End Day (25 page)

Chapter Twenty-Nine

When the alarm started sounding, Magus knew something had gone seriously off the rails. Then a breathless sec man burst into his office suite and gave him the terrible news.

“Cawdor isn't dead,” the man said between gasps for air. “He and the others shot the hell out of us, and they're coming this way!”

Magus knew what the one-eyed man was capable of when free to operate in an open field. With him and his cohorts running loose in the redoubt, anything could happen. All of his effort in revising the timeline, reliving the past, all his glorious plans for a return of status and respect had just gone out the window. There was only one safe option left: retreat. Another ignominious retreat. But losses had to be cut. Defeats swallowed. Wounds licked.

“Kill him!” Magus said, pointing a steely finger of doom at the bearer of bad tidings.

Such things were expected of him.

The enforcer seized the man by the neck and stabbed him in the chest with a talon. One slice ripped him open from sternum to pelvis. The creature then proceeded to yard out the contents of his torso while he squealed and thrashed.

McCreedy gave Magus a desperate look.

“No, you will live a bit longer,” Magus said. “I need you to drive me. Toss him the keys. Let him free his legs.”

McCreedy caught the keys the enforcer threw at him. He quickly unlocked the manacles around his ankles and got to his feet.

“Carry me!” Magus shouted at the enforcer.

Like a small child, he was scooped up, draped across the creature's brawny arms and rushed out of the room to the beat of its heavy feet. The up-and-down motion made his head loll wildly. Objects in his field of vision lurched and yawed.

There were obvious benefits in living one's life twice. This time he had had the foresight to plant another set of gassed-up escape vehicles in the next arroyo.

He kicked his legs at the knees to make the enforcer run faster.

Chapter Thirty

They heard the enforcers coming long before they saw them. Even over the pulses of the alarm horn, the tramp of bare feet on concrete was an audible rumble, which grew louder and louder behind them. Ryan kept driving his companions onward with shouts of encouragement. He wasn't thinking about finding a place for them to stop and make a stand. The only way to survive was to put miles between them and the creatures who were in hot pursuit. He wasn't thinking about how far they had to go to reach safety, either. He was looking ahead in short increments, distances of fifty, a hundred feet, trying to remember the details he had seen only once.

They dashed past the burned-out elevator doors where they had cooked the first enforcer.

Seconds later Jak led them through the half-open, steel-barred and armaglass gate of the floor's guard post and designated kill zone. Ryan remembered the sign on the wall that read: NO UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL BEYOND THIS POINT. And the machine-blaster posts staggered on either side of the hall.

Just beyond the kill zone's second gate, they picked up a tail of enforcers. The creatures shot out of a side corridor and fell right into step behind them.

Jak slammed through the stairwell door, and they started up, taking the steps three at a time.

At the first landing Ryan looked back and down, letting the others pass him. Enforcers were pouring through the shaft's entrance. He didn't pull a thermite gren, though. There were precious few of them left. To maximize the body count, he had to wait until the stairwell was fully packed.

He was halfway up the next flight when he saw the door on the landing above swing open. As it banged back and an enforcer jumped out, Mildred was just passing. Instinctively she swung up the Desert Eagle. The creature stuck out its arms to grab her, closing the gap in a single stride. The gold handgun boomed in her hands, spitting a heavy slug and three feet of crackling fire. The slug knocked the enforcer's head to one side. As it snapped back, the blaze caught, first on its cheek, then shooting across the top of its head. It beat its face, but that only spread the flames to its hands.

As Ryan ducked past, fire engulfed it from the waist up. Blinded, it turned left, missed the first descending step and fell head over heels down the staircase like a burning tumbleweed.

The enforcers coming up from below were gaining ground until that moment. As he turned to go up the next flight, for a split second he could see below him. The creatures had needed to stop and flatten themselves against the opposite wall to keep from being hit and ignited by one of their own.

The breathing room didn't last long. At the next floor, the stairwell door banged back as he passed it. The enforcers were scenting them, like bloodhounds. He didn't pause as he turned for the next flight up, but he shouted over the alarm's wail. “Mildred!”

She spun around on the landing above, the Desert Eagle in both hands. He took three steps in a single bound, then saw the expression on her face. Before he could flatten, she fired twice. The muzzle-blasts numbed the right side of his face and made that ear go dead.

As he scrambled up beside her, she took her first step down. The powerful handblaster roared again and again. Ryan looked back to see her shoot point-blank into an enforcer's face. Another of the creatures was already on fire from the chin up, whirling in panic. With a flash of light and heat, the second enforcer's head simultaneously jolted and ignited. When the two blind bastards collided, they locked arms around each other like long-lost friends. They maintained their balance and the embrace for a fraction of a second before toppling head first down the stairs in a double fireball.

Again they were granted precious time.

They still had a lead when they burst through the door to the redoubt's ground floor, but it was only about a hundred feet. There still weren't enough enforcers in the stairwell to merit using one the last thermite grens. Either most of them had died in the mat-trans anteroom or there weren't that many to begin with.

The question was, could they beat the enforcers to the redoubt entrance before the enforcers pulled them apart?

By the time they closed distance on the first trap, the one that blocked access to the redoubt proper just inside the vanadium door, the answer was no. On flat ground and a straightaway the enforcers could outrun them. And were doing so. One hundred feet had become seventy-five, and there was still another hundred to go. If they didn't do something, they'd be caught just inside the redoubt's entrance.

Ryan racked his brain to remember the details of what he'd seen in the automated machine-blaster post. The blasters were disconnected from the cams that automatically operated them, but that didn't mean the weapons themselves were decommissioned. He recalled seeing the belts of 7.62 mm ammo, because he had thought about scavenging some of it for his Steyr. Were the belts of linked ammo still hooked up to the feedway and ready to fire?

He made another hard decision. He decided it didn't matter because the result would be the same. The enforcers would be distracted long enough for the rest of the companions to get away. Trouble was, he couldn't do the job by himself—there were too many enforcers behind him.

“J.B.!” he shouted at his friend's back as they ran. “M-60 post coming up! You and me!”

He didn't need to say anything else. J.B. gave him a thumbs-up.

“Krysty!” he yelled. “I'm going to pin them down in the trap. You turn back and fry them! Everyone else, keep running!”

As J.B. fell back beside him, the others snaked through the steel-barred sec gate at the near end of the guard-post kill zone. He and J.B. didn't go that far. The access door to the bowed-out blaster turret stood open. They ducked inside the cramped space. There wasn't time for a discussion of who was supposed to do what. Ryan knelt behind the M-60 on the far left; J.B. took the one on the right. Ryan could feel the tramp of heavy feet through the concrete. He checked the feedway and found the belt correctly connected. Two flicks of the charging handle advanced a new but tarnished 7.62 mm round into firing position.

J.B. finished brief seconds before him. He just had time to thumb his glasses up the bridge of his nose before the enforcers appeared at the sec gate.

There was no way to aim through the horizontal firing slot—there wasn't enough room behind the blasters. But aiming was optional. The machine blasters were set up to cut human-size targets in two. All that mattered was Ryan timing his burst so the first one in line was hit before it cleared the maximum arc of fire.

Holding his head low, he tracked the movement in the corridor through the firing slot. Instead of leading his target, swinging the sights through it, he veered the blaster into the target with the trigger pinned. The M-60 roared, spewing lead at five hundred rounds a minute. Smoking hulls streamed from the ejection port. The first bastard was going nowhere. J.B. joined him in the onslaught, working on the other end of the line of enforcers, doubling the roar and the rounds per minute.

On the other side of the turret, Ryan visualized the enforcers, trapped between blazing blaster barrels, pinned against the backstop by an unbroken torrent of lead. They'd be unhurt but unable to move forward or back.

Dammit, hurry, Krysty! he thought.

Ryan didn't hear the soft whoosh of a thermite gren's ignition. He couldn't hear anything for the clatter of the machine blasters in the narrow space, not even the blaring Klaxon horn. Then a searing blast of heat and light shot through the firing port, and he knew Krysty had done her part. He let go of the M-60's pistol grip and shoved J.B. toward the access door.

They hit the deck as the fireball behind them bloomed larger and the stacked canisters of M-60 belted ammo began to cook off.

Ryan and J.B. lay on their bellies on the floor with their fingers in their ears until the ammo stopped exploding and the ricochets stopped flying.

“We did it,” Ryan said as he sat up.

“Black dust, we sure did!”

The others were waiting for them outside. From the height of the sun and the heat, it appeared to be midafternoon. The loss or gain in time that had happened in transit seemed unimportant as the companions joyously reunited. It was as if they hadn't seen each other in years. The backslaps and congratulations were interrupted by the sound of wag engines starting up; everyone stopped what they were doing and dug for their blasters.

Ryan was looking over the scope of his Steyr as a big Winnie lurched into view above the rim of an arroyo and then sped toward the dirt access road they'd come in on. He didn't have a clear shot on the driver because of the sun reflecting off the windshield. It made a brilliant starburst right in front of the steering wheel. The Winnie was followed by two pickups.

As the wags sped past, Ryan saw a figure behind one of the rear windows. It motioned with a hand.

“Is that who I think it is?” Doc asked.

“No, that's
what
you think it is,” Mildred said.

Ryan shouldered the Steyr and touched off a shot, but the already-falling, bulletproof window shutter blocked it at the last second. The round sparked on the steel and zinged off across the desert.

They watched helplessly as the Winnie and other wags zoomed away in a cloud of red dust.

“Did Magus just give us the finger?” Mildred asked.

“The steel finger,” Doc corrected her.

“Nukin' hell,” J.B. said.

* * *

S
INCE
M
AGUS
HAD
left behind the camp of circled wags, Ryan suggested they spend the night in comfort instead of on the ground. They would pick up their dirt bikes early in the morning, when it was still cool outside. There were no objections to that, or to stealing Steel Eyes's wag fuel, or eating the food and drinking the water still in the wags. Before they settled in, he had Ricky rig a boobie inside the redoubt entrance using the remaining thermite grens. That was in case any surviving enforcers decided to come pay them a visit after dark.

As the sun dipped below the western mountain, they were all seated around the camp's fire pit, enjoying the dancing flames and full bellies. The desert air smelled sweet and clean. In the distance a coyote yipped; it was answered a few seconds later by another series of yips.

They were hunting something, Ryan knew, maybe a mated pair working in tandem, giving each other directions from either side of the arroyo. He found that thought deeply satisfying. And the sounds, too. He knew he was really home.

“So, how did Magus come back to life?” J.B. said. “Anybody care to speculate? I think we can all agree on the fact we saw that broken corpse in 2001.”

“Guess what we saw was just one of the many,” Mildred said.

“We're never going to figure it out,” Krysty added. “Not enough information. The important things are we all made it back safe and the time hole is closed. Magus won't ever be able to use it again.”

There were grunts of agreement around the campfire.

Then Doc spoke up. “It is all over by now,” he said disconsolately.

“What's over?” Mildred said.

“In 2001 it's already well past noon. Vee's gone.”

“Doc, what are you talking about?” Mildred said. “‘Well past noon'? That happened more than a hundred years ago.”

“It does not seem that way to me,” he said. “Seems like I just said goodbye to her.”

“Me, too,” Ricky chimed in. The youth looked as gut shot as Doc.

“But you didn't just say goodbye to her,” Mildred told them. “You said it a century ago. We all did.”

“You can't change what's past, Doc,” Krysty said gently.

“That does not mean that it is painless,” he said. “I still dream about Emily and the children.” The old man sniffed.

Then he rose to his feet, walked over to Ricky and extended his open hand. “No hard feelings,” he said. “We both lost something precious—whether it was today, a hundred years ago is immaterial.”

Ricky got up and grabbed Doc's hand. As he shook it he said, “We'll never forget her, Doc.”

“Never, my dear boy.”