Fixer (36 page)

Reaching the door and jerking it open, Corrigan discovered the main hospital lobby, which confused him for a second until he recalled that the lobby was supposed to be on that floor. It was a long, thin expanse centered on a vast desk area manned by exactly one person, for whom at least a dozen people were waiting. A few looked over at him, surprised, as adults only rarely run through buildings without a good reason, yet he had clearly arrived at that point after a fair amount of running.

Corrigan was fortunate in that nobody was moving much, so the future distortions were slight and easy enough to parse. It also helped that he had stopped running long enough to figure out where Kilroy had gone. That didn’t turn out to be too hard.

The creature was standing still behind the queue near a man in a suit. It was an odd effect, seeing him hovering behind a row of blurry people because with no future blur of his own, Kilroy was the only one in focus. It was like seeing a black and white movie with one character artificially colorized.

Noting that he had Corrigan’s full attention, Kilroy smiled and raised his bat into the air, meaning to club the fellow in the suit with it. Corrigan knew it would come down to this. The consequence of chasing Kilroy was that it put everyone nearby at risk. 

But that was why he’d taken the gun.

Dropping to one knee, Corrigan drew the handgun from his pocket and took aim. Behind him Maggie was screaming something, but he ignored her; he knew what he was doing. He fired.

Corrigan was always a pretty good shot. It was one of the things he prided himself on. He even owned two guns and on weekends liked to drive out to a private shooting range in Medford for target practice. A couple of times this proficiency came in handy, most spectacularly in the bank robbery he’d helped foil the first time he worked with Maggie Trent.

But it didn’t help this time. He watched in horror as the head of the man in the suit disappeared in a cloud of pink dust. The woman behind him in line shrieked in horror, even as the remnants of a human head coated the front of her face and clothing. 

Kilroy—who had used the bat to bump the dead man into the path of the bullet—smiled satisfyingly.

What have I done?

Harvey, I understand now.

“Corrigan, no!” Maggie screamed. He looked down and realized he was still kneeling, the gun was just coming to bear, and he was about to take aim.

I’m in the future,
he realized.
I haven’t done this yet.

He lowered the gun, and the death of the man in the suit vanished, as did the rest of the future. This was jarring for Corrigan, but considerably more so for Kilroy, as when the future vision reinstated itself, Corrigan could see that Kilroy was clutching his head in pain.

“It hurts him,” Corrigan realized.

“Give me the gun!” Maggie screamed.

The people waiting in line noticed for the first time that Corrigan was waving a firearm about emphatically. This caused a mild panic, not nearly as bad as when one of them had had his head vaporized, but still. Everyone scattered, and Corrigan’s sense of the present went all to hell again.

“Give me the gun!” Maggie screamed.

“You said that, didn’t you?”

She leaned down to swat the gun free from his hand, but Corrigan saw it coming and moved his arm out of the way. “Fine,” he said, “I’m fine. He’s getting away.”

And he was. Kilroy had recovered quickly from the shock of having his present pulled out from under him, altered, and shoved back into place. He was making for the side exit, which led to the top floor of the parking garage.

Maggie was still shouting at him. “. . .shoot you,” she had just finished saying.

“What?” he asked. Kilroy stepped out through the sliding doors, preceded by the future version of a young pregnant woman who looked terrified of Corrigan. He wondered what could possibly have dragged her to the hospital at one thirty in the morning that didn’t involve the emergency room, but his speculation was cut short by the fact that Maggie was pointing her gun at him.

“I said you have to let go of the gun, Corrigan. I don’t want to shoot you.”

He stared at her. “You’re not going to,” he said.

*  *  *

Corrigan was out through the sliding door before Maggie could properly ruminate on her actually having to shoot him, deciding that if she really had to think about it, she obviously did not have it in her. She hated him for knowing this before she did.

“FBI,” she declared loudly, for at that moment everyone who was still in the lobby had seen her gun. She held up her badge for emphasis. It would have been better overall if she looked like a professional law enforcement officer instead of like another type of professional, but she’d been saying a variant of that for most of the evening, especially the parts of the evening that had her running in three-inch heels. “Everything’s okay. We’re . . . uh . . . we’re chasing down a fugitive.”

This sounded mad, but whatever.
Let them figure it out for themselves
. She followed Corrigan out the door.

He was already at the far end of the garage, heading down the ramp to the ground level and probably toward the street, where he would surely find more civilians to accidentally terrorize. Not knowing what else to do, she headed in the same direction. It was insanity, thinking she could help him bring down an assailant she could neither see nor affect in any real way, but it seemed equally wrong to let him run off alone and hope for the best.

There has to be some way I can help,
she thought. And just then, she thought of one such way.

The front corner of the parking garage afforded her a view of Mount Auburn Street a good quarter of a mile in both directions. Directly below her was the outlet through which anybody—on foot or driving—would ultimately have to emerge if they wanted to exit the garage without also breaking a leg. It was a twenty-foot drop onto a steep hill on the other side. From there, she should be able to see where Corrigan was heading. 

She slipped the gun into her jacket pocket and then pulled a much more useful device from the same pocket—a cell phone.

“C’mon, c’mon,” she muttered, listening to the ring. Finally, he picked up. “Professor Calvin? It’s Agent Trent. Listen, I don’t have much time . . .”

Chapter Twenty-Four

Now

Sir Isaac Newton appeared to be ringing. This was certainly odd, but it was not the very oddest thing about Newton. The very oddest thing about Newton was that he was roughly fifty feet tall and appeared to be wearing a trout on his head in lieu of a powdered wig. The fish was making a disturbing sucking noise in order to remain atop Newton’s head—for he was mouth-first—and that noise had been distracting them both throughout the entire conversation. Newton had apologized a couple times already for this. “Terribly sorry about the fish, good sir,” he’d said. “But if I took him off, I’d never finish with the recoinage. You understand.” Archie did not understand but had the good sense not to ask for an elaboration.

Archie Calvin, who was—as far as one could tell such things—still completely normal sized, sipped his tea and tried not to think about the fact that he was sitting at the same table as Newton and that the table accommodated both of them handily, despite being a normal table—and despite Newton’s gargantuan size.

“What did you say?” he asked Newton politely. One must always be polite to Newton.

“Ring,” Newton repeated.

As Sir Isaac had been in the middle of a lengthy treatise on the nature of time as a thing independent of observation and perspective—a viewpoint that no longer aligned with the modern understanding—
ring
did not fit in well with the rest of his argument.

“I see your point,” Archie said. Which seemed like the thing to say, really.

“Ring,” Newton said again. His nose trembled slightly.

“Um . . .”

“It’s the phone,” said the fish, which had removed Newton’s head from its mouth and was now perched sideways, dangerously close to sliding off Newton’s head and onto the table. “Wake up and answer it before Ronnie has to.”

“Ah. Thank you.”

“No problem.”

Archie lunged for the nightstand in the dark, the remnants of the fifty-foot Newton and his talking-fish wig still darting about his unconscious like fireflies under a porch light. There—but lost in the background. He could still taste the tea in his mouth.
Darjeeling.

The phone was to the right of the alarm clock, which had a red LED display that was annoying when trying to sleep but extremely useful when looking for the phone. He picked up the receiver. It was wireless, so he didn’t concern himself with the possibility that the cord might knock over something he may wish to keep.

“Hello?” he said.

“Professor Calvin?” said a woman on the other end of the line. “It’s Agent Trent. Listen, I don’t have much time—”

“Agent Trent?” he asked. He rummaged through his brain for a one-to-one match but found only more of Newton’s
Principia Mathematica
. 

“Look, I’m kind of in a bind here. It’s about Corrigan.”

This name he recognized. And having made that connection, he knew who was on the phone. “Yes, Agent Trent. Of course.”

Ronnie rolled over and snorted. She had been a loud snorer for every day of their married life, and he’d never found a way to tell her, preferring instead to swaddle his head in pillows in order to muffle the sound. Interestingly, through a down pillow, the snoring noise sounded very much like a trout might if sucking upon a head. 

He climbed out of bed a tad unsteadily and walked to the hallway, closing the bedroom door behind him. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“We found out why these people have been dying,” Maggie said. “There’s a . . . well, I don’t know what he is. A being. He lives in the future.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, wondering if he was still dreaming. “Did you say, ‘lives in the future’?”

“Yeah. That’s what Erica—
Oww
!”

“Are . . . are you all right?”

“Just twisted my ankle. I’m running in heels.”

“Oh. Right.” Archie started heading down the stairs toward his study. He kept expecting a talking fish to pop up and tell him he hadn’t answered the phone yet. “Erica—you mean Erica Smalls. The student you’d led me to believe had been killed.”

“We led everyone to believe that. Look, this guy lives at the other end of the chrono-thingie. They saw him by accident—he got pissed off about it and started killing people one at a time. Are you with me?”

“Sure,” he said, although his mind was still trying to catch up.

“Corrigan, who
can
see him, is chasing him down, and I’m running after Corrigan and completely ruining a great pair of Manolo Blahniks in the process.”

He reached his office and sat down in his desk chair, wondered what the heck a Manolo Blahnik was, and decided it was probably not important. “There is a sentient being living in the future, is that what you’re saying?”

“Professor, I need to know how to kill it before Corrigan hurts somebody and we’re looking at another McClaren situation. Do you understand?”

“No, I’m afraid I don’t just yet. You might have to give me a minute.”

*  *  *

Kilroy wasn’t the best of runners. He had an odd gait that made him look like someone who was trying to move quickly while holding a ball between his knees, and his arms flailed about arrhythmically, as if he couldn’t quite figure out just exactly how to keep them from getting tangled up in his legs. He still had the bat in his hand, but didn’t seem to know what to do with it any more than he did his arms, so it swung wildly from side to side, rapping into telephone poles and parking meters as he passed them by.

So Corrigan, who had started off more than a block behind, was having little trouble gaining. It helped enormously that there was hardly a soul in sight for Kilroy to threaten as it was approaching two in the morning. This also meant fewer moving parts in general, which was frankly a godsend for Corrigan, who had not only lost track of his present, he had given up trying to look for it. 

And then a car came down the street and offered him a cue. The sight was so alarming he actually stopped and stared at it as the front end of the car’s future sped past him. What he saw first was the headlight beam, which was uncommonly visible thanks to an early-morning mist. The beam seemed to stretch for hundreds of feet, terminating suddenly at the front of the hood and the beginning of a car that looked as though it were as long as a football field. Used to be he could distinguish between the present and the hypothetical future somewhat easily because the future was ever so slightly indistinct. But there was nothing ghostly about any part of this car. 

He knew perfectly well that the car was really car sized. But what he knew and what he saw diverged so dramatically that he was inclined to believe his eyes.
I am so not prepared for this,
he thought.

“You’re doing fine,” Harvey said. He had reappeared and was sitting on the hood of a parked car. Another bad sign. Surely the rest of the menagerie was on its way. “Now keep going. He’s getting away.”

“No, he’s not,” Corrigan said. Kilroy had stopped running at around the same time Corrigan had and for approximately the same reason; he’d seen the car, too. “He’s going to do something.”

“Looks like,” Harvey agreed.

“Go away, Harvey.”

“Corrigangangangangawaititittttt,” said someone from behind him. He looked back and saw a Maggie-like shape moving in his direction. He ignored her.

Kilroy had stepped out into the middle of the street.
He’s going to wreck the car,
Corrigan realized.

The superlong car’s superlong hood continued past Corrigan as he ran in a vain effort to reach Kilroy before the car did. In another few seconds the hood reached Kilroy, at which time Kilroy swung the baseball bat into the driver’s side of the windshield. The formerly streamlined giant vehicle’s front jerked around like the head of an electrified snake and came to a jarring termination at a telephone pole.