Infernal

“Tell me more about Primes,” Richard said.

The SUV blew through the night like a breeze through the gutters, splashing up twin fantails as the tires cut through pooling rain on the surface of the Interstate. Sophia kept their speed around one-hundred miles an hour. Any faster would have been to court death by hydroplaning into the sentinel trees crowding the macadam.

“We know a lot about the Primes,” Sophia said, “but most of it is just general knowledge. What we don’t know is much more interesting,”

“Such as?” Richard prompted.

“You have no Mirrors,” she said. “I’ve already told you that. We don’t know why. Thousands of hours of computer time over four decades have been devoted to answering that question. Aside from a consistent number of Primes existing throughout the Multi-verse at any given time, the QC’s—that’s what we call the Quantum-Crays—can’t come up with a reason.”

“A consistent number?” Richard asked.

“Yes. No matter what happens where there are always one-hundred and forty-four thousand Primes. One of you dies, another is born. Instantaneously. We have no idea why or what that specific number represents.”

The number rang a bell in the back of Richard’s mind. Something from a history book, he thought. Or maybe the Bible. He couldn’t quite grasp the memory, however. It squirted away from his conscious mind like mercury from grasping fingertips.

“Theories abound, of course. That you’re a mistake of nature, a fluke that time and evolution will weed out; or that you are alien to the Multi-verse and therefore outside of its natural processes. Neither of those theories pans out, though. A mistake of nature wouldn’t be so consistent. Evolution would have eradicated the Primes long ago if that were the case. You’re still here; therefore you are supposed to be. And you’re certainly not aliens. Not unless Dr. Bana is correct and there are a multitude of Multi-verses. And even then, how can something be from outside the whole?”

“It’s good to know I’m not a little grey guy with bug eyes in disguise,” Richard said.

“Don’t be so flippant,” Sophia said. “They’re out there.”

“You’re kidding,” Richard said.

“I’m not. The general rule is we don’t bother them and they don’t bother us. It’s irrelevant, though. You’re not one of them.”

“Then what am I?”

“The leading theory is that you are a part of the mechanism that holds the Multi-verse in balance.”

“And how does that work?”

“We don’t know,” Sophia said.

“Well what do you know?” Richard said, exasperation evident in his tone.

“For starters,” Sophia said, “you’re all mules.”

“What?”

“Mules,” Sophia said. “Sterile. So far as the QC’s can deduce, not a single Prime, male or female, has ever reproduced. It’s one of the many parameters for finding you. If a person has a Mirror, or has had a child, they can’t be Prime.”

Richard digested that information. Like any other adult male he’d had thoughts of what it would be like to father children. He’d never felt driven to do so, as so many other men he knew. Just the errant thoughts and passing fancy of an idle mind. He’d taken the usual risks as a teenager: unprotected sex, passing the point of caring whether he had protection or not when the play got too hot for such considerations. He remembered two weeks of fear and agony when a girl he’d thought he’d loved in high school had been late after a hot encounter in the woods behind his Kansas home. Reflecting on it now he realized just how unimportant having children was to him. He’d chalked it up to his long incarceration and the idea of raising children at his age being undesirable. Now he wondered if he’d known, somewhere deep inside, that he’d never be a father at all.

The trouble with such thinking, he realized, was what psychologists referred to as the hindsight bias. One has a tendency to judge new information as being more predictable than it was before it was revealed.

“You’re also exceptionally intelligent,” Sophia said.

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Richard said with genuine modesty.

“No. Really,” Sophia said. “When was the last time you had a hard time grasping a new concept? Deducing a new fact? Don’t things seem to come to you clearly and easily when others around you are trying much harder to see the big picture? Weren’t you always in the accelerated learning classes in school? Outperforming your classmates and even some of your instructors? Didn’t you hold yourself back at times so as not to embarrass the other kids and not to be bullied by those that didn’t have your gifts and were jealous?

Richard nodded. He’d never considered it but supposed it was true.

“You picked up computer operation and information technology at a rate far beyond others who have spent years in school trying to gain a tenth of what you seemed to know instinctively.”

“I’m just good with machines,” he said.

“No.” Sophia said. “You’re good with everything. You were good with sports before you decided it was a waste of your time. There isn’t a hobby or pastime you’ve tried that you weren’t good at before you got bored with it. Cars. Music. Art. Cards. Shall I go on?”

“No,” he said, embarrassed.

“And it was you who tracked down a child killer when every law enforcement agency in Kansas failed to do so.”

“I saw him take her!” Richard protested.

He remembered the day. The steel blue clarity of it. He’d gone out for a drive that morning for no particular reason other than the urge to feel cool air blowing on his face, to have control of a powerful machine, to be in motion. A shady spot under an old elm tree on a little traveled side street outside a housing development had appealed to him so he’d parked there. Sat back. Listened to a mix CD of 80’s rock music.

A short while later a blonde girl of about eight or nine wearing beige Capri pants and a pretty pink blouse had ridden by on a bicycle. She turned the corner at the end of the block and vanished from sight behind a line of poplar trees.

A light breeze played through the trees. Branches caressed each other, leaves whispering in some secret tree language

A rusty yellow sedan had followed the girl slowly enough to get his attention. It somehow looked threatening. Menacing.

The hair on Richard’s arms had stood up and he kept a close eye on the vehicle until it turned the corner in the opposite direction as the girl, disappearing behind a similar line of trees. He dismissed the uncomfortable feeling the sedan had aroused in him.

A few minutes later the girl pedaled by again, her hair trailing out behind her like a banner in the breeze. Circling the block, Richard assumed. No doubt fulfilling a similar urge to feel the wind in her face and be in motion.

No rusty yellow sedan had followed.

Richard had been drowsing, marking the girl’s passage as she made another, then another trip around the block. It was her fifth time past his vehicle and his eyes were closed, his mind drifting the currents of not quite sleeping. Only his ears registered the ticka-ticka-ticka of the playing card clothes pinned to the frame of the bicycle so that it struck the spokes as the rear tire turned. As the sound of the playing card faded a new sound invaded Richards senses. An engine accelerating. Richard opened his eyes.

As the girl entered the intersection to make her turn the yellow sedan entered from Richard’s left, accelerating to a joggers pace. The bumper clipped the rear tire of the bicycle sending it scooting out from under the girl. She hit the hood of the sedan with an audible squawk.

Richard was stunned. The slow motion collision had been intentional. What he saw next made the hairs at the base of his neck stand on end.

The driver’s door of the sedan opened and a portly man in his early forties, hair graying at the temples, got out and hurried to the front of the vehicle. The girl had slid off the hood of the car and was sitting in front of the bumper holding her leg and crying.

“I’m sorry, honey,” Richard heard the man say over the whispering trees. “Let me get you to a hospital.”

With that the man scooped the girl into his arms, hurried back to the car with her, and deposited her in the passenger seat. Richard could see the man’s mouth moving, but could hear nothing through the rolled up windows of the car. He didn’t need to hear the thumping noises and screams from the child as the man slammed her face into the dashboard once, twice, three times. It could have been Richard’s imagination, but he thought he saw tiny spicules of blood fly from the girl’s nose on the third blow.

Richard started his car, cursing the slow starter of the second hand Cougar’s engine. By the time the engine roared to life the yellow sedan had pulled out of the intersection, grinding the pink Schwinn the girl had been riding under its tires as it roared away.

Despite leaving twin trails of rubber where he’d been parked, Richard lost sight of his quarry before he reached the intersection. He turned right, narrowly avoiding the battered Schwinn and frantically searching the road ahead for any sign of the sedan. He saw nothing save empty asphalt, parked cars, and trees writhing in the air currents. At the next intersection he cast his eyes left and right, praying for just a glimpse of yellow.

Nothing.

He’d driven around the area for another twenty minutes before admitting to himself that the abductor and the little girl were long gone. He’d then driven straight to the police station and reported what he’d seen to the authorities.

“You were in the right place at the right time,” Sophia said. “That’s happens to you a lot, doesn’t it?”

“How do you know so damn much about me?” Richard said.

“We have detailed files on you and every other known Prime in the Multi-verse.”

“Then you know that the description I gave police led them to a postal employee named Patrick McCormack. There was ample evidence he’d taken the girl. Both on the car and in his home. Pink paint transfer on his bumper. Her blood on the dashboard. Her torn and blood stained clothes were found in his basement.”

“They never found her body though, did they?” Sophia said.

“No,” Richard said, remembering the frustration the police had expressed at their inability to find Katie Marsh’s body. The grief of her parents. His own rage when the judge presiding over the case had had no legal choice but to declare all evidence inadmissible due to a clerical error that had broken the chain of custody, setting a dangerous pedophile loose to rape and murder another innocent child.

“And when they let him go, you killed him.”

“I avenged her,” Richard hissed. “She was so tiny. So innocent. She’d never hurt anyone in her life. Just a pretty little girl who’d wanted to spend the morning outside on her bicycle, feeling the wind in her hair. That’s all. Just to enjoy the weather and go for a ride. And that son of a bitch, that monster, took her. Did unspeakable things to her and then just threw her away.” Richard stopped when he realized he was ranting, tears coursing down his cheeks like small streams of grief and rage.

“Do you regret it?” Sophia asked. “Killing him, I mean.”

Richard considered what it had cost him in the end. Ten years of his life in a hell of man’s creation. The toll it had taken on his parents and how they, now long in their graves, had had to live with the knowledge that their son, too, was capable of unspeakable acts of violence. How he’d been branded a murderer and was therefore untrustworthy in all aspects of life.

“Not for a second,” he said.

“And that’s why you.”

“What?” Richard said, confused.

Sophia said: “You’ve been asking yourself since you first found my Mirror: Why me? That’s your answer. Your confidence, your certainty that killing Patrick McCormack was the just thing to do. Despite the social taboos and legal consequences you killed a man—quite brutally, I understand—who would have preyed on more children, destroyed more innocent lives, maimed and broken more families. You’re a crusader, Richard. With an innate sense of right and wrong and gifts granted you by the Multi-verse that do not extend to the rest of us.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Richard said. “You make me sound like the Batman.”

“No,” Sophia said. “Not the Batman, or any other comic book superhero. You’re a Prime; human and flawed to be sure, but, like all Primes, something more.

“That’s why Sophia Nineteen sought you out. And that is why you’re needed now.”

Richard digested this as Sophia exited the Interstate and turned onto tree sheltered one-lane asphalt that was more path than road. A sign reading Granite Lake loomed large at the side of the road and then disappeared in the rearview as they passed it. A quarter mile later they topped a rise that gave a view of the lake that would have been magnificent in the daylight.

“What does the RLP give as the location of the Rip?” Sophia asked.

“No need,” Richard answered. “I can see it. Down by the shore on the left, about three feet out over the water.”

The Rip seemed to be casting a light of its own through the after-storm gloom; blue and shimmery, like a sheer curtain stirred by the wind.

“I’ll have to take your word for it,” Sophia said, continuing down the other side of the rise. The intervening trees blocked the Rip from Richard’s sight.

“What do you mean?” Richard said.

“Your awareness of Rips,” Sophia said, “Your exposure to their energy by traveling through one has awakened a part of your subconscious that allows you to see them. It’s another of your gifts. One us non-Primes don’t share.”

“You saw the one in California,” Richard argued.

“I saw the refraction of sunlight and the effect the energy of the Rip had on the surrounding terrain. You’re seeing the Rip itself.”

“Great,” Richard said. “Where’s SG-1 when you need them?”

“Who?”

“Never mind.”

Sophia maneuvered the SUV around a curve and into a turnout. A split-rail fence barricaded the asphalt from a steep wooded drop leading to the shoreline. The cool blue glow of the Rip a mere fifty yards away drew Richard’s gaze like a moth to lamplight.

“We’re on foot from here,” Sophia said, checking the RLP. “We should be okay,” she added, “there’s no sign of bogeys.”

Richard collected his duffel and exited the vehicle.

Headlights, approaching from the rear, lit them up. Richard’s hand slipped into his duffel and grasped the butt of a Beretta PX4.

“Easy,” Sophia cautioned from inside the SUV. “It isn’t them.”

The vehicle, a tan Landcruiser with a top mounted light bar, pulled in behind their SUV—effectively blocking their route should he choose to duck back inside and flee, Richard noted—and rolled to a stop. A spotlight blinded Richard as it first panned him, then the SUV. Sophia got out and stood in the V formed by the open driver’s door and the carriage.

The spot cut off and the driver got out of the Landcruiser. He wore an ankle length rain slicker, open at the front, revealing a khaki uniform and sheriff’s deputy badge. His hand eased onto the butt of the Glock 9x19mm Safe Action Pistol he wore on his belt. Raindrops glistened as they hit the Stratton protector fastened over his Stetson, keeping the felt and a pair of gold acorns corded to the brim dry.

“Morning folks,” he said. “Would you mind stepping over here where I can see you a little better? And could you maybe keep your hands where I can see them?”

Richard dropped the duffel on the ground and stepped towards the back of the SUV, his hands out to his side and his mind awhirl. If the cop found the weapons—and he undoubtedly would if he searched the vehicle—they were sunk. This little adventure of theirs would come to a screeching halt right here by one of the prettiest little lakes in Missouri.

Beyond what that would mean for the Multi-verse, or this particular world, it surely meant Richard was going back to prison for a lengthy stay and Sophia would be arrested and charged, her belongings confiscated. She’d be trapped here, without access to an RLP. Fair game for Jefferson’s goons. There was no choice in Richard’s mind. They somehow had to get the drop on this guy, lock him in his vehicle, and make their escape through the Rip.

“Is there a problem, officer?” Sophia asked as she joined Richard on his side of the SUV.

“Well, ma’am, there very well may be,” the deputy replied.

“What we have here are what you might call suspicious circumstances. Now I’m sure you all are just a nice couple come down to the lake this morning to do a little sight-seeing, or maybe do a little necking on the beach. But,” he said, tilting his head to the sky, “it’s a might early yet and the weather just don’t seem right for that sort of thing.”

Richard noted that though the deputy had given the impression of looking upwards, his eyes had never left the two of them.

“And when I ran your plate a few minutes ago,” the deputy continued, scratching at the five o’clock shadow on his jaw line, “the DMV database told me that that tag doesn’t exist. Not here in Missouri, or anywhere else, for that matter.

“It could just be a mix up. I could have entered the wrong tag number both times I ran it, or the computers at the DMV could be having a little hiccup. These things happen. But I figure just to ensure public safety we ought to wait right here for my friends to show up—they’ll be along any moment—and we’ll sort this all out together. You all wouldn’t mind that now would you?”

“I don’t think that’s necessary, officer.” Sophia, arms crossed at her breast up to this point, dropped them to her side, her hands creeping towards the small of her back.

“Please don’t do that, ma’am.” the deputy thumbed open his holster and pulled the Glock halfway free. “That right there could be interpreted as an offensive move. One that I’d have to defend myself against. As you’re no doubt just trying to scratch an itch that’s suddenly started gnawing at the middle of your back, it’d be a shame to make this situation uglier than it has to be.”

Sophia returned her arms to her side as Richard stared at her, wondering at what she’d been about to do.

“Now ma’am,” the deputy said, “I’d be happy to let you scratch that itch to your heart’s content if you’d just turn around and lift your shirt. You do that, and let me see that there’s nothing back there for me to worry about, and you can scratch away.”

“No,” Sophia said. “It’s fine. It’s gone now.”

“Well, ma’am,” the deputy said and sighed. He shifted his balance almost imperceptibly, widening his stance. “Now that we’re on this road I really have to insist that you show me anyway.”

Things happened very fast after that.

As Sophia turned she cast Richard a glance that said It’s now or never; confirming that she did indeed have a weapon concealed at the small of her back. Richard set himself. He would lunge forward as the officer, distracted at the sight of whatever she had back there, drew the Glock fully from his holster. Richard would force the deputy’s arm up and back, and wrest the handgun from him. By then Sophia would have her own weapon drawn and they could cuff the deputy inside his vehicle and make their escape before his backup arrived.

None of that happened.

As Sophia turned, the deputy’s Glock was already clearing its holster. Just as the front sight cleared leather the right side of his head dissolved into a mist of blood and shattered bone. His once immaculate Stetson flipped through the air twice before landing on the tarmac several feet away. A second silent shot plowed through his chest before his body hit the ground.

“What?” Richard said with confusion as Sophia tackled him. He landed on his side, facing the fallen officer. Rain trickled down the deputy’s face mixing with blood already pooling on the asphalt.

A weapon on full auto opened up, throwing chunks of asphalt into the air around Richard and Sophia, filling the night with the discordant applause of gunfire. The deputy’s body took two more rounds as if he wasn’t already dead enough.

Adrenaline surged through Richard’s body and he rolled, lunging forward and all but carrying Sophia with him to the relative safety behind the Landcruiser. The vehicle took multiple hits as they crouched there, metal spanging and spronging before the automatic fire let up and all was still again save the lone cry of a startled bird and the still falling rain.

“You said there were no bogeys,” Richard hissed through his teeth.

“There weren’t,” Sophia protested. “Jefferson must have sent someone through without an RLP. This Rip has been stable long enough for him to have done that. Maybe he’s getting desperate, sending teams through to any stable Rips in this vicinity to keep us on this world.”

“I don’t think it’s a team,” Richard said, thinking furiously. “Unless there are only two of them. The muzzle flash from the shots and the automatic fire came from the same position. But why shoot the deputy and not me? Or you? We were as exposed as he was.”

“Something blocking his shot, maybe?” Sophia said. “Rocks, or trees, or something?”

“Maybe. It doesn’t matter.” Richard said. “We’re not safe here. If it were me, I wouldn’t be just sitting out there hoping one of us pops our head up before more cops show up. I’d be circling, looking for a way to flank us. Catch us in a crossfire if there are two of them.”

He pulled the handgun—his own Beretta 92FS he noted with approval—from the small of her back and handed it to her.

“I’m going for the SUV. If anyone fires on me target the muzzle flash.” He then rose from his crouch and, keeping as low as possible, dashed for the SUV.

Weapons fire thundered through the early morning gloaming. Muzzle flash lit up the scene from a new, closer position, confirming that the shooter was indeed on the move. The rear window of the SUV vanished in a tinkling of glass and the liftgate bloomed holes like tiny flowers. The sharp bark of the Sophia’s Beretta answered, stilling the automatic fire as the BanaTech henchman ducked for cover.

Richard gained the SUV, its passenger and driver’s doors still hanging open, engine still idling. He dug through the duffel as Sophia exhausted her ammunition and brought out the Beretta PX4 and its twin. Disengaging both safeties he stood, the bulk of his body blocked from where he thought the weapons fire had come from, and loosed a two handed volley of .40 caliber rounds in that direction.

“Move!” he yelled to Sophia.

It was pure Hollywood, he knew, but he wasn’t trying to hit anything. He hoped only to lay down cover fire so Sophia could make it to the SUV unscathed.

The gambit worked. As Sophia reached his side Richard dropped into a crouch, ejecting the spent clips on both weapons and replacing them with fresh ones from the duffel.

“What now?” she asked; trading the spent 92FS for the Storm Richard offered her. Richard replaced the clip in the 92FS and dropped it in the duffel, holding on to the other PX4.

“We keep moving,” he said.

Richard reached into the SUV and dropped the transmission into Drive. The vehicle crept forward under its own power, then began picking up speed. Richard and Sophia kept pace alongside. Gunfire erupted; lead tanging against the rear and side of the vehicle.

Twenty yards from the split rail fence dividing the lookout from the drop-off Richard realized that the SUV didn’t have enough momentum to break through.

“You have the RLP?” he asked.

“Here,” Sophia said, patting her hip pocket as she trotted to keep up.

“Good,” Richard tossed her into the open door of the SUV. She let out a squawk as first the duffel, then his body landed atop of her. His feet still sticking out the open door, Richard reached over her and down, ramming the accelerator to the floorboard with his hand.

“Pull ’em in!” Richard yelled. Sophia tucked and rolled into the passenger side foot well as Richard bent his knees and crawled forward. The SUV crashed through the split rail fence, both doors slamming shut as wood splintered and flew. Now airborne, the vehicle crashed into brush on the other side, bouncing Sophia and Richard around the interior.

Forty yards in, the uncontrolled vehicle clipped a pine tree, crumpling the left front fender and dissolving the headlight in a spray of plastic and glass. The SUV slewed around sideways, tearing a larger swath through the underbrush before fetching up against larger trees. Rattled by the successive collisions, Richard shook his head to clear it.

Sophia was already on the move. She climbed up and over Richard, dragging the duffel behind her, heading for the rear of the vehicle. Richard, seeing the wisdom in not exiting through the driver’s door where they would be exposed to the shooter if he’d made it to the top of the rise above them, followed.

“You’re bleeding,” Sophia said as they paused in the cargo area. He thumbed a warm trickle from his nose, vaguely remembered his face slamming into the steering wheel during the jaunt down the slope, and said: “So are you.”

She touched a stinging spot on the side of her head, came away with blood, and shrugged:

“We’re gonna bleed a lot more if we don’t get out of here.”

He smiled, brought up the PX4 he’d managed to hold on to and not fire a stray shot from during their roller coaster descent, and dove/rolled out the empty back window of the SUV. A broken branch gave him an ugly scratch across the forehead as he landed and he took up a position behind the vehicle, aiming the Beretta uphill. Sophia tossed out the duffel and followed suit, the underbrush sparing her countenance. There was no gunfire from above.

“Can you still see the Rip?” Sophia said.

“It’s there,” Richard pointed to a spot just out over the water, visible through the trees. “About twenty yards away. It’s smaller now.”

“Then let’s go.”

A lone sniper stood atop an outcropping of rock above the shoreline. Watching. Waiting. He raised a Barrett .50 caliber BMG mounted with a Leupold Mark 4 HAM-R scope and sighted in the couple zigging and zagging through the trees. He followed as they reached the open terrain of the shoreline, his finger tightening on the trigger as the male turned to check their back trail. Holding his fire, the sniper continued to follow their progress with the HAM-R as they waded out into the water.

Several feet from shore, without flash or fanfare, the couple vanished into thin air. The sniper lowered his rifle and retrieved a two-way radio from the leg pocket of his BDU’s. He raised the walkie to his mouth.

“It’s done,” he said. “They’re on their way.”

He looked on a while longer, noted red and blue flashers approaching from the east, then faded from the outcropping and vanished into the trees.