Quantum Break by Cam Rogers Page B

skirting boards, the two-tone floors strewn with discarded insulation and wiring. The hallway ended, open-mouthed, onto the library’s main room, bracketed by frosted glass panels. Light stands were arranged evenly around the cavernous space. Shelf-lined mezzanines overlooked the main room, lined with wrought-iron railings. The long oval of the information desk remained in place, but most everything else had been ripped out. Serried lines of chrome lugs patterned the checkered floor around the info desk: the footprints of vanished Internet cubicles.
    Jack tried to pick up Will’s trail, feeling for another vision, scanning the main hall.
    He was so preoccupied that he didn’t notice the two smiley-faced troopers guarding an archway in the north wall, until it was too late. He realized his mistake as soon as they clocked him.
    Jack didn’t think. He warped forward and grabbed the first trooper’s weapon, failing to notice that it was strapped to him. The mask smiled at him and then Jack was struck in the face for his trouble. He recovered in time to be staring down the barrel of the gun he’d tried to snatch.
    Jack warped, the trooper fired, and his partner keeled over dead—three ragged holes stitched through PEACE.
    The surviving trooper’s awareness disconnected for a moment as he took in what he had done. He snapped his rifle toward Jack as Jack cannoned into him at warp speed, blasting both of them into a pile of dilapidated wooden bookshelves stacked seven deep against the wall.
    The trooper didn’t move, smiling vacantly at his own lap. Jack pulled himself to his feet, stepping away from the slack-bodied trooper he’d just used as an airbag.
    The northern room, which the two troopers had been standing watch in, was circular and just off the main room. It used to house the stacks, judging from the signage and the ghostly rectangular footprints that fanned the space. Jack heard generators thumping from a small room off to the side, from which cabling snaked.
    “Jack?”
    It was dim in the stacks chamber, the light from the main hall lighting that gutted room like dusk: clear surfaces, deep shadows. Will was there, quiet and pressed against the wall, hands zip-tied at his waist and clearly terrified. Jack searched the trooper, took his combat knife, and popped the binders off Will.
    “Are you okay? Answer me later. You got a bunch of shit I want explained.”
    “Jack. Look.”
    Against the curved wall, near the body of the crumpled trooper, was a foot. Sneakered. Chuck Taylors.
    “They brought them in here,” Will said. “Some of the students from the camp.”
    The kid wearing the Chucks was propped slack against the wall, hair spilling from beneath his hoodie across the floor, his chest a bloody ruin.
    Jack exited, shielded his eyes against the glare of the lamps and moved past their perimeter. Forward was the wide, doorless exit. To the right was the corridor through which he had entered. To his left was a long hall once used for shelves and periodicals.
    Now it was a mortuary. Bodies lay strewn across the chessboard floor, not killed here but dumped. Not one of them would have been out of their twenties. Amy, the girl that accosted him in the quadrangle, would be here, Jack realized. Somewhere. He still had her flyers in his jacket pocket. RESPECT EXISTENCE OR EXPECT RESISTANCE . He couldn’t bear to look.
    “We gotta go,” Jack said, marching back to the light. “C’mon, Will, we gotta go.”
    Two men with the familiar round-faced PEACE silhouette flanked Will. One had a carbine pointed at Jack, the other had his weapon aimed at Will’s head.
    Jack cursed his stupidity. They had been in the generator room.
    He needed to be sure that if he made a play, here and now, that he could warp fast enough to kill the two men in less time than it took to pull a trigger. He didn’t know. His powers had been coming and going. But he had to do something.
    Then someone said, “Stop. Just … stop.”
    Jack