Hosing tracer fire-aimed too high-swept toward him like a killing whip.
Shrapnel and wreckage flew toward him from below.
“Fuck it.”
Jack leaped off the desk and let the storm take him. A cardboard box full of novels slammed into his chest as a hose of tracer fire slashed downward, angry fireworks pinging and whining among the storm of wreckage. The box abandoned Jack at its parabola, continuing on its way as Jack sailed free, punched around the legs and spine by trash and memorabilia before tumbling through the shattered wall to hit the attic floor.
He gasped, rolling aside as the desk scythed overhead and stopped.
The stutter froze. The attic wall was a half-bloomed flower.
Silence and a dimness. That dead-thing reek of earth and rotting bedding.
Someone laughed and Paul spun.
Two kids were in the shelter with him, standing on tiptoes, elbows resting on the ghost of the bench that had collapsed, watching the woods, though the window was closed to all light.
“No such thing as witches,” the first kid said. His dark hair was fresh-cut and parent-approved. Even here his shirt was tucked into his trousers, his hair neatly combed. The boy next to him, fair haired, was a different story: thrift-store khaki jacket with some big pockets, unwashed blue jeans, and that Riverport Raptors shirt he’d worn to death.
The voices of the things outside used Paul’s own brain as an amplifier. As one, they howled for him-long and broken.
“Who’d live in a place like this if they weren’t a witch,” ten-year-old Jack asked Paul’s younger self. “Look at this place.”
“The disenfranchised,” the neatly dressed Paul responded.
He had always repeated the big words his mother used, had tried so hard to sound much older than he was.
“The wh-?”
And they were gone. The howling ceased.
Something strained at the door, yanked it, the thin shield of it wobbling.
Paul’s gun was up the second the door opened. A single round blasted through the head of the swaddled woman who stood there. She turned, pushed the door wide to let in the air, and lowered her backpack onto the rotted mattress.
The gunshot faded and fluxed, echoing, distorted through the time-locked woods.
Her hands were weathered, and she hummed to herself, pulling earphones free. Unzipping her bag she laid out two dented bean cans, a half loaf of bread, a cold cheeseburger.
This was the Witch in the Woods, the figure Paul and Jack had mythologized. And then she was gone.
Howls. Paul’s hands slammed to his ears, hard, pistol-whipping himself in the process. Crying out, the cry turned to a scream. One breath and the scream turned to a roar. “What? What do you want?” He slammed his face to the cracks in the door, wide eyes scanning.
Oh God, they were twenty feet away. Five of them.
Paul looked at the loaded gun in his hand. Better he end it here than let them get him. Better he die by his own hand than become like Dr. Kim. Better he kill himself than live to see the world turn to a colorless and unending purgatory, stalked by monsters and tortured by memory.
Better, kinder, that he cease to be.
The machine gun stopped firing. Jack figured it had to be reloading.
He gasped like a landed fish. His chest was one massive bruise where the desk leg had punched him, his cough wet and red.
The roll across the attic floor had cost him. The snapped halves of a rib or two scraped together, spearing him with brightest pain. The jagged ends found each other as his body rapidly healed; the snapped rib-halves kissed, then fused, seamlessly. His skin crawled at the fingers-inside feeling of his chest unbruising. Back arched against it all he saw the safe was back upstairs, twenty feet away from his head, one corner half-submerged into the crumbling floor, ready to repeat its fall through the first-floor hall and into the kitchen below.
Will’s file was inside the open safe: the property deed. The key. The only real lead Jack had left inside this burning building.
Body healed but mind still flailing, he propelled himself forward and skidded across the hot floor on his unbruised chest, plunging his hand into the safe.
The stutter broke. The safe dropped through the floorboards, just as Jack snatched his arm free and popped a shield.
The room reexploded, flame billowing out from four corners, papers flying from the folder, out of the shield, to be vaporized. “No!” He scrambled, saved a few, and jammed them into his jacket.
Paul had prepared himself for moments of doubt, for trials such as this. Seventeen years preparing to overcome more than any man had ever endured in order to purchase a future for the human race. He had taken lives, manipulated nations and economies. The soul of the man he once was had long been forfeit to a greater cause. It was his duty to undo what he had done.
He took his emotions out of the equation, broke the situation down into what needed doing.
He had to live.
If he did not see his plans to the end then all of Creation would stop.
To live he had to get away from what was outside the shelter. What was outside the shelter was…
Blackness flooded the corners of his vision. He shook his head, reduced himself to an equation, a piece on the board.
What was outside the shelter was a threat. The only way out was that door. If he waited they would enter. If he allowed the enemy to dictate terms he was doomed.
Without a second’s hesitation, Paul Serene kicked the door off the hinges and came out shooting. It was the only option he had left.
The Monarch teams were coming to terms with the playfield suddenly changing. The stutter juddered, rewound further. Behind her, as Beth reloaded, Gibson’s hand rewound far enough to unslap the deactivation plates on his rescue rig.
As she swung out to take an opportunity shot at one of the team leaders, Gibson locked her from behind, combat knife pressed to her neck.
“All righty punkin’ butter, drop it.”
Beth let the rifle hit the boards.
“See, Wilder, this is why you didn’t make the cut. Stupid.” His breath was hot in her ear. “And now… now you go from being a soldier to being something I do in my spare time.”
At that moment the second Technician team swept into the rear of the barn as the BearCat gunner opened up on the hayloft from the front. Heavy-hitting tracer rounds curled and spat, ricocheting off time-locked surfaces, sending high-velocity rebounds spraying down onto the barn floor to pinball about the space, tearing men to shreds.
Gibson yelped and leaped sideways, freeing Beth to snatch her stolen rifle and roll away from him. She wheeled, dropped to one knee, and brought the sights up level with Gibson.
Gibson threw himself off the edge, into the barn below.
The BearCat was ripping into the hayloft. From the attic inside the house Jack could see Beth hunkering down, making herself as small as possible, but it was only a matter of time before a ricochet found her.
He had no weapon, and the BearCat was armored. He had a stupid idea, so he ran with it.
He ran at the blown-open attic wall, folded into the moment, and threw himself out-aiming for the BearCat. The warp negated the impact, and Jack landed boots first on the hood. The driver had time to shout a warning before Jack clamped both hands to one section of the chronon-mobility lattice that sheathed the vehicle, and channeled everything he had into it.
Chronon energy flowed from him to the vehicle’s battery. Keeping his head under the roof-gun Jack poured everything he had into the BearCat’s mobility rig.
Somewhere inside the cabin things caught fire. Jack let go, scrambled over the windshield, grabbing the barrel of the weapon for leverage.