Well, kids, that’s a wrap: Detained, a novel I wrote in 2016, re-wrote entirely after feedback from my indomitable agent, then shelved when we judged we didn’t have much chance of selling it, has been posted in its entirety here on the wee blog. If you’ve been following along, thanks! If you’ve been waiting to read the whole book at once like a normal human being, here’s you’re chance:

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Thanks for your interest, and I hope you enjoyed the ride! I welcome all feedback on the story. I’ll probably repeat this experiment in 2022. I’ve got a lot of novels, so pushing one out here every year sounds like a lot of fun.

Happy Holidays. I hope y’all have an excellent 2022. See you on the other side.

I’ll be posting one chapter of my novel Detained every week throughout 2021. Download links below.

48. Candace

It was time for lunch. If her growling stomach wasn’t enough, her aching shoulders and stiff back took up the challenge and made it clear she’d worked long enough. She picked up a rag and wiped her hands, slumping slightly in her chair and eying the canvas critically. She still couldn’t quite see the painting, but she thought something was beginning to emerge.

She stood up and stretched. It was a sunny, clear day outside, so she’d opened up every blind and pulled aside every drape in the house to let in as much light as possible, and as a result had consented to wear a pair of paint-splattered overalls just in case some lost hunters wandered past the house. As usual when she let the light in, the house looked alien. Her father had liked things dark and dingy, private. She’d never realized just how dark and drab the house always was until she’d moved to New York.

She picked up her mug of coffee and carried it to the kitchen. The house was still her father’s. She kept meaning to plan some renovations, to modernize, but time always slipped away. She wanted to tear out the ancient kitchen with its narrow countertops and metal cabinets, she wanted to tear down a wall and install a master bath. She didn’t really have the money, but the place didn’t have a mortgage, so she thought she might get an equity line and do it that way.

Somehow, though, she woke up every morning and didn’t do a damn thing about it. She was starting to suspect she liked the house as it was, with her father’s imprint on it.

As she passed the pantry door in the kitchen she paused. With both hands on the mug, she stood very still and listened for a moment. Then she shook her head and kept walking.

The fridge only contained vegetables and a pitcher of water. This had seemed like a brilliant plan the day before, when she’d noticed an extra five pounds and a distressing tightness to her jeans. The market was a twenty-minute drive and she figured if all she had to eat in the house was salad and canned tuna, she would be forced to eat healthy. Or possibly not eat at all. Either way, her plan was to avoid the bathroom scale until Friday and then see what she had wrought.

Sighing, she gathered lettuce, a tomato, half an onion, and a cucumber and dumped them on the butcher block island. She got a bowl out of the cabinet over the sink, took a knife from the drawer, and began industriously and piously cutting up a chopped salad. When salad had been achieved, she wiped her hands on her grubby overalls and put the veggies back in the fridge.

Tuna, she thought. Dad would say I needed protein. Protein, caffeine, and beer, he always said, the most important food groups.

She smiled and steeled herself.

The pantry door stuck, and she had to put a little back into it to budge it open. It had always been that way. She leaned into it just like she had for thirty-two years, and the door scraped the floor and swung inward.

The pantry was a small room with metal shelves on each side, leaving a lane in the middle just big enough for a person to walk down. Candace paused and stared down at the trap door in the floor. Two steel bars and a padlock through an old iron hasp secured it. It led down into a tiny root cellar that they’d never used; it was just large enough for one person to be very uncomfortable in, and they’d never known what to do with the space anyway. She had a vague notion that you stored perishables in there in the times before refrigeration, but since she was living in the age of refrigeration, she didn’t see the point.

As she watched, the trap door shifted, just slightly, and a distant-sounding banging filtered up through the old floorboards. She stared at the trap for another moment, then turned and went back into the kitchen, closing the pantry door softly behind her.

####

The first glass of wine had been so relaxing she’d immediately proceeded to the second, and was seriously considering having nothing but cheese, wine, and streaming video for dinner when the phone vibrated. She watched it dance on the old warped picnic table set up in the backyard. She sat under the huge yellow umbrella and thought it was cool and soothing despite the humidity, but realized that might have been the wine. The wine had cost three dollars for the bottle and it was sweet and tasted like a headache tomorrow. Or in three hours.

When the phone stopped buzzing, she picked it up, thumbed it onto speaker, and played the message. A second later, Mike’s voice, tinny and distant.

Hey Cuddyer, he said, and she smiled. Just checking in on you. Had a moment of deja vu in an elevator this morning and almost went into a full-on panic attack. Half expected to close my eyes and open them seven years ago, you know? Anyway, that made me think of you, so I thought I’d say hey. Thinking of coming up to Manhattan again? Do. The invitation stands. Will always stand.

She sipped wine. She missed Mike. But not, she thought, in a romantic way; whatever option for romance there had once been between them had been replaced with an almost filial affection, dry and careful. She and Mike were linked. She would carry him with her for the rest of her life, but she wasn’t sure she ever needed to see him again.

I also obviously want to leave the millionth message regarding your charge. You can’t keep him in the root cellar forever, Candace. I mean, maybe he can stay there, it remains to be seen, but you aren’t going to live forever. I wouldn’t want to be the home inspector who has to deal with your root cellar after your death, probably by wine.

She snort-laughed. Death by wine. It was amazing that she’d never really known Mike Malloy—she’d only known him, in reality, for a few days at most, and they’d spent most of that time apart—but he knew her so well it often freaked her out.

Anyway, think about it. And call me, any time.

She sat for a moment, listening to the wind. She knew he was right.

They’d scrambled away from the destroyed house, bodies and destruction in their wake, Haggen tied up and tossed in the back of his truck. They’d considered destroying the box. But what was the point? Raslowski was still alive. They would build another one. Mike argued it was like nuclear weapons: They didn’t have any control over those, either, or any guarantees that some insane person wouldn’t someday hit the switch—the box was no different.

They’d found the bar in the process of being cleaned up, a new military unit in charge. They’d been arrested, but after Raslowksi had inspected his box and connected it to a small tablet computer, he’d ordered them set free.

“Really?” Mike had asked, frowning.

Raslowski sighed, removing his glasses and rubbing his eyes. “The math has changed. No one here appears to be a threat any longer. And none of this actually happened, so technically no crimes were committed—and we don’t want or need the publicity, either.”

An hour later it was just Glen, his shell-shocked militia friends, and Jack McCoy, handing out shots of whiskey to anyone who asked, shaking his head as he surveyed the mess his bar was in.

Glen had gone home, looking old and shriveled. Werner Milson, the Sheriff, had arrived with two deputies and politely asked Todd and the others to get the hell out of town, and suddenly Candace and Mike found themselves alone at the bar. She remembered a very long, drawn out moment wherein they both just sat and stared down at their shot glasses. She remembered feeling deliciously tired, the sort of tired where you knew you would sleep for a day, maybe two, and so you could linger in the moment, just experiencing the miserable exhaustion.

“I’m struggling with reality,” Mike said.

This had set off an explosion of laughter. She’d laughed for ten, fifteen minutes, him laughing with her. Tears streaming down their faces, clinging to each other. And when they’d finally regained control of themselves, they’d sat there smiling until Mike suddenly sobered and looked at her sharply.

“Jesus, what do we do with Haggen?”

####

In the pantry, she stared down at the trap door again, feeling sluggish and sleepy. The trap wasn’t moving any more, and she couldn’t hear anything. But he was down there, she knew. And he was a constant. The only Living Constant. So he would be, forever, as far as she could tell.

THE END

I’ll be posting the whole novel as an eBook next week, kids!

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I’ll be posting one chapter of my novel Detained every week throughout 2021. Download links below.

47. Mike

For a moment, all he could articulate to himself was that Haggen looked incredibly rough, even otherworldly. There was something … off about his appearance, something that made his eye want to skip right over him and look at an interesting spot on the floor. It was an uncanny valley between the Haggen he’d known—bright-eyed, red-cheeked, filled with a nervous kind of energy—and the man who was grinning up at him with fishbelly skin and dry eyes.

I’ve run the numbers.

Mike saw the flash of metal, and twisted away as Haggen stabbed at him with a long hunting knife that landed in the floor where Mike’s foot had been a moment before. Dancing backwards, he tripped over a fallen rafter and fell, sprawling painfully.

Haggen sprang to his feet, and Mike had a moment of confusion, because Haggen looked like an extra from some TV show, something with a lot of makeup and dead people. He had been shot multiple times, and was as pale as a piece of chalk, so pale his lips looked almost black. But he was alive. Or, Mike self-corrected, he was in motion; he didn’t look alive.

“I’ve been afraid,” Haggen said. “I’ll admit it. Shit, you think you’ve got it all handled, you think you understood, but do you push that button? Change a few variables and you’re immortal—but are you going to fire a gun at your head to find out?” He smiled, and Mike flinched stupidly from the white gums almost the same color as his teeth. “Oh, I sat here, barrel in my mouth. I did. But I couldn’t do it. But then, tonight, bam! it happens. And here I am. And that makes me think the rest of my changes might have worked out, too.”

Mike thought stupidly, other changes?

Haggen leaped at him, faster than Mike could believe. It was almost like an insect, a sudden bouncing motion, and then Haggen was in the air, knife in one hand, his cold white face twisted into an expression that Mike’s fatigued brain somehow interpreted as delight.

He managed to roll to his left a second before Haggen landed, the knife sinking into the broken rafter that hugged the floor. He pushed himself up to his feet and whirled, struggling with the rifle slung across his torso, which seemed to suddenly take on a sentience and a reluctance to assist. But Haggen was struggling to pull the knife from the rafter, both hands on the polished wood handle as he put his back into the effort. For a moment Mike stared at the pattern of bullet wounds on Haggen’s back, the way they opened and closed slightly as his back muscles convulsed. Then he swung the rifle forward, toggled the safety, and pointed it at the other man.

“Jim,” he said, “I don’t—”

Haggen spun and raced towards him. Mike squeezed the trigger, the rifle jerked in his hands, and then Haggen crashed into him and all he could do was thrust the rifle up at him, deflecting the knife blade as they both crashed into the table, which collapsed under them.

Mike struggled to keep the rifle under his control. Haggen was strong, and nothing made sense. His skin was cold and clammy, and Mike’s own crawled at its touch. Mike’s brain refused to process the way he grinned down at him as they struggled.

He changed something, Mike thought, sweating stinging his eyes. He had the ghostly non-memory: This room, the Dipping Bird. It had never happened, but at the same time it had. And when it happened, Jimmy Haggen had somehow made himself superhuman.

Haggen reared back, his hand curling into a fist, and Mike ducked his head down to avoid the punch. Haggen’s fist slammed into the remnants of the table, and Mike twisted free, scrambling into a crawl. Haggen whipped out a hand and grabbed Mike’s ankle, and with a roar swung Mike to the right, skimming him over the debris-laden floor as if he weighed nothing, finally letting go and letting his centrifugal force send him sailing into the wall.

Mike lay for a moment, eyes closed, suppressing a groan as an aching pain radiated downward from his head.

“God-damn this feels good,” Haggen exulted. Mike cracked open an eye and watched Jimmy pacing back and forth in the ruined room, an animated corpse. He kept himself still, assessing the damage—minimal, he thought; sprains and pulls, nothing he couldn’t overcome with a little sheer terror and adrenalin—and biding his time.

Suddenly, Haggen stopped and looked directly at him. “I see you, you little sneak. Mike Malloy, rich and good-looking and all the goddamn time in the world, huh?” He turned and walked towards him. “Well, guess what, Mr. Malloy? I made myself a constant, you hear? Not a variable. Not a changeable value, but a fundamental.” He knelt down right in front of Mike, peering down with his cadaver smile. “Change me, the whole fucking universe will collapse, how you like that?”

Mike pulled the Beretta from his pocket and pointed it at Haggen. He tried to ignore the way his hand shook holding the gun. Haggen stopped, then smiled.

“Can’t kill me, Mikey,” he said. “Like I just told you, I’m a constant. The universe can’t do without me. So it won’t let you kill me. Shoot me all you want, I’ll still be here.”

Mike believed it, based solely on Haggen’s appearance. He was suddenly reminded of Spider Hamilton.

He’d met Spider at a bar in Kansas City, a bar that didn’t have a name or permanent address, a bar that set up someplace new every morning at about 3AM, an after hours place where bouncers and bartenders, prostitutes, dancers, drivers, bodyguards, and assorted other creatures of the night gathered to wind down and relax. He’d found his way into the movable feast with the liberal application of hundred-dollar bills and bought drinks, and had been content to simply sit on a couch and sip a whiskey and watch a colorful cast of characters dance, get high, fight, and sing.

Spider Hamilton had walked in and the place acted like the whole party was for him. Mike had watched the man make his way in like a visiting dignitary, smiling, shaking hands, kissing cheeks. He was huge, a mountain of a man, his tan skin taut over muscles, marred by plenty of scars. His nose had the off-center look of the frequently-broken, and his hands were red, raw slabs of ground beef.

He’d hung back, watching, and finally introduced himself, and discovered that Spider Hamilton was a street fighter—literally a man who engaged in illegal brawls in the street, taking on anyone who put up a purse. No rules, no protective equipment, each bout filmed and uploaded to his channel online. He learned that Spider Hamilton made a comfortable living at this, and that he’d never lost a fight. Spider, plied with expensive Scotch, had been happy to lecture Mike on the ways street fighting differed from what he called Pussy Fighting.

So Mike bought a lesson.

For five hundred dollars, Spider promised he would teach Mike some basics, give him some pointers, and leave him alive, though he did have Mike sign a surprisingly complex and well-written waiver that inured Spider against being sued for medical bills.

As it turned out, the only thing Mike remembered from his lesson, aside from a new promise to himself to never try to engage in a fistfight when hungover, was that the only thing that really mattered in a fight was pain: If you made your opponent hurt it was much better than any skill move or complicated maneuver.

“I win most of my fights,” Spider had told him, “by kicking them in the balls as hard as I can as fast as I can. I make ?em hurt.”

Make ?em hurt. It was essentially the only takeaway Mike had from the experience. He looked at Haggen, who was still smiling at him, triumphant.

“Can’t kill you, huh?”

Haggen shook his head. “’Fraid not, son.”

“Does it still hurt?”

Haggen frowned, and Mike squeezed the trigger three times.

He staggered backwards and lost his footing, arms flailing wildly as he hit the floor. For a moment he was still, not moving as Mike levered himself up, wincing as he climbed to his feet, gun still held on Haggen. But as he stood up, Haggen started twitching, and after a moment Mike realized he was laughing.

Then he flipped over. There were three new wounds in his chest. They weren’t bleeding, which Mike assumed was because Haggen literally had no more blood in his body, which raised so many questions regarding chemical reactions and basic biology his brain simply glossed over it.

“Yep,” Haggen said, slowly climbing to his feet. “That fucking hurt.” He rolled his head on his neck. “And I’m going to make you pay for it.”

He launched himself at Mike. Mike pulled the trigger again, but a second later Haggen knocked the wind out of him, and then he was on the floor, Haggen sitting astride him. He reared back and brought his fist down, and Mike had the distinct displeasure of hearing his own nose break shortly before he lost consciousness.

He came to just a moment later, dumbly watching as Haggen picked up his own Beretta. Everything seemed to be coming at him in slow, confusing waves. He couldn’t breathe through his nose and for a moment he struggled to get air, watching helplessly as Haggen rose unsteadily to his feet over Mike and pointed the gun at his head.

Just as Haggen squeezed the trigger, he twitched, convulsing. The bullet smacked into Mike’s leg instead of his head.

The pain brought him back. He convulsed, half sitting up, opening his mouth and sucking in air to scream. Blood poured from his nose down his throat, and he collapsed backwards, choking, eyes watering.

“Goddamit,” Haggen growled. Then he licked his lips, bringing the gun back up. “By the way, you arrogant piece of shit,” Haggen said, no longer grinning. “I’m going to erase you. All of you. In my world, you never existed.”

And then Haggen squeezed the trigger, but got a dry click. The gun was empty. Mike passed out again, and gratefully.

####

He came to in a rush of pain, his entire body throbbing with each ragged heartbeat. He stared up at the ceiling for a moment, dizzy and hot, then cold. He could hear Haggen breathing, he could hear the occasional soft curse under the man’s breath.

Maybe I’ll just lie here until I bleed to death or he erases me, he thought.

It was tempting.

Biting his lip in agony, he raised his head up just enough to see Haggen. The only living constant in the universe was hunched over, the keyboard in his lap, the box and nearly-destroyed monitor hooked up on the floor in front of him. He was carefully splicing the wires of the keyboard back together; the cord appeared to have been cleanly sliced in half.

Mike managed, through the blurry burning pain and the hot weakness, to feel a sense of amusement. The Only Living Constant had been stymied by a lack of a fifteen-dollar computer keyboard.

He watched as Candace suddenly appeared, rising up from the floor holding a long piece of old pipe. He blinked, head trembling as he strained to keep his position.

She was covered in dust and splinters, bleeding from a deep gash on her head. But she was very much alive and in one piece, and held the pipe like a an old and very beloved baseball bat, the kind kids had in their closets, sticky from endless applications of pine tar, signed by teammates and wielded in countless epic battles. He thought she looked like a girl who’d hit people on the head with a pipe several times.

For one second, their eyes met. He blinked and tried to smile, tried to convey something, some kind of sentiment. She nodded, once, crisp and calm. Expressionless.

“Hey, Jim.”

Haggen startled and half turned around. Candace swung the pipe.

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I’ll be posting one chapter of my novel Detained every week throughout 2021. Download links below.

46. Candace

She heard something, a scrape and a creak above her. Ziptied to the ancient, unused radiator against the inner wall of the room, she glanced up, then quickly down again, doing obscure existential math. She looked over at Haggen, who was hunched over the keyboard, the monitor—its screen cracked but still functioning—glowing with white code on a black background.

She heard the creak again. She didn’t know who, but someone was on the roof. It didn’t matter who it was, she thought. She was tied up and anything that would shift the balance was welcome. She needed to distract Jimmy.

Haggen was spectral. For a moment she studied his back, the oozing bullet wounds, the pallor of his skin, and marveled at the idea of an unkillable James Haggen. It ruined so many of her teenage proclamations that she would, indeed, kill Jimmy that she felt cheated, somehow. When he’d made her angry during their ill-fated love affair all those years ago—which had been more or less a daily occurrence—she’d often entertained herself by imagining how she would kill the smug son of a bitch, fuming over his latest bit of assholery. Now that option appeared to be gone, and without the option of just killing him she wasn’t sure how to emotionally deal with him.

She watched him typing. His hands shook. He was essentially a corpse that had failed to stop living.

“Is it difficult?” she asked, surprising herself with the croaking, cracked sound of her voice. She was exhausted. She felt like she’d been fighting a fierce tide for the last six years or so, beating her way back to a distant shore that kept receding no matter what she did.

He kept typing. “Dr. Raslowksi’s early work is public,” he said. “Getting some of the basics was easy enough. I took some online courses—did you know that MIT has every course it offers for free online? Shit, they even have all the materials for download. You can’t get a degree that way, but you can self-study until you pass out. I managed to dig up some other stuff—one stupid sonofabitch at the DOD left a presentation deck on an FTP site, and the Dark Web has a shitload of leaked materials. More fucking anarchist’s with security clearances than you think. And Raslowski and Azarov, for convenience and speed’s sake, based the structure of their language on existing programming languages. And the compiler is built-in. I’ve pieced together a lot of it.”

“A lot? For re-working reality, you think a lot is gonna cut it?”

He shrugged, his wounds oozing more. “I’m kinda out of time, here, Candace. I became aware six years ago. I’ve had six years to prepare. At this point, best I can do.”

Dust sifted down onto her, getting into her eyes. She blinked and twitched, forcing herself to keep talking. “And you’re … you’re okay with the risk? Jesus, Jimmy, you might delete everything. You might erase existence,” she said quietly. “I want you to just stand up, unplug that thing, and maybe destroy it.”

“They’d just build another one,” he said, twisting around to look at her. “Besides, I’ve already put all the work in: I’d written out my changes ahead of time like a good Worker Bee. It’s all in there, Candace. So here’s the last chance, okay? The final one. I press the button, everything’s gonna change. The variables will refill with new values. Those new values will ripple out in quantum states backwards and forwards in time, reality will self-correct, and we’ll all be in a new version of everything. You want to have a say in what that new version is, you want to make a suggestion, now would be the time.”

She felt tired. She felt like she’d lived the last six years twice and only gotten the sleep of three. “Jimmy, you—”

Up above her, a loud explosion made her scream, and then everything was chaos: The ceiling collapsed above her, plaster and wood coming down in chunks that shook the floor under her as they hit. There was a rush of hot, burning air and a flurry of sparks and flaming chunks of what had once been the ceiling. Bodies crashed down with the debris, bouncing on the floor. With a loud tearing noise, another section of the roof snapped, dropping down on top of the green couch.

She took a deep breath and started to try and get her feet under her. Something heavy crashed down onto her shoulders, and everything went black.

####

She came back to consciousness in slow, sticky waves, hovering somewhere between awake and asleep for a long time. She imagined she was back in New York, she imagined she was at home doing her homework, her father puttering around downstairs, irritating her because he wouldn’t just go doze off in the easy chair in front of th TV so she could sneak out. She imagined she was working a double shift at Mad One Jack’s, buzzing on caffeine and desperation, angry because of all the one-dollar tips the Great Hunters were leaving.

She knew she was dreaming, but couldn’t shake it.

She was in the hospital, then, the day her father died. He hadn’t been awake. She knew that. He’d slept the last few days, breathing shallowly, and shown no awareness of anything. He’d died without saying a word. She knew that.

But now she was back in the dark, silent room, and he was awake. She knew she was dreaming, but then what was a dream when you knew—knew, in some inexplicable way—that you’d lived a whole other life. That instead of going to New York, you’d stayed in town. That one night soldiers had detained you. And instead of having to fly in when your father took a turn, you were home, caring for him, right up until the bitter end.

And now he was awake, and telling her he was about to die. He was telling her that life didn’t have to be this way. That there were options she couldn’t see. He was smiling and telling her that she didn’t have to do things just because she’d already done them, that there were less-traveled roads. He’d always said that: Less-traveled roads, and she’d always tried to correct his quote and he’d never listened.

And then she was back in Jimmy Haggen’s destroyed safe room. The roof was missing, the trees visible, outlined by the stars and the soft glow of the unseen moon. The kerosene lamp still burned, throwing its weak yellow light. The debris from the collapse was everywhere, shingles and drywall and the huge, cracked joists, bricks mixed in. Where the couch had been, two legs emerged from a pile of wreckage, one leg bent at the knee as if the person was just taking a nap under a ton of house.

She tried to move, and a sharp pain lanced through her. Her arms were trapped, and she struggled, panic setting in. She was pinned under a huge piece of wood, ancient and cracked, almost black; she was able to breathe, but any attempt to move brought pain and futility.

Sound made her look around. Another body lay on the floor—she recognized Colonel Hammond’s short, severe blonde hair—near the couch. The box had been knocked off the table and lay on its side, still connected via a long black cable to the monitor, which was still on the table, flat on its back, and the keyboard, which had landed on the floor.

Jimmy was crawling towards it.

He was a corpse. She couldn’t think of any other possible description. He was fishbelly white, his lips gray and thin. The wounds on his back were dry and jellied, opening and closing as he pulled himself towards the keyboard. She could hear him breathing, but couldn’t comprehend how he had any blood left to oxygenate. If she didn’t believe he was unkillable before, she believed it now.

I’ve already put all the work in.

A jolt of adrenaline flooded her. The keyboard was still connected. She had no doubt the box was still operational. All he had to do was press the ENTER key and load his changes.

She clenched her teeth and closed her eyes, pushing against the weight of the rafter despite the pain that shot through her. She couldn’t let him. She couldn’t let him erase people, she couldn’t let him remake the universe as he saw fit, she couldn’t let him mess everything up worse than he already had.

She pushed. The pain became intense, a fire inside her, and she screamed. She thought the rafter had moved a fraction of an inch. Just a fraction.

She remembered, in another reality, an old-fashioned Dipping Bird.

She watched Haggen crawl another inch towards the keyboard.

Tears sprang from her eyes as the pain became intolerable. The rafter hadn’t moved at all, she was pinned under it completely. With a gasp she stopped the effort, sobs wracking her as frustration soured into horror.

In the strange silence of the ruined house, she heard a slight, sharp noise, then something like fabric rubbing. And then a man dropped into her field of vision. He was disheveled, but appeared to be unhurt; he didn’t even have much dirt on him. She recognized Mike Malloy and stared in wonder for a moment: Had he flown in? Parachuted from a plane? Materialized from another dimension?

After the day she’d had, any of it would have made sense.

She watched as Mike walked over towards Haggen. He didn’t rush. He had a rifle slung over his shoulder, but his hands were free and hung loosely at his sides as he walked.

Be careful, she thought, trying to make the words but finding her lungs locked, he’s immortal, unkillable.

When he reached Haggen, he extended one leg and gently put his foot on the younger man’s hand.

Haggen stopped crawling, sagging down onto the floor.

“I think you’ve done enough damage,” Mike said.

For a moment, Haggen just lay there, and Candace wasn’t even certain he was breathing. Then he twisted his head around to look up at Mike, and Candace could see his cadaverous face smiling.

“You know, Malloy,” he said, his voice like gravel under wheels, “I’ve run the numbers on you.”

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I’ll be posting one chapter of my novel Detained every week throughout 2021. Download links below.

45. Mike

“Motion sensors,” Hammond said, killing the engine and getting out of the truck. The distant whirring noise was muted but clear in the cold darkness. “Couldn’t be helped. Mr. Eastman,” Hammond said, beckoning him to slide over behind the wheel. She held the truck’s keys in one hand and one of the familiar zipties in the other.

Eastman hesitated. He looked from her to Mike and Myra in the back seat. Myra held her gun up.

“Mr. Eastman,” she said sweetly, “I’m not much of a shot, it’s true, but you’re one foot away.”

He looked at Mike, who shrugged. “Sorry, Glen. Your heart doesn’t seem in this.”

Eastman began hauling himself over to the driver’s side. “Fuck you, Mike. You think this is going to go well for you? You’re an idiot. They’re going to let you help them, and then they’re going to arrest you, erase you, and take their toy and do whatever they want to us, to everyone.”

“Mr. Eastman,” Myra snapped, leaning forward to speak directly into his ear. “May I remind you we came here because our models demonstrated that you were a threat. You were going to contribute to an apocalyptic event. And you and Mr. Malloy were both part of a conspiracy to utilize technology you do not understand at all to make arrangements for your own profit.” She snorted. “So spare me the outrage.”

Mike blinked. Something had definitely changed in Myra.

Hammond secured Eastman’s hands to the wheel and stuffed the keys into her pocket. She opened Mike’s door and he stepped out while Myra slid out the other side. He followed Hammond around to the rear of the truck. As she lowered the tailgate, Myra shrugged off her white lab coat. Hammond pulled a large black duffel towards them and unzipped it. She pulled out a pair of black work overalls and tossed them to Myra. As the younger woman pulled them on, Hammond began extracting weapons from the bag.

“Mr. Malloy,” she said. “I realize trust may be a bridge too far between us. And I’ll be up front; if I thought I could do this without you, I would. But Haggen—even though he’s one man—has obviously been aware of his special circumstances longer than the rest of us. And he was much more aggressive.” She pulled an AR-15 from the bag and laid it on the truck bed next to it. “I’ll admit I was complacent. Even as I became aware of the divergent realities, I thought we would be able to play the same strategy. I was proud of myself for putting backup resources into place to overcome another shitshow.” She shook her head and placed two full magazines next to the rifle, and then turned to face him. “As I said, trust may be a bit much, in both directions. But I feel like I don’t have a choice. Dr. Azarov is resourceful and reliable, but she’s not trained for this.”

She studied him, and he studied her back. She was handsome, a thin, dry-looking woman with not an ounce of fat or wasted space to her, everything about her sinewy and tight.

“So, Mr. Malloy, all I’m going to do here is ask you to give me your word that once we have Haggen neutralized, you won’t screw me over. Can you do that?”

Mike smiled. “Should we pinky swear?” he said, picking up the AR-15 and checking it over. “We’ve got a shared goal right now: Get in there without anyone else, neutralize Haggen, take control of the box. Once that happens, we no longer have a shared goal, right?”

Hammond shook her head. “I say we do, Malloy. We all want to have a say in what happens next. If we agree to that, everything else follows.”

He picked up one of the magazines and pushed it until he got the satisfying click. He nodded. “Colonel Hammond, I’ll give you my word. If things go sideways, it won’t be because of me.” He looked at her. “All I want is a seat at the table. We get in, Dr. Azarov gives us access and the knowledge to do it right—without screwing everything up—and we all have a say. Fair enough.”

The annoying jingle of the motion alarms suddenly stopped.

Hammond pursed her lips, studying him, then nodded. “Very well. Mr. Malloy, I don’t know you, and yet I feel like I know you better than some people I’ve served with for years. We’re good. Let’s go have a look.”

The duffel bag contained another pair of rifles, more ammunition, some M67 grenades that Hammond took sole possession of, a brick of gray clay-like material Mike recognized as plastic explosive, and bright silver dart-shaped objects he assumed were detonators. Myra, he noted, took hold of the AR-15 with a practiced, comfortable posture, her eyes running over it with something that looked suspiciously like experience. He suspected they’d all been preparing for this moment privately, each of them nurturing ambitions and new skills in secret, thinking themselves brilliant.

He looked around at the dark, silent trees, and wondered how many people were aware of the “reset,” how many people had spent the last few years studying, training, building in preparation, certain they would be ready to seize control when the time came.

He shivered, then followed Myra to join Hammond. She was peering through field glasses.

“Haggen’s house,” she said, pointing. “About a hundred feet past the tree line. Hardened, in a way; the man obviously didn’t have any money, but he sure had a lot of time on his hands.” She handed the glasses over, and Mike slung the rifle over his shoulder and looked through them, the night lit up a sickly green. The house looked sad and small, the sort of one-story home that would contain a lot of linoleum and formica, a lot of rust-colored carpet.

“Shields over the windows,” Hammond said quietly. “He’s not connected to utilities, the house doesn’t have a basement, just a crawlspace I’ll bet he’s filled with gravel. Internal power and water collection and filtration. Motion sensors, at this line and probably another fifty feet in. Video surveillance. And if I were him, I’d have rigged up some IEDs around the perimeter. Not to mention a steel security door in the front—he’s closed up the rear entrance.”

Mike scanned the scene, impressed at how much she’d deduced from just observing the house—or, possibly, had already discovered before coming to this point, quietly laying her own foundation while she waited for everything else to fall into place.

“He knew this would happen,” he said. “The Jim Haggen I know—knew—was paranoid as hell.” He chewed his lip, studying the house. “So, he’s expecting a frontal assault. He probably expects you to come with your army,” he dropped the glasses and looked at her. “Or me to come with mine. So, a frontal assault would be a mistake.”

“I agree, Mr. Malloy. So, let’s imagine that Mr. Haggen is right now coding in his changes. He’s obviously been planning this for years, so let’s assume he has—or thinks he has—a firm grip on the syntax and the structure.”

Myra snorted derisively, but said nothing.

“So, we’re on the clock,” Hammond continued. “How do we get in there as quickly as possible?”

Mike brought the glasses back up, wondering if this was a test, if Hammond already had an assault plan and just wanted to see what he would say so she could gauge his usefulness. He studied the house again, then ticked up to study the trees. Haggen hadn’t done much to clear the land. Probably liked the natural privacy screening of the trees and brush, he thought. He looked back at the house, then lowered the glasses and looked at Hammond as he handed them back.

“Roof,” he said, gesturing. “We use the trees to avoid the motion sensors and whatever other traps he has.” He pointed. “Look at how close the canopy is. Once we’re in the branches, we can probably make it to the house without touching the ground. He put a lot of time into the walls and the ground-level defenses, but that roof looks old and worn-out. Shingles missing. A wavy roof-line that indicates rot. The chimney doesn’t look properly flashed, at least not from this distance. We hit the roof, find a soft spot, set a small charge, and we’re in.”

Hammond nodded, stuffing the glasses into her jacket. She looked up and studied the branches above us. “Good. We have some stakes in the bag that we can use to climb up. Let’s go.”

Mike blinked. He hadn’t actually expected her to just take his recommendation without augmenting it, or at least discussing it. Time was pressing, but it still felt off. He glanced at Myra, who looked back at him placidly.

They know something, he thought, reminding himself that they had at least limited access to the future, to a matrix of information that allowed them to predict what might happen. Their discovery that he might be part of the end of the world had brought them in the first place. He frowned as Hammond fished out the stakes and a small field hammer. With a shiver, he considered the possibility, suddenly very real, that they knew he would get into Haggen’s house, and they were just drafting along behind him.

He was being used.

He watched Hammond start pounding a stake into a wide tree trunk nearby. She worked with the speed and efficiency of a trained soldier, someone who’d spent her life setting up and breaking down temporary shelters and structures. When she had the first two stakes in place, she looped some rope around the tree and tied it off around her waits, then climbed the first two stakes and began pounding in a third.

He considered his options. He needed to get into the house. He had little doubt at this point that Haggen would not hesitate a moment to neutralize him, and when a man had control—even vague, untrained control—over reality itself, that didn’t bode well. So he needed Myra and the Colonel—if for nothing else to feel out Haggen’s defenses, set off a trap or two while he hung back. On the other hand, he was suddenly uncertain if Hammond wouldn’t simply wait for him to wriggle them into the house and then shoot him in the head the moment she and Azarov had control of the box again.

Myra was next to him, handing him a length of sturdy nylon rope. She nodded, and approached the tree. He was startled to see that Hammond had already made it into the branches, six stakes driven into the trunk forming a ladder of sorts, like you saw on telephone poles for the repair workers. Myra looped the rope around the trunk as Hammond had and attacked the climb like it was something she’d trained for.

Everyone had been building tunnels, practicing skills, doing research.

So had he, he realized. He froze for a moment. Where had his compulsion to learn, to travel around taking classes and paying people to teach him their trades, their secrets, their skills, come from? What had actually inspired it? Julia? That had always made sense to him: He’d felt useless after Julia’s death. He’d felt like a fraud adult, a man who’d been wallowing in his adolescent bullshit for so long, a man who didn’t even know how to administer CPR. Now he wondered: Had it been this? Some weird dimensional memory, some intuitive, baked-in knowledge in his DNA telling him that someday all these skills would be useful?

Was he his own puppet?

He walked slowly to the tree, trying to shake off the sudden sense of dread. Not for the first time, but most powerfully, he felt like he was just going through motions that had been stage-directed. Now he wondered if the invisible hand moving him like a piece on the board was himself.

He looped the rope around the tree and tied it loosely around his waist. He began to climb. As he did, feeling his muscles strain and burn, his breathing kick up, he shook off the dread. He saw himself climbing stealthily from branch to branch. He saw himself making the final short leap onto the roof. Sitting there with held breath for a moment, listening for reaction. Helping Hammond set charges around the chimney, where the worst of the rot was located. Moving a few feet off. He felt the bang of the explosive, too powerful because Hammond wanted to be certain of success, and then the whole roof caving in, the three of them sliding down into rubble. He saw himself breaking both legs. He saw Haggen walking towards him with a rifle in his hands, bloodied and bruised, but still in one piece.

He crawled out on the branch. Haggen’s roof was just a foot or so away, and easy swing. Hammond and Myra, difficult to see in their dark clothes, peered up at him expectantly. He made the last move easily, walking out on a stout branch that narrowed down over the roff, allowing him to make a simple leap.

He followed the other two to the chimney, where the roof was so badly rotted he could feel it giving under them, soft and ruined. Hammond knelt down and shrugged off her pack, fishing in it for the explosive. Mike moved off slightly to the side, making sure not to go too far or too fast, and slid his thumb under the loop of rope he still had cinched around his waist. He’d retied it to himself using a simple half hitch, and now he fed the slack out slowly until he had a loop in his hand.

The old chimney had never been rubberized or wrapped, and the crumbling brick had several iron clips embedded in it. He leaned over until he was able to slip the loop of rope over one of the clips, then tried to stand as casually as possible. He wasn’t certain how, but he knew the roof was about to collapse under them. A buzzing sense of excitement spread through him. He felt like for the first time in a long time he was in uncharted territory.

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I’ll be posting one chapter of my novel Detained every week throughout 2021. Download links below.

44. Candace

There was too much blood.

No human body could possibly bleed as much as Jimmy Haggen and still live. And Haggen was not only still living, he seemed to be doing just fine. Gathering strength, shaking off five bullet wounds that should have killed him within moments.

She watched him wince in understated pain as he lifted the box onto a folding table. She knew she should be doing something, she should be hindering him, stopping him from accessing the field generator. But she couldn’t move. Not because she was afraid, but because she was stunned. She watched Jimmy Haggen endlessly bleeding to death and her brain kept demanding that he die already.

“I had access to this for a while, you know,” he said, breathing hard, the strain in his voice both obvious and underwhelming. “Y’all assumed I managed a few shots in the dark, but I actually had a pretty good idea what to do. You think of it as regular old code, it’s not so hard to see the patterns. I’m not saying I could write something from scratch, but to figure out that a variable means you? Not so fucking hard.” He picked up a cable, his hand shaking, and began working it into the rear of the box. “I took some precautions. Didn’t know if it would work, but I tried to make myself … essential.”

She blinked, heart pounding. The wrongness of Jimmy Haggen still moving, still breathing, was like an assault on her senses. It aggressively made no sense to her. Some part of her could tell on a primal, instinctive level that the man she was looking at shouldn’t be alive.

She licked her lips. “What does essential mean?”

“I linked myself to everything I could think of,” he said slowly, taking a deep breath and leaning down, reaching with one hand under the table for another cable. “To make my code difficult to remove. Like, and this is a random example, I embedded a link to me in The Moon. The fucking Moon, Candace! So, to remove me—to kill me—you’d be removing The Moon. I did that with everything I could identify that wasn’t, you know, transient. That would be around for a while. I figured it would be an insurance policy. Wasn’t sure it would work, but, well, here I am.”

Here you are, she thought. She tried to contemplate a universe where Jimmy Haggen was essentially immortal, unkillable, perpetual. Where he’d weeded his own existence into so much of the bedrock of the universe that reality simply couldn’t allow him to be removed.

Then she imagined this immortal, unkillable Jimmy Haggen with the box, with the power to rewrite that reality as he wished. Then she looked around the room again, seeking something that could be used as a weapon. She was the only one inside, the only one with access. She figured Powell was probably calling in some sort of reinforcement, but who would that be? As far as she knew, Hammond and her crew were locked down at the bar. She didn’t know where Mike and Glen were, where anybody was. For all she knew—and what she had to assume to be the case—she was the only person capable of stopping Haggen.

Her eyes stopped on a pile of tools, including one large rusty crescent wrench. Why every crescent wrench in the universe was rusty, she didn’t know. What she did know is that Haggen, if maybe unkillable, was obviously affected by his injuries, which made her think it had to be possible to incapacitate. And a crescent wrench to the head was a reliable way of incapacitating someone, even someone as famously hard-headed as Jimmy Haggen.

She watched him slowly, languorously working with the box. A pool of blood had formed under him, but the bleeding seemed to have stopped, and she wondered if he would simply heal up. Would the bullets remain inside him? Would his body form new veins and arteries around them, would they magically disappear?

She felt like she couldn’t trust anything. Gravity. Would gravity still work as expected in a world where Jimmy Haggen was unkillable?

“I wasn’t sure it would work,” he said, and she took a soft, careful step to her left, bringing her a little closer to the wrench. “I thought about, you know, testing it, but I was afraid. Next time through, I’ll know from the get go. But I won’t need it. I’m going to fix things.”

Fix things. A chill went through her. She took another step.

“Don’t worry, now, I’m not gonna screw you over. What would I do without Candace Cuddyer? I think I know what to do about your Dad, too. Though I can’t make any guarantees; the rule of unexpected consequences and all that. But we’re gonna try, okay?”

She took a step to her left. The wrench was near her foot.

“The rest of them I got no love for, Cuddyer. No love at all. And I know if they had their way right now they’d try to pull me out of the weave, try to erase me—not that it would work. Me sitting here right now proves it to me: If they try to change things and pull me out, the whole goddamn thing’s gonna collapse. The whole goddamn thing, you get me?” He barked an unsteady laugh. “I made myself a fundamental part of the universe, Candy! Fundamental!”

He appeared to be absorbed in setting up the box; he’d connected it to a monitor, but the signal seemed to be out of phase, the picture distorted and squiggly, constantly moving and squirming. He might be unkillable, but his wounds were obviously affecting him; he was dreamy and slow, fumbly. She lowered herself to the floor and curled her hand around the wrench.

“So let’s just say that in the new, Jimmy-centric universe, there isn’t going to be a Dr. Raslowski or a Colonel Hammond or a Glen Eastman—or a goddamn Mike Malloy. So there won’t be a box, and there won’t be any of this.” He turned to grin at her. “I’ve got it all—”

He frowned, and his face twisted into a mask of anger. She stepped forward and with one smooth motion raised the wrench and brought it down.

Haggen spun away, a spray of blood hitting her as the wrench crashed down on top of the box and bounced back, flying out of her numbed hand as a shockwave of pain shot up her arm. Sensing movement, she threw herself backwards, but Haggen caught her ankle and she slammed on the floor with a cry, teeth sinking into her tongue, blood filling her mouth. For a second she looked around at the metal-covered windows; no one was getting in and she wasn’t getting out, that was obvious.

She rolled to her right and scrambled forward and onto her feet, wincing as her arm tweaked with pain when she put her weight on it. Then she was running, off-balance, making a tight turn as she and diving behind the old green couch. She pressed herself down and scanned underneath, seeking anything that could be a weapon, the froze as the strangely familiar sound of a magazine being inserted into an assault rifle.

She rolled towards the wall just as the couch burst into an explosion of foam and trash. Heart pounding, she pushed herself up and ran along the wall. Another quick burst of fire followed her; she launched herself at the table Haggen had set up, picked up the box, and with a twisting motion that tore something vital in her back tossed it directly at Jimmy.

He dropped the rifle and raised his arms, too late; the box smacked into him and sent him staggering backwards as it hit the floor. Back burning, she ran straight at him, tripping over the box and crashing into him. She rolled off of him immediately and crawled towards the rifle, sweating dripping onto the floor as she fought for breath.

Shoulda taken more spin classes, she thought, and had to fight the crazy urge to laugh.

Her hand closed on the rifle just as Haggen’s hand closed on her ankle. She rolled again, bringing the rifle up and squeezing the trigger—she didn’t have a second of hesitation, and some remote part of her was aware that instinctively she didn’t even think of Haggen as a person any more. In some dark, deep part of her, some ancient reptilian place, she’d decided that Jimmy Haggen should have died, and this was a monster.

The rifle bucked just slightly in her shaking, sweaty hands and the shots went wide.

Haggen surged up, growling, and she shoved the rifle up at him, connecting with his nose with a crunch she felt in her arm, a lance of pain shooting up into her brain. He staggered back, lost his footing, and landed on his ass, making the whole floor jump. She pointed the rifle at him again.

They each sat, breathing hard.

“Cuddyer,” he said between gasps, blood running down his face. She didn’t know how he could have more blood in him. She didn’t know how he could be alive. She felt her sense of gravity fading away again, lost to insanity. “Candace, don’t do this.”

“I can’t let you do this, Jimmy,” she said. “Erasing people. Setting yourself up as—what? King? God? Is that it? You can’t be killed, then what?” She blinked, a non-memory hitting her. “Jesus, you wanted them to kill you,” she said quietly. “You’d put in your code, you’d changed your variables, but you had to push the button, and you were afraid. You wanted them to make the decision for you.”

He smiled, blood in his teeth. “Cuddyer, I don’t mean this mean, but you’re out of your league here.”

She shook her head. “I can’t let you do it, Jimmy. They’re good people—”

“We don’t know them. Malloy? Hammond? Tourists.”

“Glen?”

Haggen shrugged. “I brought Glen in. He tried to screw me over, so he’s out.” He took a deep breath. “You’re here, Candace. And you and me—I’m not cutting you out. This,” he gestured at himself, “this I get. I understand.” He held up his hands. “No worries. Put the gun down, let me get set up. You get input on every decision. You don’t want something—you want, what, Malloy to be okay? Okay, he’s okay. I’m flexible. I’m not crazy.”

Jesus, am I negotiating to keep people from being erased? she thought, head spinning. Her back burned in agony, her arm was weak and shaky and aching. She felt like she couldn’t catch her breath. Like there wasn’t enough oxygen in the room.

She closed her eyes.

A loud, sour noise filled the air, startling her. She jumped and opened her eyes, but Haggen was already coming at her. He crashed into her, his blood soaking into her clothes, and then the rifle was torn from her slick hands and he shoved forcefully to the floor. She looked up and he had the rifle aimed directly at her, standing over her like a hunter over his kill.

They stared at each other for a moment.

“What’s that?” she finally asked.

He blinked and looked around. After a moment he stepped back, raising the rifle. “Motion sensors,” he said. Then he looked back at her, his expression terrifying. “Visitors.”

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