Nightwalk 2 Read online

  I pulled out a high-dollar diving watch and strapped it onto my wrist. It was an imported wind-up model, extremely rugged, and featured glow-in-the-dark numbers and hands. I remembered it being exactly the kind of thing I wished I had on me two years ago in Coventry Woods… just like everything else in the backpack.

  “It will be exactly three-thirteen in the morning.” He gestured toward the three tall lightning lamps. “I commend your foresight, sir. I will save you the trouble and see to it your watch is set to the correct time and running when you arrive. Now, please be so kind as to stand in the center of those three pylons. As you can see, I have marked where to place your feet.”

  I tried to think where I would have been at that time two years ago as I complied with his instructions. It would have likely been sometime after the period spent on Chambers Circle. While we had spent a good deal of time recuperating, arguing, gathering supplies, and making torches, three-thirteen was getting pretty late.

  Dangerously late.

  There existed the small matter of a nuclear warhead going off at five thirty.

  “Actually, five thirty-four,” the man in white said as he walked back to the table and fetched his cane. “In truth, finding a time where you were relatively alone and safe to graft to was not easy. The only earlier time would have been a brief moment in your back yard right before your neighbor spotted you and then Chandra activated his device. Putting you there would have actually been much more dangerous. You would have had the firefight and then the feeding carnivores between you and Mr. Hallett, and it would not have been even remotely safe to attempt crossing Coventry Boulevard till you got to Monroe. Not to mention, trying to put you so close to those distortion events would have come with its own perils. So although this is later, it’s safer and you have a better chance of going north to intercept him.”

  He grasped the cane in the middle of its shaft with both hands as he turned back toward me, and then pulled in opposite directions, stretching the rod out to a length of six or seven feet. I almost gasped in surprise. It came across as a vaudevillian stunt in style, the type of cheap trick an illusionist of yore would use to dazzle a crowd, yet I had the deep conviction that when he did it, it was no trick.

  “There,” he stated as he rested the bottom tip of the cane almost between my feet and stood it directly before me. He released the object, and to my total lack of surprise it continued to stand where he left it. “Now, Mr. Garret, I need you to wrap your arms around my cane. As a matter of fact, go ahead and lean into it and let it support your weight. I assure you it is quite safe.”

  I believed him, but I still leaned onto the thing with caution. As promised, it stood like it was cemented into the ground and held firm.

  My stomach started to knot up, and my breath quickened. I didn’t know what he was doing, but I could sense the moment of truth now approached.

  “A few last things before you go,” the man in white continued, his face now grave. “Remember what you are doing. You are going back to change a particular event in time. I advise using great caution and avoiding the alteration of any other events but the one you have been sent to change. You walk in sands that are not entirely set, so beware of leaving footprints. Fortunately, most incidental changes you may make will not matter now since so little survived the bomb’s blast. Yet that is one of the reasons it is vitally important to avoid being seen by yourself and to get away from your former group as quickly as possible. Your fates are not set in time yet, so you can still alter what happens to you back then… and alterations can have severe consequences. Do you understand?”

  Oh, great. The good news just kept coming. Not only would I be trying not to get killed while traversing a death-infested hellhole in order to murder an innocent man, but I had to make sure and not screw up my current existence at the same time.

  “Yeah, I understand.” I tried to harden my resolve. “Don’t be seen, get clear, get to Hallett, and… kill him.”

  I had meant it to sound brusque, like something one of my gangster characters would say, but I don’t think I pulled it off. To my ears, it just sounded gloomy.

  “Exactly.” He now gave me a thin smile, perhaps at my hollow attempt to sound tougher than I felt.

  “And then you will get me out of there?”

  “You have my word, sir,” he confirmed. “The instant the threat is neutralized, you will appear back here on this very spot, in the exact same condition you are now. There will be nothing but your memories to suggest it ever happened.”

  Personally, I wouldn’t have minded a little evidence of some kind but I guess you take what you can get. At least I knew I had a way out.

  I just had to survive to reach it.

  “Now, Mr. Garrett, grip tight,” he admonished as a hum rose around me from the glowing pylons, “and focus on maintaining your grip.”

  I took a deep breath and did as instructed. Lightning started to crackle across the instruments on my patio table, and the light from the pylons intensified to a blue-white glare. A smell of ozone now overrode the previous scents of the desert.

  “I also recommend closing your eyes.” The man in white raised his voice over the growing hum. “Things are about to become very bright. There will be a brief moment of dislocation once I send you on your way, then you will arrive. Just remember to hold on tight. Are you ready?”

  I squeezed my eyes shut against the increasing brilliance. Then came the sense of tremendous energy gathering in the air around me. Frightening levels of energy. Somehow I understood I was about to be fired from a cannon capable of rending me to atoms if everything wasn’t precisely correct. But I had accepted that things were already past the point of no return, so I nodded my readiness while maintaining a death grip on the elongated cane.

  “Then bon voyage, sir!

  The hum rose to a teeth vibrating crescendo, while dropping to a bass I felt as much as heard. I did not find it a pleasant feeling. Power pressed and fluxed around me like a physical presence. At the same time, the brightness burned a picture of the veins in my eyelids onto my retinas. Clenching my jaw, I pressed against the cane and hunched my shoulders against the gathering forces.

  And that’s when it all went away.

  The world twisted sideways, lurched, then suddenly dropped me alone into an empty eternity. No light. No darkness. No silence. No sound. I fell through a vast ocean of conscious non-existence my senses simply couldn’t interpret.

  This was forever. This was infinity.

  This was horror.

  This was peace.

  But this was not for me. I was an interloper in this boundless expanse, a mere foreigner passing through as I flew from one time-defined finitude to another.

  And all too soon, it came to an end.

  Suddenly it became dark, and I arrived in a very different place. A place I remembered all too well.

  The atmosphere became humid and gigantically thick. The smell of magnolias mixed with alien scents assaulted my nose as my lungs struggled to make the transition from high New Mexican air. My head swam and the wind howled around me as I clenched a damp metal beam against my chest.

  Except it wasn’t the wind. It was merely the sound of the wind, and that was bad. Very bad. Understanding shot through me and my eyes flew open at the horror that sound portended.

  Yet even as I realized the danger, another sound intruded and took my breath away.

  “ASHLYYYYN!!” my own voice cried from the darkness somewhere below me.

  Chapter Two: Fractured Recursions

  It was July 3rd, at three thirteen in the morning… again… and one of the lowest moments of the most awful night of my life.

  Now it had gotten worse.

  Two years ago, I had followed a young gymnast up a cell tower in an attempt to scout out our next move. It had been against my better judgment. But I had let myself get talked into doing it despite my doubtful ability to live up to my part of the task. And that led to disaster. My fear of heights had almost ov
ercome me, spurring Ashlyn to continue climbing alone in order to finish the job. She succeeded, but in the effort had also climbed straight into the clutches of a horrific predator.

  Now that white-suited bastard had put me back on the same tower. Only this time, he placed me a lot higher.

  A whole lot higher.

  I clung to the corner beam of the structure and watched in horror as the tumorous black shape of the monster clutching Ashlyn’s body slowly rose past me. It passed within twenty feet, which was far closer than I been to it last time. I couldn’t make out the creature itself, merely its silhouette against the distant lights of Houston. Then I looked away as the faint yellow light of the glowstick taped to the girl became visible on its underside.

  I couldn’t bear to see her face again.

  Below me, I heard myself swear and knew the former version of me had started his way back down the tower to confront Tommy. At least I hadn’t been spotted.

  But it still left me gripping steel over a hundred feet up in a night sky full of flying death. From this height, I could hear the howl of wind above me and knew it for the call of other beasts like the one that caught Ashlyn. I could already imagine them beginning to drift down in my direction.

  I needed to do something, and fast.

  Unlike Ashlyn, and the former me below, I came armed this time. Yett I also remembered there had been a lot of armed people in Coventry Woods and pitifully few survivors. Getting cocky would be a lethal mistake. Avoiding any sort of conflict remained the correct strategy. Besides, I didn’t remember hearing somebody blasting away with a large handgun above us on the cell tower that night — now this night — which meant doing so would mostly likely qualify as changing things.

  No, the better move would be to descend back down to the level of the trees. I remembered we could see about twenty feet up the tower, which still left a band of elevation where I could use the trees for cover from above yet remain out of sight from the ground

  The problem was going to be getting there.

  The only thing I could see were the lights of Houston in the distance, and the skeletal framework of the cell tower didn’t make for the best silhouette material. I had several forms of light in my backpack, but most of those would risk revealing myself to eyes both above and below. Not to mention, getting to them would entail releasing my grip on the tower with at least one hand, which I hadn’t worked up the nerve to do yet.

  In truth, I was already in trouble. When I looked down, the light of the little fire we had built at the base of the tower appeared impossibly far below me… a flickering speck in a vast gulf of darkness. Vertigo washed through my body, making my knees weak and forcing me to turn my face back against the beam I now clutched for dear life. The same acrophobia that had paralyzed me last time threatened to do it again.

  If it did, this time I would be the one to die.

  The sound of wind grew closer, telling me I had to move. Death was closing in.

  At least I clutched a corner beam on the same side of the tower as the ladder. I knew this because the beast that had killed Ashlyn had floated up past me on this side. I couldn’t see it, but knew it had to be only a few feet to my right. I merely needed to release my grip on the corner beam, grab a strut a little above me, then shuffle sideways on a two-and-a-half-inch wide strip of metal for a short distance.

  Laughably easy under most circumstances. But I wasn’t laughing.

  It took me three tries to finally let go of the beam with my right hand, before I succeeded with an audible whimper. I could feel the abyss beneath me, drawing me down like a physical presence. My breath sounded loud and ragged in my ears as I felt my way up along the beam for the strut I knew had to be there. As I reached higher I started to worry the strut wouldn’t be there, that maybe this section didn’t have one in that position, but just as I had about run out of arm length my fingers closed on the metal brace.

  The strut hung so high above me I could only curl my fingers over it as opposed to fully enclosing it in my hand. I didn’t remember them being this high nearer the bottom, but that didn’t matter. Things were what they were.

  With my eyes now tightly shut, I slid my right foot away from the corner and farther down the beam to my right. As I did, it naturally made me a little shorter and put weight on my fingers. The sound of wind grew, but I only had ears for the echoing void beneath me. With infinite care, I picked my left foot up and brought it around the corner beam with the goal of placing it next to my right. Every microsecond it hung out over space felt like an eternity, but I finally got it around.

  I had succeeded in putting both feet on the same beam.

  Next, I slid my left hand up the corner support until it reached the strut barely grasped by my right. Swallowing hard, I fumbled it over to the strut until its fingers found some purchase as well. This left me stretched as far as I could reach, over a hundred-foot drop, with nothing but my fingers providing balance as I started inching my way sideways down a two-inch-wide support.

  Somewhere far below, I heard voices and realized my first confrontation with Tommy had begun. But that was then and this was now.

  And now things had just decided to get worse.

  I heard the flap of large wings, and felt the faintest tremor through the steel at my fingertips. Something had just landed on the tower! And it had done it close enough for me to feel the impact of its landing!

  I opened my eyes but couldn’t see a damn thing. The sound of wind howling grew uncomfortably close, but those creatures were floaters and whatever had landed nearby was something of an entirely different nature. It had mass, and the type of physiology allowing it to land and probably move around on structures like this.

  And there I stood, stretched out on fingertips and tiptoes like a ballerina on a balance beam, ten bajillion feet above the ground.

  A throttled buzz came from the darkness about fifteen feet in front of me, causing me to refocus in a big hurry. It sounded big, insectile, and hungry. It also made for a potent reminder of how I had only encountered a tiny slice of the horrors Coventry Woods offered last time, and there were plenty more eager to make my acquaintance. I could worry about falling to my death later.

  I started scooching to my right as fast as my now dwarfed fear of heights would let me. The buzz came again, along with the sound of something hard scraping against metal.

  Shit! This damn thing was on the move!

  I now slid my way across the beam with more alacrity. But what I had forgotten was the space I had to cross really didn’t stretch very far. Thus it came as a shock when my hand suddenly hit the side of the ladder. I hadn’t expected it so soon, and almost unbalanced due to the fear I had hit something alive and waiting for me on my side of the tower.

  A second later I recovered from the shock and relief flooded through me as I wrapped my hand securely around a rung. And it was a good thing I did…

  …because at that moment a brief bit of lightning flickered, and the sight of the monstrosity caused me to recoil and almost fall off the damn tower.

  The thing measured roughly the same size as me, or perhaps a little larger, but there the resemblance ended. This thing was ghastly. It appeared to be some kind of inexplicable combination of crustacean and bat. I think it might have been bipedal, but it mainly impressed me as a crowded tangle of chitinous limbs and claws. I couldn’t make out a head, just a bunch of stalks and feelers waving around at the top of it. Finally, as if to make its appearance even more unsettling, the creature had a large pair of leathery wings folded against its back.

  It faced me from fifteen feet away, across the gulf of the cell tower’s center.

  Then the lightning faded and everything returned to black.

  “Aw shit…” I whispered as I cautiously slid over onto the ladder. “Aw shit, aw shit, aw shitawshitawshit…”

  The combination of tension and humidity had me sweating freely, and I had to be careful of my grip on the slick metal. This just added to my already taut-n
erved state. And now having reached the ladder, I had an important decision to make.

  Did I draw my gun for protection against the monster, or get moving? The thing clung to the other side of the tower, but being this high up meant the other side wasn’t so far away. Was it even a predator? Sure, it looked grisly, but looking grisly didn’t necessarily mean anything. Yet common sense said to be prepared for the worst, especially since that represented the option where all the screaming and dying horribly came from.

  But if I did draw my gun, then what? I couldn’t effectively climb one handed… especially not at this height. And if the thing didn’t attack me, I would be stuck sitting here till the damn bomb fell.

  The only realistic option was to move.

  And try not to die.

  I started slowly down the ladder, attempting to be as quiet as I could. No point in advertising everything I did. Not to mention, with my vision so limited I needed to hear as clearly as possible to keep track of my surroundings. With the growing sound of wind around me, that would likely prove to be difficult in itself.

  I managed to sneak down ten or twelve rungs before the undeniable sound of a hard carapace scraping steel reached my ears. It came from above me, and off to my right. It wasn’t right on top of me, but this thing had definitely moved.

  Holding my breath, I eased down a few more rungs.

  Sure enough, another soft scrape announced the creature had moved again. Between this sound and the last, I realized it must be climbing around the tower to the right at about the same level I had seen it before. Which meant it would soon be above me where I had started on the ladder… assuming it didn’t start coming down toward me at an angle once it rounded the corner on my side.

  I considered my options as I crept down farther.

  None of them were pretty.

  I had three lethal weapons within quick reach; the pistol in its holster, a seven-inch Marine Corp survival knife on the same belt, or a twenty-four-inch Columbian sawback machete in a sheath on the side of my backpack. Unfortunately, none of them had been selected for circumstances like this. The knife was a close fighting weapon, and I damn sure didn’t want to close with an armored creature possessing all those claws and pincers. The machete gave me better reach, but would still be awkward to wield under these conditions, and there remained the problem of this thing having an exoskeleton.