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Nuke strike! he thought. Jesus Christ, we’ve taken a direct hit!

  Chapter Twenty

  The enforcer dragged the master’s new slave through the building’s parking garage. Between cage and stairs leading up, its legs had gone all wobbly at the knee, no longer able to support its insubstantial weight. It didn’t bother trying to hold the bound and gagged human upright but pulled him along by the back of the neck, like a bundle of rags, toes scraping across the concrete.

  “Put him back in the trunk,” the master said, then slipped through the side door of the limo.

  The enforcer’s brethren followed. Their combined weight made the long wag sag on its springs.

  It lifted the parcel up with one hand and dropped it onto the pile of autoblasters. The human moaned through the duct tape around its mouth as it was rolled face-first against the wheel well.

  After adjusting the heap of weapons, it slammed down the trunk lid. The black tint of the rear windows obscured its view into the limo. Likewise, those inside had no view out.

  The passenger-compartment doors stood open in invitation, but the master hadn’t ordered it to join them. Flicking out its tongue, it tasted the scent trails its kin had left behind.

  The others hadn’t seen what it had seen at the train platform.

  If they had, they would have been feeling the same pull. It turned from the rear of the limo and raced back for the long room, bare feet slapping the concrete. If the other brethren had seen what it had, they’d be running alongside. But without the power of speech, it had no way of describing the passengers in the subway train opposite them—the perfect copies of them all, including the two brethren who had died in the street.

  It had glimpsed them again across the long room with the cages, through the twinkling lights, beyond the blurred curtain. And the pull had become almost unbearable.

  The connection it felt to its own had nothing to do with a shared experience—being hatched from the same clutch of eggs, buried in the same yard-deep hole in damp sand, crawling together upward, into the warm light. It had no memory of its birth or the circumstances surrounding it. It had never seen one of its own kind born. It had only seen them die. It didn’t know its father or its mother or if it had either, for that matter. It knew nothing of the history of its parents or the history of its own species. And the capper: it didn’t know it was missing anything. It lived only in the present, taking in information, reacting to it.

  They were called enforcers by the master, and guardians, too, but they didn’t have names of their own. They couldn’t have spoken them even if they did; they lacked the physical wherewithal, the proper voice box and musculature to form intelligible words. What they had were odors, scents unique to each and superkeen senses of smell and taste inside nostrils and on the surface of the tongue and interior of the mouth. From the day of their hatching and for their whole lives after that, they had soaked in a stew of each other’s dripping sweat. The intricate intermingling of individual scents was a constant reminder that they existed as a sum of parts, that they were not alone, that they belonged to one another.

  When a component of the swarming, filial aroma was lost, it felt as if a limb had been struck off; worse, as if a part of their hearts had died. It left a wound that never healed—unlike the wounds created by the softies’ blasters. The softies, who stood waiting so patiently to be pulled apart. When it snapped the softies’ bones, pulped the warm, pliable flesh, drew forth the slippery things inside them, they stayed broken. Their answering bullets gave it no pain. There was no gushing blood. And the chunks of hide lost to blasterfire were not lost for long. Its divots were already growing back.

  It opened the door to the stairs and started down.

  It possessed no cunning, except in the sense of anticipating the movement of its intended prey. It didn’t see what it was doing as betraying or tricking the master. It didn’t fear the consequences of the act, because it couldn’t foresee any. Besides, it wasn’t afraid of death for itself, only the death of its brethren, which it would suffer over and over with every intake of breath for as long as it lived.

  The master did not control the brethren by fear. It controlled because it was the master. It had always been the master. One sniff had told them that. Just like one sniff had told them who they were. The master had always given them purpose and direction. The master understood their needs. Obedience to the master was an automatic response. If the master had said “Get in the limo” it would have obeyed the command without question. But the master hadn’t said anything.

  It was a creature of simple function and operating parameters: a guardian, an enforcer. Protect this. Kill that. The twin poles of the possible. It couldn’t frame the concept of an indeterminate or intermediate outcome; it didn’t know what a “gray area” was, but it was in one now.

  It reached the bottom of the stairs and ran, all the way to the long room’s entrance. Without hesitation it opened the door. The machinelike placidity and composure it felt even in the heat of battle was gone. It could taste the empty place in its heart. A creature that did not bleed was bleeding.

  When it entered the room, the brethren on the other side of the shifting curtain failed to notice; they were busy stuffing a squirming white-coated human feet first into a cage. The two lost ones were there. Alive again. The why of that was another concept beyond its ken. At that point nothing short of death could have stopped it from crossing to the far side of the room, not even the master’s direct command. The yearning for completion was too strong.

  As it stepped up to the barrier, showers of sparks descended, the floor shifted under its feet, the grinding noise became a roar that shook it to its core. Bits of newly regrown hide fell away like crusts of dried mud in a heap around its feet. In response to the sensed threat, its internal eyelids automatically snapped down. When it took the next step, passing through the curtain, the grinding shut off. The blurring and the shooting stars vanished. Its hide crackled and snapped against its endoskeleton as if electrically charged.

  The first breath it took was a reunion. It had never felt such joy.

  The brethren turned from their work to stare; they seemed stunned by its sudden appearance, which was understandable because they had no wounds of their own to heal; on this side of the room, the family was whole, every scent layered in its familiar place.

  It wanted nothing more than to get in a pile with its brethren, to sweat and sleep in unconscious bliss. But it suddenly felt a different sort of pull. A pull that had nothing to do with scent memory. It wasn’t an interior impulse; it was just the opposite, as if something from the outside was pushing it from behind. Literally pushing it. The bare soles of its feet began to slip on the concrete, and the invisible hand at its back kept pressing until it was skiing across the floor, unable to change direction, to stop or slow the acceleration.

  It looked up to see a mirror image of itself, its perfect double, not thirty feet away doing the same thing. Arms windmilling for balance, they helplessly slid toward each other like two magnets on a sheet of ice.

  As their bodies closed the distance, it saw the shock and terror in its own eyes.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Ryan watched the EMT truck’s taillights disappear around the far end of the grove. Then he waved the others toward the tree line. “Let’s go,” he said. “Fan out. Keep noise to a minimum, but move quick as you can. There are a million rat holes out of this stand of woods. We’ve got to get on their trail fast, Jak, and run them down. The enforcers will protect Magus first and fight second. That means we can drive them ahead of us, make them go where we want. If you see targets, open fire. Don’t wait for the rest of us to join in.”

  “And don’t forget to aim for Magus first,” J.B. said, pushing his spectacles up the bridge of his nose and screwing down his hat. Take out that walking junk pile, and it’s game over.”

  When they turned on their flashlights, the bright beams didn’t penetrate more than a yard past the first row of trees. The g
rove beyond was as black as pitch.

  Ryan put a hand on Ricky’s arm. “Stay alert and watch your field of fire,” he said. “We’re going to be just fine.”

  The youth nodded, squinting at the light in his face.

  On Ryan’s signal they filtered into the tree line. Right away the one-eyed man could see it wasn’t a natural grove. The trunks were evenly spaced and in staggered rows four feet apart. What that meant was there was no straight course: if they walked between two trees they had a third directly in their path, so they had to detour around it. What with the light bouncing back off the trunks, it was hard to see very far ahead.

  Having fanned out in a skirmish line among the trees, they couldn’t see one another, only the dancing beams of their flashes. J.B. was on the far side of Jak, who was on Ryan’s left; Ricky was on his right. As he advanced, he held the flashlight in his left hand and the Steyr in the right by the pistol grip, safety off, 7.62 mm round under the hammer.

  Magus and company didn’t have much of a head start on them. They had no lights, and he figured the staggered trees and close spacing would slow their progress. The unnatural layout was a double-edged sword: it made it harder for the enforcers to get to them but also harder to hit the enforcers with bullets or grens.

  A shout of triumph rang out to his left.

  “Got ’em!” Jak said

  “Keep on the trail,” Ryan advised. “Let’s move it. Let’s close on them. Pick up the pace!”

  On either side of him pure white flashlight beams bounced wildly up into the branches as they ducked around tree trunks, zigzagging back and forth to stay on course.

  Then Ryan caught an odor riding on the winter-night air. Not wet trees or dead leaves. It was unmistakable. Cat piss on steroids.

  Ten feet ahead, at the extreme limit of his vision, he caught a glimpse of shiny purple in the beam of his flashlight. Then darkness closed in, and it was gone.

  “Dead ahead of me!” he yelled. “Don’t let them flank us or double back!”

  He couldn’t hear the heavy footfalls ahead, because of his own, or the sounds of snapping branches over the noise from the ones he was breaking. The pounding of his heart and the rasp of his breathing blotted out everything else.

  From the darkness to the left came the resounding boom of J.B.’s M-4000 scattergun. A high-brass load of double-aught buck slammed into tree trunks.

  He only got the one shot off.

  “Jak, Ryan, they’re coming back your way!” J.B. cried.

  The albino’s .357 Magnum Colt Python blaster barked twice. Muzzle-flashes lit up the undersides of the branches, and sharp reports echoed through the grove.

  They were fighting blind, Ryan thought as he ran, but dammit, they were gaining ground inch by inch. It was just a matter of time...

  He fully expected to see the wide backside of an enforcer pop into view ahead of him. Instead what appeared between the trees was the front side, and the enforcer was charging right at him, grazing alternate massive shoulders against the staggered trunks to shorten the distance between them. The glancing impacts dropped a shower of dead leaves and twigs in its wake.

  Ryan stopped, shouldered the Steyr, and when the enforcer rounded the next trunk, he fired. The hooded head snapped back. The enforcer staggered sideways a couple of steps before it recovered its balance and kept on coming. The momentary pause gave Ryan time to dig out a thermite gren and pop the fuse. He threw the gren but couldn’t make it break in a curve around the trunk. It hit the bark with a thunk and bounced off to the side, sputtering like a miniature volcano. Three seconds later, when the full four-thousand-degree heat blasted forth, the tree burst into flames.

  At a safe distance from the conflagration, the enforcer’s yellow eyes gleamed at him in the dancing light.

  Ryan realized what Magus had done: divided forces so it could easily escape. Four humans vs one enforcer in dense forest was no contest. The companions didn’t stand a chance. They couldn’t kill it with bullets, and they couldn’t corner it and take it out with thermite; to make that option work they’d have to go toe to toe with the monster and hold the gren up against its ball sack.

  Magus’s vulnerability was their only strategic advantage. And by now Steel Eyes was putting as much distance as possible between them.

  The De Lisle roared five times in rapid succession as the enforcer darted around a tree. Five .45 ACP rounds slapped into the side of the hooded head. Ricky might as well have blown it kisses.

  “Run!” Ryan shouted as he dipped a shoulder and darted past the enforcer’s outstretched hand. “Run for the far side of the trees. Get out of the woods!”

  Slinging the Steyr in midstep, he switched the flashlight to his right hand as he sprinted. They couldn’t stand and fight. Not here. Even though the open space beyond the grove of trees made the thermite grens just as worthless, there was still a chance they could outrun the monster.

  Or maybe the others in the EMT truck could divert its attention before it caught up to them. If they could get into the back of the wag or hang on to the sides, they could get safely away.

  Close behind them the enforcer crashed through the trees.

  Ryan struggled to maintain his pace as he wound around the trunks. He couldn’t fall or drop the flashlight.

  Doing either meant a horrible death.

  As he burst through the last row of trees, an open field stretched out in front of him. The EMT wag was nowhere in sight. J.B., Jak and Ricky joined ranks with him, legs pumping, flashlight beams swirling on the grass ahead.

  No one spoke. They needed every breath of air to keep running.

  Ryan could hear the enforcer approaching them from behind; it sounded like an oncoming freight train. It was hard to imagine how something that massive could move that fast. Without the tree trunks to slalom around, it was pouring on all the straight-line speed at its disposal.

  An angry roar erupted from Ryan’s right, out of the pitch darkness. It rapidly grew louder and louder.

  Then the high beams of the EMT wag flashed on, flooding the field and the runners in blinding light. It wasn’t slowing.

  “Oh shit! Oh shit!” J.B. groaned.

  One second the enforcer was right on their heels, the next it was gone, swept away.

  Metal and glass crashed behind them, and against his back, Ryan felt the whoosh of the wag as it rushed past. As he turned, his flashlight lit up an enormous figure cartwheeling high in the air, presumably hit by the bumper, then the cab roof, then the top of the rear compartment box like a series of steps, each taller than the last.

  The taillights of the wag blazed as Vee slammed on the brakes.

  The enforcer landed in a stiff heap, forehead and bent knees resting on the ground, arms tucked behind it on either side. Like a tipped-over statue.

  The wag’s transmission screeched as Vee shifted gears; the white backup lights flashed on and the reverse warning noise began to beep. The rear tires spun on the grass, then the wag picked up speed. When she hit the enforcer the second time, it didn’t go flying; it was driven under the back bumper. The back wheel on the right plowed over it, making the wag lurch to the opposite side, then snap back. She kept reversing until she had the prostrate figure in her headlights, then braked and shifted again.

  The third time Vee ran over it, she rolled a rear wheel onto the middle of its back and stopped there.

  “Santa mierda!” Ricky exclaimed.

  The wag’s doors opened and everyone inside piled out.

  “Wow,” Vee said, “that was way more fun than I’d thought it would be.”

  They trained their flashlights on the still form trapped under the back wheel. There was no sign of blood on it or the grass.

  Ryan nudged its head with the toe of his boot. It moved easily back and forth, as if it was no longer connected to the neck bones.

  “Is fucker dead?” Jak asked.

  “We’d better make sure,” Ryan said. “Vee, drive the wag off it and move a safe distance ahead.
”

  When she’d done that, he pulled out another thermite gren, primed it, then set it on the creature’s swayback.

  “Everybody stand clear,” he said.

  When the gren flared, so did the enforcer. A towering column of flame lit up the field.

  Returning to the EMT wag, Ryan noticed the heavy front bumper had acquired a deep, V-shaped dent in its center and the windshield was cracked at the top—from an impact with flying lizard butt. After they had all climbed in, Ryan leaned into the driver compartment and said, “We’d better put some distance between us and the bonfire in case someone gets curious.”

  Vee dropped the vehicle into gear and drove back the way she had come, around the end of the grove of trees and onto the pedestrian path. When she reached the shore of the pond, she stopped and turned off the headlights.

  “We’re never going to find Magus in the dark,” Krysty said from the front passenger seat. “What are we going to do now?”

  “I still can’t get my head around how different ol’ Steel Eyes was,” Ryan said. “Not only could it run but it had a real, human eye. I don’t see how the injuries to Magus’s flesh and bone could have been repaired between leaving Deathlands and arriving here. And why didn’t it recognize me?”

  “You told me it had made more than one trip back to this time and place in the past,” Vee said. “Do you have any idea how many trips?”

  “Could be dozens, maybe more,” Mildred said. “Like Ryan said, until now it was all just unconfirmed rumors.”

  “I have an idea,” Vee said. “Fair warning, it comes from the plot of one of the early Clanker novels. I had to research time travel to straighten out the author’s facts. There’s a theory in physics that there are an infinite number of parallel universes, each separated from the others by a kind of insulating, invisible fabric. When Magus makes an incursion into January 19, 2001, it creates a new offshoot of time, a new, separate universe with its own unique arc of destiny. The overlay of so many offshoots in one place and one time could cause them to compress against one another, which in turn could cause friction on the fabric separating them. According to the theory, when the material dividing parallel universes is worn thin or torn away, when the natural separation of proximate timelines ceases to exist, contiguous events become simultaneous and potentially catastrophic.”