The Broken Universe (49 page)

His vision wavered, and he slumped forward.

“Wait!” he said, but the words seemed slurred.

Another blow careened off his back.

He reached up and toggled the device one universe forward. He pressed the button and he and Prime flipped to the next universe.

Twilight on a sloped hill.

John’s head throbbed. His vision was doubled. He wanted to vomit, but struggled to crawl up Prime’s body to his throat. He couldn’t let Prime go anywhere without him.

He settled a forearm across Prime’s windpipe and held him down while he attacked the buckles.

Prime struggled and John couldn’t keep ahold of his neck. Prime was as strong as he, as massive as he, had the same reactions and the same skills.

Prime forced a knee up between them and pushed John off him. John found himself sliding down the hill, away from Prime, away from the device. He struggled to grab something to slow his descent. His fingers found the stem of a bush; it bent under his forceful grip, but held. He drew himself up, getting his feet beneath him.

Prime toggled the device. John was too far away to be in the radius of the machine. If he missed the area, he’d be sliced into two pieces, one going on with Prime to the next universe and one staying here on this hill in some unknown universe.

He didn’t pause to consider. John launched himself at Prime, screaming in fury.

Pain in his foot.

They fell.

The air flew from his body and he gasped. His foot throbbed. He looked down expecting to see a stump. No, his foot was intact except for a slice off the tip of his big toe. He’d barely made it inside the radius of the device.

Beneath him, Prime groaned, his eyes closed. John had landed atop him, knocking him momentarily unconscious.

John unbuckled the device and rolled Prime over to get the straps out from under him.

He held the abnormally light device in his hands. It was in his control again. He set the device for Universe 7650, Home Universe, and waited for Prime to wake up.

Prime groaned and tossed as he lay unconscious.

John nudged him with his foot.

“Wake up,” he said.

Prime groaned again. He fluttered his eyes and they settled on John. Then he glanced at the device in his hands.

“So you got it back. So what.”

“I need something from you, John.”

“Forget it. I saved your ass twice now. We’re done. I don’t need that anyway,” he said, nodding at the device.

“No, I still need you to save Grace.”

“I told you I had no idea the world was still infected!” Prime shouted. “Everyone had been dead for years!”

“I don’t care,” John said. “I need the artifacts from the lone traveler.”

“The who?”

“Where Superprime got the device. Everything that he had on him.”

“That shit? It’s worthless.”

“It’s not.”

Prime looked at him, and John watched as he came to the same conclusion he had. “You think…?”

“I do.”

“Wow.” Prime leaned forward, and then groaned. “Ow, I think my ribs are broken.”

John leaned in to give him a forearm to hang on to. Prime grimaced as he pulled himself up, and then he was coming faster than John expected. He shouldered heavily into John. An elbow caught him in the nose.

Prime reached for the device in John’s other hand. John tucked it into his chest and yanked it away. Prime clung to his shoulders with one hand, and clawed at his throat with the other.

John toggled the device.

They were in Universe 7650.

Shade trees blocked the setting sun. They were in near darkness under a canopy of ashes and maples.

John dropped to the ground, trying to dislodge Prime. Prime’s grip loosened and John swung his leg out, kicking at the other’s knee.

Prime grunted and fell. John scuttled back.

He toggled the universe counter to Universe 7651. Maybe he should run now, lick his wounds, and find Prime later. But how much time did he have before Grace Home died? Not enough to play things that way. He had to get what he needed from Prime now.

Prime swung something at him. A tree branch, and he was dazed from it. He lost hold of the device, and it slid away from him into the underbrush of shrubs and sticker bushes.

Prime must have seen it fly, because he leaped past John. John grabbed at his feet, but missed. Prime grunted and John was on him, and then the world shifted and they were in 7651.

The trees were gone, and they were in a barn. A horse lifted its head to stare at them. The smell of manure settled in John’s nose.

Prime crawled away, catching John with a foot to the side of the head. John sat back dazed. Before he could right his equilibrium, Prime kicked him again and he fell flat on the dirt floor of the barn.

John could see Prime’s feet as he lay there. He said something, but he had no idea what. His ears were ringing.

Prime’s feet disappeared.

He was gone. Prime had gotten away with the device, and John had no idea where the lone traveler’s artifacts were.

He rose to his feet slowly.

He’d blown it.

“Crap!” he said.

At least he was in Universe 7651 and not some unknown universe where he’d have to build a transfer device from scratch. If they’d gone any farther, he and Prime would have been past the settled universes and effectively stranded.

Wait.

Prime had transferred out. The device only went forward; he’d need a transfer gate to get back into the settled zone of universes. Of course, he had one in 9000. Prime had his own gate there.

John scanned the barn. He considered for a moment saddling the horse and racing to the quarry on that. But then he saw the small dirt bike, just like the one Billy Walder had when they were kids.

He grabbed it, and then poked his head out the door of the barn. No one was in sight. John jumped on the starter and the dirt bike fired up. He climbed on the seat, his knees almost knocking the handlebar, and accelerated down the dirt driveway.

Prime’s base was on the north side of Findlay. The quarry was on the south. He could keep to the country roads and dirt paths and make it to the transfer gate in Universe Top in fifteen minutes. Then to 9000.

If he wasn’t infected now, he would surely be then. He was betting it all on catching Prime in 9000 by surprise. John accelerated down the country road toward the quarry.

CHAPTER
44

John Prime stared at himself in the little handheld mirror. His right eye was swollen shut and one of his teeth was loose. Farmboy had laid into him good, and he’d almost gotten the device back. But no, Prime had managed to get away finally and he was safe in Universe 9000. No one would chase him to a plague world, not even the Vigilari.

He had a first-aid kit in his mobile home. He found it, under the butane stove, next to the cans of beans. The antibacterial ointment stung his knuckles when he applied it. He wrapped his left hand in gauze.

“You should see the other guy,” Prime muttered.

His ribs really did feel broken. He’d only overacted a little to draw Farmboy in. There was nothing in his first-aid kit for that. He’d need to find a doctor in a populated universe.

Back in Universe Prime maybe. Where the lone traveler’s artifacts sat in a safe in his Quonset hut.

He needed those things. He’d thought they were useless, but they had saved his life, if Farmboy was to be believed. They’d played with the things, microscoped then, X-rayed them, photographed them. They’d shown no sign of internal structure. Yet something saved his life. Something was keeping him from dying in 9000.

Had anyone else worn the ring? No, he only remembered himself wearing it, and then he’d forgotten he’d had it on and had worn the gaudy thing to dinner.

Apparently they hadn’t been looking closely enough at the artifacts. The transfer device had been a mystery too, until Farmboy had cracked it. The other things were clearly as interesting, clearly as useful.

How much wealth, fortune, and fame would a healing device bring him?

He’d have to get back to Universe Prime—carefully!—and retrieve the artifacts.

But first he’d need to arm himself again. He’d left his tank in Universe 0010. He chuckled.

Prime had an army truck parked next to his base in Universe 9000, filled with one nuclear bomb, assorted explosives, and a plethora of automatic weapons. He hadn’t handed all the SADMs over to the Wizards. He’d kept one for himself, and that made him a nuclear power.

John Prime laughed at the idea.

Him, a nuclear power!

In a fit of violent glee, he took an M2 machine gun and expended two hundred bullets into a pine tree. The tree toppled gently until it hung at forty-five degrees. He couldn’t have that. He loaded another belt of five hundred bullets, and shredded the tree of all limbs and cones.

The belt ended and the gun stopped abruptly, though the sound echoed in his ears. Prime felt better after the outburst. Farmboy had almost got him, but he proved he was a better person, a better John.

He filled a backpack with handguns and grenades. The M2 was just too bulky to carry, but he knew where to come to get it if he needed it. Right here in his weapons depot universe.

He rearranged the weapons in his backpack. Prime had never felt better. He had the device again. He had the ability to travel backward, to go anywhere, to take anything. He wasn’t trapped anymore. He never had to see Casey again. Or Abby.

That stung him, but just for a moment. He’d been a fool to stick down roots. He should have kept going, kept roaming. And now he would. He’d build an empire in some universe. He’d do the things Farmboy would never let him do.

Prime glanced up, looking at the southeastern horizon. He thought he’d heard something. It had happened before in this ghost world, some odd sound, some echo. He realized it was just the sound of the machine gun still ringing in his ears.

He had to fetch a flashlight to finish his work; the sun had set, leaving the camp in twilight. He entered the portable cabin he had built for the transfer device to look for it.

“Hello, Prime.”

He jumped.

Farmboy stood next to the controls of his transfer gate.

“You! I left you hundreds of universes back!”

“Only one place for you to go.”

Prime reached to toggle the universe counter on the transfer device on his chest.

“Where you going to go with that, Prime?” Farmboy asked.

“Away from you! Someplace far.”

“I wouldn’t do that,” Farmboy said, “unless you have a gate waiting farther up the line.”

Prime grimaced. He realized he was stuck. He couldn’t use the transfer device to get back from a higher universe to a lower one; he could only go forward. To get back he needed a transfer gate, and he’d never traveled past 9000.

“So, I could build one.”

Farmboy smiled. He pointed to the plans for a gate sitting on a table, plans that Prime had stolen from Henry to build this gate. He grabbed them and wadded them up.

“Can you do it from memory?” Farmboy asked.

Prime said nothing. He couldn’t and Farmboy knew it.

“So, an impasse,” Prime said.

Farmboy shrugged. “Naw.” He lifted a hammer and held it over the transfer device. “Tell me where the artifacts are, or I strand you here forever. You could always keep going up, always running like before. But I don’t think you can stand that.”

Prime began to sweat. The only thing that made the transfer device valuable again was his transfer gate that allowed him to go backward. He’d tried to exploit the multiverse going forward only and failed.

“I’m not giving up the device,” Prime said. “It’s mine.”

Farmboy stared at him for a moment. “I just want the artifacts. You can keep the device and this godforsaken universe.”

Was that some trick? “You’ll let me keep the device?”

“It’s yours, in exchange for the artifacts.”

“Fine.”

“And you never come near the settled universes.”

Prime hesitated. He’d never see Casey or Abby again.

“You … You want Casey.”

Farmboy shrugged. “I want you gone. Take the device and go. Just give me the artifacts.”

“They’re in the safe in Universe Prime, not far from where you’re standing,” Prime said.

“Combination.”

Prime told him, and Farmboy wrote it down.

“If you’ve lied to me,” Farmboy said, “I will hunt you down across the multiverse.”

He set the transfer gate for Universe Prime, stood in the transfer zone, and ten seconds later was gone.

Prime exhaled. Done, he was done with Farmboy and the Wizards for good. And Casey. That Casey at least. There were a million more. A million universes.

Done.

CHAPTER
45

John arrived in the Pleistocene universe to find that Grace Home was delirious and one of her attendants—Grace Quayle—was sick now as well. Henry Quayle had a fever but was sitting next to Grace Home, holding her hand. No one else showed any symptoms of the plague yet.

The lone traveler’s ring seemed too big for Grace’s ring finger, so John slid it over her thumb.

“What is it?” Grace Pinball asked.

“Magic,” John said. “I don’t know. Nanotechnology? Serums? Antibodies?”

“So you have no idea if it will work.”

“Just a guess. Prime survived in the plague world. There has to be a reason.”

Grace Pinball laid a wet cloth on Grace Quayle’s forehead.

“You have a backup plan, John?” Grace Quayle asked. She wasn’t delirious as Grace Home was, but she was flushed with a fever, weak, and aching in her joints.

John grinned as earnestly as he could. “I’ve got a few more tricks up my sleeve.”

Grace Quayle laughed. “Don’t lie to a Grace,” she said. “We know you too well.”

John placed a thermometer under Grace Home’s tongue. It had only been a few minutes since he had slid the ring on her finger. He checked the level of the mercury in the thermometer: forty degrees Celsius.

No change.

He had no idea if the effect would be instantaneous or if Prime had slowly built up an immunity by wearing the ring over days. He felt the remaining artifacts in his pocket. Maybe it was one of the other devices. No, Prime had worn the ring; John had seen it. But not the other stuff.