Chrono Spasm (21 page)

Chapter Twenty-Five

Nyarla had taken only a few steps from the mess hall when she spotted the figures moving toward her. There were five of them trekking across the snow, bundled up in material and furs, each one wielding a firearm. Snow fell all about them, billowing in the icy wind.

“We heard blasterfire,” the lead figure called. His voice was heavily accented, like Nyarla’s own.

“My friends—” she said breathlessly. “We were trying to shelter from the storm and—”

“Nyarla?” another of the figures called. “You made it?”

“Papa?” Nyarla asked timidly. Her gaze swept across the mismatched group, searching for a familiar face. They were so bundled up it was hard to even tell who had spoken.

One of the well-wrapped figures hurried the last few paces in the snow, rushing to take Nyarla in his arms. A shorter figure traipsed through the snow beside him, and Nyarla realized it was her sister Tarelya.

“You’re alive,” Symon Vrack cried. “My goodness, child—you made it!”

Nyarla looked from her father to the others. They had halted at the lip of the slope that led down to the mess hall doors.

“You must help my friends,” Nyarla hastily explained. “We tried to shelter, but there were dead people inside and they came back to life. My friends are still in there.”

“Wakers,” Graz said, spitting the word out like a curse.

Piotr and his allies didn’t hesitate. They scrambled down the slope and through the doors of the mess hall. They slammed open the doors and surveyed the scene within.

Over forty figures in drab olive uniforms were piling around the center of the mess hall amid the strewed remains of tables and chairs. Mildred and J.B. struggled beneath them, but it was like swimming against a strong tide—for each corpse they shifted another took its place.

Piotr, Graz and Marla charged into the room, pulling a rope from the possessions they wore strapped about their thick clothing. “Surround and drag them,” Piotr instructed. “Swift as air now.”

Graz had one end of the rope and he whipped it over the heads of three moving corpses from behind. The corpses seemed only now to become aware of the newcomers and they turned to face Graz and the others. With Piotr securing the far end of the rope, Graz yanked the other, snapping the rope like a whip and dropping the three corpses to the floor. Nearby, Marla was using her own climbing gear to similar effect.

From somewhere amid the pile of moving figures a blaster rang out, its death song echoing around the mess hall. A second later, J.B. was standing, gasping as corpses were dragged away by Piotr and his team. “Need air,” he muttered. “Need to breathe.”

Mildred emerged a moment later as more of the corpses were snagged by the ropes and drawn away.

“You people alive? Need help, yeah?” Piotr called across the room.

J.B. nodded. Now just who the hell was this guy? he thought.

“Get to the doors,” Piotr commanded. “Run and don’t look back. We’ll hold them off until you’re safe.”

“You need help?” J.B. asked as he sent another burst of semiauto fire into his nearest opponents.

“We have this one, friend,” Piotr told him. “Go. Git.”

Living corpses plunging to the floor all about them, J.B. and Mildred ran for the doors.

* * *

“T
HERE
WAS
NOTHING
I could do,” Doc explained. Along with Ryan and Krysty, he had been disarmed and taken to one of the tumbledown buildings down the slope, close to the river where great chunks of ice shuddered on the current.

Standing next to him, Ryan shook his head once in understanding. “Ambushed twice in almost as many days,” he stated. “We’re getting soft.”

“No, we’re tired,” Krysty said, correcting Ryan’s assumption. “We’ve been running too long.”

The three companions were marched under armed guard into the main room of a vast old church dating back to predark times. The church was simple inside, with wooden walls and a large stained-glass window showing an abstract, modernist design. The design was of a large white circle like the sun, around which someone had carved numerals, like the numbers on a clock dial. Close up, the window appeared to have been patched together from two or more. There had been other windows once, but they were now covered with metal sheeting. Ryan and his companions eyed the sheeting and the remaining window warily, alert for possible exits. There were several doors, including the main one—a double door—through which they had entered.

The walls of the church dripped clear water and when the companions looked overhead they saw stalactites had formed in the rafters, great pointing struts like sharks’ teeth aimed down toward the church’s congregation. The air felt sullen with the cold, each breath expelled in a great plume of misty water vapor.

The blue-fleshed muties who had captured them had been joined by a dozen or so more figures, and all of them went shuffling to their places in the pews while Ryan, Doc and Krysty were led to the front of the church. Two figures stood behind the companions, brutal-looking knives in their blue hands, their bare flesh looking like something that had died too soon. The companions’ own weaponry had been laid out across the church font at the rear of the room, like some strange offering to the gods of war.

The captives were made to wait in silence until a figure wearing a hooded white robe emerged from one of the side doors. Beneath the robe he had pale skin like the others, but his flesh was more of a gray-white than the dramatic blue that so many of the congregation sported.

“You are honored, brothers and sister,” the hooded figure said as he strode up the steps toward Ryan and his companions. His voice was accented with a lisp that made him hiss like a snake. “You have come at the ideal time.”

“Do tell,” Ryan growled in a tone dripping with sarcasm.

The robed figure pushed back his hood to reveal a pale, bald head carved with intricate designs that turned his features into those of the dial of an old-fashioned timepiece, his eyes become the three and nine of the clock’s face. Though his skin was whiter than the others’, his eyes displayed that same red-ringed ferocity, as if he had been in the cold for too long. “Time is loose here,” the man explained, “freed from the bonds of Swiss precision, left to idle its own path.

“Once time tamed man,” the pale figure continued, addressing his eager congregation, “but now we have been freed from its cloying grip. We, the clockwatchers, shall instead tame time.”

At the front of the church, Krysty leaned over and whispered to Doc and Ryan, “What the hell is he talking about?”

“Beats me,” Ryan admitted, “but he wouldn’t be the first whacko we’ve had to chill.”

“Once, time followed a straight path,” the minister continued, “circling the same points of sunrise and sunset. But after the great change, once End Day came, we were left to shape time in new ways. With our mastery shall come dominion of all of history—past, present and future. We need only become one with the chronal energies in flux, imbibe them and so become beings who sit outside time’s stream.”

The congregation was warming to its leader’s words. They were the only things that were warming in the great church space—the minister’s breath could be seen clouding the air with every word, and slowly melting ice dripped like some awful rhythm section to his speech.

“But the chronovores amass to consume our bounty,” the minister cried, “and their numbers double at every turn. The crows must be appeased.”

The congregation took up this chant, cheering and applauding. “Appease the crows! Appease the crows!” they howled.

Ryan spoke to Krysty from the corner of his mouth. “I’m not liking where this is going.”

“I’m guessing this is the part where we get sacrificed,” Krysty replied.

Four more blue-fleshed muties strode through the same side door where the minister had appeared, balancing a large cage between them. The boxy cage had wire mesh sides and was obviously used to contain an animal. Something was moving inside, bashing against the cage walls with such fury that the bearers were having trouble keeping it upright.

The minister turned back to the three figures on stage, a wicked glint in his eye. “You shall be fed to the chronovores,” he commanded, “and in the aftermath we shall absorb their expulsions and become time’s arrows, the promised children of Old Father Time.”

Ryan gave Krysty a sideways look.

“Nailed it,” she told him.

* * *

P
IOTR
AND
HIS
ALLIES
had locked the mess hall doors. “They won’t follow,” Marla explained. “The force that animates them won’t reach far enough.”

J.B. accepted that on faith. These people seemed competent and experienced, and they had dealt with the creatures swiftly and decisively. It seemed the trick was not to try to kill them—how did a person kill the dead, anyway? No, the secret was to restrain them.

“You know what those things were?” Mildred asked.

“Yes,” Piotr told her. “End Day produces a lot of...curiosities. They take strategy to stop. We’ve had some practice. You couldn’t have known.”

J.B. and Mildred were relieved to see Nyarla had been reunited with her family. They had entered His Ink Orchard to find Symon Vrack and his other daughter, but it seemed that Symon had instead found them, along with the group of survivors, drawn by the gunshots.

“Piotr kept us alive,” Symon told J.B. and Mildred after he had been introduced. “But I understand I have you to thank for doing the same for my dear Nyarla.”

“Little of both, really,” J.B. said, downplaying his role. “Your daughter’s smart, thinks quick when her ass is backed against the wall.”

They trekked across the unforgiving landscape to the clutch of buildings where Piotr and his allies had made their home. The disconcerting mouths of the chronovores snapped at unleashed energies in the distance, the noise of their feast like a swamp cricket rubbing its legs. J.B. checked over his shoulder, watching for the corpses and the things that Piotr and his team referred to as crows.

“You’ll be safe here,” Marla assured J.B. and Mildred, leading them inside the supermarket building that they had made into their base.

“Those things out there—” J.B. indicated the feasting chronovores “—they look hungry.”

“We’re all hungry,” Marla told him. “No way to change that on End Day.”

Within the building was cold and dark, but at least the walls kept the wind at bay. That was something, J.B. concluded. Together, the group sat around a pockmarked wooden garden set and introduced themselves. Symon explained how he and Tarelya, his younger daughter, had been caught in the snows beyond the barrier of the Tall Wall, and how this team had rescued them.

“When was that?” Mildred asked. She sat wrapped in a blanket now, the color coming back to her cheeks.

The rugged ex-fisherman shook his head. “It’s so hard to tell,” he admitted. “Time here has no meaning.”

As he oiled his blaster, J.B. asked about the moving corpses they had discovered in the mess hall.

“We call them Wakers,” Graz told him. “Dead people. We avoid them.”

“Where do they come from?” J.B. asked.

“Time’s in flux here,” Piotr told him, “in case you didn’t notice. We figure the Wakers get caught up in time’s dilation and bounced from wherever they were to here. Like echoes.”

“Are the Wakers always dead like that?” Mildred asked him.

“We’ve never seen a live one,” Piotr confirmed.

“And we’ve seen a lot of them,” Marla added. “End Day throws up a lot of repetition.”

Mildred looked pensive. “End Day,” she said. “What does it mean?”

“It’s a day without end,” Marla said. “Time’s glitching and twitching here but it never seems to go forward.”

“Time travel experiments...?” J.B. mused.

“I didn’t say that,” Marla corrected.

“You didn’t have to,” J.B. told her. “But this kind of hubbub could very likely be the result of someone experimenting with forces they oughtn’t to. Time travel and shit.”

“And Doc’s been acting weird ever since we got here,” Mildred said in realization. “J.B., you don’t think...?”

J.B. nodded solemnly. “Someone’s jazzing with the time stream. Whatever they’ve done, it’s going way off course. This place is evidence of that. I’m figuring this whole pesthole is the fallout of an experiment gone wrong.”

“It’s still going wrong,” Graz said miserably. “The bubble expands and the crows’ numbers are getting higher. They’re feeding off every iota of displaced time.”

“You ever seen what these crows of yours do to a person?” J.B. asked.

“Once,” Graz told him. “They strip a man to his essence, leaving nothing but a trailing spume of soul.”

* * *

P
LACING
THE
ANIMAL
CAGE
before Ryan, Doc and Krysty, its four bearers stepped back, taking up positions at the four corners of the raised dais. Each man had a knife strapped to the belt of his loincloth. Ryan looked from one to the other. They were rugged men with flat faces and wide brows, their flesh blue from cold. Whatever this environment had done to them was inexplicable, but it had left them able to survive the cold to some extent. Their flesh looked thick and blubbery, like the flesh of a seal. They were some kind of muties, Ryan reasoned, who had developed a primitive culture based around the one driving force in their lives—the unchained chronal energies that plagued this tiny region of Alaska.

The pale-faced minister took a step forward and bent toward the catch on the cage, keeping himself at the same side as the hinges so that the door would swing back to cover him. “The chronovores choose their victims,” he explained. “Once you have been consumed, we are left with your immortal souls, the one thing that cannot be corrupted by time’s influence.”

“Sounds great,” Ryan told him, “but I think we’ll pass.” With that, the one-eyed man pounced forward, batting aside the thrusting knife blade of his nearest guardian as he reached for the minister’s throat.

The minister moved fast, too, yanking back the cage door even as Ryan leaped at him. The two men went down in a tangle of limbs, Ryan’s fingers closing around the pale man’s throat as the cage door swung open.