Quantum Break (20 page)

“And Will?”

“Will was unique. A pioneer. He was given every opportunity to play a key role in the success of Lifeboat. But you know Will. No one can do his thinking for him. The knowledge and expertise that he had, and the
powerful
desire to use it against us, made him a very real threat to the future of humanity. I loved Will like a brother, Jack. You know that.”

It became harder to keep the gun straight, vision threatening to blur.

Paul took one step toward him and said, as gently as he could, “You are faced with the same choice.”

*   *   *

Standing as far from the open hayloft doors as she could Beth went through her breathing exercises, focused on what she was about to do. She shook the tension out of her hands, checked her watch again; and then she fished for the notes in her fatigues. They were a couple of crumpled pages torn from a Moleskine, written in blue ink, meticulous and neat for maximum legibility. No fuckups permitted.

She knew them back to front but checked the times again anyway, ran through her checklist, checked her watch. Closed her eyes and breathed.

Fifty-seven seconds.

*   *   *

Inside the house, Paul Serene said, “Six years ago I was exposed to a near-lethal burst of chronon radiation. I became ill, and my relationship with time changed even further. I can, with effort, stand at the junction between myriad possible futures—and choose which one to take.” The flesh of his arm ached, phased minutely from one state to another. Paul shuddered, discreetly.

“You want to tell me how this scene ends?”

“I use the ability sparingly, Jack. It costs me. I use it to save nations, not win the lottery. I’m here now because I trust you not to kill me, to hear me out.”

“I don’t trust me not to do that.”

Paul persevered. “This selective foreknowledge I have has allowed me to subtly exert a profound influence over government at local, state, and national levels, and consequently the world. Oncoming history is a slalom, Jack. The extinctions and conflagrations that I have navigated our idiot species past, my God. The atrocities I have had to facilitate in order to avoid a greater catastrophe down the road.” Paul couldn’t look at Jack as he said it, his left hand flexing uncomfortably. He cleared his head, got back to business. “Discreet teams of lobbyists, the manipulation of favor economies, deniable personnel, and leveraging the specialties of divisions within Monarch … all form a scalpel that can cut into deep tissue, remove, remodel, and leave no scar. It has been the work of sixteen years to reach this point.”

“And?”

“We call it Project Lifeboat. Monarch has been exploiting Will’s innovations and Dr. Kim’s advancements to allow ordinary people to operate freely in a chronon-devoid environment—the end of time itself.”

“So you can have a dozen people wandering around a frozen world, waiting to die. That’s a shitty use of sixteen years, Paul.”

“A few hundred people actually, all at the top of their field, all carefully selected.” Paul sighed. “If we have mobility then we have a chance to restart causality. It is our only chance.” Paul straightened. “Come with me. Come to Monarch Tower. You need to see what we’ve been building.”

Jack shook his head. “I need to think. Call off your goons.”

“With respect, Jack—”

“Thinking’s not my strong suit, yeah, I get it. Do it, Paul, or the next time you see me I’ll be waving at you as Monarch Tower falls into the Mystic River.”

Paul held up his hands. “All right. All right. Please don’t make me regret this.” Paul touched a finger to his ear. “Monarch Actual, this is your Consultant.”

*   *   *

Ten seconds. “Everything works, everything works,” Beth told herself. Five seconds. Four. One breath in for the road. Two. And out.

Go.

Two steps, turn, face the woods, and …

Beth jerked her head left as the .338 slug trilled past to blow a fresh-wood crater in the aging timber of the barn’s back wall. She translated the movement into a full-body turn, swept up the hunting rifle, and let the ShotSpotter tell her exactly where that bullet had come from.

*   *   *

A gunshot rang out across the front garden.

Disbelief. “You bastard.”

“Monarch Actual!”

Paul warped across the room, away from Jack’s gun.
“Monarch Actual!”
Then zipped from the kitchen and up the stairs.

Jack warped after him, overdid it, slammed into the back of the sofa, and flipped over it. Paul was shouting from the bedroom upstairs, which was when Jack realized he’d left the attic ladder down.

*   *   *

Gibson was over it. “You fucking
missed
?” This was bullshit. Up at sparrow-fart to lie in the dirt with some overequipped self-shitting paramilitary neckbeard only to have him completely fuck up the one thing he was here for.

There was a short
zip
and the shooter’s head snapped back. He slumped, lifeless, over his expensive rifle.

Gibson shouted, “Yes!,” tossed off his netting, grabbed his rifle, and threw himself down the slope toward the farm. Maybe the morning wasn’t a dead loss after all.

*   *   *

From outside: a second gunshot from the barn. Beth was still alive and armed, evidently.

Zipping and angling up the stairs Jack stopped short of the bedroom door, then swung in with weapon raised. No Paul. “Fuck.” He could feel his capacity for folding into the moment diminishing like a kind of soul-breathlessness. He moved into the hall, took a moment, and summoned enough energy to flash up the ladder, to the attic.

He found Paul in the middle of Will’s life, waiting. A slapping sting in Jack’s gun hand and, suddenly, the gun was in Paul’s. “Let’s talk about this.”

*   *   *

Back behind cover, Beth unzipped her jacket and checked the charge on her rescue rig: a lightweight belt-and-braces-style harness made of segmented plates attached to a power source distributed about her waist. A quick click revealed the chronon pack on the back of the belt was at full charge.

Slipping out of her jacket she took a mesh drawstring pouch from her leg pocket, unrolled it, and drew out a neatly tied roll of wires. Two sets. One end had a rudimentary series of plugs, the other a series of five cups: four for fingertips, one for the thumb.

Slipping the cups over her digits, Beth Velcro-strapped the thin cord to her forearm and bicep, and then slotted the five plugs into five jacks on her shoulder harness. She repeated for her other arm.

The rescue rig was good to go.

*   *   *

“You could have searched this place anytime you liked. Why now?”

“We did. There was nothing here at the time, but this”—Paul glanced about—“much of this is new.” He opened the nearest box, dug deep, pulling aside papers and folders. “Have you seen any diagrams or schematics of a device like a twelve-sided sphere? I need you to think: this is very important.”

Jack let himself rest against the desk. “Sure,” he said. “Yeah. In the corner over there.”

“Where?”

“Far corner. Near the stuffed elephant.”

Jack had loved that house. It wasn’t much without a family in it, though. “Y’know, Paul,” Jack said. “You dropped a building on my brother.” Reaching behind the flat-screen, he found the panic button: a palm-sized metal box with a plastic idiot shield covering a fat red detonator. He flipped it up.

Paul shifted sideways, peered deep into the stacks of magazines and papers.

Saw the gallon jug. Knew immediately what it was. Reacted accordingly.

“Seems fair that he return the favor.”

The detonator went
click
.

There were two hearts in that attic. Both stopped for an instant. From behind a stack of plastic storage tubs something popped, then hissed. Concealed wiring along the ceiling join blackened and fritzed. That was it.

Jack rolled back his head, exasperated. “For Christ’s sake, Will.”

Paul went for his sidearm, Jack reacted.…

Then the attic exploded.

*   *   *

Gibson vaulted the fence in time to see the attic window spit glass, unrolling a tongue of thick flame across the yard.

Then the stutter hit and the whole of the Lord’s Creation … stopped: sounds Randall Gibson hadn’t even noticed—the rasp of leaves in a morning breeze, the distant hush of traffic, the trill of a lonely bird trying to get laid—all drew out, alien and discordant, beneath a boom turned to a roar turned to a whine turned to nought but the tinnitus pinging in his ears.

That rolling column of glass-speckled flame hung absurdly, like a mistake, across a bright-blue sky.

The chronon gauge on his rescue rig read a full charge, all good. Designed by the Merlins at Monarch, the rig was a brace across his waist and shoulders that fit neatly beneath his jacket. It afforded him a discreet profile, better than the ’roidy NASA-looking crap the Strikers wore. Downside: the charge sucked.

If Paul Serene was still alive in there he’d be mobile; moving unassisted through a stutter was just one of the things that cold-eyed freak could do.

Nah, the Consultant would be fine. Best check on that little hardbody in the barn.

*   *   *

A God-clap vanished Jack’s past beneath an all-consuming tidal wave of flame. It lunged from all corners, the attic filled and gone in a roaring instant. From within his bubble of suspended time Jack watched as all that was left of his former life died in less time than it took to blink.

The flames hesitated, paused, backtracked, resumed.

Within a thermosphere of frozen time even the dust on the boards beneath his feet remained undisturbed, as was the section of wall caught in the bubble.

All else: Hades.

On the far side of an immobile wall of flame something shimmered through the suspended smoke and haze.

A man-sized dome of suspended time.

Within it, shaken and furious, Paul Serene stood up.

*   *   *

Gibson slipped into the barn, strolled to the ladder, and climbed on up. What a dump: cans, shelves, crap. All of it older than he was.

There she was: back pressed to the rusty shelf by the hayloft doors, rifle in hand, still as a statue.

“Hey there. You waitin’ for me?” He liked the way her T-shirt hugged her, beneath that canvas jacket that was spoiling the view. Her head was down, focused on the rifle, red hair tied back in a ponytail. He ducked his head, angling for a peek of her face beneath that cap.

He noted the ShotSpotter taped to her weapon. An unusual piece of equipment. That told Gibson she knew what she was getting into, but taped to a cheap old deer rifle? Couldn’t be civilian, the way she zeroed in on the Guardian squad shooter. So who was this warm little slice of pie?

Examining the rifle meant Gibson noticed her hands—specifically her fingers, which were capped with rubberized thimbles.

Like the ones he wore, attached to his rescue rig.

The hardbody glanced at him from beneath the rim of her cap.

She put her shoulder into a swing straight at the bridge of his nose, but Gibson was ready, shifting his weight and angling away. That put a big old smile on his face. She spun with the wasted momentum and he leaped on her for the split second her back was to him. He grabbed the rifle and yanked it like a crossbar for her throat.

She surprised him. She let go immediately and dropped. Weight displaced, Gibson lurched backward, rebounding off a rack of flimsy yet unmoving iron shelves.

Turned out she had a pistol. That figured. He—

Holy shit. It was Washout Wilder.

“Drop the rifle,” she said.

“You have got to be fucking kidding me.”

“Drop it!”

“You have fucked your life up masterfully, Wilder. I stand before you in awe.”

He tossed it away. Ten feet out the rifle lost whatever chronon charge it had picked up from either of them and froze, suspended in mid-air.

“Spare me. I know all about you, Gibson.”

“Want me to sign your tits?”

“I want you to deactivate your rig.”

“Yeah, and I want you to s—”

She cut him off with a barely tolerant, “Don’t.” And a very slow shake of the head.

Gibson racked up a checklist of things to work through once he got that gun off her.

“Deactivate it,” she said.

“Why? You on a clock?”

“You have a kid.”

“So? You just shot Larry, his sister’s got diabetes.”

“Lorelei doesn’t have to grow up without her dad. Three.”

“Or what? You’ll
murder
me?”

“Killed Larry. Two.”

“Okay. Okay.” He took that moment to catalog her: height, weight, complexion, hair, eyes, build, accent, distinctive features. “You should have shot me.” Gibson slapped release plates on both hips, the power supply disconnected. Gibson froze.

She lowered her weapon, hands shaking.

Gibson was frozen, no longer a threat, rig deactivated. Even immobile, locked into that self-dividing moment, his expression told her this wasn’t over.

This was a mistake. Once the stutter broke Gibson would radio in and blow her cover. Or kill her. Or worse. If he could.

She should kill him. He wouldn’t be the first, or the last, but killing him meant killing the love and joy she had seen in Lorelei’s eyes. Beth knew it meant condemning that little girl to becoming someone too much like herself: wounded and robbed, full of questions that would never be answered.

*   *   *

“You shouldn’t have done that,” Paul said.

The stutter rolled forward, slowly, excruciatingly, seething.

“It was worth a shot.”

Paul looked at the stolen gun in his hand, like he had never seen it before. Then he checked the mag. “We recover quite quickly, don’t we? From injuries. Our relationship to the chronon field constitutes a kind of secondary immune system—one that keeps us alive, protected not from infection but misadventure. But it still allows us to feel the pain of our mistakes; permits them to scar us. I myself have many scars.” The bullet impacted against Jack’s stutter shield before he registered that Paul had raised the gun. “Some injuries our privilege cannot save us from.” The bullet hovered, impatient, two feet away from Jack’s head. “Do not confuse your new state of being with being invulnerable, Jack. You are anything but.”