Chapter 25

I beat several Olympic records getting back down the corridor, cursing my utter stupidity. I heard a palisade of gunfire in front of me as I ran.

The door to the room was still open, and I could definitely feel a strong breeze against my back now, and a dull roaring sound from within. A quick look inside and I gulped. Lisa was against the wall near the inner vault door. She was directly in front of Victor, with one of his arms around her throat and a gun at her head. Courtney was on the floor, unconscious or dead. Chip was in the far corner, with both of the little girls from earlier behind him protectively. He seemed to have woken up a bit now; he had lost the dead expression and was staring at Victor.

And ... my heart skipped a beat or two ... Lauren was nowhere to be seen.

Victor saw me at the door. "Mexican standoff, eh?" he yelled over the rushing air. He winced, and I could see that one side of his coat was coated red with what I fervently hoped was his blood. Maybe Courtney got in a shot.

Lisa looked at me. "You do what you have to do," she said. "Understand me? I'm ready."

"Naw, he's not going to do anything stupid," Victor yelled. "Are you? Huh?"

"You're not leaving again, Victor," I said. "You're not getting in that room. You're finished. You put down your gun and you can walk away alive. Probably not even get convicted; what jury would believe all this, right?"

I had no intention of letting him walk away, but I didn't believe that Put down your gun and surrender so I can kill you was a winning argument.

Victor laughed. "Oh, yeah, bullshit a bullshitter! You ever hear that saying, eh? Bullshit a bullshitter!" He coughed, and blood stained his lips.

Good. Maybe all I had to do was keep the asshole talking for a few minutes until he bled out internally. "Ok, Vic. What do you want?"

"What do I want?" he yelled. "I want to be a god! And I can still be a god. You hear me?"

"Sure, Vic. You can still be a god."

He glared at me. "Don't patronize me. You're not better than me." A pause, and then he was screaming. "You're not better than me!" He grinned malevolently at me. "You still don't know anything. I can do anything, anything."

"Don't really care, Victor," I said. "There's no way you're going to—"

"You want your wife back?"

Those words hit me like a punch to the stomach. I must have shown something on my face, because he continued, sounding more confident. "Yeah, I know about your wife. I can change it. You don't know how to do that yet, do you? But I can. I can make that accident never happen."

I was losing my mind. "Shut up!" I screamed at him. "You can't, you can't, don't say—"

"It's all just numbers," he yelled. "You hear me? Numbers! I can write a new set of numbers over reality, and she's alive!"

"Shut up!" I didn't recognize my own voice screaming. "She's dead, she's dead, she's dead!"

I took a deep shuddering breath. He was baiting me. I knew that he was baiting me, and I knew I shouldn't play his game. But I couldn't seem to stop.

"She's only dead if you let her stay dead," he yelled. "All I need is ten minutes and I can make her live again."

"You're lying," I yelled back.

"You've seen what the machine can do," he bellowed at me. "OK, sure, I would lie if I had to. But ask yourself this: doesn't it make sense that if I can rewrite reality that I could bring her back? Eh? That I could, if I wanted to?"

"No!"

"Why not?" he tried reasonably. "You're a man of intellect. You've seen what can be done with this thing. Why couldn't it be done?"

I had no answer for him.

"Look," he yelled. "Let me just show you, OK? I'm ... I'm bleeding pretty bad here. I can get the machine to fix me, and then I can show you, all right?"

"How do I know you'll ... how can I trust you?" I asked.

"You have the gun," he said. "I'm just going to..." He began moving back into the inner room, pulling Lisa in front of him. As they crossed the threshold, I started to aim, but Lisa took the option away from me. She yanked her arm free and drove her elbow backwards into Victor's side, hard, right where it appeared he'd been shot. I could see his face blanch with pain, and she started to dive forward to get clear, when Victor's gun went off. The side of Lisa's head exploded in a spray of blood, and her body dropped to the ground. Before I could react, Victor was inside the vault room.

I ran towards the door. Victor was heading towards the console on the far side of the room, and I snapped off three shots at him. The center of the room was a maelstrom of shining light now, individual wiggles all merged together in an obscene orgy of pulsating light and howling wind. My shots must have gone wild, because Victor never slowed, although as he rounded the curve and vanished behind the glowing ball, he seemed to ... to stream. I can't describe it any better than that: the edge of his body closest to the light seemed to blur, to stretch, as though the laws of perspective were repealed in close proximity to the sphere.

I headed around to the other side until he came into view again, pushing buttons on the wall console. I lined up and fired three more times, again to no effect. I started towards him but stopped when I heard a groaning noise from overhead, loud enough to penetrate the howling wind and humming from the sphere.

Victor yelled something and I looked up.

Lauren was on the arm that held the dish suspended over the platform. I had no idea why she was there or what she had hoped to accomplish, but she was lying face down on the extended arm, reaching down onto the top of the dish. I felt the life rush out of me in an instant. I tried to scream at her to get down but I couldn't seem to generate any noise. Victor was screaming as well, but his voice sounded distant, like an AM radio station not quite tuned in.

The noise came again, and I could see now that Victor had some sort of joystick control that apparently was intended to move the dish, and that the dish wasn't moving much. It was jerking slightly but staying in place, and I could see that Lauren had her legs wrapped tightly around it. Her arms, however, were still trying to do something below to the dish, and her face was grimly focused on whatever task that was.

Whatever paralysis had gripped me for an instant was released, and I started towards Victor again. I would put a bullet in his brain this time, I vowed, if I had to pound it in by hand. I took two more shots, but neither one did a thing, and my slide was locked open now on empty. Victor turned and saw me, and with a snarl he leapt at me. I curled my hand tightly around the pistol frame and delivered a blow to his head as he hit me, and then we were rolling on the floor. Even wounded, he was an animal, stronger than I was and utterly insane to boot. He was screaming something unintelligible as he grappled for the gun, which now I was glad I hadn't reloaded, since I was losing possession of it pretty quickly. I brought me knee up into his wounded side as hard as I could, and I felt him shudder. His grip on the gun weakened and I tossed it away from us.