Ian Hocking - Flashback

‘We should go,’ shouted the inspector.

‘Agreed,’ Danny called back.

Someone took Jem by the arm, but she was not sure who. All her attention was on the left archway. Cory was standing there, easy on his cane, wearing a light-grey suit and expression whose subtleties, at this distance, Jem could not make out.

‘What are you waiting for, Jem?’ said Danny. ‘Move.’

‘It’s him.’

‘What?’ said the inspector, leaning toward her.

Jem said her next words quietly: ‘I think he’s going to kill us.’ There was no panic in her tone; she had moved beyond it. Perhaps it was this sobriety that truly spoke to the inspector. He raised his gun—left hand cupping the butt, right hand gripping the handle—and his words

‘Polizei!’

barked out

‘Keine Bewegung!’

while the slow, bulky shape of Danny moved towards her—swooping like the hawk coming to her arm. And equal slowness characterised Cory’s face as he frowned.

Screaming.

Screaming from those people in the path of the inspector’s gun. Bodies twisted aside. Fathers cuffed their sons away and reached out for pushchairs. Children looked on with open mouths. Arms were flung protectively over heads. Crouching.

Cory was raising his white cane. Slowly. Slowly.

‘Get her out of here!’ shouted the inspector.

Danny collided with her and–

(But it was not a cane. It was a gun. A gun the colour of old marble.)

–Danny and Jem tumbled down, down.

Something puffed from the nozzle of Cory’s gun and at the same time the air above her head split with a sharp, hot flash. The inspector had fired.

Her nightmarishly slowed perception ended as Jem struck the floor and Danny rolled across her. Suddenly, she was winded, alive, and deafened. Jem saw the queues break apart as people surged into the stairwells. Some were crushed. Still the water came down and Jem brushed her slick hair aside to see what had happened to Cory. Before she could stand, she was lifted bodily towards the open lift.

‘Danny, let go of me!’

Lifts were not meant to work during a fire—this she knew—but when Danny punched the panel, the doors closed on her and she dropped, alone, filling the silence with calls for her brother.

A few metres from the ground, her phone rang.

‘Ego? Ego?’

‘Turn right when you leave the lift, Jem, and don’t look back. Hurry now.’

Inspector Duczyński could not move anything other than his eyes, which slid around uselessly, failing to focus in the falling water. His shoulder burned with the most terrific pain he could remember. Did I get him? I think I got him. He pressed down on thoughts of failure and bad luck. He redrew his next decision draft upon draft. Reach for his radio. No, turn his head. No, stanch the bleeding.

I think I got him.

God, my shoulder.

Maybe I killed him.

He spat out the water that had collected in his mouth.

Move, Duczyński. Now.

Someone seized his chest.

‘Come on.’

It was Jem’s brother, Danny.

‘Danny?’

‘Move.’

The ceiling passed through his vision as though he were flying. Fountains of water chilled him. ‘ Ist er tot? ’

‘Shut up. I think you got him, if that’s what you mean.’

‘ Habe… habe ich unseren Mann erschossen? ’

The floor slid beneath his back, tugging on his belt.

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about. For fuck’s sake hold on. We’re almost at the lift.’

A second man began to shout—an official?—but was cut off by Danny.

‘Get out of my way. I’m serious. He’s injured and we’re using the lift. No question.’

Duczyński thought about the thousands who could see the TV tower from their apartment, café, or aeroplane. He considered their indifference. The rain battered his knuckles and warped his vision through his glasses.

‘ Notarzt zum Fernsehturm! ’ he shouted, sure that his police radio was at his mouth, and this was his last chance. ‘ Zwei Männer wurden angeschossen! ’

‘Easy, tiger. You’ll get a medal. Think how proud your mother will be.’

Blackness, marked by red numbers counting down.

To the Ghost, the four words were written in fire across the darkness:

Emergency neurotransmitter augmentation successful.

He was immobilised. No breath passed his lips. The message disappeared. Then:

I-Core has been forced to restart in safe mode. Full restart in one minute.

No , thought the Ghost. Restart basic …

He died.

Then sensation grew again from his fingertips: the factor had slid home to his hand, adding enough resources to raise him above the threshold of consciousness.

Restart now and establish basic life support, he thought .

Words only he could see scored his vision.

Welcome to Intelligent Core (I-Core™) BIOS v7.01

Water assaulted his face. There would be time to think over the failures that had led to the hot metal in his lung. Where in hell had that police officer come from? His overclocked nerves had passed notice of the bullet before it had met his flesh, but not soon enough for him to twist aside. A lucky shot. Or a good shot.

Warning: Brachiocephalic artery has lost integrity.

Warning: Systolic pressure critical.

Warning: Sinus rhythm and QRS complexes abnormal.

Warning: Lactic acidosis detected.

I-Core has begun the repair of Cory, R. 6457-1112-1111 and will remain in autonomous mode until the repair is complete. Nanochondrical base functions will not be affected. Stand by, please.

Cory’s fight to stay conscious brought back memories of swimming at his grandfather’s fishery, not far from Atlanta. He had visited the lake with his wife Catherine not two months after their wedding. At noon, they had dived down, holding hands, competing to reach the lake bed. It surprised neither of them that Cory, the soldier, had reached it first. He put a full palm to the gravel then he kicked himself upwards, twisting to see the naked silhouette of Catherine already halfway to the surface, having abandoned the attempt. Cory remembered rising towards her. The chilly strata were topped by warmer draughts; all the while a sleepy panic marked the time before he could take a life-saving breath.

August, 1947, Buenos Aires

As Cory crossed the city, he thought about the message he had found in the mausoleum. It had confirmed a rendezvous. His twenty-day wait was over. He could avoid the traffic-choked streets by taking el subte , the underground, but he wanted time to think, and the narrow, crowded pavements answered wonderfully in this regard. They forced him to drift, to slow. In truth, the underground held a certain anxiety for him. It was crowded and airless. The last time he had used the service, there had been a blind man moving through the cramped tranvía subterráneo selling shirt stiffeners. The passengers had jostled him, complaining in that Buenos Airean manner about their rights and the many things they had to talk about without interruption from this man. So Cory walked the streets and sometimes thought about the man, and his own father, just as he now thought about the message in the mausoleum. The streets were wet with the recent rain and smelled of tar and petrol.

He asked himself why Jennifer would take the risk of a rendezvous. There were surer methods of communication. She could send him a coded telegram or letter. The energy and risk of injecting a human through more than one hundred years of time were considerable.