The Broken Universe (2 page)

When John and the Pinball Wizards had created their head-to-head pinball machines, Visgrath had noticed. He’d found John and invested in their fledgling company, trying to determine if John was a marooned traveler as well. When Visgrath discovered John had a device, he had snatched Grace and Henry as bargaining chips against John.

John had built the transfer gate in the barn and used it to recruit his own doppelganger, Prime—who had given him the broken device in the first place and stolen his life—to help him save his friends. They’d done it, but marooned themselves in Universe 7651, at least until they had built a transfer device there.

“Hold on,” John said. “They’re armed.” All the Alarians wore pistols, and some of them had rifles. Eight against three wasn’t good odds, especially since the Alarians probably knew how to shoot. Grace could shoot too, having spent hours firing her weapons into the empty quarries for target practice in 7651. But Henry was no expert shot, and he was sick. No, the odds weren’t good.

“Let’s go back and call the police,” John said.

“And then explain the transfer gate to them how?” Grace asked.

“We can—”

“They’re using it,” Henry said.

Two Alarians stood in the middle of the transfer zone holding one of the corpses.

“Ready?” someone said in English. A technician stood at the controls of the gate.

One of the Alarians nodded.

“Three. Two. One!”

The two Alarians and the corpse disappeared.

“Six against three,” Grace whispered.

Two more Alarians took the second corpse and stood in the transfer zone. They disappeared.

“The perfect way to get rid of a body,” Henry said.

John stared at him, momentarily outraged at the cruel statement.

“Sorry,” Henry added.

“Four against three,” Grace said. “Odds are getting better.”

She stood. John grabbed her shoulder and pointed. Two more Alarians stood in the gate transfer zone.

“Where are they going?” Henry asked.

“Who cares?” Grace said. “Away is fine with me.”

“Let’s go,” John said. He took a shotgun from the duffel, made sure it was loaded, and stuffed a handful of shells in his front pocket.

Grace and John ran, heads ducked low, toward the barn door.

They were only a few meters away when the first Alarian—the technician at the controls—noticed them. He looked up, his mouth an O.

“Freeze,” John said. The man raised his hands.

The second Alarian was talking on a phone. Apparently they’d had enough time to rig a telephone line into the barn. The second one turned and looked at John and Grace.

He said into the phone, “They’re back. The vermin are here.”

“Drop the phone,” Grace said.

“Yes, you heard me,” the Alarian continued. He started to say something in Alarian.

Grace raised the M4 and fired a burst of shots into the wall near the phone. The Alarian dropped the receiver.

Henry trotted up behind John and Grace, heaving and dragging the duffel. He wheezed, and then stopped with his hands on his knees while he coughed.

“Hands behind your heads,” John said. “Do it.”

The second Alarian paused, glaring at him, and then slowly raised his arms.

“Where do you all think you’re going with my transfer gate?” John asked. “Must be somewhere special.”

The standing Alarian said something hateful in his own language.

Grace grinned, but in no way pleasantly.

“I’m gonna have to learn that language,” she said. “It’s so mellifluous.”

“Over here,” John said, motioning to a spot on the other side of the control panel.

The two Alarians started forward, and then both stopped, looking toward the barn door.

John heard it too, another car coming up the road.

Grace spun and took a spot by the door.

John kept his shotgun pointed at the two.

“Kneel,” he said, but he kept looking out the door of the barn. “What is it?”

“Another van,” Grace said. “Maybe four more bad guys.”

“Henry, cover these two.”

“Right,” Henry said, digging in the duffel bag for a weapon.

John turned and took the opposite side of the barn door.

“Wait for them to come closer,” Grace said.

But they didn’t. The driver must have seen Grace or John by the door. He stopped short and pointed.

The Alarian in the passenger seat opened the door and rolled out.

He had a pistol.

Bullets slammed into the barn wall, making holes of sunlight.

John dove to the ground, realizing how thin the walls were.

He fired one burst of shot into the van’s grille. The windshield chipped and starred.

More bullets slammed through the barn.

Behind him, Henry cried out and dove for the ground.

Grace couldn’t seem to get a good shot from her position on the dirt floor. She fired a series of rounds into the air, posturing fire making certain the Alarians knew they were facing big guns.

John pumped the shotgun and fired again.

Behind him he heard the hum of capacitors.

He twisted on the ground. The Alarian technician was starting the transfer gate.

“Henry! Stop them!”

“I can’t!” Henry was covering his head.

Bullets ricocheted through the barn.

John stood up, trying to see where the two Alarians were.

He spotted the leader, the one who had been on the phone, and he had a gun now. He pointed it at John. John rolled away, taking himself out of the barn and near his car. Henry scuttled after him.

Grace slid around to get a better aim on the new van and filled it with M4 rounds. She had no clear view of the two Alarians inside the barn, however.

John glanced up. The two Alarians were running for the transfer zone. The leader fired at him wildly.

The technician clutched a handful of rolled-up engineering prints.

They squatted in the transfer zone and the leader fired covering slugs at John and Henry. John had no clear shot from his vantage point behind his car.

They disappeared as the transfer gate triggered.

“Damn,” Henry said.

All of the Alarians in the van except the driver were out now and firing at them.

Grace slid backward on her belly. She reached into the duffel and pulled out one of the hand grenades that they’d purchased from a shady arms dealer in 7651. She pulled the pin and threw it at the van. It skittered and rolled, disappearing under the van’s front axle.

The driver watched the grenade disappear under his vehicle with a look of disbelief. He dropped the van into reverse and backed down the road. His associates, who had been taking cover behind the van, found themselves in the open. One flopped into the passenger seat. Another dove into the rear. The last ran into the woods for cover.

John hid behind his car waiting for the explosion.

“Down!” he yelled at Henry.

Nothing happened.

He peeked from over the hood of his car. Grace met his gaze from behind the barn door.

“I guess that gun dealer was pulling our legs about the hand grenades,” she said.

“We paid five hundred dollars for that,” Henry squawked.

“It did its job,” John said. He listened as the tires of the van screeched as it accelerated onto Gurney Road.

“What do we do now?” Grace said. She nodded at the transfer gate.

“We take it apart and get it out of here before they come back,” John said.

CHAPTER
2

“John!”

Casey slung her arms around his neck and squeezed.

“I guess you’re okay,” he said.

She didn’t let go for a long minute.

John had dropped Henry and Grace off at their Toledo apartment with a promise to meet at the factory in the morning. He’d phoned Casey, and she’d demanded he come see her immediately.

Casey started undoing her blouse buttons.

“Hold on! Not in your parents’ house,” John said. It felt awkward to be this close to her after so long apart. He’d had no idea for six weeks if she was safe or not. She’d been shot by the Alarians during the kidnapping of Grace and Henry.

“Shut up,” Casey said with a smirk, brushing aside a strand of blond hair. She undid the buttons far enough to slip the blouse over her shoulder. A puckered circle was etched into her skin just below the clavicle.

“Wow,” John said. “That’s a pretty nice scar.”

“I’m still wearing a bikini,” she said.

“No one would knock over your sand castle if they saw a scar like that,” John said. “Are you really okay?”

“I am, John.”

“I’m so sorry I left you,” he said. “I had to rescue—”

“Grace and Henry, I know.”

“I came back as soon as I could,” he said.

“I know,” she said, buttoning her blouse back up. “The police were very perplexed. But there were no suspects and no witnesses, and it was just a flesh wound. They stopped looking for you guys after a couple weeks.”

“They couldn’t have found us anyway,” John said. “We were elsewhere.”

“I know.”

“So you believe my paranoid delusions now?”

“John, I know something’s happened. I know I was shot. I know you had to go somewhere to save Grace and Henry.”

“I can prove it to you now,” John said. “We have a transfer gate in 7651. And one here too, only it’s in pieces in the trunk of my car.”

“I have no idea what that all means,” Casey said. “But I
am
glad you’re back.”

“Me too.”

John wrapped his arms around her and kissed her. He couldn’t help thinking of Prime’s Casey as he did so. Would kissing her feel identical to kissing the Casey in this universe? Would she taste the same? He remembered Visgrath’s laughing mockery when he’d found out John wasn’t a singleton, that he was a
dup.
Was someone with a single instance in all the multiverse, someone unique, living a more special life than someone with a million instances? How could that be? His emotions were just as real no matter how many other John Rayburns were out there.

What did it matter if there were he and a million other Johns scattered across the universe? Did that make him any less intrinsically valuable as a person? To Visgrath, it had. To be unique made a life more valuable. What twisted logic brought a society to that point? But even as he asked himself, he knew that scarcity implied value. A person who was scarce could be construed to be more valuable than one who wasn’t.

“Bill and Janet are dead,” he said.

“What?”

“The Alarians killed them.”

“The who?”

“The people chasing us.”

“Are you going to the police?” she asked.

“I expect they’ll come find us,” John said. “And they’ll want answers, no matter what Grace thinks.”

“Grace doesn’t want to conform?” Casey said. “How odd.”

“You don’t know,” John said, realizing that Casey hadn’t lived with Grace at the transfer gate build site for six weeks, listened to her nightmares in the tent next to his, saw her normally sweet nature turn inward, even to Henry.

“Know what?”

“Grace, she was … tortured.” John’s mind turned to the image of her strapped to a table and covered in cuts. It could have been Casey that Visgrath had kidnapped. That it had been Grace, that it was ultimately his fault, made him queasy.

“What?”

“Visgrath thought she might know where my transfer gate was. He needed answers.”

“My god.”

“She killed him.”

“What? Grace?”

“She shot him through the eye as he held Henry right in front of him. Coldest thing I’ve seen anyone do.”

“Poor Grace, poor Henry.”

“I don’t think she can deal with what happened to her, or what she’s done.”

“And you guys didn’t find her a psychiatrist?”

“Uh … we didn’t exactly have a health-care ID in that universe,” John said.

“You could have done
something
!” Casey pushed him away.

“We were doing everything we could to get her back here!”

Casey calmed herself. “I know. But six weeks of suffering over that. The guilt. The pain. She needs help.”

“She doesn’t talk to anyone now.”

“Maybe she’ll talk to me.…”

“If Henry couldn’t get through to her, what makes—”

“What makes you so smart?” Casey asked.

“Uh…” John closed his mouth. “I’m sorry. You’re right.”

“Usually. Apology accepted,” Casey said. “Take me to dinner, and we can discuss what happened in more detail. Now that I’ve taken a bullet for the team, I guess I better start believing you and this parallel universe crap.” She paused on the steps. “I’m so sorry about Bill and Janet. I know how much they meant to you.”

“Thanks.”

*   *   *

John found himself waiting in the foyer for Casey to do whatever she did to ready herself to go out. Her father emerged from his office, looking startled for a moment.

“John! You’re back!”

“Yes, sir, I am.”

He began to smile, and then frowned. “Where’d you go, John?”

“Um, I had a trip out of town, Mr. Nicholson.”

“I see,” he said. “Somewhere where there weren’t phones? Is that it?”

“Well…”

“You left my daughter lying in a hospital bed, shot. And you leave for six weeks.”

John felt his face flushing. “I’m sorry, sir. I would have returned if I could—”

“It’s not acceptable, John. No man can treat my daughter like that,” he said. “She was shot!”

“I know, sir! I did everything I could to get back here.”

“A letter if not a phone call? Something, John.”

“I—”

“I don’t know what your intentions with my daughter are, John,” he said, “but I know she fancies you quite a bit. I, however, don’t fancy you. What you did was unconscionable. I doubt any explanation will justify your continued presence in this house.”

John steeled himself. He could lie. He wouldn’t be believed if he told the truth. “I know it looks bad from your point of view. But the last thing I wanted to do was leave Casey. The only reason I did was because my friends were in danger and needed me more than she did. She was safe, as far as I could tell, and my friends were not.”

“I see.”

“I came back as quickly as I could.”