He trembled. “Paul,” he said and, just like that, that pathetic figure of a man burst into tears. When was the last time someone had asked him his name? Asked him anything? “Please,” he said. “Take me back inside.”
“Inside? You mean upstairs? The lab?”
“No,” he said, hurt by her obvious cruelty. “The Tower.”
The flickering shield around the top floors of the Monarch building. Someone keeping the lights on.
Beth calmed him, distracted him, decided they needed to eat. Paul showed her how he had been surviving: canned goods, a propane cooker, bottled water, stored in the staff kitchenette upstairs.
She had about forty minutes left in her rescue rig. After that she’d be as stiff as every other poor bastard.
Out from under the floor Paul had noticed her wounded leg immediately. With all the care of a small boy tending a fallen bird he had cut away a portion of her fatigues, enough to expose the wound, and tended it as best he could with antiseptic, fresh gauze, and a tight binding.
She told him she had gashed herself running from the Shifters.
“You have to be more careful here,” he told her. “When everyday things don’t yield, they become dangerous. You could slash yourself on a falling leaf, you hit it right.”
“Thank you,” she said. “You tie a pretty competent bandage.”
“Boy Scout,” he said, closing the kit.
Paul’s kitchenette was spartan: steel benchtops, small microwave (useless, no power), fridge (redundant, food lasts forever), one table, and four chairs. He chatted as he heated a pan on a propane camp stove, cracked eggs, mixed flour, chocolate, and maple syrup. And cinnamon.
Paul told her his story, about the university shooting, going through the machine and expecting to emerge back into the Riverport University time lab. Instead he found the airlock packed with passengers: men in Monarch armor. They had been nervous, Paul’s sudden presence in the machine with them unexpected. One had almost shot him but the soldier in charge said (and this was confusing), “Don’t shoot, it’s him.” Then the main airlock had opened.
From outside the machine someone had said “Welcome.” The Monarch troopers were asked to come forward and relinquish their weapons. There had been some back-and-forth, but the troopers eventually exited, hands open.
Then someone had called Paul by name, asked him to come out of the machine.
Terrified, Paul had stepped off the Promenade, into the airlock, and surveyed what awaited.
Outside the airlock was a glossy-floored expanse of polished black ceramic, the ceiling vast above. A glassed-in observation deck looked down upon him from one side. Swaddled figures stood motionless there, faces obscured behind safety goggles. He saw the Monarch soldiers being led away by a group of men and women wrapped head to toe in protective layers of dark material, weapons held loosely in hand. Paul didn’t know what had happened to the soldiers after that. He never saw them again.
At the foot of the steel ramp people in sand-colored floor-length robes waited for him, attended by personnel in black military-style uniforms.
Behind them the far wall of the lab was gone, torn away and with it part of the glossy black floor. Riverport was laid out through a flickering violet energy haze. Smack in the middle of the view was the university. The sky above it was a thick mass of black cloud punched through with pale eddies, bolts of terrible energy leaping from earth to sky. There was flame and there was smoke-none of it moving-with great gouges slashed perpendicular to Main Street.
“Come out,” the tallest figure had coaxed, gently. “You’re expected.”
“Wait,” Beth held up a hand. “How did they know you were arriving?”
Paul was getting frustrated with what he was cooking, sighing, watching it fall to bits atop the plastic spatula. The gas cooker froze every now and then and Paul had to make contact with it for a half second to reanimate it. “The people in the Tower, they’re always working, up there.”
Project Lifeboat. Had to be.
“Sometimes they come out in BearCats, hauling trailers. Sometimes monsters come for them, and they do what I do: drop chronon charges and run.”
They did it, then. Lifeboat happened. The world ended, and Hatch got what he wanted.
“They’ve even got planes,” he said. “I’ve seen them taking off from the airport. Why go anywhere? The entire world is like this, right?”
“I really don’t know, Paul. I… woke up,” she lied. “Someone put this gadget on me, told me how to use it, then left me to it. Told me to come here and look for a chronon supply before the charge runs out.”
She watched as he reached for a plate and moved it to the stove. He scraped the mess onto it.
“Are they… good people, do you think? In the Tower?”
“I don’t know,” he said, sullenly. “They gave me supplies, led me from the Tower, and that was that. Sounds like you got the same treatment. Maybe it’s an experiment.”
“Thank you,” she said as he handed her a plate. It smelled like something a kid would make for breakfast. If she was going to eat she had to make it quick-before the charge dissipated. Taking bits and pieces between her fingers she transferred it to her mouth. Lumpy, sweet, dry, and powdery… but who knew where her next meal was coming from? She noticed him watching her hands-specifically her thimbled fingers. “The people up there wear these?” She waggled her digits.
“Only when they go outside. I’ve seen you around, haven’t I?”
Beth swallowed. “This is good.”
“I’ve seen you around.”
“Gotta get out sometime,” she said, hoping that’d be the last of it.
“You know who I am.”
Her bones flashed glass-cold. “Sure,” she said, dutifully taking another mouthful, buying a few moments to think. “You’re Paul.”
“I’m not wearing a rig,” he said. “You weren’t surprised by that at all.” The cooker’s blue flames became rigid, Paul forgetting his own meal. “Why are you here?”
She swallowed, the clumped lump sticking in her throat. “I figured that was normal for some people.”
Paul had nothing to say. He just looked at her, working her out.
She couldn’t tell what he was thinking, but if he was half as skilled as the Paul Serene she knew in 2016 he could kill her here and now. All she could taste was chocolate and cinnamon and…
She knew who he would become. The things he would done. She had to shoot him. Right here, right now, with the taste of that child’s meal in her mouth.
“I’ll help you,” he said. “I have plenty of chronon batteries. I don’t need a rig so we can make them last a long time. The chronon umbrella only fits one, but we can sleep in shifts. You’ll be okay.”
Ah… shit.
He had shown her how to tap the current-model chronon containers to recharge her rig, and then they had retreated beneath the flooring. Shifters were howling in the city, but it was distant. Paul was right: it was safer here on campus. She figured the concentration of chronon energy-stored as it was-may have been enough to keep them away.
He wanted to double-check the dressing on her leg, but she had insisted it was fine. She had told Paul she’d take first watch, and to get some sleep.
Paul had crawled on to his little mat, pulled his sleeping bag over him like a blanket, and curled up fetal. “I’m sorry I was suspicious,” he said. “There hasn’t been anyone else. Not for…” He stopped talking when his voice cracked.
“It’s okay.” She gave his hand a reassuring little shake. “It’s-”
Paul’s fingers clasped her hand and he looked right at her. “Would you… would you just hold my hand till I fall asleep?”
God, she needed to backpedal. She was off mission. She was way, way off mission. “Sure,” she said, knowing there was a special room in Hell for her, for what she was about to do. “Sleep. I’ll be here when you wake up.”