already destroyed the landscape behind them, ripped through it like it was soggy paper, turning the snow and trees into fiery ruins, alive with unrestrained energy.

The cloud front was almost upon them now, and Piotr ordered his people to stick close as he began firing, sending bullet after bullet into the creatures’ gleaming teeth. Their bodies popped and fizzed as they winked in and out of time, guzzling at every piece of matter they touched now as chronal energies poured from the distant building.

From their hiding place in the supermarket, Symon, Nyarla and Tarelya watched terrified through the dirt-smeared windows, wondering if anything could possibly stop these monsters. They watched as J.B. tossed a compact charge into a swarm of the impossible creatures, saw it explode and turn a dozen chronovores into flaming forms that crisscrossed in and out of time. It wasn’t enough. Their numbers were endless.

* * *

“S
HE
IS
NOT
YOURS
,” Doc said, feeling suddenly sick. “She was never yours.”

“Ours then,” Nectar said.

“No,” Doc stated. “Emily is her own woman, and that was why I loved her. And why I love her still. You—an abomination, a murmur from the time stream—couldn’t understand.”

Nectar stepped closer, cupping Doc’s chin in his hand. “I am you,” he said. “We are one, you and I. Alpha and Omega, twin sides of the same equation, balanced perfectly. Brothers fighting for the same woman.”

“Not brothers,” Doc told him. “You are me. A broken sliver of me that those irresponsible lab jockeys managed to foul up into existence when they tossed me so carelessly into the time hole. That’s it, isn’t it,
Don Nectar?
I should have realized the very moment I heard your name. Don Nectar—it’s an amnesiac’s remembrance of ‘Doc Tanner,’ is it not? Of
my
name. You should not exist, foul curse from my heart. That is why you could never—can never—go home. You never existed.”

“And yet, I stand before you, a man complete,” Nectar said.

“No, you do not!” Doc growled, lunging forward and grabbing Nectar by the mask. In one swift movement, the old man pulled the radiation hood away, revealing Nectar’s face for the first time. It was his own face, but insubstantial, like a reflection in dark glass. He was a shade of Doc, a shadow come to life. “You are a ghost who has not even died.”

Nectar bared his teeth at Doc, but in his face they were as black as night. “Together we can depart this Hell and return home, return to Emily. We have suffered enough. You out there and me trapped here, unable to leave the time machinery or I’ll cease to be. Come with me, brother.”

“Learn your place, shadow man,” Doc replied, driving his balled fist into Nectar’s chin.

Nectar swayed in place, his faint eyes narrowing in his indistinct face. “I hit me,” he muttered. “You... I...”

“Your life is forfeit,” Doc told him. “You are nothing but a dream thing brought fleetingly to life while the dreamer tried to awaken. But this, all you are doing here—all you have done—is destroying everything. Destroying the world.”