Seize the Night

Another piece of the past had solidified around us, and Doogie triggered the Uzi as Bobby hit the floor and bounced. The machine pistol settled the dispute totally and abruptly.

Sickened, I looked away from the two dead guards.

The elevator doors had closed before anyone stepped out of the crowded cab.

The gunfire was sure to draw more security.

Bobby lay on his back. Blood was spattered on the white ceramic tile around him. Too much blood.

Sasha stooped at his left side. I knelt at his right.

She said, “Hit once.”

“Got biffed,” Bobby said, biffed meaning smacked hard by a wave.

“Hang in there,” I said.

“Totally thrashed,” he said, and coughed.

“Not totally,” I insisted, more terrified than I had ever been before, but determined not to show it.

Sasha unbuttoned the Hawaiian shirt, hooked her fingers in the bullet-punctured material of Bobby’s black pullover, and ripped the sweater to expose the wound in his left shoulder. The hole was too low in the shoulder, too far to the right, something you would have to call a chest wound, not a shoulder wound, if you were going to be honest, which I was by God not going to be.

“Shoulder wound,” I told him.

The throbbing electronic sound dwindled, the ceramic tiles faded under Bobby, taking the spatters of blood with them, and the overhead fluorescent panels began to vanish, though not all of them. Time past was surrendering to time present again, entering another cycle, which might give us a minute or two before more uniformed abbs with guns showed up.

Rich blood, so deeply red that it was almost black, welled out of the wound. We could do nothing to stop this type of bleeding. Neither a tourniquet nor a compress would help. Neither would hydrogen peroxide, rubbing alcohol, Neosporin, and gauze bandages, even if we’d had any of those things.

“Woofy,” he said.

The pain had washed away his perpetual tan, leaving him not white but jaundice-yellow. He looked bad.

The hallway had fewer lingering fluorescents and the oscillating hum was quieter than during the previous cycle.

I was afraid the past was going to fade entirely out of the present, leaving us with an empty elevator shaft. I wasn’t confident that we could carry Bobby up six flights of stairs without causing him further damage.

Getting to my feet, I glanced at Doogie, whose solemn expression infuriated me, because Bobby was going to be all right, damn it.

Mungojerrie scratched at the elevator doors again.

Roosevelt was either doing as the cat wished or following my own track of reasoning, because he repeatedly jammed his thumb against the call button.

The indicator board above the doors showed only four floors — G, B-1, B-2, and B-3—though we knew there were seven. The cab was supposedly up at the first level, G for ground, which was the hangar above this subterranean facility.

“Come on, come on,” Roosevelt muttered.

Bobby tried to lift his head to reconnoiter, but Sasha gently pressed him back, with one hand on his forehead.

He might go into shock. Ideally, his head should be lower than the rest of him, but we didn’t have any means to elevate his legs and lower body. Shock kills as surely as bullets. His lips were slightly blue. Wasn’t that an early symptom of shock?

The cab was at B-1, the first basement under the hangar floor. We were on B-3.

Mungojerrie was staring at me as if to say, I warned you.

“Cats don’t know shit,” I told him angrily.

Surprisingly, Bobby laughed. It was a weak laugh, but it was a laugh nonetheless. Could he be dying or even slipping into shock if he were laughing? Maybe everything would be okay.

Just call me Pollyanna Huckleberry Holly Golightly Snow.

The elevator reached B-2, one floor above us.

I raised the shotgun, in case passengers were in the elevator, as there evidently had been before.

Already, the pulsing hum of the egg room engines — or whatever infernal machines made the noise — grew louder.

“Better hurry,” Doogie said, because if the wrong moment of the past flowed into the present again, it might wash some angry, armed men with it.

The elevator whined to a stop at B-3, our floor.

The corridor around me grew steadily brighter.

As the elevator doors began to slide open, I expected to see the murky red light in the cab, and then I was suddenly afraid I’d be confronted with that impossible vista of stars and cold black space I’d seen beyond the stairwell door.

The elevator cab was just an elevator cab. Empty.

“Move!” Doogie urged.

Roosevelt and Sasha already had Bobby on his feet, virtually carrying him between them, while trying to minimize the strain on his left shoulder.

I held the elevator door, and as they took Bobby past me, his face twisted with agony. If he had been about to scream with pain, he repressed it and instead said, “Carpe cerevisi.”

“Beer later,” I promised.

“Beer now, party boy,” he wheezed.

Slipping off his backpack, Doogie followed us into the big elevator, which could probably carry fifteen passengers. The cab briefly swayed and jiggled as it adjusted to his weight, and we all tried not to step on Mungojerrie.

“Up and out,” I said.

“Down,” Bobby disagreed.

The control panel had no buttons for the three floors that were supposedly below us. An unlabeled slot for a magnetic card indicated how someone with the proper security clearance could reprogram the existing control buttons to gain access to lower realms. We didn’t have a card.

“There’s no way to get farther down,” I said.

“Always a way,” Doogie demurred, rummaging in his backpack.

The corridor was bright. The loud throbbing sound grew louder.

The elevator doors rolled shut, but we didn’t go anywhere, and when I reached toward the G button, Doogie slapped my hand as though I were a child reaching for a cookie without having asked permission.

“This is nuts,” I said.

“Radically,” Bobby agreed.

He sagged against the back wall of the cab, supported by Sasha and Roosevelt. He was gray now.

I said, “Bro, you don’t have to be a hero.”

“Yeah, I do.”

“No, you don’t!”

“Kahuna.”

“What?”

“If I’m Kahuna, I can’t be a chickenshit.”

“You aren’t Kahuna.”

“King of the surf,” he said. When he coughed this time, blood bubbled on his lips.

Desperate, I said to Sasha, “We’re getting him up and out of here, right now.”

A crack and then a creak sounded behind me. Doogie had picked the lock on the control panel and had swung the cover aside, exposing the wiring. “What floor?” he asked.

“Mungojerrie says all the way down,” Roosevelt advised.