The engine cleaved through the bottom two floors of the building, tearing open the black mirror to reveal the honeycomb of its innards. The tail followed up, slashing through and around the building like a whip.
“Last stop, I guess.”
Jack’s stutter had anchored the final car, the momentum now dispelled. He put his gun away.
Monday, 10 October 2016. 12:28 A.M. Twenty-eight minutes after Jack’s return.
Jack had walked the passengers down the elevated line to the platform across from Monarch Tower. He left them there, with advice to stay put, as it seemed to be one of the few places that wasn’t being pummeled by violently vacillating causality.
The thick, black cloud cover roiled and unroiled and reroiled. Violet lightning froze, rewound, reflashed. The passengers watched as the train whipped back up from the wound in the Tower, reassembled mid-flight and seamlessly reattached to the car from which they had just escaped. Then it let go once more, tearing itself apart and brutally lacerating the Tower’s face. Freezing. Back-stepping. Letting go. Superstructure sloughing down the Tower’s chest, drooling shattered black glass. Sometimes the Tower front shattered without the train impacting at all. Sometimes the truck rewound and was delayed, yet the train flew free anyway.
It was more than just the world that was falling apart: it was the rules that bound the world together, the principles that gave meaning to the flow of time. Causality was becoming porous and weak, falling apart like a wet cake.
Jack took the stairs down from the platform at a run, reached the street, timed his crossing, and warped toward Monarch Tower before the truck could tumble past again. The train completed its arc, smashing through the building, and destroying the security doors and most of the facade.
The woman and her grandfather stood on the lip of the platform and waved to him. Jack almost waved back, when they stepped back from the edge, paused, stepped forward again, waved. Paused. Stepped back.
Science was even less his thing than Beth’s, but Jack guessed that if he were standing next to them his subjective causality as it pertained to them would be fine, but at a distance his causality disagreed with theirs. In short, stutters were no longer separate and distinct things. The breakdown was becoming far more granular, finicky. Dangerous.
If it kept degrading at this rate, the universe’s chronon levels would flatline and there’d be no coming back. He had to stop that from happening.
He ran for the shattered entrance.
The engine had separated from the line of cars, frozen in the act of wrapping themselves through floors three to five. The engine had paused halfway through the act of smashing through Monarch’s lobby, the vast, open space that it used to showcase the successes of its various subsidiaries. The lobby was a museum to corporate achievement, a glossy space illuminated tastefully to better draw the eye to the contents of cases and displays.
Or rather it had been tasteful before a ninety-five-ton passenger locomotive had scythed diagonally through it all. The air was filled with concrete dust, glass shards, and flying shrapnel.
Jack ducked under the frozen train and out the other side, pulling his handgun.
The way out of the lobby and into Monarch’s atrium had been shuttered by two-inch-thick steel security doors: bomb-proof.
Jack looked at the train. Looked at the doors. Looked at the train. Against his better judgment, he reached out and laid his palm flat against the overturned side of the vehicle.
He remembered how it had worked, under the Quantum Physics dome, reanimating Will. He had done it again, pulling Sofia into their hijacked chopper fifty floors above Riverport.
He imagined everything in black and white, while from his hands flowed Technicolor.
With alarming suddenness Jack felt his blood surge, his hand tingled sharply, and the locomotive trembled.
The security doors hissed apart, heavily. Two Monarch goons, strapped into the white half shells of prototype power armor, stood framed in the doorway. Auto-cannons slung under their arms sat ready; targeting lasers probed from shoulder-mounted micromissile pods.
They spotted Jack.
Jack held up his free hand, smiled, and gave a little wave.
The train launched right into them.
Jack climbed over the wreckage of the locomotive, shaky from the exertion of freeing the train from the stutter. He climbed through the shattered wall, avoiding fritzing electrics and past the tangled, half-buried remains of a security scanner that beeped forlornly in the haze. The train had tumble-chewed through the security station and clear into the atrium-the space that had, just a short while ago, played host to Monarch’s night of nights.
Nobody had bothered to clean up. Raised stages, lighting rigs, bunting, videoboards, smashed glassware, programs sat there covered in concrete dust. Jack climbed out of the trench plowed by the train.
Overhead the atrium’s clear ceiling let in all the mad light of a universe sundered by torsion. Dust, papers, and debris fell from forty different mezzanines, none of the wreckage conforming to gravity with any sense of unison or regularity. The acoustics carried the sporadic bark of gunfire, the occasional lonely shout or scream from the street. He saw the sporadic otherworldly flicker of Shifters prowling and vanishing along the mezzanines.
Floor thirty-four vomited a gout of flame, a Monarch trooper falling, screaming, to the atrium floor-stopping before impact-rewinding, pausing, falling, and screaming again. The man’s high-pitched scream slurred into a drawn-out howl as he pinwheeled upward toward a tongue of boiling flame that was quickly retracting into one of the upper levels. He merged with the flame in time to be drawn out of sight by it, the concrete balustrade over which he had flown piecing neatly back together behind it.
The elevator bays were transparent geometric tubes, all shattered, behind the circular reception area. Two contained the wrecks of elevators. The third was rendered opaque by smoke and burning debris.
Jack wasn’t alone there: he shared the ruined space with kinetic statuary that had once been living people. Moving, jigging, and back-stepping all about him were dead people continually reenacting their final moments of life-all of them violent, all of them screaming as hideously as the man forever tumbling from the thirty-fourth mezzanine.
Jack felt weak, detached. Unleashing the train had taken it out of him. He was going to need a few minutes to regenerate his charge. It seemed to be taking longer, now that the world’s chronon levels were a thin, spasmodic mess.
He made for the reception desk, hoping to find a stairwell door, moving and turning to avoid flailing arms, airborne droplets of blood, flying glass, flying bullets. It wasn’t just Monarch troopers meeting their end there, but the workers needed to keep a place functioning. People who’d turned up to earn a paycheck.
The elevators weren’t an option-they weren’t rewinding far enough back to be usable.
Howls. A whole fucked-up choir. Shifters, up there, prowling the mezzanines. Jack figured he had no choice but to take the stairwell, but he didn’t like his chances if he was caught in a narrow space with one of those things.
He moved to the reception desk, hoping to find a floor plan.
One of the creatures was waiting on the other side of it, maybe fifty feet away, writhing, flashing. It yowled softly, curiously. Its contorted body language, the cant of its flickering, flashing head, was that of something wanting something it was not allowed to have.
Another stood to the left, by the wrecked train.