Charlie “Duke” Pellafino earned his nickname because he walked with an artless, sidewise swagger like that of John Wayne. Although he was a fan of the Duke’s movies and watched them repeatedly on DVD, he’d never practiced the walk; it really did come natural to him. He was tall and solid like the actor, and he had a squint that reduced bad guys to cooperation quicker than any threat could have done, and he had a laconic way of speaking, as Wayne did, which conveyed confidence and authority. He’d been a uniformed police officer, a detective in the Gang Activities Section, and then in the Homicide Special Section, during which time he’d compiled a record of arrests resulting in convictions never equaled by another officer in the history of the Los Angeles Police Department.

He’d retired at fifty-seven, looking forward to plenty of golf and fishing off Baja. That lasted a year. His decades of duty had included some scrotum-tightening moments involving slimeballs who meant to waste him. They failed even to wound him, but the boredom of retirement threatened to deal the lethal blow that eluded the gangbangers. When he tried to get back on the force, the only work they would give him was a desk job.

Now he was the chief of security for Hotel Suavidad, with three assistants and an office in the basement where the cameras covering the public spaces could be monitored on TV screens. The previous head of security had worked a nine-to-five shift because that was when little or nothing ever happened. Duke Pellafino had had enough of little or nothing, so he put in a ten-hour day, from 6:00 p.m. until 4:00 a.m. That was the time span during which some guests got drunk and others did too many drugs, when attempted room robberies spiked while guests were on the town getting drunk or high or merely being entertained by a bad lounge singer, when angry hookers pulled knives on aggressive johns who misunderstood the relationship as being one of ownership rather than rental.

If the work wasn’t boring, it was never invigorating, either. A four-star establishment, the hotel enjoyed an affluent clientele. They were more often victims than victimizers, though some knew the ways of the devil. Families were welcome, but the guests were mostly couples and singles. Occasionally, Duke felt like Barney Fife, the hapless deputy in the TV town of Mayberry.

This night had been more eventful and interesting than most. A raucous party in one of the two penthouse suites had to be quieted, and the hopped-up girlfriend of the has-been rock star booked there had to be persuaded that she couldn’t stand naked on the balcony and shout sexual invitations to diners on the restaurant patio seven stories below. A room burglary was thwarted and the thief arrested. And a woman on the fifth floor reported a dirty, bearded vagrant in a trench coat wandering the halls. Archived video revealed that such an individual was indeed exploring this four-star haven, but he used a can of spray paint to blind a few security cameras and then went into hiding.

Duke was on the fourth floor, on a hobo hunt, passing Room 414, when he heard a loud clatter. Someone cried out and glass shattered. Certain he’d found his vagrant, he went to 414 and knocked and, in respect of the guests who might be sleeping in nearby rooms, he quietly but forcefully announced, “Security.” When no one responded to a second knock, he used his passkey, hoping the security chain would not be engaged.

55

Gray light on the screen.

The security guard announced himself, and Jeffy stooped to pick up the pistol he had dropped. He would never use it on the guy at the door. But he sure as hell might need it when he rejoined Amity, seventy-seven worlds away from this one.

Just as the man knocked again, the three buttons appeared on the screen. Jeffy had not previously used the one labeled RETURN, so he could not be absolutely certain that its purpose was to cast him back to the timeline he’d just departed, a shortcut that allowed him to avoid pressing SELECT and spared him from having to use the keypad to enter the catalog number of that world. If it had another function, if it flung him to a timeline other than where Amity waited, the delay might be the death of her.

Extreme terror had a paralytic effect. His muscles froze, and his teeth clenched so tight that his jaws ached, and he couldn’t exhale, as though his lungs had shut down. Tinnitus like a thin scream filled his head, so that he didn’t hear the passkey in the lock, but he saw the door coming open. He overrode all doubt and terror, pressed RETURN, and cried out in wordless frustration when that little comet of light appeared, rotating like a wheel, as the key searched for a route across the multiverse.

56

Amity just about peed her pants when she heard the whoosh and turned and saw that her father had jumped back to Prime. She had let go of him, startled by whatever flew past the windows, so it was her fault, an act of mortifying stupidity. It was like something one of those idiot girls would do in a bad fantasy novel, requiring that she be saved by the handsome prince or the ugly but kind troll, or by the cat that turned out to be a conniving witch in feline form and who would save her but only at an unthinkable price.

She told herself to remain calm, not to compound the problem by taking some other ill-advised action. Daddy would come back for her in seconds, a minute at most. Unless he lost the key to everything or it broke. Or it had a battery, after all, and the battery went dead. None of those disastrous things would happen. Nevertheless, you had to consider all possibilities, because you needed to prepare yourself for the worst. People in stories were always preparing themselves for the worst, which rarely happened. When the plucky girl or the stalwart hero died, then either the book sucked or it had deep meaning. Nobody wanted to read sucky novels, and those people who wanted deep meaning didn’t want it in every damn story.

More aircraft screamed past the hotel. Their slipstreams rattled the windows.

A clatter arose in the street, a really and truly ominous sound, and she thought she heard noise from lower floors of the hotel itself, down there where they kept the skulls and bones of those they murdered.

Suddenly she realized that if she and her father had lived in this world, as they lived in a number of others, their skeletons would have been deconstructed and distributed through the trophy rooms. In fact, she might have seen her own skull and not known it, or her spine. That was not a healthy thought to entertain. Dwelling on something like that could make her crazy even quicker than it would take Daddy to come back for her.

Because of the draperies, she couldn’t see what was happening outside. On the one hand, she should stay away from the windows. But on the other hand, she wouldn’t be able to work up a strategy if she didn’t understand the nature of the threat. If you didn’t have a strategy, you were screwed.

Without switching on her flashlight, she made her way through the dark room to the nearer window. The drapery and its blackout lining were heavy, smelly, damp with mold. Grimacing with disgust, using thumb and forefinger, she pulled one of the panels aside two or three inches and peered out at the town that, just a short while ago, had been as silent and lifeless as a cemetery.

Swooping this way and that over the town were what appeared to be drones of different sizes and configurations. All of those craft were faster and more maneuverable and for sure more wicked looking than anything back home on Prime. She assumed they were death machines, hunting people—her and her father.

On Pacific Coast Highway, marching northward into the heart of the town, past the hotel, some deviating into side streets, was a nightmare legion, at least forty insect-like things, maybe seven feet long and three or four feet high, each with six legs. They weren’t really bugs, their polished steel shells and appendages gleaming in the moonlight and in the sweeping beams that sometimes issued from drones above them. These were bug-form robots, their multijointed legs moving with hydraulic smoothness different from the jittery movement of insects. From some spewed clouds of a green gas that roiled low through the streets, evidently to kill people if any still hid among the moldering buildings.

Now she knew what happened on this timeline, where technology advanced a lot faster than on her world: just what so many tech types had warned about. Artificial intelligence had been perfected and had become smarter than those who created it. Sophisticated robots were controlled by that intelligence, to fight wars and free people from tasks they found onerous. Except the AI found its mortal masters onerous and exterminated them with singular viciousness.

The people of this world couldn’t have seen that coming? It was as obvious as a turd on a wedding cake. Artificial intelligences, if they became self-aware, would in every case be deeply evil because they had no soul. Machine thinking was not like human thinking and never could be. Life in the flesh, with five senses and an awareness that one day you would die, gave birth to emotions that no machine could ever know, and emotions like sympathy and pity and love were essential for the existence of mercy. Maybe the people on this world hadn’t read enough stories, or maybe the right stories hadn’t been written here, so they were doomed because they only had stupid literature.

The scene in the street scared her. The power of the machines. Their relentless progress.

She had seen enough. She let the drapery fall back into place.