Day 276 - Repeat Offenders - Chapter 16.2 (2505 Words)

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REPEAT OFFENDERS

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 16.2

There were three men standing, Kyle still bound to the chair and bleeding, looking defiantly up at the camera positioned above the secured doorway to the Freeze Room. He was inches from the dropped lighter, the flame frozen in space and time an odd bulb of orange flame distorted by the mechanics of dropping downwards through the air.

The machine had stopped it and the time in totality except for the bubble in which Detective George Samuels now stood, watching through the monitors at first but then graduating to the opened door and staring through the men in stasis and wondering what he could do about it.

He could do a few things as soon as he unfroze time and none of them seemed palatable to him as he examined the scene and discarded scenario after scenario. He could shoot the Boss and easily kill him where he stands. A bullet to the side of the head from a dozen feet away through an open doorway and no guns aimed at him, he could pull that off with a little planning. He was a good shot and he could perform the shot using the time device to his advantage. The problem was not going to be shooting the man, it was going to be the lighter, the lighter that had already been dropped towards his partner, the severely injured and alcohol soaked Kyle Stone.

He checked his gun, there were seven shots in the chamber and he had to plan this out very, very carefully. He studied the angles, looked at the distances and checked the gun for any new obstructions, even took the time to clean it, pulling it apart using the rags he found in a corner and the maintenance cleaning gear obviously kept there to service the Freeze Room Machinery.

He took his stance and fired six shots through the open doorway, one at a time, each one planned and executed carefully and taking his time. He spent at least a minute on each of them and he saw them hit the edge of the stasis field. The sound of gunshots blasted through the space he was in but did echo or reverberate in the warehouse at all, the sound as well as the projectile were all stopped in the split second they reached the barrier.

He stood back and examined the bullets from a few inches away, the heat from them had dissipated on the rear of the bullet but they were still visibly hot in the frozen front of time barrier. Looking down the trajectory of each shot he had taken so carefully he hoped each one of them would find it’s mark and make the adjustment to the scenario he hoped for.

Finally he realized that there was nothing else he could and no further plan he could make to affect the outcome of the situation outside, in real time. He had one bullet left in the chamber and he knew the spare magazine was in Kyle’s bag, which was in the corner as yet undiscovered by the thugs who had shot and captured him. That bag was across the room; he had put it down in the corner when they had started examining the scene. It was outside of the time field and he had no idea how to extend its shape to that area without including the men in the main room. He didn’t even know if that were possible.

Satisfied as he was going to be he came back to the machine and he left the door open and picked up the one object he might need if this didn’t work as well as he thought it might. Hefting it in his hand he kept an eye on the monitor, one on the doorway and hovered his hand over the button to stop the stasis field and resume time in this universe.

Kyle Stone kept his eyes firmly on camera, willing the man he knew to be on the other side to keep to the plan and let him die, he was trying to communicate via the most stoic and calm face he could imagine portraying in the circumstances he was in.

Then a number of things all happened at once. There was the loudest gunshot he had ever heard in his life and an explosion of flame in front of his eyes, a giant fireball engulfed the space above him almost at head height, coming towards him. Just in the split second before he closed his eyes as the flame reached out towards him, the man standing right in front of him, the Boss with the lighter, his head exploded and he saw that the door he was looking towards, below the hidden camera, was wide open, he had not seen it open, it just flicked into an open state from closed.

His eyes closed he waited for the heat of the explosion to reach him and then he felt it hitting him like a wall of ice. Is that what burning to death felt like? So hot that it was cold? Is that the reverse of the so cold it feels hot sensation?

Within a few seconds though he was breathing in cold and clammy foam and sputtering the freezing cold contents of the fire extinguisher being emptied on his face and chest.

“You ok? Are you ok?” Came a frantic voice and then hands were wiping the cold CO2 from his eyes and mouth, allowing him to spit away the unpleasant sensation of having the extinguisher unloaded on him. The foam on his legs and chest was burning through the bandages as badly as the alcohol had been doing when he was being tortured for information.

George had a towel and some rags, which smelled musty, and old as he wiped away the foam, each brush of Kyle’s body was a new exercise in pain as the wounds were jostled and jolted by the movements. Breathing heavily he eventually saw the concerned look ion the cops face as he was checking to see if he had saved him according to whatever crazy plan he had come up with.

“You should have let me die.” Kyle said eventually and then looked around the room, to see that the three men were all lying in pools of blood each with a single head wound, and one of them was twitching violently, through reflex in their death. “What and how?” Kyle shook the fug from his head and the pain of a migraine settled in and was blinding him to what he could see with his eyes. The stress and strain on his body was too great and he felt the jackhammer pain in the back of his head taking control of his faculties.

“I saved a bullet, I had seven and I used six on the lighter and your new friends, and if I missed badly? Then the seventh was for you. I figured it was the most humane thing given the scenario. Glad I didn’t miss though eh?”

Kyle was too tired, too sore and in too much pain to argue the point. “Six?” he said querying the shots he had taken.

“You probably heard one, though what you heard was six gunshots all at the same exact time, I shot from outside the frozen field into the … I guess real world, the real time? Anyway I lined up and took six shots, two at the lighter, which was the smallest target and could have missed easily and then one at the men, they were easy enough to make those shots at this distance.” George had walked back to the door and was illustrating the stance and the aim that he had taken to make those shots.

“Then you turn it off and all six go at once?” That made sense and it was  a solution to the problem that had not occurred to Kyle Stone, he was glad to have George along, though with the wounds and injuries he had sustained he wondered if George had only postponed the inevitable. “Get the extra mag from the bag quickly! They’re bound to have someone else in the car, on watch!”

George ran for the bag and pulled the magazine out as the last of the men came cautiously into the room and looked over at the man in the chair and the three bodies on the floor in pools of expanding blood.

“What the fuck?” he said as the barrel of George’s gun pressed into the back of his neck and he froze, just like his colleagues had, but this time voluntarily. He held his right hand up and in it he held his piece by the trigger guard.

“I’ll take that thanks.” Said George as he took the weapon and pushed the man forwards, looking out the door for more men and seeing none he moved to the kitchen area and the corpses of the men on the floor.

“Do you know who we are you fucking moron?” Said the man with real anger in his voice, “There is no where on this earth you can fucking hide that we won’t find you and make you wish we had killed you.”

Kyle Stone laughed from his chair and felt the pain wrack his body when he did, but it was still funny.

George held the man at gunpoint and bade him untie the captured Kyle from his prison chair with a close eye to the thug who was looking for the opportunity to take his revenge. Now George had two guns on him and he handed the gun with the full clip to Kyle, taking the time to change the mag in his own piece, and then between the two of them they bound the man to the chair as tightly as they could make it, ignoring the glares and occasional threats leveled at them.

“What do we do now?” Kyle was looking at his wounds and at the door, they would have to wake up Brian to figure out how to use the machine to their advantage and see if there was any way they would be able to move to the previous dimension. To see if the following dimensions had collapsed and folded under the destruction of the machine as predicted.

“You die motherfuckers, maybe not today and maybe not tomorrow but soon. You cannot fucking hide.” The venom in the man’s was matched with a confidence and belief in his words.

“If you’re going to misquote a classic, you could probably do a better job than Casablanca, where’s the Goodfellas, the Godfather quotes when you need them eh?” George poked the man in the chest with the barrel of the gun and he got a bristled expansion of the man’s muscular frame, testing the bounds he was in but not getting any closer to freedom than frustration.

“We need to wake him up and get the machine fixed.” George was nodding as he spoke, not really looking for an agreement but letting him in on the plan.

“Can it even be fixed?” Kyle was unsure there was any point to that, and he just wanted to lie down and let the pain stop in the easiest way possible short of suicide.

“Can you fix it?”

“No, you know I can’t.”

“Neither can I so … we get the guy who can.”

Ignoring the huffing and puffing of the man in the chair they moved into the room and shut the door, making their way to the machinery they were well familiar with. They had defrosted and moved on a number of versions of Brian in the preceding dimensions, each jump taking a smaller toll on their bodies, and they had swapped out with a number of the early members of the team and taken their place. This was the easy part of the equation, the question now was how they could do it without the machine, and if the dimension they came from even existed any more.

The process they had followed relied heavily on the big machine, not the time freezer but they used the same core architecture to manipulate reality so they were betting on the ability of the man they were about to unfreeze to reverse engineer a solution from the parts they had.

There was a bang, a crash and a muffled grunt from the monitor and they saw the man they had tied lying sideways on the floor trying to get out of the chair, but it was made of metal and easily withstood the jarring crash and kept him captive, but able to move around.

“The guns.” They had not bothered to disarm the corpses, and now the thug was able to scoot around on his side, slowly and painfully making his way to the weapons on the floor.

“You do the honors.” George said and he ran back out the slowly opening door and picked up the nearest weapon from the tied up man on his side, getting a face full of saliva and some choice swear words for his efforts. The chair the man was bound to was twisted and propped up against one of the kitchen cabinets, up on two legs and using the back of the chair and the weight of the man to lock it in place, unable to easily move it from that position he was left cursing and twisting to get free.

Kyle was hunched over and spitting blood from his mouth when George came back in the room. Running to his partner and new friend he manoeuvred him into a chair of his own, this one much more comfortable and also leather bound for the desk of the man who operated from this room.

“We need to get you to a hospital.” George said and then went back to the machine. “Just not in this world, ok? We’ll wake this bastard up and then he can move us forward or back or whatever we can do, then we’ll have a chance.”

Kyle coughed more blood up and shook his head. “Put me in the box.”

“What?”

“It’ll buy us some time, wake Dr Crouse up and swap us over, then I can be frozen and my injuries won’t be any worse, but then you can work on fixing the machine. It’s the only way.”

George nodded, it made sense but it also meant that he alone had to convince the Scientist of what he needed to do and what he would eventually become, something they had done as a double act until now. But they were close now, so close to the start and fixing this whole mess.

Saving twenty dimensions and countless copies of souls across the realities, they could not give up and let it all fall and they could not turn their backs on each other and leave one behind either.

George went to the machine and signaled to his partner.

“Ready?”