Nightwalk 2 Page 16

  “I’m afraid you have, sir. Serious ones. And a potentially fatal one, too.”

  Crap.

  My heart sank at this news. I had allowed myself to lose focus, and now there could apparently be consequences… or would be. The man in white had never lied to me, and I doubt he exaggerated now. And considering the stakes involved, I had acted a fool.

  “Right,” I sighed. “Starting when I saved Darla.”

  “Pardon?” he gave me a quizzical look. “Oh! No, no! That was obviously an accident, Mr. Garrett. Your actions there were forced by circumstances. Not to mention, you did a commendable job of minimizing the fallout from it. And as far as Mrs. Dower is concerned, she is an utterly trivial woman whose life or death is of little import to any entity outside of herself.”

  Ouch. Once again I actually caught myself feeling bad for Darla. And just a teensy bit defensive of her, too. Okay, she wasn’t Mother Teresa, or a warrior princess either, but still…

  “Yet consider this,” the man in white continued. “Despite her wretched status in the scheme of things, you saw how history would still make an effort to correct the alteration you made. And that was about as direct and mild of an effort as one would ever see.”

  “That was mild? You have to be kidding me.”

  “No sir, I assure you I am not. Her death has not yet become a set point in time. But the same is not true of many others here tonight. The simple fact is you are playing with forces that are not to be trifled with, and your latest moves have you standing in the figurative railway tracks while disaster hurtles in your direction.”

  As if to emphasize his point, he reached over with his cane and tapped a certain popular toy train engine sitting on a nearby shelf. At the moment, its cartoon smile looked a whole lot less than friendly.

  I gazed at the little engine as I absorbed this latest message. So there were people I couldn’t help. And I had been endangering a world full of humanity because these people were right in front of me. Hell, I had been screwing up all night.

  Everything depended on me getting things right, and I was doing it all wrong.

  I had been doing everything wrong.

  “I’m not the right man for this,” I whispered. “I’m no good at this stuff. You need a soldier, or an assassin… somebody with the skills and mentality for this kind of thing.”

  “No, Mr. Garrett.” The man in white put his cane on his shoulder and walked up to me. He frowned down from his greater height, the force of his presence almost suffocating at this proximity. “I chose you, and you accepted. You are the one chance this world gets. No other.”

  He then walked around me, as if inspecting me from all sides. I knew by then I presented a truly ragged sight.

  “But I can see the toll this endeavor has taken on you,” he continued. “I can sense the pain you suffer and I am not unmoved. If you truly believe you are unequal to this task, then say so now and you will be released. I will take you with me when I leave and return you to your future home to spend its final years in peace and security.”

  I couldn’t believe my ears.

  I understood right away the surrender his offer represented, but the proposal still took my breath away.

  I could end this right here. No more pain. No more monsters. No more fear of dying every second. No more screwing up with everything riding on the outcome. And once those years were up, I could die along with the rest of the world and it would be over.

  Eight years versus the one pain-filled hour I would likely die within anyway if I continued this madness.

  After all, there was no guarantee I would succeed. I could very well be throwing away those final eight years for nothing. I could die soon, with my last thoughts being how I failed everybody and had nothing to show for it. Or I could live and then die after the better part of a decade. And nobody would ever know the choice I made. Looking at it from that angle, taking eight more years of a peaceful life didn’t seem too bad of a bargain.

  Except when the time came, Stella and Casey would die with me.

  And I refused to ever consider that an option.

  “No, I’ll stay,” I groaned.

  He gave me the satirical half-smile of a man who expected no other answer. Who knows, if the man in white was the same guy both tonight and two years from now then maybe he already knew my choice. I have no idea how that could possibly work.

  Regardless, my decision seemed to please him.

  “Excellent!” He started to clap me on the shoulder, then obviously paused due to the ravaged condition of my back. “You are who I thought you were.”

  I suppose he meant it as a compliment, but in my present shape it felt like getting praise for being a glutton for punishment.

  “Perseverance, Mr. Garrett. All too soon this will be over. And please forgive my seeming lack of faith in your resolve. I did not come here to berate you, but to warn you of the danger your course of action has put you in. I can see some explanations are in order.”

  “Explanations?”

  My ears perked up at once. I’m all about explanations.

  “Yes, I’m going to give a… ‘breakdown’, I believe you call it… of the danger you currently face, so you may choose for yourself how to proceed.”

  Oh, I really liked the sound of this.

  “Thanks,” I replied. “Will this breakdown include a general mission overview and the whys and wherefores involved?”

  His smile remained but his eyes once more grew dark.

  “No, Mr. Garrett. I have said all I need to say about your mission. You know what you need to know in regards to that.”

  “Oh.”

  Well that was disappointing. I was still being sent to murder a man without knowing exactly what he would do to make himself such a threat. On the other hand, receiving an explanation regarding the danger currently facing me counted as a vast improvement.

  And since I would quite possibly die in the next hour anyway, I supposed I had nothing to lose by asking the other question on my mind.

  “Well then,” I mustered my courage, “can I please ask a different question? It may be my last chance, and to be honest I wasn’t sure I wanted to know this, but now I really do.”

  “You can always ask.”

  Right.

  I faced him squarely, and took a deep breath.

  “Who are you?” I implored. “What are you?”

  He studied me, his dark eyes flashing, and I wondered if he intended to answer. I had the feeling that most who met him never knew with who or what they truly dealt. My role in our relationship certainly hadn’t rated very high on a “need to know” scale in most matters so far. But then he seemed to arrive at a decision, and he spoke.

  “I have been called the Black Pharaoh, the Haunter in the Dark, and the Crawling Chaos… amid a great many other things,” he answered, then continued with his most brilliant but ironic smile yet, “and I am… the good guy.”

  ###

  A few minutes or a split second later I stepped back out into the alley. I guess it depended on who was counting.

  The group huddled around Mickey’s glowstick near the fence as Justin prepared to attack another board. I’m guessing the man in white pulled me out of “normal time” as soon as I stepped back into the preschool. Darla had just turned to follow me, and now came to a halt at what must have seemed my immediate reappearance.

  “What the…” she started as I held up the full bottle and walked past her over to David.

  “Here, this should do the trick,” I told him with depressed assurance. I doubted I would have been given the stuff if it wouldn’t.

  The baby latched on to the bottle and quieted at once. Simple solutions to simple problems. Words fail to express how I envied the kid right then. He had no idea of the forces arrayed against him, or the gross unfairness of his whole plight. With a little luck, he would go to sleep and miss everything to come.

  I damn sure wished I could

  “So you’re an author and a ma
gician,” Mickey’s voice cut in through my musings.

  Oh well, no point in putting things off. The sooner I got past this, the better.

  “Yeah, right,” I sighed. “Unfortunately, I don’t think my next trick is going to be quite so popular. I’m afraid it’s time for me and Darla to disappear.”

  I had expected exclamations of outrage, instead I got blank looks of confusion. It was like I had suddenly spoken in Chinese. Five pairs of eyes watched me in the dim circle of green, and a weird hooting cry provided background noise from somewhere a few blocks to the east.

  “It’s time for Darla and I to go our own way,” I continued after an uncomfortable pause. “The Rex has left the building and moved off toward the dumpster at Madre Mona’s. So, there are two ways to get where we’re heading. Either crossing Coventry Boulevard and going up through the Rocketwash, storage yard, and church… or going through the fence there and crossing Coventry at Timberline. Then you can follow Timberline north until you reach the east side of the church grounds and cross back over to the highway there. Since I’m the one causing this split-up, it’s only fair to let you guys have the choice of which path to take.”

  That was when people finally started to find their voices.

  “What the hell?” Darla erupted. “Are you going nutsy-cuckoo again?”

  “Darla, believe me, this is for your own good. It’s better this way.”

  “Better?” Mickey interrupted, “You care to explain that?”

  “I would really rather not.”

  “I would really rather you did.”

  I had already figured Mickey would be the tough one to deal with, and she had wasted no time in proving me right.

  “Mickey, I’m as unhappy about this as you are, but I don’t have a choice. I can explain to you why I’m doing this, but I swear it won’t change anything and knowing the truth won’t make you any happier. This is a case where you really are better off not knowing.”

  Her almond-shaped eyes grew even harder than her norm. She stepped up to face me, and her stare could crack diamonds.

  “I’m not much of a believer in ‘better off not knowing’. I like knowing. I’m just nosy that way.”

  “Yeah, I’m getting that,” I replied. “And I admit, you have a right to an explanation.”

  “Oh good. Does that mean we’re about to get to the explaining part?”

  Okay, so apparently I wasn’t going to get to dance around this, which was just as well. I can be bad about that if people let me. Mickey obviously didn’t intend on letting me.

  “So be it,” I sighed and pulled out my wallet. “I guess it’s better to just get this over with.”

  With solemn resignation, I opened the wallet and extracted my driver’s license and my membership card from the shooting range. Then I found and removed a crisp new twenty-dollar bill. After making sure I had the right items in the dim light, I handed them over to her.

  “Okay, what am I looking at here?”

  “Check the dates.”

  Mickey frowned and held each item up to her glowstick. Behind her, I saw Darla lean in to look as well. The first card was greeted with a skeptical grimace, and then the second with a concerned frown. But it was the twenty-dollar bill that caused her to swallow and look back up at me. I could see the unease on her face as she considered the implications.

  “You expect me to believe your some kind of time traveler?”

  “Says the lady hiding behind a strip mall from a T-rex?”

  She grimaced again and looked back down at the items in her hand. Like the Rex, they were a solid reality she simply couldn’t deny. Even Darla, who had already bought in to my story, looked shocked.

  Mickey studied the cards and money a few seconds longer, then handed them back over. She stared at the ground, obviously considering the implications. Then she set her jaw and turned her face back up to me.

  “Alright, you’re from the future. So what?”

  “So how about we just wish each other luck, and you guys pick your route?”

  “So how about that explanation first.”

  I’ll give her credit, she had to suspect what my being from the future and my decision to go our own way meant, but she never flinched. She would not look away no matter how grim things appeared.

  “Okay,” I sighed, “it’s your call. Time is short, so I’ll try and tell you what you need to know while keeping this tight.”

  I became uncomfortably aware of all the eyes on me in the dim alley, and almost hated myself for what I had to tell them.

  “For me, all this happened two years ago,” I started. “My daughter and I were headed for the southern overpass when we encountered… an entity… at the Crossroads gas station. I don’t know what he was, but he was amazingly powerful. He helped us get past the police barricade and escape.

  Then two years later, he showed up on my back porch in Albuquerque, and told me civilization would end if I didn’t come back to this night and stop another man from escaping. He also told me to be careful about changing the past, but I’ll come back to that in a minute. Then he sent me here.

  That’s why I have a backpack with a bunch of different types of non-electric lights. It’s also why I’m carrying a hundred extra rounds for my pistol. I also have a couple of other things I selected based on my prior experience here.”

  Mickey nodded at the mention of my backpack but otherwise just listened with folded arms and a face of stone.

  “And since about three o’clock,” I continued, “I’ve been fighting my way through this hell, just like the rest of you. Only I’m not trying to escape. I’m trying to reach the exit point of the other guy before he does.”

  “I get that,” Mickey snapped, “but what does it have to do with the rest of us?”

  “Like I said, I was supposed to avoid changing the past. But I didn’t count on running into the T-rex, and it chasing us into the store where you guys were hiding. And there’s where things went off the rails.”

  “Explain ‘off the rails.’”

  “In this case ‘off the rails’ means that’s where I changed history. Originally, you guys never met me. Originally, I hadn’t been in there and already chopped a hole in the wall when that monster came out of the girl.”

  I watched as multiple eyes widened in the green light. Now the others were starting to realize where this must be heading.

  “Holy shit,” Justin whispered, “are you saying that thing killed us all?”

  Oh, if it was only so easy.

  “No. Originally the monster killed the doctor and the young woman with the baby. David and Lupe somehow got Lucy and the baby and retreated to the back room of the store. They hid out there until the air force arrived.”

  “And?” Mickey demanded.

  “And you and Justin managed to bust out a window and retreat to Madre Mona’s. There was something in there, and you thought everybody else was dead, so after a bit you decided to try and escape through the greenbelt and trainyard. You didn’t make it. Something got Justin in the woods, and about five minutes later you snuck out into the train yard… and into the crosshairs of a police sniper.”

  Her eyes were now even harder with a layer of true anger.

  I couldn’t blame her one bit. Sometimes the only person you have to hate is the messenger.

  “And you know this how?”

  “The same entity who sent me back just snatched me out of time when I went for the baby bottle. He basically chewed me out for screwing up. He showed me what I had done and explained the potential consequences. Then he dropped me back in a second after I stepped through the door. That’s how I got the bottle so fast.”

  She didn’t bat an eye.

  “Okay, so we were dead and now we’re alive. I’m not going to feel terribly bad about it.”

  “It’s not that simple, Mickey,” I warned. “God how I wish it was, but it’s not.”

  “Yeah? How so?”

  Now came the part I truly detested.
<
br />   “Because in about eight minutes, we are going to reach the point in time where Justin died. When we do, History… with a capitol H… is going to realize something is screwed up. Then it’s going to try and fix it. And a few minutes later it’s going to try and fix the change with you as well.”

  “Fix it?”

  “Yeah, probably just like it fixed the alteration made by that baby’s mother surviving the attack by the monster in the fabric store. Once she survived past the time she was supposed to, events started conspiring to kill her. The effect varies from person to person. But in your case, your death affected a lot of people which means it would be a fairly substantial change for you to live. And that means History is going to come after you with a vengeance. I’m guessing some monster heading the other way will now be changing course.”

  Nothing like telling a person all their good deeds and hard work for other people was going to be the death of them. I felt lower than dirt. In the short time I had known her I had come to realize Mickey was an extraordinary woman, who deserved a whole lot better than this. She had apparently impressed a lot of people in the Army, and turned a lot of lives around during her years as a social worker. But now it would be her undoing.

  By the rules governing tonight, she had been fitting herself for a coffin in the process of accomplishing those good works.

  It stunk to the high heavens, but it didn’t change what I had to do.

  “And that’s why we have to part ways,” I pressed on. “I have to stop a man named Jason Hallett from getting out of here alive. He’s a police officer, and for all I know he may be a completely innocent, truly great guy. But who he is doesn’t matter either. I have a wife, and a daughter, and their lives depend on me getting this done. The same is true of a whole world full of other people. So that is my mission. And I cannot jeopardize my mission by risking being around you when the inevitable comes your way. I’m sorry as hell about it… I mean that from the bottom of my heart… but I just can’t.”

  I swallowed hard, but kept my eyes locked with hers.

  “So the choice is yours,” I concluded. “Timberline or the highway. I wish you all the luck in the world, but this is where we part ways.”