Jack stopped. Someone was in the lab, standing unbothered, eyes on Jack as the horde flowed around him.
Martin Hatch.
The Shifters didn’t acknowledge Monarch’s CEO, didn’t lay a claw on his finely tailored suit. Hatch watched the airlock close as the monsters flowed around him, galloping and tumbling for Jack, until he was lost from sight behind the strobing and shifting mass.
The airlock smooched shut as the first creature slammed into the door. The right door opened and Jack stepped into safety.
There was one person who could still make this work, and Jack had a plan to bring him back from the dead.
Fuck the laws of the universe.
21
Saturday, 8 October 2016. 4:35 A.M. Riverport University, Quantum Physics Building. Two days earlier. Twenty minutes after initial time machine activation.
The silent trip around the Promenade ended with Jack stepping back into the night that changed his life forever. He expected commotion on his arrival, but the lab outside the airlock was oddly quiet. Risking a peek through the viewplate, the Riverport University time lab was as he remembered: ramp leading down, time controls to the right. Stairs ahead, leading up to a left-right platform. Glassed-in control booth up a short flight of steps to the right from that, the way out up steps to the left.
He triggered the airlock to open, then emerged.
“I’m telling you something just happened.” Voices from beneath the machine. The two grunts who chased Will and Jack on the night they got caught up in Paul Serene’s madness. “Someone’s up there.”
Two Monarch troopers, hunkered on either side of the access tunnel down which Jack and his brother had fled, glanced up as Jack popped his head through the gap overhead. “Boo.”
Jack had intended to freeze them in a stutter. Instead, shockingly, the causality within the confined space around the troopers disconnected, reentangled incorrectly, and then erupted in a violent contradiction that saw the skeletons of both men spontaneously disarticulated. Joints interacted bizarrely with bone; physics reinvented itself while clashing with causal outcomes that existed only in foreign timelines. The men were refashioned savagely in the blink of an eye, pinballing with terrific force from surface to surface within that confined space. Death was instantaneous, and what slumped to the grill floor beneath the machine resembled abused marionettes more than men.
Jack recoiled. “Maybe I should have just said ‘hands up.’”
His powers hadn’t stopped evolving. He was still changing. What did that mean, and where did it end?
He dropped into the maintenance cavity and, with thumb and forefinger, gingerly removed the earpiece from one of the troopers.
“… Physics Building. A couple of regulars are cleaning the lab, the rest of us are on the tenth floor.”
“All right Donny, clean house, top to bottom. Catch you after.”
“Copy, boss.”
Gibson. His crew was about to sweep through the building and kill everyone inside. People whose jobs Paul had been trying to save. The ones Jack and Paul had passed on the way to the time lab the other night-this night. People with families, Paul had said.
Jack headed for the stairwell.
He passed the fifth, hearing a trooper in Reaper squad yell, “Grenade! He popped my grenade!” before air displacement from the detonation thumped the stairwell door in its frame as he passed.
He exited the Quantum Physics Building on the third floor and crossed over the ramp into the western administration building. This took him out from under the dome-the dome where everything went to shit and he and his brother fought for their lives. Were about to fight for their lives.
“Sir?” Donny piped up over Jack’s earpiece. “The two strays from the time lab weren’t among the bodies.”
“Do what we do, Don. Lock it down. They’ll be in there.” Then, “Don? Go look out a window.”
“Well shit, boss. Am I seeing what I think I’m seeing?”
“Wait twenty seconds, Don, then tell me what you see.”
He moved as fast as he could, folding into moments and accelerating along straight corridors. In his earpiece and through the walls he could hear the successive thumps of Gibson’s grenades striking the underside of the Quantum Physics dome, with Will the target. Time was running out.
Elevators were shut down. He found the admin stairwell, taking stairs five at a time, slamming out onto the ground floor, speeding down another corridor, emerging into a reception area and out into the night.
He’d kicked the rear door open onto a small parking area, knocking over a coffee can filled with old cigarette butts. Energy levels low now, he folded into a moment, zipped about a hundred feet toward the parking lot. That got him just outside the north side of the dome-the opposite side from the protest camp and Founders’ Walk.
Guardian squad was scattered about inside the dome. A wide section of glass at ground level had already been blasted white by Gibson’s last grenade-the one whose force had thrown Jack face-first into the grill of Gibson’s BearCat.
He caught a glimpse of the camp. It was a flat mess, with very few tents left standing. Some of it was on fire. There wasn’t a single kid in or around the camp, just a few stray troopers walking a circuit, being thorough.
Headlights flashed to life on the south side of the dome. Jack saw his bloodied past self rise to his feet in front of Gibson’s BearCat as Monarch’s number one chronon operative threw the vehicle into reverse.
That meant Monarch had Will.
Right on cue the sound of struggle on the steps inside. Two goons had Will by each arm and were dragging him down the central stairs, toward the north doors-about 150 feet in front of Jack.
Ducking down, he figured he had enough energy left to zip across that space fast and hard, which should be enough to take out the goon on the left. Getting the one on the right would come down to luck. He stayed low, waited.
The doors opened and out they came, Will protesting the whole time. “You’re destroying yourselves! The…”
Jack launched at them-
– and never made it.
He’d covered twenty feet when a forearm swept across his path, collecting him from the throat, knocking his feet skyward, and slamming him back-first into the ground.
He couldn’t breathe. Someone stood over him, adjusting his tie.
Hatch. He said just one word: “No.”
Neither the troopers nor Will noticed, and Will was dragged toward a waiting BearCat.
Hatch glanced at the dome, then down at Jack. It was the same examining stare Hatch had used on him a short time ago in the Tower: unconcerned, as if wondering why Jack even existed.
Jack’s thoughts were suffocated, strangled by his own half-closed windpipe. He struggled to sit up but a foot shoed in fine Italian leather gently pushed him down. Hatch waited, watching the BearCat pull away and tear toward the library, then turned his attention to Jack.
“All right,” Hatch said, and removed his foot.
Jack blinked hard, tried to swallow, could barely form the question: “Who are you?”
He said it to the night air. Hatch was gone. Jack was alone. The fucker must have ghosted back into the western admin building. What was he doing here? Who had Paul partnered with?
Thunder rolled across the parking lot: the sound of the BearCat waking up, then peeling toward the library. No time for subtlety. Low on energy and struggling to breathe, Jack cut through the dome. Gibson and his own past self were already gone; the person he had been would already be at the library.
Jack accelerated toward the library. He only did one burst. He was going to need every scrap of energy that he could muster for what came next.