“We’re in trouble,” Pax managed. “I don’t think—”
The muffled sound of bare feet on carpeting grew louder as the killer returned, all three fingers wrapped around what looked to be a butcher knife.
At the same time, Ellis began to cough. The chest-ripping whoop felt as if it were scraping his insides from his stomach to his tongue. He bent over as one cough became a cascade of harsh body-shaking eruptions.
No one else in the room noticed.
“No—don’t!” Pax cried as Three-fingers advanced. “Here! Here! Take it!” Pax took a step back and threw the little iPortal device so that it bounced off Three-fingers’ chest.
“Too late for that,” Three-fingers said.
Ellis was trying to grit his teeth, demanding that his body obey, even as it drove him to his knees as if a demon were trapped in his chest and determined to get out. He could only watch through blurry eyes as Three-fingers closed on Pax.
Their faces might have been created from the same sequence of genes, but looking at them, Ellis saw two distinctly different people. Three-fingers grinned with an eager malevolence, closing the distance between the two like a shark after a drowning swimmer.
No aggression my ass.
Like a caricature in a horror film trying to find the key to a car, Pax retreated around the table, struggling to pull out the pocket-watch-style portal device. Catching the edge of the table, Pax fell backward.
Three-fingers skirted the coffee table to where Pax lay.
The coughing fit reduced to a sputter. Ellis drew his pistol. “Stop!” he managed to croak. He had both hands holding the gun, his thumbs lining up like puzzle pieces, arms extended but not locked, just as he was taught. “Don’t you fucking move!”
A portal appeared to Ellis’s left. “Go, Ellis Rogers! Get away!”
Three-fingers only hesitated a second, quickly dismissing Ellis.
Guns. They don’t understand guns!
Ellis didn’t have time to explain. He held his breath just as they had told him at the gun range—he had to stop coughing—and squeezed the trigger gently.
Shit! The safety was on.
Pax screamed, warding off the attack with raised palms as the knife came down.
Ellis flicked the lever and pulled the trigger. At such a short distance it was impossible to miss.
The gun was a lot louder without the earmuffs. In the seconds afterward, he couldn’t hear a thing. He smelled smoke and gunpowder, which made him cough again. His ears rang, hands vibrating from the aftershock. The barrel went up, shoving his arms with it. He hacked, eyes closed. Blood was in his mouth again, he could taste it, and when he opened his eyes he could see it.
The white wall and part of the glass door were splattered red.
Pax was on the floor, crying in a ball. Three-fingers had come within inches, but lay still. A dark puddle of blood grew, spreading out, seeping through the white carpeting that acted like a giant sponge. Three-fingers wasn’t moving.
Ellis crawled to Pax. “Are you stabbed? Are you okay?”
Pax reverted to a series of hitching breaths, unable to speak. Pax’s head shook. Ellis wasn’t certain which question was being answered, then realized it was probably both. The gun was still in his hand. Another look at Three-fingers confirmed the threat was gone, but it took three tries for Ellis to put the pistol back into the holster. Once there, he remembered the safety was still off. Glancing at the wall, at the tracks of blood-tears, he pulled it out and gently engaged the safety before putting it away again.
“That’s a gun, isn’t it?” Pax asked, staring at his hip.
“A pistol—yes.”
Pax didn’t say anything else, just stared as if the metal at Ellis’s hip was alive.
“You aren’t hurt?” Ellis asked again.
Pax’s cheeks were slick, hands shaking. “I almost died.”
Pax looked over at the body and the spray of blood. There were splatters even on the ceiling. They dripped, leaving little dots on the white coffee table and the stone pyramid. The once perfect room of Zen-like serenity traded for the violent confusion of a Jackson Pollock painting.
With a gasp, Pax seized Ellis, hugging him tight. Fingers clutched him around his waist like talons, as Pax sobbed into his chest. Ellis reached out with his own arms, returning the squeeze, and the two shook together.
Ellis wasn’t one for shows of emotion. He wasn’t raised that way. They were good old-fashioned Protestants. By the age of nine, hugging his mother had already become awkward, and if they’d had fist-bumps back then, the two would have been early adopters. He hadn’t shown much more affection toward his own wife, even early on, and later…It always felt more like work, when it should have come naturally.
But Ellis had never killed anyone before.
He told himself that if it hadn’t been Pax, he would have hugged the couch. He just wanted to hang on to something. Pax was bawling into his shirt. He could feel the wetness and knew he wasn’t too far away from a good cry himself. Hanging on helped. Feeling that he was taking care of Pax made it better. He just wasn’t sure who was really helping whom.
Pax stopped crying and pulled away, still shaking a bit. “Sorry, I think I soaked your shirt.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t pass out from the smell,” he offered, trying to sound tough and not sure why.
Getting up, Pax retreated from the room, and Ellis followed. They slipped around the corner into the corridor, which was just as empty of color as the living room. Pax stopped, flopped to the floor, and backed up against the wall.
“We need to call someone?” Ellis asked.
“In a minute,” Pax said, struggling to speak clearly, blurting words out in a rush. “No hurry at this point…I’m still trying to…remember how to breathe right. I really am sorry…I suppose that wasn’t very professional of me. Homicide cops in your day didn’t run away from blood and cry like that, did they?”
“I don’t know.” Ellis sat beside Pax. “Maybe some did.”
Pax’s expression was dominated by a force of will illustrated by a gritted jaw. “You didn’t.”
Ellis offered a forced smile. “I watched a lot of westerns as a boy. John Wayne never cried.”
Pax nodded as if understanding, but Ellis doubted it.
It took several minutes, but eventually Pax said, “I wonder who it was. That’s the trouble with the master sequence pattern.”
Out in the garden, the light was starting to fade. Ellis wondered if the falselight was synchronized with the light on the surface. Maybe they were on the surface; he really didn’t know where they had ported to, and he had already determined he couldn’t tell the difference between real and falselight.
“So we found the killer,” Ellis said. “What do we do now? What’s the procedure?”
Ellis found himself in a hurry to leave. He wasn’t showing it, but he felt sick. Not like he had the day before—a different kind. He could smell the blood, or thought so, and the odor of gunpowder lingered large in the small home. He’d just killed someone. The idea—the recognition of his actions—had flashed across his mind several times like a random strobe light, but all the sitting had started settling it into his consciousness, coalescing into a real thought. He’d prevented Pax from being murdered, which was a good thing, but at the same time, Three-fingers looked just like Pax. The whole scene was surreal enough to be drug induced.
His hands were shaking. Were they shaking when I pulled the trigger? He didn’t think so. He couldn’t even remember the exact moment of the gunshot, couldn’t recall what he had aimed at or if he’d aimed at all. Adrenaline—that’s why he was shaking. Maybe that was why he wanted to leave. Fight or flight was kicking in, and he wanted to be gone, away from the blood, the body, and the reminder of what he’d done.
“I don’t really know.” Pax wiped the tears away. “You understand we’re breaking new ground here. There’s no procedure.” Standing up, Pax adjusted the frock coat and vest, then paused. “Vox?”