Free End Day by James Axler Page B

down under his grizzle-goateed chin and said, “Yes, how can I help you gentlemen?”
    â€œWhere is Dr. James Nudelman?” Metal face said.
    â€œJim went home sick today,” he said, his eyes darting from one purple hoodie to the next. “He left before noon. He probably won’t be back until Monday. Can I take a message?”
    â€œAnd where is home?”
    The goateed man opened the door wide enough to step through and slid it shut behind him. “Who are you, exactly?” he asked.
    One of the reptilians reached out, caught the man’s right forearm in its hands and, with sickening ease, snapped it in two. Goatee let out a piercing scream and dropped to his knees, chin lowered to his chest. Masked faces on the far side of the glass turned to stare.
    â€œWhere is home?” the little one repeated with impatience.
    Through clenched teeth, the man gave up the address. McCreedy recognized it as a building near Central Park.
    â€œGood thing you work in a hospital, eh?” Metal face said.
    â€œYou mean because you broke my fucking arm?”
    â€œNo, because there’s a morgue handy.”
    A purple-hooded monster loomed over the kneeling man.
    McCreedy shut his eyes. He had a pretty good idea what was coming next.

Chapter Six
    A person of unidentifiable sex and age, swaddled in many layers of cast-off, filth-blackened clothing, smelling pungently of his or her own bodily waste, pushed a shopping cart packed with assorted reclaimed rubbish—discarded toilet seat, lengths of rusty pipe, stacks of cardboard, rags, bottles, unmated shoes—into Doc’s headlong path down the alley.
    Whether the lunge was meant to simply attract his attention or to cause him some kind of injury, he reacted without breaking stride, long legs nimbly sidestepping the front of the cart. As he did so, his silver-handled sword stick hissed through the air and cracked the cart pusher a modest blow across the right cheek.
    As if he was flicking a fly out of midair.
    â€œBas-tid! You bas-tid!” the him or her shouted in outrage.
    Doc kept running. The complaint barely registered over the cooing, achingly familiar, female voice in his head.
    â€œTheo, Theo...”
    As he sprinted alongside the companions, fragments of his past were coming at him like a hail of rifle bullets, zinging into the front of his head and out the back. A razor-sharp jumble of agonizing been-there, done-that’s, memories that spanned the two-hundred-plus years of his unique existence: walking the grounds of Christ Church College with his Oxford dons in the late 1880s; picnicking with his family in Omaha on the Fourth of July, 1896; being trawled against his will to an underground prison in the late-twentieth century, then being cast forward in time beyond the coming Armageddon to Deathlands, and there, further degraded, forced to service hogs for the amusement of Baron Teague’s head sec man, Cort Strasser.
    He had a bit of a memory of later, chilling stickies by the dozens, as they hung in mating chains on the side of a ruined, predark highway overpass, until all he could smell was burned cordite and aerosolized blood.
    And then there was the present existence.
    His experiences in late-nineteenth-century London, England, and various cities of the United States hadn’t prepared him for Manhattan in 2001. He had usually been kept sequestered in ultrasecret redoubts after being trawled to the 1990s. Though he had access to printed and digital media during that confinement, he never had been directly exposed to the realities of civilization in the twenty-first century. The surrounding noise, the wags, the smells, the tall buildings, the sea of pavement, all the people, added up to a full-sensory scour that grated his every nerve end raw.
    â€œTheo, Theo...”
    His dear wife Emily’s voice vibrated softly inside his head. It was the voice of a ghost. She had died two centuries before, as had his beloved