Jim and Blair's Excellent Terminator Adventure part two of three
An hour later
"So let me get this straight. You're not psycho. You're not a looney. You're from the future - one possible future - and you're back here to rescue me from an unstoppable killer sent from the future because I'm going to..."
"Discover the philosophies on which our whole society is based, align the planets and create universal harmony, make first contact with alien life forms..."
"And there are future bad guys who don't like living in a future utopia based on my brilliant discoveries, so someone sent an unstoppable killer to stop me making any brilliant discoveries, and someone else sent, er, you, to stop him."
"You did."
"I did what?"
"Your future self."
Blair - UrBlair - sighed deeply and rubbed his eyes. This whole future selves/alternate realities deal made pronouns - and grammar - and pretty much the entire English language, thank you very much - into pretzels. He took a deep, cleansing breath and then said, enunciating clearly, "so you're saying that I, in the future, sent you, from the future, back to now, the present, to save me from an unstoppable killer, also sent from the future, to stop the future that we're talking about from ever happening?"
Ellison smiled as broadly as if he had just invented Blair. "I knew you were a genius, Chief, but I thought it had emerged over time and tribulation: never realised it was there all along. Come on, we need to move."
Ellison was driving, would you believe, an old Ford truck but they had made good mileage in it and were coming up to the city limits. So far so good; no signs of any unstoppable future killers yet.
Only someone - some helpful someone who had seen them high-tailing it out of Rainier as if an unstoppable future killer was after them - must have called the cops on them. Because suddenly there were two cop cars blocking the road, and flashing lights behind them, and lots of men-with-guns-and-kevlar. Ellison just looked grim - grimmer - and put his shades back on.
"Oh gods and goddesses," Blair breathed, "You really are crazy, aren't you?"
"We can't afford to waste time explaining with cops. I don't have any papers, and He won't let cops slow him down. We'd just be putting bodies in his way."
"Earth to Jim: they're cops. It's not optional. Pull up or die, and the only reason I'm in this... antique... with you is because I chose the NOT die option, remember?"
The truck was hemmed in, and people were screaming at them. The world was a cacophony of loaded guns and flashing lights and "out! Out! Out!" And James Jim Ellison was sitting with his mouth open, frozen like a rabbit in the headlights. Blair groaned.
"Oh come on man! This is SO not the time to take a trip into lala land." And then something he'd read, years ago, in one of those anthropological books that had got him interested in the subject years ago, before Rainier, floated back to him...
"Are you a Sentinel, Jim? Is this a zone out? It would make sense, I suppose. If I knew a sentinel, what better person to act as my younger self's blessed protector. Only I forgot about the zones. Hell, I can't remember how Burton said the sentinel can be brought out of a zone... why don't you come with instructions?"
"It's OK, Chief, I'm back."
"What was it..."
But the cops were still screaming at them, and the chances of someone getting trigger happy were increasing exponentially, and Jim produced a big old gun and held it very very carefully by its barrel and yelled "Coming out! Don't shoot!" and then they were both lying on the ground with their hands behind their heads.
Blair found himself sitting in the back of a police car between two big black men. Rather to his surprise, he wasn't handcuffed and he didn't seem to be under arrest or anything. Jim had been dragged off, cuffed and screaming about protection, into the back of a black van, and Blair felt as guilty as if he and Jim had been lifelong friends rather than half an hour's acquaintances. But even so he decided not to mention anything to the cops about magic telephone boxes and identical twins from alternate realities. Naomi Sandburg didn't do hospital visiting.
Particularly not in looney bins.
Half an hour later
The big one was called Henri Brown and the dapper one who had driven the car was called Rafe, just Rafe, didn't seem to have a first (or second?) name at all, and the really, really big one was called Captain Simon Banks, head of the Major Crimes Division, Cascade PD.
"But you can call me 'sir'," he told Blair helpfully.
Blair sat on the comfortable sofa in Banks' office and wondered vaguely how he had got himself into this mess. Banks and his men seemed convinced that it was Jim who was the criminal, and Blair had prudently avoided any mention of the unstoppable killer from the future/exact doubles appearing from nowhere in telephone boxes part of the encounter, and instead had managed to give Banks the impression that he had agreed to go with Jim because Jim had persuaded him there was a killer on the loose, targeting Blair. Banks seemed somewhat unpersuaded by Blair's rapid obfuscation that he had encountered Jim in his research into Sentinels, modern day versions of the Neolithic tribal protector, and that it was therefore inherently unlikely if not impossible that it was Jim who was the bad guy here.
Banks handed Blair a cup of coffee and told him to rest in that gentle way that you talk to nervous animals, very small children and non-violent loonies, and Blair discovered he actually was shaking, slightly, who'd a thought it, and sitting still for a while with a hot drink and a blankie wasn't such a bad idea at that.
And then he heard gunfire.
"Stay here," Banks barked, producing an enormous handgun from his desk, "You're perfectly safe here."
"Safe," Blair muttered to himself and to the closed door, "This must be some new definition of the word 'safe' only found in this reality."
His heart was beating nineteen to the dozen and two bursts of what sounded like machine gun fire didn't reassure him at all.
Banks and Rafe burst back into the room.
"Come on," Banks said.
They led him out of the room, through an open plan office area full of shirtsleeved cops shrugging on Kevlar, through a room with coffee making equipment and a half-eaten pizza steaming in its box, and out into a stairwell.
The heavy doors into the stairwell muffled the sound of guns and Banks said "You OK, kid?"
"I'm thirty-two years old," Blair said randomly.
"Up or down," Rafe said.
"Up. Control room. Check out what's happening on the security cameras, get reinforcements, contain the situation. If it looks like we might lose the station, I want you to take Blair here out and head for the eighth street station, but at the moment he's safer here till we know what's going on. Here, Blair, put this on."
Banks slapped a kevlar vest into his hands and Blair tried to put it on and climb the stairs simultaneously. More gunfire. Somehow he was crouching low under some office windows, Banks ahead of him, Rafe behind, and the shooting was close now. There was a glimpse, no more, of an enormous guy in black, body crisscrossed with belts of bullets, eyes covered by black shades, an enormous machine gun in hand. But as the gun turned their way, Rafe hurled him bodily through a doorway and fell in after him as Blair landed on his back and saw Banks, crouched, firing, covering them both from the doorway.
But Banks suddenly went into slow motion; the universe went into slow motion, and Blair heard but didn't hear himself shouting "No!" And Banks fell backwards slowly in a graceful arc, one way, while bright blood arced brilliantly from his neck and head, scarlet, the other.
Rafe pushed him and the world changed; he was in a dark room hidden under a desk, and Rafe was standing in the doorway.
"Stay here, you'll be safe here."
Rafe closed the door and Blair closed his eyes, covered his ears and panicked, gasping for breath, clawing at his scattered wits.
Gunfire!
Gunfire, so close; that smell, that burnt smell - cordite? Blood? Both? The door of the room opened and Blair saw light, shadow; the shadow of the gunman. He held his breath, tried to still the beating of his loud, loud heart. The door slammed. Darkness. Steps. More gunfire.
Blair breathed.
Ohgodohgodohgodohgod.
Move. Move Chief. Now!
He heard Ellison's voice in his head. I'm hallucinating, he thought. Oh great. I'm in shock, and now I've decided to go mad as well.
He stood up, breathing as quietly as he could. The sound of gunfire had receded. Maybe it was safe.
His legs nearly gave way when he saw what was left of Rafe, outside the door. The machine gun had nearly cut him in half and the blood...
He stepped around the blood as best he could, stepped over Banks, carefully remembering not to look, not to see. The corridor smelled like an old fashioned butcher's shop - flesh, blood... Oh gods, there were more of them, here, there - everywhere.
There was a room with tv monitors - the control room Banks had talked about. He stepped inside, ignored the three bodies on the floor, the splash of blood that made the monitors on the left of him unreadable. He looked at the other monitors. Just a tv, he told himself. Only a movie.
The enormous man was moving methodically through the building killing everyone in his path. The cops were organising, but there wasn't anything they could do. He didn't die, dammit. Why didn't he die? They riddled him with bullets but he kept moving forwards, kept firing.
Blair watched, dispassionately. I'm not here, this isn't real, this isn't happening.
He saw Jim, on one of the monitors, beating himself hysterically against the restraints that held him fast to a chair. He was only down the corridor. Blair turned that way without thinking, picked up the keys that were hanging on the hook outside the door, unchained his wrists, and let Jim drag him along the corridor, down some stairs, into a car.
Ohgodohgodohgodohgod.
He found he couldn't stop saying it, couldn't breathe, couldn't think, couldn't see; they were all dead ohgodohgodohgodohgod...
Jim bitchslapped him.
"Chief. Chief! Blair! BLAIR!"
He breathed in and held it.
"I'm sorry. I tried to warn them."
Blair held his breath, trying to let the panic recede.
"But he won't stop. We have to move. Before he tracks you. He can't be stopped, persuaded, argued with, diverted. He'll keep coming till you're dead. So we have to run. You understand? Run fast, and far, and stay out of the way of other people. OK?"
He breathed out, and kept breathing till he had completely emptied his lungs.
"No," he said calmly.
#