Recursion(56)

She shakes her head, raises the shotgun. “But this worked last time.”

Barry catches movement swinging around the corner at the end of the corridor.

He steps in front of Helena, who screams, “Jee-woon, no!”

Gunshots explode the silence, the muzzle flash bursting from a barrel aimed at Barry, who empties his Glock in a blitzkrieg of noise.

Jee-woon has vanished.

It all happened in five seconds.

Barry ejects the empty magazine, slams in a fresh one, thumbs the slide.

He looks at Helena. “You OK?”

“Yes. Because you stepped in front of…oh God, you’re shot.”

Barry staggers back, blood pouring down his abdomen, down his leg under his pants, flowing across the top of his shoe and onto the floor in a long, burgundy smear. The pain is coming, but he’s too jacked on adrenaline to register its full effect—only an intensifying pressure in the middle-right section of his torso.

“We have to get out of this corridor,” he groans, thinking, There’s a bullet in my liver.

Helena drags him back around the corner.

Barry sinks to the floor.

Bleeding profusely now, the blood nearly black.

He looks up at Helena, says, “Make sure…he isn’t coming.”

She peeks around the corner.

Barry lifts his gun, which he hadn’t noticed slip from his grasp, off the floor.

“They could already be in the lab,” he says.

“I’ll stop them.”

“I’m not going to make it.”

There’s movement on his left; he tries to raise the Glock, but Helena beats him to the punch, firing an earsplitting blast from the shotgun that forces a man he hasn’t seen before back into the corridor.

“Go,” Barry says. “Hurry.”

The world is darkening, his ears ringing. Then he’s lying with his face against the floor and the life rushing out of him.

He hears more gunfire.

Helena shouting, “Sergei, don’t make me do this. You know me!”

Then two shotgun blasts.

Followed by screaming.

From his sideways perspective, he sees several people run through the intersection of corridors, heading back toward the elevators—guests and other crew members fleeing the mayhem.

He tries to get up, but he can barely move his hand. His body feels cemented to the ground.

The end is coming.

It’s the hardest thing he’s ever done to simply rise up onto his elbows. He somehow manages to crawl, dragging himself back around the corner of the windowed corridor that leads to the lab.

He hears more gunshots.

His vision swings in and out of focus, the glass shards on the floor from the shot-out windows slicing into his arms and a cold rain blowing into the building. The walls are peppered with bullet holes, and a haze of smoke permeates the air with a taste like metal and sulfur in the back of his throat.

Barry crawls through a scattering of his .40-caliber shell casings, and he tries to call out to Helena, but her name leaves his lips as nothing but a whimper.

He pulls himself the rest of the way to the entrance. It takes a moment for his vision to sharpen into focus. Helena stands at the terminal, her fingers flying across an array of keyboards and touchscreens. Summoning his voice, he wills it to project her name.

She glances back at him. “I know you’re hurting. I’m going as fast as I can.”

“What are you doing?” Barry asks, each breath more agonizing than the one before it, and carrying less oxygen to his brain.

“I’m going back to the memory of cutting myself in that hotel room.”

“Jee-woon and Sergei are gone.” He coughs up blood. “Just…destroy everything now.”

“Slade’s still out there,” Helena says. “If he escapes, he could build another chair. I need you to guard the door. I know you’re hurting, but can you do that? Let me know if he comes.” She moves away from the terminal, climbing onto the curved body of the memory chair.

“I’ll try,” Barry says.

He rests his head against the cool floor.

“We’ll get the next one right,” Helena says. Reaching up, she carefully pulls down the MEG microscope.

As she secures the chin strap, Barry fights to keep his eyes on the corridor, knowing if Slade comes, there’s nothing he can do to stop him. He doesn’t even have the strength to raise his weapon.

The dead memories of him dying in the last timeline finally shred into his consciousness.

The elevator doors opening to the entryway of Slade’s penthouse.

Slade standing in his immaculate living room of windows pointing a revolver into the elevator car.

Barry thinking, Fuck. He knew.

A burst of light without sound.

Then—nothing.

Through the fog of death, Barry struggles to glance one last time into the lab, sees Helena tearing off her shirt, sliding her jeans down her legs, and climbing into the deprivation tank.



* * *





Barry is sprinting down a corridor, his nose bleeding, head throbbing. The pain of getting shot in the previous timeline is gone, the memories of this new one cascading into place.

He and Helena came up from Room 825.

Stepped off the elevator onto 17, took a different route to the lab, intending to catch Jee-woon and Slade coming off the elevator.