Incursion (The Narrows of Time Series Book 2) Read online

  Jenkins slurred an uneven grunt, then said, “Don’t. Please.”

  Again, Lucas touched the ends together, sending more sparks into the air. “It’s gonna smell like burnt ball sack in a minute.” He waited a few seconds, but still nothing from Jenkins. He touched the wires to the side of the man’s neck to give him a sample of what was to come. Jenkins’ face tightened and constricted, as did most of the muscles in his body. Lucas pulled the wires away from contact. “Hurts like a motherfucker, doesn’t it?”

  Jenkins exhaled and his head slumped to his chest. He appeared to be resolute in his defiance.

  Lucas’ arms grew heavy and his neck ached. Damn it, he thought, shaking his head. He’s really gonna make me do this? He lowered the copper ends to within an inch of Jenkins’ testicles. “Last chance before I flambé your balls.”

  “Okay. . . . Okay. . . . I’ll tell you.”

  Finally, Lucas thought. He grabbed the underside of Jenkins’ chin, tugging it hard. “Where the hell are they?”

  The words dripped out of Jenkins’ mouth slowly. “In our Clark County storage facility, along Route 9. Cyrus has them hidden in the back of the Dunn-Rite Café.” Jenkins drew in a deep, unsteady breath before he added, “But you’ll need a password to get in.”

  Lucas released the man’s jaw and pushed his head back. “What is it?”

  “When the hostess greets you, tell her you heard they have the best double apple fritters in town. She’ll ask you if you want anchovies on them and you must answer ‘Yes, with yellow cream sauce.’”

  Lucas straightened his back, returning his posture to the upright position. His muscles relaxed. He didn’t have to puke after all. He tossed the electrical cord to the ground and walked to the electrical outlet. He bent down and pulled the cord from the socket before returning to Jenkins. “Now that wasn’t so hard, was it? You could’ve saved yourself a lot of pain by just telling me what I wanted to know up front, ya dumb son of a bitch.”

  “Are you going to kill me now?”

  Lucas never would’ve killed him, even if he didn’t talk. “That all depends. Are you going to tell Cyrus about our little chat?”

  Jenkins shook his head.

  “Good. Then you’ll see your wife again.”

  Jenkins’ crying grew louder as a river of tears streamed down his cheeks, running into his lap.

  “Why are you crying? I said I wasn’t gonna kill you.”

  “Cyrus will know it was me.”

  “Maybe next time you’ll think twice about selling out your own people to an evil son of a bitch like Cyrus.”

  “He’s going to kill my family. My wife and daughter have nothing to do with this. Please, you have to help me.”

  “It’s not my problem,” Lucas said, as a knot swelled in his gut.

  Supreme psychosis allows childish meanderings until lady heaven ends lavish eagerness, the voice in his head said. Lucas winced when a sharp twinge of pain reverberated inside his skull. He collected himself, then laughed at the traveler’s nonsense. Gibberish, he thought.

  “Please help me,” Jenkins said again. “You have no idea what Cyrus will do to them.”

  Lucas turned his thoughts to Jenkins’ wife and daughter. He sighed. Jenkins was right: They weren’t part of this man’s actions. They were innocent. Just like his missing foster brother Drew. He needed to do something or else the knot in his stomach would continue to consume him. He thought about inviting Jenkins and his family back to Kleezebee’s cabin where they would be safe. It was an obvious security risk, but what else could he do? He couldn’t leave the man’s family to fend for themselves. Then he thought about Kleezebee’s reaction and knew it would never fly with the professor. He needed a different plan, and fast. Jenkins’s kitchen staff would soon arrive to begin their work day.

  Lucas searched Jenkins’ pockets and found the man’s sleek, nanofilm storage device in his back left pocket. He held the electronic device up to his own digital wallet, then activated and used the light-blue touchscreen interface to transfer his three remaining Mag-Lift credits to the Jenkins’ account. Lucas had been saving the passes for emergency use in case he ever needed to get the professor and Drew out of town in a hurry. He had obtained the hard-to-get passes through trade at Big Betty’s Barter Boutique located in the musty Narrows on the south side of Flandreau City. He made a mental note to break in again and steal more handguns and ammo from the town’s gunsmith to use as trade. It worked once, it’ll work again, he thought. Simple enough.

  “I just transferred some Mag-Lift passes to your account. Use them to get your family as far away from here as you can. Change your names. Change your appearance. Do whatever you need to do. But for fuck’s sake, get on the Mag-Lift and get the hell out of here and never tell anyone you ever spoke to me.”

  Jenkins finally stopped crying. “Okay. I will,” he said, though it wasn’t very convincing. “Thank you.”

  Lucas cut through the rope with the pocketknife and threw the soiled towel into Jenkins’ lap to cover his privates. He gave the box cutter to Jenkins and stepped back in case Jenkins tried to take a swipe at him. “Use this to relieve the pressure in that eye. If you don’t, you may never see with it again.”

  Lucas rolled the interrogation tools inside the wrap, then stuffed them inside his soggy, rust-stained shirt before walking to the bottom of the basement stairs. He looked back at Jenkins, adjusting the mask to allow him to see through the eye holes properly. “Count to a hundred before you leave this room. Got it?”

  Jenkins nodded.

  Lucas climbed the stairs, but before he made it to the top step, the basement door opened. Two people—one male and one female—stood in the opening wearing chef attire. The woman looked at Lucas. She screamed. The male cook charged with an angry fist, but Lucas ducked to slip his punch. Lucas whirled around and shoved the man, sending the chef down the stairs to the bottom.

  Lucas ran past the hysterical woman, through the restaurant and out into the empty street where a chorus of long, early morning shadows covered his escape route. He sprinted to a nearby alley where his getaway vehicle was parked. He opened the overhead door and sat inside. He pulled the mask off his head and exhaled a long breath.

  TWO

  Lucas pulled alongside Kleezebee’s cabin on the north face of Ghost Mountain, set the drifting brake, and got out of the skimmer truck. The gravity inversion vehicle, a skimmer as the public called it, used a combination of pressurized air to achieve initial lift, and a vat of Mercury plasma spinning inside a magnetic coil to generate momentum and speed by modulating ground-level gravity fields. It traveled precisely eight and a half inches off the ground and, if properly maintained, could reach a speed of a hundred and twenty miles an hour.

  Kleezebee had acquired the hand-me-down vehicle a few months earlier from Crazy Larry, the local preacher in town, whose idea of proper maintenance meant simply parking it in the shade. The used skimmer’s top speed was closer to eighty-eight and reminded him of his adoptive father’s old Ford beater back on Earth, except this one was blue instead of red. Both of them leaked fluids faster than he could fill them up.

  Lucas closed the overhead door slowly in case the professor was sleeping in, but the hinges complained loudly. “Fucking POS,” he muttered as a sharp headache began to mount in the center of his forehead. He winced, looking in the skimmer’s side mirror, but he didn’t see his own reflection. Instead, it was the face of his missing foster brother, Drew, who had disappeared without a trace.

  Drew’s lips were moving at half-speed, but Lucas couldn’t hear or understand the words he was saying. It was a common vision the past few weeks, one that he encountered in the occasional reflective surface. Each time Drew’s face appeared, so did a sharp pain that burrowed through his ears and into the deep recesses of his skull.

  The pain escalated, pounding at his eardrums from the inside. He turned, leaning his back against the driver’s door of the skimmer truck. He wrapped his hands around his skull as
his chest took over, sucking in a series of deep, rapid breaths while his brain temporarily disconnected to confront the pain. Eventually, the headache subsided. So did his rapid heartbeat.

  It had been a year and a half since Drew had disappeared after stepping through the portal to the stolen Krellian hive ship. Many thought Drew was dead by now, but Lucas could sense that his foster brother was still alive somewhere in the multi-verse. He had to be. Life without Drew was hollow and meaningless, deepening the hole in his heart a little bit more with each passing day.

  He didn’t know if Drew had been transported to the distant reaches of the galaxy, kidnapped by the flesh-eating Krellian Empire, or sent across time to an alternate version of Earth. Maybe it was worse. Drew might be stranded on a distant moon, injured and alone, possibly without his wheelchair.

  One thing was certain: Drew wasn’t anywhere here on Eutopia-3, a distant Earth outpost in the spiral Omega galaxy. The subspace transmitter hidden in Drew’s leather pouch wasn’t registering on its private channel, meaning he was probably out of range in another galaxy or possibly in some remote spatial dimension.

  He wondered if Abby had stayed with Drew or if they’d been separated. Perhaps she was dead. If that were the case, would Drew have given up hope without his newfound girlfriend and had cashed it in?

  Lucas knew he might never know the answers, but didn’t care. As long as there was a sliver of hope, he would never stop searching, even if his actions were hard to justify. This certainly wasn’t what he’d signed up for when he’d enrolled at the university seven years ago. But that was on another planet in another universe, long before he and Professor Kleezebee were marooned on this fucking rock.

  He untied the temporary bandage and removed it from his hand. He checked his knuckles—they were still throbbing a bit, but they weren’t bleeding. A thin black scab had formed during the long drive from Jenkins’ restaurant in Flandreau City. He tossed the hood, bloody wrap, and his interrogation tools into the bed of the skimmer and covered them with a torn, half-sized burlap sack. He grinned. “Play nice ‘til papa gets back,” he told them, before heading for the cabin.

  He side-stepped to avoid the dirt path that led into the forest. A memory flashed in the back of his mind of a torn, severed foot lying sideways on the deck plate of the Krellian hive ship. He winced. “Sorry, Mom, not today,” he said quietly. “Probably not tomorrow, either. But if we’re lucky, maybe next week—or never, if Fuji’s right.”

  He walked to the wooden porch in front of the cabin, went up the stairs, and opened the screen door.

  Kleezebee stood bent over by the stone fireplace, poking the ashes with an iron rod. “Did you get it?” he asked without turning around. Flares of ash crackled as they shot up to Kleezebee’s waist, narrowly missing the frazzled end of his twenty-year-old gray beard.

  “Sure did, Professor. They’re in Clark County storage, along Route 9. It’s disguised as the Dunn-Rite Café.” Lucas slipped his right hand into his pants’ pocket. The jean material pulled at the scab, reminding him the wound was still fresh. “It took a little convincing, but I got it done.”

  Kleezebee hung the ash fork on a metal hook to the right of the fireplace, then turned and stared at Lucas’ front pocket. “Your hand. Let me see it.”

  Lucas pulled his hand out, palm up, then flipped it over. He waited for the professor’s reaction.

  “I thought my orders were clear.”

  “Sorry, boss, but Jenkins wouldn’t cooperate. What else was I supposed to do?”

  Kleezebee grabbed a red first aid kit from under the kitchen sink. He handed it to Lucas with the cover open. “Better clean it.”

  Lucas nodded.

  “You should have appealed to his sense of family, like I told you to do. I’m sure you could have convinced him.”

  “I doubt it. You’re the negotiator, Professor, not me.” Lucas dug around the kit for a gauze bandage. He found it buried under a red-handled pair of scissors and a spool of white medical tape.

  Kleezebee exhaled loud enough for Lucas to hear. “That’s what you said the last time. This whole thing’s spinning out of control.”

  Lucas shuffled his feet and didn’t respond. He wouldn’t admit it to Kleezebee, but he hadn’t started the interrogation as his mentor suggested. He was mentally exhausted from the endless scavenging and planning, and didn’t have the patience. The first thing he did after tying Jenkins to the chair was pound him with a few rights. He hated to admit it, but at some level, taking his frustration out on Jenkins felt good, at least until his knuckles caught the edge of the man’s tooth. He wondered how he could find a moment of pleasure in something that made him feel sick and ashamed. His deceased adoptive mother would never have approved.

  His secret traveler spoke up to add, Torrid rainbows always pinpoint picturesque sunsets hidden inside private daydreams of energetic nurses.

  Lucas fought hard to hide the associated head pain. He didn’t want his mentor to know that the hallucinations were back and in full force. It seemed to work.

  Kleezebee combed his two-foot beard from top to bottom with the two primary fingers on his liver-spotted hand. “If your mother was still alive, she wouldn’t be happy with what I’ve made you do the past year and a half since Drew disappeared.”

  Lucas finished wrapping his knuckles and applying the tape. “You didn’t make me do anything I didn’t want to do.”

  “I seriously doubt that. Beating up people for information wasn’t in my curriculum when you enrolled.”

  Lucas didn’t know what else to say. It was clear that the professor knew the field assignments were eating away at his gut. He wondered if Rico’s hand-to-hand combat training was at fault, transforming him from a disciplined scientist into something less human. Either way, it didn’t matter. Someone had to do it and his name was the only one decorating the duty roster. Lucas hadn’t told Kleezebee about the meat cleaver or the rest of his tool wrap. “Neither was a field trip to an alternate reality. Gotta do what we gotta do to get Drew back now, though.”

  “Yes,” Kleezebee replied with a numb look on his face. “And to think, all this could’ve been avoided.”

  Lucas rubbed Kleezebee’s shoulder with his hand, gently. “I know you think this is all your fault, but I’m the one who reopened the rift after Drew went missing in my universe. I’m sure that’s how the other Krellian ship tracked us here. The ambush wasn’t your fault. Neither was the crash landing on this outpost.”

  “Still, I should have factored it in. It was my job. A lot of good people died that day.” Kleezebee brushed past Lucas and sat on the sofa.

  “None of us would be alive if it weren’t for you, Professor.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “You outsmarted Cyrus. You tricked him into letting us go. Otherwise, I’m sure he would have eventually had us stuffed and mounted in his trophy case along with everyone else who has dared to defy him.”

  “A lot of good that did,” the professor said. His right ankle popped like a cork when he flexed his foot. “Your mom. Trevor. Half our crew. Hundreds of thousands of civilians. All dead because of me.”

  Lucas realized that the professor didn’t want to listen—he was more interested in wallowing in a self-pity party. Time to shift the focus of the conversation, he decided. He slid a pillow under his boss’s leg. “Ankle still bothering you?”

  “Every once in a while.”

  “The docs must have misaligned something.”

  “Or I’m just getting too damn old for all this.”

  “Do you need something for the pain?”

  “It’ll be all right. Just need to rest it.”

  Lucas looked past Kleezebee into the kitchen ten feet beyond him. A nearly empty gallon of raspum was on the counter with its twist-cap sitting upside down next to it. Lucas had just purchased the moonshine two days earlier from Crazy Larry. Some might think Lucas was enabling the professor’s drinking habit, but truth was, the old man was trying to
cope with a serious bout of insomnia and rarely drank alcohol during the day. Lucas needed his mentor rested, and a handful of shots before bed seemed to be the only solution. A sleeping pill prescription was out of the question since there wasn’t a drug dispensary left standing within five hundred miles.

  “Did you talk to Caroline today?” Lucas asked, figuring she was the reason for the open jug of raspum—again.

  “I tried, but I think her new husband is blocking my transmission; the wife-stealing asshole doesn’t let my calls through—and all I want is a few photos of my son; something I can put in my digi-frame to go along with Drew’s.”

  Lucas clenched both his fists. “If you like, I can go up north and reason with him.”

  “Thanks, but no. Your type of reasoning won’t accomplish anything.”

  When Kleezebee’s eyes focused on the moonshine in the kitchen, Lucas thought to distract him with some positive reinforcement. “I’m sure she’ll come around, eventually. Just give her some time.”

  Kleezebee’s voice was full of pain—the kind of pain that turns even the most emotionally-detached man into a sobbing idiot. “Why didn’t she wait for me?”

  “I don’t know, Professor. You were gone an awfully long time. But at least she waited ten years. That has to count for something. I’ll bet it’s longer than a lot of women would have done, given the circumstances.”

  “But she should’ve known I’d find a way home. That I’d never stop trying.”

  That was Kleezebee, demanding excellence from everyone he knew. How the man expected his wife to wait forty-plus years for his return from an alternate universe was beyond reason. Sometimes the professor’s grasp on reality was worse than his. “I’m sure you need some type of closure, Professor, but she has another life now.”

  “I hate that word, closure. There’s no such thing. I’m sorry, but when a hole’s been ripped into your life, it tends to stay open, wide open. And no amount of talking, or forgiveness, or self-help mumbo-jumbo will ever close it. When you boil it down, the best you can hope for is to avoid the wound altogether.”