Zig Zag (78 page)

"No!"
Elisa cried, while another voice inside her screamed, desperately,
Shoot
him! Shoot him!

Her
cry was drowned out by the sudden buzzing of machines all around her.
The floor shook as if an earthquake had struck. The computer began
sparking and a burned, bitter stench filled the air.

After
a few seconds frozen in shock, Harrison fired.

And
everything came to a halt.

0.01
seconds.

It
was like being deaf. And yet she screamed, and she heard herself. And
she felt the chair against her buttocks, and touched the table and
keyboard.

Victor
and Harrison were still frozen in the same position, one awaiting the
bullet and the other aiming the gun, but their figures had changed: a
vertical gash ran down the length of Victor's cheek and his stomach
was a red hole through which she could see his spinal column;
Harrison had lost part of one arm and his facial features.

And
between them, almost in the middle, lay a dead bug. Elisa stared at
it in horror.
The
bullet. My God. It didn't hit him in time.

She
jumped back and pushed the chair without managing to move it. When
she pressed the computer keys, none of them moved, as if they were
just symmetrical bumps carved into stone. She noticed something
different about herself, too. She was completely naked.

Her
face was drenched in sweat.

She
knew where she was. And she knew who was there with her.

It
was still the control room, but there were certain differences. It
looked like it had been decorated by a surrealist. The wall to her
right was full of strange, oblong holes, and she could see the beach
through them. That's where the only light was coming from. Everything
else was darkness.

She
felt something else, too. She couldn't have said how, because she
couldn't see him, but somehow she
felt
him.

Zig
Zag. The hunter.

Her
mind, overrun with panic, seemed to disintegrate. Rational thoughts
floated to the surface and remained coherent and observant; the rest
sunk into the depths of helplessness, into the memory of her fears
and fantasies of the last several years.

She
rushed to the wall as she stared through the gap in that odd mix of
horror and marvel.
I
can
think, feel, move. It's me, but I'm not really here, I'm someplace
else.
She
remembered that a few days ago—or a thousand years ago, there
was no telling—she'd spoken to her students at Alighieri about
the possibility of different dimensions being interconnected (
I
put
a coin on the overheard).
And
now here she was, stuck in the most inconceivable example imaginable.

She
touched the wall. It was solid. No way out there. But one of the
openings was wide and almost at floor level. She stuck her hand
through it and felt nothing.

For
a second she wavered. The idea of escaping through one of those
openings, somehow, made her slightly nauseous, like the idea of
walking through the earth.

Then
she noticed the hole in the generator room. It was a huge, elliptical
hole in the door. She realized that Rosalyn had managed to run
through it trying to escape Zig Zag, and that's how she'd ended up
touching the generator, receiving that shock after Zig Zag attacked
her. If Rosalyn had gone through one of those openings, she could try
it, too.

No
matter what, she wasn't just going to sit there waiting for him to
attack.

She
heaved one leg over, then the other, trying not to rest her weight on
the opening's edge, though it was totally smooth. And then she was
outside.

Elisa
couldn't hear the sea, or the wind, or even her own footsteps. She
couldn't feel the warmth of the sun on her skin, though she was nude.
Eve
in paradise.
It
was like walking though a film set: virtual nature. But the sunlight
hit her retinas as always. It must have something to do with the
theory of relativity, which stated that the speed of light was one of
the absolute constants of the physical universe. Even in a time
string, light still traveled, unchanging.

There
was a huge hole in her path, a ditch with polyhedral walls, the
ground packed into it in neat layers. She looked down, skirting it.

And
then she stopped.

In
that enormous chasm, thirty feet away, lay a motionless figure.

She
recognized him immediately. Forgetting everything, including her own
panic, Elisa crouched down at the crater's rim. She could see his
head, his pointy face smashed into the earth, fossilized, porous,
like a tree root. A milky-white tube imprisoned in the dark earth.
He's
been on the island this whole time. He fell through a hole in the
matter, trying to escape Zig Zag that night.
But
he was dead, or he certainly looked to be. She hoped, for his own
sake, that he was.

He
wasn't Zig Zag.

Ric
Valente stared up at her from the abyss, his eye sockets empty.

In
a flash, a vile sense of dread made her turn her head. Zig Zag was
behind her.

Just
seeing him staggered her. All those years of terror, nightmares, that
nest of vipers that had continued to grow in her subconscious ... it
all split wide open inside her, the contents spilling over, almost
drowning her.

There
was only one thing that kept her from losing her mind at that
instant: the lacerating pain in her left thigh. She writhed on the
ground, shrieking like a little girl, and saw five symmetrical,
parallel gashes on her midthigh. They weren't bleeding at all. Her
blood hadn't had time to flow, but the cuts were deep.

Zig
Zag hadn't even needed to touch her. She realized immediately that he
was in total control of the situation. Nothing hindered him. He could
destroy her at will. And the torment she felt now made her wonder
what it would be like, to die at the hands of that creature.

Elisa
stood, stumbled, and fell, reaching her hands out for support, and
then stood again. She ran without looking back, limping. She intuited
that this was what he wanted.
He
wants me to keep running.
Even
the idea that maybe Zig Zag
didn't
want
to catch her was horrifying.

She
rushed through the gate and kept on toward the beach, her feet
leaving no prints in the sand, skillfully dodging holes in the matter
beneath her. The thought of falling into one and getting caught
(where? how far down would she plunge before the atoms could return
and plug the hole again?) filled her with panic.

When
she got to the beach, her jaw dropped. It was like seeing God.

The
sea had frozen. Its time had stopped just as a wave came crashing to
shore. Now it formed a green brick trench crowned with snowy peaks
and filled with endless caverns. Another wave had been frozen as the
tide pulled it back out to sea.

Where
to now? She stopped and steeled herself up to turn around. No sign of
Zig Zag.

Still,
she kept going. She stepped tentatively onto the wave and found no
discernible difference between it and the sand. She climbed, avoiding
a hole in the matter, and reached the curved crest where it swelled.
Touching the foam that came up to her chest, she had to snatch her
hand back quickly; it hurt. She felt pricks on her palm and a sharp
pain on the soles of her feet. The atoms, clustered and crammed into
spaces smaller than they were in solid matter, must be what made the
water feel like broken glass. In Zig Zag's universe, the sea could
cut her and bleed her to death.

The
wave wasn't that high, but trying to scale it would be like rolling
naked in a patch of brambles. Besides, where would that take her? The
horizon was a mass of enormous gorges and deep pits. One looked as
big as the island itself, and there were black bodies suspended in
midair above it (what
were
they?
dolphins? sharks?) that must have been desiccated as they swam. The
bumpy surface of the ocean extended all around, full of frozen swells
and crests that would slice through her like razors.

Panting,
she backed down onto the shore and found that the sand was not safe,
either. It didn't shape and mold to her feet but stayed totally
stiff, like a sheet of corrugated metal. The narrow dunes felt like
blades. Up in the sky, the clouds sat like motionless smoke rings and
scattered clusters, and the emerald edge of the jungle looked like
origami gone wrong. She realized what was happening.
The
time string has extended its area. But that takes a lot more energy,
so it should incapacitate Zig Zag.

Elisa
didn't know where to go, or if she should even bother trying. She
fell to her knees on the hard, metal sand, whimpering in pain from
her thigh. She waited. Was she waiting for
him?
Or
was there a way to get free, or at least to ensure that her demise
was as short as possible?

She
realized what the only possibility was, but the idea of hoping for it
sickened her.

Curled
up on the sand, she tried frantically to think.
The
area has become so big that he'll need more energy to keep going. He
could draw it from human beings.
She
felt a glimmer of hope.
When
he's used up all the energy, he'll have to stop, even if it's only
for an instant, and then the bullet...

She
couldn't bring herself to hope for that, not saving her own life at
the expense of...

And
yet, even as she thought it, she
was
hoping
for it.

Then
she looked up and saw it was too late. It was her turn now.

Zig
Zag was ambling lightly. He didn't seem to be walking but floating,
propelled by some imperceptible wind. Elisa stared at him with the
fascination that anything that causes death brings.

She
wondered if he were aware, if he felt anything, had emotions, or was
capable of rationality. And realized suddenly that he was not. She
didn't even think he got pleasure by satisfying his desire to
destroy; maybe it wasn't even
desire,
per
se, that urged him on, maybe it was nothing like desire. Gazing at
him, Elisa was sure that Zig Zag was beyond the distinction between
living being and inanimate object. He wasn't an object, but he
certainly was no living creature, either. Even in motion, he seemed
like an illusion. She decided that he wasn't even closing in on her,
wasn't even moving. That was what it
looked
like,
but Zig Zag was really already there with her, in front of her, the
two of them immobilized in that time string. And as far as volition
went, he possessed it only to the degree that a magnet placed by an
iron does. That wasn't really volition; it wasn't free will or
determination; that was a physical phenomenon.