Jeremy Robinson - The Didymus Contingency

Spencer looked up, smiling, “A futile effort.”

“I disagree,” Tom said as he looked down at Spencer, who now had a bloody bullet wound in each thigh.

Tom looked back at Sally, whose petrified eyes were locked on Spencer. “Sally… Sally!”

Sally snapped her attention to Tom.

“Get the device,” Tom urged.

Sally nodded quickly and hustled toward the opposite side of the room, where Spencer had placed the device.

“You think this body is affected by pain while I control it?” the voices of fifty men said.

Tom whipped his attention back to Spencer, who was already on his feet and winding up. “Sally, look-”

Whump! Tom crumpled onto the floor, gasping for air.

Froth flew through the room as Spencer turned to look at Sally and growled. He jumped across the room like a gazelle. Sally stopped and slipped backwards onto her hands as Spencer landed between her and the device. She crawled away as he stormed toward her.

“How much does this woman mean to you, disciple?” Spencer said reaching out for Sally’s struggling feet.

Tom pulled himself up, struggling to shout, but there was no air in his lungs to create the sound. He couldn’t let David experience the same loss he did. He couldn’t let David feel that pain. But he couldn’t do anything to stop it. Tom fell back to the floor. His ribs were on fire and his legs were temporarily useless.

Spencer took hold of Sally’s ankle and pulled her toward him. Her squirming did nothing to loosen his merciless grip.

“Please…please…” Tom said.

Spencer held Sally up in the air by her ankle. He looked at Tom.

“Take me instead. Kill me,” Tom pleaded.

“All you Christians are the same. Kill me. Take me. Martyr me. We hate Christians! So do we! We would much rather kill this woman and have you live to be tortured again and again. Ad infinitum! Forever!”

Tom took a deep breath. “I’m not a Christian!”

Spencer bit his smiling bottom lip until it bled. “That’s right! We nearly forgot! How could all of us forget that? If we kill you now, you’ll be ours to torture for all eternity!”

After dropping Sally to the hard floor, Spencer leapt into the air and landed on top of a computer console in front of Tom, crushing the equipment below his feet as though he weighed five hundred pounds. Tom pushed away, but found his back against the cold concrete wall of the control center.

“I have bad news for you… You can’t kill me,” Tom said, attempting to act as confident as possible.

Spencer hopped off the mangled computer console and onto the floor. “And why is that?”

“The time-travel equipment… I sent it here…from the future. If I died now, how could I send it back in time?”

“Let’s see, maybe if David sent it back in time without your help? He is a smart one after all, that David. We hate that name! Stop saying it then!”

Tom had no reply. He hadn’t considered that.

“News flash, Didymus, we’ve been to the future, and you weren’t there! He wasn’t! We didn’t see him. Neither did we!”

“You’re lying,” Tom said, as he squinted his eyes in an effort to mask his surprise.

“Are we? We suppose we’re about to find out.”

Spencer reached out for Tom’s throat with his right hand, while his left twitched with excitement. Spencer paused an inch from Tom’s throat like he heard something or sensed a presence. But his reaction would be too slow.

Whack! Spencer fell to the side and slid across the floor. He shook his head and looked up; above him stood a tower of a man with sledgehammer fists.

Lazarus cracked his knuckles and motioned for Spencer to stand up.

Arizona

Tom held his chest and grunted as he attempted to stand. As David hurried into the room, he could see Tom was hurt, but he couldn’t imagine Spencer capable of inflicting it. Whatever the case, things would come to an end with Lazarus standing between Tom and Spencer, fists clenched tightly, muscles burning with energy.

David hurried to Tom and grabbed his shoulder, causing Tom to flinch away. “Tom, it’s me.”

“David, thank God.”

“What’s going on? Why was Spencer attacking you?”

“He’s blocked the functionality of the watches with some kind of device he got from the future.”

“The future?” David knew his own watch wasn’t working, so what Tom told him made sense, but why would Spencer go to all this trouble?

“We need to destroy it.”

“Where?” David asked, pushing aside any doubts to Tom’s story.

“Sally…”

David stood up straight and scanned the room He saw Sally lying on the floor, clutching a small device that looked like a pixilated sphere. David looked back at Tom. “Are you all right?”

“Just need to catch my breath,” Tom said.

Without glancing to see how Lazarus was fairing with Spencer, David ran across the room. “Sally!”

Sally looked up from the sphere and saw David approaching. “We need to destroy this thing. I’ve been smashing it on the floor, but haven’t made a dent.”

“Let me see.”

Sally handed the round device to David, who carefully inspected every nook and cranny, looking for an opening, a chink in the armor. He found nothing. “When all else fails…” David said with a hint of a smirk.

David lifted the device above his head and hurled it at the floor. The device hit the floor and rolled to a stop next to a computer console. It wasn’t even scratched. David stared at the device with squinty eyes, as though it offended him. He bent down and took the sphere in his hand.

Crash! David jumped back as Lazarus landed on the console in front of him, shattering the expensive computer components beneath his dense body.

David stood up quickly. “Lazarus!”

After rolling off the computer console onto his feet, Lazarus looked at David with a dazed expression. “I’ll live.”

“What happened?” David asked.

Lazarus rolled his neck and looked at Spencer, who was walking steadily toward them. “He is stronger than any man I have encountered.”

David looked at Spencer, gangly and small. “Spencer?”

“It’s not Spencer,” Sally said. “It’s something else.”

“What do you mean?” David asked quickly, as Spencer closed in.

“I don’t know. He refers to himself as ‘we’.” Sally’s eyes bounced back and forth, searching for a memory. “Tom… Tom called him Legion.”

David’s heart pulsated beneath his ribs like a child squeezing a water balloon. Legion. His palms grew moist. Legion. His eyes stung with sweat. “Legion!”

Spencer stopped and focused his attention on David. “Ahh! The gang’s all here! David, so nice of you to join us! We were just telling Tom how nice it was to see him after all this time… It’s been so long since Zambia… As we recall, you were there too… He was there! We saw him too! We always wondered how you came and went so quickly! But now we know! You were breaking the rules! All of them! Time travel!”

David’s knuckles turned white as he squeezed them. “Be quiet, demon!”

“You don’t want to hear the rest? I don’t think he does. Tell him. You tell him. Let’s ask! About how we killed Tom’s wife? And what a nice surprise it was to meet you there. We nearly killed you. We wanted to, so badly.”

“You killed Tom’s wife?”

Spencer giggled as he spoke. “Indeed! It was us! All of us!”

Tom sprinted toward Spencer. “Bastard!”

David reached out his hand. “Tom, no!”

Tom tackled Spencer from the side with amazing speed and force. Both men toppled to the ground. Less then a second passed before Tom shot into the air, kicked off by Spencer. Lazarus reached out his long, strong arms and caught Tom, only inches before his head crashed into the corner of a desk.