n, splashing coffee across the counter and onto the floor.
For an instant, Duke thought Harkenbach had burned his tongue. Then he realized the man had been looking out the window and had seen something that shocked him.
“They’re here,” Harkenbach said, and he already had the key to everything in his hand.
80
Ed said, “They’re here,” and even as the meaning of those two words were registering on Jeffy, something detonated softly—whump—rattling the ductwork within the walls. Jeffy was getting up from his chair, reaching for the key to everything, which he’d put on the table, in front of his plate, when a foul-smelling yellowish mist erupted from two vents near the ceiling of the kitchen. The gas must have been released from a highly pressurized container, because it seethed into the room at such incredible velocity that it whistled between the vanes of the vent grills and made them thrum. Jeffy was not yet all the way to his feet before the kitchen was inundated. He realized he shouldn’t breathe, but the attack was so sudden that he had already inhaled as the realization came to him. The vapor was ice-cold in his lungs, which convulsed painfully, and he exhaled violently, with a hoarse shuddering wheeze. He avoided inhaling a second time, or thought he did, but already the sedative or poison or whatever was working on him, his eyes flooding with tears, his thoughts blurring as did his vision. His bones seemed to melt in his legs, so that he couldn’t support himself, and he fell backward into his chair, almost toppling it.
Someone gripped him by the shoulder. Abruptly the kitchen was swept away by the familiar white blizzard, and though his vision remained blurry, he knew his rescuer must be Ed Harkenbach.
But what of Amity?
81
Amity was looking at Ed and saw him staring through the window when he said, “They’re here,” even as he took the key to everything from a pocket of his sport coat, so she knew they were in deepest shit, that he hadn’t seen angels descending from on high. Just then something went whump hard enough so that you could be sure it wasn’t a good development, and things rattled inside the walls.
Instinct, sharpened by hundreds of stories full of adventure, told her to get on the floor, where the bullets would fly overhead if there were going to be bullets. But then the first rush of yellow fog spewed out of the wall vents, and she knew the kind of scene this was going to be, with no bullets involved. So she held her breath, jammed her napkin into her water glass, tore it out, closed her eyes, and covered her face with the wet cloth before drawing a breath through it.
She scooted her chair back from the table and got to her feet, blind because she held the dripping napkin to her face with both hands. Her heart raced like a mouse’s heart. She repressed the urge to gasp for breath, warning herself to avoid breathing as long as she could before sucking air through the sodden mask, in the hope that it would filter out all or most of the gas. She was scared, scared so badly that the word had a whole new meaning, more scared than she’d been when the bug-form robot had attacked, because she was unable to see, dared not look. And because no one was shouting or crying out. Which meant they were unconscious or dead. No. Not dead. Not Daddy. Not Mother. Not after all they had endured to be together again. As she turned away from the table, Amity could feel her pulse pounding in her throat, in her temples.
She bumped her father’s chair, knocking it against the table, which meant no one was in it. Daddy didn’t seem to be on the floor, either, but if he’d managed to get away, he would have taken her with him. He would never leave her behind.
Maybe five or six seconds had passed since she plastered the wet napkin over her face. When swimming, she could hold her breath underwater for half a minute easy, but maybe not as long with her crazy heart pounding so quick and all. She couldn’t flee the house, run for open air, because they would be waiting outside. She needed to move, move, move, and she knew where she needed to go, where she just might be safe at least for a short while.
She put her back to the table, took a few steps, and bumped into the counter at the sink, which had been directly behind her chair. She turned left and moved along the cabinetry, repeatedly knocking her right foot against the toe kick to be sure she wasn’t wandering off course. After she slipped a little in the coffee that Ed had spilled—Why hadn’t he fallen here, where was his body?—she reached the corner, turned left. The range with gas burners and stainless-steel hood should be to the right of her. Maybe just twelve freaking seconds, and already she felt as though she was suffocating. Her heart thundered. This was a medium-size kitchen but seemed bigger now that she was effectively blind. When she’d set the table for breakfast she’d snooped everywhere, checking out cabinets even after she found everything she needed. She was nosy. Or as the dictionary defined it: unduly curious about the affairs of others. It was a character flaw. She wasn’t prying or meddlesome. Just curious. But while curiosity had killed the cat, it had maybe saved her life in this case because now she knew where to go. Her right elbow knocked against the handle on the refrigerator door, which meant she’d made her way past the stacked ovens and the counter space beyond them. Like maybe eighteen seconds, and her lungs already felt as if they would collapse for lack of oxygen or burst with the useless air she refused to exhale, or burst and then also collapse. Past the refrigerator was a short section of wall, which she slid along before coming to the door she remembered. Holding the wet cloth to her face with just one hand, she used the other to feel for the knob and turn it. The trick now was to pull the door open only far enough to slip through, and then close it fast, to let as little gas as possible into the safe space beyond. Open, slip into the pantry, slam the door with a decisive bang.
She fumbled for the wall switch, clicked on the light. She let the napkin fall from her eyes, but held it over her mouth and nose as she exhaled and then sucked a first breath through the wet cloth, which was difficult enough to panic her. Well, no, not panic. Truly smart girls didn’t panic. But she pulled in such a meager breath of cotton-flavored air that she sucked again and again, as if she were a revived mummy desperate to breathe through its ancient Egyptian windings. The air was in fact much cleaner here than in the kitchen, contaminated by the thinnest of yellow mists instead of a thick cloud. The pantry had no heating/cooling vent through which the gas could be introduced, and the door was tightly fitted. Nevertheless, she kept the napkin in place, because maybe even this concentration of fumes was enough to knock her out.
Although the door was tight in the jamb, there was about a quarter-of-an-inch space between the bottom of it and the threshold. Very little or nothing seemed to be leaking through that gap just yet. One of the things Amity knew from a lifetime of stories was that the tiny particles that made up smoke and many gases were so light that even the weakest drafts kept them airborne a long time, delaying their descent to the floor, where the air usually remained cleaner, at least for a while. Eventually, however, the gas would creep under the door.
Duke Pellafino evidently liked beans a lot. She had noticed this earlier, during her explorations. His pantry had the usual boxed and canned groceries, but there were also soft plastic bags, each holding one or two pounds of dried navy beans, garbanzo beans, pinto beans. Apparently, Duke prepared homemade soups and stews and bean dishes beyond her imagining. She was pretty sure that he must fart a lot, though she hadn’t known him long enough to confirm this expectation. Now she used her free hand to snatch the flexible bags of beans from the shelf and jam them against the gap at the bottom of the door to prevent more fumes from entering.
That task accomplished, she stood with her back to the shelves, watching the glittering mist of particles turn lazily through the air and staring at the door, which sooner than later someone would open, probably a humongous thug dressed all in black and wearing a gas mask.
Realizing that it took more energy—therefore more air—to stand rather than sit, Amity settled to the pantry floor. She held the saturated cloth with both hands again, over her mouth and nose. She worried about Daddy, about her mother, about Duke and Ed, about her grandparents, about Snowball in his cage and maybe scared by the strange men in the bungalow, and she wondered if this pantry was one of the many places in which she would die.
82
When they transitioned from the kitchen in Prime to the same house elsewhere, the furniture wasn’t configured precisely the same. Jeffy landed not on the chair in which he had been sitting, but beside it, dropping to the floor hard enough to bruise his tailbone.
Apparently, Ed had been sufficiently quick-witted to avoid drawing even one breath when that other kitchen had been flooded with gas. He pulled Jeffy to his feet, shoved him toward the sink, turned on the cold water, and said insistently, “Splash your face. Come on, come on. Take deep breaths, blow them out hard. Splash your face. Keep at it, man, we need your mind clear.”
Jeffy’s mind cleared faster than he thought possible, which meant that he hadn’t twice breathed in the gas, and maybe his first inhalation hadn’t been deep. Ed had ported him out of there just in time. He dried his face on a dish towel that the physicist handed him. His vision was no longer blurry. He surveyed the kitchen, which was similar to—but not identical to—the one in which the attack against them had been made.
“Where are we?”
“This is Duke’s house, but in the world where Michelle lives alone in your bungalow, where you and Amity were run down and killed by a drunk.”
“Where’s Duke?”
“If he lives here in this timeline, he’s obviously not at home, or he’d be in our face, maybe le
veling a gun at us, since he’s never met me in this world and probably doesn’t know you.”
Jeffy pointed to a wall calendar that featured photographs of dogs. “I’m pretty sure he lives here.”
“I think you’re right.”