None
of this affected Billy's resolve. Sensing his panic, Billy's armor
flushed potent new molecules into his blood. The killing urge, which
had seemed so powerful in the past, blossomed into something new and
even more intense: an agony of necessity.
At
the top of the stairs he faced a man he had killed once before, a
time traveler. Billy didn't question this resurrection, merely
resolved to kill the man again, to kill him as often as necessary.
Some momentary fluctuation caused him to topple forward; he fell,
looked up, and the time traveler asked him his name. Billy answered
without thinking, startled by the sound of his own voice.
Then
he raised his wrist weapon. But the chaos inside him had made him
slow and the time traveler was able to aim and fire his own weapon, a
beam device that seemed to lock Billy's armor into a momentary
rictus, so that Billy toppled forward in a parody of movement,
like a statue tumbling off a pedestal.
He
didn't waste time regretting his vulnerability; only waited for it to
pass. As soon as his arm was mobile he brought it up and forward with
all the precision his failing neural augmentation was able to
calculate and burned open the time traveler's belly.
The
result was impressive. The walls seemed to crumble. Machine bugs
rivered across the carpet. A stab of primitive revulsion made Billy
leap to his feet and back away. He detonated another pulse
grenade—his last—and it slowed the bugs but didn't stop them.
Detonated
aboveground, the pulse did have a profound effect on the local
electrical grid. The houselights flickered and dimmed, brightened and
flickered again. Down the length of the Post Road, three different
families would wake to find their television sets fused and useless.
In a dozen homes in the east end of Belltower groggy individuals
stumbled but of bed to pick up ringing telephones, nothing on
the other end but an ominous basso hum.
The
cybernetics churned around the body of the fallen time
traveler—healing him or devouring him. Billy didn't know which,
didn't care.
Dying,
Billy hurried for the door.
Tom
had circled to the front of the house when the last intact
window—north wall, master bedroom—was blown out by a second
concussion.
The
floodlights dimmed, brightened, dimmed again. So did the streetlights
down along the Post Road.
He
cut through the front yard and across the open width of the road to
the gully on the far side. Ben was supposed to be covering the front
door of the house; but it had occurred to Tom that Ben was not an
impenetrable barrier and that the front door was handy to the
basement stairs. He left Doug out back with Joyce and Catherine and
prayed the three of them would be safe there.
The
shock of being roused out of a deep sleep had nearly worn off. He was
as awake now as he had ever been, clearheaded and frightened and
acutely aware of his own peculiar position: barefoot and carrying a
space
soldier
ray
gun from K-mart, modified. Every window in his house had been blown
out and he was tempted to reconsider the logic of this adventure.
What kept him moving was Joyce—her vulnerability overriding
his own—and the single glimpse he had caught of the marauder in an
empty street in Manhattan. Those eyes had contained too many deaths,
including Lawrence Millstein's. Eyes not vengeful or even
passionate, Tom thought; the look had been passive, the distracted
stare of a bus passenger on a long ride through familiar territory.
Tom had not especially liked Lawrence Millstein, but it hurt to think
that Millstein's last sight had been that leathery muzzle, those
thousand-mile eyes.
He's
already dying, Tom thought. Dying or being dismantled from
inside. All we have to do is slow him down.
He
was thinking this when the front door opened, spilling light down the
gravel driveway and across the road.
Tom
ducked into the roadside ditch opposite his front yard.
For
the space of three breaths he pressed his face into the wet grass and
dewy spiderwebs, no thought possible beyond the panicky need
not
to be seen,
to
make himself small among the Queen Anne's lace and goldenrod, small
in the starlight, let this apparition pass him by.
Then
he took a fourth and deeper breath and raised his head.
The
marauder walked out of the house with the queasy deliberation of a
drunk. One step, two step, three step. Then he tottered and fell.
Tom
rose into a crouch with the zap gun ready. The marauder was
obviously disabled but probably still dangerous. But Ben: where was
Ben? A thread of blue smoke rose from the open doorway past the
moth-cluttered light . . . Something bad had happened in there.
He
chose a Douglas fir growing in the wild lot south of his property as
good cover and began a spring back across the Post Road, still
crouched, a posture he'd seen on TV: supposed to make him a
smaller target though that didn't seem likely under the
circumstances. He had just cleared the gravel margin of the road and
felt blacktop under the soles of his feet when the marauder began to
move and Tom did a stupid thing in response: turned to watch. He
didn't stop running but he slowed down. Couldn't help it. This was
some kind of spectacle, this golden man lifting himself to one knee,
like a Byzantine icon come creaking to life, like some upscale
version of the Tin Man in
The
Wizard of Oz,
now
standing up, bent back straightening, head swiveling in sudden oiled
motion. Tom didn't begin to feel appropriately terrified until
those eyes lit on him.
Even
in the starlight, the dim glow of a streetlight down the Post Road,
dear God, he thought, those eyes! Maybe not even the eyes, Tom
thought, just some reflection or refraction in the goggles, the
illusion
of
eyes, but he felt pinned by them, trapped here on the tarmac.
The
marauder raised his hand, a casual gesture.
Tom
remembered his own weapon. He raised it, felt himself raising
it, and it was like hoisting an anchor from the bottom of the sea,
cranking it up through the weight of the water link by agonizing
link. Why was everything so
slow?
He
realized he'd never fired this device, not even once, as an
experiment; that he had thumbed back the little switch marked Safety
without being absolutely sure it was part of the weapon and not part
of the toy. There were questions he had neglected to ask: questions
about range, for instance; was the weapon effective from this
distance?
But
there was only time to commit an approximation of aim and pull the
trigger. Showdown on the Post Road. Some part of him insisted that
the whole thing was too ludicrous to take seriously. Only dreams were
conducted like this.
He
was hit before he could finish. His shot went wide.
The
marauder's shot had gone a little wide, too, a stitch of flame from
Tom's hip to his armpit and across the biceps of his left arm. There
was no impact, only a sudden numbness and the alarming realization
that his clothes were on fire. He fell down without meaning to.
Rolled like a dog in the dirt at the verge of the Post Road until the
flames were extinguished, though this provoked the first stab of
a deep, paralyzing pain.
What
kind of burns? First degree? Third degree? He looked down at himself.
Under the ashen shirt was a peninsula of charred and blackened
skin. He closed his eyes and decided he wouldn't look at the wound
again because the sight of that blistered flesh was too scary, not
useful.
He
felt a little drunk now, a little dizzy.
He
hauled himself up with his good arm and looked for the marauder. The
marauder had fallen down, too. Tom's shot had missed but the
encounter had slowed him. That's why I'm here, Tom recalled. Slow him
down so the machine bugs can work inside him. Maybe he was already
dead.
It
was a faint hope, extinguished at once.
The
marauder stood up.
There
was some kind of heroism in the act, Tom thought. It was a faltering,
tormented motion that reeked of malfunction, of stripped gears,
overheated engines, buckled metal. The marauder stood up and moved
his head as if the goggles had clouded, a querulous and birdlike
gesture. Then he stripped off the headpiece and looked at Tom.
Tom
couldn't discern much of his features in the dim light, but it seemed
to him this was even worse than the mask had been, the revelation of
a human face underneath. With what expression on it? Something like
despair, Tom thought. He felt a dizzy urge to call time-out. I'm
hurt. You're hurt. Let's quit.
But
the marauder took aim, a little raggedly, with his deadly right hand.
Oh
shit, Tom thought. What happened to my
gun?
He'd
left it in the road.
Inadequate
lump of polystyrene and impossibility. It hadn't done him much good
anyhow. It was yards away. The yards might have been miles.
The
marauder aimed but held his fire, advancing from Tom's gravel
driveway in a crippled but steady lope. If I move, Tom thought, he'll
kill me. If I go for the gun or roll into the gully, he'll kill me.
And if I stay here—he'll kill me.
He
had pretty much decided to go for the gun anyhow, count on surprise
and the work of the cybernetics to give him a chance against that
deadly right hand—when the miraculous event occurred.
The
miracle was heralded by a light.
The
light made strange, wide shadows on the pines and the shadows swayed
like something huge and alive. Then he heard the sound of the engine,
the sound of a car coming down the Post Road from the highway, high
beams probing the slow curve south of the Simmons house.
The
car was traveling fast.
Tom
turned toward it as the marauder did. The lights were blinding. Tom
took the opportunity to pitch himself left, into the ditch at the
side of the road. He put his head up and saw the marauder dodge
toward him as the car seemed at first to veer away . . . Then tires
squealed against blacktop, the car swerved again, and the marauder
was fixed in the glare of its lights like a fragment of a dream,
motionless until the impact lifted him like a strange, broken bird
into the air.
□ □
□ □
Ordinarily
Billy's armor would have protected him from the impact—at least in
part. Maybe it
had
protected
him: the collision hadn't killed him. Not quite.
But
he was broken. Broken inside. Armor broken, body broken.
Blood
oozed out of his armor at the broken joints. The gland in the elytra
had been crushed, the last of its stimulants dissolved. Billy was
only Billy.
Nevertheless,
he stood up.
Felt
the shifting of ribs inside his chest.
He
turned to the house. He ignored Tom Winter, ignored the pinwheel
rotation of the night sky, attempted to ignore his pain. He could not
fathom a destination but the tunnel, which he had confused with
escape or going home.
He
hurried through the open door of the house, this bar of light. This
door which contained a door which was a door in time which was all he
had ever wanted, an unwinding of his life, a way home. He imagined it
as a road, pictured it in his mind with sudden clarity. A dusty road
winding into dry, distant mountains under a clean blue sky.
Sanctuary.
A door into the unmaking of himself.
Billy
peeled off the battered fragments of his armor and entered the house.
□ □
□ □
Past
reason, past calculation, Tom picked up his weapon and followed the
marauder into the house.
Forced
to justify the action, he might have said it was still possible for
the marauder to escape, follow the tunnel back to Manhattan, heal
himself and repair his armor. The idea that the events he had just
endured might not be an ending was too painful to consider. So he
rose and followed the marauder into the house under the blinding
weight of his own burned flesh. Doug Archer and Joyce and Catherine
came around the corner as he was at the door, called out to him to
stop, but he barely registered their voices. They didn't understand.
They'd missed the main event.