Elsewhere, page 26
But what of Amity?
81
Amity was looking at Ed and saw him staring through the window when he said, “They’re here,” even as he took the key to everything from a pocket of his sport coat, so she knew they were in deepest shit, that he hadn’t seen angels descending from on high. Just then something went whump hard enough so that you could be sure it wasn’t a good development, and things rattled inside the walls.
Instinct, sharpened by hundreds of stories full of adventure, told her to get on the floor, where the bullets would fly overhead if there were going to be bullets. But then the first rush of yellow fog spewed out of the wall vents, and she knew the kind of scene this was going to be, with no bullets involved. So she held her breath, jammed her napkin into her water glass, tore it out, closed her eyes, and covered her face with the wet cloth before drawing a breath through it.
She scooted her chair back from the table and got to her feet, blind because she held the dripping napkin to her face with both hands. Her heart raced like a mouse’s heart. She repressed the urge to gasp for breath, warning herself to avoid breathing as long as she could before sucking air through the sodden mask, in the hope that it would filter out all or most of the gas. She was scared, scared so badly that the word had a whole new meaning, more scared than she’d been when the bug-form robot had attacked, because she was unable to see, dared not look. And because no one was shouting or crying out. Which meant they were unconscious or dead. No. Not dead. Not Daddy. Not Mother. Not after all they had endured to be together again. As she turned away from the table, Amity could feel her pulse pounding in her throat, in her temples.
She bumped her father’s chair, knocking it against the table, which meant no one was in it. Daddy didn’t seem to be on the floor, either, but if he’d managed to get away, he would have taken her with him. He would never leave her behind.
Maybe five or six seconds had passed since she plastered the wet napkin over her face. When swimming, she could hold her breath underwater for half a minute easy, but maybe not as long with her crazy heart pounding so quick and all. She couldn’t flee the house, run for open air, because they would be waiting outside. She needed to move, move, move, and she knew where she needed to go, where she just might be safe at least for a short while.
She put her back to the table, took a few steps, and bumped into the counter at the sink, which had been directly behind her chair. She turned left and moved along the cabinetry, repeatedly knocking her right foot against the toe kick to be sure she wasn’t wandering off course. After she slipped a little in the coffee that Ed had spilled—Why hadn’t he fallen here, where was his body?—she reached the corner, turned left. The range with gas burners and stainless-steel hood should be to the right of her. Maybe just twelve freaking seconds, and already she felt as though she was suffocating. Her heart thundered. This was a medium-size kitchen but seemed bigger now that she was effectively blind. When she’d set the table for breakfast she’d snooped everywhere, checking out cabinets even after she found everything she needed. She was nosy. Or as the dictionary defined it: unduly curious about the affairs of others. It was a character flaw. She wasn’t prying or meddlesome. Just curious. But while curiosity had killed the cat, it had maybe saved her life in this case because now she knew where to go. Her right elbow knocked against the handle on the refrigerator door, which meant she’d made her way past the stacked ovens and the counter space beyond them. Like maybe eighteen seconds, and her lungs already felt as if they would collapse for lack of oxygen or burst with the useless air she refused to exhale, or burst and then also collapse. Past the refrigerator was a short section of wall, which she slid along before coming to the door she remembered. Holding the wet cloth to her face with just one hand, she used the other to feel for the knob and turn it. The trick now was to pull the door open only far enough to slip through, and then close it fast, to let as little gas as possible into the safe space beyond. Open, slip into the pantry, slam the door with a decisive bang.
She fumbled for the wall switch, clicked on the light. She let the napkin fall from her eyes, but held it over her mouth and nose as she exhaled and then sucked a first breath through the wet cloth, which was difficult enough to panic her. Well, no, not panic. Truly smart girls didn’t panic. But she pulled in such a meager breath of cotton-flavored air that she sucked again and again, as if she were a revived mummy desperate to breathe through its ancient Egyptian windings. The air was in fact much cleaner here than in the kitchen, contaminated by the thinnest of yellow mists instead of a thick cloud. The pantry had no heating/cooling vent through which the gas could be introduced, and the door was tightly fitted. Nevertheless, she kept the napkin in place, because maybe even this concentration of fumes was enough to knock her out.
Although the door was tight in the jamb, there was about a quarter-of-an-inch space between the bottom of it and the threshold. Very little or nothing seemed to be leaking through that gap just yet. One of the things Amity knew from a lifetime of stories was that the tiny particles that made up smoke and many gases were so light that even the weakest drafts kept them airborne a long time, delaying their descent to the floor, where the air usually remained cleaner, at least for a while. Eventually, however, the gas would creep under the door.
Duke Pellafino evidently liked beans a lot. She had noticed this earlier, during her explorations. His pantry had the usual boxed and canned groceries, but there were also soft plastic bags, each holding one or two pounds of dried navy beans, garbanzo beans, pinto beans. Apparently, Duke prepared homemade soups and stews and bean dishes beyond her imagining. She was pretty sure that he must fart a lot, though she hadn’t known him long enough to confirm this expectation. Now she used her free hand to snatch the flexible bags of beans from the shelf and jam them against the gap at the bottom of the door to prevent more fumes from entering.
That task accomplished, she stood with her back to the shelves, watching the glittering mist of particles turn lazily through the air and staring at the door, which sooner than later someone would open, probably a humongous thug dressed all in black and wearing a gas mask.
Realizing that it took more energy—therefore more air—to stand rather than sit, Amity settled to the pantry floor. She held the saturated cloth with both hands again, over her mouth and nose. She worried about Daddy, about her mother, about Duke and Ed, about her grandparents, about Snowball in his cage and maybe scared by the strange men in the bungalow, and she wondered if this pantry was one of the many places in which she would die.
82
When they transitioned from the kitchen in Prime to the same house elsewhere, the furniture wasn’t configured precisely the same. Jeffy landed not on the chair in which he had been sitting, but beside it, dropping to the floor hard enough to bruise his tailbone.
Apparently, Ed had been sufficiently quick-witted to avoid drawing even one breath when that other kitchen had been flooded with gas. He pulled Jeffy to his feet, shoved him toward the sink, turned on the cold water, and said insistently, “Splash your face. Come on, come on. Take deep breaths, blow them out hard. Splash your face. Keep at it, man, we need your mind clear.”
Jeffy’s mind cleared faster than he thought possible, which meant that he hadn’t twice breathed in the gas, and maybe his first inhalation hadn’t been deep. Ed had ported him out of there just in time. He dried his face on a dish towel that the physicist handed him. His vision was no longer blurry. He surveyed the kitchen, which was similar to—but not identical to—the one in which the attack against them had been made.
“Where are we?”
“This is Duke’s house, but in the world where Michelle lives alone in your bungalow, where you and Amity were run down and killed by a drunk.”
“Where’s Duke?”
“If he lives here in this timeline, he’s obviously not at home, or he’d be in our face, maybe leveling a gun at us, since he’s never met me in this world and probably doesn’t know you.”
Jeffy pointed to a wall calendar that featured photographs of dogs. “I’m pretty sure he lives here.”
“I think you’re right.”
Like schooling fish, nausea suddenly swirled around and around in the bowl of Jeffy’s stomach, a lingering effect of the gas. “I think I’m going to throw up.”
“Then do it,” Ed said impatiently. “The clock is ticking, we’ve got work to do.”
Jeffy turned to the sink and bent forward, but the nausea passed. “I’m all right. What work?”
Drawing back one panel of his sport coat, Ed revealed the pistol in his holster. “You weren’t wearing yours when we ported.”
“I put it on the counter, by the bread box, when Amity and I were making breakfast. I never had a holster for it.”
“If Duke lives here in this world, he’ll have guns somewhere. We need to find them.”
“We’re going back there shooting?” Jeffy asked.
“If that’s what seems necessary when we get there.”
“But Amity, Michelle—”
“We’ll do our best not to shoot them,” Ed said, and he led Jeffy out of the kitchen.
In the downstairs hallway, the dark eye of a ceiling-mounted motion detector, part of the home-security system, winked red when they stepped into view. At once the alarm sounded and a stern, recorded voice declared, “You have entered a protected area. Leave at once. The police have been called.”
83
Powerful directional microphones were aimed at the windows of the Pellafino house from within a surveillance vehicle disguised as a Roto-Rooter van parked across the street and also from an abandoned house on a parallel street with a line of sight on the back of the residence. With the aid of the mics, those who were about to attack the place had determined there were five people present at that address. One of them was a version of Edwin Harkenbach—almost certainly the one who shot Falkirk at the Coltrane bungalow.
In his heightened state of consciousness, wounded but without pain, above all pain, having earlier murdered a demigod without consequences, John Falkirk sat in the back of the Roto-Rooter van, thrilled by the realization that two keys to everything were in the house—Harkenbach’s and the one that Coltrane had received from another Harkenbach. They were soon to be in Falkirk’s possession, the instruments of absolute power.
When the directional mics further determined that all five people were gathered in the kitchen for breakfast, Lucas Blackridge, the SWAT specialist, approached the residence from a direction that ensured no one could see him through a kitchen window. Employing a police lock-release gun, he opened the side door of the garage. The forced-air furnace was located there. Blackridge extinguished the automatic pilot light, to ensure there would be no explosion. He set the timer and inserted the pressurized tank of sedative into the furnace, from which the gas would be distributed through the house ducting to every room.
Falkirk was disappointed that a deadly nerve agent or poisonous gas was not available for immediate use. To obtain either, he would have incurred a wait of between twelve and twenty-four hours while his requisition was sent to Central Ordnance, considered, fulfilled, and delivered to him. For all of its secret power and ruthlessness, the shadow state nevertheless had a bureaucracy of its own and the usual lazy functionaries who felt secure in their positions because the leaders of their union were harder cases than any agents with licenses to kill.
Within five minutes of Blackridge’s stealthy entrance to the garage, Falkirk could be certain that the occupants of Pellafino’s house were knocked out and waiting to be harvested like fish that had been jacklighted and then blown to the surface with a stick of dynamite by an impatient fisherman. They would remain unconscious for about an hour or more.
At that point, agents swarmed the street in black Suburbans, barricaded both ends of the block, and quickly cordoned off the target residence. When curious neighbors stepped outside to learn the reason for the commotion, they were told to stay in their homes and were respectfully escorted inside if they were polite. However, if they objected to any extent whatsoever or were rude or had the temerity to say, “I pay your salary through my taxes,” then they were taught a lesson about obedience to authority that they would not soon forget.
Only a few years earlier, after such a blitzkrieg as this, it would have been necessary for Falkirk and his men to enter the house wearing gas masks and open the windows to ventilate the place. In so doing, they would have risked being photographed by neighbors who would have uploaded their snapshots to the internet, making it more difficult to craft a cover story that even a gullible media and a somnolent public would accept at face value.
If progress had once been the friend of average men and women, these days every advance in technology seemed to give an advantage to those who understood that the masses must be managed, controlled, and encouraged to live in a crafted virtual reality where they would be content and confident of their freedom, even though they had none. Now, Falkirk and team benefited from a technological breakthrough that spared them from the need to mask up and enter the house and throw open the windows as if engaged in spring-cleaning.
In the garage, after retrieving the first now-empty tank, Lucas Blackridge inserted a second pressurized container into the furnace. This subsequent round released a high-velocity counterpoising gas that, in chemical reaction with the initial sedative, eliminated every trace of that material and of itself, leaving zero residue of either, returning the air within the home to a normal condition.
Falkirk climbed out of the back of the van. Preceded by two of his men, he caned across the street to the Pellafino residence.
A high-pressure system of dry northern air graced the morning with a meteorological phenomenon known as “severe clear,” a totally cloudless sky of an intense blue. The day was warm but not hot, and the air appeared free of all pollution. Hawks swooped wild and high, and other birds sang in the trees.
It was the perfect day to become the emperor of everything and to kill those who conspired against his ascendancy to the throne.
84
In the pantry, Amity heard a second whump that rattled things in the walls.
A weariness settled through her mind as she thought, Now what? She wasn’t physically weary, because she’d slept soundly for a few hours the previous night in the Bonner house, while her father kept a watch on their bungalow. She didn’t want to be one of those girls, the kind without enough fortitude in the face of adversity. It was always nice, however, in the middle of an epic quest, to have a respite with, say, a kindly retired couple—she having once been a maid to a princess, and he having been a former foundry man who had forged armor for the bravest knights—who would invite you into their cottage in the enchanted forest to share their dinner and then have a pipe and a snifter of brandy by the fire, with two good dogs snoring by the warm hearth. After that convivial evening and a safe sleep in a goose-down bed while the dogs stood guard against witches and warlocks, you were fortified and ready to carry on at any cost.
Instead, what she had was a pantry with canned goods and bags of dried beans that made her want to fart just by looking at them. She was alone and afraid and on the brink of being dispirited.
At least, when she dared to take the wet cloth off her face and breathe without that filter, she found the concentration of gas in the pantry was so low that she didn’t pass out.
After the second whump, the brief weariness lifted from her because unidentifiable sounds like that always meant something was going to happen. Lord knew what. And whether you were weary or not, you’d better be prepared for whatever was coming.
She got to her feet and took two cans of pears from a shelf, intending to throw them at whoever opened the door.
85
According to this Ed Harkenbach, who seemed to have more street smarts and be somewhat more balanced than the Ed who had entrusted Jeffy with his key to everything, the security alarm was nothing to worry about.
“A lot of things change from timeline to timeline,” he said as he led Jeffy along the hallway to Duke Pellafino’s study, “but in those that are at all similar to this world, one of the things you can rely on is that the police will take at least twenty minutes to respond to a security alarm in a private home. We’ll have our guns long before then.”
“How can you be certain Duke has guns?”
Raising his voice above the wailing alarm, Ed said, “How can I be certain the sun will rise in the east and set in the west? He said he was a detective in the Gang Activities Section of the LAPD.”
“He told me, too,” Jeffy said. “But he retired from that.”
“When you spend years putting hard-core sociopaths in prison, many of them MS-13 lunatics from Mexico and points south, psychos who like to behead people and hang others from streetlamps before eviscerating them, who butcher babies for pleasure, you have to figure if one of them gets out of prison, he might come looking for you. To a guy like Duke, retirement doesn’t mean the same thing as it does to your average accountant.”
In Pellafino’s study, as the house alarm continued to shrill, they found a handsome mahogany gun cabinet. The doors were locked, and the glass in them proved to be armored when Ed tried to shatter it with the butt of his pistol.
“Stand back,” the physicist ordered, and with two shots he blew out the lock on the cabinet.
