Jack Joyce, twenty-eight years old now, sprinted through the fragile mausoleum to his dead mother, feet pounding across mold-encrusted concrete, past racks and beds gone to rust and ruin, and shoved wide the frail, grime-darkened glass door to stumble, gasping, into morning sunlight.
The black eyes of a dozen assault rifles awaited him.
Without pausing, he translated himself into speed and flew forward as the Technician squad unloaded-missing by a wide margin, bullets sparking off the time-locked greenhouse. The delicate bones in his hand cracked as his fist met the face of the first trooper square below his nose, spun, and booted his compatriot in the back of his knee. He didn’t bother with the assault rifle, which was strapped to the man, but went for the sidearm while the rest of the team oriented and reacted. The first trooper punched the gravel, back first. Jack snatched the weapon and warped back toward the momentarily bulletproof greenhouse as the squad opened up and the second trooper hit the dirt, covering his head.
Jack popped back to regular speed behind a row of moldering planters stacked flush next to the greenhouse wall, the bones in his hand already mending. He popped up fast, and his healing hand lost grip, and the pistol flew from his fist.
Jack had enough time to belch out a disbelieving, “For fuck’s-!” when Beth opened fire from the hayloft.
Caught in the open, the rescue-rigged Technicians scattered fast. Chronon tech, just like the art-killers at the university but far less polished.
Retrieving his weapon as the Technicians scrambled for cover, he noticed the second unit: a crew flanking the barn. They had put together what was happening and were looking to kick into the barn from the rear, taking Beth by surprise. Jack blatted off three shots, catching one man on the hip and causing the rest to rethink their plan. Jack fell back to the rusted planters as a swarm of shots sought him out, every round sparking off-rather than penetrating-time-locked earth and glass.
The house was in a terrible state, rolling slowly outward in pieces from the attic and second floor, stopping, winding back a little, only to roll forward again toward the inevitable.
It was hard to focus. The light-headedness was back. Warping and shifting was costing him. He needed to regroup.
Four troopers clustered together behind the garage across from the house. Jack popped up and blasted out a stutter shield. The localized self-dividing moment popped to life around the four grunts, locking them into place-“Ha!”-for about a second before the tech they wore to keep them mobile tore the shield apart. “Crap.” Jack zapped forward, closing the distance… and his abilities ended there.
The ground seesawed. Jack forgot where he was.
A trooper fired a blind spray around the corner of the garage. Slugs zip-fanned above Jack’s head. He flinched, translating his forward momentum into a knee-skid across the drive’s white gravel. Righting himself as fast as he could, instinct then sent him scrambling-not for the blind side of the garage, but onto the porch and into the front door of the dying house.
Literally into the front door. In his panic he didn’t extend his chronon field, to make the door active, and Jack rebounded off it as if it were concrete.
The garage squad regrouped, crept along the south-side wall. Beth kept them back by kicking up a wall of dirt in front of them with a three-round burst.
Jack got to his feet, eyeballed Beth. Framed by the upper hayloft doors she pointed to herself and then at the crew behind the garage. Then she pointed to Jack and jerked a thumb toward the crew circling the barn. Jack gave the thumbs-up, took a deep breath, and rabbited toward the barn-gun up and firing. From her elevated position Beth opened fire with Gibson’s carbine.
Paul had crashed out the kitchen door, half-blinded, onto the porch that curved around the north and east sides of the house. The occasional clap of gunfire made him jump, reflexively dropping a stutter shield. No bullets came; the threat was not to him.
He sped from the shield, west, into the forest-fringed back garden, jagged south to put the house between him and the firefight that was taking place in the front. His chronon field was already working to restore his vision, the lacerating caustic sting of his facial injuries fading to a livid mottling of his flesh.
The gunfire at the front of the house escalated from a smattering of pops to a full-on multipointed fusillade. Jack was still alive. Paul wheeled, prepared to translate himself at speed around the southern side of the house to attack and apprehend his unskilled friend-to put an end to this madness.
But stopped. What he saw made the strength flee from his legs.
They existed. Five of them, south of the house, near the tree line. Flickering, hulking, twitching.
Then it was there, in the morning light, dark and glittering and monstrous, as though it had a right to be in a world that held Paul’s happiest memories. That thing of…
It moved.
The ground belted him in the ass before his inner ear had the chance to realize he had toppled. The Shifter with the shining palm came for him, unhurried, like every button-pushing nightmare because it could, because he couldn’t get away. Because the universe itself knew Paul Serene was so much worse than dead.
The thing raised its black, shifting hand to display the killing star at its palm.
He froze; he was an animal trapped in the barrow of his own skull, with death at the entrance.
Chanting. The same syllable, repetitious, forever. In time it penetrated and the sound became a word.
Paul listened as his throat coughed up the word “go,” over and over and over.
His boots kicked against the cold ground, carved runnels in damp soil. His body twisted, fingers clawing at grass, and he was stumbling, chest grinding into the sod. Paul picked himself up and then he was running-straight for the woods.
Jack let the tree trunk take his weight, slid to the ground, jacket biting into his armpits as he found the ground. The emptied and open pistol smoked, cradled loose in his slack fingers. Eight men dead. One of them kneeling beside him, face resting against the selfsame tree, lost to his wounds. Others were scattered about the area, frozen, like this one, at the moment they died: some in mid-pirouette, some on their backs, one in mid-air. Misted blood hung like a spray of rubies. As the stutter slowly inched forward every dead man engaged in the last dance of his life.
Jack couldn’t look at it.
Throat raw and gasping, his head swimming and kill-sick, Jack’s brain tapped out. Beth called his name from the barn. He heard her clack in a fresh magazine.
“Yeah,” he called back. It took all he had.
“Get up, Jack. Right now.”
His tree was east of the barn. It was a perfectly pleasant place to sit on this sunny morning and watch the family home die. Will’s desk had flown out of the shattered attic on a tongue of flame, smashing into the gravel drive. Flaming papers trailed its descent.
It came to him then, the cause of Beth’s alarm: the sound. It made its way across the garden, skipping schizophrenically through sliced-up and compartmentalized submoments. It was the sound of a combustion engine. A big one. Jack had first heard it early that morning, outside Zed’s-Beth’s-empty house, in the dark: the grumbling blat of a Monarch BearCat’s 300-horsepower diesel engine.
Survival instinct got him upright. Extending his chronon field to the dead trooper beside him almost exhausted Jack to the point of blackout, but he managed to snare the dead man’s rifle and two magazines before the stutter rebuked him. The toppling corpse refroze halfway to the ground.