Fixer (39 page)

Kilroy Prime of the River Tribe Kilroys squealed from the shock/pain of the See’s unexpected attack on his nose.

Not possible!

The Prime backpedaled from Kora-gan and tried to shake away the shock/pain. He needed to think/chew this through because obviously he had underestimated the See’s true power.

No, he is still just an Echo
. But when he looked up, he saw the Minion had similar misgivings and appeared ready to dash/scream away. The Prime hissed a command.

“See must die.”

It was far too late for them to back off now.

*  *  *

While the Alpha Kilroy stepped back and dropped his bat, staring the way one might look at a squirrel that’d suddenly gained the power of speech, Corrigan got to his feet. He chanced a look at the other one, who appeared no less confused.

“Seemustdie,” the Alpha said, but he didn’t sound all that sure of himself anymore.

“Do you say anything else?” Corrigan asked. He swung his fist into the creature’s stomach, doubling him over.

“Ooow,” it said.

“There you go.” He smiled. “How about ‘I’m gonna kick your ass now.’ ”

Corrigan was—he would reflect moments later—a tad cocky. He had no idea what mechanism had allowed him to jump forward into the realm of the Kilroys, nor did he particularly care to know. What he did care about was that his wish had come true. Although not a violent man by nature, these creatures had pushed him to the limit, and he was not just ready to kill the both of them with his bare hands if need be; he was looking forward to it.

“Kickyourassnow,” the Kilroy mimicked.

“Good!” Corrigan risked another look at the second Kilroy. He was still standing well away, uncertain as to whether he should be fleeing or attacking.
I take care of the Alpha, the other one will run off,
he reminded himself. Harvey would have said it for him, but he seemed to have disappeared. Things were looking up all around.

“Corrigan,” the Alpha Kilroy said. Corrigan had been about to kick the guy, but hearing his own name caused him to hesitate. “Corrigandie.”

“Um . . .”

The Alpha Kilroy swung his arm up and right at Corrigan’s face, faster and harder than Corrigan had expected him to be able to. He thought he’d positioned himself outside of the Kilroy’s wheelhouse, forgetting this was a being with unnaturally long hands. The triple-knuckled open palm slap across his face broke his nose on impact, rocked his head backward, and actually caused him to lose his footing. When he landed and looked up again he was a good two yards away from where he’d been standing a second ago.

“Wow,” he said, spitting out some blood and part of a tooth. “You guys are a lot stronger than you look.”

There was a downside to being able to hit them, Corrigan realized—they could hit him too, without needing a weapon. And as far as hand-to-hand combat went, their hands were a lot bigger than his.

“Gun,” he muttered. “Where’s the gun?” He looked at the spot where he’d dropped it, but the gun wasn’t there anymore. 

Maggie was holding it.

*  *  *

Now

Once her call with Calvin had ended, Maggie was left with a choice to either sit out the rest of it and hope for the best, or find some way to insert herself into Corrigan’s fight. Her thinking, in choosing the latter, was keyed on something Calvin had said about how she could only hurt this Kilroy if he wasn’t paying attention to her. Corrigan was keeping him pretty well occupied; maybe she could get off a lucky shot if she could figure out where he was—which shouldn’t be all that hard as long as he kept hitting Corrigan.

So she left the haven of the bushes, walked into the midst of the battleground, and was about to draw her own weapon when she spotted officer Kupchak’s gun.

It was just sitting there on the ground. Her initial impression was that it was something she wouldn’t be able to touch, as Corrigan had carried it into the future with him. But when she leaned over and picked it up, it was as solid as ever.

Object permanence,
she remembered.
This is what he meant.

Corrigan picked that moment to fly across the lawn, landing only ten feet or so away from her. His nose gushed blood and he spat more out of his mouth when he sat up to speak. 

You guys are a lot stronger than you look,
he said. She couldn’t hear him, but she could read his lips well enough, and gave a quiet thanks to the FBI for teaching lip-reading as part of her surveillance training.

“Keep talking,” she said loudly, as if volume could somehow allow her words to bridge the temporal gap more quickly. “Maybe I can figure out what the hell is going on.”

*  *  *

Now +

“Keep talking. Maybe I can figure out what the hell is going on,” Maggie said, or would say shortly, depending on one’s perspective. She waved the gun around in the vicinity of where the Alpha was standing, calculating his position based on where Corrigan had been standing when he was struck. But she didn’t know there was more than one Kilroy.

The second Kilroy also heard her. Having just gone from terrified of Corrigan to pleasantly surprised that Corrigan might be relatively easy to beat up, he now looked extremely happy to find a less dangerous victim in the area to prey upon. He was directly in front of Maggie, maybe fifteen feet away, and she didn’t even know it.

“Great,” Corrigan said. “I told you to stay away, dammit.”

The Alpha Kilroy had picked up his bat again, but he looked so shaky it was obvious he wasn’t going to be a threat for a few more seconds. The problem was the second Kilroy. 

I need the gun,
he thought again and then wondered why Maggie had to go and grab his gun at all when she had one of her own. 

The Kilroy was walking up to Maggie and brandishing his nightstick while she was still quite oblivious.

Getting back up off the ground, Corrigan’s hand fell on the only weapon left—the sword.

“Hey!” he shouted, swinging the sword around wildly and trying to look like he knew how to use it. “Stay away from her!”

But the Kilroy was too interested in Maggie to be distracted and Corrigan had no chance of getting to him in time. The creature swung his nightstick right at her face.

“Duck!” Corrigan shouted.

*  *  *

Now

Corrigan had picked up, of all things, a sword. She was afraid to even guess where it had come from. Perhaps now he was fighting a medieval knight?

He was looking right at her. She saw him shout,
Stay away from her!
and all at once realized she’d made a mistake.
You guys are a lot stronger than you look,
he’d said earlier. 

Plural. 

There’s more than one.
She thought she had a good idea where one Kilroy was, but hadn’t factored in the possibility of multiples. Now, one of the extra combatants was about to take a free shot at her.

Duck!
Corrigan shouted. So she did. Something whooshed in the air above her head.

*  *  *

Now +

Even prior to ducking, the physical presence of Maggie Trent in the future-verse occupied by Corrigan and both his sparring partners was oddly indistinct. The Kilroys and Corrigan were solid and clear and as evidently real as anybody in the commonly agreed-upon present would appear to anybody else in the commonly agreed-upon present. Maggie—even when standing still—was fuzzy, as if a poorly focused camera had captured her. Had Archie Calvin and Erica Smalls been standing next to Corrigan, they might have been able to explain to him that this was because no matter how close to accurate this future path was, there were always going to be minor uncertainties. As they were not there, the best Corrigan could muster by way of explanation was,
how odd.

And then Maggie ducked, which was an explicit alteration of her future. The timing was correct because while Corrigan said it to the future Maggie, the blow she was ducking was being inflicted upon the future Maggie, so that when she caught up to this future and it became her present, the warning and the attack happened more or less in the same order in which they should have. Corrigan didn’t think of this either; he was just hoping it would work. In one version of events, Maggie stayed where she was and took a nasty blow to the face, caving in her nose and right cheekbone. But now there was a second Maggie, one that lowered her head at just the right moment. She split from the injured version, and when her future changed, the entire world—the ground, the trees, the air—wiggled, spun sideways, and was temporarily rent in two. There was a sound that came from this rending that was somewhat like a tremendous steel door being fed through a gigantic wood chipper. This sound had a physical impact on Corrigan and equally so on the Kilroys. It rattled his teeth and shrank his genitals and punched him in the stomach. He screamed—silently for lack of air—then fell to his knees and seriously considered running himself through with the sword. It was worse than the shriek of the Kilroy he’d heard earlier—worse than anything he’d ever heard or felt in his life.

And it lasted barely half a second. When it was over he understood a little bit about the motives of the Kilroys. Someone who saw them could also do this to the future.
He
could do this to the future . . . and already had. Although it didn’t appear to be the case when he altered his
own
future. It only happened when he—or Harvey, or someone like them—changed the future of someone else whose destiny was otherwise set. And it was so painful that if Corrigan was destined to remain stuck in the future—and who was to say he wasn’t at this point—he might consider acting the same way the Kilroys did, if only to prevent that horrible sound from ever happening again.

The beneficial result of Maggie having ducked was that she did not end up with her face smashed in, and her attacker was temporarily incapacitated. Corrigan, as shaky as he was, saw this as an opportunity to close the distance between him and the Kilroy. He staggered toward the Kilroy as best he could, holding the sword over his head like an axe. It must have looked comical—he moved the way a person who had been spinning in place for several minutes might—but with the Kilroy still focused on Maggie, he didn’t notice that he had a sword coming at his head until too late.

With a loud
clang
, the blade bounced off the Kilroy’s skull, and the weapon nearly vibrated right out of Corrigan’s hand. He actually fell over backward with the ricochet. The Kilroy, although decidedly wounded after being struck by a long piece of metal, did not suffer death by cleaved cranium, as one would expect. He did fall down, however.

Getting up again, Corrigan ran his hand along the blade’s edge. It was dull.
Decorative,
he thought.
Naturally.
He examined the point and found that it was slightly rounded, which was also a major disappointment. But it was still a heavy, flat piece of metal that tapered at the end. He figured he could drive it through someone if he had to.

But the gun made a lot more sense. He tossed aside the sword and grabbed the gun from Maggie’s hand. Her future self jumped back in surprise. 

The Kilroy got to his feet and emitted a whiny screech. It was nothing like the one the Alpha Kilroy had let out earlier in the street. More like something a miffed parakeet might utter. He charged.

Corrigan shot him twice in the chest and then, when he fell over, a third time in the face, just to be sure. A headshot had worked on the first one, and he couldn’t be sure these things had a heart in which to put a bullet. Then, rather than dallying any longer, he spun around to take care of the Alpha Kilroy. Unfortunately, the Alpha happened to be right behind him at that time, such that when Corrigan turned, he brought the gun right into the creature’s swing. 

The bat knocked the gun at least thirty feet and also, not incidentally, broke two of Corrigan’s fingers. Without thinking of much beyond how very painful that was, Corrigan grabbed his broken fingers with his good hand, which, of course, left his head unprotected for the next swing of the bat. At the last second he turned his shoulder enough to absorb most of that blow, but it still hurt like hell and nearly knocked him to the ground.

“Corrigandie,” the last remaining Kilroy declared once again. He swatted at Corrigan with the bat, but this time Corrigan was prepared. He grabbed it with his uninjured hand, planted a boot into Kilroy’s chest, and jerked the bat free. It was a maneuver that would have worked a lot better if, after completing it, he’d managed to hang onto the bat, but it ended up flying over his head and far enough away that it may as well have landed in the river for all the good it did him. The Kilroy continued to press the advantage, lunging forward and wrapping his tremendously huge hands around Corrigan’s windpipe. In a second, the Alpha had Corrigan pressed up against the trunk of a tree, their faces inches apart. Corrigan couldn’t breathe or move. 

Kilroy opened his mouth, his gigantic yellow teeth glistening. His jaw seemed to have no hinge to it. Like a snake, it looked as though he could have eaten Corrigan’s head whole. And as the creature leaned closer it occurred to Corrigan that might just be what he was planning to do.

*  *  *

Now

The nonstop entertainment that was the Corrigan Bain Pantomime Theater had Maggie so entranced she’d almost completely forgotten she was in mortal danger. There was the Mystery of the Sword, in which Corrigan swung hard at something that was not there, hit it, and then almost recoiled his way across Memorial Drive. This was preceded by the Dance of Agony, which seemed to involve the lead actor grasping his head tightly in an apparent effort to get his eyeballs to pop out. And then there was the Grabbing of the Gun. She didn’t like that piece. Corrigan had gone from standing beside her to ripping the gun from her hand without his hand actually traversing the necessary distance in between first. It was spooky. The performance got much more serious after the Firing of the Gun with the climactic Breaking of the Fingers and The Choking. Maggie realized then that she was watching Corrigan die but didn’t know what she could possibly do about it.