Timelock Read online

  What are they all doing in the cooler with me?

  Who’s minding the store?

  Where did this leather office chair come from?

  I register these questions, but most of all I know I have to get out of here fast. I force my legs to move. One step. Two. The shop workers don’t try to stop me.

  They just wait. I’ve almost made it to the door. I seem to be moving in slow motion. Feet are heavy. Muscles don’t respond.

  But my brain still works. No wonder the idea to buy P.J. flowers popped into my head right before I passed this store. It was planted. Some sort of telepathic suggestion. I fell into a trap.

  I reach for the handle. But the door now seems heavy. I manage to pull it open an inch. “Help me,” I mumble.

  “Beacon of Hope, you’re the one who needs to help us,” the bald florist says.

  3

  I look back at the florist. Shake my head. “No.”

  “Yes,” he insists. “Terrible things have happened. There’s no time to lose. You’re urgently needed.”

  “NO!” I scream, and with a tremendous effort pull the door open a little more. “Find someone else. I’m out of here.”

  The girl with the pierced nose steps over, raises her spray bottle, and squirts me in the face. My fingers instantly go limp on the handle and the door swings shut again. I start to topple and the big guy catches me on the chair. He wheels me over to the table, and then lifts me up onto it.

  The exotic flowers in the cooler room seem to be blurring, melting, transforming. I’m surrounded by computer controls. Screens and dials and keyboards.

  It’s getting much harder for me to talk, but I gasp out, “No. Please. It’s not fair. My life. P.J.”

  “I’m afraid there’s no choice, my Prince,” the florist says, injecting me with something as his two helpers strap me down. “Kidah was not able to kill the Dark Lord. Things have taken a frightful turn. Horrific. You’re needed right away.”

  I gasp out a final question: “Where?”

  “Why, there. With your mother and father. Or at least your mother. As for your father, that’s part of the whole problem, isn’t it? Now stop trying to move. Just hold still. Think of something nice. This will hurt, but it won’t take long. Relatively speaking, that is.”

  He steps away from me, to some sort of master control panel. His two assistants start punching keys and turning dials. The cooler is no longer cold. It’s getting warmer. Hotter. Stifling.

  The tabletop I’m strapped to starts to move. Swing. Revolve.

  When I come up from that first revolution, I hear the explosion. Like a tsunami of sound. I see on a screen that a wall just got blown out in front of the shop.

  “Sonic grenade!” the big guy in the Giants cap calls out in a worried voice.

  “The Dark Army has found us!” the girl announces.

  “We can’t stop now!” the florist tells them. “We have to finish. Meredith, help me. Alazam, fight them.”

  As I complete a second revolution, I see that the big guy is unsheathing some sort of flaming sword. The florist and the girl are working at their computer consoles with great intensity.

  I go down and up a third time. Whatever is spinning me is speeding up. Whirling.

  I’m starting to get dizzy. Disoriented. Maybe it was the injection. I open my mouth to scream but no sound comes out.

  The door to the flower cooler liquefies and a seven-foot-tall Dark Army cyborg steps in and points a gun at me.

  Before he can shoot, Al chops him in half with the flaming sword. Torso and trunk are hewn apart at the hip, and blood spurts while circuits spark.

  Now I’m spinning very fast.

  More dark shapes pour into the cooler. One of them manages to wrest the sword away from Al and behead him with it.

  A Dark Army monstrosity with a human body and an owl-like head shoots Meredith with a laser that comes streaming out of its yellow eyes. The blazing beam burns off her right arm to the shoulder. She screams, and then a second laser burst silences her.

  I see the owl head swivel toward me. A blast streaks out but misses me.

  I’m not just a moving target, I’m a whirling target that they can’t draw a bead on. I try to follow what’s happening, but I’m spinning so fast it’s getting blurry.

  The pudgy florist is spouting blood from some dire injury, but I see him dive toward Meredith’s console where a green button is flashing.

  A laser shot irradiates both his legs, but his momentum carries him the last few inches, and he bashes his fist decisively down on the green button.

  A split second later he is lasered into cinders. The Dark Army goons start firing away at the complicated machinery all around the room. Screens melt and keyboards explode.

  But jabbing down the green button must have finished some sort of crucial command sequence. Bolts of blinding emerald light shoot down from the ceiling and converge on me while I spin.

  The last thing I see is a Dark Army goon firing a gun at me, and I feel a searing pain in my shoulder.

  And then the green light swallows me up.

  4

  Propelled through a tunnel of blinding light, faster and faster. Barely conscious, but I feel the acceleration and I know where it must lead.

  No one can survive this speed. I will crash out. Hit a wall. Atomize.

  Side tunnels diverge in all directions at all times. Branches in a flickering labyrinth of green, white, and red. Up ahead, some sort of dark threshold looms.

  Can this be the gateway to death? It seems to reach out for me. A dark tongue licks me in.

  Ingested by a black hole?

  In the large intestine of an event horizon?

  I feel myself being torn slowly apart from all directions at once. Is this dismemberment by gravity? Evisceration by centrifugal force?

  It’s beyond agonizing.

  Over the far edge of unbearable.

  But I have to bear it because there’s no way out. I’m screaming but there’s no sound here and no one to hear me.

  Death would be such a mercy. An escape. Please take me. Enfold me.

  End it.

  But it doesn’t end. It only intensifies. Till everything but the agonizing pain fades to nothingness.

  And then I’m out the other side of the excruciating inky hell, bursting through a golden membrane into some sort of bright cottony haze.

  Particles. A quanta snowstorm. The dandruff of space-time. I’m sailing through it, head over heels.

  It’s warm. Soft. Salty.

  Plop. Now I’m swimming in it. Floating in it. Sinking down into it. It’s more than warm. It’s hot!

  The old survival instinct kicks in. A red alarm light begins flashing in my mind. Something is very wrong.

  Because it’s not snow. Nor did I tumble out of the tunnel of eternity into a swimming pool.

  These are grains of sand, scorching to the touch. Beneath my head. Sifting through my hair. Covering me like an electric blanket that’s short-circuiting.

  It’s a sandstorm! And once the sand buries me, all will be over! Another few seconds and I’ll be too deep to ever fight my way to the surface.

  One chance. Have to battle back to daylight. But which way is up? I could just be digging myself down deeper. I force my mind to work.

  The fear of being buried alive helps me shake out the cobwebs. Yes, these are my hands, clawing upward. These are my legs kicking. My eyes are blinded by stinging sand. This is my mouth cracking wide open, wailing in agony.

  One hand breaks through, and then my arm, and somehow I pull myself up and out of a desert grave. I try to gasp in oxygen, but what I’m breathing doesn’t fill my lungs. I try to clear my eyes, but even as I wipe the sand away, I glimpse an orange-white sky so bright and burning with unfiltered glare that I can’t bear to look at it.

  I’m still in the shorts and T-shirt I went jogging in around the reservoir. The sand chars my skin.

  I get to my feet, and I can feel the heat from the
ground through my running shoes. Where am I?

  An endless expanse of sand shimmers in the fierce heat of the blast-furnace sun. No trees. No buildings. No rocks. No shade. A spot of red falls on the sand.

  Oh yeah, my shoulder. There’s a nasty gash where the Dark Army ghoul shot me while I was strapped to the table.

  I wonder if I’ll bleed to death before I bake to death. I start walking. The sand blows in my eyes so I hold my good arm in front of my face. It blocks my vision, but there’s nothing to see in a raging sandstorm. And even if the wind died down a bit and the sand stopped whipping at me, the solar glare would be blinding.

  I’m lost, blind, and dripping blood.

  But that’s not what’s really worrying me. There’s another, deeper concern edging into my consciousness.

  When I was on the table in the florist’s shop, the Dark Army ghouls didn’t only shoot at the people. They also fired away at the controls of the machines that launched me through time. They succeeded in killing the florist and his helpers, and they probably also did serious damage to the computer controls.

  I’m pretty sure my mother and father didn’t arrange for their son to be teleported back into a deadly sandstorm. I was probably supposed to arrive in some cushy palace chamber, just in time for a late-night snack.

  So something malfunctioned; some key chronometer dial was probably incinerated by a laser. As I stagger through the sand, I can’t help wondering how much alteration that might have caused to my trajectory. Did it significantly change the time and place where I arrived?

  Suppose I’m not just a few miles south of the palace. I might have also arrived ten years later than I was supposed to, when humanity has completely perished.

  The Dark Army may rule this bleak planet. Or the earth’s declining condition may have been too much even for them. I might have arrived on a lifeless crag. I could be the only living organism left.

  I stagger on. The soles of my shoes are melting—my feet feel like they’re being slowly grilled. I lurch and almost go down. Blown sand blasts my arms and legs. There’s no way for me to cover up. I try to turn my body so that my back is to the wind, but it’s swirling.

  I sink to one knee and scream as my weight pushes down and I can feel the skin of my kneecap singe.

  Somehow I get back up and force myself onward. In desperation, I lower my arm and blink through the red-hot cloud of dust. There’s something up ahead.

  Is it a house? A cave? No, just a black rock. An ugly, misshapen boulder in the middle of a wasteland.

  It will provide little or no shelter, and I’ll never reach it anyway. It’s too far, and I’m too weak.

  But I have to try. Because I’m out of other options.

  I stagger toward it. Every remaining volt of my life force is now directed toward making it to that boulder.

  I keep myself going with visions of P.J.—she’ll be back from the library now, planning her evening in the city. I wish I could knock on her door with my roses. I wish I could take her in my arms and tell her how much I love her, and warn her that the Dark Army may be closing in.

  But I can’t. While I’m dying in this sandstorm, she’s probably heading out with the lacrosse player.

  That thought pushes me on a few steps.

  I think of Gisco. I wonder if he was involved in planning that little charade at the florist’s. He knows how I feel about P.J. and he’s a tricky fellow—the telepathic suggestion that brought me in the door could certainly have been his idea. I’ll never get to ask him. And he’ll never know what happened to me. Strange that two comrades who shared so many dangers together should end up so far apart.

  The boulder is much closer, but I can’t walk another step. I sink to my knees and crawl toward it, screaming each time my leg or palm presses the scorching sand.

  Eko will also never know what happened to me. I guess Kidah’s prophecies that I would marry her were wrong. I’m sure she’ll get over it and find someone else. Her combination of beauty and brains, Zen calm and intensity, sexiness and vulnerability, is pretty irresistible.

  Five feet from the boulder. Sand is coating the insides of my nose and mouth now, hot and dry in my throat. My hands and feet are flayed and fricasseed. I can feel myself slowly passing out.

  I lunge forward and just manage to touch the boulder, and then I jerk my fingers away. It’s smoldering hot. Great, I’ve managed with my last effort to crawl to the largest hot coal in a future Sahara.

  I’m flat on my stomach now in the burning sand, too weak to lift myself up to my knees. I slither and snake around the boulder, searching for some semblance of shelter. Is there a cave, a rooflike overhang, or even a small ledge that will create a tiny patch of shade?

  I can’t see anymore, but I can still feel. The sand does seem just a bit cooler. Or maybe I’m dying, and my senses are blinking out.

  I’ll expire here, unmissed and unmourned, hugging this humongous charcoal for all eternity.

  I feel one last surge of rage at the pointlessness of it all, and then I sink away into the blackness of a final surrender.

  5

  Would he like some tea?

  I don’t know where I am or what’s happened to me, but five telepathic words puncture the dark stillness.

  I’m surely dead. Roasted in the hot sand. Mummified by the dryness. Desiccated, buried, and forgotten.

  This must be the afterlife. Strange, I don’t see any angels or hear any harp music. No hellfire, either. It’s just black and quiet.

  Does he take it with lemon?

  Only one problem. It’s hard for me to believe they drink tea in the afterlife, with or without lemon. I try to move. The only thing I can feel is my parched tongue, which slowly unsticks from the roof of my mouth.

  I’m blind. Paralyzed. Insensate.

  Of course it’s not real lemon I’m offering to him. Citrus has been impossible to get for twenty years, since the last trees withered in Haifa. But it’s a pretty good homemade substitute, if Morgan does say so himself.

  “Can’t see,” I try to say. But the words don’t come out. I can’t open my mouth. Actually, that’s not the problem. I think my mouth is open. But there’s something in front of it, blocking it.

  Then I realize that whoever’s talking to me isn’t speaking out loud. He’s using telepathy. So I fire back: Help me. I can’t move. I’ve gone blind.

  He’s being silly. His ocular equipment is perfectly functional. Morgan just had to cover him to hydrate him a bit. He was very dry. But what did he expect, taking a stroll on the crust in broad daylight? And he shouldn’t try to move. He’s still too weak.

  It’s weird being spoken about in the third person.

  Something wet and sticky is slowly peeled off my face.

  I can breathe more easily. And I can see again! Not clearly, but shapes and shadows.

  Someone is moving near me. Not walking upright like a man. Scuttling. Uh-oh—is it a giant spider? Have I been taken prisoner by the Dark Lord, or one of his arachno-spawn? No, whoever is with me is not scuttling on eight legs but shuffling along like an ape.

  I blink. It’s a man. A little man, with bushy eyebrows and unnaturally long arms that seem to brush the floor when he walks, so that he looks like a gnomish chimpanzee. We’re in some kind of low-ceilinged cavern.

  Is he better?

  A little better, I tell him. Thanks. Who are you?

  Morgan. Who is he?

  Jack. What am I doing here?

  He’s lying on my table.

  I know that, Morgan. I’ve been making kind of a habit of lying on tables lately. I meant what am I doing in this hole or cave or pit or wherever the hell we are?

  He doesn’t like Morgan’s hutch.

  I like your hutch. It’s fine.

  But not good enough for him? Too small, maybe? Too dark? Just a Gorm, he mocks, living in a glorified latrine. Ah, but when he was dying on the crust, who saved his life? Thank you, Morgan. And thank you for offering him tea, Morgan. You could have
left him to die and instead you rescued him, Morgan, and he’s ever so grateful.

  Uh-oh, a Gorm. I don’t know exactly what that means, but I ran into one when I first fled Hadley, and it didn’t end well. She pretended to be a Manhattan prep school girl, lured me to her fabulous penthouse, and almost devoured me. I’d better be very careful here.

  I try to sit up. No good, I’m too weak. But I do manage to raise my head a few inches and peer around. The floor is dirt, covered by what look like plastic throw rugs. I see a small bed and chairs and on the far wall a bunch of mechanical equipment that I can’t begin to fathom. It could be junk or it could be a supercomputer.

  I take a breath and try to shake the cobwebs from my brain and the sand out of my ears. I’ve got to find a way to befriend this Gorm.

  Look, I try to placate him telepathically, no offense meant. It’s one of the nicest hutches I’ve ever been in.

  He says it but does he really mean it?

  Absolutely.

  How many has he been in, I wonder?

  The point is that your place is swell. But how did I get here? The last thing I remember is curling up next to a rock and preparing to die as the hot sand covered me.

  Yes, but Morgan dug him out. When darkness comes, Morgan hunts. Darkness is the time to dig. Morgan brought him back and kept him alive and now Morgan wants to drink tea and have a nice chat.

  Okay, you got it, let’s have some tea. I push myself up with my arms and swing around to a sitting position. The room swirls and I feel dizzy, but I make it.

  He wants to drink Morgan’s tea, but he doesn’t want to chat with Morgan.

  Just my luck, I think to myself. Lured into a flower shop, attacked by the Dark Army, teleported into the far future, buried in a sandstorm, and rescued by a basket case of a Gorm with severe self-esteem issues.

  You’re wrong, I tell him, I’d love to chat. How’s the weather outside?

  Heat, lethal. Radiation level, lethal. Winds, lethal. Humidity index, lethal.

  Wow, bad day, huh? What about tomorrow?