She yanked the Eagle from its sheath. Kicking the debris from her path, she exited the apartment. As she looked over the hallway rail, more bullets crashed through the front door, a story below.
The strangers were out of the line of fire, squatting along the walls of the foyer, clearly pinned down. Eyepatch, the albino, the black woman, the guy with glasses and fedora, the brown kid, the statuesque redhead, the senior citizen with walking stick—they were variations, permutations of the series’ characters she lived with on a daily basis. Prototypical crusty, hard-bitten badasses, a melange of signature guns and knives in abundance, dressed like homeless people.
And of course, they had suddenly and remarkably come to life.
“This way!” she shouted as she rounded the foot of the staircase. She led them down the hallway to the back of the building and out a rear entry. She turned to the left and descended another short set of steps to the backdoor landing of the building’s below-ground apartment. The door looked solid, but for someone who had mastered violent-entry techniques, it wasn’t. Expelling a grunt, she executed a front kick, planting her foot in precisely the right spot. With a crunch, the door splintered away from the deadbolt and lock plate and swung slowly inward.
“There’s nobody here. Don’t worry,” she said as she stepped through the entrance. “Owner’s still at work. Go on through to the front. We can come up from below street level, get cover from the parked cars.”
The leggy redhead raised an eyebrow at the word we, her expression undisguisedly suspicious and hostile, but the Latino kid with vomit on his shirt and the old man beamed at her. They all seemed taken aback at the apartment’s furnishings.
The fedora-and-glasses guy pointed at the calendar on the kitchen wall. “Wow, that’s an old one,” he said.
Veronica thought the remark was odd since it was the current Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition, and the model in question—blonde, tanned, microbikini, zero body fat, draped over the stern of a vintage speedboat—was all of twenty.
“Don’t put your eyes out staring,” the black woman said, giving him a hard shove from behind.
Taking them through to the living room, Veronica opened the front door, which led up to the street.
Eyepatch put a hand on her shoulder and stopped her from taking point. “This is as far as you go, lady,” he said. “Trust me, you have no idea what you’re getting yourself into.”
He held up a red canister. She recognized it at once from her extensive research. Thermite. Four-to five-second delay fuse. Undo safety clip, pull pin, release safety lever. Throwing range, twenty-five meters.
“Let’s clear a path, Jak,” Eyepatch said to the albino. “Right through the windows, into their laps.”
The albino pulled out his own thermite grenade. Veronica thought that the canister’s color was a disturbingly close match to his eyes.
They pushed past her and climbed to the top of the short flight of steps. The others hung back, just below the level of the street. Safety levers plinked off. The two men chucked hissing grenades.
Eyepatch and the albino didn’t appear ready for what happened next—because they didn’t duck.
Massive overlapping explosions rocked the ground, sending them flying backward, arms and legs flailing. As they crashed down on top of their equally astonished friends, the concussion blast emptied window frames up and down the street. A wave of blistering heat washed over the stairwell, then car alarms a block away started wailing.
“Dark night,” the man in the fedora said as he regained his feet. “What was in those wags?”
“Let’s do this before they recover,” Eyepatch said, unslinging his Steyr Scout. Then he scrambled back up the steps, with the others close behind.
Despite the warning for her to stay put, Veronica brought up the rear, Eagle at the ready. The pall of greasy black smoke that hung over the sidewalk made it hard to breathe. Inside the towering, twin fireballs at the curb, there was nothing left but twisted car frames and axles. The spindly sidewalk trees were burning furiously, as if they’d been doused with gasoline, and the cars fore and aft of the thermite strikes were on fire, too. Monsters in purple hoodies had given up trying to jumpstart a ride. They lumbered across the street and disappeared behind the parked cars. She followed the strangers as they took cover away from the heat and smoke, next to a pair of cars farther up the block. As she ducked beside the rear passenger door, autofire rattled at them from the opposite sidewalk. The driver side of the sedan absorbed a torrent of bullets. The left-hand tires both blew out, glass shattered and the car quivered on its suspension. Just above her head, slugs zipped through the front compartment and sparked on the concrete steps behind them.
She had gone through live-fire drills in a Georgia backwoods training camp. This was no drill; these shooters weren’t trying to miss. No way could she get off a shot from her position without putting her head in the ten-ring.
Then Eyepatch, the Latino kid, the black woman and the redhead jumped up from the ends of vehicles and returned fire.
The albino was already in motion, scampering like a white spider between car bumpers. With an underhanded, bowling-ball pitch, he skipped a sputtering red can across the street and under the car the shooters were firing from behind. Then he dived back over the front hood amid a flurry of bullets. He landed with a shoulder roll and came up crouched on the balls of his feet, grinning madly.
An instant later a tremendous boom shook the street. The jolt dropped Veronica hard onto both knees. As she caught herself, she thought she saw a shadowy blur of car door and hood sailing high overhead, then a wave of withering heat made her whimper.
Grenades of that type didn’t explode, she knew. The car’s gas tank hadn’t exploded, either. Not enough time had elapsed for the heat to reach combustion point. The monsters themselves had exploded, like they had five pounds of short-fused C-4 stuffed up their butts.
She peered over the windowsill and saw the surviving monsters break cover and take off down the sidewalk in the direction of Washington Square Park. Their blocky heads and wide shoulders bobbed over the tops of the cars. The monster in front held the one she’d thought was Bob Dylan, carrying the form as if it were a small child—or a ventriloquist’s dummy—legs bouncing up and down at the knees.
When the strangers popped up from behind cover, so did she. Taking stable holds against the vehicles and trees, they all opened fire at once. Eyepatch worked the Steyr’s bolt like a machine, punching out shot after scope-aimed shot. She could see his bullets striking the backs and heads of the retreating monsters, plucking at the fabric, the impacts staggering them as they ran.
Veronica knew her ballistics. For some reason, what should have been certain kill shots with 7.62 mm NATO rounds wasn’t.
She tracked the moving targets over the sights of the Eagle but held fire—without a clear shot, no way was she going to send .44 Magnum slugs sailing down her own street.
The opposition seemed to have a destination in mind.
As they disappeared around the corner, Veronica’s new friends leaped from between the cars to give pursuit. Eyepatch waved for her to stay put.
“No, lover,” said the redhead, a strange glint in her eyes, “let her come along if she wants to.”
Again bringing up the rear, Veronica holstered the Eagle, as it was awkward and heavy to carry in hand while running.
The monsters crossed West Fourth Street against the light, bringing the afternoon traffic to a screeching, horn-honking halt. They took off along the wide sidewalk that bordered the south side of Washington Square Park, scattering pedestrians and sending them fleeing into the trees. The panicked screams brought a pair of horse-mounted cops onto the sidewalk. As they drew sidearms on the approaching purple-hooded crew, their steeds suddenly spooked, reared and, with minds of their own, shot off back into the park.
Farther ahead at the corner, a helmeted motorcycle cop jumped the curb and, with the bike’s siren wailing, cut off the monsters’ path. He drew and rapid-fired his service automatic pistol, but it didn’t slow the charge. The monsters swept over him. Then, like a CG movie stunt, something that shouldn’t have been possible in real life, both Harley and rider were tossed forty feet in the air and came crashing down on the stopped traffic.
The motorcycle’s siren abruptly cut off on impact, but more were coming from all directions and getting louder by the second. The police response would be the Emergency Service Unit—ESU—NYC’s version of SWAT. That was not a good thing. Veronica wanted to yell a warning to the others that armed civilians would be shot first and asked questions afterward, but couldn’t because she was struggling to breathe and keep up the headlong pace. Though Eyepatch and the rest were running hard, they kept looking around. They seemed disturbed, even apprehensive about the surroundings, the people, the traffic, the city skyline.
A half block ahead of them, the monsters poured down the steps to the West Fourth Street subway entrance. As they closed in on it, the rattle of rapid gunfire rolled up from belowground. It sounded like pistols, not AKs.
They paused at the edge of the stairs to catch their breaths.
“Why are they running from us?” the Latino kid said. “They’re stronger, even without blasters. Why they not stand and fight?”
No one answered him.
Hat-and-glasses guy was staring up at the tall, wall-to-wall buildings, as if he’d never seen the like before.
“Dark night! This isn’t Deathlands,” he gasped. “Where in nukin’ hell are we?” To Veronica it looked as if he was on the verge of hyperventilating.
The black woman put a hand on his back and tried to calm him. “We’re in New York, J.B.”
Eyepatch didn’t seem to notice his friend’s distress. “We’ve been here before,” he said. His attention was focused on the traffic on the street beside them; he seemed to be looking from one license plate to another.
“What year is this?” he asked Veronica.
In the context of what had already happened, the question didn’t seem all that strange. “It’s 2001,” she said.
“By the Three Kennedys,” the old man groaned, “we have jumped back in time.”
Veronica blinked at him in disbelief. “You’re from the future, then?” she asked dubiously. As she uttered those ridiculous words, an uncharitable thought popped into her mind: Wow, it must really suck.
Eyepatch didn’t confirm or deny their origins. Instead he asked another question. “What month and day is it?”
“It’s January 19.” A thoroughly assimilated New Yorker, she added sarcastically, “Why? Do you people have somewhere more important to be?”
