Fuck Technicolor. Jack yanked and Will slid heavily out of the deformation. The stutter cracked and failed, half a glittering pound of hot glass clattering back into the atrium as a hundred loosed rounds rapid-smacked into the already wounded dome.
With Jack’s grip tight on his feet, Will cleared the gap, shoulder blades and head thwacking on the guardrail. He hit the floor, hard. It hurt, but he was alive. He had no idea what had happened; as far as he was concerned the ground heaved suddenly, Jack had materialized next to him, and now he was…
“I can’t… I can’t keep…”
Jack’s heart hurt for him. Will was not good at reality-and this was way too real.
From downstairs someone bellowed: “Dr. Joyce!”
Will hesitated. “Do they mean me?”
Jack let Will figure it out.
“Dr. Joyce. Are you in good health, sir?”
Jack peered through a gap in the burnished metal sheet that was the main feature of the guardrail. Five goons and their commander had weapons trained on the walkway. Not good.
“No,” Will called back. “You shit.”
“Sir, there’s been a misunderstanding. We have paramedics on standby-”
“Why are you here?” Jack interrupted. “Monarch owns this place. Owns the lab. The research. The people. Why do this?”
“Sir,” the commander said. “Jack-”
“Fuck you.”
“We have paramedics on standby and can get you clear of this incident in minutes.”
From the top floor of the building Don had a clear vantage down to the lobby. With one finger pressed to the mic in his ear he said: “Dr. Joyce is to the left. His brother is to the right. Aim right, two feet above the deck.”
Jack, still peering through the gap in the guardrail, saw every trooper shift aim to his side of the barricade. “Sons of bitches.”
Pulling himself into the cocoon of a single second Jack sprang from cover, leaped down the stairs, and slammed into the fourth-floor guardrail. To the eyes of everyone else under that dome, Jack had teleported. From his new position one floor down he watched as time reengaged, Jack’s side of the steel plate was perforated by a sparking fusillade, sending Will recoiling. Jack tried to expand another moment, to make it to the third floor, but it wouldn’t come.
“Will, those powers I had may have been a phase I was going through.”
“Uh…,” Will said. “Possibly you overdid it?”
Jack pulled the handgun from the back of his jeans. The last time he had used it burned like a brand in his memory, shame so real it felt like it might end him. Through the gap in the guardrail, through the glass dome, past the trees of Founders’ Walk, the Monarch logo burned bright atop the new tower that looked over the sleepy, unimportant town he had grown up in-the town they had all grown up in.
In his mind’s eye he saw the dome explode upward. He saw the smile on that bastard’s face as he watched Will fall to his death.
Fuck it.
Jack racked the slide and came up shooting. Three snaps, one hit sending a lone trooper spinning behind cover as the rest of the squad ducked. A volley of semiautomatic gunfire tore Jack’s cover to shreds as he leaped down the stairs, sparks tracking the underside of the stairwell.
Time slowed. Back in business.
Jack zipped for the third-floor guardrail, knocked his hip into it, and rebounded down the next stairwell. He was upright behind second-floor cover and blasting as the moment caught up to him. This time his aim was better. The moment danced with him, movement and responses becoming as predictable as minutes and seconds. He sighted and fired cleanly. Three troopers went down, slugs smacking into chest plates, punching through one leering yellow mask.
The remaining squaddie took cover but the commander didn’t. Jack had lingered a moment too long and Guardian’s CO let his weapon shout itself empty-as predictable as minutes and seconds.
Not quite enough though. A channel of air by Jack’s chest and face pulsed like a hot artery and, as reflex and panic threw him backward down the stairwell, one slug took a piece out of Jack’s left arm. Rotating with the force of it Jack crashed down the first-floor stairwell like a sack of spare parts.
His pistol skidded over the side, clattering to the lobby floor. Guardian’s CO moved forward, unhurried, the yellow mask smiling as he reloaded. His grin twin, the last standing squaddie, flanked around the right side of the information desk, weapon leveled.
The CO motioned the squaddie to advance up the stairs. The squaddie moved up, the CO close behind, when the space around him tremble-snapped, trapping both him and the barrel of the CO’s assault weapon. The CO wasn’t a small man but there was no withdrawing his rifle: it was frozen in space as surely as if the barrel had been set in concrete.
Jack walked down the stairs, holding his wounded arm, blood trailing from his fingers.
The CO abandoned the weapon, drew his sidearm, and backed away. He had learned enough in the last few minutes to know that firing was a waste of time until the bubble popped. Jack stepped into the stutter and took the CO’s rifle for himself.
The trapped CO tensed his arm, smiling face doing a poor job of disguising the panic beneath.
From inside the bubble Jack emptied the mag into him.
The ex-marine disappeared backward over the information desk in a spray of blood, ending his life with feet in the air like bad slapstick.
Jack dropped the rifle, took its replacement from the squaddie’s static hands. The stutter burst, the squaddie almost overbalancing as he lurched forward… then realized his gun had vanished. He took things in quickly: his missing weapon now in the hands of his target, and his CO’s legs sticking up from behind a blood-spattered welcome desk.
“Get out of here.”
The squaddie backed away, hands up, turned, and ran.
“Will! Will, you okay?”
Will was already at the third floor. “No more, Jack. Your abilities are completely untested.” Will made it to the lobby, panting. “I want to go home. Once the adrenaline wears off I intend to throw up.” Still gasping: “Your arm… you’re wounded?”
“I’m okay. It’s not as bad as it looks.” Right now, it was little more than a shallow tear.
“Too much blood for a cut so trivial. You’ve healed, and rapidly. Your relationship to time has changed, there’s no doubt.” Will moved for the western exit and the parking lot beyond. “None of which will save you from massive organ trauma if someone wounds you correctly. Dead is dead. Bear that in mind.”
Will was right about the adrenaline: Jack’s teeth were grinding. Thoughts more complex than “find car, leave” were tripping over each other. They needed to get out of there. He couldn’t keep this up much longer. He had nothing else in him.
Without warning the double doors shredded off their aluminum frames, info desk blowing to shrapnel. The salvo didn’t come close to hitting the two brothers, but it got their attention. Someone on Founders’ Walk cut loose with a roof-mounted.50 caliber.
“Hey! You boys weren’t about to leave?”
It was him, the guy who led the attack on the time lab, the one the others called “boss.” The guy wearing the happy grin as he had blown the roof out from beneath Will.
He dismounted the BearCat, took a cigarette from a sleeve pocket, and snapped open a Zippo. Cupped the light with his hands. Drew a deep, healthy lungful.
“Jack,” Will said. “Come on. The car’s this way. We can-”
“Wait here.”
Will grabbed Jack’s arm.
“Wait here.” Jack shrugged him off.
Will wasn’t accepting it. “Do not go out there! We can fix all of this, but I have to-”