Time Jacker by Aaron Crash (nonfiction book recommendations .TXT) 📕

top, unbuttoned to show cleavage and a lacy black bra. It was quite the outfit. More than once, Jack caught Gabby staring at Bailey’s chest.

Gabby wasn’t straight, clearly, but she was trying to be chaste. He wondered how deep that chastity went. To him, it seemed pretty shallow.

The trio went to the stairwell and up to the second landing.

Gabby pointed at the corner. “There’s a thin place here. Even when the building was full, not many people have ever really lingered here.”

Who spent any time in stairwells anyway? Most people took the elevator.

Jack slipped his shotgun out and let the bag drop to the smooth cement floor. He then flipped the switch on the toy soldier. A gleaming doorway appeared in the blank cement, shining brightly, with the light and noise coalescing around a single circle. That was the doorknob.

Jack gripped it, twisted it, and pushed.

And the doorway out of reality opened. They walked out onto a flat plain—the sky the angry red of an infected wound. The ground was pale yellow hard-packed dirt. It wasn’t like there was a central sun giving them light. The sky just glowed red. Behind them was a shoddy wooden door—the way back, it seemed.

In the distance rose a cinderblock building, ugly and gray and squat.

Jack noticed the pools first. It was like he’d walked right into a Salvador Dali painting. The puddles were clockfaces, liquid and shimmering. He had to stick the toe of his boot into a puddle. The puddle gave away to a black liquid, but soon went back to being a clockface.

In the distance, the yellow dirt seemed to drop off into nothingness, as if the whole realm was only a mile wide and a mile long, and everything else around it was void. The place was weird. Jack was glad he had his shotgun. He would’ve liked to have an AR-15, but beggars couldn’t be choosers.

Bailey summoned her demonic war pick. Gabby might look like a businesswoman going to work at an insurance company, but she had the gold jewelry, the golden belt, the sword, and the horn.

They approached the squat cinderblock bunker. There was a square opening in the front, with shadowy shapes walking back and forth. They looked like dogs, except they had something on their backs that looked like the same kind of key that was in Jack’s toy soldier.

Were they windup dogs?

Well, for someone called the Clockwatcher, that made sense.

The shapes emerged from the shadows to growl at Jack and his friends. They were a cross between clocks, monster wolves, and, yes, windup toy soldiers. They had the keys on their backs. Clocks had been shoved into their chests with numerals like the clock puddles. Their eyes were spinning gears, but their teeth were long and yellow.

They growled as their clockwork ticked away inside their hairy bodies. The keys continued to swivel on their backs.

Jack got ready for a fight. He was curious to see what kind of damage his shotgun would do against the clock dogs.

He never had the chance because Gabby strode forward, her horn in her hand. “Clockwatcher! I am Gabriella Jibra Jibril of the Pinturicchio Legion, a servant of heaven and one of the angelic righteous. If you do not want to hear my horn, you will call off your guards!”

One by one, the keys on the backs of the dogs wound down until they stopped. There were six in all.

Gabby threw a grin over her shoulder.

“What in the hell does that horn do?” Jack wondered.

Bailey hefted the war pick onto her shoulder. “You don’t wanna know.”

They walked past the clock dogs, which smelled like gun oil and wet fur. It wasn’t pleasant. They walked into a courtyard full of clock parts and animals: some clockwork bears, a few zebras, and a big lion with golden gears showing where its hide had rotted away. The decaying elephants were the worst, since they were the biggest and smelled the most. Inside, the elephants had a mixture of mammalian entrails and clock parts. Every animal had the windup key on their backs.

At the back of the courtyard was a series of cinderblock steps that led up into rooms above, which seemed to be big and square and as formless as the rest of the weird place.

Jack held the toy soldier in his pocket. The headache was starting. If this Clockwatcher knew where Horns took Annie, he’d better tell them sooner rather than later. He had to steady himself. He wasn’t on Earth anymore. This was an eon palace, a totally other dimension, and that was unnerving.

“So time is stopped on Earth?” Jack asked.

“Yeah,” Bailey breathed. “We’re outside the normal flow of time. Some fuckers call places like this the Influunt Interim because they have their own rules.”

Gabby got chatty, probably because she was nervous. “Heaven is known as the Influunt Divinatio, while hell is the Influunt Diaboli.”

A clanking from above silenced her.

Something big and clicking came down the cinderblock steps from the rooms above—something with metal feet that came smashing down on the bricks. Clack. Clack. Clack. A fat man came into view, or at least he was mannish. He had clocks in his skin—big faces and small faces, big roman numerals and scripted Arabic numbers. Some of the clocks showed through gaps in his skin, while others were inked on. The combination of tattoos and clocks culminated in his face. He had a big clock inked around his right eye, which was black and diabolic. The left eye was like the clock dogs, spinning gears, buzzing and clinking.

The Clockwatcher didn’t have a key on his back though. While he wasn’t naked, his loincloth and vest barely covered his nipples and dick.

He moved on brown metal feet that were connected to his knee bones. He wouldn’t be able to flex those bronze toes—they looked like they’d been poured into a mold and let cool. His fingers were fleshy though. And he pointed at Jack. His voice was oddly mechanical. His teeth were gears.