LITMIR.BIZ

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top of the stairs, they found a long, darkened hallway with broad puddles of standing water on the floor. Steam pipes and conduit hung low above them; what looked like banks of generators and transformers, and their controlling circuit panels, stood behind locked cages of heavy wire. When Vee opened the exit door to an alley, the grinding din was back—wag horns, the steady growl of engines, sirens, now mixed with unintelligible bullhorn commands. They moved quickly between high, windowless brick walls, around a hard right corner to the mouth. The street leading to the subway entrance was now blocked off with police and emergency vehicles and flashing lights. Helicopters zigzagged across the sky overhead. No one had time to marvel at what was going on outside.

      “Our position appears untenable,” Doc observed.

      “Then we go back to her place,” Ricky said, nodding in Vee’s direction. “We get in the machine and go back home to Deathlands.”

      “That isn’t possible,” Vee told him. “What you see happening on this street is what’s happening on my block. That’s the response when people get killed and cars get blown up. The whole area will have been cordoned off by armed police with helicopter overflights. No way in or out.”

      “We shouldn’t have chased Magus onto the street,” J.B. opined. “We should have just followed at a distance until we had a chance to chill him, with no witnesses. Now we’re as dead as everyone else in this city. That apartment is our only way out.”

      “Even if we could get back into her building, J.B.,” Ryan said, “even if we figured out the mat-trans’s controls and somehow made it to Deathlands, I think we’d arrive at the same redoubt with enforcers clawing at the door.”

      “So,” Krysty said, “if the city sec men don’t kill us, the enforcers at the other end of the chron jump will. And if we survive here until the twentieth, the nuke strikes will take us out anyway.”

      “That doesn’t leave many options,” Mildred stated.

      “Except to have one hell of a send-off,” Krysty said.

      “The mistake was all mine,” Ryan told them. “I brought this down on us. We should have waited outside the redoubt for Magus to come back. From the moment we set foot inside that place, we were fucked.”

      “Stuck between a rock and another rock,” Doc said soberly.

      They had been caught in countless tight spots in the past—or more correctly in the future—but they had always been able to figure a way out. This time perhaps not. A question occurred to Ryan: Could a person really die a hundred years before he was born? He kept it to himself.

      “We still have some time left,” Vee said. “Can’t we change the future somehow? Avert this nuclear attack? What do you know about it?”

      She sounded remarkably calm for someone who’d recently learned the world was going to blow up in a matter of hours, Doc thought.

      “Precious little that would help that cause, my dear,” Doc said. “An all-out missile exchange between the United States and the Russians on January 20, 2001, created a global, nuclear holocaust that ended much of civilization. That conflagration and its aftermath necessarily complicates the unraveling of the whos, the wheres and the whens. Which one, if either, started it is unknown. It could have been initiated by a third party or a computer glitch—or misinterpreted data. Miscommunication, even. Because we don’t know the precise chain of circumstances that triggered Armageddon, altering the course of those events becomes difficult if not impossible.”

      “If you’re thinking of warning someone about nukeday,” Krysty said, “who would listen?”

      “You’re right,” Vee agreed. “No one is going to listen.”

      “You believe us?” Ricky asked.

      “After what I’ve seen with my own eyes today, I’d believe anything you told me.”

      “What’s happened to us is triple bad luck, and there’s no way around it,” Ryan told the others. “But it doesn’t change why we’re here. Or what we can do in the time we have left. One way or another we can still make sure Magus never leaves this place.”

      “Chill half-metal bastard,” Jak spit.

      “We need to get off the street and figure out how,” Ryan said.

      “We can go to my office,” Vee told. “It will be closed for the night by the time we get there. I have the keys. No one will bother us. We can cut through the alleys and stay out of sight.”

      As they trooped single file down the sidewalk, away from the subway station and the police barricades, a man in a peacoat stepped from a doorway and, smiling broadly, accosted Ryan. “Snake Plissken!” he exclaimed. “I thought you were dead!” Then he laughed like a mutie hyena.

      Ryan kept walking. It wasn’t the first time he had heard that line.

      To his back the man shouted, “Hey, Snake, Escape from L.A. blew chunks!”

       Chapter Five

      Angelo McCreedy lowered his copy of the Daily Racing Form as people poured up the steps from the Thirty-Fourth Street–Herald Square Metro station. In his classic black chauffeur cap, black three-piece suit and tie and black leather gloves, he leaned against the stretch limo’s front fender. If his pickup didn’t show soon, he was going to have to move the limo from the taxi stand and start circling the block—the cabbies lined up behind him were starting to get restless. Exiting subway travelers seemed in an extra big hurry this afternoon, maybe because of all the sirens going off. A major accident was the cherry on top. It could louse up traffic for the rest of the day.

      As he folded his Form and tucked it under his arm, a mass of shiny purple appeared at the top of the subway stairs.

      Man, those are some big dudes, he thought.

      They looked almost identical, like octuplets. They were in matching outfits and had the same height and build. The tight hoodies kept their faces in shadow. They all sported what from a distance looked like very expensive alligator boots. All except the littlest one, who was being carried like a child.

      Some kind of cripple, he thought. Poor thing had metal feet.

      McCreedy’s heart did a skip-tee-doo when the purple bunch turned and came right at him. His face flushed with fight-or-flight hormones. He wanted to retreat around the front of the vehicle but couldn’t make his legs move quickly enough. He didn’t notice the assault rifles they carried until the two-horned, front sight of one was jammed up under his chin.

      The eyes shadowed by the hoodie top were yellow. Not yellow brown or yellow green. Yellow yellow, as in a daisy. And the pupils were elliptical slits that ran vertically, like a reptile’s. The double-wide holding the gun had on a rubber, alligator Halloween mask; it and the daisy eyes had to be some kind of prank. Then the mouth opened, and he saw the rows of small, pointed teeth and the flicking tongue.

      As he sagged back against the fender, the creature holding the cripple leaned the little one’s head close to his ear. McCreedy opened his mouth to cry for help, but no sound came from his throat.

      It had only half a human face, the rest was metal. The eyes were both metal. As the fan-bladed pupils opened wider, they made a whirring sound like the aperture of a cheap video camera. Guy wires and grommets connected its cheeks and jaw. Where living flesh abutted the stainless steel it looked angry and infected. It shouldn’t have been alive, but it was.

      In a voice that sounded like wing nuts rattling in a tin can, it said, “You will drive us.”

      As McCreedy was bum-rushed around the front bumper to the driver door, he kept thinking that this couldn’t be happening. In desperation he looked to the slowly passing cars for help, which was absurd—it was Manhattan. No help was forthcoming.

      The limo sagged heavily, springs squeaking

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