It was not smart to lurk in the area, so he used his lock picks to enter the back of the apartment house, and again on Bundy’s door. The mailboxes below had helpfully reassured him that the mass murderer of so many women lived here, months before his crimes began.
To pass the time he found the materials that eventually Bundy would use to put his arm in a fake plaster cast and ask women to help him carry something to his car. Then Bundy would beat them unconscious with a crowbar and carry them away. Bundy had been a particularly organized killer—socially adequate, with friends and lovers. Sometimes such types even had a spouse and children. The histories said such men were those who, when finally captured, were likely to be described by acquaintances as kind and unlikely to hurt anyone. But they were smart and swift and dangerous, at all times.
So when Warren heard the front door open, he slipped into the back bedroom and, to his sudden alarm, heard a female voice. An answering male baritone, joking and light.
They stopped in the kitchen to pour some wine. Bundy was a charmer, his voice warm and mellow, dipping up and down with sincere interest in some story she was telling him. He put on music, soft saxophone jazz, and they moved to the living room.
This went on until Warren began to sweat with anxiety. The transflux cage’s position in space-time was subject to some form of uncertainty principle. As it held strictly to this timeline, its position in spatial coordinates became steadily more poorly phased. That meant it would slowly drift in position, in some quantum sense he did not follow. The techs assured him this was a small, unpredictable effect, but cautioned him to minimize his time at any of the jogg points.
If the transflux cage moved enough, he might not find it again in the dark. It was in a dense pine forest and he had memorized the way back, but anxiety began to vex him.
He listened to Bundy’s resonant tones romancing the woman as bile leaked upward into his mouth. The cancer was worsening, the pains cramping his belly. It was one of the new, variant cancers that evolved after the supposed victory over the simpler sorts. Even suppressing the symptoms was difficult.
If he vomited he would surely draw Bundy back here. Sweating from the pain and anxiety, Warren inched forward along the carpeted corridor, listening intently. Bundy’s voice rose, irritated. The woman’s response was hesitant, startled—then beseeching. The music suddenly got louder. Warren quickly moved to the end of the corridor and looked around the corner. Bundy had a baseball bat in his hands, eyes bulging, the woman sitting on the long couch speaking quickly, hands raised, Bundy stepping back—
Warren fished out the pistol and brought it up as Bundy swung. He clipped the woman in the head, a hard smack. Her long hair flew back as she grunted and collapsed. She rolled off the couch, thumping on the floor.
Warren said, “Bastard!” and Bundy turned. “How many have you killed?”
“What the—who are you?”
Warren permitted himself a smile. He had to know if there had been no victims earlier. “An angel. How many, you swine?”
Bundy relaxed, swinging the bat in one hand. He smirked, eyes narrowing as he took in the situation, Warren, his opportunities. “You don’t look like any angel to me, buster. Just some nosy neighbour, right?” He smiled. “Watch me bring girls up here, wanted to snoop? Maybe watch us? That why you were hiding in my bedroom?”
Bundy strolled casually forward with an easy, athletic gait as he shrugged, a grin breaking across his handsome face, his left hand spread in a casual so-what gesture, right hand clenched firmly on the bat. “We were just having a little argument here, man. I must’ve got a little mad, you can see—”
The splat of the 0.22 going off was mere rhythm in the jazz that blared from two big speakers. Bundy stepped back and blinked in surprise and looked down at the red stain on his lumberjack shirt. Warren aimed carefully and the second shot hit him square in the nose, splattering blood. Bundy toppled forward, thumping on the carpet.
Warren calculated quickly. The woman must get away clean, that was clear. He didn’t want her nailed for a murder. She was out cold, a bruise on the crown of her head. He searched her handbag: Norma Roberts, local address. She appeared in none of the Bundy history. Yet she was going to be his first, clearly. The past was not well documented.
He decided to get away quickly. He got her up and into a shoulder carry, her body limp. He opened the front door, looked both ways down the corridor, and hauled her to the back entrance of the apartment house. There he leaned her into a chair and left her and her coat and handbag. It seemed simpler to let her wake up. She would probably get away by herself. Someone would notice the smell in a week, and find an unsolvable crime scene. It was the best he could do.
The past was not well documented … Either Bundy had not acknowledged this first murder, or else Warren had side-slipped into a space-time where Bundy’s history was somewhat different. But not different enough—Bundy was clearly an adroit, self-confident killer. He thought on this as he threaded his way into the gathering darkness.
The pains were crippling by then, awful clenching spasms shooting through his belly. He barely got back to the transflux cage before collapsing.
He took time to recover, hovering the cage in the transition zone. Brilliant colours raced around the cage. The walls hummed and rattled and the capsule’s processed air took on a sharp, biting edge.
There were other Bundys in other timelines, but he needed to move on to other targets. No one knew how many timelines there were, though they were not infinite. Complex quantum processes generated them and some theorists thought the number might be quite few. If so, Warren could not reach some timelines. Already the cage had refused to go to four target murderers, so perhaps his opportunities were not as large as the hundreds or thousands he had at first dreamed about.
He had already shot Ted Kaczynski, the “Unabomber.” That murderer had targeted universities and wrote a manifesto that he distributed to the media, claiming that he wanted society to return to a time when technology was not a threat to its future. Kaczynski had not considered that a future technology would erase his deeds.
Kaczynski’s surprised gasp lay behind him now. He decided, since his controls allowed him to choose among the braided timelines, to save as many victims as he could. His own time was growing short.
He scanned through the gallery of mass murder, trying to relax as the flux cage popped and hummed with stresses. Sex was the primary motive of lust killers, whether or not the victims were dead, and fantasy played strongly in their killings. The worst felt that their gratification depended on torture and mutilation, using weapons in close contact with the victims—knives, hammers, or just hands. Such lust killers often had a higher cause they could recite, but as they continued, intervals between killings decreased and the craving for stimulation increased.
He considered Coral Watts, a rural murderer. A surviving victim had described him as “excited and hyper and clappin’ and just making noises like he was excited, that this was gonna be fun.” Watts killed by slashing, stabbing, hanging, drowning, asphyxiating, and strangling. But when Warren singled out the coordinates for Watts, the software warned him that the target timeline was beyond his energy reserves.
The pain was worse now, shooting searing fingers up into his chest. He braced himself in the acceleration chair and took an injection his doctors had given him, slipping the needle into an elbow vein. It helped a bit, a soothing warmth spreading through him. He put aside the pain and concentrated, lips set in a thin white line.