If he paired up and I didn’t, I was still going to the rail. But the odds were in my favor, and that was all I’d been waiting on. Grinning, I sprang back over the table. I meant to plunge back into my body like a hand sticking into a glove.
I landed someplace else instead.
I looked around in confusion. It was dark, but not dark enough to keep me from making out the high stone columns holding up the roof, because the building had no walls to block out the starlight. Or the sight of distant pyramids rising against the night sky.
I just had time to think: Egypt. Then creatures stalked out of the shadows.
They were eight feet tall, with heads that were too big and the wrong shape. The nearest one roared like a lion and chopped down at me with an axe.
I jumped out of the way, and I swear, he missed. Still, a shock went through me, and I split into pieces.
Or into five versions of myself. Number Two looked exactly like me. Number Three glowed red, and Four, a silvery white. Five was murky and almost invisible in the gloom. But I still recognized him as a semblance of me, the way you recognize your shadow on a wall.
The giant with the lion’s head came at me-or at us-again. So did one of his buddies, who had the long toothy jaws of a crocodile.
The five of us scattered. I felt instantly that it was a mistake, but it was also the only thing to do if we were all going to avoid having to fight giants with our bare hands. And I didn’t control the others, anyway. Each of them was making his own decisions.
I ran, dodging through the columns with their carved hieroglyphics, using them for cover. The giants used them, too. A fat one with the head of a hippo jumped out right in front of me, feet planted wide in a sumo stance and hands stretched out to grab me.
I dropped and slid on the hard stone floor like I was sliding into second. I shot between his feet, scrambled up, and ran on.
Not long after that, I found myself at the spot where the temple-if it was a temple-gave way to desert sand. Panting, I wondered if I should keep going. Then what I thought might be the voice of a hippo man gave a grunting, croaking cry.
But not quite the way a real animal would do it. I thought I could make out words in the noise, although I had no idea what they meant.
Echoing through the temple, other animal voices roared, hissed, and bellowed in response. The three or four monsters that had been hot on my trail turned and headed back the way we’d come.
That seemed like it ought to be a good thing. But I was pretty sure it wasn’t.
For the first time since the Army cut me loose, I wished for my M16. And when I did, I felt what was starting to be a familiar shiver inside my chest.
Was it possible I could make a rifle, or call one to me? I figured I might as well try. I pictured the Thunderbird, and then the M16. I remembered the weight and feel of it in my hands, and the kick when I fired it. I wanted the hell out of it, and hoped I wouldn’t fly off to wherever it was instead of drawing it to me.
Then the cramps hit, like my insides were rupturing. Maybe because I was operating on only one fifth of my mojo. I kept concentrating anyway.
Something slithered around and through my fingers, liquid and oily at first, then hardening. I looked down and saw my rifle, just like back in Afghanistan. It even had the long scratch on the stock.
My instincts told me that, hard as the trick was, it would have been a lot harder in the real world. But in this place, I’d had just enough juice to pull it off.
I waited for the cramps to ease, then crept deeper into the temple. As I did, my other selves slipped out of the shadows one by one.
First came the red guy, shining like a hot coal. Next, the one who looked exactly like me. And then, hesitantly, the shadow.
Which left us a man down. “Where’s the other glowing guy?” I whispered.
The shadow pointed toward the heart of the temple. Right on cue, animal voices started chanting.
“Shit,” I said. The giants had called off the chase because they’d caught one of us, and one was apparently all they needed. “Christ only knows what they’re doing, but we need to go get him.” I started forward.
The others stayed put.
I turned back around. “What’s wrong?”
“If I die tonight,” asked the guy who looked exactly like me, “who will remember me?”
“Who gives a rat’s ass?” I answered. I looked at red me and shadow me. “What’s your problem?”
They just stared back, and I decided they couldn’t talk. Not that they really needed to. Their attitude was clear.
“Hey,” I said, “I don’t want to go, either. But do you really think any of us can be all right without him? And at least we’ve got this.” I hefted the M16.
At first, nobody reacted, and I wondered if Red and Shadow had really even understood me. Maybe the five-way split hadn’t left them with their fair share of brains. But then the glowing me gave a nod, and the spooky version turned up his hands in a way that somehow communicated that he still didn’t like it, but he was in.
“Give me the rifle,” said my twin. “I’m a really good shot.”
“To hell with that,” I said, “make your own. Or, if you can’t, wait until I shoot a monster with an axe, and then pick it up.”
Apparently he couldn’t whistle up an M16, because he just gave me a pissy look. Then we all sneaked toward the chanting. Sometimes it sounded like real voices reciting real words, and sometimes, like feeding time at the zoo.
Finally our objective came into view. Sort of. The lion, croc, and hippo men hadn’t been considerate enough to light torches or anything like that. But even in the center of the temple, there was a little light coming in from outside, and that, combined with the GE soft white glow of silver me, was enough to show what was happening.
A round pit opened in the floor. On the far side of it was a giant bronze balance scale. A pale, fluffy feather longer than I was tall lay in one weighing pan. A lion man and a croc man were lifting Silver into the other. He struggled, but feebly, like he needed to recover from a crack over the head.
I couldn’t see any way that Silver wasn’t going to weigh more than a giant feather, but the monsters weren’t leaving anything to chance. They pulled down on the pan in which he lay like drug dealers gypping a customer.
The chanting stumbled to a stop. The lion man and the croc man dragged Silver off the scale and hauled him toward the edge of the pit.
And, just standing there like an idiot, I realized I was running out of time to do anything about it. I shouldered the M16 and shot the croc man in the head. He reeled backward. I shifted my aim and shot the lion man. He dropped, too.
I hoped that at that point, silver me would make a run for it, and he did. But staggering, not sprinting, like he was still dazed.
I lost sight of him when giants rushed my three buddies and me. We’d been lucky until then. Caught up in their ceremony, the monsters hadn’t noticed Red’s glow as we sneaked up on them. But it would have been hard to miss the bang and flash of the rifle.
With their long legs, the creatures came on fast. I switched to three-round bursts and blasted away for all I was worth. It didn’t look like it was going to be enough. One of the giants would charge into striking distance, and that would probably be that.
But then a hippo man fell down clutching his crotch and bellowing. Shadow me whirled away from him and used the axe in his ghostly-looking hands to hack a croc man’s leg in two. The whole thing was one smooth blur of movement.
As I went on shooting, I saw that Red and my twin were fighting, too. Not with the kung-fu-master-goes-berserk speed and fury of Shadow. I couldn’t match that, either. But, mostly taking cheap shots at giants who were busy trying to kill him or me, they were doing all right.
In fact, we were winning. And I was happy about it until I shot a hippo man in the chest. When he went down, I saw what was behind him. A crocodile man had recaptured Silver and wrestled him to the edge of the pit.