Vs.

R.L. Carmine

 

 

As he opened his eyes, his fingers brushed forward over the gravel. Ground. I’m on the ground. His hands slipped beneath him and he pushed himself up, rocking back on his knees, red hair falling long around his face. The city was in ruin. He knew this place. Not the location, but the environment, the aftermath.

 

It ripped through his shoulder a split-second before he heard the report, and it sent him springing upright and staggering aside. Reactively he clutched at his arm as he looked around, smiling. “You’re gonna hafta try harder than…” and then he felt the blood, and something seemed different. A glimmer of concern flashed through his eyes. Low and quick he darted in the direction of the nearest buildings as more shots rang out, peppering the street at his heels, and as he reached for the cover of an alley wall, another round struck broken wood shoved into a beaten waste bin, sending splinters flying. His head jerked back as he tumbled forward, tripping on his feet and crashing into the bin, careening into the alley floor.

 

The sound, bellowing, was that of a large wounded animal as he rolled about on the ground, grabbing at his face, at the wall, at anything. As he flailed, footfalls sounded, crunching on the gravel, approaching. Hunched forward on his hands and knees, he sat there grunting at the pain while his attacker, his murderer, came around the corner, and through the pain he could almost hear the hammer of the pistol cocking, the cold barrel pressed against the back of his head.

 

“You’re a pathetic example,” the gunman growled. “I hope you don’t have her in your world to disappoint, not coming back.”

 

Though barely did the man finish the sentence when his would-be victim kicked sideways, taking out the man’s knee. Concealed within the debris of the overturned bin, his bloody hand found a tarnished metal pipe, and with one swift motion he brought it up against the gunman’s wrist, the pistol, skittering across the sidewalk.

 

Over and again, blood spraying with each progressively heavy swing of the pipe, the would-be murderer twisted and twitched beneath its stroke until the long-haired man looked down. Amidst the blood-matted red hair, lacerations, and broken bones he stared into the one blue eye looking vacantly back into his own, and he noticed something odd. Unnerving. The tattoo he had on his wrist, the black heart, he shared with the man that had just attempted to kill him. There, on the dead-man’s cheek, beneath a displaced eye patch.

 

Adrenaline. He hadn’t felt that genuine sensation in a number of years and now here it was. Close now, as he had come to…what? Death? Well, since that one time when he actually….

 

The sharp, stabbing sensation, both cold and warm at once, throbbing across the front to back distance of his eye socket and into the rear of his skull was mind-numbingly distracting, and quickly brought him from his reverie. Leaning back against the brick wall he hesitated not once in yanking the splinters he could grasp from his face, and kneeling down he pulled the patch off of his foe, slipping it around his head, and picked up the pistol.

 

“The fuck were you?”

 

And with a click of another hammer, he leaned and spun, whipping the pistol across his chest and finding himself standing off, pistol to pistol, with another redhead; this time female.

 

Looking up from the tops of her eyes, she sneered. “Guess you didn’t have time to read the rules, new boy.” At his raising of an eyebrow, she nodded. “Pocket, on a slip of paper.” With his free hand he fished for them. “Don’t bother. Rules are simple. You get to go home to your love, to your crew if you have one, when you’re the last one standing. Welcome to the death match, Vic Storms.”

 

“How…?” He edged forward, thrusting his pistol closer to her. “You did this?!”

 

“Don’t be daft. Look at me, look at you, look at him. You have to have already made some connection, even if you haven’t pulled it all together yet. Though it took me a day the first time around.” She shrugged. “Sport. They didn’t want the most artful fighters, they wanted the most successful killers. Wanted the best in all of galactic history.”

“Galactic what? Excuse me?”

 

“Jesus, you are a slow one. What year is it where you’re from?”

 

“Fuck you, cunt.”

 

“Fine, be obstinate. Follow the ball.” Shoving her pistol back into the waistband of her leather jeans she fished around for a cigarette and lit it up. “Once you have the most prolific killer in history, who do you pit him against? Who’s up to the challenge?”

 

“There isn’t anyone,” he replied, lowering his pistol to his side. “It’s pointless.”

 

“You’re thinking three-dimensionally. You pit him against himself, literally.”

 

“Last I checked, I didn’t come in here with a fucked up eye, or a pussy.”

 

“You’re not the same in every timeline. Every alternate reality. Mom married someone else or got pregnant earlier or later. There are so many variables, and sometimes the smallest thing, like what she ate, had an affect on how you, we, came out. But we had the same soul. The ones of us that don’t look the same are actually the rare ones. Mostly they look like this big Dolph Lundgren, Rocky four motherfucker; about six-four, and two-hundred and thirty pounds of pissed-off beefcake.”

 

“And you know all of this how?”

 

“I’ve played before. Twice, actually. It’s like any other sport. If you win you live but they yank you back to play the winners of other games, and some new blood like you. I keep trying to end it, stop it at the source, but in case you didn’t realize it, most of us are a bit antisocial.” Passing the cigarette off to him she watched him take a few puffs before handing it back to her. “The first time the guy was using me to back him up to get him through the game and then he tried to kill me at the end. He lost. The second time, I had two others but they didn’t make it to the end either. Picked off by other players. No one seems to get that just because they win, that doesn’t mean they’re done.”

 

 

 

He studied her. Looked for tells. All the things he had ever learned regarding signs people give off when they are being dishonest. There was nothing. But then, if she was telling the truth, even a little bit, then she very well could have read the same books in her world. “Name’s Nikki, not Vic. I go by my middle name. Nickname, at least. Always have.”

 

In response, she nodded. “Fair enough. The other four females I’ve seen went by Victoria. Well, one went by Victoria Nicole. I’m Tori. All of the males seem to go by Vic or Victor, so I just assumed. My foul.”

 

He looked around at the desolate street as they stood there by the body. “I suppose we shouldn’t stand here too long.”

 

“No. Others could be by at any time.” Turning she began to walk. “I’ve been here two days, already have a spot staked out, couple blocks down.”

 

“That a bit of trust showing?”

 

Stopping cold, Tori glanced back at him. “At some point you’re either gonna try to kill me or not. I don’t like to fuck around.”

 

Nikki offered a nod. “Fair enough,” he replied, as he made to catch up to her. From his pockets he dug out his own cigarettes and fished one out while he glanced around. “So what, we’re transported here? Beamed down? What?”

 

“Something like that, near as I can figure. Yanked from wherever we were and dropped here.”

 

“Anything else ever come in other than one of us?”

 

“Not that I know of, though I suppose it’s possible. Why?”

 

“Still a little fuzzy-brained, but I think I was driving my car.” Shaking his head he took a puff. “Love that car. Better not be wrapped around a pole somewhen, `cause I’m gonna rip someone’s fucking lungs out.” Tori couldn’t help but laugh. “What?”

 

“Car love seems to be one of the constants. Specific car. Mustang?”

 

“You can stop now, because that’s just getting creepy.” As they made their way along, their boots crunched on the layer of dirt and rocks, accented with small pieces of other broken things. The sun was getting long in the day. “You too?”

 

“Eighty-nine Fox body and a seventy Grande.” To that he made a disapproving noise. “You have a problem with that?”

 

“You know, taste is taste and all, but the Grandes were just so damned ugly, and the Foxes shouldn’t’ve even been called Mustangs. They could’ve slapped the badges on a Dodge van and called it a Mustang and it would have been more deserving.”

 

Stopping again, she dropped her head back and slowly pulled her pistol, letting it drop by her side. “See, now I’m gonna hafta shoot you, and I was just starting to like you.” She eyed him as he raised his hands in defensive manner, though playfully.

 

“Hey, the Foxes are nice cars, don’t get me wrong, they just shouldn’t’ve had the badge. Call it a Mercury Capri and move on with your life.” He offered a half shrug. “The Grandes still looked like shit, though.”

 

Shaking her head she smiled and began walking again. The wind picked up, blowing her shoulder-length hair about. “I’d lay money my Fox would whip your car’s ass, sight unseen. What’ve you got, a seventy-two? A Boss? A Mach? That first guy wouldn’t shut up about his sixty-eight fastback.”

 

“Oh-five.”

 

“Oh-five what? You mean five point oh?”

 

“No, oh-five GT. Two-thousand five. After the generation change-over from the SN Ninety-Fives in two-thousand four. The…”

 

Quickly she spun, growing serious. “Wait, what? How far did your Earth make it?”

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The paper with the rules fell from his gloved fingertips and caught the wind, blowing on the currents before being slammed to the ground and pinwheeling along into the distance. “Bull fucking shit.” Surveying the desolate urban landscape with his one blue eye, the spiky red-haired man looked for answers only to find none immediately.

 

Rustling around in the left pocket of his olive drab cargo pants, tightly tucked around muscular calves into his knee-high lineworker boots, he removed his cigarettes and brushed silver Zippo. With a metal “ping” and a flick of the wheel the flame licked the tip of the cancer stick held between tightly pursed lips, painted black in odd contrast to the goatee that matched his mane. “You people snatch me from Pan, and you want me to play games for you in trade for my return?” A half-laugh, half-grunt jumped from his gut, smoke blowing out through his nose. Pulling the nickel-plated forty-five from his right leg holster he checked the clip, and then proceeded to do the same to its blued mate in the sling beneath his left arm.

 

“Your game’s mine, now, and when I find you, after I’m done cutting off your appendages, I’m gonna fuck your goddamned eyes out and leave the rest staked out for the ants.”

 

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The building was squat and as battered as the rest. The second floor roof had started to cave in some areas. In another life, it had been perhaps a warehouse converted from a strip mall, with the front windows and most of the doors blocked up and spot-painted, so the colors were slightly off from the rest of the structure. What few doors remained were either heavy steel single doors or bay doors, either type gray. Inside, a couple of small torches burned, more to provide light than anything else.

 

“It happened in two-thousand eight,” Nikki began. “Just after Valentine’s Day people started getting sick. In about twenty-four hours it was global, and two days later it was done. The government had shit in place, after nine-eleven and SARS and Hurricane Katrina totaled Louisiana, but a lot of the military forces the plans seemed to rely upon had been deployed to the Middle East for the Iraq War, and the civilian response teams, state and local, just weren’t fast enough to contain anything. I think the last casualty number I heard from official sources was somewhere around five billion dead.”

 

“Jesus. Five billion? We lost two and just about everything collapsed in a year. I can’t imagine five.” She paused for a moment to mull over his words. “What’s nine-eleven? And SARS? I mean, I figure they were major events if as you implied they restructured the way the government deals with emergency situations but…. Our event, the plague, happened in nineteen ninety so…. There was a war in Iraq? The United States was involved?”

 

“Yeah. Actually there were two. Can’t imagine not living in a world where that other stuff didn’t happen. And nine-eleven was a terrorist attack against the World Trade Center in New York using hijacked passenger planes in suicide runs. Leveled the twin towers, and hit the Pentagon as well. There was another plane, but it was shot down over Washington. The debris alone killed about seven hundred on the ground. They figure it was headed for the White House.” Pulling the pistol out of the back of his waistband he laid it on the floor and leaned back against an old crate. “So much stuff got reorganized after that. They started screening people. Established the so-called ‘Patriot Act’ which simply acted as a gateway for jack-booted thugs to rifle through your shit without a warrant, to run you through a database every time you bought a house or a car, and track your electronic trails through the internet.”

 

“The inter-what?”

 

Nikki sighed and shook his head. “You missed so fucking much. This is going to take a while, but I’ll catch you up on what happened on my Earth after the plague.”

 

“Well, wait on that. I’m curious and all, but first, more important than the car love is one of the other constants. What’s your Pandora like?”

 

Cocking his head, Nikki raised a quizzical eyebrow. “Who?”

 

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The facility was dimly-lighted, but clean. Lights flashed on consoles, and the glow of monitors and holo displays threw a kaleidoscope of colors across the faceless Oddbots manning the stations. He couldn’t help but be mesmerized by the Christmas of it. When the alarm sounded, however, he snapped back. “Who brought him in?” Scanning the screens of the twenty opponents still on the board, he found the image of the spiky red-haired man. “He was never supposed to be one of the candidates! His timeline was locked off. Eight?”

 

Clicking, one of the Oddbots turned its head. “He was not in his native timeline.”

 

“Damn chaos theory,” he muttered under his breath. “Send him back. You get that Vic Storms out of here before he does damage.”

 

“Plotting jump coordinates. Charging skip generators.”

 

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The war cry preceded the sound of broken glass by only a second at most. Short, stocky, and shaved bald, he flung himself through the second story window. Vic glanced up in time for the first of the bigger shards to slice into the ashen skin of his face, only for the flesh to heal before they struck the ground. His gloved hands didn’t even reach his pistols when the scrapper palmed his head and used the momentum of his fall to put the spiky-haired counterpart off-balance and send them both crashing into the pavement.

 

Rolling upright, he found himself face-to-face with the bald-headed man. “You’re not even Chosen; you couldn’t kill me if you wanted to.”

 

“Oh, I want to!”

 

“No,” he quickly replied, clapping his hands against either side of the bald head, concussing his enemy at the ears. “Good to want things.” Digging his .fingertips into the side of the stubbly skull, Vic gave a sharp twist and was rewarded with a resounding crunch of bone. The man went limp, and was tossed aside like so much old laundry. “Bad to be stupid about it.”

 

Squatting down beside the body, Vic looked him over. Similar facial structure, in possession of both his eyes but only half his teeth. “Trailer dweller.” Straightening back up, he felt a dizzy, tingling sensation. Stand up too fast? But almost as soon as he’d thought it, he discounted the notion. The sensation traveled through his body from head to feet and he began to identify it, though it possessed a flavor slightly askew from what he had known about personal space folding. “What’s wrong,” he yelled, looking around. His muscles tensed, brow furrowing. “Don’t like me?!”

 

Back in the command and observation center, Oddbot Eight looked up at its master. “The subject appears to…”

 

“…Be fighting the skip. I can see that.” The Overseer of the game was less than amused. “It’s pulling at his every molecule and he’s resisting. He must be in agony. Increase it to maximum safe.”

 

And back on the street, Vic’s howl was barely a peep before he blew away like dust in a hurricane.

 

“Now,” began the Overseer, “let’s turn our attention back to our other contestants.”

 

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“I can’t even think of a world without Pandora.” Tori shoved her fingers back through her hair and stared off. “So much was set in motion because of her, and it would almost be impossible to explain it in a nutshell without sounding like a lunatic.”

 

Nikki leaned forward. “We’ve been kidnapped through space and time to a planet filled with alternate versions of ourselves to fight to the death. Try me.”

 

Shrugging, she collected her thoughts and decided to give it her best. “The universe exists in spans, like breaths. We’re living in one now. They’re bookended by the death and rebirth of everything, when the souls of all living things take what they’ve learned through reincarnation and join to make one big all-powerful god-like being. But there are some left behind because they haven’t grown enough. They look after the next ‘generation’ of souls born into existence by the rebirth of the universe as they continue to mature.

 

“At the end of the last span, there were two such souls, and they were in love. Now this process of making someone one of these immortal guardians, these Chosen, is an infusion of energy, and the body of one of the souls was killed before it could be done, so his soul drifted, unable to join with the others, or be made Chosen, through the death of one span and the birth of this one, until forms existed to support the soul. Earth, and what would one-day be called Humans. Meanwhile, the other soul, Pandora, was in an unshakable sense of mourning through the eons until that happened, and when it did, she tried again and again to find an incarnation of her love’s soul that would accept her, being rejected time and time again. But finally, as far as I’ve seen, that acceptance came with us, and we were made Chosen by her.”

 

When she paused, he nodded. “You’re right, you do sound like a fucking loon.”

 

“You asked.”

 

“So you’re immortal?”

 

“Essentially. The only thing that can kill a Chosen is another Chosen. I mean, I’ve always wondered if we could come back from an explosion big enough to atomize us, but it’s my impression that while it might take a while, we could come back from that as well.”

 

“That’s…” He shook his head, as if that would help it sink in any faster. “That’s pretty fucking impressive. So I guess even if I did want to kill you, it wouldn’t matter.”

 

“Not if you’re not Chosen.” A shrug, and she pointed to his wound. “I thought that was just because the other us that attacked you was Chosen, and you killing him, that so were you, but I guess that means you got lucky with him not being one either.”

 

“Makes you wonder how many of them you’ve killed that’re just like me.”

 

“Not really. Makes me wonder where your Pandora is, though. If something happened to her.”

 

 

 

Looking up at her from the top of his eye made him wince, now that the adrenaline had worn off, but through gritted teeth he managed. “You’re pretty fucking cold.”

 

“I spent almost twenty years living in that shit before it even happened in your world. You’re damn right I’m colder for it.” She made a little noise, and smirked. “Though from what I saw of you in that alley, you adapted well.”

 

“Harder to adapt the older you get. Set in your ways.” Nikki looked down at the cracked concrete and zoned.

 

Her eyes softened as she studied him. He was somewhere else. “More to lose.”

 

“Maybe,” he grumbled. “Maybe not.”

 

When she moved forward, reaching out for him, he grabbed the pistol and pressed it against her forehead faster than even she foresaw, and for a moment they stayed frozen.

 

“I just want to check your eye. You didn’t do anything with it and it’s likely to get badly infected.”

 

His voice became a whisper, but still carried the weight of his tone. “No. I’m fine.” Laying the pistol back on the floor, he nodded.

 

Sitting back down, shrugged. “No good to me if you’re all sick.”

 

“Yeah, well I’ll be good. Whatever it is needs being done, I’ll do it, that time comes.”

 

“I’m sure.” There was a pause, and then she made her first move to intrude, subtly. “I was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia. Only child. Lived there my entire life, even after the plague. Parents died before that. After, the military scrambled when the federal government collapsed, tried to control territories closest to the Pentagon; Richmond was one of them. By the time Pandora found me I’d lived five years under Pentagon rule and then another six fighting to overthrow them with the resistance. But as the old adage goes, wars of liberation are often followed by civil wars. The gangs that had worked together to oust the military dictatorship turned on each other. By then I had my own group, and with Pandora as my second we broke the other gangs and reformed those that wanted to work in Richmond’s better interest.”

 

“And those that didn’t?”

 

Raising her eyes, she glared hard. “We disposed of them.” A sigh, perhaps regretful, escaped her lips and her body loosened. “You can’t reeducate the adult population of a conquered group or nation. Can’t force your beliefs on them. If they do not already share in your views, they have to be wiped out. You start with the next generation. Those whose minds can still be shaped.”

 

“That’s a rather extreme view.”

 

Tightening, her back went rigid. “It’s a realistic view.” Looking for give, he provided her none, so as she motioned round about with her hand, Tori once again relaxed. “You had to be there. And I stand by my actions, and those afterwards.”

 

“What happened?”

 

“There were about thirty-thousand of us in the city proper and outlying counties. Most drawn in by the stability we’d created.” Fumbling for her cigarettes, she paused, holding them in her lap as she stared off for a moment before lighting one. “Military remnants out of D.C. dirty bombed Richmond. Twice. And then we had twenty-thousand corpses and ten thousand painfully making their way that direction about a week out. Pandora and I were the only ones left.” Licking her lips, she took a hit off of the cigarette and exhaled. Then repeated the act again before continuing. “I had a guy, out of the city. In the Carolina Territories. He knew things. Built things. So I went to him and had him do for me what he did. Something to make D.C. glow for about five centuries.”

 

“You nuked Washington?” Nikki couldn’t hide the rise in pitch of his voice.

 

 “Bang.”

 

And the nearest door burst wide, the steel crumpling like aluminum foil. Tori and Nikki wrapped fingers around their pistols and brought them to bear as they came upright, as if in unison. Into the building he came, almost having to stoop to avoid the top of the frame as he stepped up on the door. A hulking form, a leviathan, his face tattooed so as to almost make him unrecognizable; the mad glimmer in his eyes was all-too familiar.

 

“Hello, pets,” Leviathan rumbled. “Wandering by, heard the party.”

 

Nikki cut his eye. “That’s the crazy Dolph Lundgren fucker?”

 

“No, this guy’s bigger. A lot.” She stepped forward, her pistol still raised. “We want to stop this. How many times have you been here? Twice? Three times? It can end if we work together.”

 

“End, pet?” Leviathan’s laugh built, and became raucous enough to send chills even through Tori. “I’ve been here forty-nine times before. This is purity. This is what we are. Let me show you.”

 

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“Inbound dimensional skip registering,” exclaimed Eight.

 

Out in the street, the shadows against the building rippled and faded. A moment passed, and the rippling appeared again, rising in intensity of motion before once again stopping. Then, in perhaps one final attempt they exploded outward in twisting tendrils and hooks. Skittering like thousands of rats sliding down steel plate, then they withdrew, leaving behind the spiky-haired troublemaker and his ashen-skinned wife, Pandora, the Asian woman with the white hair and luminescent green eyes.

 

Her voice was high and giddy, like song sung by a deranged young girl. “The Wisp,” she began, noting the trans-dimensional shadow-creatures that had brought them. “They struggled in bringing us here. They were in such pain.”

 

“But did you see it, love? Wasn’t like they were blocked off, or crowded out by the Wisp native to this timeline.”

 

“No. They were lost. Disoriented. The pathways created through the otherwise overpopulation of Wisp were nonexistent.” She trembled, but smiled.

 

“There are no Wisp in this timeline.”

 

“But once there were. The shadowspace exists, it has simply…thickened, as if healing over. Something here has killed them all.”

 

Vic cocked his head. “But that…” He almost uttered the word “impossible”, but he knew better. “That’s, at least in our line, an almost infinite count of Wisp.”

 

“Well, they were what existed in the nothing before the beginning of time brought light. That, my love, is a lot of time to enjoy the pleasures of the flesh.” Again, she trembled. “It makes me wet, Victor.”

 

“Hold that thought, love.” Looking up, he studied the sky. It wasn’t familiar, but he knew the shades were different; he couldn’t place it, but he knew that something looked wrong. “I want to check out a few places.”

 

And with only slightly less struggle, the Wisp returned, vanishing them in shadow.

 

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Tori fired off her pistol as the Leviathan charged, showing no apparent signs of succumbing to his immediate wound. Grabbing her pistol and hand together with one hand of his own, he gave a sharp downward twist and threw her chest and chin to concrete. Immediately she rolled aside as his heel came down where her spine had been.

 

Nikki moved in, taking shots at the monster’s legs, chunks of  meat and blood hitting the floor as he buckled and dropped to his knees. Only for a second before he was up again, as was Tori, catching him in the ribs roundhouse, the kick absorbed, the Leviathan flung her up and at Nikki, who reached out and attempted to block her. Without thinking, he’d done so with his wounded arm, the open flesh and torn muscle in his shoulder screaming at him and refusing to be pushed, she stopped short of the wall and he spun about. Opened up a split second, the monster landed a direct hit to Nikki’s spine, and his legs went numb beneath him, the Leviathan moving faster than his size belied, sweeping him at the legs almost at exactly the same time as his knees touched concrete. The long hair settled over his face for but an instant before his behemoth adversary’s foot made contact with his chest. Nikki felt the crack of ribs and the hot-cold sensation that flooded his torso as he slid back into the wall, kissing black and his head struck the block.

 

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Solar systems distant.

 

The jungles had been thick, sprawling, basking in the warm rays of the binary stars in-system. Now it was nothing but night on the surface, flash-frozen. Everything in Vic’s bones told him that it was the place. That even if not in that timeline, he had stood on that world before.

 

But too cold, even for them. The Wisp raised and withdrew them repeatedly in short hops in and out of shadowspace, moving them along from black to black, until finally, in a blink, he found himself confronted with what he had suspected, but hoped he would not find. The massive structure with its satellite buildings was empty, and had succumbed to the ravages of abandonment and time, frozen over like the rest of the planet.

 

It is. He looked back to his wife for answers, but she could only nod, confirming his discovery. Straightening up, he looked skyward. For all the dark and lack of atmosphere, the night seemed dimmer than he had remembered, even when all was bustling.

 

The Wisp took them again.

 

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A little give, between hard against harder. A flash of light followed by black dizziness. A distorted voice, angry, and then another hard shock, “I said wake up!”

 

Dried and stuck. Pull and pull, and then something warm slapped against Nikki’s cheek and pulled his blood-dried eye open. It was blurry, and he was disoriented; it took a few seconds to realize that the face staring back at him was the Leviathan. Not long behind the return of his senses came the pain, worse than before, and he knew what that meant. Alive.

 

“Good, pet. Fun game.” Leviathan grinned, chewing something like gum, his breath foul. “Been at least an hour since the last one, and I got urges.” As the hulking mass stepped aside, Nikki’s eye struggled to focus on the change in distance. It took him a second to make out Tori, face down on the floor; wrists bound around one of the support beams by her pants, her underwear still up, but barely. Most likely, he did his best to reason, lowered by the removal of her pants. Something in their enemy’s voice told him that nothing had happened yet. “Like an audience, the opportunity arises. Especially ones know the pet.”

 

A new pain crawled up from Nikki’s gut and the monster raised his hand, fingers red, a piece of something between them he almost immediately popped into his mouth. Head flopping forward, Nikki felt the tug at his shoulder, and saw the head of a metal spike, the pipe he’d used earlier, perhaps, shoved through his shoulder wound, pinning him to the concrete wall. And then the thing that made him start to slip into the cold fever chills he figured to be shock. Clutched in Leviathan’s other hand, thumb resting against the back of the blade, was a knife, shaving not-so-shallow flesh from Nikki’s side, as if he were simply peeling the skin from an apple.

 

As he raised it to his mouth, the beast wrapped his tongue around it and grotesquely slurped it from the blade as he turned toward Tori. “Wait right there, boy. I’ll want something on my stomach after I’m done with her.”

 

“Fuh…” Nikki’s words turned to red spit, and he struggled for strength. “Go fuck yourself,” he managed hoarsely.

 

Leviathan nodded. “Intend to, pet. You just watch.”

 

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Another solar system. Another world.

 

The vast oceans were desert, and the forest islands that shot up from the waters, once comprising the majority of the planet’s landmasses were but dry mesas, crumbling under the high gravity and wind erosion.

 

The couple stood at the edge, before a few fragments of stone that had once been a government building, tens of thousands of years old when humanity was first reaching for the stars. So much rubble.

 

In the sky, the sun leaned closer on them than it ever had, and the Wisp yanked them back. Next destination, sliding through the inky shadowspace in coldslick erratic neckbreakmotions of worn soles and oil on tile.

 

And then the bounce. Sudden stop, hard, and an equally abrupt change in direction, less than a recalculation and more like a ricochet, the shadows spread outward and threw them back to the world of counterparts.

 

“Dead,” he mumbled. “Sainin, K’Raiga. And the Clast Sphere; what was that? They wouldn’t even take us there.”

 

“They could not,” Pandora replied in equally hushed tones. “That reaction of theirs…. They knew our destination and they realized that nothing was there and so they reacted to take us some place safe.”

 

“Nothing was there?!” His voice now boomed. “You don’t disappear an entire fucking Dyson Sphere, Pan. Not unless you take out the sun inside of it. And you certainly don’t take out the Clast Sphere. Our blood is there, and not even the Bazqure are that goddamned stu….”

 

“Different timeline, love. Remember. It may have never existed. Or as its star expanded, the gravitational forces might very well have collapsed the structure.” She tilted her head to the side. “The balance to be maintained is fragile.”

 

“But why would the star…” Vic’s voice trailed off as everything began to come together. “The same way K’Raiga’s did, and Sainin’s was dark. We are way out in the future. We’re being pulled from parallel realities, but not parallel times. They’re taking us from all over our respective timelines.”

 

------------------------------------------

 

“You too, pet.” The voice was low, but insidious instead of comforting. “Wake up.”

 

Tori shoved the darkness back faster than Nikki had, a gift of being Chosen, but almost as quickly as she regained her sensibilities she realized her position. “Get the fuck off of me,” she yelled, only to have her head yanked back.

 

“When I get bored,” he replied close in to her ear as he reached for the top of his pants.

 

Not far away, Nikki did his best to force himself back to lucidity. Pull together a coherent set of thoughts before shock managed to kill him, and Tori was lost to Leviathan. One chance. And with all he could gather, Nikki twisted hard, throwing himself forward and ripping his body off of the steel shaft. Failing him, his legs folded and he fell to the floor, just close enough, if only it did anything. Grabbing one of the pistols still on the ground, he fired a round through Leviathan’s head, sending the beast tumbling over Tori. For a moment all was quiet, and then the monster groaned.

 

Chosen? Chosen. What was it Tori said? Think! Damnit!  

 

She looked back at him but needed say nothing as he took the last of what he had and slid the pistol over towards her before surrendering to the dark once again. The pistol slipped almost right into her hands and twisting around the column she took aim as Leviathan pushed himself up and sprung forward to wrap his fingers around her throat.

 

“You’re touching me.” She smiled as he looked down, realizing what he’d done an instant before the muzzle flash. Leviathan crumpled, lifeless. Struggling, she freed herself from her bonds and made her way over to her comrade. “Nikki!”

 

His eye was closed, but still he breathed.

 

---------------------------------------------------------

 

 

 

 

“Why is that man still in this timeline, and how did he get back in the first place,” the Overseer demanded. On the display just beyond him, Vic and Pandora made their way down one of the dusty streets as the sun sank deeper in the sky.

 

“How he returned is not known, sir, though as to how he is remaining here,” Eight clicked and whirred as it looked around at its counterparts. “He and his partner no longer seem to be registering as quite here enough for the skip generators to get a lock.”

 

The Overseer’s eyebrow raised. “He came back his way; he’s here on his terms, not mine. Is this it?” Perhaps this is the End Game.

 

--------------------------------------------------------

 

The blade glowed slightly as she pulled it back from the torch. Squatting down she quickly looked it over before laying it against his side. Nikki’s eyes flashed open and he flailed, pushing upright as best he could, strengthened by the surprise and adrenaline, only to find her other hand pressing down against his wounded shoulder. Words came mumbled and half-formed from his mouth as she pulled the blade back and leaned in, his eye wide, expressing all.

 

“It’s okay, Nikki; it’s just me.” Pulling the blade away she leaned in closer. “You’re hurt bad. I’m no medic, but I’m doing my best to patch you up with what I can. Trying to cauterize what he did to your side, that’s easy, but your shoulder I can’t do a whole lot with.” Lifting her hand off of it she looked at the blood smeared on her skin from his wound. “This’ll help, but I’m gonna need more out of this hole to help your body wash out whatever’s in there to cut down on the infection risk. Puncture wounds are a bitch. I…”

 

Arching his back, he sucked in air as best he could, before low and broken, “dead?”

 

She shook her head and he tensed. “I think you’ll be okay. If you were Chosen you would heal up fine but your shoulder, I’m not sure…”

 

“Him.”

 

“Oh.” Tori’s hand was warm, comforting as it moved to his chest. “Yes. Very. But we’re going to have to get you mobile as fast as we can, find another place, just in case that mess drew attention.”

 

-----------------------------------------------------

 

Packing a cigarette against his lighter, Vic Storms sat on the front stoop of a battered apartment building, his wife standing before him, looking down the street. Whipping up, the wind rolled small dust clouds down the sidewalk around them.

 

“You wish to stay here, love?” Her words floated by him.

 

Lost in thought he barely caught them. “Yup.” For a moment he stopped to consider her place and words. “You gonna find this troublesome?”

 

Shaking her head, she smiled. Haunting. “You are my love, the others are mere shadows. I was simply curious as to why you would wish to bother with…” As her words trailed, she slowly turned, almost as if uncertain she wanted to see what could be behind her. Were she any mere mortal woman. Down the street she gazed, brow furrowing, eyes narrowed.

 

“Pan?”

 

“Something is here. Something familiar, but wrong.” Turning back, she was mischievous. “Let us find it?“

 

Vic nodded.

 

-----------------------------------------------------

 

Rocks and dirt shuffled under their feet as Tori and Nikki made their way from the abandoned building where the Leviathan had died. Holding his arm around her neck, over her shoulders, she helped him stumble along as best he could, still week from the loss of blood, the shot to his back, and everything in-between.

 

“You’ll move faster without me.” For the pain, the words were difficult.

 

Looking into his eye, she knew that the words held no implication, no attempt at guilt or manipulation, they simply were as stated. “Yes,” she agreed, continuing on as his crutch. “But I’m not leaving you behind.”

 

“Why?”

 

“Because I owe you one.”

 

He eyed his tightly wrapped shoulder and looked back to her. “Paid.”

 

“When I say it is. Now shut up and get better.”

 

Turning they worked their way down an alley for a time before the narrowness of it opened into a courtyard parking lot of sorts, and there, sitting in the center of it, perilously close to a wall, sat a somewhat dirty black car.

 

Nikki smiled, and Tori cocked her head in his direction, but kept eyes fixed on the car. “I know my cars, and I know my badges, but I don’t know that one. Is that what I think it is?”

 

“My car.” He nodded. “Know how to drive stick?”

 

“Not well.”

 

Sighing, Nikki cut his eye up at her. “Sacrilege.”

 

“I do, well enough.”

 

“No.”

 

“Give me the keys.”

 

Checking to make sure the fingers of his right hand were actually flexing, as he was telling them to do, he shook his head. “No.”

 

“You have a hole the size of a silver dollar through your right shoulder. You are not driving.”

 

“Try me.” Short seconds later, the car doors slammed and from the passenger’s seat, Nikki looked over at Tori behind the wheel. “Looks like it just stalled out and stopped. Press in the clutch and turn the car on.”

 

“I know how to start a manual.” Turning the key, the engine roared to life, and a beeping emanated from the gauge cluster. She looked at him, and he reached over and tapped the reset button in the center console, above the stereo.

 

“The stall out made the onboard computer system have a shit.” He tapped the button again. “It’s running through a system check to make sure battery, oil, and whatnot are okay and nothing’s amiss mechanically that caused the stall.”

 

“That’s…kind of cool.”

 

“Okay, slowly let your foot off the clutch. It’s tight, the car either goes or stalls, but there’s a spot at about five hundred RPMs where you can balance out on just the clutch without brake or gas. When it starts to roll, give it gas as equally as you finish pulling off the clutch.” She looked at him, and he could only do his best to shrug. “Just saying if you drop the tranny I’ll find a way to kill you.”

 

“Nice.”

----------------------------------

 

“It’s a fair piece of city,” Vic acknowledged.

 

“It is incomplete.”

 

“Yeah. Like something just decided to stop it in the distance, and the desert outside blew it away. A movie set.” Flicking away his cigarette he lit another as he rose to his feet and began to move away from the stoop. “Reminds me of Richmond a bit. A bit of Callian, too, except no fucking palm trees.” The cigarette dangling from his lips he stood there before drawing his pistols and spinning them in his hands, butt up. Eyeing the nowhere near stock clips he took note of a near-full charge on both of the bullet replication units before almost instantly spinning them back around into their holsters. “Thank god. Look like someone scared the shit out of them. It’s unsettling. No more unnerving plant than a palm tree.” He shrugged. “Except that thing on Intakashii that eats small villages. That’s pretty fucking disquieting.”

 

Whipping around she looked off an instant before he did, simultaneously with the jet of purplish charge that streaked between them, followed by the electrical crack of an amped up Tesla coil. The stoop exploded in small chunks and fine dust as Vic immediately returned fire.

 

“That,” began the ashen woman, interrupted by a much more abrupt version of the electrical sound.

 

“Was familiar. But here?!” Standing out, unafraid, Vic lowered his pistols to his side. “We didn’t even exist in that timeline. That was the reason they…”

 

“Could exist. One of only seven timelines where we do not exist…of which we are aware. Our souls in other bodies, Victor.” Turning, she locked eyes with him. “Their bodies.”

 

The sharp static crack took visual form between them, closer to Vic, the displacement wave from the out-fold throwing him off-balance as she appeared between them. The bioluminescent purple brands beneath her eyes, almost triangular, curving inward a bit, accented her matching eyes. Clad in a black, bodysuit-like armor everywhere save for her head and the purple around her fingers, she swept his foot and spun about roundhouse, swinging her fist upright, only to have it effortlessly blocked by Pandora. Taking hold of the intruder at the wrist, the ashen women flung her about rag-doll against the building, fracturing brick.

 

Straightening her clothes as Vic came to stand, Pandora eyed the woman. “What is the meaning of this, Evelyn?”

 

“Pandora?” She looked up at the two of them. “Vic? Oh God, it is you. Actually you!” Lunging up, arms outstretched, she found herself looking down the barrel of Vic’s pistol.

 

“What the fuck, Eve? Seriously.” Eying her up and down he cocked his head and squinted. “All that surprise and jubilation over your not being all, well, dead is just kinda absent when you try to off us.”

 

“I just…I didn’t know you were actually you. And after the last one, I…” Behind her eyes, it was almost as if he could see her brain doing an about-face. Her face. Almost as young as he last remembered, her mix of Japanese and Native American features distinctive and beautiful. “Dead?”

 

Placing the pistol back into its holster, he lit up another cigarette as he snuffed out the one lying on the pavement. “Last thing you remember?”

 

Eve considered arguing, but she had learned long ago that it was pointless approach with either of them. “Gabriel and I, with Prenna, had folded into sector Elatin Vu, to the Prentori baseworld of Nio. There was a planetary distress call and the first two ships responding went silent. Almost as soon as we hit the sector the grav waves were pulling at us. Harder than anything.”

 

“Not a black hole,” he stated. “With a strong enough focusing system…”

 

“The gravitational forces only enhance the scope of the fold. No, she’s folded out of black holes before. Folding doesn’t require the escape velocity that cannot be reached by conventional ships against the increasing mass. Besides, her nature of being anchored in multiple points of time allows her…leverage.” She shook her head. “It was a gateway, and there were so many ships. We fought hard, called in reinforcements, and then we were hit by something that resembled a planet killer, of the string-generating variety. Super-dense. Probably their gateway-maker. Prenna’s shields collapsed, her energy sheath breached, and she was holed right off the core. I tried to fold to the guide chamber and then I woke up here.”

 

“So then,” began Pandora. “It is not simply Victor in form and soul, but soul separate from form, with life-experiences being inconsequential as well.”

 

“Where’s my brother.” Eve’s tone was demanding, and she would recognize no counter, for while not directly out of the gate, once started, she could be as set in her way as either of them.  “I answered your question; now you will answer mine.”

 

Nodding, Vic made his way past her. “Fair enough.” He motioned her along, and the three of them made their way down the sidewalk.

 

“Victor.” Pandora’s inflection was rare caution.

 

“Okay. Anything I say comes with the warning that it could fuck up your future, your brother’s future, our future.” He shrugged. “That last part I’d have to kill you for if I remember.”

 

“So Gabriel’s alive?”

 

“Last I saw. We shared a few drinks in a little bar on a hidden world called Grenu. We were drowning our sorrows, him over the loss of a friend, me still not dealing with the loss of one of my kids, while Grenu fell to a pesky little expanding empire. The Shozari. That was a little bit my fault, one of my wayward pups being all vengeful. But Gabe got out with me. He’d been living in our native line, not yours. He moved there with the grandkids. I guess that was early twenty-eighth century. But we haven’t seen him in close to fifteen hundred years.”

 

“Fifteen hundred?”

 

“Yeah, at some point he became fused with…a piece of Prenna herself. He said it only served to lengthen his already long lifespan.” In the distance the shape of sound began to change, echoing down the canyons of concrete, brick, and blacktop. “Still had access to her abilities that way, and even without the living ship around as, well, all whole and ship-like, he could still live. The symbiotic link wasn’t broken that way. Figure much the same with you now? `Cause I know that once bound to Prenna, hosts have to stay in proximity or they die.”

 

Stopping, Eve’s head lowered and she stood there a moment before the armor around her left arm and shoulders split like billions of fine hairs and partially retracted, withdrawing into the implanted seed point at the back of her neck that had originally served to create a partial link to the ancient living ship. Like the raised aftereffects of ritual scarification, textures not unlike those on the inside of the ship were left in her skin, burned into her flesh along with speckled fragments of the ship itself. And almost as soon as she had retracted the armor, it exploded outward again and rewrapped.

 

“That’s what I figured.” Slipping his pistol from its holster, he looked off into the distance, as the throaty sound grew closer. “Like I figure that sounds like wheels.”

 

 

 

 

As the sun sank over the horizon and the way ahead grew darker, Tori moved along in third, hitting brakes to slow for a corner and then dropping to second, RPMs jumping briefly before starting to lower. Nikki shook his head, but made no other comment. That was enough. “Right now I’m all you got for movement, Captain Blood-loss. So howsabout being grateful for whatcha got?”

 

He nodded. “I am. It’s just that no one else drives my car. She’s use to being driven a certain way. And it’s odd being on this side of the cockpit.” With his left hand he gestured towards the steering wheel. “Dial on the left near the door. First notch towards the wheel is running lights; pull out on it for the runners and fog lights. Second notch is headlights; pull there for those and the foggies.”

 

Dial all over, the headlights shone down the road, and when she pulled out, her peripheral lighting increased. Grabbing the wheel again with her left she clutched and shifted to third, accelerated and shifted to fourth. Down the street the Mustang tore, pushing seventy. Debris ahead, she dropped to third again, and then to neutral, rev-matching and switching to second as she turned hard down the closest alleyway. The car jumped up and to the side going over the riser across the sidewalk, the solid rear axel showing its limitations, but her quick compensation showing her capacity to rapidly acclimate. The buildings on either side expressed gasps as the car passed each one and the echo changed, before breaking out onto the next road. Spinning the wheel in hand she all but drifted around the corner, making it up into third only briefly before slamming on the brakes.

 

And there before her stood Vic and Pandora, smack in the center of the street, his pistols drawn.

 

“Damn.” Tori sucked the word under her breath and glanced back into the rearview, only to see Eve appear, fist charged with energy. “The hell?! Nikki, I….” But he lay there in the passenger’s seat, unconscious again.

 

Her hand went to the pistol in his belt and her eyes went back to Vic.

 

“Wouldn’t do that,” the spiky red-haired bastard growled. “Dragging the clutch like you’ve been doing’s bound to fuck it all up eventually.” Shoving his blued back into his waistband, Vic moved in, the nickel-plated still drawn and aimed squarely at the bridge of the driver’s nose. “Don’t recognize the year, but I recognize a body and badging like that anywhere,” he said, resting the sole of his boot on the front bumper. “Howsabout you move that inevitably pretty ass out of that seat before I have to put a round through that front windshield?”

 

Tori raised her eyebrow. “A bullet won’t do shit against Chosen, outside of  put one down a few. How about you get out of my way and I won’t have to run you down?”

 

“Bumper-fu won’t do shit against Chosen,” he retorted, leaning in. “Outside of making me wanna kill you slower, you Goddamned slag.” Swinging his arm across his chest, he holstered the other piece. “Besides, you won’t get your back wheels over my body before the one behind you blows your head off, taking the top half of the car with it. And she ain’t Chosen, so it definitely won’t kill you, but it’ll hurt.” He watched her glance over at her passenger as he slid his foot off the bumper, turning and making his way back towards Pandora. “And while I’m waiting for you to all pull your atoms back together and recreate your head, before I off you all permanent-like, I’ll bide my time doing your cold and limp lower torso.”

 

Smirking, Pandora clasped her hands behind her back and rocked back and forth. “I want to fingerpaint with her while we wait.”

 

“Of course, Love.”

 

Laying the pistol in her lap, Tori wrapped her fingers around the stick and shifted into first. “Say I get out of the car. Then what?”

 

“I’m not unreasonable.” Cocking his head, Vic turned as if to glance back towards her, but kept his eye fixed on his wife, a mischievous grin on his lips. “Well, not generally. So, since you haven’t tried to kill me and I haven’t tried to kill you, I think maybe this is something all sorts of meaningful we can build on. Name’s Vic. Course, your friend’s all sorts of dying on you, so let me be all kinds of olive branchy and say that maybe we should talk about this somewhere other than out in the open, before we attract…others.”

 

For a moment, she mulled over the notion, her hand moving into her lap, laying atop the weapon there. “If I don’t like what you have to say?”

 

“Then you go your way and we go ours.”

 

-------------------

 

 

-------------------

 

Down the street, as night crept on, an old corner garage sat hushed from all outward appearances, while inside, the Mustang sat parked, hood still warm. In an office, bridging the bays and what had once been a waiting room, Nikki laid on the black and green checkered floor, buffered by an old blue tarp and covered by Tori’s jacket, while Vic, Pandora, and Eve looked on.

 

“Awfully trusting of you,” Vic growled.

 

“Not really,” responded Tori, without shifting her focus from her wounded ally. “You wouldn’t be the first you I’ve killed, you force me. Prefer not to, though. Be easier with three more people.”

 

Chuckling, he eyed his wife. “I like her.”

 

“You like her because she is you with breasts, my love.” Moving closer, Pandora ground her crotch against him, as she reached around the front of his pants and played her fingers over his bulge. “I like her, too,” she whispered. “Perhaps we can keep her for a pet?”

 

“If it were another time, I might be interested,” began the red-haired woman, “but in this time, my interest is in getting out of here.” She looked back at them, her hand never pausing as it comfortingly stroked the side of Nikki’s head. “Kill the games-master; that’s what I want. Never come back here again.”

 

Studying her, Eve nodded, and voice low she leaned in to Vic. “She wants nothing to do with you; she’s already set on someone, whether she realizes it or not.”

 

Hearing her words, he chose not to acknowledge Eve’s statement. “You want to make a run at the house? That’s just why I came back.”

 

“You act like it’s a choice.”

 

His laugh was boisterous. “Sweetie, Pandora didn’t come from nowhere; I brought her back after the fuckers tried to play yo-yo with me.”

 

“What?”

 

“I was brought here, offed a couple guys, and then got sent away, back to my native. I don’t like being toyed with.”

 

“You can come and go?” Tori brushed her fingers over Nikki one last time before standing as Vic offered up a nod of confirmation. “Why would you come back?”

 

“Because people fuck with me and they never do it again. Object lesson. Inspires others to reconsider doing it in the future.” Leaning back against the wall he smiled. “`Sides, I hate being screwed with.”

 

Tori pointed to her ally. “Can you send him back to his world, then?”

 

“I could,” Vic nodded, “if I knew where it was. The Wisp might be able to figure it out, catch his scent and if they’ve been there, take him back. But tricky thing with realities, sometimes they’re only a shade different. Voyagers was on television an hour earlier, Jolt Cola was more than a fad, or Ford didn’t put out a white Mustang the first three years of production.” His mind wandered, and a gleam hit his eye. “I loved that Edison episode. Did you have that show? With the guy, Bog, and the kid and the time-traveling watch that blinked red or green? It was like Quantum Leap for kids.”

 

“Vic, please.”

 

“Point being, the only way to be sure he ends up home is likely to kick the door in on this funhouse and find the system they’ve been using to hijack everyone, because right now, Ms. Sexy Me, the Omni is blinking red, and the only way home is to put right what once went wrong, hoping that makes the next leap the leap home…and not some bar.”

 

“Omni?” The voice was weak, the word broken and barely audible, but all turned to look at Nikki, whose eyes fluttered and opened. “I loved that show.” Slowly, a smile spread. “Wassup?”

 

“Nothing, Nikki.” Leaning back, Tori kissed him on the forehead. “Go back to sleep.”

 

Looking past her, his eyes opened and closed as, upon realizing they were not alone. “Dolph.”  He tried to force focus on the company, his hand limp but fumbling around his beltline for his pistol.

 

“It’s okay,” she comforted, wrapping her hand around his. “They’re on our side.”

 

Taking a few steps closer, Vic squatted down, leaning in on the younger of the group and smiling. “Kid’s got gumption, that’s for sure.” Swinging his right boot around, he sat cross-legged and thumped Nikki’s wounded arm. “Got a warm piece of mean up inside you, keep moving with all that’s been done to you, son.”

 

“Ain’t seen mean,” he mumbled groggily, before blacking out again.

 

Glancing sideways at Tori, Vic raised an eyebrow. “He knows I can snap him in half, right?

 

“A good sneeze could do that right now,” she replied. “But I wouldn’t hafta kill a sneeze afterwards.”

 

---------------

 

Hours on, the sun should have broken on Earth, but outside was still dark as far as Eve could see through the front windows.

 

In the bays, with his wife at his side, Vic stood against one of the doors, eyeballing the car, his mind elsewhere. Shuffling out his cigarette case, he removed one of the contents and lighted it. “Nice ride, though I woulda gone with Calypso Coral. Or maybe a Grabber Orange.”

 

“Your mind, my dear, is not on the vehicle. Evelyn?”

 

He nodded. “Is this where she dies, Pan? We always thought she died in that attack. Gabriel did, too. Though standard comic book wisdom says no body, no death.”

 

“You know reality does not always afford you that closure.”

 

“Yeah, but we’ve lost so many friends over the years. Worlds more than we’ve kept. Maybe this is a gimmie.” Dragging off the butt, he stole a moment to exhale and continued. “She just managed to get yanked at a time when she could have been killed, all Freejack-like. You and I know from our own memories that she never came back. Gabe woulda said something if she had.”

 

“True.”

 

“Then we have three options, and the one that says she dies isn’t viable.”

 

“We send her back to our timeline or we send her to another?”

 

“Ours. That’s where her brother is. That’s the only option. The question being when.”

 

“Then, my love, it is not a question.” Her eyes flashed up at him. “I will discuss it with the Wisp.”

 

Vic smiled.

 

One room up, Nikki had managed to get himself upright, with labored breathing and light sweat. The wall served to hold him in place as he looked to Tori, his only company for the time.

 

“You trust them,” he whispered, as if any more would be a strain that could take his legs from under him.

 

She shrugged in reply. “Nowhere near as much as you. But they’re certainly not the usual for this place, and I think their aims and ours correspond. Much else I can’t say, outside of that if that Pandora is anything like mine, she could kill all of us without trying.”

 

“Comforting.” He’d actually managed to muster enough to tinge the word with sarcasm, however subtle, as he turned to look at her, only to find her looking to him as well. For a moment they stood there before the corner of his mouth curled. “This is so weird.”

 

“You need to stay here,” she blurted, and as soon as she’d uttered the words, upon gazing at his face, she knew it had been the wrong thing. “I mean, you’re in no shape….”

 

Nikki shook his head. “I’m seeing this. You don’t know them, just got a hunch. Someone’s got to be there to back you, and it’s looking like I’m it, Tori. If this ends me, so be it.”

 

Her voice grew small, and flooded with preemptive remorse. “That’s exactly what I don’t want, Nikki.”

 

“Hey, kid!” Vic’s voice boomed as he leaned in from the garage. “You gotta tell me about this ride of yours if I’m gonna drive it.”

 

“Nobody drives his car but me and him,” she snapped in response.

 

Nikki’s smile couldn’t grow any bigger.

 

“We’re gonna have a problem, though. His car’s standard two plus two. There’s five of us. Unless one of us rides on the hump…”

 

“No.” Vic strode by the two of them. “There’s only gonna be us four.”

 

Watching him disappear into the waiting area, she turned back to the ashen-skinned Asian. “He’s not gonna…?”

 

“No. Evelyn is one of ours. One of our family. That means more to him than anything.”

 

Hearing his footfalls, Eve glanced back to see Vic move into the room behind her. For a moment, they stood together at the window before she finally had the courage to work up what she’d been pondering. “When this is over, I’m going back to die, aren’t I?”

 

Heavily, his hand rested on his shoulder. “You’re not seeing this one to the end, Eve.”

 

“You need me, Vic!”

 

“Maybe. But your brother needs you more. Y’all’re…a matched set. Told you once, your world was one of the few where Pan and I don’t exist, just our souls. Mine in yours, hers in Gabes. You need to be together.”

 

“I’m already dead,” she whispered.

 

“No, you’re just missing.” Around them the shadows began to move, twisting, spinning, and then exploding outward and freezing, as if waiting to embrace them but holding off. “We haven’t seen him in fifteen hundred years. I’m sending you back to right after I left him the last time, and you know how this works.”

 

She nodded. “You can’t see us, he can’t contact you to say anything, until after this is over.” Pause. “You think this will work? That this is why you haven’t talked to him in so long?”

 

With a flick of his hand, he turned on his heels and made his way back towards the others as the shadows withdrew, swallowing Eve whole. “I don’t know, little sister.”

 

Nikki and Tori glanced up to see Vic standing in the doorway, tossing down a cigarette and then lighting another. For a time it was quiet as he stood there, the smoke swirling around as he stared off blankly. “Now, kid…you’re gonna gimmie your keys or I’m gonna rip off your good arm and beat you with it.” Tori opened her mouth, but had no chance to get anything out. “Shut-up. You’re good, both of you are, actually, but Pan and I are on a totally different level from the two of you, and unless your ego is making you stupid, you damn-well know it. Your boy is pretty-well useless at this point, and we need to be the ones quickest to get out if shit goes down. I’d rather cruise than hop, `cause it gives us a chance to see things.”

 

“He’s right.” Muttered Nikki. “You need someone who can move, and you know it.” Once again, Tori attempted to say something, this time to be stopped short by a kiss to her cheek, leaving her speechless as he fished the keys from her pocket and tossed them to their compatriot. “You know how to drive a five-speed?”

 

A chuckle. “Boy, there ain’t a damn thing with wheels I can’t drive.”

 

-----------------

 

“I don’t like this.” Making his way across the room, the Overseer pushed through a set of double doors near the corner of the far wall, climbing the winding flight of stairs, walls illuminated, to the observation area. There he stood, looking down on the oddbots as they worked over their consoles. “Two more to the numbers of those I can’t lock or skip. This is organization. His ranks are growing.” Reaching aside he tapped a nearby console, opening the intercom to the area below. “This little group of Storms aside, how many other players are still on my board?”

 

Below, one of the oddbots looked up from its station and in the direction of the observation lounge. “Fifte…” A series of short tones from its console gave it pause and it corrected itself. “Twelve, now, sir. Soon to be eleven.”

 

“Confirm their locations and set up the holographic system.”

 

-----------------

 

“Passenger and now back seat.” Nikki shuffled around behind Pandora riding shotgun. “God, there really is no room back here.”

 

“And you’re sittin’ behind her, not me,” said Vic, sliding into the driver’s seat in front of Tori. “Think about that, boy. They’re pony cars, not sedans. Back seats have always been a joke for people tall as us. I almost pulled them out of mine.” Slamming the door he gave pause, then opened the door again, watching the window automatically lower to clear the roof. Closing the door again, he eyeballed the window automatically rise into the track. “Huh. That’s nifty. Door sounds good and solid, too.”

 

“The windows go semi-automatically, too. Just have to tap them for all the way down or up. Lay on them if you want a set height,” noted Nikki.

 

Giving the clutch a push he cranked the engine and listened to it roar to life, hanging briefly. “Revs sound a little high.”

 

Cocking his head, Nikki leaned in from the back seat, wincing a bit as his arm pulled. “You can tell that? You have one of these?”

 

“No, I have a sixty-nine Mach-1 and a seventy Boss three-oh-two. Course, none of them are original anymore. Every part on both has been replaced repeatedly. Had to totally fab the Mach about six…”

 

“Twenty-seven,” Pandora corrected.

 

 “Five different times.” Scratching his jaw he could only offer a sigh, then, “don’t know why it keeps getting blown up.” Glancing around, Vic played with the dials and adjusted the seat and steering wheel.

 

“You forgot the other one, Love.”

 

“No I didn’t,” he mumbled. “Not in mixed company, Pan.”

 

But it was too late, and Tori chimed in. “What other one?”

 

“Damnit.” Pulling hard out of the garage, his hand worked the gears, keeping them low and pushing hard until the car bolted through the streets nearing triple digits. “Not important. We need to figure out where the game’s being run out of. Look for something obvious. These guys always like their fortresses.”

 

Taking hold of the back of his seat, she leaned in close to his ear. “It’s a Mustang II, isn’t it?”

 

“Shaddup. It’s a King Cobra.”

 

Nikki chuckled. “Yeah, I wouldn’t admit that one, either.”

 

Taking out his blued, Vic slapped it down on the center console. “I can still shoot you. Mustang’s a Mustang, doesn’t matter what generation, or whether it’s an eight, sixer, or four-banger. That’s the badge, that’s what it is.”

 

“Then don’t be so embarrassed about it.”

 

“He is not, Victoria.” Picking up his pistol, Pandora reached back across her husband and returned it to its place without looking as she leaned back between the seats. “You will get use to his sense of humor, given we outlive this adventure.”

 

“Stick or automatic,” Nikki inquired.

 

“All autos now, though the Boss was originally stick.”

 

“Automatic?” He could not hide his surprise. “Really?”

 

“You ever try to drive through a city doing running gun play and shift gears, too, kid? Gun spends most of the time in your lap, or you hope you don’t inadvertently blow a hole in your windshield, dash, or passenger if someone rams you or shoots you or you just plain slip while you’re working the wheel or stick with a piece in your hand.”

 

“Hadn’t really…thought about that.” Leaning back, Nikki gave it a little consideration. “Hadn’t needed to.”

 

”One point I actually riveted a stand-by holster to the dash by the shifter so I could minimize time and movement.” Vic gave a nod, more to himself than anyone. “Damn right, autos.”

 

Tori couldn’t help but look at Nikki at stick out her tongue.

 

“But for just driving and ultimate control over the machine,” Vic added, “you can’t beat a standard.”

 

------------------

 

Elsewhere, glass exploded as a body crashed through the display window of an old storefront. The body, female, hit the ground hard, sliding across the tile. On the sidewalk outside she stood, looking at herself, but not herself, laying inside. Reaching up, she used her heavy gray scarf to wipe the blood from the back of her knuckles as the figure inside began to stir. In no great hurry to reach her victim, with arms outstretched to the side, she shook off the small cloud of dirt and debris from her leather jacket before reaching into her back pocket and removing a silver butterfly knife. Clattering back and forth as she opened and closed it repeatedly, she stepped through the window, proceeding towards her prey.

 

“Cole.” The voice was strong, but when she turned she saw no one. “That is the name you prefer, correct?”

 

Her words were flat, detached, cold. “Where are you?” The holographic image flickered to life, faint, ghostly, lacking much beyond simple outline, as the other woman attempted to drag herself away. “Holo. One moment.” Focusing her attention back to the other, she moved in, kicking away a weak attempt at a strike, and then crushing the hand beneath the heel of her boot. “What do you want?”

 

“To provide for you a way out.”

 

Dropping her knee into the other woman’s back, Cole flipped the butterfly open again, spinning it to clutch overhand. “Price?” The blade whipped down into the neck and out, again and again, hacking away at muscle and bone.

 

“I am organizing an escape from those who put us here.”

 

Spinning the blade back around, she slipped it beneath her victim’s throat and pulled tight and fast, flipping it closed and into her back pocket in almost the same motion as she came to stand. “Tell me where you are; I’ll come to you.”

 

“Not yet. When it’s done. There are four, perhaps five of them, and one is already wounded. I’ve managed to contact the others, there are ten in addition to you, so it should be short work and then you’re home free.”

 

“You mean we?”

 

“Do you really care?”

 

:”No.” Making her way back to the window she stepped back outside. “Where?”

 

“One block ahead and four to your left. You should intercept them there. They’re traveling in a black car.”

 

“I’ll know it.”

 

“Of course you will.”

 

-----------------

 

Staring out the window as the buildings whipped by, Nikki began to drift off to the sound of the engine and the hushed conversation between the couple in the front seat. Gently stroking his leg was Tori’s hand, almost absentmindedly. For a time, it felt as if he were some place else. Somewhere safe and home. He had almost forgotten the entire situation when the car hit a pothole and the rear end hopped.

 

“Vic? Pandora?” His words were groggy. “What’s your universe like? Your Earth?”

 

“Earth’s dead. Almost three thousand years gone.” Vic’s tone was primarily matter of fact, but masked some bitterness. “The galaxy-spanning government came down on humanity for it. Blamed the species, hunted us, imprisoned billions, executed billions more. Those left turned in on themselves, corporations took over, did the usual and waged war on each other. Turned out, the destruction of Earth wasn’t even our fault. But humans were a trash species for a long time, lost the home system for a long while. We only found it again a couple centuries ago.”

 

“Jesus.” Tori shook her head. “What’s it like now?”

 

“We’re better. I called in debts from a few of the heavy alien species, the Sainin, K’Raigan, Prath…put together a big old group, along with our groups, and made the galactic government…consider the error.”

 

“Seems to be a common theme.” Nikki laid his hand atop Tori’s.  “So you saved humanity and killed everyone in the government?”  The laughter from the front seats was startling. He even felt a jump from the hand under his own. Or perhaps it was his own.

 

“Fuck humanity. We were gone too long and the Alcitt Xirrae thought they could push the Allied Families. My families. We pushed back. They pushed harder. I ended them.” 

 

“Sounds like a big can of worms. Hope for your sake none of them had family of their own.”

 

“Not any more.”

 

“Wait. You…wait…their family lines, too?”

 

Vic’s tone dropped, low and rolling. “The families. The species. All four of them. And each of the two thousand three hundred seventy nine rocks and stations they called homes. Just short of a trillion individuals. I can give you exact numbers. We pulled the trigger on a quarter of them ourselves.”  Glancing over at Pandora he smiled, drawing the backs of his fingers across her cheek. “Amazing how quickly you can wipe out a space-faring species that had interstellar travel and nanotechnology when humans were still furry and picking fleas offa each other. All it takes is a few genetically engineered viruses, a nasty little species of quadrupeds that likes to use other species as wombs, and a fleet of planet killers.”

 

Even Tori faltered beneath her breath. “God.”

 

“Us, Victoria.”

 

“So what happened then? You’re talking about a massive government structure, species, organizations, corporations, probably facilities of rest and resupply. The power vacuum left behind…”

 

“Was filled by us. We’d tried to stay outside, to be left to our own devices, but they couldn’t let us be, and now they know what happens when you keep poking a stick in a nest of bees. Eventually the bees own your ass.” Vic shrugged. “They’ll have a better life under us anyway, and at least one of my kids’ pet projects will have plenty of relatively uninhabited worlds to colonize.”

 

“You conquered the galaxy.” For a moment, Tori became lost in the shadows at the floorboard. “I don’t know whether that’s comforting or scary.”

 

“Want scary? Meet my eldest daughter Ishtar some time.” His chuckling subsided, and upon reflection his tone once again dropped. “They weren’t doing anything worthwhile with it.”

 

-----------------

 

At the mouth of the alley, leaning up against the cold brick, Cole took a quick glance around at the street, spotting least five others milling around, two actually talking to each other. One was a Victoria dressed like a three-dollar hooker, in leather shorts and boots and a black and white striped midriff, her red hair short and sprayed back on the sides. The Vics were pretty standard, with superficial differences. One bald, two with short hair, another with a ponytail halfway down his back. The last one stood out, sporting a short Trojan Mohawk, with tribal tattoos up the back of his neck and out to the sides over his ears, mimicking the hairline. Wearing a kilt, he was chatting up the one with the ponytail. The marvel was that none of them were trying to murder each other.

 

“It’s a sight.”

 

Dancing aside, she whipped out her knife and had it open by the time she stopped moving.

 

Standing just behind where she had been, hands shoved into the pockets of his leather jacket, a Vic with long, slick-backed hair stood, staring at her. “I wanted to kill you, you’d’ve been dead.” Walking out of the alley, he headed for the others. “I just want to get back to her, and if that means I gotta work with the rest of you, so be it.”

 

Scanning the alley, and then glancing back over her shoulder, just to make sure, Cole folded up her blade and made her way towards the group.

 

-----------------

 

“So,” Vic started, “what’s your Earth like, kid?”

 

“Yeah, you never finished that story,” chimed Tori.

 

Reaching up with his good arm, Nikki brushed his hair back over his ear. “Not much to tell. There was a virus. I was living in Florida when it started.”

 

“Hey, really?” That piqued Vic’s attention. “Callian?”

 

“Yup.”

 

“Same here, when the Virus hit. Been down there about six months, then fought my way back up to Richmond to get back to my crew.”

 

“Yeah, I didn’t have anyone back in Richmond.” He slumped into the back seat. “All my old school friends had drifted off over the years, though some of that was my fault, too. My best friend, Sy, he married his highschool sweetheart, Cinder…”

 

“Traitorous whore.”

 

“Excuse me?”

 

Vic tensed visibly. “In our timeline, Cinder turned on us, became a mole within our organization. Our Judas. She betrayed us to a man named Hodge, who she later married. Almost cost us everything; nearly destroyed Sy.”

 

“Oh. Well in my timeline, they got married, had a couple kids in the late nineties. Nineteen-nineties. That’s the last I heard from them. His sister Ivy got killed in a car accident about a year after I moved to Florida. Anyway, point being, it was years until our virus hit. Killed about five billion people.”

 

“Can’t imagine the clean-up. Or the smell. Ours was a little over three billion and cleaning out Richmond was trouble enough. Mostly we piled them up in the streets, block-by-block, and burned them.”

 

“Yeah, well…that would have been easier if they stopped moving.”

 

“Excuse me?” Tori’s head snapped around. “They…”

 

“Yes. I try not to say it myself because it’s still just absurd. But yes. Five billion dead, only they kept moving.”

 

“Really? Aw, c’mon,” Vic turned to his wife. “I wanna go to zombie world.”

 

“A lot of the infrastructure remained intact. We have a nuclear power plant nearby, which is kinda worrisome, but things have kept going. Some stuff has broken down, but the internet, our global network of communicating computer systems, is still running, for the most part. Yay automation.” Tapping Tori on the arm, he pantomimed smoking a cigarette and she pulled one of hers and lit it up for him. He smiled in turn. “Some stuff is down, servers, cities where the grid is failing, but there’s enough to communicate with other survivors.” Pausing, he took a few drags and Vic cracked the windows for him. “I’ve seen a handful of others over the last couple years, but they’re usually just passing through, or they get killed. It’s gotten to where I spend my time stockpiling, and then holing up in my place until I need to go out again. Keep the car in the garage, keep the storm shutters up in case a few of the nasties come wandering by. Makes the house look dark even with the lights on, and they’re made to keep hurricane-driven debris out, so….” Another pause, another drag as he nodded to himself. “Talking to people elsewhere online. I have a friend in Malaysia that’s doing pretty much the same as me, and four guys and a girl in Russia that are rocking the paramilitary thing. Other than that, people come and go. Sometimes they just never make contact again. Don’t know if they got killed, or if their grid just went out.”

 

Leaning in closer, Tori looked up at him, her eyes softening. “So you’ve been…alone.”

 

“Mostly,” he whispered.

 

Large and gray, it whisked by the driver’s side door and hit the pavement as the GT yanked to the right, swerving.

 

“What the hell was that?!” Tori turned in her seat, looking out the quarter and then rear window.

 

“Cinderblock.” Dropping into third, Vic poured on the gas as he corrected. “Knew it wouldn’t be long before someone took notice of our engine.” Giving up the stick he pulled the emergency brake and switched hands, tapping the window control and yanking the wheel hard. “Pan?” As he reached across, drawing his nickel-plated from its leg holster, he pushed the clutch as his wife dropped the brake and shifted into reverse. By the time the window was down, he swung his pistol out and tracked the guy on the rooftop that had, until mere seconds ago, been behind them. Three quick shots and the body fell off the roof, “Pan,” as he dropped the pistol into his lap, Pandora shifting again as they came back around.

 

“Think I’m gonna puke,” choked Nikki.

 

“Holy shit.” Tori couldn’t help but be impressed. “You two do that often?”

 

“Been together a long time.” Vic smiled, glancing at his wife only briefly before he caught something out of the corner of his eye at the leading edge of the headlight beam. Slamming on the brakes, the antilocks engaged, stuttering down the pavement in smoke. “Either you two know about how many of us are around?”

 

“Usually about twenty or twenty-five,” replied Tori. “Why?”

 

Nodding to the silhouettes in the distance, Vic grabbed his pistol and opened the car door. “Because I think that’s the rest of them.”

 

“All working together?” Pandora’s brow furrowed. “That is unlikely.”

 

“Someone’s mustering their pawns,” growled Vic, as he and Pandora stepped out in unison. Quickly he counted off the heads he could make out. “So we have ten potential Chosen, plus the one behind us.”

 

Looking across the roof at him, she nodded. “It has been some time since we have had to fight others of our kind.”

 

“Love, these ain’t our kind.”

 

Her hand on his, Tori eyed her company in the back seat. “Stay here.” Shaking his head, he began to slide forward only for her to reach across and poke him near his wound. Wincing, he cut his eye back at her. “Don’t be stupid. Just hang back by the car and keep your head down.”

 

“Then at least gimmie back my gun. Not like you don’t have one. I can still shoot from back here.” Hesitating only briefly, she pressed the pistol into his left hand and stepped from the car, followed by him on the other side as Vic’s voice boomed.

 

“Lemme guess,” he began. “We’re the bad guys and you’re the less bad guys.”

 

“Don’t particularly care,” ponytail shouted.

 

“You die, we go home,” added the Trojan.

 

Nodding, Vic holstered his pistol, holding his hands out to the side. “Then let’s make it interesting.” Slowly he started, his pace quickening over the distance as he thought about the situation and his anger rose.

 

“Yeah, no.” The Trojan drew his pistol and fired a shot, followed by three more.

 

Vic’s body yanked around before his knees gave and he hit the pavement, gloved hands bracing as he looked up. “So be it.”

 

Behind him, Pandora winked at Tori and the Wisp swallowed them both as Nikki moved around the tail of the car and knelt behind the driver’s door. The shadows exploded within the distant group, depositing the two women before the twisted, varied forms of the Wisp themselves emerged, from the figures to the strands to the hooks.

 

Someone screamed.

 

“Jesus, it’s Pandora!”

 

“No, wait!”

 

The one who almost looked like Vic himself, with the slicked-back long hair, held his ground. “Just wanna get back to mine.” As others around him panicked, he tracked her as she moved among them, deliberately drawing his pistol and training it on her. He watched as, from a barely visible sheath built into the upper leg of her pants, she pulled a chrome marlinspike with one hand as she grabbed one of the Vics with her other, hyper-extending his shoulder, twisting his elbow backwards before yanking him to her and shoving the spike into the base of the skull. For a moment the shot was blocked as she moved onto another. “Gotta off you to do it, that’s fine.” The round exploded the side of Pandora’s head and she collapsed, the spike pinwheeling across the street.

 

“Pan!” Vic launched to full sprint as he pulled his pistols, firing into the crowd, tagging Tori in the shoulder.

 

“Hey, watch it,” she snapped, the wound healing almost immediately as she grabbed another by the side of the face and shot him through the eye.

 

Pandora regained consciousness, her head reconstructing itself, to find herself restrained by ponytail and another Vic as two more, along with Cole, kicked and stomped at her.

 

“Don’t fucking kill her,” snarled one of the Vics

 

“Why not?”

 

“Wanna see what it’s like to gut one.”

 

Ponytail looked up. “Rape her.”

 

“Gut her,” said one of the others.

 

“Do both.”

 

Pandora thrashed around as she felt her leather pants being pulled down to her knees as Cole knelt by her head, lowering her lips to her ear. “I can stop these animals before they violate you. Before they stick their vile parts inside of you.”

 

“If only I promise to be yours alone?” Stopping her flailing, Pandora locked eyes with Cole. “You are one of the angry ones, are you not? Sorry, but my love and I prefer both the company of males and females, and I am his, first.” She smiled. “In all ways.”

 

“They’re going to rape you,” Cole’s voice became tinged with anger.

 

“Do not tease.”

 

Eyes narrowed, Cole pushed away, shoving the Vics back and forcefully sliding her hands between Pandora’s legs. “How does it work? Is it only instantly fatal attacks, like a head or heart shot?” She cocked her head. “If I reached inside and started pulling out parts, would that kill you?”

 

“I asked you not to tease,” Pandora whispered through clenched teeth, as the Wisp lashed out around them, eviscerating two of the ones helping Cole, while Tori herself moved in, shooting ponytail before being sucker-punched by Trojan, her pistol flying from her hand. Pandora threw the other Vic off of her as another Wisp took hold of Cole. “Do no kill her,” she ordered the shadow.

 

As Vic rapidly moved in on the scene, his slick alternate stepped in front of him only to be hit almost immediately in the head by Nikki. Grabbing the long-haired double before he could fall, Vic shot him in the heart and kept moving to his wife’s side. Passing Tori’s fight, he shot Trojan in the head. Scrambling to find the nearest pistol, she touched her opponent and shot him again.

 

Vic fired a round in the air. “Stop!” And surprisingly, everyone did. The two that had been eviscerated by the Wisp slowly returned to their feet as Pandora pulled her pants back up. “Look at what we just did to you. You’ve been played. The ones that brought us here can’t get to me and mine because the Wisp, these creatures, are shielding us, and that scares the shit out of them because we’re going after them to end this. They set you up, probably gave you some line about how if you offed us they’d send you home, or that we were the ones doing it and with us dead it would end. Both. Whatever.”

 

“How do we know you’re not the one, lying?”

 

“Because I’m being nice and not killing you for asking me that question, though a lot of that has to do with that sounding like a legitimate question and not you being snarky.” Vic paused and looked over all of them. Cole strung up by the Wisp, a Victoria, and the rest Vics. “Pandora’s here.” Kneeling down, she picked up her marlinspike. “They tried to get rid of me, but I came back and she came with. My understanding is they only bring us here. Victors, Victorias…not Julie Andrews. Has to be us by soul, blood, or both.”

 

“Maybe her being here just proves you’re the ones in charge.”

 

“Dude, I’d rather be sitting at home, in my chair, hanging out with my kids. I don’t mind kicking people’s asses, obviously, but I generally like to be left alone.” Holstering his pistol and fishing out a cigarette, Vic lit it up. “I also like fast cars, long walks on the beach, and laying on the grass staring at the night sky. So here’s the deal. We’ll give you the shelter of the Wisp, you can sit around here and shoot the shit, smoke, sleep, whatever, and the four of us will go and find these fuckers and kill them a lot, and then get everyone home.”

 

“Gosh, that’s really nice of you,” mouthed another. “And why would you not want us coming with you?” And almost as soon as the question left his mouth, Pandora moved up behind him and spiked him in through the ear.

 

The Victoria laughed and shook her head.

 

“That,” Vic pointed to the body as his wife stepped over it, “was snark. Don’t be a dick, I’m being nice here. I trust the ones I’m with, generally, and I don’t want to spend the next few hours sussing out whether I can trust all of you at our backs.”

 

“If we fail,” began Pandora, “then the Wisp will still shield you. It is, at that point, up to you as to whether you attack your keepers or you start fighting their game again.”

 

“Everyone cool with this?” Studying his alternates, he got the nods he was hoping for, save from Cole. “What’s with her?”

 

“Unfinished business,” Pandora replied in hushed tones as Tori moved up beside them. “I rebuffed her advances, and she did not take it well. She wanted to know if I would live should she, as another Chosen, decide to, as you might put it my love, ‘rip out my girl parts’.”

 

Tori cringed. “Oh God.”

 

Raising a finger, Vic’s brow furrowed. “I’m not particularly disturbed by that. I am a little stranged by hearing you say ‘girl parts’.”

 

“Girl parts.” Leaning in close, Pandora laid her hands on Vic, her pitch raising beyond her normally high sing-song tone, and her enunciation drawing out, almost like that of a child. “Do you want to see my girl parts, mister?”

 

“Um, question?”

 

Pandora did not even turn to her, a little perturbed by the interruption. “Yes, Victoria?”

 

“Would that kill us?”

 

Cutting her green eyes, the woman raised an eyebrow, and then spun around, pointing at two of the Vics. “You were going to rape me.” One shrugged and nodded, the other winced. “With me.” The one who nodded almost protested, but a look from her shut him down.

 

“She’s not,” began Tori.

 

“More than likely.” Grabbing his cigarettes, he shuffled one out. “Smoke?”

 

“Everyone over here.” Pandora’s words were not a request, as Cole was yanked upright by the Wisp strands. Hooks, like massive sharp fingers, more than a person tall, sprung up from the shadows on the street and pulled at the strands, suspending the woman as Pandora’s fingers caressed her body. “Let us answer a question, posed by this dear, beautiful Victoria” Her hands finding the knife in Cole’s back pocket as she fondled her, Pandora slipped it out and grinned to herself, flicking it open and delicately cutting down the seams of her captive’s pants.

 

“I’m gonna eat your fucking eyes out, you chink whore,” she yelled.

 

“No, the Chinese thing was,” Vic paused to count a little on his fingers. “Three body regenerations ago. It’s kind of a controlled Dr. Who aging process, if you haven’t gotten there yet. She’s back to more of a Japanese thing this time around.”

 

“I expect all of you have the stomach for extreme acts of unkindness, undue or otherwise.” Pandora scanned her audience before peeling off Cole’s jeans. “No underwear, either. Well, that makes it easy.” The Wisp yanked her legs apart, and one of the Vics chuckled.

 

From the car, Nikki could see most of what was happening, and he could infer the rest when he heard the blood curdling scream as the suspended woman thrashed about, only making things worse.

 

Back at the scene, Pandora tilted her head back and looked at her husband. “Can you see my elbow, love?”

 

He shook his head. “No, I’m pretty sure it’s,” and then a warm wet sound and Vic found himself so surprised he almost laughed. “And that’s the shoulder.”

 

Cole gurgled and coughed up some blood, choking on the rest, as Pandora pulled her arm out and flung it down by her side, blood and bile, along with pieces organs slapping the pavement by her feet as Cole convulsed, and then stopped, her eyes rolling back in her head.

 

“Okay.” One of the Vics let loose a quick exhale. “And there goes my hard-on.”

 

One of the others looked over at him. “Really? `Cause mine’s still good.”

 

Walking up along side of her, Pandora cut a portion of shirt off of the limp body and used it to wipe off her arm, when suddenly Cole gasped out, and her insides began to heal themselves.

 

For a time she continued to choke, before, faintly. “God…God…please….”

 

And Pandora looked to Vic, and then to the others. “Anyone who does not wish to partake, step aside. Interfere and the Wisp will stop you in much the same fashion. The rest of you, I am giving her to you as entertainment, starting with the two who were helping her before. Do not kill her, that is the only caveat, as we will claim her when we return.”

 

“And if you don’t return?”

 

Another hook rose from the ground, taller than the rest. “That descends if we fail. At which point you can kill her or keep her.” Turning on the balls of her feet, she began to walk back towards the car. “Otherwise, I expect you not to stop until we return.”

 

“Evil fortress of doom.” Vic barked. “Anyone seen anything like that?”

 

“That way,” pointed the Victoria, as she moved in close to Cole. “Where the city stops. There’s something that looks like a short little mesa in the distance, only it doesn’t look quite right.”

 

“Fair enough. Best bet yet.” Vic nodded and followed his wife, with Tori right behind him, glancing back over her shoulder to see the Victoria delicately scratch the underside of Cole’s leg.

 

“Don’t hurry back,” she giggled.

 

---------------------------

 

The Overseer watched the number of players drop, only a few in permanent fashion, but when they all disappeared, seemingly masked by the signature he’d seen before, his body tensed. “How?” Bringing his fists down on the console in front of him, he exhaled forcefully, as if that alone would excise what he was feeling. More than simple anger, but also…fear? Was that what he was feeling? Taking a step backwards, he rolled his head on his shoulders and clenched his fists, extended his fingers, and clenched again.

 

Collecting his thoughts, he made his way back down the stairs and into the operations room, surveying the scene, Taking account of the oddbots, the number of consoles, screens, holographic projectors, and the dimensions of the room. It was not as if he was unaware of the numbers, he had designed the entire operation himself, but sometimes it paid to refresh ones perspective on a thing.

 

“They’re coming,” he began, addressing the machine men around him. “Standard countermeasures will be ineffective, a waste of time and power. Disengage all defensive systems and let’s usher them through as quickly as possible, so I can clear out the rabble and we can return to our normal operations.” Leaning by one of the oddbots, his fingers played over one of the holo pads, bringing up on one of the displays a schematic of the facility. “I want troops deployed here, here, and here,” he commanded, pointing to the front gate, the corridor just inside, and the one just outside of the center of operations. “Soften them up, slow them down right outside the door, and when they’re close enough for us to get a solid body lock, we’ll skip them into the sun, where they can burn and die and pull themselves back together long enough to burn and die again.”

 

Eight raised its head. “And if, sir, we still cannot get a lock on them?”

 

“Then I will finish them myself.”

 

---------------------------

 

The road nearing its end, with little more than dirt and rocks ahead, the Mustang’s exhaust rumbled as it slowed to a stop. The engine shut off as the doors opened, and the occupants extricated themselves, Nikki being the slowest.

 

Wind picking up, lifting a cloud of dirt and spinning it into a dust devil that dissipated almost as quickly as it had formed, Vic stared off into the distance at the squat rock formation, peppered with bits of exposed metal framework, and a small contingent of armed humanoid forms outside of what looked to be a large closed doorway. “Yeah, that looks like a good evil bunker.” He turned to Pandora and shrugged. “I was hoping for some kinda crazy Magneto Citadel.”

 

“You do realize, my dearest, that half the time I truly do not understand your references, correct?”

 

“Yeah, but you’re great at extrapolating.” Patting the roof of the car, he began to slide back inside. “Saddle up, and let’s ride this pony to…”

 

“Hey!” Nikki raised his eyebrow. “You are not driving my car up to the front door. We all know it’s likely to get nuked halfway there. They’ve gotta have some defensive system up in there, that’s just common sense, and you are not turning my ride into scrap. Respect for other people’s property.”

 

“Yeah,” Vic shook his head as he continued to slide in, “I always had a problem with that.”

 

Whipping out his pistol, the longhaired man pointed it at Pandora’s head. “I reiterate…”

 

“I know you are not pointing a gun at my wife.” Getting out of the car, Vic’s pistol never had the chance to clear its holster before he felt the cold barrel of Tori’s pressed to his temple.

 

“This is fun.” Pandora could barely contain her glee.

 

“You backin’ him on this, Tori?”

 

“Yes,” she replied, nodding. “I believe I am, Vic.”

 

“Worth it, getting wasted over a car?”

 

Out of her peripheral vision, she saw her wounded ally, and grinned slightly. “No one should be alone, Vic.”

 

Nodding, Vic smiled. “Eve was right.”

 

“I believe she was, my love,” added Pandora.

 

Sliding his pistol back into its holster, Vic made his way around the car door and off towards the bunker on foot. “I really think I’m growing fond of them.”

 

“Agreed.” Pandora, ignoring Nikki, followed suit. “Though something is still wrong in this world. Familiar, but wrong.”

 

“Dunno what you mean, Pan. Buncha crazy alternate versions of myself running around with the killing and the raping and the raping and the killing. Sounds like a lovely place to….” Stopping, he glanced back over his shoulder at the two by the car. “Hey, you kids coming or what?”

 

Staring at them, and then each other, Nikki shook his head and shoved his pistol into his waistband and hobbled along, closing the door as he passed.

 

“They’re lunatics,” he muttered.

 

“And we’re following them.” Tori closed the driver’s door and put her piece away as well. “Course, God knows what we’d be like after a few thousand years.”

 

And with the flick of Pandora’s wrist, more for show than anything, their own shadows devoured them, and distance passed, they reappeared at the main gate, among the oddbots.

 

Meanwhile, just inside, the Overseer took in the action on the monitors, as Wisp ripped through the bulk of his forces, with Vic dancing among the oddbots as well, taking hits here and there, but avoiding most, as his every move seemed to begin another. His martial form of close-quarters combat with pistols becoming nothing other than cleaner with the years. Smooth, succinct, and effective, until a larger oddbot stepped from the crowd and his kick meant to destabilize the machine ended only with the red-haired man on his back. Rolling up on his shoulders he sprung upright to find himself struck in the chest by a large metal fist, tumbling backwards head over heels, finally slowing enough to regain some semblance of control, feet and hands on the ground, he shoved off into a full-on run. Drawing his pistols he summoned the shadows, only to change his mind, jumping through them as they reached around him. “Naw, old fashioned way, we’re doing this one.”

 

Firing his pistols well beyond the point where they would have naturally emptied, but still full thanks to his replication clips, he charged the machine, dodging oddbots as they attempted to intercept him, throwing a hand here and there, but mostly moving around them, spinning, hurdling. As one moved in on him from the side, he averted his attention blowing away the joints while another let loose a burst of arm-mounted cannon fire as he cartwheeled through the air, a seemingly impossible task given his hulking form. He stopped and sneered, his barrels continuing to heat up. “And you, you’re a poor man’s Shang.” Reaching his target, finally, he ducked at the swing, his body’s momentum carrying it up and over the other arm as the hand came to clutch at him. Boots hitting hard, Vic swung his pistols upright and aimed at the sensors impersonating the shape of eyes. “Gotcha.”

 

Tori dove aside as the larger `bot, face in flames, came crashing down on two of the ones she was fighting, and she came up to catch sight of Nikki, doing his best in his condition. Their two other companions were so wrapped up in the frenzy of combat that they seemed oblivious to the fact that one of their number was not only not healing as quickly as he should have been, but was also straining against himself to keep going. But she knew it. She saw it. And though he did not ask for help, she darted through the melee to his side, back to back, as they fought against the onslaught.

 

Her marlinspike in hand, Pandora shoved it between the coiled wires in an oddbot’s neck, twisting, popping them from their sockets like a knotted line, the machine simply dropping over as she moved to the next, strutting through the crowd around them while the others in her party allowed themselves to be carried away simply by the beauty of the violence. And in that she remembered something.

 

A time long ago, sitting shotgun in Vic’s Calypso Coral Mustang, an almost different woman. So long had that been lost, that person. As her love’s world had grown darker with the loss of his closest friends, Sy and Helena the most crippling, Max and the others as well, her careless joy at having found him again had been suffocated as he was struck full-force by the things she had simply come to accept eons before. No. No. She hadn’t come to accept them, that was the long and the short of it. That’s why she had gone in search of him. In search of the reincarnated soul of her lost love. There in the fight for perhaps nothing less than their lives, as she looked across the battlefield at the man she’d fought through hell to reclaim, she remembered who she was, or at least enough of a scrap to hold onto, and she smiled.

 

“Love,” she shouted, holding her hand outstretched as she sheathed the spike with her other. Vic looked at her quizzically, and then there was the look in her eyes. The look he’d seen lost, so long ago. “Old times, love. Old times.”

 

Through the fighting back and forth, the crimson-haired bastard flung his nickel-plated forty-five and Pandora reached for it, wrapping her fingers around the warm handle, her face filled with wicked pleasure as she swung it around, blasting at another oddbot on approach, and then round-housing another, to finish him with a few shots as well. Glancing back over her shoulder, the Wisp crept through the seam between the double doors, hooks spilling outward and ripping the doors apart, strands pulling them from the hinges and bringing them down on the oddbots positioned directly in front of them.

 

Pivoting on the balls of her feet, she ran into the corridor, and oddbots that at least equaled those they had faced outside, if not outnumbered. The light panels shattered around her, fragments of whatever passed for glass or sairs transparent alloy coasting by her, cutting her flesh as she moved among them, both doling out shots and taking them, fighting not unlike she had watched her husband do for over two millennia, not unlike she remembered doing herself. She, who had fought to protect an incarnation of her beloved’s soul during the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, across time to the Revolutionary War, and various wars that would follow, trying to court both male and female incarnations, rejecting her time and time again, but still she struggled, right up until the last one, the small boy dying of cancer who refused to take her offer. The same hospital in which Vic would be born just barely a year later.

 

She stood by his father as he looked over his newborn son in the hospital nursery; the father he would barely know. Watched him from the shadows as he grew. As he fell in the schoolyard, as an overzealous Virginia police officer named Nathaniel Hodge struck him down as a boy of fifteen for helping his wrongly accused older brother. Hodge, who would appear again and again like some damnable curse on their family. And the next generation, and the next. Her darling Victor, who never wanted anything other than for his family to be left in peace, hunted and haunted by a blood feud that had twisted him almost as much as he had been by the loss of those closest to him.

 

Grabbing her by the neck, one of the oddbots shoved her against the wall, her thoughts shattering. “Get off me,” she yelled, kicking it backwards and firing the gun yet again as Vic and the others made their way in, hampered by those that she herself had moved passed, ignored, and left behind.

 

The four of them fought, Nikki being the weakest of them all, his deficit covered by Tori, until in the corridor all oddbots where down, just as those outside.

 

“What happened to you, Pan?” Vic looked at his wife, concerned as they made their way through the main hall. “What I saw out there…”

 

Stopping, she reached out for him, grabbing his arm and bringing him to a halt as her eyes watched Tori and Nikki ahead of them. “I,” she began, her voice cracking. “I…remembered something. We were out there with them and…” Pausing, she leaned against the wall. “I never really said it but…Sy and Helena. I…” Her eye line dropped, darting around the floor for a second before looking up at him again. “I think I loved them.”

 

Vic’s eye welled up and he nodded. “I know, hon. I know.” He began to turn to follow their comrades, only to have her grip tighten on his upper arm.

 

 “No. You need to understand. I’d lost so many, and when you lost them…when we lost them, I….”

 

Laying his hand on her cheek, he leaned in and slowly pressed his lips to hers.

 

“You guys coming, or what,” Tori shouted back.

 

The old married couple smiled at each other, as she leaned over his shoulder. “Yes, we are coming.”

 

Mere minutes later, outside the door to the command and control the foursome cut through yet another contingent of machines, faster than they had before, not slower.

 

“Skip them back,” commanded the Overseer. “All of them! Now!”

 

The Wisp burst forth, tearing apart consoles and those manning them before Eight or any of the other Oddbots could respond. Flung from its hinges, the door cartwheeled in with enough force to imbed it at the corner in the far wall by the Overseer himself, and through the gaping hole of broken frame and cinderblock strode Vic and Pandora, Tori and Nikki.

 

“Of course,” growled Vic, looking into the Overseer’s eyes. “One of me.”

 

There he stood, his muscular form and angular face, clean-shaven, his crimson crew cut high and tight around his ears. “Please. You are all a pollution, and I will see to it that…”

 

Raising his hand, as if in school, Vic didn’t even wait to be called. “Let me guess. You’re the Uber Nazi me?”

 

“How dare you lump me in with such immoral miscreants?”

 

“Um…everyone in your timeline is dead? Guessing you killed them. You’re the last one left, makes you the most prolific killer, but once everyone’s dead, it gets awful boring jerking off to robot porn.” Pulling a cigarette, Vic lit up and took a drag. “You’re holding contests to essentially work through who is the best suited to give you a challenge one more time.” Clapping, Vic took a bow. “Eat your heart out, Three Investigators.”

 

“Obviously deductive reasoning is not your strong suit.” Finding a seat by one of the few intact consoles the Overseer relaxed. “You know how we came to be. All this was set in motion as the end of the last Span, when those among the universe’s population who had learned enough through their various incarnations became one being, sharing their vast knowledge gained by their experiences. Those who had not learned enough were left behind to plant the seeds and care take when the next Span, this one, began. We were ‘Chosen’ because we failed. It’s the end of time here. This universal span has ended, the galactic populations have already died out naturally and their souls have merged into the omnipotent Coalescence. My love, my Pandora, has joined them. And I made certain no one had to endure the torment of the Chosen’s near immortality by helping up those that looked as if they might fail. I am the last, but I could not allow myself to join the others with so many tainted versions of myself running around destroying so many timelines, making a mockery of all I fought to do in this one.”

 

For a moment, Vic mulled over the information. “You can’t be the good guy. You’re the evil trans-dimensional kidnapper Rube Goldberging the deaths of all the other alternate yous, and I know that I for one am not….” Reaching up, he scratched his goatee, and gave pause. “Shit. I’ve got the evil goatee, don’t I?” Glancing at Nikki and Tori, they half-shrugged and nodded, Pandora only smiled. Whipping out his pistols with lightening speed, Vic unloaded twenty-some rounds from each into the Overseer, and then placed the guns back in their holsters. “Okay, so I do have the evil goatee.”

 

Turning to leave, they made only a step when the Overseer, slumped in his chair, pushed himself to his feet. “You can’t kill me.” In an instant he was among them, as he made to kick Tori in the gut, Nikki blocked him, only to have the Overseer snap his neck and nonchalantly use the body to knock Tori over instead. Pandora was next, shoved into the wall as little more than an afterthought, with Vic the Overseer’s main focus.

 

“Energy doesn’t die. The other Chosen are gone and no others will be born here.” Grabbing Vic by the neck, the Overseer stared into his one eye. “Where do you think all that goes?”

 

“Into making you a bigger asshole?” Vic smiled as the Wisp sprung forth, grabbing hold of the Overseer and swallowing him in shadow. “Pan!”

 

Pushing herself away from the wall, she looked up, blood trickling from her mouth. “I am…fine. If he is correct about all other Chosen here, and is as strong as I fear, the Wisp will not be able to contain him.” Feeling his arms wrap around her, for a moment she gave in and collapsed to his embrace, but then regained her composure. “They will try, and many will die. But they will do their best.”

 

“Yeah, well I’ve killed a couple Chosen in my day, so I’m not the average bear.”

 

“My love, what you and I have gained by the deaths is negligible.”

 

“Great, he’s the fucking Highlander. Fantastic. I’ll just have to…” And then sobbing, and they turned to see Tori on her knees next to Nikki’s body. “Aw Jesus. And I was starting to kinda like the kid.”

 

“Pandora,” Tori began. “Can you…?”

 

“I cannot bring back a Chosen killed by a Chosen; that death is permanent. Besides…”

 

“But he wasn’t Chosen. There was no Pandora in his timeline. At least not one that found him. So…”

 

Pandora shook her head. “As I was about to say, Victoria, all that I had in me to bring someone across, to make one Chosen, has long since been used, and Victor never inherited that talent. If we send you back to your timeline, might your Pandora…”

 

Tori shook her head. “She died. Killed by a Chosen driven mad by the immortality. Please, there has to be something that…”

 

“You. If she brought you across, then even if you never developed that ability, like Victor, whatever she had should have passed directly to you. If Nicholas has any hope of breath, it resides within you.” Laying her hand on Vic’s shoulder to brace herself, she moved, hobbled, towards the two on the floor. “I will help you as best I can.”

 

Screams of a thousand frightful things issued from the shadows, and the Overseer punched through, pulling himself from the black nothing in the corner, only for Vic to put his steeltoe boot against his skull before he could get completely free. “You take care of the kids, Pan, I’ll handle Mister fuckin’ Niceguy.”

 

Taking Tori’s hands in her own, Pandora laid them on Nikki’s chest, and then moved one slowly up to his forehead. “Now,” she began, her luminescent eyes flickering from the face of their fallen comrade to her beloved’s female alternate, “slow your breathing. Make each breath delib…” Voice trailing, her head snapped back and then down again, as her eyes locked on Nikki’s face. “Familiar but wrong.” Releasing the other woman’s hands, she moved in closer, her lips mere inches from Nikki’s cooling cheek as she stared into vacant eyes.

 

“Pandora?” Fingertips still pressed to Nikki’s chest, Tori had started to lift her hands when the white-haired woman spun back and grabbed her by either side of her face.

 

“Do not break contact!” Swinging back around, she looked back and once again met the vacant stare. “There was no Pandora in his timeline because his Pandora died, and this is not Victor as any of us know him.”

 

“H-how can you know?”

 

“Because I recognize my own Goddamned soul!”

 

And then it clicked. Beneath her hands he shuddered, breaking into outright seizure, back arching, hard as stone and then he dropped flat, laying still. For but a moment there was pause before Tori turned to look to the ashen woman, who only offered an attempt at a comforting smile, strange uncertainty in the act for her. Whipping upright, Nikki grabbed hold of Tori, his arm wrapped around hers, his other hand reaching past to lay on Pandora’s leg. Slowly, winded, he opened his eye and looked up, beyond his red-headed female counterpart and into gleeful green eyes.

 

“Hello, me.” Pandora was beyond giddy, but it lasted only seconds before behind her, Vic howled like she had not heard in years.

 

The Overseer’s thumb sank into Vic’s good eye, digging deeply before casting the brute aside to writhe on the ground. “How well will you find your fighting spirit now, blind man?”

 

Slowly Vic’s shaking subsided and he rolled onto his hands and knees, laughing. “Been a while since someone did that.” Raising his head, blood ran down his cheek from his ravaged eye socket. “Lost my other one before I became Chosen, but after,” he began, as he reached up and slipped the patch over to reveal an undamaged eye, “the damn thing just grew back.” With a smirk, he rose to his feet again. “I do hate change, and the patch really makes the outfit.”

 

Flinging himself at Vic, the Overseer put him into a console before Pandora and the others could cross the room. Reaching behind Tori, Nikki yanked her pistol from her waistband. Grabbing hold, Vic shifted his weight and swung his opponent around just in time for Nikki to vault the otherwise abandoned station and be on him as well.

 

“Fucking killed me, you son of a bitch,” growled the wiry, long-haired other, pressing the barrel to the Overseer’s head only a split-second before a quick hand whipped Vic back and over into Nikki, sending them both crashing to the floor.

 

Moving over the console, the Overseer took hold of Nikki yet again by the neck. “You may be a god among men, but you are an amateur among gods, child!”

 

And then the alarms sounded. Those screens that still functioned lit up, and gave everyone pause long enough for Pandora to summon the Wisp, spiriting herself and her comrades away. Together they reappeared in the shadow of a building a little more than a kilometer from the facility, just down the block from Nikki’s Mustang, when the hyperspace bloom exploded in the atmosphere above, sending electrical arcs outward, shockwaves shattering glass nearby. She and her husband smiled as a small olive drab and brown ship rocketed outward, followed by another ship, massive in appearance. Large enough to blot out the sun. The smaller of the two redirected itself quickly, in ways physics should not allow, and coasted in low over the group. Vic gestured back towards the complex, before the ship climbed rapidly skyward and folded out in a charged arc of purple energy.

 

“What the hell is that?!” Tori glanced back at the larger craft.

 

“That’s our message in a bottle.” Vic didn’t bother turning. “That’s our crew.”

 

Folding back in, the smaller ship strafed the complex with plasma rounds and cutter beams, folding back out as the other ship rained enough firepower down from its twenty weapons tracks and eighty-five ports to destabilize the average continent, had it not been focused. Eight more blooms opened at various altitudes, and a thousand more ships poured out of them, at the ready but keeping their distance. And then the weapons fire stopped, and the First Couple of Chaos, Vic and Pandora Storms, began walking towards the crater with the other two close behind. Above, the bulk of the fleet formed up on the first two starships, which hung like a silent flock over the area in all directions.

 

With a crack of purple energy, Eve and her brother, only slightly taller, hair long and gray with age, appeared walking alongside Vic. Gabriel offered a nod and smile to his old friend, while a cloud of smoke offered shadow for the Wisp to spring forth near Pandora, depositing five others, all with ashen skin, and a massive rust-colored alien quadruped. Reaching the crater, the newcomers stood at the edge while the four made their way down the side through the smoke and airborne dirt until they reached the horribly burned but still living form of the Overseer at the bottom.

 

“I want you to consider this moment.” Squatting down, Vic looked where he thought eyes should be, if so much hadn’t been melted near down to muscle and bone. “Where your body is working to rebuild itself, and you sit at the feet of three people you yanked out of their worlds, just so you could exterminate your own personal demons.” Reaching into his pocket, he fished out his cigarettes. “I mean, you got so far along trying to help your reality. You helped nurture everyone who might’ve remained as Chosen so no one had to be left behind the way that we were the last time. That became your driving motivation, to make everyone part of the same group that blew you off. Congratulations, you’re a giant suck-up.” Cigarette clenched between his teeth, Vic reached into his holster and pulled out his blued forty-five, the repli-clip charged and loaded. “And then you just about won the game, but you got sidetracked. Had to go stick your nose in everyone else’s back yard because your ego couldn’t accept any you that thought differently. You failed to learn.” Spinning the pistol around in his hand, he offered it, butt to Nikki, who paused only briefly before taking it. “Without anyone else, you became the biggest shut-in in existence, and like all shut-ins, you only had yourself to feed off of, and you regressed. So when you’re dead, will all the good you’ve done be enough? Or will the Coalescence of this Span leave you behind, without your Pandora, without the group, to be the only Chosen in all of this reality for the next Span?” Lighting his cigarette, Vic turned and started to make his way back up the crater wall. “Consider that while Nikki decides whether or not he’s going to put you down.”

 

Cradling the pistol, Nikki stared at it. “Why me?”

 

Stopping as her husband continued, Pandora turned back. “Because, Nicholas, he did you the greatest wrong. He killed you.”

 

“Didn’t figure you two on being big on justice, or justified.”

 

“Depends on the person, kid,” he rumbled.

 

Figuring she understood, Tori spoke up. “They do…with family. I think you just got adopted, Nikki.”

 

A laugh. “Not just him, girl.” Vic stopped, and his volume lowered, changing pitch, becoming almost fatherly. “If you can’t do it, Nikki, I’ll handle it for you.”

 

The Overseer’s healing of his smoldering flesh had reached a point where it had become almost audible, like small animals chewing on fresh friend chicken. It played as background music while he considered the situation. “He’s lost everything.” Reaching over, he pressed the pistol to his foe’s head, before lowering it back to his side. “Come to a really nasty truth that would break anyone else who wasn’t already where he was, and so there he is, with nothing to lose.” Sitting down, he gently took what he thought looked like something that had once been a hand, and was trying to be again. “Sorry you got lost.” Pressing the pistol back to his head, the slide jerked back with the muzzle flash, and the cartridge jumped outward with the spray of blood and gray matter.  The Overseer slumped against him, gurgled, and slowly stopped breathing. For a time, Nikki sat there before laying the dead other down and coming back to his own feet. Behind him, Tori moved up, laying her hands on his shoulders. “Made him more dangerous than ever.”

 

Starting up the crater wall as well, Nikki flipped the safety on the pistol and handed it to Vic as he moved by. “Tell me you can send me home.”

 

“See what we can do, kid.”

 

Reaching the rim of the crater, the four came to stand with the others. One of the ashen newcomers, a somewhat regal looking female with long red hair and expensive taste in clothes, wrapped her arms around Vic, delivering a long, lip-locked kiss. Breaking away, she stared at him, her fingertips brushing the underside of his eye patch. “Someone finally put out the other one, huh? He nodded his reply, and she continued. “This has apparently been a long time coming, from what Eve said. I barely believed it when we got the signal. You and mom always told us stories, but, you know, she died before any of us were ever born. If Gabriel hadn’t been there….”

 

Arching an eyebrow, Vic turned to Eve. “What all did you tell them?”

 

“Just that you and Pandora were teaching someone a lesson and might appreciate some support. We popped at the edge of the system long enough to map the planet and then we jumped where you saw us, over the largest energy signature, when Prenna sensed you guys shadowshift.”

 

“Guess we called it right, huh, old man?” Gabriel smirked as the wind kicked up, blowing hair around his face, hanging long on the shoulders of his black body armor, accented with purple.

 

“Good to see you again, Gabe. Was starting to think you’d gotten lost trying to find yourself.”

 

Touching Vic’s shoulder, Pandora shook her head and stepped forward. “He was concerned that he had done something to annoy you, but was steadfast in his feeling that you would reach out to him if you felt the urge. You know how stubborn he can be.”

 

Gabriel embraced his old friend. “I owe you, man,” he whispered.

 

“You owe me nothing. Family doesn’t do things for reward; it’s does it for the family.” Breaking away, Vic grabbed hold of Nikki’s shoulder. “Speaking of which, this is Nikki and Tori. They’re me, after a fashion.”

 

An ashen boy stepped forward from alongside a redhead female that could easily be his twin. Hair long and white, eyes green, and more than effeminate facially, he moved up on Nikki and seemed to almost smell him. “Seems a little weak, father. But he has potential.” 

 

“That’s my boy, Sune. His match over there is his sister, Quill. Princess is Ishtar, our eldest. The two boys are Ishtar’s kids; Saxon’s the youngest, Alex is the oldest.” At the mention of Alex’s name, both Quill and Sune stiffened and cut their eyes towards the blond with the scars down his right cheek. Vic noted Nikki’s awareness of it. “Family tension. Rocky start. But you know, at the end of the day, it’s all about the family.”

 

Nikki reached to shake the white-haired boy’s hand when he saw him halved, and then came the pain from his own side and he staggered. Something metal. A piece of scrap a couple of feet across. Quill yelled something, dropping by Sune’s body for only an instant before springing up, pistols drawn, firing plasma rounds, Alex joining her in kind. Hitting his knees, long red hair hanging around his face, he tracked Quill as she darted by him, and he saw the Overseer at the edge of the crater. Dust rolled up around Nikki’s periphery, as Tori slid beside him, grabbing hold, and he looked down to find most of his bowels hanging. 

 

“My blood was on that,” the Overseer snarled, leaning into the shots from Quill and Alex, taking them with ease. “Let’s see if that’s touch enough.”

 

Quill threw a punch, the Overseer slapping it away with one hand and backhanded her with her other. She turned the momentum and spun the other way, dropping down and sweeping his legs. The edge of the crater began to slide and she jumped back as he began to tumble, only for him to regain his ground before she leapt into him, feet-first, pistols firing pointblank in his face, both dropping into the crater. No sooner had Alex slid to a stop at its edge when Vic went right passed him, diving head-first as Quill’s body shot by him in the other direction, flung upward, knocking Alex off of his feet and sending him to the ground.  Crashing into the Overseer, Vic growled like some animal as they hit hard glass at the bottom. The spiky-haired man enraged, he pounded at his adversary, whose smile infuriated him all the more.

 

“Didn’t think it would be that easy, did you? You need something far more powerful than a warship and you and your common little brats to stop me! I’m second only to the Coalescence in this universe, you twisted piece of…”

 

“Aw shut the fuck up,” Vic demanded, grabbing hold of the Overseer’s jaw and ripping it off, only to have his own head palmed right after, and slammed against the glass. “My kids…” Head yanked up, it once again hit glass. And then again.

 

Spitting slightly as his jaw finished reforming, the Overseer leaned in close. “You won’t have time to cry for your little bastards, or make claims of vengeance.”

 

Vic laughed that laugh of his in-between the repeated collisions with the ground. “It’s not that.”

 

The shadows exploded beside them, and Ishtar appeared, only for the Overseer to grab Vic and hurl him against her, the two sliding over the glass to a stop, Vic laying atop her.

 

She smiled. “Hello, daddy.”

 

“Not now, Ishtar,” he replied, pushing himself upright again. “Swear, you’re worse than your mother sometimes.”

 

Crawling up the inside of the crater again, the Overseer reached a point where debris had become commonplace, and not simply melted into the sand. This was where he had found the piece he used against Sune, and where he grabbed hold of another, flinging it back down with enough strength to force it to fly straight, cutting through Vic, his Chosen blood coating the scrap as it passed through Ishtar’s ribcage, cleaving her heart.

 

“Your daughter,” the Overseer inquired rhetorically, as Vic’s body separated and dropped in two. “How’s it feel to know you just killed her, Chosen or not?” Looking down, Ishtar’s fingers touched the blood at her breast. Her hand reaching up, she smeared it across her lips. “What?”

 

“Born of two Chosen parents, but not Chosen. I was not redesigned by the Coalescence,” she said, locking eyes on him. “Not mortal, either.”

 

“Abomination!”

 

“I was the first of my kind. Something that should not be.” She smiled as she knelt down and stroked her father’s hair. “My brother, sister, and first-born had to be engineered to even come close, my second an anomaly like me, but not quite. The Universe realized its mistake in me, and this you will only briefly understand.” As the Wisp swallowed Ishtar, the Overseer returned to his ascent, only to see Sune, Quill, Alex, and Saxon standing on the rim above. Convulsing, he doubled-over, and peeled open, blood, bone, and meat spraying out in all directions as the Wisp withdrew, and Ishtar stood at the epicenter. “There are shadows inside each of us, as well.”

 

“Classy,” Vic grumbled as he literally pulled himself together and rocked back on his knees. “How’s the kid?”

 

Ishtar looked to Sune, who glanced back to see Tori helping Nikki to his feet. The effeminate boy returned a nod to those in the crater as Pandora moved up beside the children.

 

“Enjoying yourself, my darlings?”

 

“Oh yeah. Swell time. I always love being cut in half.” Exhaling, Vic came to his feet. “Almost as much fun as that time we crashed that ship from orbit, and rode it down.”

 

With the wave of her hand, Pandora summoned the Wisp, who quickly collected the bits and pieces of their adversary, and then disappeared. “He can reassemble himself in the vacuum of space all he may wish.” 

 

Trying to suppress the pain from having his guts spilled and regenerated, Nikki shook the haze from his vision. “That’ll stop him?”  His words were light; shallow with his breathing.

 

“Pull himself together all he wants, his body still won’t function right until he hits an atmosphere that can support our life. Likely take him thousands of years, if ever. Then he has to put himself back together after falling from orbit.”

 

Tori’s fingers slipped between Nikki’s, and she pulled him close. “So we’re done”

 

“Yes,” Pandora replied, smiling mischievously. “Save for that stop to retrieve our new pet.”

 

“You sure?”

 

“Yeah,” agreed Vic as he pulled himself up over the edge, his children lending a hand.

 

Nodding his head, Nikki turned back towards the city in the distance, and his car, Tori right behind him. “Good, because I wanna go home. I’d rather deal with the fucking zombies.”

 

--------------------

 

Prenna and the larger ship, the Richmond, burst forth from the transdimensional buffer between quantum realities, “surfacing” into normal space almost like an old-style Earth submarine coming up from beneath the depths of the ocean. Not far behind them was the fleet as the ships returned to Vic and Pandora’s natural timeline.

 

Aboard the Richmond, within its factory levels, the black fifth generation Mustang of Nikki’s sat next to Vic’s first and second generation cars, the two of them standing around, smoking cigarettes and drinking beers.

 

“Kinda like it if you’d stick around,” offered Vic.

 

“Yeah?” Nikki took a drag from his cigarette. “That your way of saying that with evil good you’s base of ops blown up, you can’t do shit to get me back?”

 

“Naw.” Vic shook his head. “ I got a girl, way smarter than me. Lacey. She’s my go-to girl. Between her and Ishtar, they’ve already figured where you came from. Certain. I’m just saying,” he paused, looking over at the kid. “Kinda seems right, having you and Tori here. You’re good people. Haven’t reached that point where you’re missing something. You’re not like me, not like Pan.”

 

“But I am,” he replied, looking up. “That’s what she said; I’m her.”

 

“But you’re not. You’re you.” He shrugged. “Maybe it’s selfish of me. You just remind me of me, and a lot of someone I use to be all kinds of close to.”

 

“I’m not Sy.”

 

“No, you’re as far from Sy as I am from me when I knew him. It’s kinda…equalized.”

 

“So if I go back to my world, Vic, can we get back?”

 

The elder of the two nodded. “I’ll make sure of it. Make sure the girls fix you up with something you can use to signal us if you ever want to return permanent like, or just come for a sleepover.” Looking down at the floor, he rolled the neck of the beer around between his fingers. “What’re you gonna do about the girl? She fancies you.”

 

“She’s me. Just from another world.”

 

“Sorta,” he nodded. “But she’s not. You have different souls, different experiences. And you’d be doing yourself a real disservice if’n you didn’t admit to yourself what everyone, least Pan and I, see clear as day.”

 

In the lift, two levels up, Pandora eyed Tori, waiting for her reply.

 

“I just…” the red-head’s voice trailed off.

 

“Look at us,” Pandora began. “Should we care what others think? From what you have told me, you did not care when you fell in love with a female me. That should not change with Nikki. Yes, he is not your Pandora, and he is not female, but the root soul still exists within him.”

 

“But the things she told me, my Pandora, and what you’ve told me. She will come back. Her soul will return.”

 

“And if it is meant to be then it will be so. Or perhaps it is fate that your Pandora’s soul, in search of your soul, finds its way across the timelines to encounter what would be Victor in any reality other than Nikki’s. That does not mean you become celibate while you wait.”

 

“No, but if I do this, I’m done. I’m with him.”

 

The door of the lift opened to the factory, where Nikki and Vic leaned beneath the hood of the Mach-1 as the two women exchanged glances, Pandora nodding. “I know.”

 

Leaving the elevator behind, Tori made her way over the catwalk and down the stairs to the main deck, her footfalls failing to echo, as she moved up behind Nikki. Straightening, he looked behind to see her there, staring at him the way he’d caught her in the back seat of the car, on that far-distant world.

 

“Vic says his people can get me home,” he began.

 

“Oh.” She hesitated only briefly. “Can I come?”

 

“You sure?”

 

Leaning in, she stared at him only a minute before flipping his patch up and looking into both of his eyes then closing her own. As they kissed, Vic and Pandora offered each other a nod of agreement.

 

“She’s sure, kid.” Vic confirmed, taking a break from his beer. “She’s sure.”