The Last Watchmen Read online

  Dekker glanced at her; she winked at him. He shook his head incredulously and they meandered through the halls, coming to a T-junction. Listening for the right path, they found it: the loudest one. That’s where they knew they’d find Guy, Corgan and Rock.

  They heard the firefight raging. Dekker quickly checked the ammunition on the weapons he’d scavenged and set a charge on the partition wall.

  The blast disintegrated the wall and Dekker stepped through the veil of smoke, firing a weapon from each arm. He mowed down the warriors that flanked Guy’s crew where they hid behind a makeshift barrier of metal desks they’d built for cover.

  As the last enemy fell dead, Dekker turned to Guy who shrugged sheepishly. “Out of ammo?” Dekker asked.

  Guy nodded and tossed his empty mags up in the air. “Glad to see you guys. We thought we’d throw you a party. Um… surprise!”

  Dekker rolled his eyes.

  ***

  Guy quickly recapped how they’d arrived at the facility.

  “Well, near as I can tell, we’re in the main operations facility of the Druze headquarters,” he said, shuffling some papers around as they tried to piece the connections together. “It looks like Austicon used the Druze as his personal strike force, a criminal network fueling him with enough resources to keep him in business.”

  “If you can call ‘crazy’ a business,” Guy interjected.

  Vesuvius put down the papers she’d skimmed. “But they’re more than just criminals. These people were fanatics. They revered him like some kind of messiah ever since he took over two centuries ago. Even though, Austicon kinda ran the whole organization into the ground over that span. I mean where are the rest of the people? Adherent numbers show sharp declines in their population. He must’ve been doing something with all these people; even fanatic zealots don’t just up and disappear like this.”

  The walls groaned as the damaged factory shifted uneasily upon a damaged foundation.

  Dekker nodded, acknowledging the mystery. He called over at Corgan, “You almost done with that safe?”

  “I’m just about in.” Corgan bit his lower lip as he tinkered with the safe’s lock mechanism. An electric spark sizzled across the steel door and then the internals clicked. “Got it.”

  The five Investigators gathered around the heavy door. “Here’s the moment we’ve all waited for,” Guy said, grabbing the handle. “What’s behind door number one?”

  Opening with a shrill squeak, the door yawned open to a closet-sized space; the safe was nearly empty. Only a small framed picture waited for them. It had been perched up on a stand so it would be immediately visible: something like stretched parchment

  Vesuvius grabbed the thing and muttered a few colorful profanities before handing it to Dekker.

  Under the glass, a fresh section of human skin stretched across the backing, pinned in place. The bloodstain seeped around the edges which just began to curl as the skin dried in place. The red and black ink of Prognon Austicon’s tattoo remained clearly visible: the red tree.

  Still, Austicon toyed with them. Just above the frame he’d scratched a taunt on the parchment, “Catch me if you can.”

  Dekker clenched his jaw, his ire stirred up.

  “What now, boss?” Guy asked.

  The walls groaned again and the hall echoed with the sounds of a ceiling collapsing nearby. Dekker stashed the frame underneath one arm and readied his weapon. “Now we leave, before the whole place comes down on our heads. And by the way,” he accused, “I thought I said ‘No explosions!’”

  Guy shrugged. “They started it.”

  “Oh yeah. I got you this.” Dekker took a piece of paper and a pen from his pocket. He scribbled on it briefly and crumpled the paper up and threw it at Guy. The IOU from the crashed, stolen speeder now read: Bill to Guy Falon -- Reef City.

  Dekker’s Dozen #004

  Ezekiel

  *clink* *clack*

  Dekker breathed hard and heavy, mimicking the noises a sleeping body should make. He barely moved a muscle as he silently wrapped his fingers around the pistol that he always kept holstered between his mattress and wall.

  Whoever was in his bedroom, they didn’t belong. A thief? Definitely none of the Dozen; everybody knew this was his most holy sanctuary.

  The only question he wondered, as he listened to the intruder’s random shambling in the dark, is how such an inept burglar got past all their sophisticated security systems. The shambling noises stopped; some item had the thief’s attention.

  Dekker let his vision adjust to the darkness as he scanned the silhouette near his closet. His eyes picked the intruder out from the darkness; he pulled his weapon to bear and sat up.

  ***

  “Put your gun away,” spat the intruder with a raspy voice. He chided Dekker as if he should’ve expected him. He flicked on the lights, blinding Dekker.

  Surprised, Dekker winced and discharged the weapon, blowing a hole though the wall a half meter from the intruder.

  “Wow,” he examined the smoking weapon with wide eyes. “I don’t remember you shooting at me.” Holding the Reliquary, the old man shambled over to the bedside and set the massive gun down on the mattress, examining it in great detail.

  Dekker recognized him because of the heavy, bronze amulet that hung from a chain about his neck—he would never forget what happened just after their last encounter. Ezekiel, the self-proclaimed time traveler possessed an identical talisman to the one hanging on Dekker’s wall nearby—a gift from his father.

  “What are you doing here?” Dekker demanded, still too bewildered to address the trespass into his private sanctum.

  “Yes, I see,” Ezekiel muttered to himself, giving Dekker no heed. “So that’s how that works.”

  Frustrated, Dekker shook his head wryly. “Nobody knows how it works. And it’s been examined by a lot of people but its technology simply doesn’t exist.” Dekker set his weapon down beside him. He didn’t exactly understand what was happening, but he figured the old man was mostly harmless.

  “Well not here yet, it hasn’t… or maybe not anymore, I mean,” Ezekiel muttered. He whirled around to take two large shells from the nearby ammo box. The stain of ancient dirt clung to the old box; it had been encased in clay for several millennia. Unable to locate any more, the reliquary’s ammunition supply was limited: about half the box. Ezekiel examined the engravings on a shell casing, about the size of a fist, and smiled. “I remember now: the sequence of Greek alphabetic characters.” He chuckled to himself and rammed one canister-like cartridge into the chamber and clicked it shut.

  “Whoa,” Dekker squinted against the light and snatched the gun away. He safely unloaded the shells. “That’s a terrible idea. A double-load is a bad idea, but never triple load it.”

  “Oh, it’s quite alright,” Ezekiel reassured him. “I built it. Or at least I will… I think. It’s one or the other. I lose track sometimes.”

  Skeptically, Dekker looked at him and rubbed the sleep from his face. Ezekiel looked exactly as he did when he last saw him several weeks ago. In fact, Muramasa’s blood still looked wet on Ezekiel’s shirt.

  Ezekiel took a strange device from the leather satchel that hung at his side. It attached by an adjustable band which he strapped over Dekker’s left forearm.

  “What’s this thing?”

  “I guess you must not know me yet, so you won’t recall any of this.” He muttered his thoughts aloud, “Yes, that’s it; that is why I’m here... It’s a temporal phase-stabilizer, obviously.”

  “Oh sure,” Dekker said sarcastically. He fidgeted with its fitting and stood up. He wore pants, but was otherwise shirtless. Dekker always wore pants to bed; he’d had to leap from sleep into action often enough that he’d learned to prepare.

  “Don’t take that off.”

  “Or else what?”

  “You’ll fall out of time.” Ezekiel put a cartridge in his satchel and slung the Reliquary over the half-sleeping Dekker’s shoulder. “Now ha
ng on, we’re going to jump through the Great Engine.”

  “Wait, what?” Dekker heard a loud knock on his door. With a bright flash of light, like a sudden blow to the head, he felt suddenly heavy, like he was falling, and slipped into unconsciousness.

  ***

  Cold. The chill wind startled Dekker to his senses. Slow, like waking up hungover, Dekker felt as if he’d mostly recovered consciousness, and yet, through the groggy haze, a fog of memories, barely perceivable, washed over his brain like a slow tide.

  Ezekiel extended a hand to help Dekker to his feet. Craggy plains stretched away in one direction and a rocky wall blocked the other. They walked towards a rising slope; the current scenery didn’t matter much to the accidental time-traveler.

  “It was…” Dekker tried to explain the haze of images bleeding out of his mind like a fading dream. “I can’t describe it.”

  “The great machine,” Ezekiel labeled it. “Don’t worry. There aren’t words in the tongues of any created beings sufficient to describe it. The gears, the wheels, the sheer power. The raw energy it generates powers this,” he indicated the contraption on his back and the device on Dekker’s arm.

  Awestruck, Dekker grappled with words. “It’s like infinity… spinning eternal. Time? Life? Love?”

  “The thing about infinity,” Ezekiel said as he pointed Dekker toward the nearby mountain, “is that it’s not specific enough.”

  Dekker gave him a confused look. Ezekiel had yet to give him a straight reply.

  “Nonexistence and timelessness are both as infinite as an eternal progression of time and reality. It’s a dreadful irony.”

  “But I exist. Time exists. Nonexistence, timelessness cannot be infinite if existence is truly real.”

  “Is it?” Ezekiel chuckled as he walked onward, beckoning the investigator to follow.

  “What do you mean? Would you start making some sense,” Dekker demanded.

  “My mission. I told you about it when we met at Muramasa’s funeral, or, I will tell you about it when we meet.”

  “The machine—you intend to keep it running? You’d said something about the engine seizing, stopping, or something like that.”

  “Quite right. If the machine breaks,” Ezekiel pointed to a staircase carved in the stone of the mountainside and started climbing, “then the function ceases.”

  “The function?”

  “Time. Existence.”

  “Wonderful. So the fate of the galaxy, reality, and all time itself rests on my shoulders?” He still barely knew what was going on and such a mission out of the blue had Dekker all but convinced he’d fallen into some sort of lucid dream state. He didn’t put it past Guy and Vivian to prank him with a dosage of psychotropic neuro-stims.

  “Ha! So full of yourself,” Ezekiel laughed. “No, you failed. Err, you will fail? In fact, you need to. It’s what happened, or will happen. But in your defense, you were setup, outmatched—that is… you will be.”

  “What! Then why am I here?”

  “Because this has all happened,” Ezekiel looked around into empty space, trying to make sense of it himself. “It needs to happen… in my future—your past. No wait, maybe it’s the other way around?”

  “You’re a nutjob, I think.”

  “I seem to recall you saying that last time too,” Ezekiel winked at him and continued the climb. “Time stopped being linear for me quite some time ago. My apologies for the confusion.”

  Dekker followed him. Still befuddled as ever and unsure if even Ezekiel really knew what was going on. The whole surreality of the situation further convinced Dekker that he was dreaming and so Dekker followed in silence; he looked at the gizmo the time traveler had given to him.

  “So how does this thing work, anyway?”

  “It’s the same technology as the machine. It draws power from it if you understand the mechanical operation. The engine literally fuels it and tethers you to the device on my back. It creates a kind of piggyback system.”

  Dekker looked more closely at the device hanging from Ezekiel’s posterior. It didn’t look like much. “So this ‘engine’ travels through time?”

  “It does more than that! Time, reality, is infinite. The great engine spins the very fabric of time and reality, but that stuff is linear. As much as it splits and divides into eternal substructures, each nanosecond replicating the whole into another strain, each of those remains linear and, thus, someone could jump to any place or time in reality by passing through the engine. The machine’s power allows me to skip across the woven strands and insert myself into them.”

  Dekker glanced at Ezekiel thinking of him as some kind of quantum superintendent. “So this power that fuels this,” he shook his banded wrist, “it’s not going to go nuclear or irradiate me to death or anything is it?” He scratched an itch under the device’s leather strap.

  “No,” Ezekiel stated. “There is no danger; it’s the same basic energy source as your ‘Reliquary’ takes. Based on what the future holds, I do suppose that an alternative fuel could be found, although no force is as powerful as the great engine. Perhaps the power of an entire star might do the trick—it might even allow one the capability of a horizontal jump—not through time, but perhaps through space.”

  “So,” he fidgeted with the gadget, “it moves through time or space?” Dekker blew out a breath of thinning mountain air. He shuffled up another leg of steps. “Why didn’t you teleport us to the top of the stairs then, instead of to the bottom?”

  “Linear time is a funny thing. We didn’t do that last time. And we can only do what we’ve already done before.”

  Dekker looked at him, about to complain again. Ezekiel stopped him. “We already had this conversation at least once before. For now, we must climb. It is time for you to play the hero.”

  ***

  A broad expanse yawned open at a clearing on the mountainside cliff. Squarely in the middle, an old monastery stood in defiance of the raw nature around it, and also lived in harmony with it.

  Ezekiel paused. “Don’t be too free to offer up information,” he warned. “You don’t want people to think you’re crazy.” He waved to a man in the distance and then hurried to meet the monk at the temple gate.

  Dekker followed.

  “As promised, Diacharia,” Ezekiel stated. “I’ve delivered you a champion.”

  “My friend, you continue to amuse me,” Diacharia replied warmly. He was young, but wore the clothes of a monastic priest, an outfit Dekker had not seen in many years. “You are Ezekiel’s friend?”

  Dekker shook Diacharia’s hand. “I know you.”

  Diacharia regarded him skeptically.

  Ezekiel pulled Dekker aside for a moment. “These things already happened. You must simply play your part.”

  “But Diacharia is the old priest who gave my father the Reliquary. I remember him… I was young, then.”

  “Where and when do you think he got it,” Ezekiel slapped Dekker on the shoulder. “Diacharia, show our friend, Dekker, to his room.” He leaned in one last time and whispered, “Just don’t freak out when you meet your father.”

  Dekker shot Ezekiel an incredulous look.

  Diacharia led Dekker through the temple grounds. In the courtyard, young men and women methodically practiced Wushu moves as a part of their self-discipline. Across from them, others used wood bokken as swords as they went through a series of Kendo maneuvers with trained precision.

  Just inside the monastery, a group of nearly thirty foreigners reclined. They looked earthy: road weary, agitated, and most definitely out of their element. Diacharia led him past and Dekker could feel every eye follow him.

  “That was my flock, the ones Ezekiel brought you here to protect.” He saw Dekker to a nearby room where clothes had been laid out for him. “You must be tired. I’ll let you rest until our next meal.”

  ***

  Dekker woke to the sound of voices, not realizing he’d been sleeping. The concept of sleeping while in his dream amused h
im for a moment.

  He stepped into the hallway and walked back the way Diacharia had led him. A small group of young men sat with Ezekiel, engaged with intense conversation. The old man, his bloodied shirt now soiled by dirt and mire, waved him over to join them.

  “Sorry. I did not wake you,” Diacharia said. “You looked as if you needed rest.” He scooted a bowl of rice to Dekker.

  He graciously accepted the food and examined those at the table. Incredibly, he saw the much younger versions of several men he already knew, men from a past life. Muramasa, perhaps thirty years old, sat next to him. Diacharia had been an old friend until he’d disappeared several years ago, or many years in the future, as Ezekiel would point out—they’d only found a hand-painted red tree on the old priest’s floor and friends assumed he’d gone on a private journey—perhaps to meditate on nature—and never returned.

  Across the table sat Dekker’s father, Jude. Dekker grinned as he ate; Jude was quite a bit younger than Dekker was now.

  “Well,” said Muramasa, “We certainly agree that the Krenzin are keepers of dangerous doctrine. While their philosophies look good externally, their end result is that they would assimilate our culture and dilute our beliefs, our passions. I think they are still too new to this galaxy to have our full trust.”

  Jude nodded. “I still can’t thank you enough, Muramasa. Despite a thousand secret religions waging thousands of secret wars on each other, it’s good to know that we still have friends… that not every religion seeks the death of all others. And yes, the Krenzin might be included in the assumption of the latter.”

  “Well, we share love as a common, core principal,” Muramasa smiled. “Right or wrong, theologically speaking, is moot if we cannot practice that love which we pledge ourselves to. So we can easily pledge ourselves to your protection. Besides, this man who hunts you is also my enemy. He’s tried to leverage his influence against my brother in law for years now.”