“Kim didn’t create the Regulator, Jack. Will did. This is it. The Countermeasure and the Regulator are the same thing.”
Something heavy thudded in the far walclass="underline" the security door was being deactivated.
“The Countermeasure doesn’t go missing because we steal it, Jack. It goes missing because they do.”
Jack grabbed her sleeve and pulled her behind the scaffolding that ran north-south between the box and the small eastern-side office.
Two people-a man and a woman-entered, the guy carrying a rubberized gym bag. With a finger on one ear the woman said, “We’re inside.”
Her counterpart muttered, “Aw no,” and moved to the open door of the box.
“Looks like the device has been damaged, Actual.”
Beth glanced at Jack and closed her eyes in despair.
Monarch.
“We can stop this,” he whispered to her.
She shook her head, frustration turning to fury. “You can’t change the past,” she hissed, softly. “It’s a fucking impossibility. We’ve lost.”
Looking through the gaps in the scaffolding, through bundles of wiring, Jack could tell the two intruders weren’t decked out in the Monarch outfits he remembered. The logo was similar but cruder, and the uniforms were cheaper, dun-colored, off-the-rack.
Jack unslung his carbine. “You want to gift wrap it for them, or are you going to help me here?”
The guy carrying the gym bag stepped into the sterile room and picked up the Countermeasure, barehanded, without precaution or ceremony. “Yeah, it’s pretty banged up.”
Beth tensed, fingers flexing on her gun. With a glance Jack understood what had to happen.
As the guy left the room with the device, Jack and Beth swept out from behind cover, weapons level.
The woman spotted them, eyes wide with shock. Beth pressed one finger to her lips. The woman screamed.
The guy, whose back was turned, leaped, saw the guns, also screamed, and ran.
The muzzle of Beth’s carbine followed him as he bolted for the door-sweeping across the woman’s head as her finger tightened.
Jack leaped in, knocked her barrel skywards with the barrel of his own, a three round burst ringing out.
Beth wheeled on him, furious.
“You can’t just shoot him!” he said.
Patience spent, Beth shouldered past the woman and out through the security door.
Bright sunlight resolved into shapes, and some of those shapes turned out to be men with guns leaning against a four-wheel-drive, startled to action by the sound of gunfire.
Beth skidded to a halt, sixty feet from them, armed, as the entire team brought their weapons up.
The guy with the gym bag kept running, straight toward them. The Monarch crew were just guys in jeans, shades, and Monarch-branded T-shirts.
The runner was in the line of fire.
The space around the four-wheel-drive snapped and froze-a shimmering dome of stuttered time.
From the doorway Jack said, “Get the Countermeasure. I’ll take care of these.”
She took off after the runner, past the security team.
Jack headed straight for the mini-stutter when a gunshot rang out and a cannonball of force took him in the torso. He hit the concrete with a disbelieving cough.
Before Jack could refill his lungs, Paul Serene was on him.
“The machine changed you, too. I knew it had.”
Paul’s face was six inches from his own. This version of the face he knew so well was a little younger than the bastard who would kill Will in 2016.
“You’re the second you,” Paul said. “Not the one who rode away just now. You’re from 2016. Which means Will’s machine is intact. That has to be how you got here. Where is it?”
“It’s good to see you too, buddy.” He could feel the bruise forming, sharply and painfully, beneath the Kevlar, and then tickling as it quickly healed and faded.
Paul let go of Jack’s shirt. Jack noticed that both of Paul’s hands were pristine, normal… human. No sickness. So that first trip through the machine in 2016 hadn’t made him sick. What had?
“Good to see you too, Jack. I have so much I need to tell you.”
The runner had recoiled from the sight of the stutter bubble encasing the security team and kept on running. Countermeasure in hand, he pounded for the gap between the warehouses where Beth had parked the car. She didn’t like the way that gym bag was bouncing around in his hand. If the Countermeasure cracked open it’d be game over.
“Stop!” she yelled.
She raised the carbine’s barrel, cracking a warning burst over his head. The runner skidded to a stop. As he threw his hands over his head the gym bag containing the Countermeasure slipped from his fingers.
Beth recoiled, shielding her eyes as the bag hit the ground, hard.
Nothing happened.
“Stay down, Jack,” Paul said. “This’ll be over soon, and then we can talk. This is so weird, man. You won’t believe it.”
Just as suddenly Paul’s weight was off him.
Paul folded himself back into a moment, propelling himself across the open ground and past his frozen security team. In a blink Paul tore the carbine from Beth’s hands, flipped it, and jabbed her square in the forehead with the butt of her own weapon.
Beth’s head snapped back and she went down. Jack heard her cry out and began struggling to his feet, breath burning in his chest.
Behind Paul, the security team sprang back to life as Jack’s mini-stutter collapsed. Paul marched toward them, hand up, ordering them to hold fire. They were confused, but this would be a key learning experience for them. All in all, this was turning out to be a most beneficial day.
Paul addressed the guy with the gym bag, now gratefully relaxing against the hood of Beth’s car parked between the buildings some fifty feet away. “Well done. You’re safe now. Is that it, in the bag?”
The man was nodding, loose-jointed with relief. “Yes sir, yes it is. Thank you.”
Past the security team, closer to Will’s workshop, Jack got to his feet. The scene filled itself in: the security team covering him. Beyond them Paul, with Beth’s carbine. Beyond Paul, Beth laid out flat, clutching her head. Past her, leaning against the car, the tech. At the tech’s feet, the gym bag containing the Countermeasure.
Paul gestured to the waiting vehicle. “All right, technician. Get yourself to-”
Like a living thing the gym bag at the technician’s feet leaped off the ground-the bag disintegrating instantly-and all the light in Heaven spilled out.
The self-replenishing source within the battered Countermeasure hosed out a density of chronon particles orders of magnitude greater than the environmental baseline. The technician-engulfed by a roiling, expanding distortion field-was rapidly reinvented by a flickering, shifting phage that swept from his center of mass toward his extremities, and raced upward toward his mind.
Eyes open, terrified and ignorant, he felt all that he was being replaced a thousand times over.
Paul shouldered Beth’s carbine and shot the doomed tech through the head.
The tech’s sickness vanished upon death, and he slid to the concrete fully human.
Silhouetted against the crazed, strobing light, Paul let the weapon slip from slack fingers. Caught within the Countermeasure’s ongoing blast, the left side of Paul’s body was already changing. His hand was reskinned by the same iridescent transformation that had claimed the doomed technician. Both terrified and entranced, Paul saw his flesh alternate between versions of itself, the shining facets of the sickness like shifting windows on to alternate versions of his own flesh, nothing constant, always changing, always different. The change crept toward his shoulder, inch by slow inch, accelerating as Paul’s cells absorbed more and more of what the Countermeasure threw out.
The roar of approaching trucks came to them from blocks away, echoing off the closely packed buildings: Monarch backup, responding to the emergency.