The Broken Universe (41 page)

He gestured for the two carrying the bodies to stop; he asked a question. One pointed to one of the bags, which the masked man ordered them to open. Based on the size, John guessed it was the corpse that had been cut in half.

The masked man squatted and looked at the body, but did not touch it. He asked a question, muffled by the mask. The same man shrugged a nonanswer.

The masked man barked a harsh question. He brought his hand down in a cutting motion. John guessed he was asking about the other half of the corpse or why it was cut in half. John knew the morbid answer.

The masked man made another gesture and the other man zipped the bag closed again. The two continued dragging the bags into the huge machine.

John heard a humming. A wind blew a gust of snow across the drive. The masked man looked up, and from the sky a machine landed in the drive. It was just a few meters long and a couple wide. A single pilot sat in the front of it. As it landed, John heard very little sound at all. Clearly, this silent aircraft was what had chased him from Henry’s and Grace’s house in this universe.

John watched as the pilot dismounted, and then began folding the flying machine, bending wings and struts into the fuselage until it was no bigger than a meter by a meter. Then he and another of the men from the van rolled it onto the large vehicle.

The masked man gave an order and everyone ran toward the machine, up the ramp, and into the machine. The leader was the last to leave and scanned the frozen drive before disappearing into the vehicle’s maw.

John heard a humming, a deep throb that reached him through the ground. He wanted to flee, but he held his ground under the pine tree.

With a whoosh, the vehicle disappeared. Air seemed to suck him in, and then just as quickly it pushed him back. He gasped, realizing he’d been holding his breath.

He’d just seen a transfer device, the first time ever he’d seen one besides the one on his chest and the ones he had built from scratch. It was embedded in that monstrous machine, and it transferred it en masse. The power of it shook the earth and collapsed the air around it when it moved.

John crawled forward, out from under the tree, and stood slowly in the knee-high snow. The Wizards were truly up against someone who had the same technology they had. He had seen it, someone else had transdimensional traveling ability, and they were after the Pinball Wizards.

He’d known it, but now he’d seen it.

John stepped forward onto the driveway. He glanced at the farmhouse. It was dark and apparently empty. The snow to the side door was undisturbed. The enemy had wanted the farm for its large garage only. They’d needed someplace to store their war machine, someplace out of sight.

John pulled open the van’s side door. No black-clad enemy lurked within, just the antiseptic smell of the morgue clinging to the unfinished cargo area. Otherwise the van was empty. He reached under the front seats, checked the glove. Nothing.

John peered into the garage. Indented in the dirt three centimeters deep was the tread imprint of the tires of the behemoth. Even in the cold, frozen ground, the thing had left impressions. John scanned his flashlight around the dark corners. Nothing.

He turned, glancing one last time before starting for his rental car. He’d seen them, he’d found them, and now the enormity of their enemy had been driven home. There was more, he realized. He’d seen their transfer devices. He’d seen them and how they acted. They could use all that information.

He had taken no more than three steps when he was knocked flat.

The whoosh pushed John down, and as he fell, he turned to see the machine hulking over him, just meters away.

“Shit!” he cried, struggling to get up in his bulky winter coat.

Lights flared. He ran, aiming for the tree he had crawled under.

Shouts sounded behind him.

He dove under the tree, flattening himself against the ground. Something whizzed through the air near his head. A stream of bullets turned the trunk of the tree into Swiss cheese. Splinters rained down in front of his eyes. Only there was no explosion of gunpowder, no rat-a-tat-tat of machine-gun fire. The gun was using some other method of launching projectiles. Some silent way.

The tree keeled over, exposing him to the sky and light. Something heavy hit his shoulder. A webbing of some kind, sticky and thick. He tried to shake it off, but the stuff was glued to him.

He reached into his jacket to trigger the device, to get him out of there, but his right hand wouldn’t move. The sticky webbing had pinned his right arm against his torso.

“Shit!”

The projectiles had stopped. Lights focused on him. He lifted his head up, trying to see what was happening.

John’s left hand was plastered against the ground too.

The ramp of the machine had lowered. Two men ran out, armed with rifles, and crouched there, staring at his location.

He rotated his torso, trying to get his left arm out of his sleeve from the inside. The webbing seemed to tug tighter. He groaned. Sweat beaded on his forehead and froze there.

Suddenly his arm came loose. He exhaled.

His left hand was trapped between his coat and his shirt. He grabbed at his buttons, trying to get to the device. He could feel it under his shirt, but he couldn’t work the controls through the flannel.

A shadow passed across his head. He looked up at the two soldiers. Their expressions were cold, as they aimed their rifles casually at him.

“I’m— I’m— from next door,” John said. “I didn’t see anything.”

“Nice try,” one said, in a slightly accented voice. “We know who you are, John Rayburn.”

John worked at the button on his shirt.

“Who?”

He ripped at the shirt and a button popped.

John snaked his hand into his shirt and pressed the button on the device. Nothing happened.

“Freeze, Rayburn,” the soldier said. “The goop is only going to get tighter.”

John’s mind raced. Why hadn’t the device worked? Then he realized he’d forgotten to set it to another universe. It was still set to the current universe. He toggled the universe counter, hoping 7352 was a nice universe, and pressed the transfer button again.

He was back under the tree, still plastered in the sticky webbing.

John exhaled. Safe. That had been closer than he wanted it to be.

He tried to sit up. He couldn’t. His predicament wasn’t over. He was still encased in webbing.

Peering over his shoulder, he tried to see around his hood at his body. Blobs of white stuck to his shoulders, torso, and legs. But there was less of the gunk. He’d transferred past most of it.

John realized he’d have to crawl out of his clothes, just as he’d pulled his arm out of the sleeve to trigger the device. He’d have to squeeze out of the neck of the coat without getting any of that stuff on his body.

But not in this cold universe.

Using his left hand, he unzipped his coat and looked down at the display on the device. He dialed it to the Pleistocene and pressed the transfer button.

He was on the plain in the Pleistocene world. Dark, cold, but not as cold. The sky was cloudless and the half-moon gleamed silver, casting the waving grass as swords. Bearable, he decided, and pulled himself out of his coat carefully. To the north he saw a jutting of rock; he’d seen the same formation in 7351.

He stood shivering in his flannel shirt looking down at the gunked winter coat.

“At least the run to New Toledo will keep me warm,” he said to himself.

Getting a clear bearing on the North Star, John began his run, at least ten kilometers in the dark, hopeful that he wouldn’t come across any smilodons or a nest of the cat-dogs.

CHAPTER
34

He had to turn south twice to ford a river, finding shallow rapids of icy-cold water, and so approached New Toledo from the west. By chance he looked in the sky, away from the rising sun, and caught a flash of silver.

“Shit!” he screamed. It was the flying machine.

The enemy had followed him. He was a fool. He was a damned fool. He’d left his jacket on the plain, covered in goo, and probably covered in some sort of tracking device. They were facing an enemy with technology far in advance of their own. Of course they’d have means to track things across universes. Maybe even communication across universes, and he’d led them right to New Toledo.

He ran, even though he was exhausted and nearly empty.

Casey was there, to teach her class. Melissa and Kylie were there. Clotilde and the rest of the Alarians. What had he done?

He had to warn them.

His face was senseless from the cold. His lungs burned. He forced his legs to move, to punch the hard ground. He didn’t care if he ran across a nest of cat-dogs, or a saber-tooth. He had to get there.

Twenty minutes later the flying machine crossed the sky in the direction it had come from.

They had time; the enemy was leaving. They could evacuate.

He should never have gone looking for clues. He’d found trouble, and he’d brought the trouble to them.

He turned at the whine in the sky.

It was bigger than the first flying machine. It thumped the sky and sounded like it looked. It bristled with gun turrets. Another war machine. Another deadly thing.

John ran harder, unsure where the strength came from. A gully appeared in front of him and he crested it with a behemoth jump. He had to warn them, stop the enemy, save everyone.…

The dark machine still moved on the horizon, just two kilometers away, and beyond that he saw the cooking fires of New Toledo, the exhaust of the generator, rising up into the air in plumes.

They had to see it. They had to know. There was always a sentry, always a lookout for wild animals.

Please evacuate, Casey, he said to himself. Please transfer to 7650. Please.

The behemoth flying machine rose higher into the air. John had to strain his neck to see it, and stopped looking for it, focusing on his pace.

He tripped, sprawling on the ground among a thicket of stones. He groaned, looking at his skinned elbows. It didn’t matter. He forced his knees under him. Then pushed himself to his feet.

Ahead of him was a stand of trees he knew well: the site of Grayborn’s execution. An unwelcome sight at any other time, but that meant he was only across the river from New Toledo.

He forced himself to his feet. Woozily, he took a step, then another.

He’d have to bypass the trees to avoid the gorge where they executed Grayborn. It was his natural instinct to go around it. Instead he aimed right through: it was the shortest distance. Damn Grayborn’s ghost.

He paused at the edge of the trees, looking into the bluing sky, trying to find the aircraft. Nothing. Where had it gone?

He pushed into the forest. He expected to be going slower, but he found the tree trunks provided him with natural crutches. Instead of falling in agonizing exhaustion, he could lean against the ashes and maples, stagger from trunk to trunk.

His shoulder hit hard against a tree trunk; he whispered Casey’s name. This urged him onward and he jogged forward. The gorge loomed ahead of him.

He stopped at the edge of the gorge, but the dirt was slick and his balance was gone. John slid and found himself at the bottom of the gorge, where he had shot Grayborn.

He tried not to look, but his eyes found the plaque someone—not him, never a John—had placed there.
Here Lies the Remains of the Rapist Jason Grayborn.

He stared at the sign, the words blurring.

His ghost would be laughing now.

“Damn you!”

He reached his hands up to grab handholds in the far gorge wall.

A flash of light turned the sky white. A second later he felt a wave of heat, a shock wave of tropic sun, followed by a pounding deep thunder rolling across the top of the gorge. The heat of the firestorm forced John to drop to his belly and bury his face in the mud.

He screamed as the air above him sizzled. But it was so loud he could not even hear his bellowing.

He felt the hair on the back of his head curl and singe. Fire seemed to lick at his back and buttocks. Seconds ago he had been cold and beaten, now he burned in pain, gasping for breath as the oxygen was sucked from the air to feed a raging fire in the sky.

But no such conflagration could last for long, and it faded in intensity after thirty seconds such that he no longer screamed in pain.

After a minute he could roll over and put out his smoldering clothes. The sky, previously cloudless, was the green of an impending tornado. Debris—dirt, pebbles—rained down on him.

He blinked, took a slow breath of pain, and stood.

John had to see over the gorge wall.

He dug a hand in the dirt, gripped a loop of roots, and pulled himself up half a meter. He hung there, uncertain and suddenly disoriented, then he saw a flat bit of stone that he could push his palm against. Another half meter. His feet scrambled against the dirt wall, finding a bit of purchase. Then his right hand found the top of the gorge, grabbing crumbling grass and moss. He reached as far as he could, his hand catching a small tree.

Grunting, then screaming, he pulled himself over the edge of the gorge.

John lay there, gasping. The world smelled of char. He looked up in horror.

A mushroom cloud rose above him, less than a kilometer away, centered over what had once been New Toledo.

He screamed, incoherent sounds of rage and horror.

Casey had been there.

So many others.

Destroyed by his stupidity. His stupidity.

He stared and screamed as the head of the cloud slowly rose into the sky. Dark, murky clouds settled over the river, obscuring what had once been there on the shore. He found himself trying to find some glimpse of the buildings, hidden in the murk, some sign that they had miraculously survived, but he saw nothing but swirling dust and dirt.

So intent was he on peering into the dark clouds that he did not see the aircraft until it was nearly atop him.

Its weaponry turned toward him.

Rage filled him.

He would have his revenge, but not now. Not here.